The relic

The first thing I learned in my studies of linguistics is that languages aren't static.

It's a good thing, because my field is historical linguistics, and if languages didn't change over time I kind of wouldn't have anything to study.  There's an ongoing battle, of course, as to how much languages should change, and what kinds of changes are acceptable; this is the whole descriptivism vs. prescriptivism debate about which I wrote only last month.  My own view on this is that languages are gonna change whether you want them to or not, so being a prescriptivist is deliberately choosing the losing side -- but if lost causes are your thing, then knock yourself out.

Where it gets interesting is that the rates of language change can vary tremendously.  Some cultures are inherently protective of their language, and resist things like borrow words -- a great example is Icelandic, which has changed so little in a thousand years that modern Icelanders can still read the Old Norse sagas with little more difficulty than we read Shakespeare.

Speaking of Shakespeare, it bears mention that the language of Shakespeare and his contemporaries isn't (as I heard some students call it) "Old English."  Old English is an entirely different language, not mutually intelligible with Modern English, and by Shakespeare's time had been an extinct language for about four hundred years.  Here's a sample of Old English:

Fæder ure şu şe eart on heofonum, si şin nama gehalgod.  To becume şin rice, gewurşe ğin willa, on eorğan swa swa on heofonum.

I wonder how many of you recognized this as the first two lines of the Lord's Prayer:

Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.  Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on Earth as it is in heaven.

There's been a discussion going on in linguistic circles for years about which dialect of English has changed the least -- not since the time of Old English, but at least since Elizabethan English, the dialect of Shakespeare's time.  We have a tendency, largely because of some of the famous performances of Hamlet and Macbeth and Richard III, to imagine Shakespeare's contemporaries as speaking something like the modern upper-class in southeastern England, but that's pretty clearly not the case.  Analyses of the rhyme and rhythm schemes of Shakespeare's sonnets, for example, suggest that Shakespearean English was rhotic -- the /r/ in words like far and park were pronounced -- while the speech of southern England today is almost all non-rhotic.  Vowels, too, were probably different; today a typical English person pronounces words like path with an open back unrounded vowel /ɑ/ (a bit like the vowel in the word cop); in Shakespeare's time, it was probably closer to the modern American pronunciation, with a front unrounded vowel /æ/ (the vowel sound in cat).

Analysis of spoken English from dozens of different regions has led some linguists to conclude -- although the point is still controversial -- that certain Appalachian dialects, and some of the isolated island dialects of coastal North and South Carolina, are the closest to the speech of Shakespeare's day, at least in terms of pronunciation.  Vocabulary changes according to the demands of the culture -- as I said, there's no such thing as a static language.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Alumnum, Primary Human Languages Improved Version, CC BY-SA 4.0]

The reason all this comes up is that linguists have come upon another example of a dialect that preserves a relic dialect -- this one, from a great deal longer ago than Elizabethan English.  In the region of Trabzon in northern Turkey, there is a group of people who speak Romeyka -- a dialect of Pontic Greek that is thought to have changed little since the region was settled from classical-era Greece over two thousand years ago.

Since that time, Romeyka has been passed down orally, and its status as a cultural marker meant that like Icelandic, it has been maintained with little change.  Modern Greek, however, has changed a great deal in that same time span; in terms of syntax (and probably pronunciation as well), Romeyka is closer to what would have been spoken in Athens in Socrates's time than Modern Greek is.  "Conversion to Islam across Asia Minor was usually accompanied by a linguistic shift to Turkish, but communities in the valleys retained Romeyka," said Ioanna Sitaridou, of the University of Cambridge, who is heading the study.  "And because of Islamization, they retained some archaic features, while the Greek-speaking communities who remained Christian grew closer to Modern Greek, especially because of extensive schooling in Greek in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries...  Romeyka is a sister, rather than a daughter, of Modern Greek.  Essentially this analysis unsettles the claim that Modern Greek is an isolate language."

The problem facing the researchers is that like many minority languages, Romeyka is vanishing rapidly.  Most native speakers of Romeyka are over 65; fewer and fewer young people are learning it as their first language.  It's understandable, of course.  People want their children to succeed in the world, and it's critical that they be able to communicate in the majority language in schools, communities, and jobs.

But the loss of any language, especially one that has persisted virtually unchanged for so long, still strikes me as sad.

It's a consolation, though, that linguists like Ioanna Sitaridou are working to record, study, and preserve these dwindling languages before it's too late.  Especially in the case of a language like Romeyka, where there is no written form; without recordings and scholarly studies, once it's gone, it's gone.  How many other languages have vanished like that, without a trace -- when no more children are being raised to speak it, when the last native speaker dies?  It's the way of things, I suppose, but it's still a tragedy, a loss of the way of communication of an entire culture.

At least with Romeyka, we have people working on its behalf -- trying to find out what we can of a two-thousand-year-old linguistic relic from the time of Alexander the Great.

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Resurrecting a fossil

A year ago I wrote about linguistic isolates -- single languages, or small clusters of related languages, that have no apparent relation to any other language on Earth.  The problem, of course, is that being spoken by only a small number of people, these are some of the most endangered languages.  There are many of them for which the last native speakers are already elderly, and there's a high risk of their going extinct without ever being thoroughly studied.

And as I pointed out in my post, the sad part of that is that each one of those is a lens into a specific culture and a particular way of thinking.  Once lost, they're gone forever, or only exist in scattered remnants, like the fossils of extinct animals.  What you can reconstruct from these relics is perhaps better than nothing, but still, there's always an elegiac sense of what we've lost, and what we're still losing.

This topic comes up because of an article in Smithsonian sent to me by a friend and frequent contributor of topics to Skeptophilia, about some linguists who are trying to reconstruct the extinct indigenous Timucuan language of northern Florida.  Timucuan was a linguistic isolate, and seems to be unrelated to the languages spoken by neighboring groups (such as the Seminole, Muscogee, and Choctaw).  The Timucua people, which at the time of European contact in 1595 comprised an estimated 200,000 people in 35 chiefdoms, each of which spoke a different dialect, was decimated by war and by diseases like smallpox.  By 1700, there were only about a thousand Timucuans left, and the slave trade eradicated those few survivors.  There is currently a genetic study to see if some populations in Cuba might be the descendants of the Timucuans, but so far the results are inconclusive.

This would just be another in the long list of complete and irretrievable cultural loss, if it weren't for the efforts of linguists Alejandra Dubcovsky and Aaron Broadwell.  Working with a handful of letters written in Timucuan (using the Latin alphabet), and a rather amazing bilingual document by Spanish missionary Francisco Pareja called Confessions in the Castilian and Timucua Language, With Some Tips to Encourage the Penitent, they have assembled the first Timucuan dictionary and grammar, and reconstructed how a long-gone people spoke.

A page from the Confessions, with Spanish on the left and Timucuan on the right [Image courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library, Brown University]

Which is incredibly cool, but there's also a wryly amusing side to it, because with Dubcovsky's and Broadwell's knowledge of the Timucuan language, they're able to compare what Pareja wanted the translators to say with what they actually did say.  "Our favorite is the description of marriage," Dubcovsky said.  "The Spanish side asks very clearly, 'Have the man and a woman been joined together in front of a priest?'  And the Timucua version of that sentence is, 'Did you and another person consent to be married?'  The Timucua translation not only takes out any mention of gender, but it also removes any mention of a religious officiant.  A priest did not write this, because a priest does not forget to include himself in the story."

So the Confessions document is not only a Rosetta Stone for Timucuan, it gives us a fascinating window into how the Timucuan translators saw the Spanish Catholic culture that was being imposed upon them.

It's tragic that this language and its people were so thoughtlessly (and ruthlessly) eradicated; worse still that such tragedies are all too common.  So it's all the more important that people like Dubcovsky snd Broadwell work to resurrect these extinct languages from the scant fossils they left behind.  It can't ever repair the damage that was done, but at least allows us to glimpse the minds of an extinct culture -- and to honor their memory in whatever way we can.

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A hand and a message

One of the most enduring mysteries, both in history and in linguistics, is the Basque people of northeastern Spain.

For many years, it was thought that because they speak Euskara -- a linguistic isolate, certainly not Indo-European and seemingly unrelated to any other known language -- that they were physically unrelated to the rest of Europeans as well.  That's proven to be untrue; their genetics are markedly similar to other western Europeans, including a high prevalence of the R1b-DF27 Y-DNA haplogroup, found throughout Spain and southern France.  While there is some evidence that the Basque people are remnants of a Paleolithic population of western Europe, there's enough similarity with the surrounding population that this question is considered far from settled.

There's no doubt they've been genetically isolated for a long time, though.  One good indicator is their abnormally high frequency of the Rh negative blood type allele.  If you, or one of your parents, is Rh negative, there is a great likelihood that you have ancestry in northern Spain or southwestern France.  (My mom, who was Rh negative, was nearly a hundred percent of French descent, mostly from western France -- I'm quite certain she has some Basque ancestry back there somewhere.)  This has a significant downside; the danger of Rh incompatibility disorder, which occurs when a negative mother conceives a positive fetus (i.e. the father is positive).  When that happens, the mother's immune system can set up a reaction against the baby's blood and destroy it.  It's what killed my sister, Mary Margaret -- when she was born, in 1945, she was premature and severely anemic, and only lived a couple of days.  Between her birth and mine, in 1960, the RhoGAM injection was developed, which suppresses that part of the mother's immune system and prevents the damage.

That injection is why I'm alive today.

In any case, there's no doubt the Basques are a unique people.  The origin of their gene pool, culture, and language are still shrouded in mystery.  But a discovery last year near Pamplona may end up shedding some light on their history.

Called the "Hand of Irulegi," it's a bronze piece thought to be about two thousand years old.  This is cool enough in and of itself, but recent analysis has shown that it has an inscription, seemingly in proto-Basque, the language of the Vascones -- the Iron Age tribe encountered in northeastern Spain by the Romans, and who are thought to be the ancestors of the modern Basques.

It had been thought previously that the Vascones had little in the way of written language -- no traces of it had been found except for occasional one-word inscriptions on coins.  So almost nothing is known about the language they spoke (except, as previously noted, that it was definitely non-Indo European).  The first word in the inscription on the Hand of Irulegi is sorioneku, almost certainly the root word of modern Euskara zorioneko, meaning "luck" or "a good omen."

It's worth being cautious, though.  Unfortunately, such claims have been made before -- and have turned out to be worse than false, actually fraudulent.  Two years ago, two archaeologists were fined and given short jail sentences for faking artifacts and claiming that they were evidence of an early Basque written language.  So following the "once burned, twice shy" rule, the archaeologists and linguists studying the Hand of Irulegi are proceeding carefully.

But if it holds up under scrutiny, it will be a pretty remarkable discovery.  The early history and linguistics of the Basque people have been huge unanswered questions before now, and any pieces we can add to the puzzle will help clarify the origins of what is undoubtedly one of the most fascinating cultures in Europe.

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