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He will promise the sun moon and stars to anybody who will catch him out. And well he may. Just take the sun, moon and stars for a moment. Sun, you say, is grian. Not at all, Dinneen shouts that grian means 'the bottom of a lake, well '. You are a bit nettled and mutter that, anyway, gealach means moon. Gealach means 'the white circle in a slice of half-boiled potato, turnip, etc.
Eclectic I think is the word. I didn't come down in the last shower. Call me a bit fastidious if you like but I like to have some idea of what I'm writing.
One must be careful. If I write in Irish what I conceive to be 'Last Tuesday was very wet,' I like to feel reasonably sure that what I've written does not in fact mean 'Mr. So-and-So is a thief and a drunkard. That's not what I wanted to quote either. Let's just say that my top 10 are in base Some numbers have all the luck. Considering what most English speakers can achieve with their tiny fund of noises, it is a nice speculation to what extremity one would be reduced if one were locked up for a day with an Irish-speaking bore and bereft of all means of committing murder or suicide.
There is scarcely a single word in the Irish barring, possibly, Sasanach that is simple and explicit. Apart from words with endless shades of cognate meaning, there are many with so complex a spectrum of graduated ambiguity that each of them can be made to express two directly contrary meanings, as well as a plethora of intermediate concepts that have no bearing on either. And all this strictly within the linguistic field. Here is an example copied from Dinneen and from more authentic sources known only to my little self: One could go on and on without reaching anywhere in particular. If it's small, it's a boat, and if it's big it's a ship.
In Donegal there are native speakers who know so many million words that it is a matter of pride with them never to use the same word twice in a life-time. Their life not to say their language becomes very complex at the century mark; but there you are. But, at the same time he does have something to say about what's possible in languages-known-to-entirely-too-few. Imagine how funny he might be in Irish writing about English! Witness my document of this: Some 25, people were killed in this way.
Even three years later radio broadcasts and newspapers were calling for the total extermination of the Indians of El Salvador to prevent another revolt. Many people stopped speaking their languages to avoid being identified as Indian, in order to escape what they feared was certain death in a country which officially had no Indians.
Language death is symptomatic of cultural death: I'm not one of them.
Only some 50 languages are widely spoken today and of these only 18 have at least speakers. These 18 account for roughly 25, of the remaining 30, speakers of Aboriginal languages. There is no Aboriginal language that is used in all arenas of everyday life by members of a sizeable community. It is possible that only two or three of the languages will survive into the next century. Some ideas are more native to one language than another, one can expect for there to be ideas in one language entirely lacking from another.
Let's take a somewhat shocking example. My motto of sorts is "Anything is Anything". In English that's a pretty straightforward tautology at least at 1st glimpse. My multilingual friend Florian Cramer, who probably speaks at least 5 languages if not more, offered to translate it into German, his 1st language, for me, He concluded that there's no equivalent in German for "anything". That IS shocking isn't it? His translation had to substitute something like 3 to 5 words for "anything". Looking in my handy German dictionary I find "anything" translated as "etwas" or "alles".
At any rate, I trust Florian's claim that "Anything is Anything" doesn't translate in its full meaning as easily as: Compare English with only 24 consonants and approximately 20 vowels, depending on the combination of sounds in a particular variety; or Rotokas, a language spoken on Bougainville island in Papua New Guinea, with the smallest number of sounds in any language, only 5 vowels and 6 consonants.
The majority of "world" languages such as Chinese, English, Spanish, and Arabic, spoken by 50 million or more people, are, by contrast, not isolates and they are also not as grammatically complex as many of the world's smaller languages. I prefer complex culture, complex music, eg. I'm exasperated by the way global conqueror iTunes has reduced musical language to a level of imbecility, to "songs" played by "bands".
I'd give Vanishing Voices an April rated it liked it Jan 11, Daniel Nettle received his Ph. There is little for me to add to the other fine reader reviews of this work except to say that I found it very repetitive. In our languages lies the accumulated knowledge of humanity.
Sep 20, Kora rated it it was amazing Shelves: I've read this book in order to write an accademic paper and I found it really useful. First of all, the book focuses on the technical terms such as Language Death, Language extinction and Language suicide; mentioning that both linguists and biologists refer to the disappearance of a Language or different species with the same terms. This is due to the fact Language is far more than a system of communication.
In fact, as the most fascinating invention of humankind, includes various forms of ancie I've read this book in order to write an accademic paper and I found it really useful. In fact, as the most fascinating invention of humankind, includes various forms of ancient culture and ancient knowledge and therefore the languages most be maintained.
The book also mentions how the extinction of some languages is related to human rights abuses persecution and eradicaion of minorities or forced assimilations to the dominant Language and culture or to the extinction of various plants and animals. A must read for anyone interested in seeing languages in a different way. Nov 04, Amber rated it really liked it. This book was a fascinating insight into the world of language and how it directly connects to the world around it. It's also an eloquent plea for making the effort not just to document languages or create educational systems for them, but to change our very way of living so as to encourage the growth of diversity.
I highly recommend it. It was wonderful to find a book like this, written for the more casual reader. Not only did this book delve into the history and ascent or decline of various languages, but also into biological and socioeconomic factors as well. This book will certainly make you a supporter of linguistic diversity.
Nov 10, Clara rated it it was amazing Shelves: I did a seminar paper on language death for my Sociolinguistics class and got this as a recommendation from my professor. It's very informative and written in such a way that anyone can understand, which makes it more interesting. It's also a great starting point for anyone who wishes to deal with this subject in greater depth. Jun 14, Kim rated it really liked it Recommends it for: People interested in linguistics. This books reviews all the languages in the world that are going extinct and the cultures attached to them.
A very fascinating book.
It also discusses many similarities between languages. For the linguist in you Nov 22, Anthony Knuppel rated it really liked it. Excellent introduction to folks interested in language preservation and the importance of documenting dying languages of the world.
View all 3 comments. Nov 24, Tammy Chiang rated it really liked it. A comprehensive overview of the field of Indigenous language studies. Convincing argumentation and well explained terminology. Jan 22, Tjahja rated it really liked it Shelves: Oct 26, Christopher rated it liked it. The Extinction of the World's Languages they have written a introduction for laypeople on the phenomenon of major language death in the modern world, and why we should be concerned.
The history of these developments is the story of the rise of agriculture--the first major change when small populations in equilibrium shifted to dominant and weaker societies--and then the Industrial Revolution where European languages spread all over the world. Numerous case studies are used, such as the decline of the Celtic languages in the British Isles and France, Papua New Guinea youngsters shifting from tribal languages to standard languages, and Hawaiian going from sole language of a million people to a forgotten ancestral language among a now reduced indigenous population.
The authors also fascinatingly show that language death tends to be only one part of poor development strategies with detrimental effects to ecology and human rights as well as local speech.
There are ways to stimulate economic development while still preserving the local language, and Nettle and Romaine give several examples of where this is happening, such as Bali, Hawaii, and Israel where Hebrew, against all odds, has been revived. When it comes to why we should care about the loss of indigenous languages, one major and perfectly valid reason that Nettle and Romaine give is that certain structures only exist in a few languages on Earth. Had Hixkaryana in the Amazon, for example, died out, we would have never known that human languages can have Object-Subject-Verb order.
However, other reviewers have already warned that the book approaches the fallacy of Sapir-Whorfism, by which a given worldview is possible only through some languages and not others. The book has numerous other problems, most of which are small but which add up to the point that the book sorely needs a second edition with revisions. For one, there are minor factual errors like a map showing the Altaic language family spreading from Mesopotamia into the southern Russian steppes.
The Altaic grouping in general extremely controversial, and the spread of these languages--the Turkic migrations--were from the Far East into Central Asia, the very opposite direction. There is also the troubling condemnation of missionary activities. The authors suggest that missionaries of a faith abroad can only do harm to the local language, ignoring completely such prominent figures as St Stephen of Perm Komi , St Herman of Alaska Inuit , and Sts Cyril and Methodius Slavonic who in fact protected local languages and helped their development into literary use.
The authors overall give the impression that local traditions are always good and worth preserving. I disagree, as linguists we can make only the case that all languages are equal, but there's very little support for moral relativism among philosophers anymore.
Finally, while Oxford University Press has a high standard of typographical and print quality, this book is shoddily made. Poor-quality paper, an impression that seems like photocopying instead of printing, and peculiar formatting. I thought it was just my copy, but all other copies of the book that I have come across are the same. A well written and informative book that adresses one of the more underappreciated problems of the world of today: The book sheds clear light on the scale of this cultural disaster, mention many factors that have caused this process, including colonisation and globalisation: The authors also stress the ties be A well written and informative book that adresses one of the more underappreciated problems of the world of today: Oxford University Press Bolero Ozon.
The Extinction of the World's Languages. Daniel Nettle , Suzanne Romaine. Few people know that nearly one hundred native languages once spoken in what is now California are near extinction, or that most of Australia's aboriginal languages have vanished. Daniel Nettle and Suzanne Romaine assert that this trend is far more than simply disturbing.
Making explicit the link between language survival and environmental issues, they argue that the extinction of languages is part of the larger picture of near-total collapse of the worldwide ecosystem. Indeed, the authors contend that the struggle to preserve precious environmental resources-such as the rainforest-cannot be separated from the struggle to maintain diverse cultures, and that the causes of language death, like that of ecological destruction, lie at the intersection of ecology and politics.
In addition to defending the world's endangered languages, the authors also pay homage to the last speakers of dying tongues, such as Red Thundercloud, a Native American in South Carolina; Ned Mandrell, with whom the Manx language passed away in ; and Arthur Bennett, an Australian who was the last person to know more than a few words of Mbabaram. In our languages lies the accumulated knowledge of humanity. Indeed, each language is a unique window on experience.