Word: worlding
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...course, most indigenous peoples don't have the good fortune of being left alone. With a corporation stripping a forest here and a megacity sprouting there, the pressures of the globalized world are weighing all the more heavily on some of humanity's oldest communities. But, says Harrison of the Living Tongues Institute, all's not doom and gloom for the planet's endangered languages. After decades of neglect, governments and international organizations like UNESCO have started committing significant funds to tribal research and education projects. This is happening in tandem with recent grass-roots efforts to defend native tongues...
...effect their last link to the olden days. "It's the end of thousands upon thousands of years of history," says Miriam Ross, spokeswoman for Survival International, a London-based NGO that defends the rights of tribal peoples. "A whole way of looking at the world is finished, and there's no way of bringing it back...
...history of human speech. "There's a consensus [among linguists] that we are seeing an unprecedented pace of language extinction. And it is accelerating," says David Harrison, a professor of linguistics at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania and co-founder of the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages. Of the world's roughly 7,000 spoken languages, over half are spoken by only 0.2% of all the people on earth. Nearly 80% of the world's population speaks just 83 languages, a proportion that is growing as globalization and urbanization encourage migrants and rural outliers to learn the dominant tongue...
...each oral language. Anvita Abbi, a professor of linguistics at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi who spent the better part of the past decade studying the languages of the Andamans, says the speech of hunter-gatherer societies like the Bo carry an intimate, encoded understanding of the natural world and its biodiversity. Though the Bo seldom strayed from the few islands they inhabited, they have at least 67 words for varieties of birds and some 150 for fish. "There's a vast knowledge base slipping from our grasp," says Abbi...
...Despite all the crashes, several boarders refused to admit that their sport was unsafe, pointing out that the weather was beyond their control. But if inclement conditions put Olympians at risk, doesn't that make their sport inherently perilous? Two World Cup athletes have died competing in snowboard cross over the past five years. The winner of Tuesday's women's race, Maelle Ricker of home country Canada, had to be airlifted to a hospital after crashing during the final of the 2006 Games (she suffered no serious injuries...