Dying words: endangered languages and what they have to tell us

Acknowledgments. Prologue. A Note on the Presentation of Linguistic Material. Part I: The Library of Babel. 1. Warramurrungunji's Children. 2. Four Millennia to Tune In. Part II: A Great Feast of Languages. 3. A Galapagos of Tongues. 4. Your Mind in Mine: Social Cognition in Grammar. Part III: Faint Tracks in an Ancient Wordscape: Languages and Deep World History. 5. Sprung from Some Common Source. 6. Travels in the Logosphere: Hooking Ancient Words onto Ancient Worlds. 7. Keys to Decipherment: How Living Languages Can Unlock Forgotten Scripts. Part IV: Ratchetting Each Other Up: The Coevolution of Language, Culture, and Thought. 8. Trellises of the Mind: How Language Trains Thought. 9. What Verse and Verbal Art Can Weave. Part V: Listening While We Can. 10. Renewing the Word. Epilogue: Sitting in the Dust, Standing in the Sky. Notes. References. Index of Language Names. General Index.