melinthropy

I thought this was an interesting article about languages that are nearing extinction. The article talks about how “More than half of the world’s 7,000 languages are expected to die out by the end of the century, often taking with them irreplaceable knowledge about the natural world”.

I thought it was a little weird that the knowledge about plants and animals and culture would necessarily die with the language. The article talks about how the languages usually die slowly as children decide that another language is more popular to learn and don’t learn the old language. But they still learn enough of it to mostly communicate with their elders. Then the next generation learns less of the language, and so on. But it would seem to me that the knowledge of the medicines and plants would still be passed down to the generations that only “kind of” learn the language. Then those children would be able to assimilate that knowlege into whatever the more popular language is, and continue to pass it down in the more popular, surviving language.

But, I guess it just doesn’t work like that. Maybe when children reject a language as not being worth learning, they are also rejecting the culture that goes with it, so that would be why that knowledge dies with the language.

I was just writing my “About” page and talking about how I like languages — I’ve tried to learn French, Japanese, Irish Gaelic, Cantonese and German at various times through various means with varying levels of success. I will probably add Italian, Esperanto, Latin, and who knows what else to my list in the future.

But the most recent one is Spanish. Living in Smyrna, I have a lot of need for it, really. I’ve actually had two particular instances that stand out in my mind when it would have come in handy. It would have been good to be able to say “You can activate the gas pump by pressing the green button” and “Oh my god, why is your car sticking out of my neighbor’s house? Do you need an ambulance?”. These were separate occasions, by the way. Also, I would like to be able to understand the zany dj’s on the Spanish radio station (Viva! 105.3 Tan Latina Como Tu!).

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