On Wed, Feb 19, 2003 at 01:45:38PM -0800, Brewster Kahle wrote:
>
> [on a recent trip to India, Dr Om Vikas from the Ministry of
> Information gave a presentation and one of the slides really hit me
> hard. I have reproduced it here, with permission. This is the first
> time I have ever heard someone question the accepted meme of our
> knowledge explosion. Even if I disagree with the fringes, it is a
> bold and interesting point. Maybe an analogy with the loss of
> biological diversity stands: there are more biomass on earth, but of
> fewer types. -brewster ]
>
> Is there gain in knowledge or loss of knowledge?
>
> * From an estimated 10,000 world languages in 1900, about 6,700
> languages survived in 2000. Two percent of the world's languages are
> becoming extinct every year. ...

At the risk of sassing my betters, I'd say that you need to get out
more, Brewster. :-) This is an old idea and a common critique of
globalism and cultural "monoculture". I think most any freshman
anthropology text would introduce the concept of net loss of knowledge
as traditional cultures join the mainstream.

Dr. Vikas' statistics about publication and translation are apt, but I
suspect that the numbers and proportions would be even more staggering
if similar statistics could be compiled about the oral traditions of
primarily unwritten languages.

Then there is a more philosophical and psychological question about the
relative information density of direct versus mediated experience.
Bill McKibben's widely noted 1993 book "The Age of Missing Information"
(http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0452269806/) concerns a
Walden-like experiment in which he collected and watched all 1700 hours
of television provided by his cable TV system in one day, then compared
that with the experience of camping for 24 hours on a mountain.

For more on just the topic of language extinction, see:

"Vanishing Voices: The Extinction of the World's Languages" by
Daniel Nettle and Suzanne Romain (2000,
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0195136241/)

"Most of the World's Languages Went Extinct", ch. 7 of "The
Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language" by John
McWhorter (2001,
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/006052085X/)

-- Prentiss Riddle ("aprendiz de todo, maestro de nada") riddle@...
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