“Just as we would be inestimably poor to be denied the opportunity to see giraffes, roses, bombardier beetles, tulips, and little black house cats with white spots on their chests that sit on our laps as we write, we lose one of the true wonders of the world every time one of these glorious variations on a theme set by the first language slips away unrecorded for posterity. We will never encounter a stegosaur, but we can be thankful that fossils allow us to know what it was like. In the same way, if we cannot enjoy all 6000 of the worlds languages alive for much longer, let us at least make sure to afford them high quality preservation…The world’s riffs on basic materials that emerged in East Africa around 148,000 B.C. represent 6000 ways of being human.”