A Language dies every two weeks

[avatar4321]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070918/ap_on_re_us/endangered_languages

I think this is what stood out to me:


"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.

While I think its sad when we lose languages, I cant really help but wonder, if the language isnt written down, no one speaks it, nothing is written in it, what exactly have we lost?

Doesnt a language have to actually leave some knowledge to be lost, before we have lost something?

And if the people who are speaking the language are dying out, dont they have a responsibility for ensuring the language can be translated after their passing? Shouldnt they be responsible for creating a dictionary, a written language, a pronounciation key, if there is none?

[Yurt]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070918/ap_on_re_us/endangered_languages

I think this is what stood out to me:



While I think its sad when we lose languages, I cant really help but wonder, if the language isnt written down, no one speaks it, nothing is written in it, what exactly have we lost?

Doesnt a language have to actually leave some knowledge to be lost, before we have lost something?

And if the people who are speaking the language are dying out, dont they have a responsibility for ensuring the language can be translated after their passing? Shouldnt they be responsible for creating a dictionary, a written language, a pronounciation key, if there is none?


word up my friendizzle homey cheese slice on the side. I like, full on, way out, wicked bad, agree.

my question:

two languages a week?

that is 104 languages a year. Doesn't add up. What exactly do they consider a language?

[PostmodernProphet]

I nominate Eubonics for the first half of October.....

[PostmodernProphet]

Doesn't add up.

you are right....unless the original post has been edited, I come up with 26 languages a year....one every two weeks, not two every week.....

[Hugh Lincoln]

Last week it was English.

[Yurt]

you are right....unless the original post has been edited, I come up with 26 languages a year....one every two weeks, not two every week.....

oops, my bad, i miss read the post, still, that is a lot of languages.

then again, Papua-New Guinea has approximately 900 languages and only about 4 million people according to stats. Thus, I don't think we are really losing that many "languages" and instead are probably just losing "dialects".

[dan]

I think there's something romantic in the idea of languages never being written down, then dying out. In today's mega-exposure society, it's sort of cool to think of something as major as a language disappearing forever without it being documented somehow.

[5stringJeff]

Most such languages are spoken by very very few people.