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As a boy, Blas Omar Jaime spent many afternoons learning about his ancestors. Over yerba mate and torta fritas, his mother, Ederlinda Miguelina Yelón, passed along the knowledge she had stored (lưu trữ) in Chaná, a throaty (cổ họng) language spoken by barely moving the lips or tongue.

The Chaná are an Indigenous (bản địa) people in Argentina and Uruguay whose lives were intertwined (gắn liền) with the mighty (hùng vĩ) Paraná River, the second longest in South America. They revered (tôn trọng) silence, considered birds their guardians and sang their babies lullabies (bài hát ru): Utalá tapey-’é, uá utalá dioi — sleep little one, the sun has gone to sleep.

Ms. Miguelina Yelón urged (kêu gọi) her son to protect their stories by keeping them secret. So it was not until decades later, recently retired and seeking out people with whom he could chat, that he made a startling discovery: No one else seemed to speak Chaná. Scholars had long considered the language extinct.

“I said: ‘I exist. I am here,’” said Mr. Jaime, now 89, sitting in his sparse (thưa thớt) kitchen on the outskirts of Paraná, a midsize city in the Argentine province of Entre Ríos.

source: nytimes,