NEWS

No 17 Gough Square, London

Samuel Johnson compiled his Dic- tionary (1755) at the above address, and the above address still stands. Thousands of tourists visit it every year, most of whom appear to be Americans, and it must be one of the very few shrines to lexicography in the world at large, leave alone in the English-using world.

It is in need of repair, however. Its last major renovation was in 1911, land.

Requiem for a Small Language

On 13 July 84, the International Herald Tribune reported efforts by scholars to record a Caucasian language on the edge of oblivion. Only one man, now 82 and living near Istanbul in Turkey, still understands Oubykh, whose speakers once num- bered 50,000. Oubykh's decline began after 1864, when Muslim herders and farmers left Russia in the wake of the Crimean War and moved into Turkey. In due course the Turkish language began to crowd out the older language among the tribesfolk, until today only one elder can speak it in full. When Tevfik Esenc dies, Oubykh dies with him.

Linguists from Paris and Oslo have been working with him, however, to record as much as they can before that happens. They are particularly fas-

since when it was damaged on three separate occasions by enemy action during World War Two. An appeal has now been launched for a minimum of £150,000 necessary to restore and maintain this historic spot. Donations can be sent to: The Doctor Johnson's House Appeal Fund, 1 Dean Farrar Street, West- minster, London SWIH ODH, Eng-

cinated by the extreme variety of sounds in Oubykh, with 82 con- sonants and only 3 vowels. Notes John-Thor Dahlburg in the IHT: Transcribers have had to use both Latin and Greek letters, plus some signs of their own, to capture the wealth of sounds.'

Georges Dumézil, a member of the Académie Française, has laboured long and hard to create an archive of Oubykh. He has spent 20 summers in Turkey, compiling a grammar and dictionary and transcribing Oubykh folk tales. Dumézil observed to Dahlburg: 'The younger people there don't understand why anybody would waste his time learning the language. They told me: "You'd be spending your time better learning English"."

Properly Constituted English

There is a movement underway for the defence of English in the United States. A lobbying group that calls itself 'U.S. English' claims the support of such opinion-formers as Saul Bellow, Norman Cousins and Alistair Cooke, and wants English enshrined in the Constitution as the official language of the U.S.A. to safeguard it against multilingual fragmentation on the one hand and the advance of Spanish on the other (reports Francis X. Clines, New York Times, 3 June 84).

The group claims to favour all kinds of second languages, but nevertheless insists that an amend- ment to the Constitution is necessary 'to stop the erosion of the traditional method by which immigrants are assimilated through the need to learn English'. Its opponents, however, label the movement as silly, 'another of the crazy California movements,' as Robert Garcia puts it. Garcia is head of the Hispanic Caucus and considers the proposed amendment (in Clines' words) 'an elitist symptom of prejudice against politically rising ethnic groups'.

The founder of U.S. English is the Californian Republican and U.S. senator S. I. Hayakawa, who also happens to be a well-known semanti- cist. His view is that Americans 'can speak any language we want at the dinner table, but English is the language of public discourse, of the marketplace and of the voting booth.'