Dying Words Endangered Languages and What They Have to Tell Us

by Evans, Nicholas

• ISBN13: 9780631233060
• ISBN10: 0631233067
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2009-04-27
• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell

Summary

The next century will see more than half of the world's 6,000 languages become extinct. Most of these will disappear without being adequately recorded. Yet each distills the philosophy, knowledge, and cultural fabric of a different people. This compelling book asks what loss to our collective intellectual heritage will be inflicted by the death of these languages. It brings the conceptual issues vividly to life by weaving in portraits of individual "last speakers" and stories about linguists and their discoveries.

Author Biography

Nicholas Evans is Professor of Linguistics at the Australian National University and a fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. He is on the editorial boards of the journals Linguistic Typology and Australian Journal of Linguistics, and on the Scientific Advisory Board of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen. He is the author of a number of books, including Bininj Gun-wok (2 volumes, 2001), Archaeology and Linguistics: Aboriginal Australia in Global Perspective (co-edited with Patrick McConvell, 1998), and A Grammar of Kayardild (1992).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. ix
Prologue	p. xv
A Note on the Presentation of Linguistic Material	p. xx
The Library of Babel	p. 1
Warramurrungunji's Children	p. 5
Four Millennia to Tune In	p. 24
A Great Feast of Languages	p. 45
A Galapagos of Tongues	p. 49
Your Mind in Mine: Social Cognition in Grammar	p. 69
Faint Tracks in an Ancient Wordscape: Languages and Deep World History	p. 81
Sprung from Some Common Source	p. 85
Travels in the Logosphere: Hooking Ancient Words onto Ancient Worlds	p. 105
Keys to Decipherment: How Living Languages Can Unlock Forgotten Scripts	p. 129
Ratchetting Each Other Up: The Coevolution of Language, Culture, and Thought	p. 155
Trellises of the Mind: How Language Trains Thought	p. 159
What Verse and Verbal Art Can Weave	p. 182
Listening While We Can	p. 205
Renewing the Word	p. 207
Epilogue: Sitting in the Dust, Standing in the Sky	p. 229
Notes	p. 232
References	p. 249
Index of Languages and Language Families	p. 274
Index	p. 280
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