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| Southeast Asia |
| Spengler: For whom the chopper lands |
| 2005-01-10 |
| Neolithic hunters aiming arrows at a rescue chopper stand out among the terrible images of the December tsunami (Early warning? Ask Nicobar's stone-agers, January 9). For the aborigines of the Sentinel Islands, the last stone-age people to resist contact with the world, an Indian Coast Guard helicopter landing on their shores seemed a direr threat than the tsunami. It is not known whether more than 40 of them survived the events of December 26 out of an estimated population of 100, the remnant of 10,000 at the turn of the 18th century. Because we often have seen the dreadful fate of primitive peoples thrust into the modern world, their hostility surprises us not at all. They would rather die on their own terms than live as our wards. Like Friedrich von Schiller's William Tell, the Sentinelese will cry, "Better by the hand of God than the hand of man." To refuse disaster aid would seem an irrational choice for a Swedish tour group, but not for aborigines, for whom the approaching chopper resembles an exterminating angel. "Send not to know for whom the chopper lands: it lands for thee," a modern John Donne might have written. [1] Who is less rational, the aboriginals of the Andaman Sea or today's Europeans? The former are fighting to keep their culture, while the latter are liquidating theirs, first of all by failing to reproduce (Why Europe chooses extinction, April 8, 2003). Our actions seem more rational than those of the Sentinelese because we live at a greater distance from the existential boundary. The Sentinelese live in wariness of the next anthropologist to step out of the bush. Remote by contrast seems the day in which other people will inhabit the hills and valleys of our land, and our language will be preserved only in libraries, in Franz Rosenzweig's memorable phrase. |
| Posted by:tipper |
| #2 Yep, that's what happens to languages. There used to be a lot more languages -- and peoples, too -- in Sub-Saharan Africa, before the Bantus, with their more efficient agriculture, took over pretty much everything (see Guns, Germs, and Steel by J. Diamond for details). Nowadays people who speak English tend to be more successful than people who don't, whether as a first or nth language. It isn't a matter of imperialism, but of differential success. But since anyone with access can learn to speak English, this language benefit is not exclusive to the native speakers. Not like the good old days, when the dominant language was that of the conquerers, and the one about to disappear that of the conquest, often only spoken by the womenfolk after their men had all been killed off. Of course its sad, and wouldn't we all love to explore the literature of the Etruscans, or the cavemen of Southern France, but all the fussing in the world isn't going to change it. On the other hand the fussers can look forward to the coming dark ages, when in the many isolatated small population groups English will splinter and evolve into many different languages once again. |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2005-01-10 8:09:10 PM |
| #1 Great quote: "Pessimists reckon that in 100 years' time 90% of the world's languages will be gone, and that a couple of centuries from now the world may be left with only 200 tongues," observed The conomist, in a plaidoyer for funding to preserve the grammar and vocabulary of doomed idioms. "French and German may not be among them; 200 years from now, at current rates of population decline, they will be spoken only in hell." |
| Posted by: Tibor 2005-01-10 3:06:05 PM |