Posted on 09/18/2007 8:34:19 PM PDT by james500
When every known speaker of the language Amurdag gets together, there's still no one to talk to. Native Australian Charlie Mungulda is the only person alive known to speak that language, one of thousands around the world on the brink of extinction. From rural Australia to Siberia to Oklahoma, languages that embody the history and traditions of people are dying, researchers said Tuesday.
While there are an estimated 7,000 languages spoken around the world today, one of them dies out about every two weeks, according to linguistic experts struggling to save at least some of them.
Five hotspots where languages are most endangered were listed Tuesday in a briefing by the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages and the National Geographic Society.
In addition to northern Australia, eastern Siberia and Oklahoma and the U.S. Southwest, many native languages are endangered in South America — Ecuador, Colombia, Peru, Brazil and Bolivia — as well as the area including British Columbia, and the states of Washington and Oregon.
Losing languages means losing knowledge, says K. David Harrison, an assistant professor of linguistics at Swarthmore College.
"When we lose a language, we lose centuries of human thinking about time, seasons, sea creatures, reindeer, edible flowers, mathematics, landscapes, myths, music, the unknown and the everyday."
As many as half of the current languages have never been written down, he estimated.
That means, if the last speaker of many of these vanished tomorrow, the language would be lost because there is no dictionary, no literature, no text of any kind, he said.
...
Anderson said languages become endangered when a community decides that its language is an impediment. The children may be first to do this, he explained, realizing that other more widely spoken languages are more useful.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
Lun-vesperto *ping*
“Scientists: Many World Languages Are Dying”
Well, some non-scientists are actually doing something that slows
down this “loss in diversity”.
Finally, something you can’t blame on “those Christians”.
Well, at least not these Christians (see URLs below):
http://www.wycliffe.org
http://www.wycliffe.org/Explore/WhatWeDo.aspx
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wycliffe_Bible_Translators
didn’t the aztecs put a woman on the moon in 1920?
certainly we should perserve their language.
/s
And that spanish will be written in arabic script.
I don’t know, I’m pretty sure Bush is keeping at least one unknown language form alive. Good for him!
I agree with RobbyS. Language is how we understand what is around us. Understanding the complexities of the human mind require understanding the varieties of language. Sure it gets oddball. Sure it seems strange to be trying to preserve the language of a dying culture, but there are tremendous things that have been learned about the history of Man through studying the foundations and history of language. One indication of the power of language was the amazing discovery around 10-15 years ago that language and DNA almost form the same geographical barriers between cultures. In hindsight, it is no surprise. But it is still unexpected.
So, there could easily be other discoveries to be had by gathering this info. I say go for it.
You leave Rufus out of this!
preserve.
Bilingualism from very early , well before school, is different. Children that learn one language at home and another outside with their playmates become quite fluent in both and it is some time before they even know they are speaking two languages. The 4 year old uses one set of words with people of one type and another with people of another type, I have known many Viet immigrant kids who speak both languages well at their age level but if I tell little Lanh to say hello to me in Vietnamese instead of English it makes no sense to him at all. He is not conscious of speaking two languages. If I, with my round eyes and light hair speak to him in Vietnamese he will answer in English because that is what I look like and because he has heard me in English though he may turn to his brother and speak Viet. Such children can carry on in a mixed language group with instant changes in languages back and forth.
and to get it all properly transliterated into Arabic.
Adapt of die.
Such children can carry on in a mixed language group with instant changes in languages back and forth.
I have noticed the same with the Dutch. Some fluent in English, German, Nederlands, and French, using terms from all four languages in conversations.
Latin once served the same purpose in Europe as “Chinese” does today. It was primarily a written language, enabling scholars from Poland to Portugal, from Stockholm to Naples to communicate. Seldom did these men get to speak to one another. When they did, they spoke it in the “accents” of their own language. John Henry Newman wrote excellent Latin, spoke it fluently, and was annoyed by the snobbish insistence of Italians that THEIR Italiante pronunciation was the correct way. He said that Latin would disappear as a lingua franca in the Church if the Romans insisted on this kind of uniformity.
The problem is where both language are not spoken in the home, or the quality of one/both languages is poor. Language conveys the culture and if the culture is low , the language will be inferior. But your story reminds me of a couple I know. She is an American who married a German pastor and has become a German, She speaks English to the children so they will learn the lnaguage; Father speaks German to them and to his wife. When the American grandmother came to visit, Mother spoke in English to her as did the children (all under four by the way). When Father came home he also spoke in English. The four year old became with cross with Father, because he was speaking English, and told him so.” Mother speaks English: YOU speak German!” ;-)
The Dutch are to Europe what the Overseas Chinese are to Asia. By the time they are adult they are fluent in 4-6 languages and can pick up the basics of a new one in a day. More time is required for vocabulary. I learned languages easily when I was young and attribute it to learning English in the home, Turkish when out playing and French in school in the first 3 grades. Until I got old I would learn new languages as fast as I needed them. Unfortunately I forgot them just as fast. I still speak, besides English, Vietnamese, and can carry on conversation some in Dutch or French. I thought I had quite forgotten Turkish until last year I got to talking to a woman who grew up in the neighborhood in Istanbul next to mine. She coaxed and prodded until I was bringing back a surprising amount of it.
Nederlands is gemaklijk. Het is dicht bij Engels.
The immigrant families that speak only Vietnamese in the home raise children who speak both Vietnamese and English without accent. Those immigrants that insist on English in the home raise children who speak English with an accent. That accent with the girls is totally delightful. Vietnamese seems to be a language carefully designed for female voices and the Vietnamese accent in English carries that quality over. I used to think it was because of the tones but then the accent on English would not be so fine.
i no wht u meen
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