MAKING THE WORLD SAFE FOR LANGUAGE DIVERSITY: THE MITTON LECTURE 2010 The members of the Modern Languages Department were very excited when the Mitton Lecture and Prof. Harrison were announced, and the day entirely lived up to our expectations. We and our students were utterly engaged and fascinated by the presentation that Prof. Harrison gave to the assembled Upper School and we teachers were privileged to then be able to spend some private time with him, learning more about his research, especially in relation to European and Oriental languages, his views on language acquisition and retention in general, and on bi-/ tri-lingualism in particular.
Prof. Harrison emphasized the importance of language in conveying knowledge— of plants and animals, weather patterns, seasons, number systems, medicine, and culture; the workings of entire ecosystems may be lost along with the language which can tell us about them. Globalization does facilitate communication and exchange of ideas, and it can work in favor of small language communities: “the Ho of India can petition to have their bizarre alphabet included into the Unicode standard and can access a Ho talking dictionary website hosted in the United States (The Last Speakers, p. 272).” However, as Harrison concludes, “it would be incredibly shortsighted for us, in our Western industrialized societies, to think that because we have put men on the moon and split the atom, we have nothing to learn from people who just a generation ago were hunter-gatherers in a remote wilderness (p. 274).”
When we brought Prof. Harrison to the Lindsay Room for lunch, something like 20 students were already there, waiting to meet him and to talk to him as they ate together. As one group of students left for class, others arrived, and the conversation just continued, entirely naturally, covering some of the areas mentioned above but also with questions relating to the definition of a dialect as opposed to a language, the best way to help endangered languages, the creation of online “living” dictionaries. Students also sought advice and ideas from Prof. Harrison on the study of languages and linguistics, both at Swarthmore and more generally. Our students made a very strong impression, prompting Prof. Harrison to compare the level of discourse over lunch to that of a college-level seminar.
Prof. Harrison challenged our western, Indo-European concept of grammar and vocabulary, giving us examples of a single word in chulym which conveys an entire sentence in English; he described learning how to imply “go” in Tuva by one’s relation to the flow of a nearby river. Children in Siberia learn their colors by examining their family’s herd of yak; others refer to months in the lunar calendar as “green” or “fox”; some count in both base 12 and base 20 simultaneously, so that 93 is expressed as 4 20’s + 12 + 1. Prof. Harrison opened our eyes to the many different ways we can express ourselves and communicate with each other.
Prof. Harrison also clearly took great pleasure in visiting Modern Language classes—Chinese, French, Spanish—during the day and worked with students each time, discussing and illustrating the current position of the language in question and how certain languages featured in his “Linguistic Hotspots.” Many questions were asked and much fascinating material encountered; French students discovered, for example, that there are nearly 2 million surviving speakers of Occitan in the south-west of France (Danny Lawrence has resolved to seek out at least one of them during his next visit). In the meantime we were given information on websites and organizations which provide access to these minority languages and their speakers.
November 30th was a truly exhilarating day for Hackley’s modern linguists, and all the more because of its link with our dear friends and former colleagues, Raymond and Maag Mitton. Any future Mitton lecturer has quite a lot to live up to. —Danny Lawrence and Adrianne Pierce
Prof. Harrison addressed the struggle between keeping alive a dying language, spoken by only a few but integral to the identity of many, and the desire to participate in a global economy, necessitating the adoption of the dominant regional language. In some cases, speakers of dying tongues face political and social pressure to use the dominant language; this is especially true in schools, where young people are discouraged, or sometimes forbidden, from speaking their language. It is the young people, however, in whom hope rests for the revival, and therefore survival, of these endangered languages. Prof. Harrison showed a video clip of Songe Nimasow, of the Aka tribe in India, who has created hip hop songs in his native tongue, thus encouraging other young people to continue to use the language and preserve it for future generations.
Mitton Lecturer David Harrison spoke to Upper School students during the day, and then returned in the evening to address parents, alumni and friends, including Raymond Mitton, in whose honor the lecture series was created, and his wife Maag, also a former Hackley language teacher. Raymond and Maag visited at the dinner with Hackley football coach Rob Pickert and alumnus Chris Berman ’73, a former student of the Mittons and one of their biggest fans. 11