Published: Sunday, July 29, 2001
KABAKABURI, Guyana {AP}— At 86, John Peter Bennett is blind and nearly deaf, but he's still sharp enough to detect a dropped syllable in his beloved native tongue.
Living in the village where he was born, in the forests of Guyana, Bennett is one of a shrinking number of Arawak Indians who still speak their language, and he has noticed a tendency to drop the first syllable of "akorakali," the Arawak word for thunder, leaving "korakali."
"Everybody wants to do it in a faster way," Bennett says. "Speed has a great influence on all things."
Some experts predict that in the next century, more than half the world's 6,800 living languages could disappear. From the Indian language of Salish in the northwestern United States to Ibu in Indonesia, endangered tongues that thrived in isolation are fading as the outside world creeps in.
"These languages evolved over thousands of years, and they're being snuffed out over the order of decades," said Doug Whalen, a linguist who leads the Endangered Language Fund at Yale University. "It's an entire heritage that's being lost."
Even in the age of the Internet and jet flights, however, something of Arawak is sure to survive, thanks to a dictionary Bennett spent 25 years compiling.
Published in 1989 and updated in 1994, "An Arawak-English Dictionary with an English word-list" reflects the remoteness of Arawak life from the global mainstream. The dictionary offers no word for "computer" but has five for "frog" and four for "snake."
It doesn't even have "hurricane," even though the word derives from "hurakan," a god of the Caribbean island Arawaks. The reason for the omission: Hurricanes don't generally reach Guyana.
It does, however, define "bororo, n. — a frog, a large kind that spends its time on or in the ground," and "shiparari-kodibiu, n. — aeroplane, metal bird."
At night, Arawaks usually mention snakes with caution, according to Bennett, lest a snake's spirit overhear them and take offense. To be on the safe side, they speak of "madunarobe," or the "armless ones."
When Christopher Columbus reached the New World, Arawak in various forms was spoken from South America to the Florida Keys. It's the language from which came such words as hammock, tobacco and canoe.
The Arawak tribes largely died off under the enslaving, disease-importing Spanish. But they survived on the northeastern coast of South America, and an estimated 17,000 remain in Guyana and Suriname.
Only about 2,200, most of them elderly, still speak Arawak — or Loko, as it is called here.
In Kabakaburi, a predominantly Arawak village of more than 1,000 people on Guyana's Pomeroon River, children understand a few words of Arawak, but they communicate in the English brought by the British more than 150 years ago, and in an English-based Creole.
The village embraced Christianity with the founding of an Anglican mission in 1840, and teachers encouraged villagers to speak English. Bennett, born in 1914, recalls teachers forbidding the use of Arawak and flogging offenders.
Gloria Lowe, a 60-year-old teacher who helped run the class, said Arawaks seem largely uninterested. Few Guyanese today know that some rivers bear Arawak names, such as the winding Orinoco, which means "snake mouth," and the Maichony, which means "the song of trees' leaves when the breeze blows."
"It is sad to know that this Arawak language is dying," Lowe said.
"Everybody wants to do it in a faster way," Bennett says. "Speed has a great influence on all things."
Some experts predict that in the next century, more than half the world's 6,800 living languages could disappear. From the Indian language of Salish in the northwestern United States to Ibu in Indonesia, endangered tongues that thrived in isolation are fading as the outside world creeps in.
"These languages evolved over thousands of years, and they're being snuffed out over the order of decades," said Doug Whalen, a linguist who leads the Endangered Language Fund at Yale University. "It's an entire heritage that's being lost."
Even in the age of the Internet and jet flights, however, something of Arawak is sure to survive, thanks to a dictionary Bennett spent 25 years compiling.
Published in 1989 and updated in 1994, "An Arawak-English Dictionary with an English word-list" reflects the remoteness of Arawak life from the global mainstream. The dictionary offers no word for "computer" but has five for "frog" and four for "snake."
It doesn't even have "hurricane," even though the word derives from "hurakan," a god of the Caribbean island Arawaks. The reason for the omission: Hurricanes don't generally reach Guyana.
It does, however, define "bororo, n. — a frog, a large kind that spends its time on or in the ground," and "shiparari-kodibiu, n. — aeroplane, metal bird."
At night, Arawaks usually mention snakes with caution, according to Bennett, lest a snake's spirit overhear them and take offense. To be on the safe side, they speak of "madunarobe," or the "armless ones."
When Christopher Columbus reached the New World, Arawak in various forms was spoken from South America to the Florida Keys. It's the language from which came such words as hammock, tobacco and canoe.
The Arawak tribes largely died off under the enslaving, disease-importing Spanish. But they survived on the northeastern coast of South America, and an estimated 17,000 remain in Guyana and Suriname.
Only about 2,200, most of them elderly, still speak Arawak — or Loko, as it is called here.
In Kabakaburi, a predominantly Arawak village of more than 1,000 people on Guyana's Pomeroon River, children understand a few words of Arawak, but they communicate in the English brought by the British more than 150 years ago, and in an English-based Creole.
The village embraced Christianity with the founding of an Anglican mission in 1840, and teachers encouraged villagers to speak English. Bennett, born in 1914, recalls teachers forbidding the use of Arawak and flogging offenders.
Gloria Lowe, a 60-year-old teacher who helped run the class, said Arawaks seem largely uninterested. Few Guyanese today know that some rivers bear Arawak names, such as the winding Orinoco, which means "snake mouth," and the Maichony, which means "the song of trees' leaves when the breeze blows."
"It is sad to know that this Arawak language is dying," Lowe said.
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