H. Russell Bernard Quotes

There are 63 officially recognized indigenous languages in Mexico, but there are at least 282 indigenous languages spoken in Mexico...We see the different languages in these families referred to as "varieties" or “dialects” in the literature. Nobody would think today of calling Spanish, Romanian, Catalan, French and Portuguese "varieties" of Latin.

Languages have always come and gone. Neither the language of Jesus nor that of Caesar are spoken today. But languages seem to be disappearing faster than ever before.

Weren't humans domesticated by the requirements of the plants and animals themselves?

The extinction of language is nothing new...What is new today is the rate and extent of extinction of languages.

It is not necessary to argue that language diversity caused the evolutionary success of humans. We need only recognize that the knowledge generated by all those successfully adapting cultural groups over the millennia is stored in all those thousands of languages now spoken around the world.

Computers will not preserve cultures. But they can be used to foster cultural pluralism and to provide people everywhere with the power to make their own bilingual educational materials, or to print pamphlets on how to grow better rice, or to record for future generations the customs and lore of those now alive.

Teaching people to read primers and Bibles does not produce authors; it produces readers. Printing presses and publishing houses produce authors. This rule is no different today for nonliterate languages than it was in late medieval times in Europe.

As a university professor I sell what I know.

Research is a craft. I’m not talking analogy here. Research isn’t like a craft. It is a craft. If you know what people have to go through to become skilled carpenters or makers of clothes, you have some idea of what it takes to learn the skills for doing research. It takes practice, practice, and more practice.

I see nothing useful or charming about remaining monolingual .. if that results in being shut out of the national economy.

.. most people think of science as technology and engineering—life-saving drugs, computers, space exploration, and so on... It is less commonly understood that social and behavioral sciences have also produced technologies and engineering that dominate our everyday lives. These include polling, marketing, management, insurance, and public health programs.