BBC News - The people who want their language to disappear

Three hours drive from Silicon Valley, we reach the railway. The orange rusting tracks follow the curve of the river through the mountains, disappearing into rough-cut tunnels, deeper into the heart of north-eastern California. This is the road to Taylorsville, a frontier town in the Genesee Valley.

We pull over at the general store. Apart from the hairdressers, it is the only shop in this town of 140 inhabitants - a pointed timber building painted in deep red. The shelves are piled with tins, dried jerky and black and white postcards of pioneers, leaning on wagons or puffing on pipes. Trina, a distant relative and my guide, points to the old mechanical cash register, its brass buttons polished by more than a century of use.

"That was probably one of the first pieces of technology to be brought from the city to the mountains," she says, tucking a strand of black hair behind her ear. "Your great uncle John might have seen it arrive."

Our forefathers were brothers living on a Welsh farm, when in 1850, John Davies travelled to the west coast of America in search of gold. As with many miners during the gold rush, he travelled to California on a wagon train eventually arriving in Genessee Valley where he married Mary Yatkin, a Native American woman from the Maidu people (above).

"There weren't any other women around from Europe," says Trina. "And many of the Maidu men had died at the hands of the early settlers."

We take her jeep through the pine forests to John Davies's farm, a feather, tied delicately to some beads with a leather strap, dangling from the mirror.

"Is Welsh taught in the UK?" Trina asks. "Do you speak it?"
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It is, I explain, but I can't. I stutter a couple of badly pronounced phrases and nursery rhymes that my grandmother taught me, which proves the point. She nods.

"I'm the same with Maidu," she says. "But here we are losing our language. There are only five speakers left and they are all aged between 87 and 93."

"Is someone taping it?" I ask. "It needs to be recorded, written down phonetically."

Trina smiles, a little pained. "It isn't quite that simple."

BBC News - The people who want their language to disappear

A Phrase To Renounce For 2014: ‘The Mentally Ill’ | CommonHealth

I wince every time I read it. So does the president-elect of the American Psychiatric Association, Dr. Paul Summergrad, he says.

I saw it most recently in The New York Times, in the headline pictured above and a recent masthead editorial: “Equal Coverage For The Mentally Ill.” It’s all over, from The Boston Globe — “New Era for the Mentally Ill“ – to The Wall Street Journal — “Crime and The Mentally Ill.” Just about any media outlet you care to name.

What’s so bad about “the mentally ill”? Isn’t it reasonable shorthand in the usual headline space crunch?

In a word, no, says Dr. Summergrad, psychiatrist-in-chief at Tufts Medical Center and chair of psychiatry at Tufts University School of Medicine. He sees two main problems with it. First, the definite article, “the.”

[,,,]
Second, Dr. Summergrad said, “there’s the denotation of what mental illness means, but there’s also the connotation. When people ask me, is it really possible that 25 percent of the population is mentally ill, what do they mean by that question?”

[,,,]
I’d add a third argument against “the mentally ill”,,,Some newly minted peer specialists sat me down and re-educated me about the wrongness of using “the mentally ill” and the rightness of using “people first” language. A person is not defined by a diagnosis, they said. If you have a mental illness it doesn’t define you any more than your heart disease defines you if you’re a cardiac patient. A person is a person who happens to have depression or schizophrenia; the correct term is “people with mental illness.”

[,,,]
Virtually all illnesses have biological, environmental and psychological components. We could say the same for migraines, ulcers, asthma or diabetes. But it does not make one feel uneasy if we say, “He has asthma.’ On the other hand, ‘He has depression or obsessive-compulsive disorder feels so very different. Is that because it is labeled ‘mental?’ Certainly. ‘Mental’ is an arbitrary negative label that segregates something psychic, personal or ‘in the head’ from the body and the environment. It also is very scary.”

A Phrase To Renounce For 2014: ‘The Mentally Ill’ | CommonHealth