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The World's Languages Are Fast Becoming Extinct
Ant sends news of a report, released a couple of weeks back by the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages in Oregon, on the alarming rate of extinction of the world's languages. While half of all languages have gone extinct in the last 500 years, the half-life is dropping: half of the 7,000 languages spoken today won't exist by the year 2100. The NY Times adds this perspective: "83 languages with 'global' influence are spoken and written by 80 percent of the world population. Most of the others face extinction at a rate, the researchers said, that exceeds that of birds, mammals, fish and plants."
I for one welcome our new Chinese/English speaking overlords.....its the first step to having Firefly back on TV.
I want to stop this unmanaged fishing of languages before they all go extinct! Where's my big rubber boat? Let's stop these language trawlers and hit them where it hurts!
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
Heh. That reminds me of an old joke. What do you call a person who knows 3 languages? 'trilingual' What do you call a person who knows 2 languages? 'bilingual' What do you call a person who knows 1 language? 'American'.
A few decades from now, we'll all be speaking spanish!
This is my sig.
Not quite sure how yet, but have a feeling that SUV's are in part responsible for this.
Table-ized A.I.
Damn you global warming.
According to a report released Monday by the Modern Language Association, speakers of the Star Trek-based Klingon language outnumber individuals fluent in Navajo by a margin of more than seven-to-one.
"Navajo, a 3,000-year-old Native American tonal language belonging to the Athabaskan/Na-Dené group of tongues, is clearly dying and will likely be extinct by 2010," MLA president Frederick Toback said. "Fortunately, though, the sad, steady decline of this once-proud Native American tongue has been more than offset by a rising interest in Klingon culture."
No it won't, don't you see? If languages continue to disappear at this rate, we will soon have none left! And without words, how can we attain a first post? The horror... it's unthinkable.
Oh, and Godwin.
No I prefer having multiple languages. If it was just a single language, then everyone would know what I meant when I say "FUCK YOU!" to them. ;)
~ Old Warriors Society
It's getting worse -- I drive by a building every day that proclaims "Systems Intergrators" in large and expensive signage. It kind of hurts to see it.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
We're seriously behind schedule on that Tower of Babel project.
About the only good thing here is the introduction of newer materials. Labor costs have gone way up, and you can't even get slaves anymore.
Boy, you're living right on the edge there, posting anonymous in case your mob connections trace your slashdot userID down and come to your house, finally culminating in a glorious gun fught that will make the news for weeks. Good thing you checked that box.
But seriously. This reminds me of the Futurama episode where Prof. Farnsworth shows Qbert his universal translator that, "unfortunately only translates into some incomprehensible dead language." Qbert says "hello" into the machine which translates it as "Bon Jour."
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
"I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men and German to my horse." - Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor
Or Ingsoc.
We will all speak Common. The intelligent ones will still get bonus languages.
Bearvil.
As soon as there is a concept which someone needs to express, they will come up with a word for it. See "haxor", "0wned", "automagical", etc.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
I blame the Americans.
Australia seems to be doing rather well when it comes to using correct English.
You don't come down here very often, do you? ...
Semi-automatic amateur armchair Australian philosopher; conjecture ready at any moment...
Why can we not add versioning to languages?
...
...
I'll write in English v.2.0 RC1
New features:
Deprecated:
Same with German. A lot of Aliens learned it as a second language
Perhaps that would explain the mystery of why David Hasselhoff is so popular...
Ya know, screw both English and Chinese. That's a problem created by humans, so maybe we should just take a step back. A UK cat has no problem communicating with an Asian breed, for example. (Well, when it can be arsed to communicate, anyway;) It's a global language. So I say let's all learn to meow.
.txt file, is it in UTF-8, UTF-16 -- big or small endian at that? --, or one of the two dozen ISO-8859 flavours, or EBCDIC, or what?) Good old fashioned 7 bit is enough for whole words.
On the upside, IIRC they have like 100 words total, so we can give up on the whole character set madness. (If I give you a
Plus, it'll be easier to know if your cat is actually plotting against you.
Plus, think how much easier poetry will be. E.g., you have to rhyme with "meow", you can't go wrong with "mew" or "mrow".
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I find it very difficult to read anything that is littered with blatant spelling and grammar errors.
I take it you are not a big fan of Shakespeare or Chaucer then?
English follows other languages down dark alleys, hit them over the head, and rifles through their pockets for loose grammar.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Or Slashdot, for that matter.
There they were, sitting in the van with all those dials, and the cat was dead. -V. Marchetti, CIA
Start learning Sumerian next week.
Shouldn't that be "Wow that's awesome."
Actually, it would be:
"Wow! That's awesome."
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.