With each bit of data about language, we have more information for building theories about human language.

What I mean to say here is that the more evidence we have for the possible forms language can take, the better we can formulate theories about a universal human language instinct, if it exists. On retrospect the distinction I made between human language (the universal human instinct for language) and language (individual languages spoken by people) didn’t seem clear. Or maybe it was clear. Sleep, where art thou?

Linguists seem to get an almost religious zeal going when it comes to language death, but there are some who don’t think it’s a bad thing. I think the whole loss of knowledge is a bit of a stretch. It seems like most of the lost knowledge is survival oriented and is primarily valuable only to people living in the bush off the land.

As far as how useful knowledge of these species would be to scientists? Total crap. A few animal and plant names? The biologists would have to travel to the area and collect samples anyway to verify it. Which they could do right now if they had the funding. Preserving those languages won’t change that. The only good it would do is add a couple footnotes to a paper that say “we were led to the samples by members of tribe X, who call the animal/plant Y.” The knowledge is in the people’s heads not in their language.

Also, the idea that language shapes our thoughts and how we visualize things is a matter of great debate in linguistics, one far from settled. The classic bit of evidence for it that most people know is that eskimos have so-and-so many words for snow, which is a myth that has been played up for so long in the media that it has entered the public pscyhe as fact. However, there does seem to be some evidence for it, so who knows. The debate will probably go on for a long time. (And it’s called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, btw.)

Personally I think the real thing at stake with language death is that we are losing evidence of the range of possible forms human language can take. Even when we document these languages, there could always be facets that are missed. With each bit of data about language, we have more information for building theories about human language.

But I think trying to stop language change and language death is futile. Unlike species, languages die because the people who would inherit the language of their parents rejects it instead, or the parents reject it as their household communication method and so the next generation loses the opportunity to learn it. (Of course there are other cases, such as genocide.)

The native populations of different wilderness learn to cope with their environment with local remedies, and once those elders are gone, so goes the knowledge of what a ‘normal’ summer is like in the area, or what plants can be used to treat what sort of local diseases or problems. There’s no one to pass this hard won knowledge on to since the children who are leaving don’t want to work that hard in those conditions. There’s little reason to in their perspective since modern technology seems to have it all in hand.

Another problem is that with the loss of a language we are also loosing the ability to visualize certain things as a collective. Language defines how we think and what we can visualize. You can only visualize certain concepts in certain languages. Those languages might even have a word to express a concept that takes a nobel prize writer a novel to express in an aproximation. Not that this affects us directly, but it’s a bit sad.

As for the species number, it’s a true. New species is marketable and a company can make billions of dollars on one novel protein that they find in a Bolivian Thorn Forest, while the loss of a language has ZERO economic impact. They find a new protein, package it up and mass produce it, Bingo instant product saving them literally billions in R&D, so that’s the tact that all the hippies and environmentalists are angling for lately. If you lose a language, the only one an elder speaks who might know of a plant to successfully treat malaria and that suddenly equates to big bucks.

-Tyme

I also found myself curious how that guy can claim that science has not discovered 80% of the species out there. I guess he could be extrapolating based upon statistics, but I wonder. Could it be that people and the sources of research funds would be more concerned about the loss of scientific knowledge than the destruction of a language? I’m guessing linguists hate the idea of a language dying and the chance to a study a possibly different facet of human language, but many people couldn’t care less about a language that is being naturally lost.