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Ryan Catalani

Everyone Speaks Text Message - NYTimes.com - 5 views

www.nytimes.com/...ryone-speaks-text-message.html

technology harrison endangered rare languages

shared by Ryan Catalani on 15 Dec 11 - No Cached
  • Ryan Catalani on 15 Dec 11
     
    "For years, the Web's lingua franca was English. ... For many tiny, endangered languages, digital technology has [now] become a lifeline. ... Whether a language lives or dies, says K. David Harrison, an associate professor of linguistics at Swarthmore College, is a choice made by 6-year-olds. And what makes a 6-year-old want to learn a language is being able to use it in everyday life. ... Though most of the world's languages have no written form, people are beginning to transliterate their mother tongues into the alphabet of a national language. Now they can text in the language they grew up speaking. Harrison tells of traveling in Siberia, where he met a truck driver who devised his own system for writing the endangered Chulym language, using the Cyrillic alphabet. ... Africa is the world's fastest-growing cellphone market. Texting allows farmers to check crop prices. ... for hundreds of heritage languages, a four-inch bar of plastic and battery and motherboard is the future of the past."
Ryan Catalani

BBC News - Digital tools 'to save languages' - 4 views

www.bbc.co.uk/...science-environment-17081573

endangered languages harrison globalization social media technology

shared by Ryan Catalani on 22 Feb 12 - No Cached
  • Ryan Catalani on 22 Feb 12
     
    "Facebook, YouTube and even texting will be the salvation of many of the world's endangered languages, scientists believe. Of the 7,000 or so languages spoken on Earth today, about half are expected to be extinct by the century's end. ... Tuvan, an indigenous tongue spoken by nomadic peoples in Siberia and Mongolia, even has an iPhone app to teach the pronunciation of words to new students. 'It's what I like to call the flipside of globalisation' [said K David Harrison] ... 'Everything that people know about the planet, about plants, animals, about how to live sustainably, the polar ice caps, the different ecosystems that humans have survived in - all this knowledge is encoded in human cultures and languages, whereas only a tiny fraction of it is encoded in the scientific literature.'"
Ryan Catalani

Interview: Seven questions for K. David Harrison | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...interview

extinction endangered language

shared by Ryan Catalani on 24 Nov 10 - No Cached
  • A language hotspot is a contiguous region which has, first of all, a very high level of language diversity. Secondly, it has high levels of language endangerment. Thirdly, it has relatively low levels of scientific documentation (recordings, dictionaries, grammars, etc.). We've identified two dozen hotspots to date
  • The hotspots model allows us to visualise the complex global distribution of language diversity, to focus research on ares of greatest urgency, and also to predict where we might encounter languages not yet known to science.
  • The human knowledge base is eroding as we lose languages, exacerbated by the fact that most of them have never been written down or recorded
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • Each language is a unique expression of human creativity.
  • there are no exact matches for words or expressions across languages.
  • In Tuvan, in order to say "go" you must first know the direction of the current in the nearby river and your own trajectory relative to it. Tuvan "go" verbs therefore index the landscape in a way that cannot survive displacement or translation.
  • People of all ages, but especially children, can easily be bilingual. New research shows bilingualism strengthens the brain, by building up what psychologists call the cognitive reserve.
  • I and many fellow linguists would estimate that we only have a detailed scientific description of something like 10% to 15% of the world's languages, and for 85% we have no real documentation at all. Thus it seems premature to begin constructing grand theories of universal grammar. If we want to understand universals, we must first know the particulars.
  • Their knowledge of ice, their words for it, and the hunting skills and lifeways are all receding in tandem with the Yupik language itself.
  • If we can learn to value the intellectual diversity that is fostered by linguistic variety, we can all help to ensure its survival.
  • I'll close with the inspiring example of Matukar, a language spoken in a small village in Papua New Guinea. Down to about 600 speakers (out of a tribal group of 900+), Matukar is under immense pressure from the national language Tok Pisin and from English.
  • Working with me under the National Geographic Enduring Voices Project, he devised a written form for what had been until 2010 a purely oral language. Rudolf and his mother Kadagoi Raward patiently recorded thousands of words in their language.
  • Ryan Catalani on 24 Nov 10
     
    "The human knowledge base is eroding as we lose languages, exacerbated by the fact that most of them have never been written down or recorded... Each language is a unique expression of human creativity... it seems premature to begin constructing grand theories of universal grammar...If we can learn to value the intellectual diversity that is fostered by linguistic variety, we can all help to ensure its survival."
Ryan Catalani

The Linguists: A Very Foreign Language Film - 1 views

www.thelinguists.com

shared by Ryan Catalani on 24 Nov 10 - Cached
  • Ryan Catalani on 24 Nov 10
     
    "David [Harrison] and Greg [Anderson] will circle the planet to hear the last whispers of a dying language. They are The Linguists." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Linguists
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