quote [ Luckily, Humboldt had the foresight to phonetically transcribe around 40 words from the parrot’s vocabulary in his notebook, thereby successfully saving the tribe’s language from oblivion—so successfully, in fact, that in 1997 two more parrots were trained to speak Humboldt’s words language as part of an on-going art installation.

As always with such a bizarre story, however, Humboldt’s encounter with the parrot that saved a language from extinction is often dismissed as nothing more than linguistic legend ]