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sil.org>There are so many errors of fact in this NYT article that a point-by-point rebuttal would probably be longer than the original essay. I won't attempt that here, but I will comment on one point. In the context of the notion that language extinction is not permanent because languages can be revived, no language can be brought back unless it has been documented, where documentation includes large amounts of text, grammatical and lexical analysis, audio recordings (or at the very least detailed phonological analysis). Very few languages are documented to that extent today, and few if any of them are endangered languages. Most endangered languages are not documented _at all_. Mike Maxwell Linguistic Data Consortium maxwellMail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue
attbi.com>Speculation about the the parallel between species and languages goes back at least to Leibniz (Waterman 1978). And it may well be that the parallel between the panda and Ubykh is even closer than suggested in this discussion so far. Panda's are in trouble because their traditional environment for food and sex is changing and pandas' behavior is not. Ubykh was in trouble because, unlike pandas, the traditional Ubykh speakers apparently felt that as times change - like it or not, another language would be more adaptive. Linguists might -- like it or not -- consider whether something about Ubykh itself led to its demise in modern human environments-- possibly its more than seventy consonants? Imagine a two year old singing the Ubykh alphabet song--would they ever get to "LLLMMNPPPP?" Psychologists since (Ebbinghaus 1885/1913) have known that phonological encoding is among the more basic cognitive processes and that specific codes lead to specific outcomes in working memory. Articulatory issues impact schoolchildren's reading and mathematical capacities. It does not stretch the imagination to consider that different languages might impact these cognitive processes differently--if in nothing more than computational "overhead" in mapping phonological neighborhoods of their mental lexicons. Could Ubykh have choked to death on its own consonants? Probably as I write, someone is preparing yet another comparative neurolinguistic study contrasting blood flow, caloric uptake, oxygen usage or whatever between speakers of one language or another while encoding their language. Such comparative questions can be now be addressed directly. Differences may be small but in terms of reproductive fitness it may not take much advantage for one species to replace another when environments change. Ebbinghaus, H. (1885/1913). Memory: A contribution to experimental psychology. New York, Teachers College, Columbia University. Garlock, V. M., A. C. Walley, et al. (2002). "Age-of-acquisition, word frequency, and neighborhood density effects on spoken word recognition by children and adults." Journal of Memory and Language 45: 468-492. Paulesu, E. et al. (2001). "Dyslexia: Cultural diversity and biological unity." Science 291: 2165-2167. Waterman, J. T. (1978). Leibniz and Ludolf on Things Linguistic: Excerpts from Their Correspondence. Berkelely, University of California Press. http://www.evertype.com/alphabets/tevfik.html John Limber Department of Psychology University of New Hampshire 10 Library Way, Durham, NH 03824-3567 Course info at: http://pubpages.unh.edu/~jelMail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue
hermes.cam.ac.uk>Tom Pullman quotes Andrew Dalby: ''Unlike other, earlier world languages, modern English will never split off into distinct parallel forms, as the Romance languages evolved from Latin. For a new language to emerge requires a degree of cultural isolation, or at least independence, that has become impossible. The world is simply too interconnected, by global technology and a global economy, to think in new words.'' I would be curious to know whether other linguists' experience supports this or not. In particular, I get the impression that when the substantial majority of a country's population speak a mostly unwritten language, as in the Arab world's "dialects", or Hong Kong, or several African countries, that language is likely to change extremely fast. In Algeria, for instance, dialectal poetry of two generations ago is already difficult for younger speakers to understand, not because the language has shifted to some more standardized form but because its vocabulary has extensively borrowed from French and standard Arabic and its grammar has changed in several respects. If this is true generally, then we could have a variety of new languages to look forward to, even assuming that present trends continue. Lameen SouagMail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue