Re: Congratulation to this newsgroup!


"J. W. Love" <Lovejw@xxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1134748689.973955.190790@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Chess wrote:
>
>> I am amazed that any language with only hundreds of speakers could
>> survive
>
> Anutan has survived for centuries with no more than a few hundred
> speakers, as have several other Polynesian outliers. As Matthew has
> pointed out, New Guinea has many hundreds of languages. Try a rough
> estimate: if the population of the island is, say, 6,000,000 and the
> languages are in the order of magnitude of 1,000, then the average
> language has 6,000 speakers. Naturally, the situation is more complex:
> a few languages have more than 50,000, or even 100,000 speakers, and
> that leaves many languages with far fewer than the average. Also, many
> New Guineans are familiar with languages other than their own. Probably
> at least 15 percent of the world's languages are rarer than the one
> described earlier in this thread as being rare.

Thank you, and everyone, for pointing out these languages, but I never
intended my comments to become a competition. I published 'rare' languages
for mainly Peace Corps use, including for several of these languages the
only grammar of it, eg - that is, a grammar not possessed by its own
speakers.

I wansn't aware that only a few hundred speakers possessed any current
language, other than as transient decrease or increase [as Cornish, eg, a
particular variant on p-Celtic, distinctly different than Welsh].

Some material was so rare that it lay in large envelopes, typed and unbound
as a master, and if anyone ever required a copy we would send them a
photocopy. I don't know if we held any very small New Guinean languages, I
certainly don't remember anyone every buying a copy or licence for them.

>> are they sufficiently different to not be a patois variant of a similar
>> language?
>
> Yes. In New Guinea, some languages spoken by adjacent communities don't
> even belong to the same language family---that is, their ancestral
> languages (if indeed they descend from a common source) may have
> diverged 5,000 to 40,000 years ago. Pick a number.

While those numbers may be correct, they would be very difficult to prove. I
wonder if they had developed written versions of them, or if writing took
place in another language - or if there was a written language at all!?

Cordially, Phil Innes


.

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