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You're listening to Away with Words, I'm Grant Barrett.

And I'm Martha Barnett.

You know, Grant, there was a touching story the other day in the Dallas Morning News.

Did you see it, it was about the last surviving speaker of the Wichita language? morning news

We hear news reports all the time about how there are some what 7,000 languages spoken in the world today but some of those languages are dying off at the rate of about

one a week, and I think that story really brings home that idea in a really visceral way.

I've tried to figure out why it bothers me so much that the languages are

disappearing. I think the key part of it for me Martha is that I still believe

that each word is a totem of sorts. There's something a totem. Yeah it represents a kind of power.

Like I think about the Amazon jungle. I think about this beautiful resource that might be filled

with medicine. We don't know what these

plants will do for us until we try them and it's being destroyed slowly and I think

about the languages is the same way that they might actually have medicine for our

minds they might have the medicine for our minds. They might have the cures for our

existential ills. I mean I don't want to sound too poserish about it but there might

be ideas there about why we're here and why we are the way we are. might be

ideas there about why we're here and why we are the way we are and we might be losing those ideas.

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