May 13, 2004

AN OLD PARROT.

A striking quote from Alexander von Humboldt:

It is to be supposed that the last family of Atures did not die out until a long time afterwards: since at Maypures - bizarrely - there still survives an old parrot that nobody, say the natives, can understand, because it speaks only the language of the Atures.
(From Ramage.)

Posted by languagehat at May 13, 2004 08:48 PM
Comments

That's a subject for a Larson, isn't it?

Posted by: MM at May 14, 2004 02:33 AM

Poignant. Did anyone take the time to transcribe the sounds the parrot was voicing?

Posted by: jean-pierre at May 14, 2004 09:25 AM

I remember one of my linguistics professors talking about the problems of recording all-but-dead languages when, for example, the last remaining speakers are so old that they cannot enunciate the phonemes properly (due to lost teeth or other problems). I can only imagine the headaches of trying to get data from a parrot.

Posted by: Justin at May 14, 2004 12:46 PM

Yes.... in all the thousands of versions of this story, there never seems to be admitted the possibility that the natives were simply having a bit of fun at his expense. More Monty Python than Humboldt's Parrot?

Posted by: brian at June 22, 2004 09:24 AM