July 22, 2004

• wow. amazing site. banana! says here that plautdietsch, or low german, is spoken mainly in Hillsboro, Kansas; Reedley, California; and Corn, Oklahoma. whaddya know. also, isn't it sad, the languages with just one speaker left? nobody to talk to. literally.
• like Martha's Vineyard Sign Language. Something I will definitely look into the history of.
• [bannana] SideDish: One of the sadder "extinct languages" stories I heard was that the last native speaker of the language of Cornish died only a few years before voice recording was invented in the 19th century. If there's at least one or two native speakers, you can record them and caputre the language as it's spoken if descendants want to ressurect it.
• Bah! They don't have Klingon, I'm not interested. HahdibaH'!
• They could do better on the Gaelic -- there's information scattered here and there, not accessed through the main index yet. Which is an interesting one, thnaks, shawnj.
• Not sure what you mean about the Gaelic; the various forms are listed under the countries where they're spoken, and all of them are listed here. As for Klingon, you'l want to supplement Ethnologue with this: "All codes assigned by LINGUIST will contain four letters, with ancient languages having the prefix X (e.g. XAKK Akkadian) and all constructed languages the prefix C (e.g. CKLN Klingon)."
• Cool. I'm totally gonna learn Lewada-Dewara.
• I've come across SIL, the linguistics organisation behind ethnologue before, when looking for information on Yi, a Tibeto-Burman language spoken by some of the villagers where I was then working in rural development in south west Sichuan. I realise they have their roots in prosletising Christian organisations looking to get God's word out to "unreached peoples". Subsequent attempts to interview them when working for a development journal revealed them to be somewhat cagey. Other fundametalist Christian organisations here in China use development as a cover for missionary work. Now I have no objection, indeed much admiration, for Christian service organisations, and I remember that many of the materials I used when studying Tibetan were produced by an earlier generation of missionaries, like HA Jaschke. What disturbs me about the tenor of much of their message is that their focus is on harvesting souls, not on a genuine desire to preserve minority cultures or to promote human development goals. However, apart from my failed attempts to have a dialogue, I've had direct contact with them, so are my suspicions unfounded, are they just a benign bunch of scholars, or are they indeed supporting the study of minority language and culture with a view to bringing enormous change from the outside, based on a faith that they have a message of salvation that justifies their intervention?
• no direct contact I meant to say in last para.
• I wish I knew the answer to that question.