Ian Greenleigh

Ian Greenleigh (ISG) is an Austin-based writer who leads growth and brand at Postlight, a digital strategy, design, and engineering agency. Ian here. In a small California town in the early 2000s, I met a man from Guatemala who spoke only a rare Mayan language. To live so close to thousands of other Guatemalans, so far from home, and yet unable to speak with most of them? I can't imagine.You’re reading this in English, one of nine languages spoken by more than half of the people on earth. We speak roughly 7,000 languages today, and 50% of them are at risk of falling silent by the year 2100. One-third of languages have fewer than one thousand speakers each. Approximately every two weeks, a language’s last speaker passes away. When languages die, they’re usually killed by globalization, urbanization, disease, colonialism, the digital divide, and other forces. People who speak endangered languages are almost always marginalized in other ways, too.“When language is endangered, human knowledge is endangered,” the linguist Dr. Lyle Campbell told me. When linguists study language, they discover more about the ways we think and perceive the world. Native Dutch and Farsi speakers, for example, think about and describe the same musical pitches differently. But the idea “that each specific language has its own influence on the thought and action of its speakers” is a matter of debate. A dying language may contain vital knowledge of the natural world. The Seri people in the Gulf of California harvest and consume eelgrass from the sea. Fewer than 1,000 people speak Seri, but the language has revealed key information about this previously little-known source of nutrition which requires no fresh water, pesticides, artificial fertilizer, or farming land to cultivate. When groups lose their mother tongues, they lose their heritage and something that makes them distinct. Why is this interesting?A language isn’t automatically considered endangered when the number of speakers dips below a certain level—that is one of nine factors UNESCO uses to determine that status, including “availability of materials for language education and literacy” and “intergenerational language transmission.” This is why experts list Yiddish (3,000,000 speakers) as “definitely endangered” but Navajo (120,000 speakers) as the less dire “vulnerable."UNESCO’s Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger classifies 2,572 languages by degree of endangerment.My fascination with endangered languages began a decade ago when I came across IndigenousTweets.com. The site works by surfacing tweets containing words it matches to a database of indigenous words. Computer Science professor Kevin Scannell designed it to help speakers of 185 indigenous languages find each other. Sort by number of users, and at the top you’ll find 17,052 people tweeting in Basque. At the bottom, you’ll find solitary Twitter users posting in Bahasa Sinama, the language of the widely-dispersed Sama-Bajau communities in Southeast Asia. Linguists, technologists, and indigenous communities are working together on preservation, documentation, and revival. And while in the aggregate, the future for endangered languages looks bleak—by one estimate, only 5% of the world’s languages will cross the digital divide—there are many innovative technological efforts that focus on different dimensions of the issue.Amongst the most well-known attempts at solving the problem of lost languages comes from language training apps. More than 1 million people take Duolingo’s Irish lessons every week, for instance, making it the app’s most popular language in Ireland. This might help to counteract the language’s endangered status, which comes from a lack of “intergenerational transmission.” Duolingo crowdsources much of its endangered language curriculum—which includes Navajo, Hawaiian, Irish, Scottish Gaelic, and Yiddish—from volunteers like Meena Viswanath, a civil engineer who grew up speaking Yiddish in New Jersey. The question of dialect complicates such efforts: should Duolingo teach Northern or Central Yiddish?I take for granted that I can text and tweet in English on my phone because its operating system ships with a Latin-alphabet keyboard. But those who wish to do the same in many endangered languages need to use third-party keyboards and apps, like FirstVoices, which provides more than 100 custom keyboards for use across mobile apps. Motorola phones running Android 11 now support Kaingang and Nheengatu, two endangered languages spoken in South America in communities that “heavily rely on mobile phones for all their internet access needs.”In the end, the story of endangered languages is a good way to tell the general story of technological change. On the one hand, you have large swaths of knowledge and culture that risk being lost because they don’t fit easily into the structure of our modern technological world. But on the other hand, those same technologies offer many of these languages hope of survival as online communities, and transmission techniques emerge. While more languages will surely be lost in the future, I find hope in that fact that more people care about preserving endangered languages than ever before, and, because of fields like AI, more people are working at the intersection of language and technology who can pitch in to help. (ISG)Listen of the Day:The fascinating story of pirate radio, featuring clips from Brooklyn-based pirate radio stations.  (ISG)Quick Links:Embracing Artificial Intelligence to preserve dying languages (ISG)Fecal Microbiota Transplantation is Poised for a Makeover (NRB)Duchamp’s Last Riddle (NRB)[Sponsored Link] If you’re at a SaaS company, check out Variance. It’s a tool to help grow customers (some people are calling it a PLG CRM). If you have questions or want to try it, get in touch. (NRB)Thanks for reading,Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN) & Ian (ISG)—Why is this interesting? is a daily email from Noah Brier & Colin Nagy (and friends!) about interesting things. If you’ve enjoyed this edition, please consider forwarding it to a friend. If you’re reading it for the first time, consider subscribing (it’s free!).

The Endangered Language Edition

Ian Greenleigh (ISG) is an Austin-based writer who leads brand and communications at 1E.Ian here. In some places, your number plate says more about you than the car on which it’s bolted. On a late-night walk through central Yerevan, Armenia, I noticed a guarded lot filled entirely with pristine supercars and luxury SUVs. It took me a beat to register the pattern my primate brain had already clocked: Every plate featured repeating letters and numbers (e.g., 08 AA 008, or 05 GG 005) in sequences that further sharpened the contrast between the posh set in the lot and the Soviet-era Zhiguli sedans rattling through the capital sporting plates with a wider and less repetitive array of letters and numbers (e.g., 35 MG 978, or 01 AD 234). An Armenian friend explained the number-pattern plates belonged to oligarchs and their associates, to be read as a not-so-subtle warning to police: “We are untouchable.” A leaked cable from the U.S. embassy in Armenia confirms “well-off Armenians have established family numbers–patterns and numbers that identify them and their close associates,” and these plates are “as good as red [diplomatic] plates” for deterring law enforcement. Why is this interesting? I spotted a similar phenomenon in New Delhi while strolling past the valet line at a ritzy hotel—high-end autos with low-digit tags. An Indian colleague described it as a flex to advertise the owner’s wealth and ability to acquire rule-bending special treatment from civil servants. In Russia, the expected frequency of the string “001” on number plates would be 1 in 999, or 0.10%—but luxury cars receive them at 3-5 times that frequency. The effect is so strong that researchers use it to measure corruption. This is conspicuous corruption, “in which part of the value of a status symbol arises from hinting that the owner ‘knows the ropes’ and is above the rules.”  In Singapore, number plates telegraph not just wealth, but your family’s pre-independence roots: …the oldest vehicle car licence plates in Singapore simply just start with a single ‘S’, and have been dated back to 1906. So if your friend’s got one of these coveted licence plates, you know their great-great-great grandparents were already rich enough to own a car way back when. Also, that their family has been in Singapore for generations.Less than a year after the first Model T hit the market, in 1909, a San Francisco Call columnist wrote, “...it is a piece of vanity on the part of the owner to exhibit a low number so that he may be considered by the general public a veteran” of car ownership. That year, there were fewer than four automobiles per 1,000 Americans.WITI Classifieds:We are experimenting with running some weekly classifieds in WITI. If you’re interested in running an ad, you can purchase one through this form. If you buy this week, we’ll throw an extra week in for free on any ad. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to drop a line.Royal Braun connects cutting edge companies with key creative talent. Meet Royal BraunNudge, get customer insights with ease. Try NudgeIn 2008, Abu Dhabi businessman Saeed Khouri set the current world record by paying $14M for the single-digit “1” number plate. Abdulkerim Arsanov, another UAE entrepreneur, set up an online marketplace for plates with “distinctive” numbers. There, you can spend $2.5M to own the tag “A 911” (Abu Dhabi), or $23,000 for “K 123” (Fujairah). "Number plates have become more luxurious than the cars themselves," he told CNN. Low-digit plates have also been the stuff of American political scandal, like in Illinois, where state officials exchanged them for campaign contributions, and Connecticut, where outgoing governor M. Jodi Rell used the DMV to reward dozens of apparatchiks with coveted two- and three-digit tags. Economists used data from after-market plate auctions in Delaware to quantify the premium on fewer digits: The average price for a two-digit plate was about ten times higher than a three-digit plate. Likewise, it was about 100 times higher than the price of a Delaware 4 digit tag.Some symbols are obvious. Others, open secrets. Next time you spot a conspicuously uncluttered tag, you’ll want to know the backstory. (ISG)Thanks for reading,Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN) & Ian (ISG) —Why is this interesting? is a daily email from Noah Brier & Colin Nagy (and friends!) about interesting things. If you’ve enjoyed this edition, please consider forwarding it to a friend. If you’re reading it for the first time, consider subscribing.

The Conspicuous Number Plate Edition

Ian Greenleigh (ISG) is an Austin-based writer who leads brand and communications at 1E.Ian here. There are places considered so special, boundaries stretch and contort themselves just to touch them. Their lines converge on volcano peaks, on the edges of dead empires, in black seas and shallow rivers, in sleepless cities and in desert desolation. These are multipoints, the kaleidoscopic locations where three or more boundaries meet. Earth has 175 international tripoints, and China holds the record with 16. Mathematician Greg Hurst’s analysis–which includes subnational administrative divisions–located 724 quadripoints, 13 quintipoints, and one decipoint (on the summit of Mount Etna, where 10 Sicilian municipalities come together). Why is this interesting? Multipoints take what we find fascinating about borders and turn up the complexity. Each additional entity adds its own bit and intensifies what makes the places special. Take Three Emperors' Corner, in present-day Poland, which sits at the historical confluence of the Prussian, Russian, and Austro-Hungarian Empires: “It is said that the most interesting part of the excursion was to see the difference: all the three countries were visibly unlike each other in landscape, culture, and economy.”Or Treriksrøysa, a double-multipoint that marks the shared border of Russia, Finland, Norway, and the nexus of three time zones. Canada established a new quadripoint overnight when it created Nanavut in 1999. The Canadian Four Corners Monument joins Manitoba, Saskatchewan, the Northwest Territories, and Nanavut 1,600 miles north of the Utah-New Mexico-Arizona-Colorado Four Corners Monument.Like all borders, multipoints are variously the products of diplomats, conquerors, surveyors, committees, and natural features. These boundaries also divide, connect, sequester, demarcate, attract, and deter. But to me, multipoints will always be more magnetic than their binary counterparts, curious and complicated anomalies compared to those "ordinary" imaginary lines. (ISG).Want to run a WITI classified? Want to reach 20,000 brilliant readers? WITI classifieds start at $250, and you can purchase one through this form. If you buy this week, we’ll throw an extra week in for free on any ad. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to drop us a line.