When Languages Die

"Language and culture cannot be separated... Language is a tool that is used to explore and experience our cultures and the perspectives that are embedded in our cultures."

~ Buffy Sainte-Marie (Piapot Cree, Academy Award-winning singer and songwriter)

Throughout history, when conquering armies have invaded new countries, they have tried to eradicate the native languages of the inhabitants. Think of the English in Ireland and Wales, the Japanese in Korea or westerners in North America. I’ve always wondered about their intentions. Are they hoping to suppress resistance by erasing a core aspect of the conquered people’s identity? Is it simply more convenient to have everyone speak one language? Are they just mean?

Unfortunately, you don’t need a conquering army to kill a language; contemporary society does the job very effectively, with little or no bloodshed at all.

Around the world languages are dying every day. I was reminded of this when I received the most recent edition of AWADmail, the weekly newsletter produced by Wordsmith.org. Wordsmith.org is all about language. It is the force behind the wonderful A.Word.A.Day e-mails and the ever-amusing Internet Anagram Server, which produced on a moment’s notice 1,087 variations of the word “divinipotent” (e.g., divine tin pot, do invite pint, dip oven in tit). But I digress. 

"Everything can change, but not the language that we carry inside us, like a world more exclusive and final than one's mother's womb."
~ Italo Calvino

In most editions of AWADmail, founder and editor Anu Garg offers up links to interesting stories he’s come across in his travels. The most recent edition took note of two examples of disappearing languages. An article in Science Daily reports on efforts to record and save two Ob-Ugrian languages, Mansi and Khanti. Once common in Northwestern Siberia, in recent decades both have been largely supplanted by Russian.

A second example comes from India’s Andaman Islands, where Boa Sr, the last person to speak the Bo language — one of India’s oldest — has died. According to a report from BBC news, "Languages in the Andamans are thought to originate from Africa. Some may be 70,000 years old." You can hear a recording of Boa Sr speaking Bo on the BBC Web site.

In this era of expanding cultural homogeneity, we should be grateful to those who create for posterity accurate records of dying languages. Still, each loss subtracts from the rich diversity of our world. One might write an elegy, but in what language?

"The vanishing of languages, like those of living species, is an event that has been repeated many times in history...The death of a language is not only a tragedy for those directly involved but also an irretrievable cultural loss for the rest of the world. Through language, each culture expresses a unique world view. Thus, any effort to preserve linguistic variety implies a deep respect for the positive values of other cultures."

~ Rodger Doyle, Scientific American, March 1998

Resilience: The Science of Equanimity

“He who gains a victory over other men is strong; but he who gains a victory over himself is all powerful.”
~ Lao Tzu

A few weeks ago I sat in a conference room in a New York City hotel as Andrew Shatté, Ph.D. gave a lecture on “The Science of Resilience: Why Some People Thrive and Others Fail.”

Dr. Shatté is currently managing director and principal of Adaptiv Learning, a company that helps other companies teach their employees to be more successful. He was previously adjunct professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and is co-author of the book The Resilience Factor. You could safely say he is a resilience expert.

Andrew Shatté is a singularly entertaining speaker who knows how to win over his audience with humor and personal anecdotes. But it wasn't all fun and games; some of his observations provided the audience with surprising moments of self-awareness. His fundamental message: resilience is not blind perseverance, nor is it a function of genetics or intelligence; instead, resilience is the intelligent deployment of limited assets and a particular thinking style — and it is a skill that can be learned.

Wherever academics talk about psychological balance, they’re likely to bring up Epictetus, the Greek slave whose serenity and self-control led to his freedom and eventual acclaim as the leading philosopher of Rome. Epictetus maintained we are all the masters of our own feelings and lives. Although it's believed he wrote nothing down, here are some of the philosophical tenets attributed to him:

“People are not disturbed by things, but by the view they take of them.”

“Make the best use of what is in your power, and take the rest as it happens.”

“Difficulties are things that show a person what they are.”

As Dr. Shatté noted, in today's world the philosophy of Epictetus is most commonly expressed in theologian Reinhold Niebuhr’s well-known Serenity Prayer. The prayer has become a mantra at most twelve-step programs, but for those who are unfamiliar with it, it goes like this:

God, grant me the serenity
To accept the things I cannot change;
The courage to change the things that I can;
And the wisdom to know the difference.

As we all know, wisdom is the tricky part.

Another man who knew a great deal about resilience was Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl (1905–1997).  Frankl developed his understanding of defeat and resilience, as well as his existential therapeutic approach, while imprisoned in the German concentration camp at Auschwitz. His book about his experiences, Man's Search for Meaning, later became a best-seller. Frankl's fundamental insight has much in common with that of Epictetus: “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way." You can read more about Viktor Frankl's philosophy and download recordings of lectures and interviews at the Web site of the Viktor Frankl Institut in Vienna.

When he was teaching at Penn, Andrew Shatté was part of the team that established the Penn Resliency Project — a research program that teaches children and adolescents how to cope with life's setbacks and disappointments. So far, the program has studied over 2,000 children in the U.S., the U.K. and Australia. Coincidentally, a few days before the lecture, National Public Radio broadcast a story about the Penn project titled “Emotional Training Helps Kids Fight Depression.” I encourage everyone to go to the NPR Web site, read the story and listen to the podcast. In nine fascinating minutes, it will open your eyes and maybe even lift your mood.

Still to be determined: when will we have a Penn Resiliency Project for adults?

“Don't wish me happiness — I don't expect to be happy, it's gotten beyond that, somehow. Wish me courage and strength and a sense of humor. I will need them all.”
~ Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Waking Dreams, Dreaming Wakefulness

“Life is something that happens when you can't get to sleep. “
~ Fran Lebowitz

The other night as I tossed and turned, occasionally sneaking glances at the clock in the hope that I might have dropped off for an hour or two, an old memory came to me.

In 1969 I spent several months in a rambling Victorian house in Oakland, California, sharing the rent with a small group of nomads and free spirits. Since we were young and this was the 1960s, most household members were experimenting with mind-altering substances of one kind or another. There came a day when the most eager experimenter in our group — let’s call him Gary — consumed way too much of something he hadn’t tried before. Hours after the drug should have worn off Gary was still rattling around the neighborhood babbling to himself. Eventually, with some effort, we coaxed him into the house. The question was how to keep him there. We were certain that if he rambled out again, as he was inclined to do, he would end up under arrest or in an asylum.

We decided we would take turns guarding Gary around the clock until he was back to normal. You may wonder why we didn’t simply bring him to an emergency room. The answer is, that would have made sense, but this was the 1960s and young people rarely did the sensible thing, especially if it involved authority figures. Has that changed? Probably not. In any case, I took the overnight shift, but stress also kept me awake during the day. When the next night came and I took my turn, I was exhausted.

Around 5 a.m. on the second day of Gary’s madness I discovered myself sitting in the kitchen, drinking a cup of coffee, having a conversation with Gary and another friend. I had no recollection of how I came to be there. Gary was back…but where had I been?

Somniloquy is the name science gives to talking in one’s sleep. (Imagine for a moment what Hamlet's somniloquy might have been.)  Somniloqy is a subset of the larger classification called parasomnia, which includes somnambulism — sleepwalking — which I had obviously been doing as well. I cannot find any scientific information about somnicaffeination — sleep-coffee-drinking. It is possible that it's a subset of nocturnal sleep-related eating disorder (NSRED). But I suspect it was simply a natural instinct telling me to wake up. After all, it's what millions and millions of us do to wake up every morning.

That experience awakened me (pun intended) to the fact that my unconscious mind was able to participate in its own activities, with no input from me. I wonder, what else is it doing?

"All men whilst they are awake are in one common world:  but each of them, when he is asleep, is in a world of his own." 
~ Plutarch