Manuel Segovia
The language of Ayapaneco has been spoken in the land now known as Mexico for centuries. It has survived the Spanish conquest, seen off wars, revolutions, famines and floods. But now, like so many other indigenous languages, it’s at risk of extinction.
There are just two people left who can speak it fluently – but they refuse to talk to each other. Manuel Segovia, 75, and Isidro Velazquez, 69, live 500 metres apart in the village of Ayapa in the tropical lowlands of the southern state of Tabasco. It is not clear whether there is a long-buried argument behind their mutual avoidance, but people who know them say they have never really enjoyed each other’s company.
“They don’t have a lot in common,” says Daniel Suslak, a linguistic anthropologist from Indiana University, who is involved with a project to produce a dictionary of Ayapaneco. Segovia, he says, can be “a little prickly” and Velazquez, who is “more stoic,” rarely likes to leave his home.
The dictionary is part of a race against time to revitalise the language before it is definitively too late. “When I was a boy everybody spoke it,” Segovia told the Guardian by phone. “It’s disappeared little by little, and now I suppose it might die with me.”
Segovia, who denied any active animosity with Velazquez, retained the habit of speaking Ayapaneco by conversing with his brother until he died about a decade ago. Segovia still uses it with his son and wife who understand him, but cannot produce more than a few words themselves. Velazquez reputedly does not regularly talk to anybody in his native tongue anymore.
Regardless, the record should be kept. It is a contribution to ethnology, the history of communities that precede whatever we become next.
Thanks, Cinaedh
I will traslate: “Fuck you!” “No, fuck you!!”
I will prioritize: who cares?
Language separates people==in net effect, not a good thing.
Tower of Babel -or- One ring to control them all.
Bobbo, the reason people care about language from an anthropological angle is that it tells you a lot about the culture that uses (used) it, IF you know what to look for.
The short syllable words are used most often in most languages. So if the language has a complex concept (such as “duty”, “honor”, “trust”, “God”) embodied in a 1 or 2 syllable word, it’s probably an important concept in the culture. If a word has a lot of syllables, chances are whatever it describes is not in common usage in the culture.
For instance, the innuit have, what, 30+ words to describe different types of snow. If you know absolutely nothing else about the eskimos, that alone tells you that they have to deal with a LOT of snow.
That said, these last two fluent speakers of the language apparently don’t give a rat’s ass about preserving their language if they’re not actively teaching it to others.
#3 – How do you explain Ebonics?
There have been so many languages lost.
One more is meaningless.
How we speak is of no value, what we say and then what we do is
Cursor_
Drive By–I looked up anthropological in my “Easy Math for Everyday Issues” and it ain’t there. So, I don’t think there is any angle to this.
So then I looked up anthropological in my “Morans Almanac” and it said–a special subset of historical reconstructionists who are called in to evaluate moronic issues when no one else cares to do so.”
I guess we are all in agreement then?
Sister==did you know Ebonics has 30+ words for how to cheat and stay on welfare? I think that is almost half as many as the church has for wheedling donations! An up and coming dialect for sure.
Too bad. Another language I will never learn.
There are only 2 languages: English and Funny Foreigh Sounding Noises.
There are only 2 cultures: Meat eaters who drive 4x4s and SUVs and Irrelevant.
#6, bobbo, heh. Universities act kind of like the various government welfare, err.. endowment programs for artists, but for academics to spend their lives pursuing knowledge in fringe topics that are of zero practical value to anything.
Only the living say anything worthwhile. Phuck the dead and their worthless languages.
#3 – So are you saying they have 30 ways to say, “this pepper is so hot, my ass will be burning later?”
The language is dead. Move on.
#4 Sister MAry – I always look forward to viewing … errrr…. reading your contributions.
#6 Bobbo, you’ve managed to do it again. You’ve insulted me. Inadvertently, perhaps. One of my degrees IS anthro – though I have little interest in languages, I do some research in medical anthro. My language interests these days are pretty much centered on learning Thai. Grammatically it is a simple language but, alphabetically, very complex. (44 consonants and 28 vowel forms + tonalities!)
#3 DRIVE BY: Actually, the Inuits do not have an unusually large number of words for snow. That is a linguistic urban legend. The Sami people (European “Inuits”) on the other hand are reported to have HUNDREDS of words for snow.
Eideard: Your comment is appropriate and well said. These dead languages do help us to understand ourselves. But, the article says the dictionary compiler wants to “revitalise the language” and this seems a waste of grant money to me. Languages die for a reason – they are not relevant. In high school, I spent four miserable years studying Latin. I wish I could go back and sue the school board. Oh, well, it was of some value when I learned Spanish and medicine. Not much, but some. I speak four languages (not LAtin) and can get by in four more. I think encouraging people to keep and use a dying language is to exclude them from society; linguistic segregation. This guy should compile his dictionary, make recordings of the spoken sounds and then go home to write his thesis. There is no reason to revive a dead tongue. It’s akin to linguistic Frankensteinism.
Seriously, why do we need this language retained? Reducing the numbers of plants and animals we drive to extinction every day is of far greater importance than keeping alive a dialect that has no more than a curiosity value.
I can speak all the extinct languages.
I want to install Windows 7 in Araynpico, or whatever the fuck it is.
The language of Emglish has been spoken in the land now known as Great Britain for centuries. It has survived the German invasion, seen off wars, revolutions, famines and French purity laws. And now, unlike so many other major languages, it’s at risk of becoming universal.
It does not sound like these two Mexicans are going to go on a holiday to San Diego shortly !
Amazing they speak the same language – the last two souls on earth – and they have nothing to talk about
Perhaps the language is very stunted and limited
Scanning UHF-VHF radio receivers are very popular with local television station news departments. Lets you keep up with the police, fire, ems and your competition.
I am working on a scanner in the shop. I press the button that scans the marine frequencies. The receiver locks onto a conversation between a man and woman. The language they were speaking was totally unrecognizable to me. Obviously a ship’s crewman speaking to someone back home.
At the end of this very emotional exchange they break into English and exchange “I love yous.”
Does this mean there is a language lacking a suitable equivalence for “I love you?”
iuy.//s_33
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Ooo33.ss)#$#
!!?go
# 20 Faxon said, “%)#fd//ddi”
*&hg@1”[
Moran!
De gustibus non disputandum.
Most people hate Latin because it is taught so poorly. I was fortunate enough my freshman year in high school to have as the text “Latin by the Natural Method” by Father William G. Most. I was able to coast through three more years of Latin at different schools on the strength of what I learned that first year. It has helped me understand English better. English actually has a lot of Latin words, thanks to William the Conqueror. For example, most words ending in -ate or -ation: aviate, fornicate, fortunate, vacation, translate, et alia, et cetera.
#21
jk0r00043
*%($ ($
O((49kl093#$$%
If he wants to learn the language for his dictionary, why doesn’t he just go and talk to one of them, have them teach him?
#12–Animby–no one can be insulted by anyone else “unintentionally.” Maybe you need to study modern English more than ancient Latin? And that is what I would suggest to most people: become literate in “something” but yes–English is the Best Choice. No one cares what language 900 Million Chinese Farmers speak.
To your point, whats insulting about no one else caring about what any other one or two people don’t care about themselves? Well, that goes to the extant speakers. Whats insulting about no one lese caring about the Gringo Researcher?
What’s insulting Animby at reading your own opinion put in print just because you studied an almost entirely unrelated subject.
My, you do make the world your bitch. But FREEEEEDOM still exists. I say O((49kl093#$$% to anyone who gets insulted by anything not intentional. I do have to give credit though to the Ayapanecoians for catching that idea so perfectly. English has no equivalence.
I suppose Bobbo is right. You can learn a lot about a culture by the one, two , three, and four letter words they use.
While I admit to being interested in dead cultures especially Roman the fact you know little or nothing about nearly all of them is hardly likely to be a hindrance to your becoming a success in the present which is why such studies get very limited funding.
It is also true that if you don’t know about and recognize the mistakes made by others you are still very likely to repeat them.
deowll==wouldn’t it be nice if we would just all study history, maybe the “same” history, then we would all agree with one another about what the right thing to do in the same situation would be?
Yeah. And what we rapidly learn from history is that you can’t model one situation from another. If it did, why would all the college graduates running our country be so conflicted?
Maybe it has nothing to do with knowing what a certain outcome will eventually be? Maybe its about risk taking and the desire to extract as much as you can for yourself, and screw everyone else, until what we all agree will eventually happens does indeed happen.
I’m a Proud Republican: I’ve got mine, screw all of you.
Yea, verily.
#23
Okay, okay. You win…
There’s really no call for using those kind of words.
Languages which are popularly spoken, evolve over time. That was the reason Latin was chosen for scientific use in Taxonomy and Medicine, etc., was that does not change over time, hence the label “dead language”!
Likewise, a popular language like English evolves differently in different locations. Another reason it is popular is that English is very trite. [practice sex and travel simultaneously, vigorously is clumsy, awkward compared to flock off!]
What is the purpose of language anyway? To communicate ideas [concepts]and commands [demand action or reaction]!
English is probably one of the youngest languages to evolve if not the youngest. As time demands faster activity in business, sports, medicine, etc., it becomes even more trite [truncated]. Where success in endeavors become more critical, more people learn it as a second language and then their offspring tend to learn it as a first language.
Languages can be invented, too! Esperanto is an example of that!
What value is there to learning obscure dying languages? Probably they contain some experiences and information not readily known in the work a day world, but of course this is lost on the peasants!
Interesting that more people speak Klingon than this language. More people speak Esperanto.
#29
🙂