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The Last Man on Earth To Speak His Language (axios.com)
From a report: An elderly man in Peru named Amadeo Garcia Garcia is the last person on earth to speak his native language, Taushiro, the NY Times' Nicholas Casey reports in a remarkable long-read. A combination of disease and exploitation have led the Taushiro, a tribe of hunter-gatherers in the Amazon, to the verge of extinction. In the last century, at least 37 languages have disappeared in Peru alone, lost in the steady clash and churn of national expansion, migration, urbanization and the pursuit of natural resources.
... what did you say?
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Donald Trump cut his taxes by raising ours so millions are racing to pre-pay their 2018 property taxes before the Trump tax increase goes into effect.
If you don't care that Trump is a Russian owned traitor, could you at least have some consideration for the millions of Americans whose taxes are increasing so Trump can put more money into his pockets, and the pockets of Republican donors?
Traitor! Tax Raiser! Idiot!
Seriously, when is cobol going to die...
but then if he ever did, this wouldnâ(TM)t be an issue would it
but this must be an extra lonely feeling
But it'll be the happiest day when White Europeans finally die off!
Of the things that are going extinct, speakers of a particular language are not of great concern. Some people may see it as a tragedy but we aren't really losing much of anything. It's more romanticism over something interesting more than anything else.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
then no value is lost when one culture replaces another.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
If a spoken language "goes extinct", if there was no written language that accompanied it, the main "problem" would be, "how would I be fluent enough to communicate with these people when I use my time machine to visit them when they spoke language X?"
The written language, and the history written in it, that is a bit more of a problem for future of that culture. Assuming there are written histories, working with this "last native speaker" to build a base for translation would be a good idea.
If he's the only one who speaks his native language, how can anyone know that he actually speaks it? He could just be babbling in complete gibberish, and everyone would be standing there going ... aww, how sad ... nobody else speaks his language any more ...
the crackers are dying off in droves
they will all die of cancer from the toxic waste dumps that their trailer parks are built on
someday nobody will understand the phrase "I am a republican"
Preferably there'd only be one language we all speak. To be fair, it can be a new language called Universal Basic, then we all speak that, and if you speak anything else you die.
Obviously his tribe was very liberal and inclusive and allowed the less inclusive tribes / governments / corporations to cross into their tribal territory and supplant the indigenous languages and cultures.
Great. The sooner we can all understand each other the better the world will be. I'm not commenting on the merits of any individual language but on the fact that unity is strength, but hard. The more we all get together the better we can make the world itself. There is too much division.
This is what happens when you have weak borders, race mixing, gay marrage, etc.
they Want you to
https://livinglanguages.wordpr...
This estimation can be wrong in many ways, but the point remains: languages do die all the time.
Only European languages rightfully deserve to preserved, since they're the only ones to convey True Culture. We Europeans are the true and only masters of the world by virtue of our superiority. All hail victorious Europe, united from the Atlantic to the Urals! A nous la victoire, toujours!
I'll admit I don't feel much twinge about losing a language.
Agreed with the exception that sometimes we lose historical information when we lose a language. But in most cases little of value is lost. If it wasn't important enough for people to learn, odds are good it wasn't important in general.
at some level I feel like more languages just leads to more confusion, and the fewer of them we have, the more likely it is we'll understand each other.
Excellent point. Speaking a different language makes it just a bit easier to engage in pointless tribalism and we really don't need more of that. If the cost of people getting along better is to lose a bunch of minor languages then that is a cost I'm more than willing to pay.
im not rich by any means. and im going to save about 2 grand a year under the new plan. over 80% of americans are going to save money.
No they aren't. It just means we're going to have to borrow more which will need to be repaid later. They didn't cut medicare or defense or social security which account for around 3/4 of the federal budget so all they did was incur additional debt, most likely to burden future generations. Collectively we save nothing and any "savings" you realize will simply have to be picked up by someone else somewhere down the line.
They should teach him to program in BLISS or COBOL, just to add some irony.
Do you have ESP?
Yankees killed some 97% of native population of contemporary US. This was the biggest, continent-wide scale act of genocide in known history. Some 500 cultures were destroyed. How many languages did disappear back then ?
Teach the last man to program in Bliss or Cobol, so he can get on craigslist to look for a job.
Today's captcha is clowning, and I am dead serious.
His unintelligible babble just added to the background noise. In life there are winners and losers. This dude chose poorly.
OH, now you want to balance the budget after 8 years if 1T deficit?
8 years? Try 30+ years. We've been running huge and increasing deficits since the Reagan administration. And no the annual increase for the last 8 years was about $500-600 billion - roughly the amount we spend on defense annually. They've recently become bigger because the Bush administration decided to start two wars in the Middle East and didn't raise taxes to pay for them. Then there was all the stimulus to keep the economy running after the crash in 2008 with again, no taxes to compensate because republicans break out in hives if you mention the words "raise taxes" even when it is the responsible thing to do. So we continue to borrow to keep everything running with no end in sight. Right now the federal debt stands at around $18.9 trillion which means every man, woman and child in the US owes approximately $63,000. Lowering taxes will not lessen this problem.
And with his dying breath, he whispered one word..."covfefe".
You are welcome on my lawn.
How stupid are idiots who are mourning disappearance of rare shit?
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Another six thousand or so and we can dump unicode.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Don't forget that the big man in the sky made us all speak different languages on purpose because we were trying to build a tower up to his kingdom or whatever. According to the story, he intends for us to all be confused and unable to understand each other (and work together.) Let it happen, it's the big man's will. /s
The Slashdot team is disincentivized to fix character encoding issues because last time they improved character encoding support, the result was moderation score spoofing through bidirectional overrides. If you want Unicode, you could always give SoylentNews a try.
Is culture defined by language, is language defined by culture or both?
The Sapir-Worf hypothesis is that English and Klingon are not "sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality."
Some 75%% of all extant languages today, some 4000 of them are in the high lands of Papua New Guinea. Every tribe fights with every neighbor constantly, and they tell each other by language. Every grammar every syntax every linguistic device used anywhere in the world is found there. And some found there nowhere else. If, and when, Papua New Guinea becomes peaceful, we will lose anout 4000 languages.
In my home state the love for our mother tongue runs deep. We sing anthems for Mother Tamil. Name children Tamil-princess, Tamil-gem, Tamil-music. Only time Tamil Muslims disagree with Islamic orthodoxy is when Arabic is placed above Tamil. Only time Tamil brahmins disagree is when Sanskrit is placed above Tamil. National parties pledged to make Hindi the national language of India do not even garner 10% of the votes in my (former) home state.
Language is fundamentally divisive. Winners, military or economic or cultural will drive to extinction loser's languages. We started with one language 75000 years ago. We seem to be heading towards 100 languages in about 100 years.
(Pardon typos, typing on a phone.)
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Not nearly enough.
If languages are such a non-issue why do people in the US freak out that so many non-english speakers prefer their native languages? I mean if languages like Spanish are just the preferred communication language of so many, why the backlash? Why not just let people choose what they speak? I mean it would be a non-issue if English just happens to be less preferred and dies away, no?
I'm willing to bet 99% of posters in this thread who say that loosing a language is no big deal, or that the world would be a better place if everyone on earth spoke the same lnaguage, etc, are native english speakers. Better yet, american native english speakers, the only people of the G20 the vast majority of whom are unilingual, and have never known the effects of learning and speaking even one other language can have on the mind.
Explaining the virtues of cultural diversity is just like explaining the virtues of bio-diversity, and the dangers of monoculture: If we still have to explain it to you, then you're probably a lost cause anyway.
Posted by a non-native english speaker.
and this matters because?
The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World
The censorship here is out of control.
Slashdot really does not want you to know about Wade Davis' "The Wayfinders". A series of lectures that discusses the importance of ancient knowledge in the modern world and covers how loss of languages represents a real loss of knowledge.
Posts that try to discuss real knowledge are deleted. While the rabid american politicals are allowed to smear their excrement all over every discussion. Fuck you fuckers. Fuck you controlling pieces of shit.
No indeed. It's time someone finishes the job.
if he is really the LAST person to speak a language, whom is he speaking with?