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Comment by kgeist | Hacker News Reader

>Shawnee language

>Native speakers 100-200 (2024)

Imagine knowing every single speaker of your language personally. You could invent neologisms and make them spread quickly.

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In reality:

Imagine having no canonical word for 'tap' (to tap something on a touchscreen) and needing to come to a consensus on what that should be, where a number of speakers aren't digital natives.

Imagine doing any form of research/preservation/data collection involving audio, and having no practical ability to do this anonymously, because voices are recognisable.

Imagine holding back recordings and writings because your great grandmother may have said something unusual, and not wanting to bring shame on the family/her memory.

Imagine discovering that your language has translations of the N-word, and needing to decide whether to reintroduce this to the language.

Imagine taking on the responsibility of releasing a dictionary, and drastically changing the usage of the language.

Imagine also knowing that if you don't teach your language, few else can, and fewer will.

And it's a polysynthetic language, so new words are invented all the time :) Also cool: They have two third persons, proximate and obviative (some times called fourth person)

All words are invented?

This is true for everything, but it's more obvious when you only have ~200 speakers.

> In English and many other European languages, the principal means of distinguishing between multiple third-person referents is using gender or (lack of) reflexive. Thus, in "she saw him", it is clear that there are two third persons because they are of different genders. In "she saw her", it is clear that there are two third persons because otherwise, one would say "she saw herself". However, "she saw her mother" is ambiguous: it could mean that she saw her own mother or that she saw someone else's mother. This is because it is not clear, in some contexts, if "she" and "her" refer to the same person. An obviative/proximate system has a different way of distinguishing between multiple third-person referents. When there is more than one third person named in a sentence or discourse context, the most important, salient, or topical is marked as "proximate" and any other, less salient entities are marked as "obviative". Subsequent sentences that refer to previously-named entities with pronouns or verbal inflections can then use the proximate and obviative references that have already been established to distinguish between the two.[0]

[0] - https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obviative

Russian has a similar distinction: if there are two "he's", you can use "on" (proximate) and "tot" (distant) to distinguish between them. Like,

  "he (on) said it was okay, but he (tot) disagreed".

In this example, the first "he" is the person with the main focus in the conversation, and "tot" is someone else who was also mentioned but is not the main focus.

I had always assumed from the amount of attention that was paid to them that the tribe adjacent to my city numbered in the tens of thousands spread out across the greater area. I found out last year that the tribe's population is only around 400 members in total, with only around half of them living in their ancestral territory (which is now a suburb).

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