Saturday, May 30, 2009

Raupuch

"...Every language is a storehouse of indigenous culture and knowledge. It reflects a peoples' worldview. English and Hindi have words for someone who loses their spouse or their parents, but they do not have a word for a person who loses a sibling. Great Andamanese does - raupuch. This tells us a lot about this society and the emphasis it places on family kinship."

Anvita Abbi, Linguistics Professor, JNU

from the article - "Mind your Languages: Dwindling populations, social pulls, sound the death knell of India's rare tongues"
by Debashri Dasgupta, Outlook Magazine, 19 Nov 2007

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