2: a village in the swamp
By encouraging us to think in terms of ecosystems rather than political systems, comparisons of endangered languages to endangered species obscure the simple realization that language death is anything but a natural phenomenon. It is, on the contrary, a profoundly social phenomenon. Languages do not die because they exhaust themselves in the fullness of time or are killed off by predatory languages of greater phonological scope or syntactic richness. Languages die because people stop speaking them.
Rather than exploring why a language dies, I came to realize that the question I needed to ask, instead, was: How does a language die? I needed to discover what had to happen in a community, among speakers of a language, that resulted in parents ceasing to teach their language to their children. Where does language death start? How is it sustained? Does it have to involve a conscious decision on anyone’s behalf? Can a language die without anybody really wanting it to?
NADPH对本书的所有笔记 · · · · · ·
-
2: a village in the swamp
The betel nut they all chewed gave off a faintly minty tang, and the villagers themselv...
-
2: a village in the swamp
The chops that the men make in the palm tree widen and harden as the bark dries, and th...
-
2: a village in the swamp
-
2: a village in the swamp
Contrary to received wisdom, and common sense, this constellation of tiny languages was...
-
2: a village in the swamp
The war put a sudden stop to all this. Japanese soldiers appeared in the northern Sepik...
说明 · · · · · ·
表示其中内容是对原文的摘抄