Design Observer has my piece up about David Harrison's new book, When Languages Die:
Linguists have, in general, done a poor job of articulating why people should care that half of the approximately 6,900 languages spoken on the planet will be extinct in a century. And despite heaping scoops of truism and sentimentality atop exoticism, journalists haven't done much better. As for me, afraid of having to dip into the sentimentality and the fetishizing of Last Things, I've kind of been repulsed by the topic and have never written about it.Until now, that is.
To read the rest of the piece, go here.
Comments (1)
Dear Michael,
Thanks for this very nice review of my book, I really appreciate it. I only wish it were a bit longer, since it seems you've got more to say on the topic (send more thoughts my way, if you have them!).
There's no question that languages are design objects; they are emergent, self-organizing systems. Many linguists have been modelling them as such for a long time, so the idea is not new. It's great to see you drawing the attention of people who care about design to the issue of language design.
You're absolutely right in pointing out my imprecision in the book in distinguishing between "knowledge" and "information". The knowledge problem pervades the fields of linguistics / anthropology as well, since we're trained to look for "emic" categories but tolerate a rather fuzzy boundary between what's tacit knowledge and what people actually know (or know that they know)...
With respect to intellectual ownership, I have noticed that among speakers of very small languages, and among their speech communities, there is often a much stronger sense of ownership over the language. No one has yet written much about this phenomenon. And our western legal (patent) regime that rewards the individual idea but that fails to recognize community intellectual property does not bode well for the future protection of small languages as design entities.
Best wishes,
K. David Harrison
Swarthmore College
Posted by K. David Harrison | May 12, 2007 5:20 PM
Posted on May 12, 2007 17:20