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 Eyakpart of the Athabascan family of languagesthe 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 livingor nativelanguage, people must use it as a primary means of communication.
(Excerpt) Read more at slate.com ...
We have a winner for best post of the day!
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus
Or Hebrew -- which was nearly extinct in daily use, but taught for religious rituals, much like Latin. It was revived as the official language of the present-day State of Israel.
Cornish is a Celtic language formerly spoken in Cornwall, in SW England.
Popular with game hens.
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.
Because otherwise, those poor cats would just be chasing their tails. Oh, wait.
A Romance language called Dalmatian
Are you Dr. Doolittle? What's with the need to talk to Manx cats and Dalmatians?
But no English-speaking countries have been at war with one anotherfor centuries.
I thought this would be an article on the Dim’s graveyard voters!
ping
Another example of a language preserved because of its use for religious purposes, after dying out as a spoken language, is Coptic, a late form of the Egyptian language still used by the Coptic Church. It has an alphabet using Greek letters with some additional letters for sounds not found in Greek.
Note: this topic is from 1/31/2008. Thanks forkinsocket.
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