zhé ("talkative")

Curious Article No. 9:

Specialists tell us there are somewhere in the neighborhood of 6000 languages currently being spoken, which spring from at least 200 families. A reliable source cites the five most widely spoken in descending order, with millions in parentheses, as: Mandarin Chinese (1120), English (480), Spanish (320), Russian (285), and French (265).

Toward the other extreme are many you may not have lately run across, such as Livonian (of which there are fewer than a dozen speakers left in the Baltic); the Channel Island languages Jèrriais, Dgèrnésiais, and Sercquiais (still spoken on Jersey, Guernsey, and Sark respectively); Frisian (spoken in parts of Holland and Germany); Friulian (often heard in northern Italy); Asturian (proudly spoken by around 70,000 in northern Spain and Portugal); Karelian (cherished by a similar number in Finland and Russia); and Dalecarlian (a Norse tongue still used by perhaps 50,000). These, and a thousand or so more, are all endangered to a greater or lesser extent and may not be with us in a few more generations.

It’s too late for Norn (spoken on the Shetland and Orkney Islands north of Scotland until around 1800), Dalmatian (whose last native speaker, Tony Udaina, died in 1898), Manx (of the Isle of Man, which bowed out in 1974 with the death of Ned Maddrell), and Shuadit (a Jewish-Provençal creole whose last speaker died in 1977.) On the other hand it’s encouraging to know there can be philological life after death. Manx, for example, has since been taken up as a hobby by locals inspired by their singular heritage. Considering the Bee Gees were born there, during their heyday I'd always hoped they'd record a song in it.

Lately I've come across some remarkable extremes in languages that I'd like to share with you. First to serve as a yardstick, English uses around seventeen vowel and around twenty-five consonant sounds. This places us somewhat on the high end for vowels but about average for consonants. We do have a sound or two that are at least mildly rare, such as the so-called retroflex approximant R. Most languages that have Rs pronounce them with a tip-of-the-tongue trill — the stereotype of foreignness to an English listener — while others like German, Modern Hebew, and Parisian French use the back of the throat. Mandarin Chinese, Tamil, and the Australian Aboriginal language Warlpiri, though, use “our” R.

There’s an Amazon rain forest language called Pirahã that makes do with what may be the smallest range of sounds of any in the world. Though the exact number is in dispute, Pirahã unarguably uses P, T, S, H, a voiceless glottal stop, plus three vowels. Female speakers sometimes use an H in place of S, and P is sometimes exchanged for a K. It also has a sound which involves touching the tip of the tongue against the inside upper gum line and snapping it downward. Lastly, there’s a raised pitch of the voice shown in writing with an acute accent over the vowel. What’s additionally bizarre about Pirahã's parsimony is that it has no words for numbers other than hóiihíi (“one or so”), hói (“few”), and hoí (“more than a few”). Nor does it offer useful names for colors. Furthermore the Pirahãs, about 200 of them, have no mythology, frequently change their names, and rarely sleep longer than two hours at a stretch.

In stark contrast there’s Ubykh. It went extinct in 1992 with the death of its last fluent speaker, Tevfik Esenç. But fortunately swarms of linguists had taken every opportunity to study and record him beforehand. They even went so far as to X-ray Mr. Esenç as he spoke. Many believe Ubykh descended from Hattic, an ancient language that flourished in modern-day Turkey until Indo-European Hittite largely displaced it. (A century and a half further on, King Tut’s widow wrote beseeching letters to the Hittite King Suppiluliumas.)

Anyway, Ubykh features approximately eighty-three consonants. About seventeen of these are ejectives, which involve gentle popping or puffing effects. There are twenty-six fricatives (sounds which involve pushing air through a confined space, like our F and S) and fourteen pharyngealized consonants (formed by constricting the pharynx — just pretend you're talking like a pirate). But Ubykh’s phonological pièce de résistance has to be its “pharyngealised labiodental voiced fricative” which may be unique on the planet. They say when babies begin to babble, they experiment with every phoneme that has ever occurred in human speech. I wonder if they cover that one.

Understandably neither the Roman nor Cyrillic alphabets can come anywhere close to coping with Ubykh, and even the International Phonetic Alphabet gets a pretty serious workout. And if the woes of its pronunciation are not enough, there are aspects of Ubykh’s grammar involving locations and directions that Wikipedia concedes as “hideously complex.” Curiously there’s no verb for love. “I love you,” in Ubykh comes out as, “I see you well.”

Sedang, distantly related to Cambodian and spoken in Laos and Vietnam, appears to have the most vowels of any language with fifty-five. Many of these are distinguished by being nasalized, creaky, or both. Some Native American languages such as Totonac (Mexico) and Cheyenne have certain vowels that are whispered rather than voiced.

Most westerners including me are awed by Chinese, not necessarily as spoken but as written. No one really knows how many characters the language has, but the

Chinese character for “nàng”

number exceeds 50,000. Ninety percent of these are hardly ever used, though. Also, there are a limited number of basic forms, called radicals, from which all other characters derive. Originally there were 540 radicals, but in 1716 they mercifully cut that down to 214. On average, Chinese characters consist of about ten strokes. Classically the most complex is a figure composed of four dragon radicals, pronounced zhé (with a rising voice) meaning “talkative.” It totals sixty-four strokes, but it's been out of use for 1500 years. Currently the most complex is nàng (falling voice) meaning “sound obscured by a stuffed nose” and consisting of thirty-six strokes.

Náhuatl was and still is the language of the Aztecs of Central America. If the conquistadores expected to encounter “primitive” people down there they were sorely mistaken. For starters, the Aztecs had an eighteen-month calendar which you might be interested in memorizing (Acahualco, Tlacaxipehualiztli, Tozoztontli, Hueytozoztli, Toxcatl, Etzacualiztli, Tecuilhuitontli, Hueytecuilhuitontli, Tlaxochimaco, Xocohuetzi, Ochpaniztli, Teoteclo, Tepeilhuitl, Quecholli, Panquetzaliztli, Atemoztli, Tititl, and Itzcalli). On second thought, maybe not.