Language extinction triggers the loss of unique medicinal knowledge

[NNadir]

The paper I'll discuss in this post is this one: Language extinction triggers the loss of unique medicinal knowledge (Rodrigo Cámara-Leret and Jordi Bascompte PNAS 2021 Vol. 118 No. 24 e2103683118)

I was directed to this interesting paper by this article in popular press: Extinction of Indigenous languages leads to loss of exclusive knowledge about medicinal plants (Mongabay by Sibélia Zanon on 20 September 2021 | Translated by Maya Johnson) , which in turn came in my email from my Nature Briefing subscription.

It was my privilege to work in various capacities on the development of several drugs that were discovered originally in plants, two of the taxanes for cancer, originally found in Oregon Yew Tree bark, and irinotecan, originally obtained from the bark of the Chinese "Happy Tree." I supported a group working on the total synthesis. (It was very exciting.) I'm working with a team developing one now, but I can't talk about it.

Although many drugs have been obtained from molecules in plants, or derived from them, we have only scratched the surface of drugs available.

The paper linked above gives an interesting perspective about which I had not thought.

From the introduction:

Indigenous people have accumulated a sophisticated knowledge about plants and their services—including knowledge that confers significant health benefits (1)—that is encoded in their languages (2). Indigenous knowledge, however, is increasingly threatened by language loss (3) and species extinctions (4, 5). On one hand, language disuse is strongly associated with decreases in indigenous knowledge about plants (6). On the other hand, global change will constrain the geographic ranges of many human-utilized endemic plants and crops (7, 8). Together, language extinction and reductions in useful plant species within the coming century may limit the full potential of nature’s contributions to people and the discovery of unanticipated uses. So far, however, our understanding of the degree to which the loss of indigenous languages may result in the loss of linguistically unique knowledge and how this risk compares to that posed by ecological extinction has been limited (Fig. 1)...

Figure 1:



The caption:

Medicinal plant knowledge and its association with indigenous languages. The figure illustrates a regional pharmacy with remedies (jars with plants) cited by languages (jar labels). In this paper, we assess to what degree the knowledge contained in this pharmacy would be eroded by the extinction of either indigenous languages or plants.

Another image, Figure 2:



The caption:

Fig. 2.
Most medicinal knowledge is unique to a single language. Histograms depict the number of indigenous languages that cite a medicinal service. (A) North America. (B) Northwest Amazonia. (C) New Guinea. Red bars show medicinal plant services only known to one language. Dots within the maps indicate the distribution of languages.

The caption:

Fig. 3.
Distribution of unique knowledge across languages. Trees represent language phylogenies of North America (n = 119 languages) (A); northwest Amazonia (n = 37 languages) (B); and New Guinea (n = 80 languages) (C). Illustrations represent indigenous groups whose languages have the highest number of unique medicinal services per region. These languages are indicated by their corresponding numbers in the linguistic trees: 1, Cherokee; 2, Huron–Wyandot; 3, Navajo; 4, Ticuna; 5, Barasana–Eduria; 6, Cubeo; 7, Biak; 8, Lower Grand Valley Dani; and 9, Molima. Language names at phylogeny tips are abbreviated following Glottolog codes. For the list of language names and Glottolog codes, see SI Appendix, Table S2.

Figure 4:



The caption:

Distribution of unique knowledge across medicinal floras. Trees represent medicinal plant phylogenies of North America (n = 2,475 species) (A); northwest Amazonia (n = 645 species) (B); and New Guinea (n = 477 species) (C). Illustrations and their corresponding numbers show the plant species with more unique medicinal services per region. 1, Liriodendron tulipifera; 2, Persea borbonia; 3, Pinus glabra; 4, Tachigali paniculata; 5, Fittonia albivenis; 6, Tetrapterys styloptera; 7, Inocarpus fagifer; 8, Flagellaria indica; and 9, Cordyline fruticosa. All illustrations from www.plantillustrations.org belong to the public domain.

From the conclusion the paper:

Only about 6% of higher plants have been screened for biological activity (21). Therefore, assessing to what degree linguistically unique medicinal services are truly effective in the Western sense is beyond the scope of this paper. In many instances, these plants have been proven medicinally effective (12, 22⇓⇓⇓⇓–27), albeit there are also exceptions (28, 29). Regardless of that, here, we treat this knowledge as what it is: part of the cultural heritage of indigenous people.

The United Nations declared 2022–2032 as the International Decade of Indigenous Languages to raise awareness about their importance for sustainable development and their endangerment across the world. Our study suggests that each indigenous language brings unique insights that may be complementary to other societies that seek potentially useful medicinal remedies. Therefore, the predicted extinction of up to 30% of indigenous languages by the end of the 21st century (3) would substantially compromise humanity’s capacity for medicinal discovery.

I'm not sure if the PNAS paper is open sourced, but the Mongabay article probably is.

Interesting I think.

[mdelaguna]

1. Muy muy importante!! Nt

[keithbvadu2]

2. A form of corporate knowledge

A form of corporate knowledge

[yonder]

3. Thanks for this post.

This is similar to the loss of a great library - so much will not be recovered

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

4. Interesting.

But if this knowledge is ONLY available in a language just about ready to go extinct, it's going nowhere to begin with. Basically it's secret knowledge that's not being shared. Or is someone actively trying to translate and preserve it?

[Karadeniz]

5. I remember the yew fiasco. Yews were being destroyed... then they were found to contain a cancer

treatment.

[Igel]

6. This kind of thing is easy to get a bit skewed.

Yes, a lot of knowledge is held in language-specific forms.

On the other hand, as one population and language moves in and displaces another, there's population mergers. If you're surrounded by 20 plants and need to name them, you have a choice: coin a new word or borrow one. A lot of "indigenous" knowledge on the part of the indigenous populations of parts of the US, Europe, Asia, S. Asia, and Africa were borrowed from the previous indigenous populations of those parts.

After all, Native American tribes migrated, expelled, absorbed, and genocided other tribes. Language expansion in Africa follows genetic migrations, showing that people came, squashed the previous indigenous culture, and produced a new indigenous culture.

Even the Albanians and Slavs and Celts aren't truly indigenous to Europe, if you trace them back: the IE folk moved in, even if Poles resulted from the break-up and merger of pre-existing ethnic groups. (So the Poles existed nowhere else as an ethnic unit; but they came from stock that was overlain on older ethnic substrata.)

I like using cilantro and epazote. Cilantro is good old fashioned European coriander, and is entirely non-native to the new world. Epazote is an entirely non-English word that I nonetheless know and use. Realia matter; realia acquires words when people need them.

The knowledge from old populations was either passed to the newcomers who needed it or lost in antiquity (and maybe rediscovered). If passed on, then language extinction isn't the issue; if lost, then it's not just a modern feature. This misses a large part of the point, though.

The main point is this: When a population becomes urban, that knowledge is lost even if they keep the same language (that is, the language not only doesn't go extinct, but mushrooms in terms of population size). Look in an English dialect dictionary for words for herbs. Pick a random 100. See if anybody knows any of them where you work. And if they recognize one, it's likely to be the last bit of a compound, "red something-or-other".

In other words, the indigenous language borne by the newly indigenized Germanic arrivals in Britain (following by centuries the languages borne by the former indigenized Celtic arrivals) is losing all that rich medicinal knowledge. Actually, it's mostly lost it.

I moved to Texas and found a whole new world of weeds. Had to learn the names for them--two choices. Linnaean or common (with variants for the common names). What's funny is that when I talk about them, on the rare occasions I've had to talk about them, nobody hardly knows them. They're all urbane, educated, and don't root around in the dirt. Even if they speak the same language as their great-grandparents in Texas (such folk do exist) and live within 10 miles of their family homestead, the knowledge is lost.

This is a different kind of thing, and, I'd argue, the actual problem with language extinction. The knowledge can be carried across a language barrier quite handily. But if the next generation says "screw that!" to the knowledge and doesn't have a use for the words, then the knowledge dies. Even if the language--the big thing some people fight for--continue to exist. Even if the ethnic group continues as an ethnic group, unless they live in the same situation in which they need to know the most common 100 wild plants within 5 miles of their home they won't.

The flip of that is also a problem. One of the banes of my existence when reading Siberian and mid-19th century Russian literature was the desire that writers had to show off local knowledge. I don't know how many words I knew for the same set of species of some chamomile or a variety of mushroom or some sort of local grass snake, all in the same language (and just try to find a picture of those to put object to phonetic form for these things in the 1980s, pre-net). Now nobody knows what those words mean, and I have stacks of books with obscure names like "The fish of the Upper Volga" or "Mushrooms of the SW Urals"--mostly pictures, descriptions, and a variety of dialectal names for them, and uses. Since I teach high school science now, they're useless; and since nobody but the rare Slavic dialectologist is interested (lit people don't care about these words unless they can hang some critical-theoretic point on them), they'll be tossed when I die or downsize.

(It's the same issue with some words in Leviticus--the referents are lost; words without referential knowledge is pointless.)

What's left is the way to keep this from happening. If you record the words, that helps little--you need to translate them and the texts, and immediately run into a critical-theoretic tangle. (Are you imperialist? colonialist? appropriationist?) You need to keep samples of the referents, and the use of the actual word in the local language (there are probably several) is utterly meaningless at that point.

Or you can force the young to retain the words, learn what the words mean, and maintain that knowledge ... How, exactly? Didn't work with young people moving to cities or finding non-agricultural work who speak French or Russian or Mandarin or Spanish. Why should it be different with other indigenous languages?

It's a useful bit of work and points to a real problem, sounds linguisticky and biological but it's more political than anything. (I've had this conversation with a number of linguists who want to preserve and resurrect indigenous languages--never Cornish, of course, or Romansch) and they always fall back to, "But diversity. Inclusion. Equity." The real problem is seen in a lot of Native American communities--if you speak a language lacking a developed lexicon so you can't discuss circuit theory or resonance or double-entry accounting or even how to replace rings in a car in the abstract in a language, you'll switch to a better developed language. And if you already know it in one language and not the other you'll code-switch to keep down the burden of learning 10k words in 2 or 3 languages and keeping them active.

[NNadir]

7. Thank you for your thoughtful comments. I mostly agree with what you say, and of course...

...human knowledge is often lost or neglected for long periods of time, not only from the destruction or loss of languages, but other reasons.

Probably the most famous case is that of Archimedes; some of his surviving works strongly suggest that he had discovered calculus or something close to it nearly two millennia before either Newton or Leibnitz. His method for calculating the value of π as well as the area between a parabola and a secant line suggest a knowledge of some form of calculus.

Some work is almost lost, but is pulled from obscurity, for instance the work of Galois on the theory of groups, or Gregor Mendel on genetics. Newton kept the Principia Mathematica in a drawer, and was only reluctantly convinced to publish it by Halley. It could have been lost.

I have convinced myself that many important things have been discovered by people who for one reason or another do not have access to sharing their knowledge, or decline to share it, or who are not taken seriously, the latter being the case for Galois, who died in his early 20s in obscurity, in what amounts to a bar fight.

English is one of the richest languages in the world because of British Imperialism which was to be supplanted by American cultural, if not political or military imperialism. The English not only stole resources; they "stole" words.

I was working in a lab with one of the first "Mainland" Chinese chemists to come to the United States in the era of Deng Xiaoping, opening Chinese scientists to training in the US. At that time there was still a lot of political wrangling between Taiwan and China, both claiming to be "legitimate" China. I asked the scientist on how the Chinese selected characters for new chemical compounds, and whether any political issues were involved. He said - it may have been only true then - that in China, when discussing organic chemistry scientists often chose to speak English, since English offered more flexibility.

I think the real issue is the efficiency with which ideas find their way to the mainstream, here I'm not talking about crazy ideas, but serious ideas reflecting objective truth.

I worked with a number of scientists who paid close attention to traditional Chinese medicine, as well as some Indian scientists who focus on Ayurvedic medicine. It is interesting how these folk medicine concepts seek validation by the scientific principles first developed in Europe.

The religious scholar Elaine Pagels in one of her books - it may have been The Origin of Satan - that the moral philosophy of the Judeo Christian world, specifically that each human being had intrinsic worth has more or less "conquered" the world and become something of a truism, albeit one subject to being widely disregarded in practice.

It seems that the "discovery" of the scientific method, largely in Europe, has also conquered the world.

Languages however may express conceptions of value that are not expressible in other languages until they are imported. It is certainly true, as you say, that many languages have no words for things commonly available in English. I often find myself listening to people exchanging ideas in fairly obscure languages and some very common languages, everything from Norwegian, to French, to Dutch, to Telegu, to Mandarin, to Cantonese, to Guajarati, to Tagalog, etc. Of course I do not speak all of these languages, but often I can follow the general tenor of the conversation because so many English words are dumped in, or because the speakers lapse in and out of English.

In general, I support efforts to support dying languages, not just because of a knowledge of plants that may be limited to a few speakers, a shaman for instance, but because of the cultural information they help preserve, an intrinsic beauty similar to that of a species in danger of extinction.

Will the world be grossly changed if the El Segundo Blue butterfly goes extinct? Probably not. But somehow, I think, it will be less beautiful.

Thanks for your excellent comments. I appreciate them.