Every language is an old-growth forest of the mind

I believe we need to think about how a language dies. When you consider all that died with Bo Senior, it is sobering. As National Geographic Explorer Wade Davis has said, ““A language is not just a body of vocabulary or a set of grammatical rules. … Every language is an old-growth forest of the mind.” In other words, there was much more that died with Bo Senior than just a compilation of phonetics and phonemes. A history of a people of the world with all its stories and wisdom died too. It would seem that, as with the extinction of an endangered species, when a language dies, it leaves our world a little less charming and a lot less educated. How does a Language die? February 21st 2013 in Academy, Languages, Linguistics, One World. Also Speaking the language of your grandparents. Though Boa had no one to talk to in her native language she was often sighted talking to birds in her language as she maintained that birds were her ancestors and understood her. OBITUARY for Boa Senior, died 26th January, 2010, last speaker of Bo language.