Aramaic, a Semitic language related to Hebrew and Arabic, was the common tongue of the entire Middle East when the Middle East was the crossroads of the world. People used it for commerce and government across territory stretching from Egypt and the Holy Land to India and China. Parts of the Bible and the Jewish Talmud were written in it; the original "writing on the wall," presaging the fall of the Babylonians, was composed in it. As Jesus died on the cross, he cried in Aramaic, "Elahi, Elahi, lema shabaqtani?" ("My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?")
But Aramaic is down now to its last generation or two of speakers, most of them scattered over the past century from homelands where their language once flourished. In their new lands, few children and even fewer grandchildren learn it. (My father, a Jew born in Kurdish Iraq, is a native speaker and scholar of Aramaic; I grew up in Los Angeles and know just a few words.) This generational rupture marks a language's last days. For field linguists like Khan, recording native speakers—"informants," in the lingo—is both an act of cultural preservation and an investigation into how ancient languages shift and splinter over time.
In a highly connected global age, languages are in die-off. Fifty to 90 percent of the roughly 7,000 languages spoken today are expected to go silent by century's end. We live under an oligarchy of English and Mandarin and Spanish, in which 94 percent of the world's population speaks 6 percent of its languages. Yet among threatened languages, Aramaic stands out. Arguably no other still-spoken language has fallen farther.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/how-to-save-a-dying-language-4143017/?all
(Score: 4, Interesting) by c0lo on Wednesday July 31 2019, @03:12PM (11 children)
How about a continuous culture far older than any other on this Earth [australiangeographic.com.au] which one may never learn directly about because their language dies? [wikipedia.org]
Other uncontacted people [wikipedia.org], many invaded in sorta contemporary conquista [survivalinternational.org]?
Tears in the rain, we don't even know what we are losing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 31 2019, @06:15PM (10 children)
The dirty little secret that no one will publicly acknowledge is that the current population of Australian aborigines have only been here 10,000 years. They displaced an earlier culture which is where all the >10,000 year old artefacts come from. So they are invaders too, just a bit older.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 31 2019, @06:41PM (5 children)
Nice try. Except the Earth is only 6000 years old. So you'll need to come back with a better justification for genocide.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01 2019, @01:39PM (1 child)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01 2019, @02:40PM
Just give them more petrol to sniff, that will get their minds off the intrusion.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01 2019, @01:42PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01 2019, @01:55PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01 2019, @01:59PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01 2019, @01:28PM (1 child)
Yeah, we don't talk about things like that. Just like we don't mention that those tribes would slaughter each other for resources making the arrival of Europeans no different than some other tribe taking over.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01 2019, @02:09PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01 2019, @02:02PM (1 child)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01 2019, @02:27PM
Racist!