Here are seven questions with a linguist dedicated to the study and preservation of dying languages.
On why some words can be simply untranslateable, he discusses the dizzying complexity of some vanishing tongues:
As I learned working among the Tuvans, nomadic yak herders of South Siberia, words can also be anchored to a specific place. In Tuvan, in order to say "go" you must first know the direction of the current in the nearby river and your own trajectory relative to it. Tuvan "go" verbs therefore index the landscape in a way that cannot survive displacement or translation. Knowledge systems such as the Tofa reindeer taxonomy and Tuvan "go" verbs get lost, flattened out, and vastly simplified when people switch to speaking another language.
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