Re: Congratulation to this newsgroup!


"Matthew Huntbach" <mmh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:Pine.LNX.4.61.0512161156510.26485@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> On Fri, 16 Dec 2005, Chess One wrote:
>
>> I was once the publisher of an international non-profit who specialised
>> in
>> rare language and culture studies. Some of the languages were so rare
>> that
>> no one even knew their names! As fate arranges these things, I wound up
>> with
>> a work-study student who spoke one of the rarest languages on earth, Tem
>> from Togo, which has [had?] only 100,000 speakers.
>
> Then it is not one of the rarest languages on earth. There are large
> numbers
> of languages whose speakers number in the hundreds, not thousands.

I should be interested to learn of them rather than argue if 100k of
speakers can be called rarest /ibid. As well as Tem he also spoke Ewe,
pronounce the 'w' as 'v', which is tolerably rare.

I am amazed that any language with only hundreds of speakers could survive -
are they sufficiently different to not be a patois variant of a similar
language?

Phil Innes

> Matthew Huntbach


.

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