When Languages Die Arbeitsbereiche（当语言死去Arbeitsbereiche）.pdfVIP

When Languages Die The Extinction of the World’s Languages and the Erosion of Human Knowledge K. David Harrison 1 2007 Worlds within Words 7 “Do you find it easy to get drunk on words?” “So easy that, to tell you the truth, I am seldom perfectly sober. Which accounts for my talking so much.” —Harriet Vane and Lord Peter Wimsey in Gaudy Night, by Dorothy Sayers “Studying the form of a linguistic expression without studying the meaning is like sipping a fine wine, swishing it around in your mouth, and spitting it out—it can be fun, but not intoxicating.” —Randall Eggert, Linguist ll linguists share a fascination with words, and we are trained to seek Aout and describe intricate patterns within human languages. As lan- guages rapidly vanish into the vortex of cultural assimilation, linguists justifiably fear they will never see the full range of complexity and struc- tures human minds can produce.1 When Noam Chomsky proclaimed language ‘a window on the mind’, an entire research program for the discipline of linguistics was launched. In the fifty years since, this research has already yielded many important insights into human cognition. With his famous sentence “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously,” Chomsky demonstrated how linguists can explore complex structures (sounds, phrases, sentences, etc.) even when there is no meaningful content at all. The lack of meaning does not hinder lin- guists in our investigation of mental structures, who have come to focus mainly on the