SDLC 105 Journal #9

[Chelsea Prough]

     The article "Tribe Revives Language on the Verge of Extinction" and the related video we watched in class were really interesting to me. They made me think about the huge majority of languages that none of us know anything about! I also thought about how languages die. It's a really strange concept to think about, because a lot of major languages (like Latin or Ancient Egyptian) used to be very widely spoken but have now died out! I wonder what cultural shifts took place for that to happen. We lose a lot of culture and the benefits of the native knowledge a language may contain when languages die. On one hand, I think it's important to try to conserve languages, but on the other hand we can't save everything. It is a natural and cyclical process for languages to die out. English has changed so much over time--think about how different it was when Beowulf was written, or in Shakespeare's day--that it's practically been separate sets of languages. The video we watched also brought up some interesting questions for me. It made me think about some concepts we've been discussing in my Anthropology of Human Rights class (and I shared the video on the blog for that class!), like how it is a human right to self-identify however you want. This begs the question: do we have the right to designate a language that is dying out as important if we ourselves are not native speakers of it? It seems as if the speakers of a language aren't interested in conserving it then maybe we shouldn't force the issue--but this is a tricky subject to think about. However, I definitely agreed with Dr. Harrison's point that science takes too much of a Western perspective and should depend more upon the knowledge inherent in other cultures as well.