Language

Moai Statues Easter Island is branded into popular consciousness as the home of the mysterious and towering moai statues, but these are not the only curiosity the South Pacific island holds. Where the moai are fascinating for their unknown purpose and mysterious craftsmen, the island’s lost language of Rongorongo is equally perplexing. The unique written language seems to have appeared suddenly in the 1700s, but within just two centuries it was exiled to obscurity.

Known as Rapa Nui to the island’s inhabitants, Rongorongo is a writing system comprised of pictographs. It has been found carved into many oblong wooden tablets and other artifacts from the island’s history. The art of writing was not known in any nearby islands and the script’s mere existence is sufficient to confound anthropologists. The most plausible explanation so far has been that the Easter Islanders were inspired by the writing they observed in 1770 when the Spanish claimed the island. However, despite its recency, no linguist or archaeologist has been able to successfully decipher the Rongorongo language.

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Languages are thoroughly organic entities. Each one is complex and versatile, constantly shifting according to the needs of those who use it. When social, political or environmental changes create a gap in a language, its individual speakers use creativity and problem-solving skills to generate a solution. Successful changes to the language are spread quickly and often intuitively.

Another example of creativity influencing language is when small groups of children invent their own languages; however these do not tend to be languages in the fullest sense. They are typically simple, and based on the structures and/or vocabularies of languages that the children already know; they tend to function more as secret codes than anything else.

In at least one case, however, a group of children was able to spontaneously invent a totally new language out of necessity. The children in question were deaf, illiterate, and devoid of all but the most basic language skills, yet they were able to devise an intricate method of communication to use amongst themselves. Nicaraguan Sign Language (or ISN, for either Idioma de Señas de Nicaragua or Idioma de Signos Nicaragüense) is a unique and remarkable linguistic phenomenon of recent years.

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During times of economic hardship, people turn to the road to see if they can make their luck somewhere else. As such, back in the days of the Great Depression, the U.S. saw an increase in the hobo population. Walking along long roads or hitching rides on trains, these hobos would travel about, looking for a place where they could get lucky and find a better home. Of course, such a life of wanderlust was difficult, especially since one has to travel without knowing anything of the landscape or local populace.

To combat this ignorance, the hobos came up with an ingenious sign language to communicate to each other along the way. This is not like the sign language that hearing-impaired people use to communicate; rather, it was markings and drawings that hobos would leave along the road for their fellow travelers. Whether a sign told others of locations of important places in town, the attitudes of the locals to tramps, or the best places to beg, the hobo sign language helped many get by in hard times.

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Do you speak Votian?

Votian is the language spoken by the Votes. Votes are the people of Ingria, an area of Russia just Southwest of St. Petersburg close to the Estonian border.

The Votian language is also practically extinct with 50 speakers at most. There are no children currently speaking Votian. Experts generally consider a community’s language to be “endangered” when at least 30 per cent of its children no longer learn it.

Imminent extinction is also on the horizon for the Livonian, Krimchak and Yevanic languages. Norn and Polabian have already disappeared. In fact 50 to 90 percent of the world’s languages are predicted to disappear in the next century, many with little or no documentation. The UN says that least 3,000 tongues are endangered, seriously endangered, or dying in many parts of the world.

That’s where the Rosetta Project comes in.

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If someone used their political position to alter English grammar, would it work?

If that sentence bothered you, then the answer is yes.

You see, for most of the existence of the English language, ‘they’ was used as the accepted singular gender-neutral pronoun. The use of ‘it’ was reserved for objects, as it is today, but for people the pronoun of choice was they/their/them.

So how did this all change? Courtesy of the English Parliament.

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