=?Windows-1252?Q?=93Literacy_Makes_You_Lazy=94=3A_?=Saving End ang ered Lan guages (fwd link)

Tue Jun 26 13:54:07 UTC 2012

I find it really surprising that David would say something so silly. Actors memorize thousands of lines of plays. Shakespearean actors making a career playing different roles on the stage memorize all the lines for multiple roles across several different plays because they deploy that knowledge regularly. Same with opera singers. I have forgotten most the lines to Marc Anthony's funeral speech that I memorized in high school because I haven't been performing it regularly. I can only assume that the reporter deleted all the hedging and context that David would normally provide.

Watching and helping my 6-year-old and 9-year-old acquire literacy shows me just how much hard work is involved. It doesn't end with them. Teaching first-year university students how to read a journal article is another skill requiring teaching and practice before they learn how to do it. I'm sure David has had similar experiences teaching undergraduates, too.

The point that I think David was trying to make, and the 'journalist' garbled, is the classic Boasian position that oral traditions should be valued just as much as written/literary ones. The keepers of oral traditions are also fantastic artists in many cases. We will never know for sure unless we send out more people to document those traditions in the original language, and even better would be to foster a political and economic landscape that rewarded those individuals and communities for maintaining heritage languages, whereas now they are rewarded for shifting to one of a handful of dominant languages.

-Alex

On 26 Jun 2012, at 1:22 pm, Anthony Webster wrote:

Apparently, prior to literacy, Harrison memorized his cell phone numbers! Literacy does not "make" you "lazy." Harrison seems to be ignoring a great deal of research on the interconnections between orality and literacy. Memorization, for example, has co-existed with literacy (there are a number of religious examples of this). Literacies are social practices. We should be suspicious of claims of technological determinism. akw

On Mon, Jun 25, 2012 at 10:21 PM, Phillip E Cash Cash <cashcash at email.arizona.edu<mailto:cashcash at email.arizona.edu>> wrote:
“Literacy Makes You Lazy”: Saving Endangered Languages

Posted by Brian Clark Howard of National Geographic News on June 25, 2012
US

“Literacy makes you lazy: we don’t memorize 10,000-word epic poems any
more,” David Harrison, the director of research for the Living Tongues
Institute for Endangered Languages, told an audience at the Aspen
Environment Forum in Colorado this past weekend.

“I don’t even memorize cell phone numbers any more,” said Harrison, a
linguist who studies many of the world’s disappearing languages.

Harrison’s group has been featured in National Geographic, and his
team formed a five-year joint project with NG, Enduring Voices, to
study some of the most important endangered language “hotspots” around
the world. Harrison is also an NG fellow.

Access full article below:
http://newswatch.nationalgeographic.com/2012/06/25/literacy-makes-you-lazy-saving-endangered-languages/

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http://cola.siuc.edu/undergraduate/CollegeofLiberalArtsNativeAmericanStudies.html

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