Here's a better link to the actual project.
<a href="http://www.endangeredlanguages.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.endangeredlanguages.com/</a><p>This is really awesome. One of my good friends is a linguist, and when I first started learning about languages, I couldn't figure out what all the hype was about. Yeah languages are dying... So what? A single language where I could communicate with anyone in the world would be the best, wouldn't it?<p>A language is like a toolbox for idea transmission, we want to share what we see on the inside, and language is one of our best ways to do it. It's the most universal, it's one of the first things we learn, and it has the ability to incite the most powerful imagery (books vs. a movie).<p>Say a language is the average mean of a group of people's ability to speak to one another. These people were likely geographically isolated and their language developed on it's own, they saw things in the world and described them with their language. Their culture, their ideas, their perceptions of the world are all encoded into their language. When all the native speakers of a language die, we lose more than just the language, we lose the insights that the language carried, a language that was likely crafted over many thousands of years.<p>Take for instance color blindness. Attempt to explain to someone with color blindness what colors look like. It will never work, they will never experience what you experience, but they can share your experience through your description of colors, they can imagine what the world could be like if you give a good enough description. We lose analogies for human thoughts when languages die, and if we ever want to begin to understand what a consciousness is, preserving these analogies is an absolute necessity. We could wonder for millions of years whether or not a language could ever come to be that didn't have counting words, but luckily we found the Piranha[1] that do just that [2]. It's like all the species we're losing in the rain forests, what if the cure for cancer was present in one of the now-extinct mushrooms? What if we never could find the cure for cancer because we just didn't have that mushroom? It likely won't happen for cancer, but for consciousness we need every piece of information that we can get.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/04/16/070416fa_fact_colapinto" rel="nofollow">http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/04/16/070416fa_fact_...</a><p>[2] <a href="http://phys.org/news/2012-02-math-words.html" rel="nofollow">http://phys.org/news/2012-02-math-words.html</a>
Semi-unrelated, am I the only one astounded at how effective Google was in making the Blogger reading experience as terrible as it could be? <a href="http://cl.ly/HaPS" rel="nofollow">http://cl.ly/HaPS</a><p>Weird layouts, loading screens, horrible gesture-based interface for touch devices, etc.<p>I miss the static blogs.
They missed Venetan[1].<p>It's considered vulnerable by UNESCO[2], but it's not even recognized as a language by the Italian governement (just by the Venetan region).<p>As almost all pre-unitarian Italic languages, it's not being thought, degraded as 'dialect' and is being discouraged as an idiom for ignorants.<p>There's a very ample discussion to make about these issues here in Italy. If anyone wants to know more, I'll try to answer. Here or in a more appropriate venue.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venetan_language" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venetan_language</a><p>[2]<a href="http://www.unesco.org/culture/languages-atlas/en/atlasmap/language-id-1021.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.unesco.org/culture/languages-atlas/en/atlasmap/la...</a>
For a minute there, I thought it was about endangered programming languages. Well, this is far better, looks like a very interesting project that I would like to follow close.
There's a language around my hometown that only about 250 people speak: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kwakwala" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kwakwala</a><p>The community is doing a great job at keeping their language alive. A few of my friends took Kwak'wala classes in middle/high school.<p>Here's what the language sounds like: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNECt4ViNjY" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNECt4ViNjY</a>
Let's not forget Microsoft and supporting all their products in languages such as Irish and Welsh. P.s Welsh isn't on the map of endangered languages (oops).
Every endangered language we can categorize is an insight into our more primitive selves. Languages reflects so much of a society's culture, and so many of these languages come from isolated areas that have had little contact with the developed world.
It seems like they're missing some Chinese dialects which are mutually unintelligible from mandarin. Maybe they aren't endangered, but China only teaches mandarin in schools.