Language
The Natchez language is generally believed by scholars to be a language isolate. Its two last fluent speakers were Watt Sam and Nancy Raven. The Natchez nation is now working to revive it as a spoken language among its people.
Read more about this topic: Natchez People
Famous quotes containing the word language:
“The human face is the organic seat of beauty.... It is the register of value in development, a record of Experience, whose legitimate office is to perfect the life, a legible language to those who will study it, of the majestic mistress, the soul.”
—Eliza Farnham (18151864)
“In a language known to us, we have substituted the opacity of the sounds with the transparence of the ideas. But a language we do not know is a closed place in which the one we love can deceive us, making us, locked outside and convulsed in our impotence, incapable of seeing or preventing anything.”
—Marcel Proust (18711922)
“Syntax and vocabulary are overwhelming constraintsthe rules that run us. Language is using us to talkwe think were using the language, but language is doing the thinking, were its slavish agents.”
—Harry Mathews (b. 1930)