r/interesting • u/Key_Performer_3645 • 4h ago
HISTORY Marie Wilcox realized she was the last person on Earth who could speak the Wukchumni language fluently, so at 82, she taught herself to use a computer and spent seven years typing a 6,000-word Wukchumni dictionary, the first written record of the language in history, to save it from extinction.
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u/gigayoink 3h ago edited 3h ago
The title does not appear to be correct.. Here from the NYT:
For many years, Marie Wilcox was the guardian of the Wukchumni language, one of several Indigenous languages that were once common in Central California but have either disappeared or nearly disappeared. She was the only person for a time who could speak it fluently.
She started writing down words in Wukchumni as she remembered them in the late 1990s, scrawling on the backs of envelopes and slips of paper. Then she started typing them into an old boxy computer. Soon she was getting up early to devote her day to gathering words and working into the night.
After 20 years of labor, of hunting and pecking on her keyboard, Ms. Wilcox, who died at 87 on Sept. 25, produced a dictionary, the first known complete compendium of Wukchumni.
The article even says that the family didn't even fully understand what she was doing until they had a watch party for a documentary about her.
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u/CuteJRock 2h ago
Hunting and pecking on a keyboard for 20 years just so an entire language doesn't vanish into thin air makes the real story even more incredible than the title.
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u/Most_Structure9568 1h ago
It makes me want to cry. It kinda reminds me of this bird I saw that was the last of his species. Just calling out for a response that never came.
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u/radicalelation 1h ago
I'd be more likely to blow it all out in one big go, but decades of dedication to anything is a noble and awe inspiring thing that's well beyond my capabilities, as far as I've known.
The weight of responsibility to a whole people and all who follow might help push me though.
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u/spw1 37m ago
Do you think you could just enumerate all the words you know in English? Like just start with 'aardvark' and 'abbreviation' and 'abcess' and list them all out in a couple weeks?
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u/CompoteNext1955 16m ago
Yes, and you could too but not in a couple weeks. It's less about the difficulty and more about the dedication. It's very easy to do, but not so easy to be dedicated enough to a cause, unless you also strongly believed in it
It's her faith in what she was doing and her responsibility that are awe-inspiring, not the process itself. "Rome was not built in a day"
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u/SundyMundy 1h ago
Normally these types of clarifying top comments make the headline of the post less impressive. This is quite the opposite. Well done.
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u/DigiMagic 1h ago
6000 words, 20 years, that's less than 1 word per day. It makes no sense that she was getting up early and worked into the night, just to type 1 word during the entire day; some information must be made up.
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u/Buckfutter81 1h ago
I don't know of you've ever looked at a dictionary before but all the ones I've seen aren't just a list of words, it defines the words... so while 6000 words in a list wouldn't take 20 years to write down, defining and translating 6000 words probably would.
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u/Mikecd 1h ago
Perhaps she is adding a definition in addition to just writing the word down. The statement was that she created a dictionary, not just a word list. Also consider time off (few people work 8am-10pm every day of the year, year after year. She likely spent some time visiting with friends and family, cooking, shopping, doing housework, etc . She likely didn't work every single day.
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u/Academic-Trifle8151 1h ago
Ok but not to be rude. The other guy is a little right. Writing one word and it's definitions and pronunciations shouldn't really take all day. Even if you factor into it not working every day, 2 words per day (meaning half as many days) still doesn't seem to add up to 6000 words working all day for 20 years.
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u/International-One202 28m ago
The Oxford English Dictionary took 71 years for 250k words. That's 10 words a day and there were over a thousand people working on it at a time.
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u/Academic-Trifle8151 20m ago
It didn't really have over a thousand people working on it. It had that many people crowdsourcing and sending in information for the actual creators to sort and then record.
The completed dictionary also expanded from an initial four-volume plan to 10 volumes containing over 400,000 entries and 2 million quotations.
Their scope was also insanely vast, providing a detailed chronological history for every word and phrase, citing quotations from a wide range of sources, including classic literature and cookbooks. The OED is famous for its lengthy cross-references and etymologies.
I can provide sources for that if needed. But it's a far grander creation than you are giving it credit.
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u/International-One202 3m ago
And how is Wilcox's dictionary? I haven't seen it, but if it also contains more than just "word, type, pronunciation, translation", it's not that quick. Especially as she didn't have background researchers to send her information or cross-reference. I also wonder about the source material she had access to. Was it just "hey today I remembered word x!"?
In comparison, even if we discount the complexity of OED and the assistants/volunteers working on it, even to the point of only counting entry/editor, Ms. Wilcox wasn't that slow in comparison. Though to me the "waking up early and staying up late" in articles sounds more like "got up an hour before going to work".
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u/redlaWw 1h ago
I'd imagine that at her peak she was writing a lot, and then as she ran out of words she'd stop until something popped into her head, at which point she'd add that to the dictionary. It's likely that once she'd gotten the major vocabulary down, it'd take a while before a new word popped into her head.
So she could well have spent some time getting up early and working late into the night as she fleshed out the major vocabulary terms, but then reduced the intensity of the work naturally as she ran out of immediately apparent words.
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u/inkcannerygirl 1h ago
It doesn't say anywhere that she worked all day every day.
If she's being very careful and thorough about it, which I certainly would in her place, it could easily be slow going overall. You'd want to check your work as best you could.
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u/Academic-Trifle8151 51m ago
I mean it says she was getting up early and then working into the night. As for every day I did say even if you half it and make it 2 words per day.
There's being slow and steady and then there's working at a pace GRRM would be proud of!
Like let's be real, think of a word, any word. How long is it going to realistically take you to write the word, pronunciate it and define it?
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u/esclemens 1h ago
And if she was the last one to speak it, she probably also had to write out pronunciations that may not translate easily if at all
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u/SoLo_Se7en 52m ago
If she also added context definitions (linguistic and situational), that would also add substantial time to her project. For example, the word “run” has a few context definitions by itself. Dictionaries aren’t simple.
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u/NukaClipse 3h ago
Preserving history is always a good thing, even if most people won't care. Always a good chance someone will.
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u/det0724 3h ago
You never know what amazing archeological finds or historic records they find with that language that they will now be able to translate.
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u/TheNotSoGreatPumpkin 2h ago
Of the 300 or so known native languages spoken in California, none are known to have had a written form before European contact, so such a discovery is unlikely.
But this makes her contribution all the more precious.
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u/Xxuwumaster69xX 43m ago
It isn't just translation. It's the fact that others can study the language itself, which can tell us a lot about where they come from and what groups are related to them/had close contact with.
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u/LittleSisterPain 33m ago
Yeah, its not exactly 'useful', but it is important. That said, its weird what nobody was interested in it except for her - surely at least a few linguists would be?
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u/DontFearFailure 27m ago
100%
Can you imagine if 500 years , let's say Japanese was a dead language? We have centuries of hours worth of media that they could learn it if they wanted to , just no one wants to speak it. Crazy to think that going forward the only thing that is stopping something or someone from being forgotten is the lack of data on it.
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u/useeikick 17m ago
There is an eternity after you die, might as well record you knowledge for everything that comes afterward since there's a good chance that it will
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u/I_madeusay_underwear 3h ago
There are so many languages of indigenous peoples that have been lost or are in danger of being lost, with only a few people left who speak them. They tend to be extremely difficult to master, for non native speakers, it’s not like French or German where you can just pick it up without too much trouble. These languages have very complex grammar and there’s a lot of rules that you just have to know because they don’t follow a standard pattern of usage. They can also have words that are either difficult for most people to pronounce or that have very subtle differences, in sort of the same vein as tonal languages. It’s really sad how much culture was lost when the people it belonged to were murdered and displaced. I’m sure a lot of it will never be known
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u/iwillhaveredditall 53m ago
it’s not like French or German where you can just pick it up without too much trouble
Some may disagree
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u/StpPstngMmsOnMyPrnAp 8m ago
I think the difference is textbook standardized language which you learn in schools vs the language actually spoken irl by people with accents, dialects, and a vocabulary and rules which are more fluid than a standardized language.
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u/Mild_Karate_Chop 3h ago
Brilliant if her. But I can't help think the sadness she must gave been feeling too
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u/Ender_Nobody 3h ago
Maybe there was satisfaction instead.
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u/Mild_Karate_Chop 3h ago
Yes, could be but a dying language and an octogenarian facing mortality . I think there must have been some sadness too.
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u/External-Praline-451 2h ago
Sadness, but also hope and amazing determination. Because her efforts mean she's not actually the last person to speak it, if other people can learn from it and at least keep it alive and captured as a record for the next generations.
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u/Inevitable_Cat_7878 3h ago
Hopefully, she recorded herself as well so people will know how to pronounce the words.
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u/hungry4danish 2h ago
The picture shows a microphone. Did you think she was recording her demo tape?
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u/Rude_Society6232 1h ago
For some reason I thought she was being part of a radio show there
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u/textilepat 1h ago
No, she's podcasting, which means she gardens by casting seed pods into the soil.
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u/Neveed 1h ago edited 16m ago
She did save it from disappearing without a trace, but if she was the last native speaker and died, the language is now extinct so she didn't save it from extinction. That said she contributed in making revival efforts possible and apparently one of her descendants is trying to teach her son the language as a native language.
As far as I'm aware, the only revival of an extinct language that worked on the long term was Hebrew, but it benefited from a very large group making a massive effort about it for cultural/ideological reasons, which is much harder to do when you're still in the situation that lead to the extinction of the language you're trying to revive.
I wish Wilcox's granddaughter luck.
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u/Away-Living5278 2h ago
I wonder if she added information about sentence structure too.
It's sad that we've lost so many languages
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u/TheGreatRao 2h ago
Quite the hero. Her claim to immortality even. I'd love to know more of her story.
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u/Abject-Composer-6810 1h ago
I would just start making words up. Who’s going to check if she’s right?
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u/RasterMomentum 2h ago
Gasp all you want, but in the grand scheme of things language death is more often than not a good™ thing.
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u/FratboyPhilosopher 10m ago
Yeah, the whole world should be completely homogenized, and all people should just be interchangeable widgets in the corporate machine. All differences are simply inconveniences to be eliminated.
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u/FTWCWDIG 1h ago
I hope this language becomes revived it deserved to after all the effort this legend put in
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u/AlbacoreJohnston 56m ago
When I was 10 we all got to choose a language to study as a school project. They made the mistake of letting us choose ANY language we wanted, and I chose a Native American language. The teacher and my parents all had to tell me no because there was no curriculum for any native language.
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u/torakku2 48m ago
I think by now the fact that a human language goes extinct once every 2 weeks is rather well known but also very looked over. It's difficult to understand because we all her speak English and maybe a few languages numbering in the dozens or hundreds of millions of speakers and we just can't wrap our head around that we have so much culture, such knowledge and traditions that just... go away when the last person passes away.
It's a profoundly sad event, and I am glad this lady did the best she could to keep at least one for future generations.
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u/SkyVINS 1h ago
.. but why.
Even if someone was to learn it from her .. who would they then speak it with.
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u/throwaway098764567 1h ago
sigh, to record it for posterity, leave her mark on the world. some linguist might find it interesting to compare to other languages. to have a hobby in her twilight years.
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u/iwillhaveredditall 53m ago
Let‘s say a historian wants to translate something that was found… wouldn’t that be handy?
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u/SkyVINS 46m ago edited 19m ago
do they have written works?
there is *some* information on wikipedia about this group, it seems to be a minor splinter of a indigenous population of california.
The internet. Where you get downvoted for copypasting from wikipedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yokuts_language
no, they don't have any written works. the first alphabet for this group of languages was developed, by someone else, in 2012.
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u/e37d93eeb23335dc 51m ago
At the very least, linguists would find this very useful. I wouldn’t be surprised if the least to learn that someone got a doctorate from writing their dissertation on this language.
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u/SkyVINS 23m ago
some of the replies i got here are really difficult to reply to. because, they all start with stating things that are, in fact correct. I am working on the assumption that i've come across as brutishly ignorant.
Yeah. Absolutely. You totally can get a masters in linguistics by turning in a paper on this language. Now let's drop the facade and review the implications of that statement. Most dissertations that earn masters are barely ever read, much less understood. This isn't a fault of the institutions, it's the nature of science - at those levels, even experts in their fields are only only expert in a portion of that field. Some professor will see that you've put in the work and will wave you away with a roll of paper and a "doctor". Nobody actually cares about your research in a field that is likely to have zero impact in the practical application of (any) science.
Linguistics could *potentially* learn from that language, though the likelihood is small. You barely need to look online at any linguistics resources online to see that linguistics is an extremely thorough science, encompassing practically every combination of phonetics and syntax. A dialect of the Tule-Kaweah language isn't likely to hold much surprises for glottologists. Why? Because dialectal deformations happen is ALL languages, not just this one.
I probably sound like an asshole now, but keep in mind that over the past 30 years i've seen the internet get swamped by these posts where everything needs to be misrepresented in a way that please some or other culture tribe. (that's us. we're the culture tribe) And having seen this same post already 4 times, this time i couldn't help myself, to point out that, IF you look at what this feelgood post actually says, it's far enough from the truth to have the opposite of a feelgood effect on someone who understands what's actually written in that post.
This lady's work will have zero effect on any science you can name. Someone found god knows what filler article on the Newbernsburg Modern Herald or another internet-published newspaper and decided to earn some karma points. She ain't decyphering Proto-Elamite script, she's doing this because she's lost a sense of belonging. I can see the human aspect, but i don't necessarily approve of it. I would prefer a world were everyone speaks a common language, and can understand everyone else, since that is the function of spoken language, at the cost of sounding like i'm crushing butterflies to get there.
i felt like i wanted to vent. sue me.
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u/zoosha2curtaincall 41m ago
Language can tell us so much more than that. Someday we may realize that some other language is related. Imagine if it turned out that this language had a bunch of loanwords from another language on the other side of the continent. There’d be all sorts of things to figure out about interactions they might have had, and you could learn so much about history.
More broadly, don’t ever “but why” with learning. There’s always something useful about it, even if you don’t know what it is yet.
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u/Different_Method_191 30m ago
I’ve learned that with every language that disappears, we lose more than just sounds and words; we also lose cultural knowledge, a people's memory, stories, traditional techniques, and even knowledge of local plants and animals.
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u/Arenshii 3h ago
Tbh, it’ll still be extinct after she passes.
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u/det0724 3h ago
She passed away in 2021 but a few of her family members now speak it fluently and have taught it to a few people.
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u/ILiekBookz 3h ago
Imagine your grandma asking you to set up a computer so she can write a dictionary for a language she is the last known user of.
Really, at that point you have to learn
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u/Hermes3000Typewriter 3h ago
She is dead. She died in 2021 aged 87.
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u/lemonjuicypumpkin 3h ago
Huh? The post said she bought a computer at 82 years old and spent 7 years writing the dictionary. Did she start weiting before owning a computer?
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u/voidchungus 3h ago
The record she created is meaningful, regardless of whether or not the language continues to be spoken. She created a lasting legacy.
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u/Whole_Mongoose1854 3h ago
And, sadly, typically there is nothing but occasional passing interest in dead languages unless those who spoke it had huge historical impact or a reclamation project by descendants(not common). But, it was clearly important to her, and that matters.
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u/Superb-Airport135 1h ago
How do we know didn't make some bullshit up?
I speak a not very common language. If I was thr last person I would absolutely try my best to document everything but I would absolutely make some bullshit up and add it for the lulz
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u/Wagagastiz 39m ago
Because it's not an isolate, it has relatives that most words can be compared with, and it has morphosyntactic rules that would make something you just made up stick out like a sore thumb.
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u/Superb-Airport135 35m ago
My post was a joke but for sure if you wanted to put made up shit for lulz anybody that is native speaker could do it.
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u/AngryMandragora 13m ago
We will never know if she just made the words up since no one else speaks the language...
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u/-crazykidbad 2h ago
I don’t understand why they didn’t have a savant just sit with her or read everything she has or those people that have an perfect recall. Seems it could be accomplished quicker than 7 yrs. What about the guy who can speak 28 languages?
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u/hungry4danish 2h ago
how many of those languages feed off each other? Spanish/Portuguese, Russian/Bulgarian, Even Korean and Chinese could share similar grammatical structure at times.
Native American languages are entirely their own things.
And perfect recall really isn't a thing. So in no way is sitting down with 1 savant more helpful or advantageous or fool proof than actually recording it down in its entirety. Time be damned.
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u/Yakoke6969 2m ago
I get what you are saying but those people might have known she existed. She should have spoke up sooner to her family and maybe some social media attention could have been used to reach what you are trying to accomplish. But she is gone now.
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