Language extinction triggers the loss of unique medicinal knowledge

[Igel]

6. This kind of thing is easy to get a bit skewed.

Yes, a lot of knowledge is held in language-specific forms.

On the other hand, as one population and language moves in and displaces another, there's population mergers. If you're surrounded by 20 plants and need to name them, you have a choice: coin a new word or borrow one. A lot of "indigenous" knowledge on the part of the indigenous populations of parts of the US, Europe, Asia, S. Asia, and Africa were borrowed from the previous indigenous populations of those parts.

After all, Native American tribes migrated, expelled, absorbed, and genocided other tribes. Language expansion in Africa follows genetic migrations, showing that people came, squashed the previous indigenous culture, and produced a new indigenous culture.

Even the Albanians and Slavs and Celts aren't truly indigenous to Europe, if you trace them back: the IE folk moved in, even if Poles resulted from the break-up and merger of pre-existing ethnic groups. (So the Poles existed nowhere else as an ethnic unit; but they came from stock that was overlain on older ethnic substrata.)

I like using cilantro and epazote. Cilantro is good old fashioned European coriander, and is entirely non-native to the new world. Epazote is an entirely non-English word that I nonetheless know and use. Realia matter; realia acquires words when people need them.

The knowledge from old populations was either passed to the newcomers who needed it or lost in antiquity (and maybe rediscovered). If passed on, then language extinction isn't the issue; if lost, then it's not just a modern feature. This misses a large part of the point, though.

The main point is this: When a population becomes urban, that knowledge is lost even if they keep the same language (that is, the language not only doesn't go extinct, but mushrooms in terms of population size). Look in an English dialect dictionary for words for herbs. Pick a random 100. See if anybody knows any of them where you work. And if they recognize one, it's likely to be the last bit of a compound, "red something-or-other".

In other words, the indigenous language borne by the newly indigenized Germanic arrivals in Britain (following by centuries the languages borne by the former indigenized Celtic arrivals) is losing all that rich medicinal knowledge. Actually, it's mostly lost it.

I moved to Texas and found a whole new world of weeds. Had to learn the names for them--two choices. Linnaean or common (with variants for the common names). What's funny is that when I talk about them, on the rare occasions I've had to talk about them, nobody hardly knows them. They're all urbane, educated, and don't root around in the dirt. Even if they speak the same language as their great-grandparents in Texas (such folk do exist) and live within 10 miles of their family homestead, the knowledge is lost.

This is a different kind of thing, and, I'd argue, the actual problem with language extinction. The knowledge can be carried across a language barrier quite handily. But if the next generation says "screw that!" to the knowledge and doesn't have a use for the words, then the knowledge dies. Even if the language--the big thing some people fight for--continue to exist. Even if the ethnic group continues as an ethnic group, unless they live in the same situation in which they need to know the most common 100 wild plants within 5 miles of their home they won't.

The flip of that is also a problem. One of the banes of my existence when reading Siberian and mid-19th century Russian literature was the desire that writers had to show off local knowledge. I don't know how many words I knew for the same set of species of some chamomile or a variety of mushroom or some sort of local grass snake, all in the same language (and just try to find a picture of those to put object to phonetic form for these things in the 1980s, pre-net). Now nobody knows what those words mean, and I have stacks of books with obscure names like "The fish of the Upper Volga" or "Mushrooms of the SW Urals"--mostly pictures, descriptions, and a variety of dialectal names for them, and uses. Since I teach high school science now, they're useless; and since nobody but the rare Slavic dialectologist is interested (lit people don't care about these words unless they can hang some critical-theoretic point on them), they'll be tossed when I die or downsize.

(It's the same issue with some words in Leviticus--the referents are lost; words without referential knowledge is pointless.)

What's left is the way to keep this from happening. If you record the words, that helps little--you need to translate them and the texts, and immediately run into a critical-theoretic tangle. (Are you imperialist? colonialist? appropriationist?) You need to keep samples of the referents, and the use of the actual word in the local language (there are probably several) is utterly meaningless at that point.

Or you can force the young to retain the words, learn what the words mean, and maintain that knowledge ... How, exactly? Didn't work with young people moving to cities or finding non-agricultural work who speak French or Russian or Mandarin or Spanish. Why should it be different with other indigenous languages?

It's a useful bit of work and points to a real problem, sounds linguisticky and biological but it's more political than anything. (I've had this conversation with a number of linguists who want to preserve and resurrect indigenous languages--never Cornish, of course, or Romansch) and they always fall back to, "But diversity. Inclusion. Equity." The real problem is seen in a lot of Native American communities--if you speak a language lacking a developed lexicon so you can't discuss circuit theory or resonance or double-entry accounting or even how to replace rings in a car in the abstract in a language, you'll switch to a better developed language. And if you already know it in one language and not the other you'll code-switch to keep down the burden of learning 10k words in 2 or 3 languages and keeping them active.