Linguistics Tools

In NY Times Science section: -- this may not be something we are unaware of but many people are not, and this plays a role in the long, ongoing call for "English Only" in our schools and public places:

[ "Africa has about 2,000 of the world’s 6,000 languages. Many are still unwritten, some have yet to be named and many will probably disappear. For centuries, social and economic incentives have been working against Kim and in favor of Mende, a language used widely in the region, until finally, Dr. Childs speculates, the Kim language has been pushed to the verge of extinction." ]

This isn't a new point, that in anthropology the observer, which includes the observer's tools, affect the data:

[ "The relationship between linguistics and technology goes deeper than what format the sounds are recorded in. Dr. Childs, who remembers working with computers as large as a room when he was a doctoral student, said that theories of language often shaped themselves to resemble the tools at hand.
In the beginning, he said, linguists imagined that the mind processed language with many rules and little in storage. “What happened over time was that more and more stuff was moved into the lexicon, was listed there, and that sort of paralleled developments in the computer industry of storage getting cheaper,” he said." ]

Additionally so many in the U.S. are entirely ignorant to the ubiquitousness of mobile phones in Africa and other regions most people here think of as 'backward' -- which is one the many ignorances that allowed the criminalfamilygangsydicate to ram through the invasion of Iraq -- their conviction that only in Europe and the U.S. is there digital capacity:

[ "Of course, online resources are useful only to communities with Internet access. Communities without that access, like the Kim, still require books to be printed, and recordings to be copied onto CDs or tapes.

Holding more promise are programs that put electronic dictionaries on mobile phones. James McElvenny, a linguist at the University of Sydney, has led the development of software to help revitalize vanishing languages. Mr. McElvenny has been working with Aboriginal groups like the Dharug of Sydney to give learners, many of them no older than 16, a portable reference that supplies the definition and the sound of words that are otherwise no longer spoken, because Dharug is a dead language.

“A lot of the older members are technophobic,” he said, “but the kids are really getting into it.” ]

So, then, though nothing here may be new to us, this is a worthwhile piece for a daily newspaper to have published.