Sometimes, I am asked, "Well, OK, what kind of government spending do you like?" Here's a $250,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities that I don't mind:
BLOOMINGTON, Ind., Sept. 15 (UPI) -- The language of the Assiniboine people, an American Indian group centered in Saskatchewan, Canada, is being preserved by University of Indiana anthropologists.
Only about 50 speakers of the language survive, researchers say. The Indiana project will include two volumes of oral histories and a dictionary as well as analysis of recordings made in the 1970s and 1980s using modern technology.
According to the National Science Foundation, at least 3,000 of the world's 6,000-7,000 languages -- about half -- are about to be lost. When a language disappears, we lose not only how a people described things but how they viewed the world. As the NSF says, the world's languages represent "a vast, largely unmapped terrain on which linguists, cognitive scientists and philosophers can chart the full capabilities and limits of the human mind."
