Linguists have, in general, done a poor job of articulating why
people should care that half of the approximately 6,900
languages spoken on the planet will be extinct in a century. And
despite heaping scoops of truism and sentimentality atop
exoticism, journalists haven't done much better. As for me,
afraid of having to dip into the sentimentality and the
fetishizing of Last Things, I've kind of been repulsed by the
topic and have never written about it. Until now, that is. A new
book by K. David Harrison, a linguist at Swarthmore, titled When
Languages Die , looks at what we lose when languages disappear.
Unusual ways of counting. Unique landscape names and calendars.
Specialized vocabularies for the natural and agricultural world.
Fantastic rarities of grammar, such as the suffix -sig in the
Siberian language Tofa that means "smelling like." Examples come
from dozens of languages from all over the world. He even
illustrates with his own adventuring among nomads in Siberia and
Mongolia, hunting down the last