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

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 ?

[nitehawk214]

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

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: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.

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.