Practice question · Select all that apply
Which are legitimate reasons for documenting an endangered language?
Hints
- Three are reasons; one is a false empirical claim about small languages.
- Speaker numbers have no relation to grammatical complexity.
Show the answer
- A. The community may want records for its own transmission
- B. A grammar lost is a data point lost for claims about what languages can do
- D. Documentation preserves knowledge encoded in the language's vocabulary
Why
The fourth is simply untrue: some of the most morphologically intricate languages ever described have a few thousand speakers. It is worth naming because the assumption that small means simple has a long and unhelpful history in the field.
Practise The Branches and What They Are For
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More questions on The Branches and What They Are For
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