Posted on 10/17/2004 12:45:37 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
The social status of a language is the most accurate way of predicting whether it will survive, argue researchers in a paper appearing today in the journal, Nature... "Thousands of the world's languages are vanishing at an alarming rate, with 90% of them being expected to disappear with the current generation," warned Dr Daniel Abrams and Professor Steven Strogatz, both of Cornell University in New York... The model is based on data they collected on the number of speakers of endangered languages - in 42 regions of Peru, Scotland, Wales, Bolivia, Ireland and Alsaçe-Lorraine - over time. All have been in steep decline over the past century or so, and the model suggests that Scottish Gaelic and Quechua will be close to extinct by about 2030... A language's fate generally depends on both its number of speakers and its perceived status, the latter usually reflecting the social or economic opportunities afforded to its speakers, they said. When two languages are in competition, the one that offers the greatest opportunities to its speakers will usually prevail.
(Excerpt) Read more at abc.net.au ...
Que es Aztlan?? La cosa se llama Aztlan no existe.
It will by then. They will call it the USA. It will be in place of what we now call the USA, only it will include Mexico, Guatamala, Nicragua and a few others.
I hope so.
"The Gaelic Language is spoken by around 86,000 individuals primarily in the North of Scotland and in the Western Isles (eg. Skye, Lewis, Harris). The vast majority of gaelic speakers are bilingual Gaelic / English. Today there are very few people who do not speak English.
"Gaelic (or Scottish Gaelic as it is sometimes known outside Scotland) has similarities to the other Celtic languages, and is particulary close to Irish (or Irish Gaelic) to the extent that a mutual understanding is possible. Another variant of Gaelic is spoken in the Isle of Man (a small tax haven between England and Ireland) called Manx Gaelic."
http://www.geo.ed.ac.uk/home/scotland/gaelic.html
Ooh, check it out...
http://www.ceantar.org/Dicts/MB2/
A friend of mine is an engineer from one of the minority tribes of Burma, three generations out of the stone age. There are perhaps 500 people who speak his native language. "You walk five miles down the road, and no one understands you anymore," he told me once.
Thanks for corroborating the information I posted. When you get a chance, do read the information at that link, regarding the source of the Koran.
Just a word of advice if you ever go to Paris. 'Chapeau' means hat. 'Oof' means egg. It's like those French have a different word for everything.
Wow. Read it. Thanks for the link. I hear the Assyrian Christians in Iraq are having hard times, and are being driven in great numbers from the homelands they've occupied for several thousand years.
Glad to see you are posting. I was worried about you!
(i know it is a bit late for the thread but came across both this thread these links while googling)
here is an updated link as the one in your post is out of date:
http://www.chiesa.espressonline.it/dettaglio.jsp?id=7025&eng=y
also, it appears to have been posted right here on fr too:
http://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1119114/posts
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