A Dying Language and a Breath of Life

That puts them way ahead of many other native American peoples who no longer exist. An unknown number had already been wiped out (or nearly so and therefore merged with other tribes) before scholars arrived to catalog and study them.

The Navajo are the largest tribe in the USA, with an enormous reservation occupying much of northeastern Arizona and northwestern New Mexico, which they govern with less interference from U.S. and state authorities than any other rez. Their language still thrives, and was used as a code in WWII by Navajo "code-talkers," on the (valid) premise that no Japanese had ever studied it. Their reservation is so big that the Hopi reservation is completely surrounded by it.

The Cherokee are the most successful tribe, due to forceful relocation from their ancestral home in Florida to what is now Oklahoma. An untold portion of the population (possibly a majority) died along the way, which is forever remembered as "the Trail of Tears." When the Industrial Era came into full flower petroleum was discovered in Oklahoma and the Cherokee people became wealthy. They have hospitals, universities and business corporations, and generally live among us. Chief Sequoia invented an alphabet for their language (more properly called a syllabary, each symbol represents a consonant-vowel combination like Japanese kana), and Cherokee became the first written Native American language. With their newspapers and other publishing enterprises, at the end of the 19th century the rate of literacy was higher among the Cherokee than among the Euro-Americans of Oklahoma.

European explorers often encountered more than one group living in an area--different clans of one tribe or even different tribes--speaking different dialects of the same language. "Dakota," for example, is rendered "Lakota" and "Nakota" in various dialects.

Since the mid-20th century there has been a renaissance of sorts in the USA (and some other countries) in which minority cultures unrelated to the culture in power reclaim their native heritage for the sake of history, and also in order to not lose the philosophy of their ancestors--not to mention their cool legends and songs. The Museum of the American Indian here in Washington has a rotating set of several dozen extremely well-funded and curated exhibits (after all it's part of the Smithsonian Institution) that not only help share those cultures with us "white folks" but also draw their own young people back into the cultures with the reward of a trip to Washington and a bit of fame and honor.

Unfortunately I didn't get around to the opening exhibit, and missed my own local tribe, the Hupa. Which is spelled "Hoopa" in the name of the town in the center of their reservation. Most of them commute to Eureka or one of the smaller cities in the county for work.

Of course this is not limited to our native peoples. The "Chicano Pride" movement has been underway for four decades, as kids whose parents never taught them Spanish suddenly renamed the Southwest Aztlán and their generation La Raza.

The technology of the Electronic Age has given this work a boost. It's now a trivial effort to record a song or film a dance. The few remaining native speakers of a language can be taped and the material reviewed later.

Have they identified its family? Many languages in western USA and Canada belong to the Na-Dene family, including Navajo and Tlingit. Just since the turn of the millennium Na-Dene was discovered to be related to the Yenisei language of Siberia. (This is still somewhat controversial but if the relationship is not real it's a bunch of large and amazing coincidences.) This is the first time that languages of the New World and Old World have been linked, and it means that the technology of language is at least 15,000 years old, going back to the separation. Languages change so fast that the hints at their relation to one another vanish (for example, Chinese has not always been tonal), so until now there's been no convincing proof that the technology was invented more than six or seven thousand years ago, so if this is true it's a champagne-and-balloons event for linguists. Of course anthropologists think it has to go back to Africa around 70KYA, because that's when they see the sudden emergence of coordinated activities that simply could not have been done without intricate oral communication.

Some African and Australian languages also do that. It seems that as a community advances out of the Stone Age, and begins merging with other nearby communities to form villages, towns, cities, and eventually nations, intricate phonetic idiosyncrasies are leveled out to make the language easier for outsiders to master. Even today, phonetics is almost always the most difficult part of learning a foreign language for adults or even teenagers, even those who are precocious enough to master bewildering grammar and daunting vocabulary.

As far as I know, Hawaiian has the easiest set of phonemes: AEHIKLMNOPUW and the glottal stop written as an apostrophe as in Hawai'i. The original Polynesian language had to be aggressively simplified in order to be understood when shouted between rafts on their long ocean voyages. Tahitian tabu becomes Hawaiian kapu, Samoan salofa becomes Hawaiian aloha.

Every language is an expression of the community's culture. Look at the proliferation of acronyms--strictly speaking, an abbreviation that can be pronounced as a word. Radar, Cobol, Laser: these words could only have been invented by a population that had invented the technology of writing.

And look at Chinese. Its grammar operates entirely without inflections. No singular/plural, no nominative/accusative, no masculine/feminine and no present/past/future. Does this sound like the language of a people who have had a continuous civilization for three thousand years, so they are accustomed to today, tomorrow and yesterday always being pretty much the same?

That was unfortunately common worldwide in the "reeducation" of colonized people. Although scholars managed to record many of these languages before they were lost, if only in rough phonetic alphabets, many others are gone without a trace.

Cool!

Tears of joy for this amateur linguist.

Even Irish might have vanished. When the whole country was occupied by the Brits, they tried to outlaw it, especially the written language. There is an anecdote that may be apocryphal, but knowing how the British felt about foreigners in the 19th century, it could just as easily be true. A kosher butcher put a sign in Hebrew in the window of his shop. The English cops were there in an hour, demanding that he take it down and threatening to throw him in jail. It turned out that these guys could not distinguish the Hebrew abjad (an "alphabet" with no vowels since they're not phonemic in the Afro-Asiatic language family) from the stylized form of the Roman alphabet used for writing Irish.

Saving our species's history, one language at a time.

My first wife was from Bremerton, so I know it's pronounced pyoo-OLL-up.

Actually they're quite common all over the USA. 29 of our 50 state names are of native origin. Each region transcribes Indian names in the language of its settlers. In the East it's English or French. In California they look like Spanish names because of the Spanish spelling, but they're not. Cucamonga, Tujunga, those are all native names.

Alabama: Name of a native people
Alaska: Aleut, "The object toward which the action of the sea is directed."
Arizona: Probably from a local name meaning "having a little spring," but it could be the Basque word arizonak, "good oaks," brought over by the Spaniards.
Arkansas: The name given to the Quapaw people by Algonquian speakers
(California is NOT an Indian name but most people think so. It's an imaginary place in "The Exploits of Esplandián" by Garci Ordóñez de Montalvo.)
Connecticut: Mohican for "at the long tidal river."
Hawaii: "Place of the gods"
Idaho: The Athabaskan word for "enemy," given by them to the Comanches
Illinois: Unidentified Algonquian language, apparently literally, "one who sounds normal" (i.e., speaks an Algonquian language)
Iowa: Chiwere branch of the Aiouan language family; said to be from Dakota ayuxba "sleepy ones."
Kansas: The Kansa, a Siouan people, same root as "Arkansas."
Kentucky: Iroquois or Shawnee, perhaps Wyandot for "meadow"
Massachusetts: Name of Great Blue Hill south of Boston, literally, "at the big hill"
Michigan: Perhaps from Old Ojibwa (Algonquian) meshi-gami "big lake."
Minnesota: Dakota mnisota, "cloudy water."
Mississippi: Algonquian "big river."
Missouri: Name of a group of native peoples among Chiwere tribes, Algonquian for "people of the big canoes."
Nebraska: Siouan name for the Platte River, literally "water flat."
[New] Mexico: Nahuatl name of the ancient Aztec capital.
[North and South] Dakota: Name of a group of native peoples from the Plains states, Dakota for "friendly."
Ohio: Seneca "good river."
Oklahoma: Choctaw, "red people." Coined after the Christian invasion by Choctaw scholar Allen Wright, and first used in the Choctaw-Chickasaw treaty of April 28, 1866.
Oregon: Origin is uncertain and disputed, but sure looks like Algonquian.
Tennessee: Cherokee name given to a village, but origin unknown.
Texas: Caddo, "friends, allies."
Utah: Name of the Uto-Aztecan people that we now call the Utes, probably named by the Apaches from their word "high," a reference to them living in the mountains.
Wisconsin: Native name, although meaning and exact origin unknown.
Wyoming: Originally a region in Pennsylvania, popularized by a poem by a Scots poet. Subsequently this native name was given to several other locations including the state.

Notice how common it is for our name for a people to actually be some other people's name for them, rather than their own. Many Paleolithic tribes simply called themselves "the people" and only have names for other groups, quite often of the form "those guys on the other side of the river" or "crazy people who eat fungus."