Slashdot Mirror

It appears the limited character set on Slashdot is also contributing to the demise of the Navajo tongue. The "L" and "A" derived characters won't come through. The word is written here for those that are interested:
http://www.native-languages.org/navajo_words.htm

Define "Western religions", please. Judaism, Islam, and Christianity are all mideastern religions, it seems to me. The fact that Christianity has spread so far and wide in the last two thousand years doesn't change the fact that it started in Israel. Eastern concepts, routed through Rome, then through Europe, and branching to the American continents doesn't exactly constitute a "Western" religion.

Want a real "Western" religion? You could start here, with the Cherokee, who I am proud to call kin: http://www.native-languages.org/cherokee_culture.htm

If that's to "Western" for you, then you might look up the Druids. They were more "Western" than Christianity.

Buddha? Like most legendary figures, he probably wasn't what people think he is. The stories tend to take on a life of their own, and have little resemblance to the real man.

Hypothetically, what if they decide to put them out only in Swahili? Would it not be considered as discrimination against non-Swahili speakers? And if that is the case is an English-only then not discrimination against non-English speakers?

Most likely you will see English and Spanish, but is that not discrimination against all others, like (just to avoid the discussion of if you are not speaking English, get out) http://www.native-languages.org/languages.htm#alpha

I am interested. I live in Belgium where language is the main point politicians keep coming up with to avoid working on solutions. (Much easier to blame the others)

Your argument here makes no sense at all.

Everyone should learn a second language, for many reasons. However, everyone learning a second language will do nothing to halt or even slow language extinction. The languages that are dying are languages spoken by tiny handfuls of people in remote, generally near-wilderness, locations. There is no one who lives near you who can teach you one of these languages, the people who speak them are uninterested in travel, and even their children lack the fluency to be good instructors.

I have personal experience with one of these dying languages, an obscure dialect of Zapoteco[*], spoken only in a single village near Temascal, Mexico. Actually, I'm sure the language is now dead. When I was there in 1990, there were only a dozen speakers of the language left, and they were all very old. The youngest was about 60, the oldest maybe 75 -- they live a hard life and medical care is very poor, so very few reach 80. They all understood varying amounts of Spanish, and could speak pidgin Spanish. Their children understood Zapoteco just fine, and could speak it, but not fluently. Their grandchildren understood very little Zapoteco and could not speak it at all, though they knew a few words.

There is almost nothing anyone could have done to preserve this Zapoteco dialect as a living language, because even the native speakers felt it was more important for their children and grandchildren to speak good Spanish. They thought it was a little sad that the language of their ancestors was going to disappear, of course, but considered it vastly more important that their children be able to live and work in modern Mexico, which speaks Spanish, not Zapoteco. Even if you were to have traveled thousands of miles and spent a couple of years living with them in order to preserve their language, you wouldn't succeed in keeping it alive, because you would be the only one who speaks it.

The only way to prevent one of these languages from dying is to get a group of people to learn it, and to form those people into a community who speak the language as their primary tongue. But that's never going to happen -- not even the children and grandchildren, who have a much greater cultural imperative to learn and speak the language than anyone else could ever have, are interested in doing this.

While I wholeheartedly agree that it's a good idea for everyone to learn another language or two (I'm American and so speak English, but I also speak fluent Spanish and can get by in Italian), but people who study another language will invariably learn one that is alive and useful, which will do nothing whatsoever to preserve these dying languages.

[*] Although Spanish-speakers in Mexico call the variants of Zapoteco "dialects", many of them are quite distinct languages, with disjoint vocabularies and even different grammatical structures. The people I talked to called their language "Zapoteco", but were aware that there existed people in many other villages that spoke different languages also called it Zapoteco. These dialects also have other names, but even those names are often applied to multiple, mutually-unintelligible languages. The people I talked to said their variant of Zapoteco was "Choapan", but that they found it easier to communicate with people in a nearby (about 80 km) village in Spanish, because they spoke a different "Choapan".

The Living Languages Institute is just the latest of a number of organizations devoted to the study and/or maintenance and revitalization of endangered languages. Here are some other organizations and sources of information:

• Canadian Linguistic Association Committee on Aboriginal Languages
• Endangered Languages Fund
• European Minority Languages
• First Nations Languages of British Columbia
• Foundation For Endangered Languages
• Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Project
• Indigenous Language Institute (formerly IPOLA)
• International Clearing House for Endangered Languages
• Linguistic Society of America
• Native Languages of the Americas
• The Red Book of the Peoples of the Russian Empire
• Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas
• Terralingua
• Volkswagen Foundation Documentation of Endangered Languages Project

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eskimo, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inuit, and http://www.native-languages.org/iaq23.htm

Eskimos, or Esquimaux, are terms used to refer to people who inhabit the circumpolar region, excluding Scandinavia and most of Russia, but including the easternmost portions of Siberia. There are two main groups of Eskimos: the Inuit in northern Alaska, Canada and Greenland, and the Yupik of western Alaska and the Russian Far East.

The term Eskimo can include the Alutiiq, Inupiat, Sug'piak, and Yup'ik Eskimo populations of Alaska, and the Yupik population of Eastern Russia. The speakers of the Yupik languages self-identify as Eskimo [1], but the majority of the Native population in the Canadian Arctic and Greenland prefer to be called "Inuit", or to a smaller extent Inuvialuit, and most find the term Eskimo highly offensive.

Now I need to learn Indian as well.

Please do! Here is a list of Indian Languages and schools where you can study them. Or if you'd just like further information on learning Indian click there.

All of those languages are dying (probably faster than the ol' /. cliche "*BSD is dying") so every little bit learned is of benefit. :)

(Yes, I know you meant those "other" Indians. You still got it wrong, so we're going to continue mocking you. HAND.)