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Language Matters, An Interview with Wade Davis
Half of the seven thousand languages spoken in the world today may disappear in our lifetime. This startling and sobering fact is the starting point for Wade Davis’s new book, The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World, a wide-ranging enquiry into what it means to see through the world through the particular prism of one’s own language and culture. Each of the world’s languages represents a unique and valuable way of interpreting the world, but as Davis writes, “every fortnight an elder dies and carries with him or her into the grave the last syllables of an ancient tongue.”