My friend David Harrison had an article featuring him published in the New York Times today. He does great work to capture samples of languages that are dying off:

In a teleconference with reporters yesterday, K. David Harrison, an associate professor of linguistics at Swarthmore, said that more than half the languages had no written form and were “vulnerable to loss and being forgotten.” Their loss leaves no dictionary, no text, no record of the accumulated knowledge and history of a vanished culture.

I can’t help but wonder if social tools and their place on the internet will lead to the preservation, or homogenization of language… Perhaps David will have a look at this post and comment

Categories: language, stuff
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