'The Last Speakers' and the other yesterday

I've just read the most fascinating book about the scores of indigenous languages that are disappearing around the globe.

I've read about this before but not in a book-length treatment. The book is called The Last Speakers: The Quest to Save the World's Most Endangered Languages, by K. David Harrison, a Swarthmore professor and an explorer with the National Geographic Society. 

In it, the author frequently laments what will be lost when a particular language ceases to be spoken. As he and his partner-in-rescuing-languages put it, when a language is in danger of disappearing, a way of looking at the world is also at risk for becoming obsolete. Gone.

In some cases, he is talking about a language spoken by a handful of people. And it can be easy to think it's not that important.

But then he mentions particular phrases. Like the Tofa people  in Russia calling October not a single word like ottobre (Italian) or pazdziernik (Polish) but rather "the month of rounding up male reindeer."

To indulge a "Jerry Maguire" reference, he had me at rounding up reindeer (male or female). Because clearly that is quite distinct from how I think of October. When I say I like October, I am saying little more than a preference for a particular 31-day stretch of the year that happens to fall later on the calendar.

And I know what he means, simply by knowing Italian. Italians don't say 'the day before yesterday.' The phrase they use translates literally to 'the other yesterday' (ieri l'altro, colloquially or l'altro ieri).

Ditto 'the day after tomorrow.' In Italian, that's the other tomorrow, literally (domani l'altro, again, colloquially).

I also love the phrase "sa di fumo" or "sa di chiuso" where the verb for to know (sapere) takes on the connotation "smells like." In the first case, you might say "sa di fumo" if you enter a room that smells like smoke. But note: literally it means "it knows about smoke," or "it knows of smoke."

In many cases, Harrison's examples are much more expressive. To wit, 'roundup male reindeer month.' Other members of a language group he interviewed had months like "Moose month," "Green month," and "Bear month." That feels as though it has a touch of anthropology thrown in.

But that doesn't mean the quirky Italian linguistic curiosities don't delight or have merit. Why do they say, instead of the phrase about wanting to have your cake and eat it, 'have the bottle full and the wife (ALSO) drunk?' (Avere la botte piena e la moglie ubriaca).

I've always told people that the first two words I distinctly remember learning on the ground in Italy -- which is to say separate from my university studies before I was in country -- were the verb "scherzare" (to joke or to kid) and the noun "sciopero" (a labor strike). Talk about cultural immersion! The first word covers a key part of Italian life, probably even the Italian coping mechanism, and the second hints at how their society is set up, who's at the table, who wields some modicum of power, and how that dynamic plays out (i.e., when I lived in Florence, the bus was late a lot).

I've written about something similar before in the context of Leo's early forays into English. He would say "tomorrow's tomorrow," rather than the day after tomorrow, and the process of decoding his words reminded me of learning Italian.

Makes me wonder if I shouldn't have studied linguistics! Studying a foreign language, as I have, positions you at the edge of the field of linguistics -- but just the edge.

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