Comments on: Wars, Languages and Budgets.

By: Jangari

Jangari — Sat, 29 Sep 2007 02:36:46 +0000

Ha, you’re right Peter. I accidentally left off three zeroes, which I’ll fix up. But at least the AU$2.137 billion was right. I take your second point, but three years of research into many languages that would otherwise get only very paltry research, if any, would put a real dent in the current endangerment situation.

And yes, true, there aren’t enough trained linguists to do all this, but there are plenty of linguists without adequate funding to do their research. Besides, a massive injection of funds might attract more linguists back to doing documentation, or even attract other people to the field altogether.

MrsChili, you’re not alone in that. Most of our governments spend the taxpayers’ money in questionable ways.

By: mrschili

mrschili — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 10:48:43 +0000

I am horrified and ashamed at where my government chooses to spend our money.

By: Peter Austin

Peter Austin — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 08:14:03 +0000

Even if the 100,000 pounds per year per language were correct, your maths is a bit off. The total 300,000 x 3,000 = 900,000,000 pounds not 900,000!

I seriously doubt that one can do good reliable documentation of languages in 3 years – perhaps some basic data collection and analysis but for serious work let’s think in terms of 5-7 years, at least.

I suggest the major problem is, who is going to do all this documentation? We simply don’t have enough well trained people to undertake the task.