George H.J. Weber is the Swiss web author who has made his life’s work the study of little-known and unusual people and languages, living, extinct, recent and prehistoric. Several of his articles appeared in the printed issues of Language International in the early 1990s. For the last ten years, however, he has specialised in all aspects of the Andaman Islanders, and has become one of the leading experts in this field, which had hitherto been little explored. Our correspondent Hugh Sedon-Strutt put some questions to George Weber about the fascination this (and other) obscure people hold for him.
Q: How and why did you get so involved with studying unusual languages?
It was Geoffrey Kingscott – no less! – who pushed me onto this slippery slope by mentioning in that deceptively by-the-way sort of way of his, that I should perhaps try to find out what was the most obscure, least known and last researched but still living language family was. It took me quite a while before I stumbled over the Andamanese languages. For a living family it certainly seemed to have no equal in obscurity anywhere in the world. So I just stayed with it.
Q: What first attracted you to studying the Andamanese language family?
I did not really “study” it. That is difficult even for Indian professional linguists with exceptional access to the closed and/or remote areas where Andamanese languages are still spoken. I merely collected the (few, obscure and mostly 19th century) works of British researchers who had in their day had direct access to native Andamanese speakers.
Q: Why has this group of languages now, seemingly, become so predominant in your language studies?
It hasn’t become predominant. Language was merely the first aspect to attract my attention. I am now just as interested in many other aspects of these fascinating and still little-known people. I remain interested in their culture, languages, ethnology, anthropology, archaeology right down to their outside relationships as revealed by molecular genetics. What I am trying to discover as a helper and profiteer of the real specialists is what other populations (living or extinct) the Andamanese might be related to and when and where they originally came from. The possibility that they represent the earliest still surviving group of the human “Out of Africa” migration remains a distinct possibility, though not proven beyond reasonable doubt yet.
Q: Not many people know anything about the Andaman Islands and their peoples. Can you tell our readers briefly about them?
There still are a lot of open and disputed questions about who the Andamanese Negrito are, but the amount of scientific knowledge about all aspects of their life has grown enormously in the last 20 years. One exception are the Sentineli on their isolated little island. Just before the earthquake and tsunami of late December 2004 it looked like they were just about to accept the dubious “hand of friendship” that the Indian authorities and traders “stretched out to them” (as the Indians put it) and which would have been the end of the Sentineli. But then the earthquake and tsunami struck, tilted their island over and made it rather bigger, but left them unscratched and quite uninterested in further outside contact.
Apart from the Sentineli, quite a lot is now known on how the other Andamanese live and what they think themselves. There are a few Indian scientists who have learnt their languages and have gained their trust. One example is Professor Vishvajit Pandya, another Professor Anvita Abbi.
The islands are also not quite as remote as they used to be. The local government is having some success in attracting wealthy foreign tourists which boosts local awareness that their environment is worth preserving, along with the tourist attraction that are the Andamanese. One shouldn’t get worked up about the motives. It is the results that are important and they are positive in this case at least in the short term.
There is much to tell about the Andamanese but rather than repeat myself here – have a look at our website www.andaman.org.
Q: Have you visited them? Can you converse in any Andamanese language?
My wife Eloi (she is partAmerind Brazilian) and I have been to the islands in the 1990s but the authorities in those pretourist days were not happy about foreigners poking around. We did not get close to any Andamanese. At that time the Jarawa had not yet come out of the jungle to hassle the Indian settlers who had been hassling them by chopping down their trees and building roads all over their hunting grounds.
Can you converse in any of the Andamanese languages?
No. Only a few Indian linguists can do that with any proficiency.