Sometimes you read a news story that makes you proud to be human. Today’s story, Saving Extinct Languages is one of those. It describes the work of John Peabody Harrington, who
spent four decades gathering more than 1 million pages of phonetic notations on disappearing languages spoken by tribes from Alaska to South America. When the technology became available, he supplemented his written record with audio recordings – first using wax cylinders, then aluminum discs.
The story makes clear the quiet dedication of Harrington, who died in 1961. His archive contains his old field clothes, pockets still containing “the buns and crackers Harrington kept in his pockets so he wouldn’t have to waste time looking for meals.” His letters to his assistant confirm this sense of urgency: “Rain or no rain, rush. Dying languages depend on you.”
It’s amazing to learn of the linguistic diversity California once housed. The archive contains records of more than 100 California languages alone. And it’s moving to learn how much these notes and recordings mean to today’s native Americans, a thread tying them to their lost past:
The first time Jose Freeman heard his tribe’s lost language through the crackle of a 70-year-old recording, he cried.
“My ancestors were speaking to me,” said Freeman of the sounds captured when American Indians still inhabited California’s Salinas Valley. “It was like coming home.”
…the last native speaker of Salinan died almost half a century ago…
It’s wonderful that this work is now being rediscovered by scholars and native Americans. It’s a testament to the difference that one person with a passion can make to the lives of others, even fifty years after his death. And it’s a reminder to all of us to work on stuff that matters, regardless of contemporary success or the lack thereof.
(Sidenote on the link above. This is actually an AP story that ran in my local paper, the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, but I linked to it in the Vacaville Times because that’s the only one that shows up so far in Google. I wonder why the Vacaville Times is indexed better than the AP feed itself.)