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

Re:continuation ?

[DickBreath]

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

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...