The author succeeds admirably in keeping us entertained with fascinating facts as he visits speakers of assorted endangered languages: Australian and Amerindian indigenous languages with only a handful of speakers, Manx and Provençal, Yiddish and Welsh, vividly bringing home to us the difficulty of being forced to live your life through a language that isn’t your own.
Despite all his energetic research (which includes mentions of Whorf, Chomsky, and Trubetzkoy), Abley is not a linguist, and is conscious of not being one. I must admit I had never realized how forbidding some of our familiar linguistic terminology can be to outsiders.
One of the things he presents to our admiring eyes as part of “an elaborate array of phonetic devices”, as used in the description of Yuchi (an endangered language of Oklahoma), is that Yuchi distinguishes between “a dorsal-palatal x (as in German ‘ich’) and a velar x̣ (as in German ‘ach’)”. Well yes, German has this ç - x distinction too, and so for that matter do many other not terribly exotic languages, including Modern Greek.
Continuing with the “elaborate array of phonetic devices”, you’ll be amazed to hear that Yuchi vowels can be “open, closed, lengthened, or nasalized”. Just imagine!
If he knew more phonetics, Abley might reasonably have mentioned that Yuchi has not only an aspiration contrast but also ejectives, so that we have p vs. ph vs pʼ etc. And it has a voiceless lateral fricative ɬ. Now that’s a bit more interesting.
Yiddish … has a linguistic feature with the menacing name “devoicing assimilation”: voiced consonants like b and d are “devoiced” by other consonants that follow on, so that the vocal cords no longer vibrate.
In no time at all Abley is running with a metaphor, of a speech community “devoiced” (prevented from making their voice heard) by their gradual assimilation into the majority language surrounding them.
The take-home message is one that I agree with whole-heartedly.
One irascible, bloody-minded, language-speaking son of a bitch is worth a few dozen well-meaning hobbyists.
It’s no use just talking about endangered or minority languages, in the way that Abley found enthusiasts for Provençal doing among themselves (but in French). You’ve got to speak them, sing in them, play in them, use them. That’s the only way to keep them from disappearing.