Learning Journal #7-SDL105

Respond to the reading, reflecting on what is lost when languages die.

I think the most essential things behind a language is its culture. Thus, when a language dies, the history and the cultures behind it would lost and disappear. From a language, we can know how the people who use the language react to their daily lives, that is in another words, their cultures. Such as the language in the reading, teacher has showed us that this culture has many ways of naming "basket". From this, it is apparent that this culture puts a lot of emphasizes on the baskets, maybe because different kinds of baskets have different usages. Thus, a specific name for a specific basket is important for them. Another example is the languages between the northern countries and the south. In the north, people have many ways of calling different types of snow, some are wet snow, and some are dry, and they have many different adjectives to describe them. However, in the south, people don't even have snow, so they would only call snow as "snow", no other special adjectives to describe because they don't need them at all. Thus, from this, we can see that knowing the  language of the specific area is very important because it can tell us the history and the culture of that area. In conclusion, when a language dies, its cultures and history would be lost as well. Thus, it is very important for us to preserve those dying languages so that we can record the history and the cultures behind it.

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