Swarthmore College Linguist Calls Attention to Dying Languages (fwd)

[phil cash cash]

Mon Feb 19 07:21:42 2007 Pacific Time
http://newswire.ascribe.org/cgi-bin/behold.pl?ascribeid=20070219.060013&time=07%2021%20PST&year=2007&public=0

      Swarthmore College Linguist Calls Attention to Dying Languages

       SWARTHMORE, Pa., Feb. 19 (AScribe Newswire) -- Speakers of
thousands of the world's languages are now abandoning their ancestral
tongues at an unprecedented rate. What is lost when a language dies?
And what are the implications?

       "Languages are the repository of thousands of years of a people's
science and art - from observations of ecological patterns to creation
myths," says Swarthmore College linguist K. David Harrison, who spoke
this weekend at the American Association for the Advancement of
Science's annual meeting held this month in San Francisco. "The
disappearance of a language is not only a loss for the community of
speakers itself, but for our common human knowledge of mathematics,
biology, geography, philosophy, agriculture, and linguistics."

       In "When Languages Die: The Extinction of the World's Languages
and the Erosion of Human Knowledge" (Oxford University Press 2007),
Harrison argues that complex systems of knowledge are embedded in
indigenous languages. He also examines why people stop using them and
urges that they be documented before they are gone.

       In his book, Harrison examines the human knowledge that is slowly
being lost as the languages that express it - in Siberia, North America,
the Himalayas and elsewhere - fade from sight. He uses anecdotes and
portraits of some of these languages' last remaining speakers to
demonstrate that this knowledge not only represents the cultural
heritage found in oral histories and poetry, but useful knowledge about
plants, animals, the seasons, and other aspects of the natural world.

       Harrison is a specialist in Tuvan and other Siberian languages
and has conducted field research
(http://www.swarthmore.edu/SocSci/Linguistics/aslep/) on endangered
languages of South Siberia and Western Mongolia since 1996. During
field expeditions, he lives and travels with nomadic people,
accompanying them on their seasonal migrations as they herd camels,
horses, yaks, and sheep. He has also worked with one of the last
speakers of the Karaj language in Lithuania and documented language and
ethnography in Eastern India and the Philippine highland rice terraces.

       Located near Philadelphia, Swarthmore is a highly selective
liberal arts college whose mission combines academic rigor with social
responsibility. Swarthmore, with an enrollment of 1,450, is
consistently ranked among the top liberal arts colleges in the country.
On the Web at www.swarthmore.edu/news/.