Opening of a book by a Daniel Everett „Valoda – kultūras instruments” (Language: The Cultural Tool)

Continuing the series of translated books, Latvian Language Agency has published a book by a linguist Daniel Everett „Valoda – kultūras instruments” (Language: The Cultural Tool, 2012; translated into Latvian by linguist Ina Druviete). On October 7th, in collaboration with the University of Latvia and UL Livonian Institute, a book launch event is planned at the Small Hall of the University of Latvia at 14.00. Guest of honour – the author of the book, linguist Daniel Everett (Bentley University, USA).

Daniel Everett considers and describes language as a cultural product, a tool created by humans for a practical necessity to communicate in order to survive. The book is very personal, based on the author’s own experience of more than thirty years of research into languages and cultures of America’s indigenous people in terms of the origin of the language. The book can also be seen as tribute to the language and culture of Pirahã people and therefore to all the endangered indigenous languages in the world. It is thus in line with the UN International Decade of Indigenous Languages 2022–2032, which aims to focus attention on the preservation of indigenous languages.
As Daniel Everett has written:
“The diversity of languages spoken on planet earth is one of the greatest survival tools
that human beings have as a species. This importance stems from the fact that each language is a cognitive tool for its speakers and comes to encode their solutions to the environmental and other problems they face as a culture. Collectively, therefore, languages express the collective wisdom of our species in ways that are never fully translatable in their entirety from one language to another.”

“Given this continuous cycle of death and rebirth, it might seem that the death of one language is not a particularly serious event. Who cares if some little island language has died off? How does this fundamentally affect humanity one way or the other?The answer is ultimately that each loss is a terrible human and scientific tragedy. A language is a repository of the riches of highly specialized cultural experiences. When a language is lost, all of us lose the knowledge contained in that language’s words and grammar – knowledge that can never be recovered if the language has not been studied or recorded. Not all of this knowledge is of immediate practical benefit, of course – it will not all lead to new medicines, technologies, or means of emotional development. But it is all vital in providing us with different ways of thinking about life, of approaching day-to-day existence on planet earth.”