WHY LANGUAGES?

摘要

LINGUIST NICHOLAS EVANS had heard the Kaiadilt people, an Aboriginal group in Northern Australia, utter "mo///" on the beach many times. He knew the term meant "schools of mullet" and "holes of a fishing net," but they would say it even when pointing at empty water. It wasn't until he saw a local artist's painting of malji-a blue canvas covered in pink and red eyelets-that he realized the word also described the bubbles of light that indicate where the catch might be. As with many small, remote cultures, the Kaiadilt's native Ka-yardild vocabulary got muffled by Europeans and missionary teachings. In modern history, the tongue's never had more than a few hundred speakers. Today, according to UNESCO, about 40 percent of the world's 7,000 languages are at risk of vanishing in the next century or two. Losing them means letting go of ancient knowledge about little-known places embedded within the words-and gleaned from multigenerational observations. "Each language holds clues that help us understand all people, but you don't know until you look," says Evans, who's also a professor at Australian National University.