The proverbial sadness of the Torrid zone has been depicted in particular by much ameliorate people than me: yet I must echo the lament.

In fact, I've got a bizarre fondness, recently, for the Tlingit, a population of natives of southern Alaska. They're non Eskimo and they're not classical American Indians either: something in between and neither.

Tlingit area

Hither is a few quick random trivia of interest, mostly courtesy of Wikipedia:

  • They live on the coast at the extreme south of Alaska, crossing sometimes the border with Canada.
  • They accept a matrilinear club, where the fathers practise not actually raise children -they have a loving but sort of discrete relationship- but the maternal uncle does educate them, somewhat rigidly.
  • They have a dual concept of "soul": one that is mortal, and that corresponds somehow to mind, thought, feelings; and an immortal ane that is sort of a "fingerprint", a pattern remembered.
  • They more often than not swallow salmon, shellfish and berries (something awesome in itself if Swedish cuisine teaches us something – even if the thought of gutting salmons in the cold doesn't mayhap align with my expectations in life).
  • Their clans belong to ii "sides", the Raven and the not-Raven, which is usually identified with Eagle or Wolf. Traditionally, regardless of clan, one should ally with someone of the other "side".
  • They practice potlatch, like many other neighbouring populations.
  • They have a kind of concept of "super-copyright", in which non but an creative pattern, just the very idea behind a design, is property of the author or the clan; stories and songs also belong to authors and, at author's death, to clans. To dance another clan's song, yous have to ask permission.
  • They were involved in slavery. Like, they endemic slaves -in that location goes the "noble savage" myth. Then much that in fact, when slavery in USA was abolished, they were quite much annoyed, to the point of carving a "totem of shame" to Abraham Lincoln.
Tlingit carving

But what I really appreciated first was their linguistic communication, songs, and dances. The Tlingit language is quite unique (fifty-fifty if not an isolate: it belongs in fact to a large family of northamerican languages, the Na-Dené ), it has a bewildering number of consonant sounds and an intricate, complex grammar (run into the commodity that just describes the behaviour of the noun in Tlingit). But this ways nothing until you lot hear Tlingit, and Tlingit sounds damn alien, almost non-homo, kind of a vaguely gentler Klingon: hear the Tlingit numbers and come across what I mean.

And withal, such a harsh language tin can became hypnotic, of a musicality obscure and remote still that taps deep inside, when sung: Tsu Héidei Shugaxtutaan, which repeats the poetic sentence "We will again open this container of wisdom that has been left in our care." , or the oniric lullaby Ch' al Uxaa Shaatk'i , for instance, are eminently musical and elegant.

Tlingit awesome black-and-reddish clothes.

What actually hooked me however are Tlingit dances. Incredibly elegant cerise-and-black capes, stylized, stiff, dynamic movements, all under obsessive and dark beats: they expect like between Indian dances, Maori dances and the Residents. : see here for a pretty impressive example.

A real problem is that Tlingit language is dying. Information technology has nearly 200 native speakers, there are efforts to put it back on rails but it is obvious that information technology is a very much uphill battle. The language of the neigbouring tribe, Eyak, died in 2008 with its final native speaker.

I was reading, few weeks ago, this book on the expiry of languages, where probably I first heard of Tlingit. The subject is as heartbreaking as information technology may be: to put it simply and coldly, there are roughly 6000 singled-out languages in the world, and 90% of those languages are going to exist extinct in the side by side 100 years.

There is, even among learned people, quite a misunderstanding, that indicates less languages as a blessing. Afterwards all, why using and so many codes to communicate? Aren't also many languages simply barriers. Just death of a language is not just the death of a code. Expiry of a linguistic communication is just similar the death of a civilisation, is the death of what is a collective monument of a people's thoughts. Language is the dear produced past the man'due south hivemind.

Imagine if tomorrow, for instance, a new language (say, Chinese) is going to have the identify of English (or Italian, or whatever y'all speak), until making it extinct completely. Don't imagine just the sudden disappearance, imagine the process. Imagine y'all, being raised equally usual in your English language-speaking family, and then seeing the world changing effectually you, year after yr. Your children speaking less and less English, and more and more in the new language -after all, that's the new language that gets to be spoken outside. The TV volition not speak your language. Books being published most all in the new linguistic communication. Store signs, slowly become alien. You lived in a vibrant English-speaking urban center; at present you lot're i of a smaller and smaller of a lost language, which survives in the odd geographical name. You get older, you lot have grandchildren, and judge what: they most don't speak your old language -your sons and daughters just passed a few sentences, a few words but: what was the point of raising them in that old language? They grow upwards and yous get older, and all songs, puns, the very sounds of your language, its unique subtleties, its flavor: all of these just fade as material for linguists and historicians. One mean solar day you lot wake upward and you lot discover you are alone. There is nobody else who fluently speaks your linguistic communication anymore -nobody else who thinks in it. You die, and millennia die with y'all.

Borges said, in "The Witness", a novel contained in The Aleph:

"In a stable that stands almost within the shadow of the new stone church a gray-eyed, grey-bearded man, stretched out amid the odors of the animals, humbly seeks death as one seeks for sleep. The twenty-four hour period, faithful to vast underground laws, little by little shifts and mingles the shadows in the humble nook. Outside are the plowed fields and a deep ditch clogged with dead leaves and an occasional wolf track in the black earth at the edge of the woods. The homo sleeps and dreams, forgotten. The angelus awakens him. By now the sound of the bells is one of the habits of evening in the kingdoms of England. But this man, as a kid, saw the face of Woden, the holy dread and crowing, the rude wooden idol weighed down with Roman coins and heavy vestments, the sacrifice of horses, dogs, and prisoners. Earlier dawn he will dice, and in him volition die, never to return, the last middle-witness of those heathen rites; the earth will be a petty poorer when this Saxon dies."

It doesn't happen simply to small-scale populations of remote tribes. Substitute English with Norn, and you get the picture of what happened not too much time ago in the Orkney and Shetland, where Norn was spoken until the 18th century, to be substituted by Scottish dialects. Manx linguistic communication has gone through the same, with the concluding native speaker dying in 1974: it's only saved by a small just vibrant community of 2nd-language speakers. The last Dalmatian speaker, a language that linked Italian to Romanian, died in 1898. The last speaker of Shuadit, a peculiar variety of langue d'oc spoken by southern French republic Jewish communities, documented since 11th century, died in 1977. Ane day our linguistic communication will die every bit well, the grade of our minds being finally immobile, like the trounce no more inhabited by an extinct creature.