Tuesday, September 02, 2008

What’s lost? Who will even know? (comment on botkin entry)

Of all that is being lost in turmoil and conflict in the Caucasus right now, this has to break a linguist’s heart. Is there hope that someone somewhere has been working with this? Or the other 40-plus languages of the region?
Once again thanks to The New York Times and John Freivalds () August 24, 2008
The World:  Barriers That Are Steep and Linguistic By ELLEN BARRY:  To understand the conflict in Georgia, listen to how people speak in the Caucasus. 

“A language is the prime indication of the existence of a people,” said George Hewitt, a University of London scholar of Abkhaz, the language spoken in Abkhazia, another separatist region of Georgia. “If a language dies, the culture dies as well. The people will become assimilated.”

One more question to be answered in the calm that comes after the end of fighting: Caucasian expert Dr. Anna V. Dybo at the Russian Academy of Sciences has yet to hear from a library in Tskhinvali, which held a magisterial lexicon of the Ossetian language that was compiled over the course of many years. It’s a single manuscript, never transferred to a computer.

She is not sure, she said, but she thinks it burned up on Aug. 8.

“She is not sure. . . .”

Posted by Laurel on 09/02 at 06:34 PM

(0) Comments• (0) Trackbacks• Permalink • Digg