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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.
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.
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.
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
"I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men and German to my horse." - Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor
Or Ingsoc.
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.
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