I've learnt quite a lot this week, bein' that it was the final week of my first semester back at school. First, I learnt, that you're only punishing yourself when you wait to do big-ass projects to the last minute, Second, I learnt that one day your procrastination might catch up to you and bite you in the ass, and third, I feel - well....I feel like I've been beaten like a rented mule. Here's what else I learnt this week during the negotiation and renegotiation of....stuff...
97 percent of the world’s population speaks about 4 percent of the world’s languages; and conversely, about 96 percent of the world’s languages are spoken by about 3 percent of the world’s people.
Furthermore...
Over the last five centuries, an estimated one-half of all the world’s indigenous languages died. Of the estimated 7,000 living languages in the world today, nearly half are likely to disappear by the year 2100.
Every two weeks the last fluent speaker of a language passes on and with him/her goes literally hundreds of generations of traditional knowledge encoded in these ancestral tongues.
The guy with the beard in the photo is the last speaker of his language. Ever.
Sources: National Geographic News, 2007 & The Living Tongues Institute, 2007 & UNESCO, 2004
2 comments:
Hey, where did you get that picture of Victor? I'm not sure he's the last speaker of his language ever, but , while the verbiage is sometimes difficult to understand, the attentive listener is rewarded with some unique and colorful phrases.
Abbzug, when you think about the last guy that knew the language dying do you immediately think of “If a tree fell in the forest.............?”
Well not me…..I pulled up (from my mind’s shallow depths of random access memory) the thought provoking exchange from the epic Napoleon Dynamite: "This is pretty much the worst video ever made"......"Like, anyone could know that!"
If begs the question of how will we know the last-talker woman died? (I have no doubt it will be a woman, because they always get the last word in.............)
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