NP Re: Losing Languages--Sorta P-related

[Dave Monroe]

... perhaps what's (also) interesting here is how pervasive that discourse of
extinction--and an attendant discourse of preservation, of conservation--is
these days.  Species, languages, musics, what have you, not to mention
ethnicities and just plain human beings.  An elegiac, even apocalyptic, tone
everywhere.   But that little blurb was of much interest 'round these parts,
amongst my lingustic, literary and lepidopterary correspondents, thanks for
posting it.  But do note that people like Thomas Pynchon and Samuel Beckett and
Jacques Derrida and Umberto Eco and ... have made no small effort to keep the
archaic and the arcane in language in play.  The danger, perhaps, lies in a
certain, I don't know, romanticism? antiquarinism? nostalgia? whatever,
concerning "a" language (as if there are any such enclosed, exclusive entities),
against inevitable change, invigoration, hybridity, even ... but it is sad to
see the lttle fellas suffer and die, is it not?

davemarc wrote:

> Not to belittle the issue of endangered languages, but over at the American
> Dialect Society it's been noticed that this kind of article on the subject
> seems to be somewhat mandatory at many periodicals these days.
>
> One of the more amusing comments from Shorris is this one:  "English, as it
> is generally spoken, seems to be losing more words than it gains....You need
> only look at the thin thesaurus that came with your word-processing program
> to see how the English language is losing its internal diversity."
>
> What kind of a standard is that?  I suppose the implication is that "we"
> English-users will all rely on our word-processing thesauri, and that the
> limitations of those so-far limited resources will consequently limit our
> vocabularies.  There may be a little *something* to that, but I doubt that
> since the development of English dictionaries and thesauri there has been an
> attendant decrease in spoken words. In Shorris's world, wouldn't the early,
> less-inclusive dictionaries have frozen the language's growth on the spot?
>
> What may be encouraging about modern technology is that people are
> better-equipped than ever to preserve languages.  There are some cases of
> peoples being able to revive old languages based on linguistic
> documentation.  Perhaps that will be more likely the more that recording
> equipment improves.
>
> d.