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If the only remaining speaker is a bird and no one can understand the bird, I don’t think this counts as saving a language from destruction. I don’t see even a whole 2% chance we’ll ever regain that knowledge. It’s just noises now.
Strictly-speaking, the article just claimed that the parrot was the last speaker of the language. It is possible for someone to be able to understand a language without being able to speak it themselves.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_speaker_(language)
A passive speaker (also referred to as a receptive bilingual or passive bilingual) is a category of speaker who has had enough exposure to a language in childhood to have a native-like comprehension of it, but has little or no active command of it.[1] Passive fluency is often brought about by being raised in one language (which becomes the person’s passive language) and being schooled in another language (which becomes the person’s native language).[2][3]
Such speakers are especially common in language shift communities where speakers of a declining language do not acquire active competence. Around 10% of the Ainu people who speak the language are considered passive speakers. Passive speakers are often targeted in language revival efforts to increase the number of speakers of a language quickly, as they are likely to gain active and near-native speaking skills more quickly than those with no knowledge of the language. They are also found in areas where people grow up hearing another language outside their family with no formal education.
So theoretically, the parrot could be speaking to someone else. They just wouldn’t be able to respond in the same language. Though I suppose that if the parrot was bilingual, maybe they could use that language.
The wording of the article does directly blame Humboldt once, and the parrot three times (if we count the headline).
if a language has not been recorded in some way, as soon as it ceases to be spoken it dies. Luckily, Humboldt had the foresight to phonetically transcribe around 40 words from the parrot’s vocabulary in his notebook, thereby successfully saving the tribe’s language from oblivion.
Parrots do have some understanding of what they’re saying, so I would be willing to accept that it was the last true speaker on those grounds, but they lack much (if any) ability to teach humans those words. At the very least, I’m not aware that it taught Humboldt anything. It may have, but if so, it really should have mentioned that.
So I’m left to assume the understanding of the words are gone, and it’s the understanding that’s the point. The turkish word for “milk” sounds very close to the English word for “suit,” but that doesn’t mean you’ve been speaking turkish all your life. All we’re left with in the case of the Atures is mimicking sounds I have no proof we’ve defined.
The subject of passive bilingualism is a super interesting one, though, and I’ve never heard of it before. It does make sense and having very little command, I could see. You do tend to understand the words of others more/faster than you can speak them yourself, but you gradually get there through repetition. By contrast, grammar is the hard part and not liable to be picked up at all without work.
But they’re…including no understanding in this? One can live their life with a fluent situational understanding and not retain a single often repeated word? How? Why?? Your brain would have to squirrel away one single word, surely, even if that word is “hello” or “shut up,” or “come here.”
Even if it’s just an apocryphal story, it’s at least a crazy-interesting concept that I hadn’t even considered before.
Great TIL, however flawed:
Humboldt’s encounter with the parrot that saved a language from extinction is often dismissed as nothing more than linguistic legend—even the great linguist and professor David Crystal calls the story “probably apocryphal.”
They do continue on to make it seem more truthfull, failing, however, to diminuish the apocryphality. I mean they even link to an article that basically disproves what they claim ffs.
Birds are awesome.
Lmao the other two comments in this thread are hilarious next to each other
lmao
Goofy headline, incredibly doubtful that this wasn’t fabricated
Great read! Thank you for sharing. It’s incredible that they trained two parrots to recall some of the 40 words almost 200 years later. 🧠💥
