Marie, RIP. Eyak language too
Honestly, I didnt know anything about the almost-vanished Eyak language. Today I read the last page of the past issue of the Economist (with the annual subscription to the print edition as a great gift from my brother Vincenzo and Annalisa). The article is about the death of Marie Smith Jones.
["Day 57 - On the Nature of Language", CC licensed picture by margolove]
She was the last person on the planet to speak the Eyak, the native language of the southcentral Alaska.
Reading the wikipedia entries and the Economist article, it doesnt seem to me that we should blame someone for the extincted language. There was no 'invasion', no violence, nothing... just globalization, maybe.
From the article I found a couple of interesting points about how the Eyak was so tied to its natural roots and location, Alaska:
- "drift-wood", the woods carried by the water of a river, for example, in Eyak is 'u'l, and gets a different name if the driftwood has a shape and is not broken.
- the Eyak language has dozens of terms for the condition of ice and snow
- "demexch", for example, means a soft and treacherous spot in the ice over a body of water: a bad place to walk on, but possibly a good one to squat beside with a fishing line.