Wednesday, July 23, 2008

LANGUAGES IN DANGER is a new book by Andrew Dalby which "considers the consequences of the current language crisis, in which a language is dying every two weeks." He's produced a list of ten for the Guardian, although it's not entirely clear what the criteria are for inclusion. Coptic is certainly threatened, but Greek is a stretch, and French more so. The Indus Valley language isn't threatened, it's long gone and remains undeciphered. And I am very skeptical about anyone being able to reconstruct the language of "Eve." Anyhow, there you have it.