Wednesday, September 19, 2007

More endangered languages ...

NPR just ran a little piece on the Harrison et al. project on endangered languages. Nice thing is, they included a lot of little sound files, words or phrases in endangered languages. Audio should be up here in a few hours, here. But the best thing is to check out the project's map directly, here.

Major update: See here. Apparently reports on the project (maybe the project itself) didn't exactly get some major facts right, and in some serious ways.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

What a drag ... I thought we had a good story abot documenting endangered languages and it turns out to be junk. That's depressing.

Everybody in the world seems to be talking about this story too, of course.

Monica said...

Wow, interesting comment by Anggarrgoon, or um, at Anggarrgoon (is it a person? place? thing? god forbid a verb?) and even more interesting response by Harrison. Hard to know what to think.

Mr. Verb said...

That is indeed an amazing response from Harrison.

Anonymous said...

Unfortunately the media, though well-intentioned, work in tremendous haste. As a result they often fail to get facts right. Secondly, they face enormous competitive pressures which can lead them to to sensationalize stories, often to the detriment of the actual people (both scientists and indigenous communities) involved.