viernes, 14 de junio de 2013
trabajo final
Compresión
de Textos en Ingles
Profesor:
Francisco Minor Reyes.
Grupo:
CEDCO 167
Trabajo
Final Análisis del Texto:
“SAVING
LANGUAGES”
Por:
Jorge Antonio Ojeda Ortiz.
INTRODUCCIÓN
El presente trabajo
realizado por un servidor de manera individual, fue escogido debido a la
cantidad de contenido visual y la dificultad que existe en combinar las ideas
visuales y el contenido en el texto, el presente texto contiene muchos datos
diversos que hacen difícil la codificación ya que al contener tanta información
se pierde el objetivo de la lectura sin embargo aplicando las técnicas
aprendidas en el curso es más fácil comprender el objetivo del mismo.
[1] Obviously we must do some serious rethinking
of our priorities, lest linguistics go down in history as the only science
that presided obliviously over the
disappearance of 90 percent of the very field to which it is dedicated.
[5] Michael
Krauss, “The World’s Languages in Crisis” (Language, 1992)
SAVING DYING LANGUAGES
Linguists have known for years that
thousands of languages
in the world are in serious danger of extinction. However, only recently has called the realm of will and the money to do something about.
[10] By W. Wayt Gibbs
Ten years ago Michael Krauss
sent a shudder Through the discipline of linguistics with his
prediction that half the 6,000 or so languages spoken in the world would cease to be uttered within a century. Krauss, a language
professor at the University of Alaska–Fairbanks,
had
[15] founded the Alaska Native Language Center to try to preserve
as much as possible of the 20 tongues still known to the
state’s indigenous
people. Only two of those languages were being taught to children.
Several others
existed only in the memories
of a few aged speakers;
[20] the rest were rapidly falling from use. The situation in Alaska was
emblematic
of a global pattern, Krauss
observed in the journal of the Linguistic Society of America. Unless scientists and community
leaders directed a worldwide effort to
stabilize the decline of local languages, he warned,
nine tenths of the linguistic
diversity of humankind would [25]
probably be doomed
to extinction.
Krauss’s prediction was
little more than an educated guess, but other respected
linguists had
been clanging out similar alarms. Kenneth L. Hale of the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology noted
in the same journal issue that eight languages
on which he had done fieldwork had [30]
since passed into extinction.
A 1990 survey in Australia found that 70 of
the 90 surviving
Aboriginal languages were no longer used regularly by all age groups.
The same was true for all but 20 of the 175 Native American
languages spoken or remembered in the U.S., Krauss told a
congressional panel in 1992.
[35] On the face of it, the consolidation of human
language might seem like a good trend, one that could ease
ethnic tensions and aid global commerce. Linguists don’t deny those benefits, and they acknowledge
that in most cases small communities choose
(often unconsciously) to switch to the majority language
because
they believe it will
boost their [40] social or
economic status.
Many experts in the field nonetheless mourn the loss of
rare languages, for several reasons. To
start, there is scientificself-interest: some of the most basic questions in linguistics have to do
with thelimits of human speech, which
are far from fully explored.
Many researchers [45] would like
to know which structural elements of grammar
and
vocabulary if
any are truly universal
and
probably therefore hardwired
into the human brain. Other
scientists try to reconstruct ancient migration patterns by comparing borrowed words that appear in otherwise unrelated languages.
In each of these cases, the wider the [50]
portfolio of languages you study, the more likely you
are to get the right answers. “I think the value is mostly in human terms,” says James A. Matisoff, a specialist
in rare Asian languages at the University of California at Berkeley. “Language is the most important
element in the culture of a community. When it dies, you lose the special knowledge [55] of that culture and
a unique window on the world.” In 1996
linguist Luisa Maffi helped to organize a group
called Terralingua to draw attention to the apparent link be-
Overview/Endangered
Languages
■The latest edition of the Ethnologue
lists 7,202 languages
spoken worldwide, 440 of them within a generation
or
two of extinction. [60]
Allowing for some mislabeling of
dialects, most linguists put the number of distinct languages
between 5,000 and 7,000. Most also accept rough projections
that
without sustained conservation
efforts, half or more of these will fall out of use by the end of the century.
■A small fraction of languages have
been documented well enough to [65] test theories of universal grammars, language
evolution, and many other unanswered
questions in linguistics and
anthropology.
■ Linguists have only recently begun to organize
large-scale efforts to save dying languages.
A new $30-million field research project set
to begin early next year will increase the funding committed
to such work [70] by nearly 10-fold.
DIVERSITY IN
JEOPARDY:
LANGUAGES AND
LIFE-FORMS
www.sciam.com SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN 81
BIOLOGICAL AND LINGUISTIC
diversity are often
highest in the same countries of the world, a correlation
that
has prompted some researchers to suggest that
the two are linked. But when the biological “hot spots” that have [75] the highest density of endemic plant and vertebrate species
(orangered highlights) are mapped along
with endangered and recently extinguished
languages (dots and crosses), a more complicated picture emerges. If there is a link
between biodiversity and language
variety, it is not a straightforward one.
[80] Joyce Pendola;
sources: Atlas of the World’s Languages
in Danger of Disappearing. Second Edition.
Unesco Publishing, 2001; “Biodiversity Hotspots for Conservation
Priorities,” by Norman Myers et al. In Nature, vol. 403; Pages 853–858; February 24, 2000
ETCHING A NEW
ROSETTA STONE
[85] THE HIEROGLYPHIC
LANGUAGE of ancient Egyptians
was lost until Napoleon’s troops discovered
a 1,000-year-old slab
of basalt in the Nile village of Rosetta. Etched
into its black face were three copies of the same text: one in demotic, one in
Greek and
one in hieroglyphic Egyptian. With that key, scholars were able at last to unlock millennia [90] of hidden history.
The Rosetta stone survived by chance,
but
it has inspired a
small group
of engineers and
scientists to deliberately fashion a new artifact that could preserve some basic
knowledge of the world’s languages for
anthropologists of the distant future. Jim Mason, who directs the [95] Rosetta Project
for the Long Now Foundation in San
Francisco, says the group is on schedule to complete its first “stone” [65]
this autumn.
Like the original, this new Rosetta stone
will carry parallel
texts (the first chapter of Genesis), transliterated if
the language has no native [100] script.
But
its design allows it to hold much more detail- 27 pages of glossed
text and English description
for each of 1,000
languages. The pages will
be etched as microscopic images onto a
three-inch nickel disk, with a map at the center
indicating where each language is spoken. No
technology more advanced than
a 1000× microscope is [105] needed
to read the microprint.
The foundation plans to mass-produce the disks, along with steel spheres to protect
them, and to distribute the artifacts globally. That
will increase the odds
that at least one will survive for posterity. The most important contribution of the Rosetta Project may
not be the analog [110] disk but
the digital database of word lists for 4,000 to 5,000 languages that the group
wants to complete next. “We already have word lists in digital form for 2,000 languages,”
Mason says. Scientists at the Santa Fe Institute,
he adds, are keen to use the database to refine
the picture of language evolution and
human migration.
[115] To fill in gaps in the database, the Rosetta team last year set up a collaborative
Web site (rosettaproject.org) through which scholars and native speakers of rare languages
can submit and
peer-review word lists, audio recordings,
grammars and
other kinds of documentation. By June, 664 volunteers (25 to 30 percent of them [120] professional linguists, Mason
estimates) had contributed material. In principle, the last speakers of
moribund languages could upload their
knowledge for the benefit of future generations.
In practice, unfortunately, last speakers are
typically old, poor and computer illiterate. Few have e-mail addresses. —W.W.G.
[125] Tween linguistic
diversity and biodiversity, which seem to be highly concentrated in many of the same countries.
Another international group drafted
an ambitious “universal declaration of linguistic rights.” The draft was submitted to UNESCO in 1996, but the organization
has yet to act on
the proposal.
[130] A new British philanthropy has set aside $30
MILLION for a massive documentation project.
An End to Apathy?
Indeed, despite the near
constant buzz in linguistics about
endangered languages over the past 10 years, the field has [135] accomplished
depressingly little. “You would think that there would be some organized response to this dire situation,” some attempt to determine which languages can be saved
and
which should be documented before they
disappear, says Sarah G.
Thomason, a linguist at the University
of Michigan at Ann Arbor. “But there isn’t any [140] such effort organized in
the profession. It is only recently that it has become fashionable
enough to work on endangered languages.”
Six years ago, recalls Douglas H. Whalen
of Yale University, “when I asked linguists who was
raising money to deal with these problems, I
mostly got blank stares.” So Whalen
and
a few other linguists founded [145]
the Endangered Languages
Fund. But
in the five years to 2001 they were able to collect
only $80,000 for research
grants. A similar foundation
in England, directed by Nicholas Ostler, has raised just $8,000 since 1995.
“I don’t think the situation
has changed in the seven years our foundation has existed,” Ostler
says. And no wonder. With so [150]
little research money available, says Steven Bird of the University of Pennsylvania, “anyone who wants to
work on endangered languages has to forgo a more lucrative and secure career.”
But there are encouraging signs that the
field has turned
a corner. The Volkswagen Foundation, a
German charity, just issued its second [155]
round of grants totaling more than $2 million, Whalen says. It has created a multimedia archive at the Max Planck Institute
for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands that can house recordings, grammars,
dictionaries and
other data on endangered languages. To fill
the archive, the foundation
has dispatched field
linguists to [160]
document Aweti (100 or so speakers
in Brazil), Ega (about 300
speakers in Ivory Coast), Waima’a (a
few hundred speakers in East Timor), and
a dozen or so other languages
unlikely to survive the century.
The Ford Foundation has also edged into the arena.
Its contributions [165] helped to reinvigorate a master-apprentice program
created in 1992 by Leanne Hinton
of Berkeley and
Native Americans worried
about the imminent demise of about 50 indigenous languages in
California. Fluent speakers receive $3,000 to teach a younger relative (who is also paid) their native
tongue through 360
hours of shared [170] activities, spread over six months.
So far about 75
teams have completed
the program, Hinton says, transmitting at
least some knowledge of 25
languages. “It’s too early to call this language revitalization,” Hinton
admits. “In California the death rate of elderly speakers will always be greater than the recruitment rate [175] of young speakers. But at least we prolong the survival of
the language.”
That will give linguists more time to record these tongues before
they vanish. But
the master-apprentice approach hasn’t caught on outside the U.S., and
Hinton’s effort is a drop in the
sea. At least 440 [180]
languages have been reduced to a mere handful of elders,
according to the Ethnologue, a catalogue
of languages produced by the Dallas-based group SIL
International that comes closest to global coverage.
For the vast majority of these languages,
there is little or no record of their grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation or use in daily life. [185] To help fill that need, the Lisbet Rausing Charitable Fund,
a new British philanthropy, has
set aside $30
million for a massive documentation project.
Barry Supple, an adviser to the foundation,
says the money will
probably be doled out over the course of
eight to 10 years. Part will
be given to the School of Oriental and African [190] Studies in London to train linguists
specifically on field documentation of dying languages. But most of the money will go to fieldwork itself.
By the time the program ends, Supple says,
“we expect to document about 100 endangered
languages.”
A New Tower of Babel
[195] The Rausing documentation project is
an order of magnitude larger than any previous
effort. A key test will
be whether it collects the records on all these languages
in a consistent way and stores them in a safe and
accessible archive “The archives we have are generally
impoverished,” says Bird, who is associate
www.sciam.com [200] SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN director of
the Linguistic Data Consortium. “There is no
archive that a university
or
national science foundation
has committed to
maintain indefinitely—say, for 25
or
50 years.” He warns
that languages may be recorded only to be lost again as the digital recording succumbs to obsolescence. “This
is a huge [205] issue,” Whalen
agrees. Complicating matters further, dozens of institutions around the world are setting up digital libraries
for data on endangered languages. This could
create a tower of Babel of a new sort, because the projects
plan to use inconsistent data formats, terminology and even names of languages.
[210] Bird, Gary F. Simons
of SIL International
and many others have
been working to bring some order to this chaos by building an
“open language archives community” (OLAC)
that uses metadata—a kind of digital card catalogue—to smooth out these
inconsistencies. Launched in North America
this past January and in Europe in May, OLAC [215] encompasses more than
20 language repositories, including a number of
those devoted to endangered languages. When the system
begins operation next year, it will allow researchers to
search a vast array of data to check out their theories about how languages evolved,
about how the confluence of tongues reflects the migration
of peoples, [220] and
about the limits of human
speech. Those are the main questions; after
all, that
linguist’s worry may become unanswerable with the loss of rare tongues. Linguistics is a young science still full of
mysteries. Ostler offers one example:
“Ica, spoken in northern Colombia, seems to have nothing comparable
[225]
to a personal pronoun system—I, we, you, he, she, it and
they. Otherwise I would have thought [that] a linguistic universal.” Bird’s colleague Michael B. Maxwell is fascinated by reduplication: a feature of numerous
languages in which a repetition signifies
meaning, such as a plural (as if the
plural of “cat” were “catcat”).
[230] Lushootseed, a nearly extinct language of the Puget Sound area, is almost unique
in its use of reduplication in three different
forms—as prefix, suffix and even as root— Maxwell says: “If languages
like
this die out, we’ll never know the limits of
how reduplication can work in real languages.”
Or
consider a different puzzle of plural variation.
In [235] several languages, such as English, most words are either singular
or plural.
But
just a few, such as the (probably recently deceased)
Australian Aboriginal language
Ngan’gitjemerri, have
four forms for each noun: singular,
dual, trial (three of a kind) and plural. Sursurunga, Tangga and
Marshallese have five
forms. What’s the [240] limit? It
may already be too late to know.
Jana Brenning; Source: Language death, by David Crystal. Cambridge
University press, 2000
Fewer than
four percent of the world’s people are
responsible for maintaining about 96
[245] Better Alive Than
Fossilized
EVEN IF A LANGUAGE has been fully documented,
all that remains once it vanishes from active
use is a fossil skeleton, a scattering of features that the scientist was lucky and astute enough to capture. Linguists may
be able to sketch an outline of the forgotten language [250] and fix its place on the evolutionary
tree, but
little more. “How did people start conversations and talk to babies? How did husbands and wives converse?” Hinton asks.
“Those are the first things you want to learn
when you want to revitalize the language.”
But there is as yet no discipline of “conservation linguistics,” as there is [255] for biology.
Almost every strategy tried so far has succeeded in some
places but
failed in others,
and there seems to be
no way to predict with certainty what will work where. Twenty years ago in New Zealand, Maori speakers
set up “language nests,” in which
preschoolers were immersed in the native language. Additional
Maori-[260] only classes were added
as the children progressed through elementary and secondary school. A similar approach was
tried in Hawaii, with some success the
number of ative speakers has stabilized at 1,000 or so, reports
Joseph E. Grimes of SIL International,
who is working on Oahu. Students can now get
instruction in Hawaiian [265] all the way through university.
(They learn English as well.)
It is too early to tell whether this first generation
of nest eggs will speak
the native language to their children in the
home. And
immersion schools launched elsewhere have met with resistance from both within the community and without. Only one other indigenous language,
[270]
Navajo, is taught this way in the U.S., according to the Center for Applied Linguistics. Leupp Public
School on the Navajo reservation in Arizona started
an immersion program after a survey there showed that
only 7 percent of students could speak
Navajo fluently. Children— initially kindergartners but now those up through
fourth grade—use the [275] language while raising sheep, tending gardens,
performing traditional dances and otherwise learning about their
culture. But
the program has struggled to find qualified
teachers, to obtain Navajo language
textbooks and
tests, and
to garner sufficient community support.
[280] Ofelia Zepeda of
the University of Arizona, who is perhaps
the most prominent Native American advocate
for indigenous language revival in the U.S.,
describes similar troubles with her own language, Tohono O’odham. “Like every tribe in the
country, our problem is that whole generations of children are
nonspeakers,” she says. “The [285]
leadership supports language efforts, but
the issue is funding. We’ve been waiting about three years to get our projects started.”
Even then, the small population of the tribe
means that “we are
essentially powerless in the grand scheme. Getting power over the
schools in our own communities is a key necessity.”
[290] Just because
a speech community is small does not mean that its language
is doomed. At last report, notes Akira Yamamoto of the University of Kansas, there were just 185 people who spoke Karitiana. But
they all lived in the same village in
Brazil, which had just 191 inhabitants.
So
better than
96 percent of the population
was still [295]
speaking the language and teaching it to their children. Because surveys of endangered languages
tend to look only at the number of speakers,
“there has been a
history of linguists predicting the death of languages only to return 20 years later and
find them still there,” says Patrick
McConvell of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and
Torres [300] Strait Islander Studies
in Canberra.
One factor that always seems to occur in the demise of a language, according to theorist Hans-Jürgen Sasse of the University of Cologne in Germany, is that
the speakers begin to have
collective doubts about the usefulness of language
loyalty. Once they start regarding their [305]
own language as inferior
to the majority language, people stop using it for all situations. Kids pick up on the attitude and prefer the dominant language. “In many cases, people don’t notice until they suddenly realize that
their kids never speak the language, even at
home,” Whalen says. This is how Cornish and some dialects
of [310] Scottish Gaelic slipped
into extinction. And it is why Irish
Gaelic is still only rarely used for daily
home life in Ireland, 80
years after the republic was founded with Irish as its first official language.
“Ultimately, the answer to the problem
of language extinction is multilingualism,” Matisoff
argues, and
many linguists agree. “Even [315] uneducated
people can learn several languages, as long
as they start as children,” he says. Indeed,
most people in the world speak more than one tongue, and in places such as Cameroon
(279 languages), Papua
New Guinea (823) and
India (387) it is
common to speak three or four distinct languages and
a dialect or
two as well.
[320] “Most Americans and Canadians, to the west of Quebec, have a gut reaction that anyone speaking another language in front of them is committing an immoral act,” Grimes observes.
“You get the same reaction in Australia and
Russia. It is no coincidence that these are the areas where languages
are disappearing the fastest.” The first step in
[325] saving dying languages is to persuade the world’s majorities to
allow the minorities among them to speak with their own voices.
The Green Book of Language Revitalization in Practice. Edited by Leanne Hinton and Kenneth Hale. Academic Press, 2001.
On Biocultural Diversity. Edited by Luisa
Maffi. Smithsonian Institution Press, [330] 2001. Ethnologue: www.ethnologue.com
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Verbos en Pasado simple
|
|
Verbos en Presente simple
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
RESUMEN
Tenemos
que hacer un replanteamiento serio de nuestras prioridades, la lingüística
puede pasar a la historia debido a que el 90 porciento del campo de estudio
desaparecerá.
Michael Krauss, “The World’s Languages in Crisis” (Language,
1992)
SAVING DYING LANGUAGES
Hace
diez años Michael Krauss hizo estremecer la disciplina de la lingüística con su
predicción de que la mitad de los 6.000 idiomas que se hablan en el mundo
dejaría de ser pronunciado en un siglo.
A
menos que los científicos y los líderes de la comunidad dirijan un esfuerzo
para estabilizar el declive de las lenguas locales, advirtió, nueve décimas
partes de la diversidad lingüística de la humanidad probablemente estarían
condenados a la extinción.
En
vista de ello, la consolidación de la lengua humana puede parecer una buena tendencia,
que podría aliviar las tensiones étnicas y facilitar el comercio global. Los
lingüistas no niegan esos beneficios, y reconocen que, en la mayoría de los
casos, las comunidades pequeñas, elijen (a menudo inconscientemente) cambiar de lengua, ya que creen que va a
mejorar su condición social o económica.
Muchos
investigadores les gustaría saber cuáles son los elementos estructurales de la
gramática otros científicos tratan de reconstruir los patrones migratorios
antiguos mediante la comparación de palabras. En cada uno de estos casos, cuanto mayor sea
la cartera de idiomas que estudias, más probabilidades tendrá de obtener las
respuestas correctas.
Dice
James A. Matisoff, especialista en lenguas asiáticas raras de la Universidad de
California en Berkeley, "El lenguaje es el elemento más importante en la
cultura de una comunidad, cuando muere, se pierde el conocimiento especial de
la cultura y una ventana única en el mundo.
RESUMEN / LENGUAS EN
PELIGRO
■
La última edición del Ethnologue enumera 7,202 lenguas que se hablan en todo el
mundo, de estas 440 de ellas se extinguirán dentro de una generación o dos. La
mayoría también aceptar proyecciones ásperas que sin los esfuerzos de
conservación sostenida, la mitad o más de éstos caerán en desuso a finales del
siglo.
■
Una pequeña fracción de los idiomas se ha documentado lo suficiente como para
poner a prueba las teorías de la gramática universal, la evolución del
lenguaje, y muchas otras preguntas sin respuesta en la lingüística y la antropología.
■
Los lingüistas han comenzado recientemente a organizar esfuerzos a gran escala
para salvar lenguas moribundas. Un nuevo proyecto de investigación de campo de
30 millones de dólares que comenzará a principios del próximo año aumentará la
financiación comprometida con este tipo de trabajo en casi 10 veces.
DIVERSIDAD EN
PELIGRO:
IDIOMAS Y LAS FORMAS
DE VIDA
Diversidad
biológica y lingüística son a menudo más alta en los mismos países del mundo,
una correlación que ha llevado a algunos investigadores a sugerir que los dos
están relacionados. Pero cuando los "puntos calientes" biológicos que
tienen la mayor densidad de plantas endémicas y especies de vertebrados
(destacado orangered) se correlacionan con las lenguas en peligro, y recientemente
extinguido (puntos y cruces), emerge un panorama más complicado. Si existe un
vínculo entre la biodiversidad y variedad de la lengua, no es un simple uno.
Joyce
Pendola; fuentes: Atlas de las Lenguas del Mundo en Peligro de Desaparición.
Segunda edición. Ediciones UNESCO, 2001; "Puntos Calientes de Biodiversidad
para las Prioridades de Conservación", Por Norman Myers et al. En la Naturaleza,
vol. 403; Páginas 853-858, 24 de febrero 2000
GRABADO UNA NUEVA PIEDRA ROSETTA
EL
lenguaje jeroglífico de los antiguos egipcios se perdió hasta que las tropas de
Napoleón descubrieron una losa de 1.000 años de basalto en el pueblo del Nilo
de Rosetta. Grabada en su rostro negro tres copias del mismo texto: una en
demótico, una en griego y uno de cada jeroglífico egipcio. Con esa clave, los
estudiosos pudieron al fin de desbloquear milenios de historia oculta.
La
piedra de Rosetta sobrevivió por casualidad, pero ha inspirado a un pequeño
grupo de ingenieros y científicos a la creación de un nuevo artefacto que
podría conservar algunos conocimientos básicos de las lenguas del mundo para
los antropólogos del futuro lejano.
Al
igual que el original, esta nueva piedra de Rosetta llevará textos paralelos
(el primer capítulo del Génesis), Las páginas serán grabadas como imágenes
microscópicas en un disco de níquel de tres pulgadas, con un mapa en el centro
que indica donde se habla cada idioma
La
fundación planea producir en masa los discos, junto con bolas de acero para
protegerlos, y la distribución de los artefactos a nivel mundial. Esto
aumentará las probabilidades de que al menos uno va a sobrevivir para la
posteridad.
En
efecto, a pesar de los rumores casi constantes en la lingüística sobre las
lenguas en peligro de extinción en los últimos 10 años, en el campo se ha
logrado poco. "Se podría pensar que habría una respuesta organizada a esta
grave situación," un intento para determinar qué idiomas se pueden guardar
y que deben ser documentados antes de que desaparezcan, dice Sarah G. Thomason,
un lingüista de la Universidad de Michigan en Ann Arbor. "Pero no es así recientemente
se ha convertido en moda trabajar en las lenguas en peligro”.
Douglas
H. Whalen, de la Universidad de Yale, y algunos otros lingüistas fundaron el
Fondo de las lenguas en peligro. Sin embargo, en los cinco años anteriores a
2001 fueron capaces de recoger sólo $80,000 dólares para becas de
investigación. Una fundación similar en Inglaterra, dirigida por Nicholas
Ostler, ha recaudado sólo $8,000 dólares desde 1995. "No creo que la
situación ha cambiado en los siete años de nuestra fundación ha existido",
dice Ostler. Y no es de extrañar, que con tan poco dinero para la investigación
dice Steven Bird de la Universidad de Pennsylvania, "cualquier persona que
quiera trabajar en las lenguas en peligro ha de renunciar a una carrera más
lucrativa y segura."
Sin
embargo, la Fundación Volkswagen, una organización benéfica alemana, acaba de
publicar su segunda ronda de subvenciones por valor de más de $ 2 millones,
dijo Whalen. Se ha creado un archivo multimedia en el Instituto Max Planck de
Psicolingüística de los Países Bajos que pueden albergar grabaciones,
gramáticas, diccionarios y otros datos sobre las lenguas en peligro de
extinción.
La
Fundación Ford y sus contribuciones ayudaron a revitalizar un programa
maestro-aprendiz creado en 1992 por Leanne Hinton de Berkeley y los nativos
americanos preocupados por la inminente desaparición de cerca de 50 lenguas
indígenas en California.
The
Lisbet Rausing Charitable Fund, una nueva filantrópica británica, ha destinado
$ 30 millones para un proyecto masivo de documentación. Barry Supple, asesor de
la fundación, dice que el dinero probablemente será repartido a lo largo de
ocho a 10 años.
UNA NUEVA TORRE DE
BABEL
El
Proyecto de Documentación Rausing es un orden de magnitud mayor que cualquier
esfuerzo previo. Una prueba clave será que recogerá los registros en todos los idiomas de
una manera consistente y los almacena en un archivo seguro y accesible
"Los archivos que tenemos son generalmente empobrecidos", dice Bird,
quien es socio del SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN y director del Consorcio de datos
lingüística.
Advierte
que las lenguas pueden ser grabadas sólo para perderse de nuevo, para complicar
aún más las cosas, decenas de instituciones de todo el mundo están creando
bibliotecas digitales para datos sobre las lenguas en peligro de extinción.
Esto podría crear una torre de Babel de una nueva especie, ya que los proyectos
planean utilizar formatos de datos incompatibles.
Bird, Gary F. Simons
de SIL Internacional y muchos otros han estado trabajando para poner orden en
este caos mediante la construcción de un "lenguaje abierto los archivos de
la comunidad" (OLAC) que utiliza los metadatos de un tipo de tarjeta digital
del catálogo-para suavizar estas inconsistencias.
Lanzada en América del Norte en enero pasado y
en Europa en mayo, OLAC abarca más de 20 depósitos de idiomas, incluyendo un
número de los dedicados a las lenguas en peligro de extinción. Cuando el
sistema comience a funcionar el próximo año, permitirá a los investigadores buscar
en una amplia gama de datos para comprobar sus teorías acerca de cómo las
lenguas se desarrollaron, sobre cómo la confluencia de lenguas refleja los
pueblos su migración y sobre los límites del lenguaje humano.
MEJOR VIVA QUE FOSILIZADO
También
en el caso de un idioma se ha documentado totalmente lo que queda una vez que
desaparece de su uso activo es un esqueleto fósil, un puñado de características
que el científico tuvo la suerte y lo suficientemente astuto como para
capturar. Los lingüistas pueden ser capaces de dibujar un esquema del lenguaje
olvidado y fijar su posición en el árbol evolutivo.
Hace
veinte años, en Nueva Zelanda, hablantes maoríes crearon "nidos
lingüísticos", en el que los preescolares se sumergieron en el idioma
nativo. Se añadieron clases adicionales Maori sólo cuando los niños avanzaban
en la escuela primaria y secundaria. Un enfoque similar fue juzgado en Hawaii,
con cierto éxito, Ahora los estudiantes pueden recibir instrucción en hawaiano
todo el camino hasta la universidad.
El hecho de que una
comunidad lingüística es pequeña no quiere decir que su lenguaje está
condenado. Según el último informe, señala Akira Yamamoto de la Universidad de
Kansas, había sólo 185 personas que hablaban karitiana. Pero todos ellos vivían
en el mismo pueblo de Brasil, que tenía sólo 191 habitantes. Así que mejor que
el 96 por ciento de la población aún hablaba el idioma y la enseñanza de sus
hijos. Dado que las encuestas de las lenguas en peligro de extinción tienden a
fijarse sólo en el número de hablantes, "ha habido una historia de
lingüistas predicen la muerte de las lenguas sólo para regresar 20 años más
tarde y encontrar todavía allí", dice Patrick McConvell del Australian
Institute of Aboriginal y Estudios del Estrecho de Torres en Canberra.
Un factor que siempre
parece ocurrir en la desaparición de una lengua, de acuerdo con el teórico
Hans-Jürgen Sasse, de la Universidad de Colonia en Alemania, es que los hablantes
empiezan a tener "dudas colectivas sobre la utilidad de la lealtad
lingüística." Una vez que empiezan con respecto a su propia lengua como
inferiores a la lengua de la mayoría, la gente deja de usarla para todas las
situaciones. Los niños recogen en la actitud y prefieren la lengua dominante.
"En muchos casos, las personas no se dan cuenta hasta que de repente se
dan cuenta de que sus hijos no hablan el idioma, incluso en casa", dice
Whalen. Esta es la forma en Cornualles y algunos dialectos del gaélico escocés
se metieron en extinción. Y es por eso que el gaélico irlandés es todavía sólo
rara vez se utiliza para la vida diaria en casa en Irlanda, 80 años después de
la república fue fundada con el irlandés como primer idioma oficial.
Muchos lingüistas
están de acuerdo que las personas sin educación pueden aprender varios idiomas,
siempre y cuando comienzan como niños". De hecho, la mayoría de las
personas en el mundo hablan más de una lengua, y en lugares como Camerún (279
idiomas), Papua Nueva Guinea (823) y la India (387), es común hablar tres o
cuatro idiomas diferentes y un dialecto o dos así.
"La mayoría de
los estadounidenses y canadienses, al oeste de Quebec, tienen una reacción
visceral que cualquier persona que habla otro idioma en frente de ellos está
cometiendo un acto inmoral", observa Grimes. "Usted consigue la misma
reacción en Australia y Rusia. No es casualidad que estas son las áreas donde
las lenguas están desapareciendo más rápido. "El primer paso en el ahorro
de lenguas moribundas es convencer a las mayorías del mundo para permitir a las
minorías entre los que hablen con su propia voz.
El Libro Verde de la
Revitalización del Lenguaje en la práctica. Editado por Leanne Hinton y Kenneth
Hale. Academic Press, 2001.
En Diversidad
Biocultural. Editado por Luisa Maffi. Smithsonian
Institution Press, 2001. Ethnologue: www.ethnologue.com
Enseñanza de Lenguas
Indígenas: http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/ ~ jar / TIL.html
Conclusión
Las lenguas de los
pueblos son las ventanas que nos permiten ver a fondo las culturas y las
costumbres de los diferentes pueblos, un ejemplo de esto es nuestro país, el
cual cuenta con una gran gama de lenguas indígenas, el preservarlas es una
tarea muy importante para los lingüistas de nuestro país ya que como se indican
en la lectura la mayor parte de las lenguas se están extinguiendo gracias a la
hegemonía de los pueblos desarrollados.
Es importante dejar
un testimonio de las culturas a través de sus lenguas y costumbres para que los
futuros antropólogos y científicos entiendan más a fondo la problemáticas
económicas y sociales existentes en determinadas culturas y cuál fue el proceso
de extinción de estas.
ELEMENTOS VISUALES
Elemento visual
|
Información que aporta
|
Título
|
Saving Dying Languages
|
Epígrafe
|
Linguists have known for
years that thousands of world’s languages are at grave risk of extinction.
yet only recently has the field summoned the will -and the money- to do much
about it
|
Fechas
|
(Agosto 2002), (1990), (1992), (1996), (1996), (2001),
(1995) (1992) (2000)
|
Nombres de
Personas
|
Michael Krauss, W. Wayt Gibbs, Kenneth L, Luisa Maffi, Napoleon’s,
Jim Mason, Sarah G.
Thomason, Douglas H. Whalen, Nicholas
Ostler, Leanne Hinton, Lisbet Rausing Charitable, Gary F. Simons, Michael B.
Maxwell, Ofelia Zepeda, Akira Yamamoto, Patrick McConvell, Hans-Jürgen Sasse
|
Tipografías
|
El
texto en negritas y cursiva, los subtítulos de color azul
|
Fuente
|
Revista: SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN
|
Suscribirse a:
Entradas (Atom)