Extinctions -- Never Quit Reading -- The Book Page -- November 26, 2024

Locator: 44427ARCHIVES.

Never quit reading.

I'm in my "India phase."

I completed the first book some weeks ago and am now reading the second book:

Two books on India.

• India: A History, John Keay, c. 2000, 2010. Notes here.
• Vishnu's Crowded Temple: India Since The Great Rebellion, Maria Misra, c. 2007 

And, now, wow, wow, wow! A seven-page essay on Indian languages in the current issue of The New Yorker. Had I not read the two books, "Hold Your Tongue: Can The World's Most Populous Country Protect Its Languages," Samanth Subramanian, The New Yorker, November 25, 2024, pp. 18 - 24.

The linguist being featured: Ganesh Devy. 

In some Indian languages, the word for “language” is bhasha—the vowels long and warm, as in “car” or “tar.” It has a formal weight and a refined spirit. It comes to us from the classical heights of Sanskrit, and it evokes a language with a script and a literature, with newspapers and codified grammar and chauvinists and textbooks. But there is another word, boli. It, too, refers to language, but its more accurate meaning is “that which is spoken.” In its sense of the oral, it hints at colloquialisms, hybridity, and a demotic that belongs to the streets. The insinuation is that a bhasha is grander and more sophisticated than a boli. The language of language infects how we think about language.

For more than forty years, the distance between these two words has preoccupied the literary scholar Ganesh Devy. He knows precisely when it all began. In 1979, as he was completing his Ph.D. in English literature at Shivaji University, in the Indian city of Kolhapur, he found in the library a commentary on India’s censuses. The 1961 census had identified sixteen hundred and fifty-two “mother tongues”—many of them, like Betuli or Khawathlang, with speakers numbering in the single digits. But the 1971 census listed only a hundred and eight; the hundred-and-ninth entry was “all others.” That made Devy wonder: What had happened to the other fifteen-hundred-odd languages, the various boli deemed too unimportant to name? “The ‘all others’ intrigued me, then it bothered me, and then I got obsessed with it,” Devy said. “Literature is a product of language, so at some point I thought, When I know that so many other languages have been masked, do I not have any responsibility toward them?”

Too often, India’s riotous profusion of languages is conveyed through metaphor, adage, or anecdote. You may compare India to Babel, or quote the Hindi aphorism that roughly runs, “Every two miles, the taste of water changes / And every eight miles, the language.” (My own anecdotal offering: My grandmother, who never finished high school, spoke five languages fluently.) Five of the world’s major language families are present here—but beyond that quantification has proved elusive. After 1961, the Indian census did not count languages with any rigor; it mainly published the names of all the languages that people said they spoke. The last one, from 2011, registered around nineteen thousand “mother tongues”—a plain absurdity. In the world’s most populous country, no one knows how many languages are living, or how many have died.

***************************
The Great Auk

And then in the current issue of The New York Review, December 5, 2024, p. 29, there's an article with regard to another extinction. But not around the extinction of a language, but rather the extinction of the Great Auk.

Standing around two feet tall and weighing around twelve pounds, the great auk was a large and stately bird, often described by those who encountered it alive as a “proud” animal.

It was flightless, the North Atlantic’s ecological equivalent of the penguins of the southern hemisphere. Distributed from the Atlantic coast of North America to Europe, its past abundance is testified to by many early voyagers.

One striking example comes from the narrative of Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s 1583 expedition to Newfoundland:

We had sight of an island named Penguin, of a fowl there breeding in abundance almost incredible, which cannot fly, their wings not able to carry their body, being very large (not much less than a goose) and exceeding fat.

This doubtless refers to Funk Island, Newfoundland, which was the main nesting site of the great auk in the Americas.