Re: Glenn wrote:

Glenn R. Morton (grmorton@waymark.net)
Thu, 22 Oct 1998 21:33:28 -0500

At 04:06 PM 10/22/98 -0600, John W. Burgeson wrote:
>>>Concerning the animals, saying that you can't turn a chimp into a human
>seems equivalent to me to those linguists who want to save the minor
>languages around the world from extinction by not allowing their children
>to learn more widespread languages. To prevent some member of a small
>tribe speaking a minor language from bettering themselves seems
>unethical.
>Could the same be applied to a non-human species?
>>>
>
>I have no idea of an answer to your last question.
>
>As for the ethics of your next-to-last question, at first glance I
>agreed with you. Yet -- might it not be possible that there are some
>concepts expressible in a minor language that are not expressible in any
>major one!

No. In reality the major languages have more nouns enabling more
expression than the minor languages of technologically primitive societies.

>If so -- they would "die" when the last speaker died. This
>does not seem to me to be a "good."

All languages die. Middle English is dead. So is olde Anglish. Phoenician
is spoken nowhere in the world today.
glenn

Adam, Apes and Anthropology
Foundation, Fall and Flood
& lots of creation/evolution information
http://www.isource.net/~grmorton/dmd.htm