The Languages

Readers may wonder why I choose the languages I do for posting. Most of the time I write in English, which is my native language, and provide translations into French, Spanish, and Portuguese. It's not because I'm Eurocentric (I'm not), but because these are the languages, along with Italian and Esperanto, that I know well enough to edit the output of a translation program. But those are not the only languages in which I post.

There was a time when I frequently wrote in Portunhol, a mixed language from the Uruguay-Brazil border.I like the language, and I like that it does not belong to any one country. But there is no translation program for Portunhol, and I no longer live in Uruguay. Instead I post in standard Spanish and standard Portuguese, both international languages with many millions of speakers.

My choice of language is also determined in part by the subject matter of my writing, which is mostly poetry. I've recently come to realize that French is the best translation language for poetry written in English. This has a lot to do with the linguistic history of England. But if, for example, the poem is about the Holocaust, I may include a translation into Yiddish or Hebrew, although my editing of the output of the translation program is likely to be faulty. If, on the other hand, the subject of the poem is close to Hindu spirituality, I may include a translation into Hindi (because machine translation into Sanskrit is not available). If the theme of the poem is universality of some kind, I may include a translation into Esperanto, a language that I have known quite well for almost sixty years.

Many readers will have noticed my frequent inclusion of Udugi. It's a constructed language, based on Cherokee (Tsalagi, ꮳꮃꭹ) vocabulary and a simple, Esperanto-like grammar. I use it for reasons that are both sentimental and practical. First of all, I am part Cherokee through my maternal grandfather. He lived in Oklahoma, but the Cherokee genes go back to eighteenth-century North Carolina. I also feel close to Native American spirituality, and I guess all of that is the sentimental part. But there really is a practical part, as well.

Forty years ago the Cherokee language had about 26,000 speakers; now it has about 12,000, which is just 3% of its claimed tribal membership of 400,000. It has been said that you don't speak Cherokee unless you speak it from the cradle. It is, by far, the most grammatically complex language that I've studied, and adults are just not learning it. How many fluent speakers will it have in another generation? I've seen this movie before, and I know how it ends. "Udugi" means "hope," and I believe that the Udugi language is the best hope to save any part of the Tsalagi language.

Text and image © 2019 by Donald Jacobson Traxler ꮨᏺꭽꮅ.