NYT-1201: STATE OF THE ART A Thermostat That's Clever, Not ...

understand one another even if they don’t use all
the same words for the same things.) He tried usin
g the Arabic alphabet, then the Roman alphabet, bu
t found that neither one could express the tonal v
ariations of spoken Manden languages. So in 1949,
he invented his own script — one flexible enough t
o capture any Manden language in writing. Among th
e first books he translated into N’Ko was the Kora
n. He later compiled a history of Manden languages
and culture.
At the time, Guinea had a close relationship with
the Soviet Union, and Kante managed to have two ty
pewriters made in Eastern Europe with N’Ko letters
. (He was given another one by the president of Gu
inea, according to a Guinean newspaper.) “If there
was a typewriter, ink and ribbons were hard to fi
nd,” says Baba Mamadi Diane, a student of Kante’s
who now teaches N’Ko at Cairo University. Almost a
ll of the books and papers in N’Ko in Guinea were
copied by hand by Kante’s students, like medieval
monks, but with several sheets of carbon paper below.
Designed as a language for the common man, N’Ko se
emed destined to remain a code used by an elite. T
hen came the digital revolution.
Heritage languages like N’Ko are taking on new lif
e thanks to technology. An Internet discussion gro
up, Indigenous Languages and Technology, is full o
f announcements for new software to build sound di
ctionaries and a project to collect tweets in Tok
Pisin, a creole language spoken throughout Papua N
ew Guinea, or Pipil, an indigenous language of El
Salvador. “It’s the amplification of Grandma’s voi
ce,” Slaughter says.
Whether a language lives or dies, says K. David Ha
rrison, an associate professor of linguistics at S
warthmore College, is a choice made by 6-year-olds
. And what makes a 6-year-old want to learn a lang
uage is being able to use it in everyday life. “La