Posted on 01/31/2008 10:15:54 AM PST by forkinsocket
Last week, Chief Marie Smith Jones, the only remaining native speaker of the Eyak language, died in her home in Anchorage, Alaska. Chief Jones' death makes Eyak—part of the Athabascan family of languages—the first known native Alaskan tongue to go extinct. Linguists fear that 19 more will soon follow the same fate. Fortunately, starting in 1961, Chief Jones and five other native-speaking Eyaks worked with Michael Krauss, a linguist at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, to document Eyak in case future generations want to revive it. How would you go about learning a language that nobody speaks?
It depends. A well-documented language would have a dictionary, grammar book, a body of literature (such as folk tales or religious texts), and, in some cases, videos and recordings that a dedicated student could learn from. Eyak, for example, has all of these. Ideally, the grammar book and dictionary would spell out the sounds of the vowels (and tone, if there is any). If there isn't good documentation, linguists must reconstruct the language using whatever written stories or religious texts remain, and then borrow words, grammatical structures, and pronunciation from closely related languages, patching together their best guess at what they think the language sounded like.
In some cases, a language that's classified as "extinct" is still spoken in certain contexts. Latin, for example, is considered extinct, or dead, but is taught in schools and used in religious ceremonies. A language is generally considered extinct if it's no longer used in daily conversation. To be a living—or native—language, people must use it as a primary means of communication.
(Excerpt) Read more at slate.com ...
4 the after-life??
That is one of the funniest things that I have read in a long time. Thanks!
Like conservatism?
Does speaking fluent drunkinese count as a language?
You’re most welcome. Because of your comment I decided to bump the thread. :)
The Vanilla Ice in Latin thread was also damned funny. I wonder what other pop music has been translated into Latin in a similarly humourous fashion...
A case of all Chiefs no Indians.
Languages aren't some sort of noble end unto themselves, other than study for linguists.
Language is for communication. If you can adequately communicate your thoughts in a "living" language, what do others matter?
I’m sure it’s out there.
A cursory glance at YouTube and other sites shows that there are PLENTY of people out there with too much time on their hands.
A FReeper favorite!
LOL...Never thought of that.
Military tactical communications?
That's like asking "why paint if you have a camera?" or "why make pictures in color if black & white will do?"
Language affects how - and even whether - certain ideas can be expressed (see the appendix to "1984"). At an extreme, one can expand one's own thought process by adopting another language, improving the toolset for conceiving and expressing ideas - even if only within one's own head. The notion of "can you adequately communicate your thoughts" is subject to self-restriction derived from not knowing if there is a superior form of communication, and not knowing if you're not thinking something because you don't have the semantic toolset needed to formulate ceratin thoughts.
There's a reason why Italian is preferred for opera, English for technology, Korean for literacy, Japanese & Chinese for calligraphy, French for romance, C++ for systems programming, Lisp for AI, etc. - each is better suited for certain categories of cognitive expression. There are great works written in dead languages ... beautiful expressions of notions which are lost because nobody understands them; more's the pity.
Hire a dead linguist?
Korean for literacy? When the English language has the most beautiful and meaningful written works of all mankind?
English will be a dead language in the USA if Juan McCain is elected president.
Cornish is a Celtic language formerly spoken in Cornwall, in SW England. It became extinct in the 18th century but apparently there are people today trying to revive it. Manx was spoken on the Isle of Man until a few decades ago when the last speaker died. It was related to Irish Gaelic. I suppose it would be useful if you had a Manx cat which refused to respond to commands in English.
A Romance language called Dalmatian died out in 1898 when the last speaker died. About 1% of the population of Switzerland speaks Romance dialects known as Rhaeto-Romance--they are so few in number it's thought that the language may eventually die out.
Literacy in terms of how many can read/write. Written Korean is very easy to learn (nigh unto trivial), having (unlike most languages) actually been created by an accomplished linguist (the then-king around 1500). With just 24 phonetic characters, plus a simple syllabatic representation, it’s actually much easier to learn to articulate written Korean than to comprehend it.
This in contrast with English, which has an insane number of linguistic exceptions, phonetic variations per given symbol, hominyms, etc. being a cobbling-together of multiple languages.
Literacy rate, then. Interesting. Thanks for the lesson.
It’d be interesting to know more about those native languages, their origins, and their relations (if any) to Asian languages. It’s a shame when a language like that dies out.
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