Re: Khoisanid

From: John Croft
Message: 2806
Date: 2000-07-10

Hakan in reply to my post
> " - - - Hope this helps"

wrote
> It sure does! I'm here to learn and much of this was new to me.
I've
heard that many languages are going extinct today, but had no idea of
the dimensions of this. Our world must be in a very strange state
right now, compared to the last 10,000 or 100,000 years of human
history, dominated by just a few extremely large languages.
>
> 150,000 languages... And when a language disappears, it takes a lot
with it: stories, myths, religious beliefs. I'm not worried that
humanity will ever run out of its ability to create new stories,
languages etc, but still... I used to believe the world was quickly
growing culturally, but it is apparently shrinking as well as
growing.
Or, if you prefer the pessimistic view - we lost all this in exchange
for a global culture we all can relate to: a can of Coke and a bunch
of soap operas. Ha!

Talking of our Coca Colonisation of the planet, there is the worrying
report that the average 8 year old can recognise over 1,000 cprporate
logo's but could not name 1,000 varieties of native plants found in
their neighbourhood, nor tell you anything of their growing
conditions. It appears as linguistic diversity disappears so does
the ecological literacy contained in these languages. Many highland
Papua New Guineans I knew used to consider anyone who only spoke 1
language as being mentally defective 3-5 was the norm! We used to
play a game there with children - find a plant or insect that did not
have a specific name (i.e. no word like "bug" or "insect" allowed.)
Eight year olds in the highlands were amazingly proficient.

As the bumper sticker says "Monolingualism can be cured". Let's hope
Terra Lingua's "Language Preservation Project" works, for all of our
sakes.

Regards

John