|
|
|
Selection
|
Your Cart
|
Your Information
|
Check-Out
|
|
|
Saturday, Apr 26, 2008 12:00 PM
Linguists David Harrison and Gregory Anderson scour the world recording languages on the brink of extinction and salvaging the cultures they represent.
|
|
|
|
|
Tickets
|
|
70 minutes
Directed by: Seth Kramer, Daniel A. Miller and Jeremy Newberger
East Coast Premiere
There are roughly 7,000 languages in the world. One dies every two weeks. By the end of the century, there will only be 3,500 languages left. So what?
Think of the mind as a beautifully ornate room the likes of which no one has ever seen before. Suppose the room has 7,000 locked doors. The only way to see into it is through a keyhole, and each one offers a unique but incomplete view. Each language is like a keyhole into the mind. Every time one dies, another view of the room vanishes.
The directing team of Seth Kramer and Daniel A. Miller and the linguists, David Harrison and Gregory Anderson, co-directors of the Living Tongues Institute of Endangered Languages, have scoured the world with camera, notebook, and recording equipment, seeking out languages on the verge of extinction, trying desperately to salvage what fragments remain. It is a Herculean task. Students of human nature everywhere are in their debt.
The film documents the pair's efforts and the frustrating setbacks they encounter along the way. Boarding schools, for example, have proved to be unmitigated disasters for indigenous languages, places where children were taught the tongue of the dominant class and beaten for speaking their own. Is it any wonder that one of a handful of Chulym-speakers left in the world is, at first, ashamed to admit to the linguists that he knows the language?
THE LINGUISTS documents Harrison's and Anderson's uphill, sometimes dangerous, always rewarding, and absolutely indispensable struggle to ensure wherever possible that extant languages survive, and that those which cannot be saved, will not be forgotten.-Samuel Jay Keyser is an author and retired Professor of Linguistics at M.I.T.
|
|