Hi Ed and Ray, I, too, have been sad for many years that the thousands of languages of the world are disappearing at a fast clip. (I haven't read the NYT article but I gather that two or three a week are dying.) However, there's a hopeful upside to consider.
As Chomsky surmised a long time ago (and as evolutionary biologists are now confirming) we have an innate faculty for language. Although our genes for language certainly lay down much hard-wiring (e.g. the neural pathways from the motor-sensory areas of the frontal lobes to the lips and larynx), there are also creative opportunities under the influence of the culture and environment (e.g. we are told of the Inuit's many words for snow). The thousands of languages of the original hunter-gatherers around the world, some of them existing only a few miles away from a different one, attest to this. Besides language, we have great abilities to create new cultures. I believe very strongly that when the gross industrial technologies based on the ephemeral era of cheap fossil fuels disappear in the coming decades then the present globalisation of economics and culture will once again give way to localisation as we become adept at genomic technologies. People will have no need to flock into megalopolises by the million and people will have no need to commute in order have jobs with social companionship. There is no reason at all why we shouldn't evolve brilliant local cultures again (perhaps not so bloodthirsty as some of the traditional ones) and �who knows? �even new local languages. And where will politicians and nation-states fit into this? Nowhere. They're already dead, or dying, ducks. Keith At 16:51 18/11/02 -0500, you wrote: (REH) <<<< You sound like an economist. My former student and my daughter's God mother Jane Lind is Aleut. . . . She has spent the last few years working with and rescuing the indigenous theater and art forms as well as the music and language in Alaska. There is a great wealth there and it would be crime to let all of that experience and richness disappear. Like I said it is a dark age akin to the burning of the library at Alexandria. . . . . >>>> (EW) I don't mean to sound like an economist and, deep down inside, I do mourn the passing of languages and of culturally different lenses for seeing reality. When I spent a lot of time in the Mackenzie Valley, the Yukon and other northern places during the past four decades, I tried very hard to see the world the way Native people of those places saw it. I couldn't of course, at least not completely. What ever so many young Native people were trying to do at the same time was see the world as I saw it. They had a much easier time of it than I did because things were loaded in my direction and the direction of my society. Their society, at least in its traditional forms, was passing, mine was ascending. Many of them became politicians and bureaucrats able to operate in my world far better than I could ever have hoped to operate in theirs. They are still able to operate in their world, though it is no longer the world in which they work or depend on, so it may be fading for them. That is the upside story. The downside is something else that I've seen many, many times as well. It's young kids, laughing at a grandmother, because she is giving them hell in a native language they no longer understand. Or it's teens, trying to be oh so cool, oh so modern, just like they've seen on TV. Or it's far, far worse than that: sniffing gas, doing drugs, and not really being able to see reality through any kind of lens at all. Things pass. It's sad, and one can only hope that the outcome is not destructive. Often it is. >>>> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------- Keith Hudson,6 Upper Camden Place, Bath BA1 5HX, England Tel:01225 312622/444881; Fax:01225 447727; E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ________________________________________________________________________
