the argument for language maintenance

[jess tauber]

Some years ago I interacted with a scholar who had done extensive research concerning the theft of Yahgan linguistics materials (originally collected by the missionary Thomas Bridges) by the notorious self-promoting polar explorer Frederick Cook, who tried to palm them off the finished dictionary as his own work. He couldn't understand why anyone would care if the language went extinct. My eyes crossed when I heard this.

Later I got the same attitude from one grant reviewer for an endangered-language grant, which was incomprehensible. Why would such a person even be asked to review grant proposals in the first place???

The worst, though, came when I was at UCBerkeley in the graduate program, where I knew someone who thought that Khoisan languages weren't really languages or worth saving, because they were just series of grunts and clicking noises.

Jess Tauber
phonosemantics at earthlink.net