the Weight of Forgotten Words: Information Entropy and Mathematics Linguistic Loss

A dying language falls silent somewhere on Earth every few weeks and with it, an entire architecture of human thought disappears forever.When Marie Smith Jones died in a small Anchorage house in January 2008, she took the Eyak language with her. Not just a set of sounds, but a way of dividing up reality that had taken thousands of years to build. She wasn't alone. Of the roughly 7,000 languages spoken on Earth today, linguists estimate that up to 90% could vanish by the end of this century an extinction event with no precedent in recorded human history.The Weight of Forgotten Words tells this story through an unexpected and powerful lens: information theory, the branch of mathematics Claude Shannon invented in 1948 to solve a problem about noisy telephone wires. That same mathematics, it turns out, can precisely measure what a language actually is, what redundancy protects it from, and exactly what is lost in bits, in knowledge, in cognition when a language goes silent.Moving between rigorous science and unforgettable human stories, this book takes readers from the last speaker of Ubykh, whose 84 consonants died with him in a Turkish village, to two elderly neighbors in Mexico who were the final speakers of Ayapaneco and barely spoke to each other; from the rainforest medicines encoded only in vanishing ethnobotanical vocabularies to the astonishing, evidence-based revivals of Hebrew, Welsh, Hawaiian, and Wampanoag languages brought back from the edge, and in one case, from a century of complete silence.Precise, deeply researched, and written to be devoured in a single sitting, The Weight of Forgotten Words will change how you think about every word you've ever spoken and what it will cost humanity to lose the ones we're losing right now.