book review: Lessons from Documented Endangered Languages: Harrison, Rood, Dwyer (Eds)

[Harold Schiffman]

Lessons from Documented Endangered Languages: Harrison, Rood, Dwyer (Eds)


Lessons from Documented Endangered Languages
Series: Typological Studies in Language 78
Published: 2008
Publisher: John Benjamins
                http://www.benjamins.com/

Book URL: http://www.benjamins.com/cgi-bin/t_bookview.cgi?bookid=TSL%2078

Editor: K. David Harrison
Editor: David S. Rood
Editor: Arienne Dwyer
Electronic: ISBN: 9789027290205 Pages: Price: Europe EURO 115.00
Electronic: ISBN: 9789027290205 Pages: Price: U.S. $ 173.00
Hardback: ISBN: 9789027229908 Pages: Price: Europe EURO 115.00
Hardback: ISBN: 9789027229908 Pages: Price: U.S. $ 173.00
Abstract:

This volume represents part of an unprecedented and still growing effort to
advance, coordinate and disseminate the scientific documentation of
endangered languages. As the pace of language extinction increases,
linguists and native communities are accelerating their efforts to speak,
remember, record, analyze and archive as much as possible of our common
human heritage that is linguistic diversity. The window of opportunity for
documentation is narrower than the actual lifetime of a language, and is
now rapidly closing for many languages represented in this volume. The
authors of these papers unveil newly collected data from previously poorly
known and endangered languages. They organize highly complex linguistic
facts­ - paradigms, affixes, vowel patterns­ - while pointing out the
theoretically challenging aspects of these. Beyond this, they reflect on
the social and human dimensions, discussing particular problems of
nostalgia and modernity, memory and forgetting, and obsolescence and
ethics, while viewing language as not merely data on a page but as a living
creation in the minds and mouths of its speakers.

http://linguistlist.org/issues/19/19-3121.html

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