Reuters
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An indigenous language from South America’s excessive south has all however vanished after the loss of life of its final residing speaker and guardian of its ancestral tradition.
Cristina Calderon died on Wednesday, aged 93. She had mastered the Yamana language of the Yagan group and after the loss of life of her sister in 2003, was the final individual on this planet who might converse it. She labored to save lots of her information by making a dictionary of the language with translations to Spanish.
“With her an important part of the cultural memory of our people is gone,” mentioned Lidia Gonzalez, Calderon’s daughter, on Twitter. Gonzalez is likely one of the representatives at present drafting a brand new structure in Chile.
The dictionary, nonetheless, meant there was hope of preserving the language in some type, she mentioned.
“Although with her departure a wealth of especially valuable empirical knowledge is lost in linguistic terms, the possibility of rescuing and systematizing the language remain open,” she mentioned.
Although there are nonetheless just a few dozen Yagans left, over the generations individuals from the group stopped studying the language, which was thought-about “isolated” because it was troublesome to find out the origin of its phrases.
Calderon lived in a easy home and made a residing promoting knitted socks within the Chilean city of Villa Ukika, a city created by the Yagan individuals on the outskirts of Puerto Williams.
The ancestral ethnic group used to populate the archipelagos of South America’s excessive south, now Chile and Argentina, an space which nudges in the direction of the frozen Antarctic.
