Fwd: from Danny Abram; Gaelic issues

[Matthew Ward]

...as usual, an accurate article is completely distorted by the
mainstream media.

Abrams' article does not mention that language death in general is due
to the status of English worldwide, it does not make any claims about a
date of language death, and it was referring to Scottish Gaelic, which
is the most endangered indigenous language remaining in Britain/Ireland,
not Irish Gaelic or Welsh, two languages which remain more viable.

Why can't newspaper/magazine writers report on linguistic articles
without completely distorting their contents?

David Gene Lewis wrote:

>------ Forwarded message -------
>
>
>From: Danny Abrams <dma32 at tam.cornell.edu>
>To: David Gene Lewis <coyotez at darkwing.uoregon.edu>
>Date: Tue, 30 Sep 2003 15:51:16 -0400 (EDT)
>
>Hi David,
>
>I am the correct person to contact regarding that article.  I'm a
>graduate student at Cornell University, and I published a paper about
>language death with my advisor, Steve Strogatz, in the August 21
>edition
>of Nature.
>
>Unfortunately, the author of the Daily Record article oversimplified
>the
>idea a bit too much.  First of all, the report is referring to data on
>
>Scots (not Irish) Gaelic, and we never made any claims about
>predicting a
>particular year for language death.  The paper is focused more on a
>very
>simple model that can match much of existing data, and I would be the
>first to say that it is not accurate enough to be useful in later
>stages
>of language decline.
>
>I've attached a copy of the paper to this email (it's only one page)
>in
>case you're interested.
>
>Danny
>
>
>