Briefly Noted

These items seem worthy of further investigation. So get to it and report back here:

• WhatWasThere (see below) is a website (and iPhone app) that allows users to put historical photos on a Google map. It is not all that different than HistoryPin or similar services, but has a superior interface that integrates Google Street View to give you instant "before and after" views. Play with the slider on the image below!

• The Smithsonian lists the "Top Ten Works Lost to Time."

• My local newspaper the Spokesman Review now has a good local history tag. Local history is a staple of many newspapers and the reporting is often quite good, but finding the articles can be a chore. Glad to see this.

• This color promotional film of Berlin in 1936, produced for the Olympics of that year, is haunting. Combine it with this wartime newsreel, Bombing Berlin by Daylight and this post-war film of Berlin in ruins and you have a lesson plan. Or a lesson anyway!

• A single piece of recently-discovered paper in Peru is all that remains of a lost language.

• Big shot academic historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto says historians need to "start biting back" against bad pop history.

So, what are you reading?

Saving Salish

The Spokesman-Review has an excellent article on Kalispel efforts to revive the Salish language. (There is also a video at the SR website.) The combination of gambling revenue, far-sighted tribal leadership, and education technology seems to be making the difference. The Inlander has this recent article on the same topic. Though it is early to say anything for certain, the Kalispel effort may be just in time--dozens of native youths are learning the language and it is even being offered in the local public school. But the prospects are less rosy for some other Plateau languages, according to the Spokesman:

Wenatchee-Moses Columbian is spoken fluently by perhaps five people, making it one of the most endangered languages in the world. More endangered is Coeur d’Alene, with only one or two native speakers remaining . . . . 

The article reminded me of the excellent film that Montana anthropologist Sally Thompson premiered a few years ago, Why Save a Language? That film argued in part: "Over three hundred languages were spoken on this continent when the first Europeans arrived. Half have vanished. Of those that remain, many are spoken by only a handful of elderly people. The loss of a language has serious consequences for the affected community . . . The film provides cogent arguments for the importance of native languages not only to the people who speak them, but also for the contributions to the world's knowledge and heritage held in these languages." (You can buy a copy of the film for $20 via Amazon.)

Of course, the loss of tribal languages is a world-wide phenomena. The map below shows the 578 languages listed by UNESCO as "critically endangered" which is defined as "The youngest speakers are in the great-grandparental generation, and the language is not used for everyday interactions. These older people often remember only part of the language but do not use it, since there may not be anyone to speak with."

Language revival efforts are also underway all over the world, and especially in Native America. The next decade or two will tell the story. I fear that future generations will look at out era as the time of the great languages extinction.

[Photo of Johnny Arlee from the SR article.]

Eyak language dies with its last speaker--or does it?

From the Alaska Public Radio Network: Eyak language dies with its last speaker. "The last traditional speaker of the Eyak language died yesterday, making the language extinct. Eyak Chief Marie Smith Jones was 89 years old. She was the last person to have learned the language the traditional way, taught as a child from her parents." (click on the icon at the bottom of the story to listen to the full report).

The loss of native languages is of course by no means unique to the northwest. See this list of extinct languages, or even more heartbreaking this list of recently extinct languages with (in many cases) the date of death of the last speaker.

But as is often the case with these maudling media stories, there is more here than meets the ear. Marie Smith Jones spent some of her last decades working with linguist Michael Krauss to record and document the Eyak language, and the language is being taught to Eyak youth through The Eyak Language Preservation Project. This Seattle Times obituary has additional information about Marie Smith Jones and the Eyak.

Map from the Alaska Native Language Center

(Most of the links above are lifted from this Metafilter post.)