
Last speaker of ancient language of Bo dies - fogus
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8498534.stm
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lkozma
Just like with biological species, the moment when the last (or even last few
members) die is just a symbolic event, most of the diversity is lost much
earlier. (It is a small subset of language/folklore/traditions/etc. one person
can keep in their head, just as one individual carries just a small part of
the genetic diversity of the species).

~~~
Herring
Diversity in languages is more like diversity in open source licenses. The
fewer the better. I like being able to exchange ideas with people.

~~~
msg
The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis would tell you differently. The very ideas that you
can hope to have depend on the language you use to interpret the world. Lose a
language, lose a perspective.

This is also one of the things 1984 is about.

~~~
abstractbill
I don't disagree with your point. However, my understanding is that the Sapir-
Whorf hypothesis says the language you speak determines the range of things
you can think about. But that doesn't seem to preclude the existence of a
"super-language" that encompasses the range of every currently used language.
Maybe we could make one? Or maybe one will evolve naturally over time?

~~~
msg
This is an old program of the philosophers. Can you, even in principle, find
the language at the back of reality? Can you eliminate all ambiguities when
you refer to ordinary objects? Are we all talking about more or less the same
things? How could we talk about exactly the same things?

The picture gets a little muddled when you think of the choices and
distinctions each language makes. Some of them will contradict each other.

Suppose Language 1 has 150 words for snow, but only one for love, while
Language 2 has 150 words for love, but only two for snow. Would the uber
language preserve the distinctions for each word? Maybe you're losing
something by learning all this detail.

You can do the same thing with the intensional meanings of words
(connotations). I think one of the original Sapir-Whorf examples traces the
meaning of a word for corn in Language A to words in Language B that mean
"enemy food". Would the uber language remove connotations? It would probably
lose the word from Language B.

But this gets into an even deeper point, which is that when you use a
language, words aren't isolated. They frame a certain outlook on the world
that hangs together. There were probably a bunch of words in Language B that
talk about foreign or "enemy" things. Can you really say those words and mean
them without taking on their perspective?

There are many more examples. We have this kind of thing in English too. We
have "kill" and "murder". We have the Anglo-Saxon words and the Norman words.

And finally and most importantly, what perspective on the world does the
super-language take? Objective? Involved but fair? Polemical? Propagandizing?

------
Semiapies
_"Languages in the Andamans are thought to originate from Africa. Some may be
70,000 years old."_

Wow - I wouldn't mind a linguist vetting _that_ claim. How would we even
_know_ that a language hasn't evolved enough to become an entirely different
language in over ten times the length of recorded human history?

~~~
crux
That claim is utterly bogus. There's no indication that the languages have
anything in particular to do with Africa, and indeed, no evidence that the
language has 'evolved' more or less than any other. There is nothing unique to
Andamanese languages to support the rapidly multiplying claims that they're
'ancient' or 'neolithic'. They're just isolated.

~~~
miloshh
Yes, you're right, they're not "ancient" in any meaningful way. However,
studying long isolated languages is still interesting, since whatever
similaraties can still be discerned between (say) Indo-European and Andamanese
languages were presumably present in the common ancestor of these languages,
which probably existed more than 60k years ago. Thus by studying an isolated
language, we might learn something about an ancient language.

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javery
This article doesn't mention any efforts that might have taken place to
preserve the language, did they record her speaking it? Did she try to teach
anyone else the language? etc.

~~~
derwiki
I thought the same thing -- if this is such a big deal, did they try to
preserve the language by having someone else learn it? I would have liked it
if they at least commented on this; maybe there's a good reason they weren't
able to.

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rimantas
Shouldn't that be an event when _second to the last_ speaker dies? The one
left has no one to talk to anyway :(

~~~
jonknee
Very true--she could have been making it up. Who's to say you don't know the
language when no one else does?

~~~
profquail
Isn't every language "made up"? Whether you sit down and invent it all at
once, or it naturally evolves from an existing language, someone had to be the
first to "know the language when no one else" did.

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arethuza
Look on the bright side, one day the last person who likes VB6 will die too.

~~~
yannis
And Pascal will go down with me:) I loved that language. Now and then I will
code Pascal for fun.

~~~
noonespecial
Rumors of pascal's demise are greatly exaggerated. I still end up doing an
awful lot of coding/maintaining in object pascal. A royal ton of old process
management and accounting systems seem to run on it. There was this little
patch of time starting in the mid 80s and extending all the way through the
90's where it seems like a lot of stuff was done in pascal.

Just when I think I can finally ditch that windows 2000 VM with Delphi 7 on
it, another project dinosaur comes stomping out of the mist.

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sparky
Am I the only one who read that as "ancient language of Bodies?"

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tman
The picture with the subtitle "Professor Abbi and Boa Sr became firm friends"
is rather striking evidence of the diversity of human types present in that
area of the world.

Some Google searching brings up an article with a descriptions of
mitochondrial sequencing done on the Andamanese. Apparently they are of
African pygmoid descent.

It's a rather good object lesson -- if you want to be a professor (the one on
the right), don't let your ancestors get trapped in a genetic backwater for
tens of thousands of years, missing out on all those good brain gene selection
events.

EDIT: Not pygmoid after all. The pygmoid features are the product of
convergent evolution. The evolutionary trend towards small stature seems to be
due to resource competition from living on an island with barely enough space
to support human habitation. It looks like they came through southern Asia.

~~~
simon_
Don't you think it's a little premature to conclude that the quality of her
brain (and not, say, geography) accounts for the difference?

~~~
tman
Uh, no, this subject is a tangent and we shouldn't really get into it here.

However, a couple of general statements: There are reams of genetic and
psychometric data available. More than enough to develop pretty good idea when
and where the most probable selection events for good brain genes occurred and
how fast they spread. Your word 'premature' tells me something about your
acquaintance with that data.

Also, there is one very simple rule: totally genetically isolated communities
only have access to their own mutations. Their population is small, so the
number of mutations is also small. Non-isolated communities get swept by every
positive selection event that comes along.

~~~
jimmybot
It's tangent, but I'm interested. Are you alluding to particular events in
recent history or kinds of events?

Any pointers to reading on this?

~~~
tman
A recent book on this and various other topics related to recent human
evolution is "The 10,000 Year Explosion" by Cochran and Harpending.

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capablanca
He was too lonely.

~~~
crux
It was a woman.

~~~
dhughes
She, not it.

~~~
crux
Expletive 'it'. As in, 'It was a woman who died.'

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regularfry
Does that mean that she was the face of Bo?

I'll get my coat.

