"When Languages Die" author/linguist K. David Harrison

Informative conversation with K. David Harrison, assistant professor of linguistics at Swarthmore College near Philadelphia and the author of the new book "When Languages Die: The Extinction of the World's Languages and the Erosion of Human Knowledge". He is the Director of Research at the Living Tongues Institute and was recently featured in the documentary called "The Linguists" which followed hands-on linguistic field work in countries around the world. In this fascinating interview, Harrison discusses the critical importance of the world's many threatened languages and the vital knowledge that each language uniquely packages and holds for all of us. Harrison also discusses the need for more trained linguistic personnel to go out into some of the remotest parts of the world to document these nearly extinct languages before they are lost to humanity forever.

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Education

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[andogigi5]

Beowolf was written in a "basically" extinct language. Aren't we glad someone knew how to translate it?

Can you imagine if someone of the caliber of Shakespeare, Goethe, or Dante had written in an extinct language and nobody could read it?

Try reading the Epic of Gilgamesh, for example. You'll go crazy. The orginal clay tablets it was written on were smashed in a war. The translation frequently says "fragment missing". What a terrible loss to humanity! Such a waste of genius!

[labunner1]

Interesting field of research.

[pamisterios]

language is politics. money rules. this guy does a great job. I wish I could spend my life doig this kind of thing.

[urdude67]

@NorseRonin be careful what languages you study. think about where you want to live and what kind of work you want to do. try to avoid academic dead-ends. Arabic, Chinese, Spanish are all eminently useful and employable, but there are others. good luck

[urdude67]

yes go and visit the places where languages are dying, aren't they all just perfect examples of paradise? or are they crap-holes of backwardness? maybe they are spoken by the last denizens of failed societies. study what you want, interesting film, but I won't waste time weeping for them.

[9zreed]

keeping languages alive is inefficient though. I understand studying them, recording them, analyzing them and gleaning their knowledge but to assume that we could ever keep a dying language alive, or SHOULD keep it alive is silly. The very fact that it is dying is a sign that it has lost its real usefulness. It doesn't mean there aren't things we can learn from them, but it would be too expensive and down right ignorant to pretend it is important to keep them living.

[Domsta333]

@carameluz Do you even know what you're talking about? The New Age movement is related to religion, spirituality, this is linguistics!

[Edbrye2008]

Stimulating interview. - When thinking about responsible action, a tension exists between seeing languages fall into disuse vs. the speech communities themselves choosing other languages for reasons that reflect their changing values. - Ideally, enough time would be set aside to carry out a full language development program for each language, culminating in a lexicon that would "capture" all categories ever used. - When surveying Baldemu in 2000, I met a last speaker i.e. a man in his mid-90s.

[femmefatale1990]

@onikin I never hide my dislike for people and it's rare for someone to be as rude as you.

Also, good for you. I will end anyone you live with if I found out what your address is. Go away, now.

[femmefatale1990]

@onikin don't repond to a message I wrote 3 months ago, snake motherfucker.