William Jirsa: Self - Linguist, Computer Expert
Quotes
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William Jirsa : I like to say, if you take everybody who's not tied down they all sort of fall down to the bottom of the planet, so that's how we got here, you know. We're all at loose ends, and here we are together. I remember when I first got down here I sort of enjoyed the sensation of recognizing people with my travel markings. I was like, hey, these are my people. PhDs washing dishes and linguists on a continent with no languages.
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William Jirsa : So just imagine 90% of languages will be extinct probably in my lifetime. It's a catastrophic impact to an ecosystem to talk about that kind of extinction. Culturally we're talking about the same thing, I mean, you know, what if you lost all of Russian literature, or something like that. If you took all of the Slavic languages and they just went away. No more Tolstoy.
