Trip of the Tongue by Elizabeth Little Read Free Book Online

remember that I could just say hablo instead of yo hablo , because hablo is necessarily first person. I can’t even imagine how long it would take me to accustom myself to single words that can contain three verbs, a negative marker, an indefinite marker related to hunt , and a declarative marker.
    Even more unusual is the typology of Crow. Linguists use the phrase “morphosyntactic alignment” to describe the way a language treats the arguments of transitive and intransitive verbs—what we in English call subjects and objects. Some languages (like English) treat transitive subjects the same way as intransitive subjects: “ she hits her ”; “ she runs.” Other languages (say, Basque) treat intransitive subjects the same way as transitive objects. So “ she hits her ,” but “ her runs.” Then there are the languages that use combinations of these two systems. Crow is one of these languages. Known as an “active-stative” language, Crow is sometimes a she -runs language and sometimes a her- runs language.
    If you grew up speaking Crow, you wouldn’t think twice about any of this, but when you’re approaching the language from the perspective of an English-speaker—particularly from the perspective of a non-linguist English-speaker—it can seem overwhelming to have to rethink ideas as basic as “subjects,” “objects,” and even “words.”
    But the feature of Crow that most intrigued me—in part because I had never seen it before—is something called switch reference. Switch reference was first observed by the linguist William Jacobsen in his study of Washo, a language of Nevada. Roughly speaking, switch reference is a grammatical way of distinguishing multiple subjects. If in English, for instance, you were telling a story about multiple members of the same gender, you would have to use proper names (“she—Jill, I mean”) to keep the story straight. In Crow, however, there are markers that indicate “different” and “same” subjects, respectively, allowing listeners, readers, and speakers to do away with clumsier forms of clarification.
    Then there is something called the mirative. A mirative—from the Latin for “to wonder”—is a grammatical indication of surprise. There are, of course, many ways to express surprise in language, the ones most familiar to English-speakers involving intonation, stress, or the words “get out.” But languages such as Tibetan, Korean, or Crow can encode surprise in the word itself. In Crow this is accomplished through the use of a suffixal verb, the rough grammatical equivalent of a spit-take.
    Like so many aspects of the Crow language, these are all grammatical tools of eloquent distinction. They also serve to remind us that the monolithic “how” and exaggerated monosyllables of silver-screen Indians are gross misrepresentations of the complexity and elegance of Native languages; indeed, they would be gross misrepresentations of any language.
    For years the relative isolation of Crow Nation helped keep its language strong. Just over forty years ago a survey showed that 82 percent of students on the reservation spoke Crow as their first language and that 79 percent of twelfth graders reported being primarily Crow-speakers. The prospect for future language maintenance at this point looked extremely promising. By 1995, however, the numbers had taken a startling turn. Only 25 percent of children ages three to nineteen were fluent in Crow, while only 50 percent of their parents spoke the language. Though numbers were higher among tribal elders—85 percent of the students’ grandparents spoke Crow—the statistics indicated that the younger generation was in the middle of a major shift away from the traditional language. Unfortunately, it’s this generation that typically gives the greatest insight into the life span of a