Extinct languages or in "danger" of extinction

[freknu]

I am interested in the feats of Humanity (with capital H) , not in how it is realised in Lingala, Mayan, or Cheso. This interest I leave for philologists, which I am not. With your permission, of course.

This borders on a strange problem that some linguists have: you're interested in the big picture but not data. As long as you do use reasonable data (and not all from English, please!) I guess that's ok. I'm interested in the big picture too. But I am looking at diverse languages to do that (recently at Mayan and Lingala actually, not Cheso though).

Put another way, Gui is interested in society, but not the individual — and if there is one thing us Nordic socialist commie bastards have learned, it's that you cannot separate individual and society; they are two aspects of one and the same thing, and any line between them is incredibly thin.

You need both the puzzle pieces and the picture puzzle. Looking at only the picture you won't be able to finish the puzzle because you don't know what the pieces look like; looking at only the pieces you won't be able to finish the puzzle because you don't know what the picture looks like.

In a way you could say that it dehumanises humanity :/

[Daniel]

I'm not so opposed to making linguistics less human-centered and more system-centered. But in doing so we do need the right data (the puzzle pieces) and not focusing on variation and diversity to do so is problematic. Darwin's research would have gone very differently if he'd just looked at one specific kind of finch for his whole time in the Galapagos.

[freknu]

Darwin's research would have gone very differently if he'd just looked at one specific kind of finch for his whole time in the Galapagos.

Or if he just looked at finches as a whole without studying the variations and their relations.

[Guijarro]

You see?

In the end we agree, although we have different (linguistic or otherwise) tastes--which should be fine!