Aka-Bo

Pierre Bancel pierrejbancel at HOTMAIL.COM
Fri Feb 5 10:35:43 UTC 2010


Well, Johanna,
Of course all languages certainly are all as old as any other one, and in this respect you're certainly right. 
However, there is another sense in which some languages or language families may be considered older than other ones--namely, since how long they have been separated from any other language or family. In this respect, Andamanese, likely to have remained in isolation since 60,000 years, certainly is one of the oldest language families in the world. 
And their disparition is likely to deprive us from information about this distant past of human language on a scale no Australian English or Bearnese Occitan or Hakka Chinese dialect, however culturally rich and beautiful and full of history, ever could rival in disappearing. Not because they do not contain the same amount of information, but because there remains closely related sister languages which must contain a lot of the same information. In this sense the disparition of the last Aka-Bo speaker is an incomparably serious loss from the scientific viewpoint, which is admittedly not the only relevant one when dealing with languages.
Best regards,Pierre Bancel

> Date: Fri, 5 Feb 2010 10:23:32 +0100
> From: johanna.laakso at UNIVIE.AC.AT
> Subject: Re: Aka-Bo
> To: ENDANGERED-LANGUAGES-L at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG
> 
> So sad.
> 
> What also made me sad was the way the BBC article was written: "an ancient
> language"... as if there were "older" and "newer" languages (one of the
> staples of any introduction to historical-comparative linguistics is to
> dispel this illusion), and as if the death of any ("less ancient") language
> would not be such a loss to mankind.
> 
> Best
> Johanna Laakso
> 
> 
> Am 5.2.2010 09:53 schrieb "Nicholas Ostler" unter
> <nostler at CHIBCHA.DEMON.CO.UK>:
> 
> > Brief exposure for Bo on the BBC's Radio 4 Today Programme this morning:
> > 
> > http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_8499000/8499752.stm
> > 
> > I don't suppose so many people have ever heard it before, and now it is
> > gone.
> > 
> > 
> > Benjamin Barrett wrote:
> >> Wikipedia has the extinction of Aka-Bo on its main page.
> >> 
> >> BBC has an article as well:
> >> http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8498534.stm?ls
> >> 
> >> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aka-Bo_language
> >> http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=akm
> >> 
> >> Benjamin barrett
> >> Seattle, WA
> >>   
> 
> -- 
> Univ.-Prof. Dr. Johanna Laakso
> Universität Wien, Institut für Europäische und Vergleichende Sprach- und
> Literaturwissenschaft (EVSL) | Abteilung Finno-Ugristik
> Universitätscampus Spitalgasse 2-4 Hof 7, A-1090 Wien
> Tel. +43 1 4277 43019 | Fax +43 1 4277 9430
> johanna.laakso at univie.ac.at | http://homepage.univie.ac.at/Johanna.Laakso/
 		 	   		  
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