In 1804, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark and their forty-three fellow explorers headed west up the Missouri River, bound for the west coast. As they met a succession of different Native American tribes, they were often amazed by the variety in the languages they heard.
They noted that some had complex grammars, some had unusual vocabularies, some had different pitches or tones for the same words, some spoke consonant clusters without vowels.
In what is now the United States, at the time that Europeans arrived, Native Americans spoke between 300 to 500 diverse languages. Today, most of those have vanished, gone extinct.
Linguists can divide some of their languages into families. For example, the Athabaskan family includes about 38 languages spoken by tribes in Alaska, western Canada, as well as by the Navaho, or the Dine, of Arizona and New Mexico.
What is unusual are the “isolates,” those languages that display no relationship to any other language. For example, the Zuni has no commonalities with any languages that surround them in eastern New Mexico or elsewhere. In total, there are about 30 to 40 isolates in North America.
Linguists still wonder, from where did those Native Americans originate?
What is most misfortunate is that the Native Americans had no written language. No doubt, they produced oral stories, histories, fables that they passed on to their children, but once the next generation stopped speaking their native language, most stories died with them.
One of the world’s larger language families is the Indo-European family. From it, linguists identify eight branches: Indo-Aryan, Iranian, Armenian, Greek, Balto-Slavic, Germanic, Italic, and Celtic. All languages within those branches share a common ancestor.
English, German, and Norwegian belong to the Germanic branch; Spanish, Portuguese, and French to the Italic; Scottish Gaelic and Irish to the Celtic; and Russian to the Balto-Slavic.
Because these European languages possessed a written language, over the centuries each recorded their stories, tales, myths, histories, and built a canon, a body of literary works. Thus, a few languages were bold enough to save their stories, but for others, the world lost their stories.
The greatest act of literary salvation ever occurred in 1623, seven years after Shakespeare expired. John Heminges and Henry Condell, two members of the King’s Men, Shakespeare’s acting company, collected and then published that year Shakespeare’s plays in the First Folio.
The Spanish saved Cervantes’s “Don Quixote,” and also Felix Lope de Vega’s 500 plays and 3000 sonnets, all from the late 16th and early 17th centuries.
Someone saved Plato and Aristotle’s Greek works. Others saved Ovid and Cicero’s Latin works. Yet, others saved Paul’s letters and the four Gospels. On it goes, and the world is richer.
Yiddish is another Germanic language. It began in Germany’s Rhine River valley in the ninth century and was the vernacular of the Jewish people of Central Europe for ten centuries. Mainly German, it was infused with vocabulary from Hebrew and Aramaic.
Prior to the Holocaust in mid-twentieth century, between eleven and thirteen million people spoke Yiddish. Some Yiddish words migrated into English: schtick, chutzpah, shmooze, klutz, kvetch, and anything that ends with “nik,” such as beatnik.
Some 85% of the six million Jewish people whom the Nazis murdered in mid-twentieth century spoke Yiddish. Many survivors came to America, lugging with them their Yiddish books.
However, the next generation preferred English over Yiddish. The Yiddish books were soon disregarded, then discarded, and some were pitched into dumpsters.
In late-twentieth century, a young Jewish guy named Aaron Lansky decided he would rescue the remaining books. He collected an estimated 1.5 million Yiddish books from all over the U.S., at his Yiddish Book Center, and made them available to libraries, universities, collectors.
Rutgers University estimates that in the United States there are only about 250,000 Yiddish speakers remaining, in Israel another 250,000, and elsewhere 100,000.
Languages live for centuries, but then in the face of a brutal attack, they will die off. What lives are the stories within their books. Save their books, save their stories.