Lessons in the Old Language

"90% of the world's languages are dying and will be gone within decades, displaced by the cold, placeless tongues of global commerce and colonization. Millions of voices...are going silent and with them the local wisdom borne of millennia of intimate and sustainable communion with place extinguished. The very fabric of life on the planet is also under siege by the same forces. The problem of endangered languages and cultures is, thus, everyone's problem. To paraphrase the great Japanese poet Issei, "if we look carefully into the dragonfly's eye, we can see the mountain behind our shoulder."

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