Unknown Language Discovered in Malaysia (smithsonianmag.com)

Researchers have cataloged close to 7,000 distinct human languages on Earth, per Linguistic Society of America's latest count. That may seem like a pretty exhaustive list, but it hasn't stopped anthropologists and linguists from continuing to encounter new languages, like one recently discovered in a village in the northern part of the Malay Peninsula. From a report: According to a press release, researchers from Lund University in Sweden discovered the language during a project called Tongues of the Semang. The documentation effort in villages of the ethnic Semang people was intended to collect data on their languages, which belong to an Austoasiatic language family called Aslian. While researchers were studying a language called Jahai in one village, they came to understand that not everyone there was speaking it. "We realized that a large part of the village spoke a different language. They used words, phonemes and grammatical structures that are not used in Jahai," says Joanne Yager, lead author of the study, which was published in the journal Linguist Typology. "Some of these words suggested a link with other Aslian languages spoken far away in other parts of the Malay Peninsula."

Comments

No need to preserve

[jader3rd]

If it doesn't help up translate the Voynich Manuscript there's no need to put energy in trying to preserve one more unique language.

Re:No need to preserve

[Geoffrey.landis]

It's not "unknown" either. Unknown to the researchers, yes. Unknown to the world, no.

Unknown to the world, yes. Unknown to the 280 villagers who speak it, no.

They are, technically, part of the world, so I suppose you could more accurately say unknown to 99.999995% of the world.

Re:No need to preserve

[Anonymous Coward]

Who cares what that book is?

And why are "techies" so very obsessed with it, seemingly since the last four or so years?

It's obviously some old herbal/medical text. I doubt there's anything useful or novel anywhere in that book that would benefit modern society whatsoever.

Re:No need to preserve

[mikael]

Because it's a language that has some structure and meaning but we don't know how to decipher it, which is a challenge for cryptologists.

Linguists have identified the structure of the language as Hebrew written by a monk and the original language as one of the Aztec dialects. Botanists have identified 37 out of 303 pictures of plants. Astronomers have identified some of the constellations in the pictures. Both tie in to a particular region in that continent.

The idea is that it's a guidebook for medicines. One of the plants mentioned are a source of vitamin C. From natural homeopathy many plants have many uses. The viola bicolor is one that was identified.
https://www.theguardian.com/bo...
http://www.americanvioletsocie...

Re:No need to preserve

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey neckbeard, cryptologists don't decipher foreign languages.

Re: No need to preserve

[Anonymous Coward]

can I get my Babelfish upgraded?

Re:No need to preserve

[Hognoxious]

If that was a guess it was a very good one.

continuation ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it dynamically typed ? Does it have continuations ? JIT compiling ?

Re:continuation ?

[DickBreath]

Wow over 7000 human languages! That's almost as many as the number that a modern developer must know.

Re:continuation ?

[OffTheLip]

with 5 years experience in each (all).

Re:continuation ?

[DickBreath]

Also it needs to have proper tail recursion. But it probably has that if it has continuations.

Re:continuation ?

[goombah99]

Sally it uses both whitespace and braces blocks, and has glottal sounds for sigils like $, @ and %

Re:continuation ?

[nitehawk214]

Especially the ones that were invented less than 5 years ago.

Re:continuation ?

[PPH]

Just think of how much fun Victor Borge could have had dictating this. Or APL.

Re:continuation ?

[Anonymous Coward]

human languages should have a better support for multi dimensional arrays, dynamic typing, even comments, maybe compiler hints;

what do you think human languages should have a better support for ?
Too often, I have to join a parse tree with a sentence.

Re:continuation ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it dynamically typed ?

Yes, it used a s strict system of dynamically noticed types. Every time an object is bound to an identifier, the type system examines the value and exclaims "Wow, a $type this time. I would have never thought."

Does it have continuations ?

It has nothing but continuations! All programs are written in continuation-passing style. The sacred words inscribed on the village totem pole must be obeyed: "Return considered harmful."

JIT compiling ?

Almost. It uses TIJ (Tomorrow-Is-Justasgood) compiling which is much, much better: Instead of executing side-effects and computing values eagerly, they are virtualised and returned to you wrapped up in a God-monad. This allows the program to terminate instantly without doing any actual computation, which is extremely efficient. Don't worry about the returned monads piling up: If you soak them in brine and roast them, they are great in salads.

Re:continuation ?

[goombah99]

I feel old, that I actually know what you are joking about.

Re:continuation ?

[houghi]

I am a consultant. I see no problem with that. I billed all those hours.

Re:continuation ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow over 7000 human languages! That's almost as many as the number that a modern developer must know.

No, you're thinking of JavaScript frameworks.

Re:continuation ?

[DickBreath]

At one point I think the number of Linux distributions outnumbered the number of Linux users. A long time ago.

Re:continuation ?

[nitehawk214]

I am going to need you to bill 43800 hours this year.

Re:continuation ?

[PPH]

Because of the Victor Borge reference? Or the APL one?

Re:continuation ?

[Gr8Apes]

I like your accounting skills. I'm sure we can find a place for you in Trump's financial advisors to fix this minor budget deficit.

Ada?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not sure unknown is a accurate description. Lost is one I would use.

Good news everyone.

[fahrbot-bot]

Stories like this always make me think of the following clip from Futurama A Clone of My Own:

Professor Hubert Farnsworth: And this is my Universal Translator. Unfortunately, so far it only translates into an incomprehensible dead language.
Cubert J. Farnsworth: [into the translator's microphone] Hello.
Translator Machine: Bonjour!
Professor Hubert Farnsworth: Crazy gibberish!

Re:Good news everyone.

[Anonymous Coward]

I can only imagine the shock these people had, when they learned that they were speaking an unknown language.

In a nearby village an interview was conducted:
- Did you know that the people in the next village are talking an unknown language?
- No. I mean I always suspected there was something odd about them, but I discarded it as a speech impediment.

Discovered

[110010001000]

Reminds me of The Society for Putting Things on Top of Other Things. They discovered that different groups of people sometimes spoke different languages.

Papua New Guinea

[mspohr]

PNG has over 700 languages (plus many undiscovered tribes and languages).
The rugged terrain led to isolated groups each developing their own language.
The common language of the country is a pidgin (Tok Pisin) plus English.

Re:Papua New Guinea

[Anonymous Coward]

So how many languages does GIF have???

Re:Papua New Guinea

[Anonymous Coward]

The Grenada Independent Federation?

Re: Papua New Guinea

[Anonymous Coward]

Made my day

One village

[OpenSourced]

One village. I mean it'a just one village, and they cannot all speak the same language? I'm all for cultural diversity and all that crap, but, surely 7001 languages are a bit too much? There is a need to have 7000 plus different ways of asking somebody to pass you the salt?

640 languages should be enough for everybody.

7000 languages?

[tinkerton]

It's so tempting to throw that number around because it sounds impressive or what? The distinction between a language and a dialect is flexible and I'm guessing that if you shift that boundary suddenly your number of languages changes drastically.
Still, I'd like to see that on a map

Re:7000 languages?

[Hognoxious]

I've heard similar figures before[1], so I assume they know what they're talking about.

But even if 9/10 are really dialects, and there are 200-odd countries, it's still around 3:1. Intuitively, I'd expect the ratio to be the other way round, even with abominations like Belgium and Switzerland.

[1] I have somewhere a TTC course, not that old, that says 6,000.

Re:7000 languages?

[Anonymous Coward]

Belgium? Switzerland both veritable mono-cultures. Come to India. We have millions of speakers across tens of languages. Total about 700+ languages with numerous dialects between them. And these are full blown languages from multiple distinct families, with their own script, literature and cultures.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_India.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of_native_speakers_in_India

Re:7000 languages?

[Hognoxious]

Belgium and Switzerland (mainly) use borrowed languages, though. Hence, overall you get more than one country per language. So out of the EU, two share French, three share German and so on.

India is a bit of a special case, since in a way it's a lot of countrylets joined together.

Maybe it's not a new language

[mykepredko]

Just be a candidate for the IOCCC.

I'm sayin' it's aliens but...

[Anonymous Coward]

"Some of these words suggested a link with other Aslian languages spoken far away in other parts of the Malay Peninsula."

It's Aliens.

Let's hope that gcc ...

[Mister Liberty]

... will soon support this new language.

igpay atlinlay

[goombah99]

eyhay, etslay oolfay ethay inguistlay

"Unknown language?"

[ScentCone]

It seems that at least a few people know it.

Reminds me of that unknown continent that Christopher Columbus sort of ran into. You know, the one that the Vikings had already visited hundreds of years earlier, and which a bunch of Asians had walked and/or floated over to thousands of years earlier. "Unknown" is a silly adjective in cases like this.

Re:"Unknown language?"

[Anonymous Coward]

The Vikings problem was that they didn't bother to write it down. The Asians forgot to phone home about it.

Re:"Unknown language?"

[ScentCone]

Well, the Vikings did make some marks, and left a bunch of signs of themselves. And the Asians just set up shop and became "native" Americans.

Re:"Unknown language?"

[epine]

Reminds me of that unknown continent that Christopher Columbus sort of ran into. You know, the one that the Vikings had already visited hundreds of years earlier, and which a bunch of Asians had walked and/or floated over to thousands of years earlier. "Unknown" is a silly adjective in cases like this.

Any competent dictionary list these additional, commonly accepted meanings of "unknown":
        – unplundered
        – won't be missed

Weird for this to get a headline

[gman003]

"New language on an existing branch within a fairly well-studied family" seems fairly niche for a /. article. I'm sure the Austro-asiatic linguistics blogs are all over this, but new languages get discovered all the time. I'd only expect to see it on non-linguistics news sites if there was something special about it - if it was an isolate, or contained an unusual feature, for instance.

(Also: the article summary misspelled "Austro-asiatic", omitting the "R".)

Unknown?

[digitig]

Unknown to whom? It was perfectly well known to its speakers. For them, the news is 7000 unknown languages discovered.

Re:Unknown?

[Hognoxious]

Did you know about it? Neither did I. So the answer is probably "readers of this site" or "the vast majority of the world's population".

Are you an aspie or just being wilfully obtuse 4 teh lolz?

Old people hick-speak

[Anonymous Coward]

Every village has that.

There is *NO* 'Malay Peninsular'

[Anonymous Coward]

The Semangs, just like the negarito Aetas of Philippines, Andamaneses of India and other black tribes in Asia today are the remnants of the Homo Sapiens of African origin (blacks), who migrated out of Africa from about 80,000 to 70,000 years ago

The Semangs are not Malays

https://kwekudee-tripdownmemorylane.blogspot.my/2012/10/semang-people-one-of-african-natives-of.html

Those speaking 'Aslian' are Orang Asli, the TRUE INDIGENOUS of the so-called 'Malay Peninsular'

That place should not be known as the 'Malay Peninsular' for the Malays didn't showed up until some 70+ thousands of years later

The Malays are *NOT* from the indigenous bloodline

They Malays are invaders from the North - from Yunan province of China

Re:There is *NO* 'Malay Peninsular'

[Anonymous Coward]

Let me correct you: all modern people are invaders from Africa. There existed survivors of supervolcano eruption, like neanderthalians, denovisians and there is a lot of questions about papuan premodern mix(even if they are one of the latest developments). It is not like there were no people at all out of Africa when supervolcano erupted and erased them there. In fact most of modern peoples are a result of intermixing with other groups of people.

Remnants of Homo Sapiens migration out of Africa 70 000 years ago also are mongols and Ohotsk sea natives. They are not black - neither are bushmen, who has lighter skill to a later development of black skin in western Africa.

PS Aslian languages are Austroasiatic languages and it appears that negritos have shifted their language from their own a very long time ago, so it might be impossible that any native language exists. Better luck with distinct language is with Veddas in Sri lanka.