AN OLD PARROT.

May 13, 2004 by 4 Comments

A striking quote from Alexander von Humboldt:

It is to be supposed that the last family of Atures did not die out until a long time afterwards: since at Maypures – bizarrely – there still survives an old parrot that nobody, say the natives, can understand, because it speaks only the language of the Atures.

(From Ramage.)

Comments

  1. MM says
    May 14, 2004 at 2:33 am

    That’s a subject for a Larson, isn’t it?

  2. jean-pierre says
    May 14, 2004 at 9:25 am

    Poignant. Did anyone take the time to transcribe the sounds the parrot was voicing?

  3. Justin says
    May 14, 2004 at 12:46 pm

    I remember one of my linguistics professors talking about the problems of recording all-but-dead languages when, for example, the last remaining speakers are so old that they cannot enunciate the phonemes properly (due to lost teeth or other problems). I can only imagine the headaches of trying to get data from a parrot.

  4. brian says
    June 22, 2004 at 9:24 am

    Yes…. in all the thousands of versions of this story, there never seems to be admitted the possibility that the natives were simply having a bit of fun at his expense. More Monty Python than Humboldt’s Parrot?

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