(no subject)

[frandroid]

Budding Jordan cyber love ends in divorce [through dubaiwalla]. That is the funniest internet love story I've heard of in a long time.

...

I was reading ahead in my linguistics book and I came across the chapter on Amerindian languages. There was a listing of Algonquian languages, and their number of speakers left in Canada:

Cree 55,000
Ojibway 40,000
Montagnais-Niskapi 5,000
Blackfoot 4,000
Micmac 3,000-5,000
Malecite 250
Potawatomi 100
Delaware 5-10
Abenaki 10

I just started crying silently in the library. I'm very tired so I'm much more prone than usual to crying (and I'm probably more prone than most people, although I generally keep that private), but still. I mean in the same chapter I've seen tons of languages that have been dead for a good while, so why bother about those dying languages?

Anyway.

Comments

[deerscare.livejournal.com]

interesting... i grew up hearing ojibway being spoken by people in my town. there are some french inspired words in there.. for instance hello, it's a word (which i can only spell phonetically, ive never seen it written) "buh-joo" (similar to bonjour without the constenant ends to vowell sounds).

[frandroid.livejournal.com]

It's possible they borrowed it from French, since French explorators mapped big chunks of Ontario (heck, of North America), along with mixing with native people far more than the English did.

A lot of the Amerindian languages had no written scripts until European missionaries came here, and invented them. Their purpose was to be able to give out bibles written in these languages...

an aside: I got stranded in Kenora when I hitch-hiked to Vancouver in 1998(?)... The graffiti in the Timmy Ho's bathroom stall read something like "Kenora: the place where the cops fucked up a native hostage situation and everyone got killed." It made me laugh, but not so the 5 hours I waited before someone bothered to give me a ride to Winnipeg.

[compasspoints.livejournal.com]

as uncomfortable as this is to say, i think there's a definite stronger visual impact to seeing things dwindle, rather than to see them wiped out entirely.... if the language is extinct, then it's gone entirely and we can't really do much to revive it. however, if there are still a few people who speak it and you're slowly watching them die, and therefore watching the language itself die, the effect is much more immediate. those numbers have real, immediate meaning, even if you're only looking at stats on a page.

[frandroid.livejournal.com]

Yes. I'm actually quite taken by casuality numbers. I was once told that 100 million people had died in China due to the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward, that was the first time I head of the immensity of the amounts of deaths due to bad communist policies in China, whether the number is 10, 20 or 100M. My eyes welled right away. My interlocutor could not understand how I could cry for such a number, since it's so hard to comprehend. But... I felt it. I think I can feel the numbers.

Take that Descartes.

[dubaiwalla.livejournal.com]

I am one of those evil people who would be happy if every language (besides English, but of course) were to die. Sure, we'd lose a lot of literature, but we'd all be able to talk to one another. Sort of.

[mrputter.livejournal.com]

> we'd all be able to talk to one another

... but would we have anything interesting to say...?