Volume 10, Test 3

A

On the dry, windswept mountain tops of the Great Basin in the western United States, at altitudes of over 3,000 m, grow the bristlecone pines (Pinus longaeva, Pinus aristata). The bristlecone has adjusted to places on earth that no other tree wants to inhabit, and in these harsh environments has flourished. Bristlecones don’t grow very tall, 18.3 m at the most, but usually much less, while the girth of the largest one has been measured at 11.2 m. What makes bristlecone pines truly remarkable is their longevity: their average age is over 1,000 years, with the oldest specimen - an individual known as Methuselah - dated at 4,723 years. This makes it not only the world’s oldest living tree; it is also the earth’s oldest living inhabitant. The extreme age of bristlecone pines was not known about until the 1950s, and was only discovered then thanks to the efforts of Edmund Schulman. In 1932, Schulman had begun his career in dendrochronology as an assistant to A. E. Douglass of the Laboratory of Tree-ring Research at the University of Arizona.

B

Douglass had noted that the wide rings of certain species of trees were produced during wet years and, inversely, narrow rings during dry seasons. The more a tree’s rate of growth has been affected by such environmental factors, the more variation in ring-to-ring growth will be present. This variation is referred to as sensitivity and the lack of ring variability is called complacency. Patterns of ring variability are important for establishing chronologies, which allow precise dating of climatic conditions in the past. Samples taken from trees of unknown age can be studied for matches with samples from trees of a known age with known sequences of growth. Using this process, when the rings match or are found to have overlapping patterns, the chronology can be extended further back in time.

C

In his search for older trees that would provide more extensive chronologies, Schulman learned that certain species of trees in the upper-forest zones, growing under stressful conditions, showed sensitive records of drought in their growth-ring sequences. The short, distorted, and dwarfed trees of the upper tree lines were now his focus. During 1954 and 1955, an extensive survey of bristlecone stands from California to Colorado was carried out by Schulman and his assistant assistant, C. W. Ferguson. They found the oldest trees at elevations of 3,048 to 3,354 m, often in seemingly impossible locations, on dolomite soils where no other plant life could survive. These trees showed large areas of deadwood and thin strips of living bark. The trees growing in the most extreme conditions, with scant soil and moisture, seemed to be the oldest. This prompted Schulman to write: ‘The capacity of these trees to live so fantastically long may, when we come to understand it fully, perhaps serve as a guidepost on the road to the understanding of longevity in general.’

D

So what factors do account for the longevity of bristlecone pines? Spring comes to the bristlecone pines in early May with the melting of snow and rising temperatures. In this subalpine zone there are only three warm summer months, often only six weeks, to produce growth and reserves for overwintering. All of this must be accomplished on a mere 25.4 cm of rainfall. To live so long under such conditions, the bristlecone has established several strategies. Firstly, bristlecone needles can live twenty to thirty years; thus, adding new foliage to that already on the tree takes little energy. The long-lived needles provide a stable photosynthetic capacity to sustain the tree over years of severe stress. Another strategy for surviving is the gradual dieback of living bark when the tree is damaged because of fire, lightning, drought, or storms. This reduction of tissue that the crown of the tree has to supply with nutrients balances the effect of any damage sustained. The surviving parts remain quite healthy. As an example, Pine Alpha, at over 4,000 years old, is over a metre in diameter, yet has only a 25 cm strip of living bark to support it. Finally, invasions from bacteria, fungi, or insects that prey upon most plants are unknown to the bristlecones due to their highly resinous wood.

E

Environmental factors also play their part. The dry air common in the subalpine region helps preserve the trees from rotting. The oldest bristlecones live in the most exposed sites, with considerable space between each tree. The longevity of the bristlecone needles and the inability of other plants to grow in the dolomite soil preferred by the bristlecones make for little leaf litter. This distance in between, combined with the lack of ground cover, ensures that if a tree sustains a lightning strike and catches fire, the fire does not spread to surrounding trees. Thus, the bristlecone pines have survived for unknown centuries. The current threat is from all the people who come to visit them. As a result, Methuselah, the oldest tree, is not marked or identified with a plaque due to the threat of vandalism. The recording of past events provided by these trees, along with their great beauty, is too valuable for us to lose.

“Obviously we must do some serious rethinking of our priorities, lest linguistics go down in history as the only science that presided obviously over the disappearance of 90 percent of the very field to which it is dedicated.” — Michael Krauss, The World’s languages in Crisis

27 A

Ten years ago, Michael Krauss sent a shudder through the discipline of linguistics with his prediction that half the 6,000 or so languages spoken in the world would cease to be uttered within a century. Unless scientists and community leaders directed a worldwide effort to Stabilize the decline of local languages, he warned, nine tenths of the linguistic diversity of humankind would probably be doomed to extinction. Krauss’s prediction was little more than an educated guess, but other respected linguists had been clanging out similar alarms. Keneth L. Hale of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology noted in the same journal issue that eight languages on which he had done fieldwork had since passed into extinction. A 1990 survey in Australia found that 70 of the 90 surviving Aboriginal languages were no longer used regularly by all age groups. The same was true for all but 20 of the 175 Native American languages spoken or remembered in the US, Krauss told a congressional panel in 1992.

28 B

Many experts in the field mourn the loss of rare languages, for several reasons. To start, there is scientific self-interest; some of the most basic questions in linguistics have to do with the limits of human speech, which are far from fully explored. Many researchers would like to know which structural elements of grammar and vocabulary—If any—are truly universal and probably therefore hardwired into the human brain. Other scientists try to reconstruct ancient migration patterns by comparing borrowed words that appear in otherwise unrelated languages, in each of these cases, the wider the portfolio of languages you study, the more likely you are to get the right answers.

ExampleA period when there was an absence of real efforts made. C

Despite the near constant buzz in linguistics about endangered languages over the past 10 years, the field has accomplished depressingly little. "You would think that there would be some organized response to this dire situation 'some attempt to determine which language can be saved and which should be documented before they disappear, says Sarah G Thomason, a linguist at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. But there isn’t any such effort organized in the profession. It is only recently that it has become fashionable enough to work on endangered languages." Six years ago, recalls Douglas H. Whalen of Yale University, when I asked linguists who was raising money to deal with these problems, i mostly got blank stares." So, Whalen and a few other linguists founded the Endangered Languages Fund. In the five years to 2001 they were able to collect only $80,000 for research grants. A similar foundation in England, directed by Nicholas Ostler, has raised just $8,000 since 1995.

29 D

But there are encouraging signs that the field has turned a corner. The Volkswagen Foundation, a German charity, just issued its second round of grants totaling more than 52 million. It has created a multimedia archive at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands that can house recordings, grammars, dictionaries and other data on endangered languages. To fill the archive, the foundation has dispatched field linguists to document Aweti (100 or so speakers in Brazil), Ega (about 300 speakers in Ivory Coast). Waima’a (a few hundred speakers in East Timor), and a dozen or so other languages unlikely to survive the century. The Ford Foundation has also edged into the arena. Its contributions helped to reinvigorate a master-apprentice program created in 1992 by Leanne Hinton of Berkeley and Native Americans worried about the Imminent demise of about 50 indigenous languages in California. Fluent speakers receive $3,000 to teach a younger relative (who is also paid) their native tongue through 360 hours of shared activities, spread over six months. So far about 5 teams have completed the program, Hinton says, transmitting at least some knowledge of 25 languages. “It’s too early to call this language revitalization,” Hinton admits. “In California the death rate of elderly speakers will always be greater than the recruitment rate of young speakers. But at least we prolong the survival of the language.” That will give linguists more time to record these tongues before they vanish.

30 E

But the master-apprentice approach hasn’t caught on outside the U.S., and Hinton’s effort is a drop in the sea. At least 440 languages have been reduced to a mere handful of elders, according to the Ethnologue, a catalogue of languages produced by the Dallas-based group 511 International that comes closest to global coverage. For the vast majority of these languages, there Is little or no record of their grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation or use in daily life. Even if a language has been fully documented, all that remains once it vanishes from active use is a fossil skeleton, a scattering of features that the scientist was lucky and astute enough to capture. linguists may be able to sketch an outline of the forgotten language and fig its place on the evolutionary tree, but little more. “How did people start conversations and talk to babies? How did husbands and wives converse?” Hinton asks. “Those are the first things you want to learn when you want to revitalize the language.”

31 F

But there Is as yet no discipline of “conservation linguistics,” as there is for biology. Almost every strategy tried so far has succeeded in some places but failed in others, and there seems to be no way to predict with certainty what will work where. Twenty years ago in New Zealand, Maori speakers set up “language nests,” in which preschoolers were immersed in the native language. Additional Maori-only classes were added as the children progressed through elementary and secondary school. A similar approach was tried in Hawaii, with some success—the number of native speakers has stabilized at 1,000 or so, reports Joseph E. Grimes of SIL International, who Is working on Oahu. Students can now get instruction in Hawaiian all the way through university.

32 G

One factor that always seems to occur in the demise of a language is that the speakers begin to have collective doubts about the usefulness of language loyalty. Once they start regarding their own language as inferior to the majority language, people stop using it for all situations. Kids pick up on the attitude and prefer the dominant language. In many cases, people don’t notice until they suddenly realize that their kids never speak the language, even at home. This is how Cornish, and some dialects of Scottish Gaelic is still only rarely used for daily home life in Ireland, 80 years after the republic was founded with Irish as its first official language.

33 H

Linguists agree that ultimately, the answer to the problem of language extinction is multilingualism. Even uneducated people can learn several languages, as long as they start as children. Indeed, most people in the world speak more than one tongue, and in places such as Cameroon (279 languages), Papua New Guinea (823) and India (387) it is common to speak three or four distinct languages and a dialect or two as well. Most Americans and Canadians, to the west of Quebec, have a gut reaction that anyone speaking another language in front of them is committing an immoral act. You get the same reaction in Australia and Russia. It is no coincidence that these are the areas where languages are disappearing the fastest. The first step in saving dying languages is to persuade the world’s majorities to allow the minorities among them to speak with their own voices.