When Languages Die: The Extinction of the World's Languages and the Erosion of Human Knowledge (Oxford Studies in Sociolinguistics) by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub

Silent Storytellers, Lost Legends

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Figure 5.5

The first book ever published in the Ös language (2005). This story about moose hunting was told by Vasya Gabov and

translated into Russian and English by me with linguist Greg Anderson. Courtesy of Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages

A second solution would have been more like our English alphabet, where we make a single vowel symbol stand for more than one sound. For example, the words ‘fat’ and ‘father’ contain the same letter ‘a’ but are pronounced differently: ‘fat’ contains the same vowel as ‘cat’, while ‘father’ uses the same vowel as ‘bother.’ Our English writing imperfectly captures actual speech sounds. There are many exceptions that must simply be memorized, which is why events like spelling bees pose any sort of challenge. So, the

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When Languages Die

English-style solution (one letter represents multiple sounds) would also have been undesirable for Ös, and Vasya Gabov wisely rejected it.

Vasya instead came up with a clever solution using materials already available to him in the Russian alphabet. Russian has a special letter called the ‘soft sign’, which tells you to add a ‘y’ sound (as in ‘yes’) after a consonant. For example, you can say ‘la’ in Russian, or you can add a soft sign and say ‘lya’. It is important to note that ‘y’ is not a vowel here, it is what linguists call a palatal glide and it gets added onto the ‘l’ sound to make it distinctive in Russian, while still sounding like an ‘l’. Ös, unlike Russian, lacks palatalized consonants, so the soft sign is of no use. But Vasya noticed that the tongue motion required to produce ‘y’ is very similar to the tongue motion needed to produce the three special vowels. Both ‘y’ and the vowels require the tongue to be pushed very far forward in the mouth, almost to the point where it bumps against the palate.

Most people are not aware of what their tongue is doing when they produce vowels. In fact it takes professional training by a phonetician or speech therapist for most of us to become aware of which tongue motions produce which sounds. We learned to make speech sounds in infancy, by babbling, and have never thought about it consciously. Vasya figured it out on his own, with no professional help, and wove this solution into his writing system in an ingenious way, one that even a professional linguist might not have thought of. 17

In his writing system, he placed the soft sign (which signals the speaker to push their tongue towards the front) after the first consonant following one of the three special vowels. He also decided, economically, that he would put in only one soft sign per word. Since Ös has a rule of vowel harmony which requires all vowels in a word to be pronounced either in the front of the mouth or in the back, only a single soft sign is needed to clue in speakers that all the vowels in a word are pronounced towards the front of the mouth.

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