Unknown Language Discovered in Malaysia (smithsonianmag.com) 55
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."
No need to preserve (Score:1)
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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.
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If that was a guess it was a very good one.
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Because it's a language that has some structure and meaning but we don't know how to decipher it, which is a challenge for cryptologists.
Linguists have identified the structure of the language as Hebrew written by a monk and the original language as one of the Aztec dialects. Botanists have identified 37 out of 303 pictures of plants. Astronomers have identified some of the constellations in the pictures. Both tie in to a particular region in that continent.
The idea is that it's a guidebook for medicines. O
continuation ? (Score:5, Funny)
Is it dynamically typed ? Does it have continuations ? JIT compiling ?
Re:continuation ? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:continuation ? (Score:5, Funny)
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Especially the ones that were invented less than 5 years ago.
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I am going to need you to bill 43800 hours this year.
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Maybe it's not a new language (Score:2)
Just be a candidate for the IOCCC.
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Sally it uses both whitespace and braces blocks, and has glottal sounds for sigils like $, @ and %
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Just think of how much fun Victor Borge could have had dictating this. Or APL.
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I feel old, that I actually know what you are joking about.
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Because of the Victor Borge reference? Or the APL one?
Good news everyone. (Score:5, Funny)
Stories like this always make me think of the following clip [youtube.com] from Futurama A Clone of My Own [wikipedia.org]:
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!
Discovered (Score:2)
Papua New Guinea (Score:3)
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.
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So how many languages does GIF have???
One village (Score:2, Funny)
One village. I mean it'a just one village, and they cannot all speak the same language? I'm all for cultural diversity and all that crap, but, surely 7001 languages are a bit too much? There is a need to have 7000 plus different ways of asking somebody to pass you the salt?
640 languages should be enough for everybody.
igpay atlinlay (Score:2)
eyhay, etslay oolfay ethay inguistlay
7000 languages? (Score:2)
It's so tempting to throw that number around because it sounds impressive or what? The distinction between a language and a dialect is flexible and I'm guessing that if you shift that boundary suddenly your number of languages changes drastically.
Still, I'd like to see that on a map
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I've heard similar figures before[1], so I assume they know what they're talking about.
But even if 9/10 are really dialects, and there are 200-odd countries, it's still around 3:1. Intuitively, I'd expect the ratio to be the other way round, even with abominations like Belgium and Switzerland.
[1] I have somewhere a TTC course, not that old, that says 6,000.
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Belgium? Switzerland both veritable mono-cultures. Come to India. We have millions of speakers across tens of languages. Total about 700+ languages with numerous dialects between them. And these are full blown languages from multiple distinct families, with their own script, literature and cultures.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_India.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of_native_speakers_in_India
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Belgium and Switzerland (mainly) use borrowed languages, though. Hence, overall you get more than one country per language. So out of the EU, two share French, three share German and so on.
India is a bit of a special case, since in a way it's a lot of countrylets joined together.
Let's hope that gcc ... (Score:2)
"Unknown language?" (Score:1)
Reminds me of that unknown continent that Christopher Columbus sort of ran into. You know, the one that the Vikings had already visited hundreds of years earlier, and which a bunch of Asians had walked and/or floated over to thousands of years earlier. "Unknown" is a silly adjective in cases like this.
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Any competent dictionary list these additional, commonly accepted meanings of "unknown":
– unplundered
– won't be missed
Weird for this to get a headline (Score:2)
"New language on an existing branch within a fairly well-studied family" seems fairly niche for a /. article. I'm sure the Austro-asiatic linguistics blogs are all over this, but new languages get discovered all the time. I'd only expect to see it on non-linguistics news sites if there was something special about it - if it was an isolate, or contained an unusual feature, for instance.
(Also: the article summary misspelled "Austro-asiatic", omitting the "R".)
Unknown? (Score:2)
Unknown to whom? It was perfectly well known to its speakers. For them, the news is 7000 unknown languages discovered.
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Did you know about it? Neither did I. So the answer is probably "readers of this site" or "the vast majority of the world's population".
Are you an aspie or just being wilfully obtuse 4 teh lolz?