Link: Design Observer: writings about design & culture.
A new book by K. David Harrison, a linguist at Swarthmore, titled When Languages Die, looks at what we lose when languages disappear. Unusual ways of counting. Unique landscape names and calendars. Specialized vocabularies for the natural and agricultural world. Fantastic rarities of grammar, such as the suffix -sig in the Siberian language Tofa that means "smelling like." Examples come from dozens of languages from all over the world. He even illustrates with his own adventuring among nomads in Siberia and Mongolia, hunting down the last speakers of atrophied cultures.
But what caught my eye was this claim by Harrison: "Languages can package knowledge in radically different ways, thus facilitating different ways of conceptualizing, naming, and discussing the world." Elsewhere he calls languages "packaged information.
