Lost Languages

[EdwinJefferson]

Lost Languages.. BBC report. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/4172085.stm)

"Of the 6,000-odd languages in the world, one is said to disappear every fortnight."

Anyone care to work out how long this will take till there is one language (even though that will never happen)?

I'm genuinely interested to know what people here think about languages, which of the large spoken languages could be lost in time.. what of languages like Klingon.. what of languages that are lost?

Recently, the alternative Queen's speech (broadcast on Xmas day in the UK) had the Simpsons on it, with Lisa speaking in Cornish. I have been to Cornwall on many occassions and never heard it spoken. Wales I have been to and there and the language is making a come back of such there. People can speak Welsh, where it was dead only a few decades ago.

What of the differences between English and American English?

i'm not sure really what I'm asking for. I just like languages and a discussion about them would be nice.

i particularly am fond of words like Puijilittatuq -'he does not know which way to turn because of the many seals he has seen come to the ice surface' - as they are so descriptive in such a short word.

[Lucas]

Anyone care to work out how long this will take till there is one language (even though that will never happen)?

I'm genuinely interested to know what people here think about languages, which of the large spoken languages could be lost in time.. what of languages like Klingon.. what of languages that are lost?

i'm not sure really what I'm asking for. I just like languages and a discussion about them would be nice.



The current rate of language loss won't sustain itself. All the major language losses have come from places like indigenous Australia and the Americas; places where each group had a distinct language. Language is what makes us human, many anthropologists speculate that the rise of language in humans came at the same time we aquired culture.

It's amazing that one out of every five languages spoken on Earth is spoken in Papua New Guinea! Linguistic anthropologists claim that many are as different from one another as are English and Russian.

I am fascinated with the similarities and differences in the world's different languages. I could go on forever about this topic...

[Shai Gar]

that is rather true, every valley in PNG has a different language, and the australian aboriginals had a different language for each tribe/nation and there were over a thousand nation/tribes in australia.

they count a language as extinct if there are no people who speak that language and that one only, thus welsh gaelic would be extinct even if it has made a comeback because the speakers of that language also speak english. it is like latin that dead language where they certainly speak it and write it in the vatican city but they also speak italian and other lanugages.

i have been following the language aspect for a while and unfortunately my firefox is pissing me off and i have to use default instead of my ShaiGar profile that has all the links but i will track down a few that i know for you guys

http://www.ethnologue.com/
http://ebbs.english.vt.edu/hel/hel.html
http://www.krysstal.com/english.html
personally i prefer the krystall one, it deals in more concepts then the others, but the second one has a very decent amount of facts if you want to go indepth

[EdwinJefferson]

Interesting. I didn't know they considered it dead if the speaker could speak another language.

Gaelic is different to Welsh.

[crule81]

My Grandmother was born in Cornwall yet doesn't know a word of Cornish as far as I know.

[EdwinJefferson]

The only place I've seen it is on postcards.