Last Speaker of Ancient Bo Language Has Died

This is a very sad story (in more ways than one) from a few days ago - here are two reports (many more reports online).

Last speaker of ancient language of Bo dies in India
By Alastair Lawson
BBC News
February 4, 2010

The last speaker of an ancient language in India's Andaman Islands has died at the age of about 85, a leading linguist has told the BBC.
Professor Anvita Abbi said that the death of Boa Sr was highly significant because one of the world's oldest languages - Bo - had come to an end.

She said that India had lost an irreplaceable part of its heritage.

Languages in the Andamans are thought to originate from Africa. Some may be 70,000 years old.  The islands are often called an "anthropologist's dream" and are one of the most linguistically diverse areas of the world.

'Infectious'

Professor Abbi - who runs the Vanishing Voices of the Great Andamanese (Voga) website - explained: "After the death of her parents, Boa was the last Bo speaker for 30 to 40 years.

"She was often very lonely and had to learn an Andamanese version of Hindi in order to communicate with people. But throughout her life she had a very good sense of humour and her smile and full-throated laughter were infectious."

She said that Boa Sr's death was a loss for intellectuals wanting to study more about the origins of ancient languages, because they had lost "a vital piece of the jigsaw".

"It is generally believed that all Andamanese languages might be the last representatives of those languages which go back to pre-Neolithic times," Professor Abbi said. "The Andamanese are believed to be among our earliest ancestors."

Boa Sr's case has also been highlighted by the Survival International (SI) campaign group. "The extinction of the Bo language means that a unique part of human society is now just a memory," SI Director Stephen Corry said.

'Imported illnesses'

She said that two languages in the Andamans had now died out over the last three months and that this was a major cause for concern.

Academics have divided Andamanese tribes into four major groups, the Great Andamanese, the Jarawa, the Onge and the Sentinelese. Professor Abbi says that all apart from the Sentinelese have come into contact with "mainlanders" from India and have suffered from "imported illnesses".

She says that the Great Andamanese are about 50 in number - mostly children - and live in Strait Island, near the capital Port Blair.

Boa Sr was part of this community, which is made up of 10 "sub-tribes" speaking at least four different languages.

The Jarawa have about 250 members and live in the thick forests of the Middle Andaman. The Onge community is also believed to number only a few hundred.

"No human contact has been established with the Sentinelese and so far they resist all outside intervention," Professor Abbi said.

It is the fate of the Great Andamanese which most worries academics, because they depend largely on the Indian government for food and shelter - and abuse of alcohol is rife.

Another article, this one from The Independent:

With the death of Boa Sr, her people and their songs fall silent forever
Final survivor of ancient tribe spoke of the sadness of having no one left to talk to
By Andrew Buncombe, Asia Correspondent
Friday, 5 February 2010

When Boa Sr sang in her own language, the result was gently hypnotic. "The earth is shaking as the tree falls, with a great thud," she sang, on a recording captured by linguists.

But the grey-haired, 85-year-old woman will not be heard again. And neither will her native tongue – Bo – aside from the recordings that have already been made. Campaigners revealed yesterday that the recent death of Boa Sr on India's remote Andaman Islands marked the end of the Bo tribe and the loss of a language.

"With the death of Boa Sr and the extinction of the Bo language, a unique part of human society is now just a memory," said Stephen Corry, director of the group Survival International. "Boa's loss is a bleak reminder that we must not allow this to happen to the other tribes of the Andaman Islands."

Boa Sr was the oldest member of the Great Andamanese, an indigenous group of the Andamans, a cluster of islands 700 miles east of the Indian mainland in the Bay of Bengal. The Great Andamanese once numbered more than 5,000 and were made up of 10 distinct groups each with their own language.

The Bo are believed to have lived on the islands for as long as 65,000 years, making them one of the oldest surviving human cultures. But today, after more than 150 years of contact with colonisers, the diseases they brought with them, and the disastrous impact of alcohol, the Great Andamanese number just 52.

Professor Anvita Abbi, a linguist at Delhi's Jawaharlal Nehru University, spent many years speaking with Boa Sr, usually in a version of Hindi spoken on Great Andaman. Her greatest sadness, said Professor Abbi, was that as the last of her kind she could not speak to anyone in her own language. "Boa was the last of the Bo tribe. That is what was so sad – that she had no one," she said.

According to Survival, when British colonial forces failed to pacify the tribes through violence in the 19th century, they sought to "civilise" them by capturing many and keeping them in an institution. But of some 150 children born in the so-called Andaman Home, none lived beyond the age of two.

Boa Sr, known for an infectious laugh, survived the Asian tsunami of December 2004. She told linguists: "We were all there when the earthquake came. The eldest told us 'the Earth would part, don't run away or move'. The elders told us, that's how we know."

The Great Andamanese are not alone in struggling for their survival. Another of the islands' tribes, the Onge, number no more than 100 after eight of their number died in late 2008 after drinking from bottles that had washed ashore.

The Jarawa tribe are threatened by a recently completed road that has joined several of the islands and brought in settlers, poachers and alcohol. Perhaps the most secure are the Sentinelese, who live on the island of North Sentinel and resist all efforts at communication by the outside world. In the aftermath of the tsunami, one of the tribe was famously photographed aiming a bow and arrow at an emergency helicopter. The Indian government's policy is to make no further contact with them.

Professor Abbi said that Boa Sr often told her how she envied the fact that the Jarawa and the Sentinelese had managed to avoid contact with outsiders. She recalled: "She used to say they were better off in the jungle."

Saving Dying Languages

Lo and Behold! That old synchronicity at work again... An NPR report on "The Linguists" (see posts from earlier today and yesterday) from their February 22, 2009 show: Saving Dying Languages In 'The Linguists' February 21, 2009 · There are more than 7,000 languages in the world, and if statistics hold, two weeks from now, there will be one less. That's the rate at which languages disappear. And each time a language disappears, a part of history — a subtle way of thinking — vanishes too. A new documentary called The Linguists, airing Thursday on PBS, follows ethnographers David Harrison and Greg Anderson as they race to document endangered languages in some of the most remote corners of the world. From the plains of Siberia to the mountains of Bolivia to the tribal lands of India, Harrison and Anderson have hopscotched the globe, but they sat down for a moment with NPR's Scott Simon to discuss their race to capture the world's endangered languages. Harrison, a linguistics professor at Swarthmore College, specializes in sounds and words; Anderson, who directs Oregon's Living Tongues Institute, is the verb expert. Together, they speak 25 languages. Languages are rich in the history and taxonomy of a place, says Anderson, reflecting subtleties that can be lost in translation. When the last keepers of a language die off, so does the fluent understanding of that particular environment. "The people who live there are the experts on the environment they live in, whether it's Siberia or the Bolivian Andes," he says. "They know more about the ecosystem, the plants and animals, than scientists typically do. And it's not just a list of things they know; it's a hierarchy of knowledge, how things fit together." Harrison and Anderson say they have encountered some strange languages in their travels, including an East Indian dialect called Birhor — which, in English, sounds a lot like "beer whore." "But all languages are strange from a certain point of view," says Harrison. "English is pretty strange." The Linguists follows Harrison and Anderson on their "adventure science" expeditions — and finds them in some unexpected situations. "We do encounter inconveniences," says Harrison, laughing. "Getting to a very remote place, finding people and convincing them to talk to you on a camera. There are roadblocks, both literal and figurative." And surprises, like the wedding they were called to dance at in a remote village in India. The film also offers context on the question of why languages die out. "The big umbrella term is globalization, but you need to break that down. There are economic forces, ideology, social attitudes," says Harrison. "Many people have been presented with a false choice, that they have to give up their native language in order to succeed, and [speak] a global language like English or Spanish exclusively. But more people are realizing that you can be bilingual, that you have access to more knowledge by being bilingual. There are these pressures as we get increasingly urbanized, but people are successfully pushing back."

UN Says Cornish Language Extinct

Yesterday I watched "The Linguists" on PBS. Two young guys travelled to many obscure and difficult to reach places around the world in an attempt to record languages that are spoken by only a few people - some only spoken by quite elderly people, scrambling to phonetically write down the sounds of languages that have never been written, digitally preserving a part of our world for future study. It was a fascinating special - and sad, too. Only think of how much we do NOT know about the past because we cannot decipher the written languages left behind by many ancient peoples - including the Southwest Script I just blogged about and Linear A. We have no idea what the Indus symbols mean, and we cannot make any sense out of the Phaistos Disc. Without the discovery of the Rosetta Stone, we would have no idea what the history of the ancient Egyptians was. As it is, there is still so much we do not know about their history and culture. From BBC.co.uk 09:27 GMT, Friday, 20 February 2009 Cornish language extinct, says UN The Cornish language has been branded "extinct" by linguistic experts, sparking protests from speakers. Thirty linguists worked on Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger, compiled by United Nations group Unesco. They also said Manx Gaelic was extinct. Cornish is believed to have died out as a first language in 1777. But the Cornish Language Partnership says the number of speakers has risen in the past 20 years and there should be a section for revitalised languages. The Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger, published by Unesco, the cultural section of the United Nations, features about 2,500 dialects. There are thought to be about 300 fluent speakers of Cornish. But Jenefer Lowe, development manager of the Cornish Language Partnership, said there were thousands who had a "smattering" of the language. "Saying Cornish is extinct implies there are no speakers and the language is dead, which it isn't," she said. "Unesco's study doesn't take into account languages which have growing numbers of speakers and in the past 20 years the revival of Cornish has really gathered momentum." Last year the partnership agreed a single written form of Cornish which brought together several different forms of the language. "It is among a group of languages that turned out not to be extinct but merely sleeping" Christopher Moseley, editor-in-chief of the atlas UN declares Manx Gaelic 'extinct' Mrs Lowe said: "There's no category for a language that is revitalised and revived. "What they need to do is add a category. "It should be recognised that languages do revive and it's a fluid state." Christopher Moseley, an Australian linguist and editor-in-chief of the atlas, told BBC News he would consider a new classification. He said: "I have always been optimistic about Cornish and Manx. "There is a groundswell of interest in them, although the number of speakers is small. "Perhaps in the next edition we shall have a 'being revived' category. "[Cornish] is among a group of languages that turned out not to be extinct but merely sleeping."

"Southwest Script" Defies Decipherers

Experts trying to decipher ancient language (Image: A stone tablet engraved with symbols at least 2,500 years old is seen at the Southwest Script Museum on Feb. 5, 2009 in Almodovar, southern Portugal. The museum has on display 20 tablets engraved with symbols of the Iron Age extinct Iberian language called Southwest Script.(AP Photo/Armando Franca) By BARRY HATTON, Associated Press Writer Barry Hatton, Associated Press Writer – Sat Feb 28, 1:10 pm ET ALMODOVAR, Portugal – When archaeologists on a dig in southern Portugal last year flipped over a heavy chunk of slate and saw writing not used for more than 2,500 years, they were elated. The enigmatic pattern of inscribed symbols curled symmetrically around the upper part of the rough-edged, yellowish stone tablet and coiled into the middle in a decorative style typical of an extinct Iberian language called Southwest Script. "We didn't break into applause, but almost," says Amilcar Guerra, a University of Lisbon lecturer overseeing the excavation. "It's an extraordinary thing." For more than two centuries, scientists have tried to decipher Southwest Script, believed to be the peninsula's oldest written tongue and, along with Etruscan from modern-day Italy, one of Europe's first. The stone tablet features 86 characters and provides the longest-running text of the Iron Age language ever found. About 90 slate tablets bearing the ancient inscriptions have been recovered, most of them incomplete. Almost all were scattered across southern Portugal, though a handful turned up in the neighboring Spanish region of Andalucia. Some of the letters look like squiggles. Others are like crossed sticks. One resembles the number four and another recalls a bow-tie. They were carefully scored into the slate. The text is always a running script, with unseparated words which usually read from right to left. The first attempts to interpret this writing date from the 18th century. It aroused the curiosity of a bishop whose diocese encompassed this region where the earth keeps coughing up new fragments. Almodovar, a rural town of some 3,500 people amid a gentle landscape of meadows punctuated by whitewashed towns, sits at the heart of the Southwest Script region. It created a museum two years ago where 20 of the engraved tablets are on show. Though the evidence is gradually building as new tablets are found, researchers are handicapped because they are peering deep into a period of history about which they know little, says professor Pierre Swiggers, a Southwest Script specialist at the University of Leuven, Belgium. Scientists have few original documents and hardly any parallel texts from the same time and place in readable languages. "We hardly know anything about (the people's) daily habits or religious beliefs," he says. Southwest Script is one of just a handful of ancient languages about which little is known, according to Swiggers. The obscurity has provided fertile ground for competing theories about who wrote these words. It is generally agreed the texts date from between 2,500 and 2,800 years ago. Most experts have concluded they were authored by a people called Tartessians, a tribe of Mediterranean traders who mined for metal in these parts — one of Europe's largest copper mines is nearby — but disappeared after a few centuries. Some scientists have proposed that the composers were other pre-Roman tribes, such as the Conii or Cynetes, or maybe even Celts who roamed this far south. Another translation difficulty is that the writing is not standardized. It seems certain that it was adapted from the Phoenician and Greek alphabets because it copied some of their written conventions. However, it also tweaked some of those rules and invented new ones. Experts have identified characters that represent 15 syllables, seven consonants and five vowels. But eight characters, including a kind of vertical three-pronged fork, have confounded attempts at comprehension. There's also the problem of figuring out what messages the slate tablets are intended to convey. Even when they can read portions of text, scientists don't really understand what it is saying — like a child mouthing the words of a Shakespeare play. "We have a lot of doubts," says Guerra, who has written scholarly articles about Southwest Script. "We can read characters and see the phonetics in action ... but when we try to understand what they actually mean we have a lot of problems." There are clues, however. The symmetrical, twisting text gives the impression of a decorative flourish. Some stones also feature crudely rendered figures, such as a warrior carrying what appear to be spears. The lower part of the rectangular stones is left blank as if intended to be stuck in the ground. That has led experts to a supposition: The tablets were gravestones for elite members of local Iron Age society. Repeated sequences of words perhaps mean "Here lies..." or "Son of...," Guerra explains. Since most people probably couldn't read, the ornamental elements lent distinction. These are educated guesses, says Guerra, as he surveys the hilltop dig by a small river where the big stone was found last year. His team here has excavated through centuries of occupation: Islamic (Almodovar is a corruption of the Arabic word al-mudura, meaning encirclement or enclosure), Roman and pre-Roman. Nowadays, it is within view of a wind farm's turbines. Last year's find has helped, but it wasn't the breakthrough scientists had hoped for, Guerra says. If all the Southwest Script found so far were transcribed onto paper, it would still barely fill a single sheet. Without an equivalent of the Rosetta stone, which helped unlock the secrets of hieroglyphic writing, efforts to reconstruct the ancient language are doomed to slow progress. "We have to be patient — and hopeful," Guerra says.