Alaskan Range: Mortified
...Mea culpa, by the way, is Latin for “I am to blame,” and am I ever. Someone who preaches that using established, reliable sources over the whimsy so often portrayed as wisdom on the Internet ought to have realized that WikiAnswers.com, like Wikipedia, includes information from nearly anyone and consequently is fraught with error. There’s nothing wrong with beginning your research with Wikipedia, because it is so expansive, but its very inclusiveness often provides opportunity for the malicious and misinformed, like me, to wreak intellectual havoc...
Greg Hill muses on the task of discovering facts.
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Our word “mortify” comes from the Latin “mortificus,” which, according to the Online Etymological Dictionary, meant “producing death.” It was lightened up in the 1300s, sort of, when it acquired the “religious sense of ‘to subdue the flesh by abstinence and discipline.’” Now it’s been further modified, as the American Heritage Dictionary tells us, to causing someone “to experience shame, humiliation, or wounded pride.” The subject of mortification comes to mind because an alert reader just pointed out that my last column, which claimed India as the source of Indo-European languages, was flat-out wrong. Even worse, I relied on, and promulgated, questionable information.
Mea culpa, by the way, is Latin for “I am to blame,” and am I ever. Someone who preaches that using established, reliable sources over the whimsy so often portrayed as wisdom on the Internet ought to have realized that WikiAnswers.com, like Wikipedia, includes information from nearly anyone and consequently is fraught with error. There’s nothing wrong with beginning your research with Wikipedia, because it is so expansive, but its very inclusiveness often provides opportunity for the malicious and misinformed, like me, to wreak intellectual havoc.
As my wife, a former Spanish major, and four French teachers I’ve studied under can attest, I have troubles picking up foreign languages. Fortunately, it isn’t genetic, for my daughter Mimi became entirely fluent in Icelandic in less than a year when she was an exchange student there. A report last fall in ScienceDaily.com said the reason some people are more talented at acquiring foreign languages is because they’re “also better at distinguishing the sounds of their own native language.” It makes me wonder how my apparently ineradicable Texas accent fits in.
So let’s start over. English and Sankrit share a common ancestor in the Indo-European (IE) language group. The land where IE originated is still under debate, but many experts think it sprang up between 5,000 and 9,000 years ago in the area between the Caspian and Black Seas, south of the Caucasus Mountains. Twelve IE branch language groups split from the mother tongue, but only ten have sub-languages still extant. The Germanic branch, for example, includes English, Dutch, Yiddish, the Scandinavian tongues, and others. Several IE branches only have one language, like Hellenic (modern Greek), and Thracian (Armenian).
The Indic branch has the most existing languages, including Sanskrit and its derivatives, such as Hindi, Urdu, and Pali (the language of Buddhism. Interestingly, Romany, the language of the Roma, or Gypsies, is also an Indic language. Na-Dene, the language group that includes Athabaskan and Tlingit, stems from the Proto-Dene-Caucasian family of languages that includes, Basque and Sino-Tibetan. A separate language group, Eskimo-Aleut, includes those two languages and is spoken only in the most northern climes of the Americas, including the Central Alaska coast, and Greenland. Eskimo-Aleaut isn’t related to the other American family groups.
At least that’s what my sources tell me, but even usually reliable sources can err. The preceding paragraph relies on the Native Languages of the Americas website, http://www.native-languages.org, but you never know. Misunderstandings can be a fascinating part of learning, as I was reminded recently by re-reading some of Mike Doogan’s columns. Doogan, the former Fairbanksan, Anchorage Daily News columnist, and current State Representative, once wrote about a tabloid newspaper’s claim that a 120-year old Eskimo woman named Hayda Ellekes had predicted World War I, the Great Depression, and the Good Friday earthquake. She supposedly was “raised along the Cook Inlet in Alaska, south of Anchorage, where she still lives.”
Doogan vainly tried to locate Hayda, or anyone else mentioned in the tabloid story, even on the Permanent Fund Dividend recipients list. After futilely contacting the tabloid for help, Doogan saw their disclaimer, which said their “stories seek to entertain and are about the fantastic, bizarre and paranormal. The reader should suspend belief for the sake of enjoyment.” Instead of keeping my readers from guessing about my veracity, I may start including similar provisos in future columns.
Nah, let’s keep it like it is; I’ll do my best to verify my facts, and you call me on it if you detect, as Stella Gibbons, author of “Cold Comfort Farm,” put it, “Something nasty in the woodshed.”
