Mankind Wrecks Everything It Touches

Star Trek Level of Wisdom Needed To Save Planet?

Scientists have issued red alerts on the pelagic and linguistic fronts with studies showing precipitous declines in the number of fish and languages on Earth. Another study on the decline in fish languages (Doolittle and Mowgli, 2003) will soon appear in the Journal of Interdisciplinary (Pushmepullya) Studies.

The fish story was co-authored by Dr. Boris Worm of Dalhousie University, who had this to say:

This study is definitely not a way for me to conceal the fact that I've been killing off the world's fish stocks because I hate fish because my name is Worm and fish have been eating my people since the dawn of time. I love fish a lot, and I haven't sworn to destroy every last one of the finned monsters.

Dr. Worm's achievements have been celebrated by a "They Might Be Giants" song.

Another scientist named Jackson says that we have forgotten what we used to have:

We had oceans full of heroic fish -- literally sea monsters. People used to harpoon 3-meter-long swordfish in rowboats."

Jackson did not elaborate on how the swordfish got into the rowboats, nor did he mention that Jerry Lewis movie I saw as a kid where Jerry ends up impaled by a swordfish. He was also criticized for failing to take into account the effects on sea monsters of Kirk Douglas' singing in Disney's 1954 classic "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea". Captain Highliner was unavailable for comment.

However, calmer heads in the fish research community are more sanguine, knowing that when things are looking their worst, the crew of the Enterprise is likely to travel back through time and set things right while having humourous misunderstandings of cultural mores.

Things are looking shakier on the linguistic front, where scientists claim that the number of living languages is declining more quickly than the planet's wildlife. However, the linguists have so far declined to slug it out with oceanic researchers for "most dramatic decline" honours, noting that fish scientists are really stinky, and hang out with sailors and other unsavoury characters who make poor use of our rich linguistic heritage.

The alarming issue is that of approximately 6,809 languages in the world today, 90% are spoken by fewer than 100,000 people, and 46 are known to have only one native speaker (47 if you count HappyFunStevese, which is much like English but adds the words "in bed" to each declarative sentence). On the other hand, the number of people speaking Klingon and Elvish is increasing at an alarming rate. For no particular reason, here's a quote from the linguistics article:

A well-established phenomenon that comes into play when a species declines to small numbers is called the Allee effect – for example when further breeding drops off because animals have difficulty finding a mate.

Difficulty finding a mate has, of course, no relationship to speaking Klingon.

Particular concern is expressed over the decline in such languages as the Yeli Dnye tongue spoken by the people of Rossel Island, which "contains unusual sounds and a vocabulary that upsets the universal terminology for describing colours." One Rossel Islander spoke of his grief in graphic terms:

I gotta tell you, we're singing the oranges over the loss of our [fart noise] language. We look at our children learning English or [fart noise]Spanish, and we're burnt umber with envy. If our elders weren't [fart noise] a bunch of magenta-bellied cowards twenty years ago, we wouldn't [fart noise] having these problems.

One further alarm about cheap coffee destroying people and stuff was widely dismissed by scientists, who collectively said, "Yeah, whatever. Sounds pretty lame. Let's go to Starbucks and practice speaking Klingon. Maybe we'll find mates."

Posted by Steve at May 15, 2003 02:44 PM