"As the last speakers converse, they spin out individual strands of a vast web of knowledge, a noosphere of possibilities that encircles all of us. They tell how their ancestors calculated accurately the passing of the seasons without clocks and calendars, how humans adapted to hostile environments from the Arctic to Amazonia.
"We imagine eureka moments taking place in modern laboratories or in classical civilizations. But key insights of biology, pharmacology, genetics, and navigation arose and persisted solely by word of mouth, in small, unwritten tongues. This web of knowledge contains feats of human ingenuity--epics, myths, rituals--that celebrate and interpret our existence."
So writes K David Harrison in The Last Speakers: The Quest to Save the world's Most Endangered Languages, a book given to me at Christmas. I had never thought about the valuable, complex web of wisdom and lore that is lost when a language dies. It is so much more than a collection of words and phrases it is a whole system of thought and understanding of the world which we inhabit.
One of the reviewers on the dust jacket said "This wonderful book is really three books wrapped into one--a world travelogue of languages, a moving personal account of the last speakers of vanishing languages, and a revelation of the knowledge tied to each language." Jared Diamond (who wrote Guns, Germs and Steel.)
It made me think of the terrible injustice done to Native Americans which included the insane pressure on them to give up their languages.
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