St. Louis Post-Dispatch from St. Louis, Missouri • Page 35

MONDAY, APRIL 21,1997 ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH 3E FOOTNOTES Professor Battles To Save A Dying Language 4- 7 Ron Schaefer of SIUE wants to preserve an African tongue and its 2,000 years of history By Florence Shinkle Cj the Post-Dispatch Staff A 1 HERE'S a serial killer at large right now, slaying victim I after victim, and there's no way to stop the rampage. The murderer is the English language. In a hundred years, 90 percent of the world's 6,500 existing languages will be goners, mowed down by the deadly triumvirate: Spanish, Qhinese and English. So what? So, much of the history and culture of the people who speak tfie'extinguished language will be lost as well, gone with the vanished vocabulary, the vanished references to old gods.

The disturbing fact is: As English takes over, so do English ideas. In a pocket of south central Nigeria, there's a fierce battle being waged against this linguistic and cultural hegemony. The field marshal is an English professor from Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville Ron Schaefer who's trying to devise a written version of a language called Emai, currently spoken by maybe 30,000 people who are relinquishing it, word by ancestral word. The area where Emai still survives has perhaps 30 distinct tongues, all but one of which have no writing system, dependent for survival on oral use. Alas, in order to trade, the tribes use a pjdgin English.

English is also the language of the Nigerian university system. And as Schaefer says, "There's no vocabulary to talk about "7" Madonna in Emai." So Emai, 2,000 years old, a linguistic 3 1 i i 3 i studied a vanishing language. 1 1 L.ii.,i.,.ii,.ii,.iiiiii.i,.ril mi--ni nil mil I Lon Schaefer is trying to devise a written version of a language called Emai, currently spoken by maybe 30,000 people who are relinquishing it. storehouse of history in a region that has had almost no archaeological exploration, is inexorably being supplanted. But wait! Here comes Schaefer to rescue the language even as the Emai people are in the process of forgetting it! Here he comes with seconds to spare, anchoring the language to the Ron Schaefer locates where in Africa he Reissued in paperback: "The Twenty-Seventh City" (Noonday Press, $15) is a story set in St.

Louis, which the cover describes as a "quietly dying river city until it hires a new police chief." Jonathan Franzen's novel, a tale of political conspiracy and corruption, originally was published in 1988 to much acclaim. Remember, it's just fiction. Four women writers will read from their work at a benefit Thursday for Four Way Books, a literary, not-for-profit press. Erin Belieu, Pamela Kircher, M. Wyrebek and Martha Rhodes will be at Dressel's in the Pub Above, 419 North Euclid Avenue, from 7-9 p.m.

Admission is $10. For more information, call one of the event's sponsors: Left Bank Books, 367-6731, or the International Writers Center, 935-5576. Literary awards: St. Louis' Jane O. Wayne's poetry collection "A Strange Heart (Helicon Nine Editions) this week won the Society of Midland Authors Poetry Competition.

Gina Berriault's "Women in Their Beds" has won this year's $15,000 PENFaulkner Award for fiction. The collection of 35 short stories also won the 1997 National Book Critics Circle award (Berriault's publicist says the book is the first to win both awards in the same year.) Campbell McGrath, 35, Wednesday won the $50,000 Kingsley Tuft Poetry Award for the collection "Spring Comes to Chicago." He's a writing professor at Miami's Florida International U. Eight novels are on the short list for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, at 100,000 Irish pounds the world's largest prize for a single work of fiction. The winner will be announced May 14. The contenders are: "Reservation Blues" by Sherman Alexie; "Novel Without a Name" by Duong Thu Huong; "A Tiler's Afternoon" by Lars Gustafsson; "A Heart So White" by Javier Marias; "A Fine Balance" by Rohinton Mistry; "Declares Pereira" by Antonio Tabucchi; "The Good Negress" by AJ.

Verdelle; "Morvern Callar" by Alan Warner. Jane Henderson ers? One is Mary's Tea, also known as Essiac an Ojibway Indian remedy that combines burdock root, sheep sorrel herb, slippery elm bark and rhubarb root and is said to be effective in the treatment of cancer. Other popular items include sinus tea, lapa-cho (an immune system booster) and lavender essential oil. Despite their success in the business world, the Hoards have not forsaken their musical background. Both work as freelancers with the St.

Louis Symphony Orchestra and play on occasion for The Muny, the Fox Theatre and more. Jeff also writes and performs original music with The Great Flood Band and spends one day a week at the University of Missouri at Columbia as a studio instructor. Economists predict future workers will change careers several times during their lifespans. If so, the Hoards are good examples of New Age employees and entrepreneurs. "We've been extremely lucky.

It's taken a lot of hard work and dedica- tion, but so far, we've been able to do two things in life we truly love," Cheryl says. I "With the Emai people, the meaning of a word can change completely, depending upon the pronunciation," Schaefer said. "For instance, opa, with a hard stress on the first syllable means number one. But okpa, with equal weight on both syllables, means rooster." So Schaefer laboriously forged a spelling for the word he was assured meant number one. Then, sitting around the cookfire, someone announced they were having number one for dinner.

After much confusion and pointing, he was made to understand that rooster was the entree. Bad enough to discover after a month spent pinpointing and transcribing the word number one that it had resurrected itself as rooster. But worse, from then on he had to assume that this nasty dualism was a property of the Emai language and any word might have its meaning altered with its accenting. Arrgghhhh! "It was very frustrating." Another frustration: It turned out that the Emai people merge vowel signs between words. English does this within a single word so that, for instance, the act of pronouncing evolved from pronounce-ation into the more honeyed pronunciation.

But for the sake of mellifluousness, the Emai make a gooey convection of two distinct words. "Let's take 'to drink Schaefer offered. "To drink is da and wine is enyo. But when they say it together, they say -denyo. Back to the cookfire.

Someone is talking about the health benefits of denyo. Denyo? What's denyo mean? What word is denyo? Anybody? For Pete's sake, quit bringing me enyo and tell me what denyo means! One last challenge: To capture the soul of the language Schaefer could not just listen to it in everyday use, any more than the majesty of English is captured in Emai, as it is used less and less, has gone through a brutal paring down to functionalism except in the oration of the old tales, where it retains the old luxuriance. If the elders would not trust Schaefer to witness their dramatic retelling of their legends, complete with music, dancers and bardic transport, he could not capture the language's richness. It wasn't enough that the elders cooperated to the extent that they gave him the Monarch notes version of this or that legend. He wanted the full performance, the demonstration of the language when it was the spiritual center of an autonomous culture.

He got it, too. "The Emai know what's happening. They are concerned." Over years, he had gotten to the point where he had enough structure and enough vocabulary to transcribe the legends that the Emai performed. He finished one about a turtle, typing it out in Emai, according to the orthography he'd devised. Working hard to impersonate a calm person, he handed the sheets to an Emai elder who knew how to read English, indicating that the man should attempt to read what was on the page.

He turned on the tape recorder. What you hear is a voice pitched a bit high from tension, moving from word to word with the classic third-grader's trudge across the page. It isn't necessary to understand the language itself to grasp the marvelous thing that is occurring: Someone is reading! "You should have seen their faces when they realized their favorite legend was being read," Schaefer said. Past is joined to future. The golden spike, the written word.

Schaefer goes back to Nigeria next month for the summer. "We're going to tackle verb entries," he said grimly. Pass the enyo. page, lassoing escaping meanings, chiseling word spellings out of the vagaries of pronunciation, imposing an orderly grammar (subject, object, etc.) over the anarchy of speech. Da.da, da dum da! Da, da, da- dum da! The publicist for SIUE sees Schaefer as a linguistic Indiana Jones.

Actually, he's more a Robin Williams type. He has the fevered intellect, the sharp chin, the untamable kineticism. A guy for whom metabolism is style. He has a professorial goatee, wire-rimmed glasses and an interesting way of guarding against his own self-accelerating tendencies. Whenever he hears himself getting too wound up over the difficulties of capturing the ancient language of a people who are into Madonna, he has a phrase he uses like a checkrein: "It was very frustrating." Always rigorously a linguist "My background isn't Goethe; I don't teach Shakespeare" Schaefer taught in the linguistics department of the University of Benin, about 60 miles from where the Emai live, between 1981 and 1985.

One of his students belonged to the tribe and lured Schaefer to his homeland. Originally, Schaefer grandly planned to study all 30 languages of the region. Subsequently, humbled, he modified his plan, concentrating on Emai, hoping it will serve later as a sort of skeleton key to the region's other tongues. Even trying to capture the unruliness of one language and provide it spelling and grammar is like trying to capture a cloud in a suitcase. Sam LeonePost-Dispatch shelves of hundreds of additional ingredients to satisfy customers' requests.

In addition to the tiny bottles of essential oils, boxes of packaged teas and tins of ointments and balms on display, customers can request special mixtures or order personalized shampoos. And advice is always free. "Cheryl is extremely knowledga-ble. When I have a question I can't answer, I always feel like I can pick up the phone and get a friendly reply. And the company's products are of superb quality," says Roberta Stieb, owner of Third Planet Books and More in Ellisville, which carries Cheryl's Herbs products.

Virginia Seper, of Millstadt, agrees: "I do all my ordering by phone or through the catalog. I've never met Cheryl in person. But whenever I call with a question, she is so personable. She is a very dedicated, spiritual young woman. Often, when I need a particular item, they'll ship it so it arrives the next day." In fact, many of Cheryl's Herbs' own products are shipped to clients worldwide.

The business' best sell In 1992 the latest figure available Americans spent $1.3 billion on herbal products. But Cheryl believes their success is due to more than just great timing. "We are unique in that we don't just sell products; we also offer an education system. And because there are few U.S. doctors trained in herbalism, that's essential.

Consumers are on their she says. Of course, by law, the Hoards cannot tell customers that herbs will cure any condition. (Though as yet the Food and Drug Administration does not regulate herbal remedies, it does have the authority to stop sales if a product is deemed dangerous to public health. The new Office of Dietary Supplements Research part of the National Institutes of Health will eventually be deciding whether to allow manufacturers' claims for herbal products.) "All we can do is suggest to customers that they do some reading," Cheryl says. To that end, Cheryl's Herbs maintains a study center with 400 books, ranging from "Natural Medicine for Children" to "Veteri iwiiimmiiMiia Herbs From page one Of course, not all the concoctions Cheryl sampled appealed to her Western sensibilities.

She says she'll never forget a mixture of boiled eggs, pork and don quai root believed to be good for curing female problems which one family made for her. "Just hideous," she recalls. At the same time that the Hoards were dabbling with Eastern herbal practices, they and other expatriates they met from Great Britain and Canada were missing some of the Western herbs that they had been accustomed to using. "Common things like basil, thyme and rosemary were not to be found in Hong Kong," Cheryl says. "And the Europeans who were much more familiar with homeopathic remedies and aromatherapy were unable to locate popular items like evening primrose capsules, which they used for everything from premenstrual symptoms to chronic skin conditions like eczema and psoriasis." So the Hoards began mail-ordering herbs from abroad for home use.

Soon they found themselves ordering in bulk for other expatriates. "Shipping costs were high, so we would simply take an order and repackage it in smaller quantities to distribute to friends," they say. Unintentionally, the Hoards soon found themselves running a small business. After the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre coupled with jitters about Hong Kong's imminent future under Chinese rule the Hoards say the "good days" as expatriate musicians were over. The Philharmonic's governing board changed, the orchestra stopped recording, and a "loyalty clause" was written into a i iiiliwiiifiiWiii fWW ft nary Aromatherapy," which is open to the public from 9 a.m.

to 6 p.m. Mondays through Saturdays. In addition, Cheryl hosts monthly Monday evening teas and gives classes about all aspects of herbalism. As current president of the National Association for Holistic Aromatherapy (NAHA), Cheryl is much in demand as a speaker as well. She has recently become a consultant for Time Life Books, which has plans to publish "The Drug and Natural Medicine Advisor" soon.

And she is serving on a committee through Barnes-Jewish Hospital that is assessing the potential market for incorporating complementary medicine into the healthcare system. But Cheryl's Herbs customers say it is the Hoards' personal touch that makes the difference. "I tried to make this business the kind of place I would have appreciated when I began learning about herbs," Cheryl says. To that end, there are always beverage teas and scents to sample in the homey showroom. A huge storeroom in back is filled with orderly WW.

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