I did my shopping at Wired this morning. The first story to catch my eye is this one about Keeping Languages Alive. (A tip of the wing to Ken Dow who spotted this as well.) Last year, during a class I was taking on the history of language, my instructor distributed an article that mentioned the fast pace at which languages are dying out all over the globe. This was assumed to be prima facie a bad thing. Instead of just moping about it, however, the Rosetta Project is looking to capture as many languages as possible to disk before they are permanently lost.

Does it matter if a language dies? Consider Sekani, spoken by around 500 people in northern British Columbia. Most speakers are middle-aged or older, and bilingual in English. It's a safe bet that Sekani won't be around much longer.

Yet just as a pharmaceutial researcher might discover a critical compound in a soon-to-be extinct flower, so too, there might be a word or concept in Sekani that contains a key to advancing human knowledge. To accept that, you have to agree to some extent with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which holds that language and thought are inextricable at some levels of complexity, and that it is a fallacy to believe that a word in one language can be perfectly translated into that of another. I wonder if our bilingual readers have an opinion about that.

The Thought of Sight

Another Wired story of interest concerns that evil poster the London transit authority has been putting up—the one that is supposed to make you feel better, and doesn't. I like the photo here because you can see that it's at a bus stop. (Another Ken Dow spot, who tracked this from BoingBoing.) The Wired story today follows up on the poster's effect: it's filling commuters with terror and dread.

"I saw the bloody thing, and it boggled my mind, the sheer audacity of it," said de Havilland, who runs a blog on libertarian issues. "Basically what they're saying is that we're watching you and you should be happy about it."

Some of us have protested the expansion of surveillance. After the IRA bombing campaign of 1993 a "Ring of Steel" was thrown up around the City of London. I distributed anti-surveillance leaflets to motorists being stopped at check points. We were none too popular.

That was the time, in the UK, that the expansion of CCTV began to take off. From then on, it could no longer be taken for granted that people would see Big Brother as a wholly bad thing.

People came to see crime as a bigger threat than the state. While the process was a complex one, the capacity of the state to leverage the support it had for fighting terrorism to introduce a much broader culture of surveillance was an important component. Americans take note. [Joe Kaplinsky on October 23, 2002 11:49 PM]

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