Endangered languages - Lost worlds

This was the spirit in which, 400 years ago, Bishop Diego de Landa burnt all the Mayan books he could lay his hands on.

These people also used certain characters or letters with which they wrote in their books their ancient matters and their sciences, and with them and figures and some signs on the figures they understood their matters and explained and taught about them. We found a great number of books of these their letters, and because they contained nothing but superstition and the devil's falsehoods, we burnt them all, which touched them to a wondrous degree and grieved them.

(Landa: Relacion de las cosas de Yucatan ca. 1570

ed. Miguel Rivera, 1985. Madrid: Historia 16, p. 148.)

This was the spirit in which in our own century, Protestant missionaries have terminated initiation practices in Australia. At this very moment, missionaries are actively contacting groups of Huaorani Indians in Ecuador, and sending their children to school in Spanish.

The wreckers, believing themselves cultured, often had no idea of the transmission of scholarship and theoretical understanding, developed and passed on over centuries and longer, that they were interrupting, and so destroying, by these harsh acts. Only in the last generation have a few scholars managed to piece together a small remnant of what was then lost. This is not just the medical uses of the rainforest plants, important as these may be. Whole new worlds of the mind, intellectual treasure-houses, have been built in these languages. They were simply overlooked, or disregarded.

For the Maya, Western scholars began in 1973 to decipher a system of hieroglyphs, gratuitously complicated by calligraphy (since a Mayan scribe, ah tzib, was no more and no less than ah artist), and became able to read a large corpus of royal records which were graven on stone (and so immune to Landa's bonfires). From them, Linda Schele and others had laboriously worked out the word for the ball-game central to their religion: pitz. It was this game that the Divine Twins played to escape from the Lords of Death. But this word still lives on, in many of the Mayan languages, not least for the games that children play with grass balls. Its ritual significance seems to have been lost. But Mayan shamanism is still very much alive, and something of its meaning can still be learnt. Martin Prechtel, for example, has imbibed its language and lived its life, and tells of its import in his book Secrets of the Talking Jaguar.

From the Lardil of Australia's Mornington Island, Kenneth Hale heard in the 1960s from some of the last initiates how a whole secret language could be taught, and learnt for active use, in a single day. This means that it had very few words, perhaps no more than 250. But any meaning could be expressed, so that the language brought into play whole new principles of allusion and definition. People spoke, in a way that would have delighted the mediaeval scholastics, per genus et differentiam. This language, Damin, was in one way like George Orwell's invented 'Newspeak', in that it systematically provided negatives for its adjectives: small tjitjuu vs. large 'un-small' kuri-tjitjuu. And although 'I/we' n!a was distinguished from 'you' n!u, this last could also mean 'he', 'she' or 'they'.