Lera Boroditsky's recent concluding statement in The Economist's debate about how language shapes thought states "At the moment we have good linguistic descriptions of only about 10% of the world's existing languages (and we know even less about the half a million or so languages that have existed in the past) (emphasis added).
In my previous post on language death here, I used the number 100,000 to estimate how many languages have previously existed and related it favorably to David Crystal's 64,000 to 140,000 reasonable guesstimate. I'm just curious to know where Boroditsky came up with the half million number? I've managed to come up with a few references to this 500,000 number, but they claim it's a "radical estimate" (e.g., see here).
My hunch is that this is yet another example of Boroditsky's profound-problem. She has a tendency to call modest results profound when they are not. She is, I suspect, a tad prone to hyperbole.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
-
The commenters over at Liberman's post Apico-labials in English all clearly prefer the spelling syncing , but I find it just weird look... -
(image from Slate.com ) I tend to avoid Slate.com these days because, frankly, I typically find myself scoffing at some idiot article they&... -
Matt Damon's latest hit movie Elysium has a few linguistic oddities worth pointing out. The film takes place in a dystopian future set i...
2 comments:
Any talk of language birth/death makes me want to buy an island with a large, central mountain range, send a few hundred people to either side, and see what happens.
Sadly, there is no linguistic Galapagos...
Post a Comment