Experimental Blog #60

Comments on 2 books

"The Last Speakers" - The Quest to Save the World's Most Endangered Languages by K. David Harrison

In spite of the author's tendency to harangue, especially in the last chapters of this National Geographic book, "The Last Speakers" is very interesting and informative.
The author says that there are about 7000 languages being used in the world today, but isn't it true that over 90% of all the people in the world speak less than 100 languages?
Many people sooner or later realize that it is very worthwhile for various reasons to know more than one language, maybe even 3 or 4, and even knowing 3 or 4 languages is not extremely rare. How many "literary languages" are there in the world? Two dozen? Two hundred? Five hundred? People will always study those languages.
For the remaining 6500 languages, the best way to preserve many of them, probably, is for someone to write an interesting book in that language, such as "The History and/or Culture of These People" or, perhaps an autobiography.
Why be so gloomy and talk about a language, or even 1000s of languages being "doomed" to extinction? Won't people continue to do what they have always done? That is, won't they continue to make of their human speech, or their language, whatever they need or want to do?


"Andrew Johnson" by Annette Gordon-Reed

Although this author, Annette Gordon-Reed, takes a very standard liberal political view, her book on Andrew Johnson is certainly one of the more interesting books in this somewhat controversial series of political histories of American presidents.
Political history is almost by definition abstract. All the actually living people become "players", as if on the "stage of history." They lose their "human sides" and tend to become "black and white" "stick" or "cardboard figures."
None the less, maybe something like the still popular "Civil War" reenactments for some people, reading about and seeming to observe or witness these political "players" can be both enjoyable and thought provoking.
Andrew Johnson himself may have been a very "spellbinding" extemporaneous speaker; which is not always such a good thing, but he left very little original writing, and the author, and other historians say, nothing of high quality. That seems to be the main reason why he is rated so low by most historians and almost overlooked altogether. He also seems to have inconsistently "talked out of both sides of his mouth", the author says, or changed sides too many times. Or is this a "too unkind evaluation"?