Comments

Languages are the life-blood of human communications, we are yet to fully understand the evolution of a language, yet to get to the 'root' of the spoken word. The death of the last communicators' of the Bo language is sad indeed, we are poor by 65000 years in losing out a chance to understand a living language. The Bo's were hounded to death like the displaced Native Indians of the US, sheer mis-understanding of their communication protocols and habits. Today is a sad day for a Tulu-speaking minority like me, the pain of having not learned enough about a language which was alive till yesterday. Language experts in the US should move forward to revive lost languages by harnessing the power of the computing machine.

There are many other tribal people (and hence languages) under threat in the Andaman region--the full story about Boa Sr can be read at http://www.survivalinternational.org/new...

Based on the poorly-written stuff I read on Wikipedia and dozens of forums that I visit on the Internet, I contend that English, too, is threatened, with the lack of proper formal training in today's schools and the encroachment of various pidgin dialects and text-messaging writing styles. Need further proof? Check out the so-called Urban Dictionary site on the Internet. I learned German as a child from my father in the 1950's. When I compare the reading materials I had in the 1960's with what we find on the Web today, German has become almost unrecognizable, as it is larded with English words and phrases and the grammar is even getting twisted. I also learned Latvian -- an ancient language whose roots have been traced back some 4,000 years -- from my mother at the same time, and am still fluent in it, but don't find the language useful in the modern environment, as it lacks the vocabulary I need to deal in my chosen profession, electronics engineering. You'd think that Gutenberg's invention of the printing press would have frozen languages, as it did German for centuries, but with international telephone, radio, television, pop music and Internet communications, the stability of all languages seems to have become unmoored.

(Responding to comment by vu2rgu on February 5, 2010 at 12:59 a.m.)
"... the US should move forward to revive lost languages by harnessing the power of the computing machine."

The problem is that our computing machinery is ephemeral, much less stable and enduring than the "wetware" in the brains of people. People live 60-100 years. The best storage media ever developed for computers were punched paper cards, paper tape or Mylar tape, but they are extremely low-density and a half century after their invention you'll only find them and the equipment to read them in computer museums. CD's and DVD's? No one knows, but it is thought the world's best brands might be good for 10 to 30 years under optimum storage conditions. Flash memory devices? Perhaps 5 to 7 years of data retention. Storage in "the cloud"? One slip by data center employees and terabytes of data can disappear from arrays of disk drives in seconds, and even then, the disk drives we now have are Made in China and carry warranties of only 1 to 5 years. The codes used to store data evolve, too, with ASCII being displaced by Unicode, although the casual observer wouldn't be able to tell one from the other at the binary level. Until long-life storage media are developed and methods for accessing such media are frozen so that information can be stored and retrieved for centuries, even millennia, we're better off using clay tablets, parchment scrolls and the wetware of human brains to keep languages alive.

I'm sorry but English is not in trouble. The first thing you will have to know about language is that it is a living thing; constantly picking up new habits and ideas. English in fact is such a borrowed language that it would be foolish to make an argument that any version would be "proper." Writing does help to solidify language, but language doesn't want to be solid. Even with a formalized system, but there will always be vicissitudes of dialect. In fact writing does not keep language alive. Since we have hundreds of written artifacts in multiple languages with no way of reading them; only the speakers of a language keep it living. When they die, so much is lost in history, culture, and world perspective. I applaud the work OU is doing in preserving native american languages, and I hope people will notice our unique geographic advantage and help us empower that work. It is sad to see such ignorant elitism in the wake of the silencing of tens of thousands of years of another language.