Ancient dialect extinct after last speaker dies

Yahoo News/Reuters ^ | Feb 5, 2010 | Sanjib Kumar Roy

[James C. Bennett]

Andaman and Nicobar are the islands where the native tribals shoot arrows at Indian Navy helicopters which bring in food and water for them.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/4144405.stm

Tribe shoots arrows at aid flight

By Jonathan Charles

BBC News, Andaman Islands

An Indian helicopter dropping food and water over the remote Andaman and Nicobar Islands has been attacked by tribesmen using bows and arrows.

There were fears that the endangered tribal groups had been wiped out when massive waves struck their islands.

But the authorities say the attack is a sign that they have survived.

More than 6,000 people there are confirmed as either dead or missing, but thousands of others are still unaccounted for.

The Indian coastguard helicopter was flying low over Sentinel Island to drop aid when it came under attack.

A senior police officer said the crew were not hurt and the authorities are taking it as a sign that the tribes have not been wiped out by the earthquake and sea surges as many had feared.

The Andaman and Nicobar archipelago is home to several tribes, some extremely isolated.

Officials believe they survived the devastation by using age-old early warning systems.

They might have run to high ground for safety after noticing changes in the behaviour of birds and marine wildlife.

Scientists are examining the possibility to see whether it can be used to predict earth tremors in future.

“Uncontacted” and Isolated Tribes

http://travel.nationalgeographic.com/places/gallery/tribe-gallery_sentinelese-man.html

National Geographic

Native culture experts worried that the devastating Indian Ocean tsunami on December 26, 2004, may have wiped out many or all of the indigenous peoples of India's Andaman and Nicobar Islands. This image of a belligerent Sentinel Island man taken on December 28, as well other photos shot by the Indian Coast Guard, reassured them that at least Sentinelese tribespeople survived.

The Sentinelese are among the world's most isolated people. They are thought to have descended directly from the first voyagers out of Africa. Experts think they have lived in the Andaman archipelago with little outside contact for some 60,000 years.

Andaman and Nicobar are the islands where the native tribals shoot arrows at Indian Navy helicopters which bring in food and water for them.

[I still care]

We have lots of languages in the US that are going extinct because frankly, no one speaks them and they never adapted. For instance my mother spent years of her childhood in Wichita, there are very few speakers of it.

On one level it is sad but people who are interested need to preserve what they can for their history. There is a lot to learn from ancient language- many facts can be gleaned from them. But otherwise, it’s silly to want to preserve what very few want to use.

I’ve always been interested in accents, which are also rapidly dying - with mass communication, we are all learning to speak “television anchor”. My family grew up speaking “Brooklynese”, its always been reviled and slowly passing.

Ever hear old tapes of FDR and Elinor? They had an accent that wealthy people used to cultivate. It’s pretty much gone now.

[Rodamala]

...had an accent that wealthy people used to cultivate. It’s pretty much gone now.

[shibumi]

"Boa's loss is a bleak reminder that we must not allow this to happen to the other tribes of the Andaman Islands,"



Why?

[shibumi]

Qapla’ batlh je!

[BigCinBigD]

Hershey Penn would be a great place to start. kaplah!

[sig226]

There’s an academic discipline that studies the evolution of language over time. I sincerely can not remember what it’s called, which is ironic.

[married21]

Hoonch apesiiw,
iykuych apesiiw,
amat nyasaam,
amat hechkyalp.
Puy sinvech, pataly heqwik,
amat nyasaam, qwhilk we tuyaaw.
Emay, ahaa, hemaah,
Emay, ahaa, hemaah.

(Silent Night in Sycuan, once spoken in the San Diego area by the local native Americans. Before the last native speaker died in the 1970s, a professor from San Diego State learned it and gave it a written form. The children’s choir were taught some hymns in Sycuan, using his records, a few years later. I learned it from them, but I think I have forgotten much of the spelling.)

[SunkenCiv]

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[muawiyah]

Ladino was spoken in Spain and around the Mediterranean by Jews. It was their lingua franca ~ before the far later Yiddish, or certainly modern Hebrew.

So, why learn Ladino ~ and how hard is it. Ladino is your basic Latin with a far richer vocabulary. At the same time if you'd like to read a Medieval book in the original language, and it looks like Latin or Spanish, but not quite, that's Ladino.

Historians of the period as well as economic analysts into examining the entrails of 2000 years of just one thing after the other have to learn Ladino.

Now, Mingo ~ that one is more difficult. It's your basic non-Confederation Iroquois language ~ but, like Ladino, with a broader vocabulary.

So, you don't want to bother with it ~ but that'll keep you out of Mingo Camp where all sorts of folks go in the summer to dress and live like Iroquois!

Those Oklidokly words Homer Simpson uses? That's Mingo.

In their day the Mingo and their warrior elite were the most adanced Indians in North America.

Modern dictionaries tend to ignore both Ladino and Mingo so you get rather elaborate confabulations about what a certain word means when all you'd need to do was find a Ladino or Mingo dictionary to set the record straight. Alas, both kinds of dictionaries are difficult to lay your hands on.

Regarding the future of Chinese, Bill Gates has made sure the character language survives for eternity ~ there's a very good relationship between Windows/Office ideographs and Chinese ideographs. Most folks never notice. Then there are the more advanced "script" characters, which appear to be valid add-ons to the Chinese script character language.

It's not that English is sucking in all the others ~ rather, when it comes to Chinese languages, English has much more in common with them than the average person knows.

[garyhope]

“Spinal Tap” was a lot more real than many people know.

[shibumi]

“When my plans to destroy the Earth have succeeded, I will marry Dale Arden and our children, along with all the people of the Universe will be speaking Mingo!”

[TruthHound]

Believe me, I know. Had a friend who managed some big bands who got lost in a labarynth under the stage.

[Slings and Arrows]

Is that Carolyn Jones standing behind Ming?

[shibumi]

No. It’s Priscilla Lawson. The hottest babe of her time (in my not-so-humble opinion.)

Untimely death at age 44.

Bio here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priscilla_Lawson

[muawiyah]

"Make it so #1!" (chortled Jean Jaques Picard as he leaned back in the command console) "Make it so"

To which replied #1: "Okely dokely"!

[Slings and Arrows]

Got it - thanks!

[Verginius Rufus]

I once heard a lecture about Turkey (mainly about how as the Ottoman Empire shrank, many Muslims from the lost provinces resettled in Turkey). The speaker mentioned the case of Turkish consul in Chicago whose wife spoke no English. Someone who met her thought she must have a hard time there, but no—she was a Sephardic Jew and could go into the Spanish-speaking neighborhoods and converse with the storekeepers with no trouble.

[Verginius Rufus]

The problem with learning to speak Ancient Greek is there is no one to converse with in that language. There is the advantage that no native speaker can tell you that you are mispronouncing a word.

Learning to read Ancient Greek, on the other hand, is quite worthwhile. There is a lot of great literature in the language which can be better appreciated in the original than in a translation. An added benefit is that if you take it as a college course, you aren't going to be asked to write an essay on "How I spent my summer vacation" in the language.

[AndyJackson]

What value has a language that no one speaks? Is it really a language if no one uses it?

The language reflects the adaptations of a culture to survival in a unique environment. A certain richness of the human tradition is lost when a language is lost. One probably can do nothing, and perhaps one should except in certain circumstances do nothing, but that does mean that the loss should not be noted and mourned.

The way we are headed we will all be speaking a peculiar stilted form of English in the barely intelligible dialect of East Asians. Fortunately, I think that the human spirit will not allow that to happen. Even though people around the Baltic Sea speak English better than you and I, things like Finnish and Estonian are surviving just fine. It is necessary. The English language does not have an adequate way of describing the experience of a Møøse bite.