Being professionally interested in African languages, there is no way in which we could try to hide our rather selfish motive in hoping for the survival of African languages, and as many as possible at that. The disappearance of any African language means to us scholars the final, irrecoverable loss of an important empirical resource, not only for linguistic studies, but also for studies on the history and culture of a people. Not many outside the academic circle, however, will have heartaches over such matters.

The renewed interest in the fate of endangered languages has led to the adoption by the Permanent International Committee of Linguists (CIPL) of a major project on such languages and the publication of Endangered Languages, edited by R.H. Robins and E.M. Uhlenbeck (1991). This book contains not only a discussion of the conditions that lead to language death but also case studies of endangered languages around the world.

This paper describes some aspects of the mutual impact of languages in a bilingual situation where one language is dominant and the other subordinate. The influence of the two languages on each other is effected through the user, namely, the bilingual. When the bilingual is in the process of learning the second language, his mother tongue influences his mastery of the former, resulting in the process that has been variously referred to as mother tongue interference, approximation, or interlanguage. However, the influence does not take place in one direction only; in other words, it is not only a case of the mother tongue influencing the second language. If the second language is a dominant language its impact on the bilingual's first language can have far reaching implications.

To vernacularize a language is to reduce it to a vernacular. In 1953, UNESCO defined a vernacular as the language of a group that is politically or socially dominated by a group that speaks another language. This paper argues that this domination need not be colonial or racial, and that in fact many postindependence African rulerships are more comfortable in situations that are contrived to ensure that the indigenous languages of their own countries continue to be vernacularized. The same foreign language that was used in the past by a racist colonial minority is now used by an indigenous elitist minority to keep the majority disempowered by making grassroots participation in national issues and debates difficult or impossible.

At first glance singularity would seem to be necessarily opposed to the physical sciences, indeed to any kind of science. As the hallowed saying goes: “Science deals only in universals.” According to this view, the aim of any true scientific endeavor must be the discovery of universals or, in other words, the value of such an endeavor is based on its ability to explain phenomena in terms of universals. The status of singularity in science is a direct result of this approach. Singularity is associated with the presence, either in a person or an object, of an unusual or exceptional quality, or of an individual trait. Singularity so conceived must therefore be seen as inherently compromising the aims of any scientific endeavor, since the purpose of that endeavor is universality as defined above. In this sense, the basis of scientific explication is the ability to determine a feature common to a collection of objects, thus allowing them to be explained by deductive reasoning. This common feature can therefore not be individual, if individual is understood as unusual or exceptional.

The exact nature of self-consciousness is a problem that has occupied a central position in contemporary philosophical thought. Despite a wide variety of approaches, however, a common assumption in almost all theories is that adult consciousness functions as the norm and appropriate starting point for an investigation in this area. Indeed, in general, philosophers have made the presupposition that they can deal with issues in their field - whether, for example, this involves emotions, knowledge, or perception - purely as these are manifest in an adult form.

Leibniz's work resembles its author. A. Robinet has called it “an intellectual storm.” In its two hundred thousand pages of manuscript (most of it still unpublished) there are philosophical works that have nourished the thoughts of thinkers from generation to generation; mathematical texts of fundamental import (we all know of Leibniz as the founder - or rather co-founder - of infinitesimal calculus, but this triumph ought not to obscure his other contributions; for example, his being a precursor in the field of formal logic and the inventor of analysis situs); treatises on physics that have been relegated to obscurity by Newtonian mechanics but which may be in the process of being given new life because of the problems that the classic paradigm has encountered in the twentieth century; an impressive correspondence (approximately fifteen thousand letters, addressed to more than a thousand corespondents); significant contributions to fields as varied as theology, jurisprudence, history, politics and even technology (Leibniz did not scorn practical problems, and we find, alongside the most abstract of metaphysical systems, notes concerning the problem of Venice's sinking or the production of cognac).