Not sure if this belong here or World Events, but this is pretty significant. The language 'Bo' will be no more. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8498534.stm
I'd chalk this one up to the ages... was the last speaker of Bo for 30-40 years... plenty of time to disseminate...
The following assertion in the article is extraordinary: If there were any evidence to support this hypothesis it would be the biggest news in the field of linguistics since Sanskrit was discovered to be related to Latin and Greek in the 18th century. It would be all over the Internet and on the front page of the more erudite newspapers. No one has yet broken the 10,000-year barrier in language history. Everything about a language can completely turn over in that time span, including vocabulary, grammar, syntax and phonetics. 2,000 years ago Chinese was not a tonal language. English, Irish, Italian, Russian and Bengali all evolved from a common ancestor in just 4,000 years. To push back another 6,000 years, long before any language was written down, is pure speculation. To claim to trace a language back beyond the two waves of human diaspora out of Africa, 60KYA and 50KYA, defies common sense. At this point we can't even say for sure that the technology of language had even been invented yet. It may have been invented independently in many times and places, like other key technologies such as pottery, agriculture and metallurgy. This would account for the many apparently unrelated language families. A few years ago, research using massively parallel computing "discovered" a set of about thirty "cognate words" in several major languages. Since: Languages have thousands of words; There are a limited number of sounds that the human vocal organs can produce; and Relating these words to each other required postulating many phonetic shifts, each of which had only a few words as evidence... unremarkable coincidence was accepted as a more plausible explanation.
This story reminds me of The Face of Boe, from Dr Who Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! A character rumored to be billions of years old.
Thats how I see it too, but probably she could not read or write. Only speak it. I am sure there are people who have kept audio logs of her speech. Just a few months ago while travelling in Nasik, I discovered that there was a local "leepi" script, which was no longer in use, it was the original script of Marathi [called Modi leepi] which existed before the Devanagari script was adopted. Coincidentally, our driver's grandfather used to be a local bookkeeper or landlord [I forget which] and on his death, the driver received his books, which were mainly accounts, written in the old script. So within a span of two generations, the script disappeared from Maharashtra Even more strange, I have grown up among Marathi speaking people and I have never heard of it before. For anyone interested here is a sample of Moli leepi [the actual pronounciation is between moli and modi, you have to be somewhere in between the two Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!] Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
Would that make it similar to Spanish D in nada, Greek intervocalic Δ, English soft TH in "the," Icelandic ð? It's a rare phoneme among the world's languages. In my experience it's one of the most difficult sounds for foreigners to master in both English and Spanish.
I don't know how the Spanish nada is pronounced The actual alphabet is Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! And its pronounciation is given here: http://www.omniglot.com/writing/marathi.htm
It's exactly like the TH in the, bathe, mother, those, etc. But I've never heard you speak English so I don't know how you pronounce those words. It's a very difficult phoneme for Indians--at least those who speak Indic languages, I don't know about Dravidian. Many Indians I know just pronounce it as D. Many other foreigners do too, for the same reason, so we've gotten used to hearing it that way. Mexicans and Greeks all say it correctly but we don't run into a lot of Icelanders in America.Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
I cropped the image Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Is that similar to the d in nada?
Not like d. It is a unique sound found only in Indian languages. It l but quite thick, Can't be represented.
Yes I am a native Maharashtrian so I know how its pronounced. I don't know how to convey the sound in English its like a very hard L pronounced as rdh with the tip of the tongue folded back on itself and compressed as its flipped forward
