The Linguists

Sweeeeet. Apparently there was a film out two years ago all about linguistics and saving lost languages. After reading about the last speaker of Bo dying yesterday, I was inspired wander more online and found out lots of interesting information about saving dying languages, many of which are found in southeast Asian islands and Native American tongues in the United States.

Here's a great citation from an article called The Tragedy of Dying Languages that describes how important languages are:

We imagine eureka moments taking place in modern laboratories or classical civilizations. But key insights of biology, pharmacology, genetics, and navigation arose and persisted solely by word of mouth, in small, unwritten tongues. Finally, this web of knowledge contains feats of human ingenuity -epics, myths, rituals - that celebrate and interpret our existence.

Pundits argue that linguistic differences are little more than random drift, minor variations in meaning and pronunciation that emerge over time (the British say 'lorry', Americans 'truck'; Tuesday is CHEWS-day, for Brits, TOOZ-day for Americans).

These reveal nothing interestingly different about our souls or minds, some claim. But that's like saying that the Pyramid of Cheops differs from Notre Dame Cathedral only by stone-cutting techniques that evolved randomly in different times and places; revealing nothing unique in the ancient Egyptian or Medieval French imagination.

All cultures encode their genius in verbal monuments, while considerably fewer do so in stone edifices. We might as well proclaim human history banal, and human genius of no value to our survival.

The fate of languages is interlinked with that of species, as they undergo parallel extinctions. Scientific knowledge is comparable for both domains, with an estimated 80% of plant and animal species unknown to science, and 80% of languages yet to be documented.

Sweet! Languages are sooo important. I have often been on the receiving end of looks that scream, "You majored in French? That's not very useful." But the study of languages, how people learn them, how to teach them, and how they integrate into history, literature, and culture is immeasurably important.

On a completely unrelated side note, we are supposed to get 4 inches of snow today, 14 tonight, and 8 tomorrow. I'm guessing I won't be at school for much of next week...