thin ice

This news of global warming's effects on the linguistic landscape of the High North is disturbing, not because it is desirable to defend Saami, Finnish, Inuit, or Icelandic from invading terms for southern birds, but because the great shifts in the environment that are causing the animals' migrations that then pose difficulties for speakers of languages not previously used to discuss elk, robins, hornets, &c. are distressing of themselves.

Mind you, change of itself is not bad.

I can get enthusiastic about language on both sides of whatever phoneme shift you like. Watch me.

I mourn, in a recreational kind of way, the exinction of delightful grammatical fauna like the Old English dual pronoun wit, the disappearance of engaging orthographic flora like the eðel of Old Norse. All the while I know that I can invoke these odd creatures in prose and verse, summon them from beyond the grave exactly by bemoaning their vanishment, and it is just possible that I enjoy my revenant menagerie the more in its afterlife than I would have otherwise.

But when Ursus maritimus disappears from the North, when he succumbs (and I mean the great white bear himself and not his signifier in any particular tongue), on that day and ever after no amount of clever verbiage, no ex post facto ekphrasis from stock footage will begin to make up for it.

(Update: see also Ray Girvan at Apothecary's Drawer for a considered reaction to the same Reuter's piece, full of excellent links. Learn, for example, how to identify a snowclone.)