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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."
Is it dynamically typed ? Does it have continuations ? JIT compiling ?
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!
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
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.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Reminds me of The Society for Putting Things on Top of Other Things. They discovered that different groups of people sometimes spoke different languages.
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.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
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.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
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
Just be a candidate for the IOCCC.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
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...
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
... will soon support this new language.
eyhay, etslay oolfay ethay inguistlay
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
"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 to whom? It was perfectly well known to its speakers. For them, the news is 7000 unknown languages discovered.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
If that was a guess it was a very good one.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Any competent dictionary list these additional, commonly accepted meanings of "unknown":
– unplundered
– won't be missed