new language discovered in remote Australia

[Benjamin Barrett]

I wrote the NYT, told them that this is not the first time this has happened and gave them the link to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaraguan_Sign_Language, but they have failed to correct Dr. Bakker's quote. 

Benjamin Barrett
Seattle, WA

Learn Ainu! https://sites.google.com/site/aynuitak1/videos

On Aug 5, 2013, at 5:53 PM, Joel S. Berson <Berson at ATT.NET> wrote:

> I think W Brewer is being unfair.  Perhaps it is "merely" a "dialect"
> rather than a "language", but it has a speaking, self-perpetuating,
> youthful population, and certainly is "new" because it did not exist
> 30 or so years ago.  Worth my tax dollars. (And definitely in "remote
> Australia": about midway between Darwin and Alice Springs, with
> nothing I'm aware of to the east or west except a rabbit-proof fence.)
> 
> I found this especially intriguing because the language (vocabulary
> and grammar) is said to have been invented by the children of this
> village.  (As the articles note, it does have borrowed and merged elements.)
> 
> A perhaps more-informative article appeared three weeks ago in the
> NYTimes Science pages (with map), online on July 14 and in print on
> July 16.  It's worth reading just for the history of the formation of
> the village (omitted, expectedly, from the Australian article David
> Daniel pointed to, and also, unexpectedly, from Wikipedia's article
> on Lajamanu) -- forcible removal from their home territory of an
> aboriginal population in 1948.
> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/16/science/linguist-finds-a-language-in-its-infancy.html
> 
> Joel
> 
> W Brewer wrote:
>> Depends on what your definition of  <language> is. Call it just another
>> English pidgin and nobody cares.  "But the discovery of a new language in
>> remote Australia is causing a ripple of excitement among linguists around
>> the world."  Congratulations, Ms. O'Shannesssy, from the University of
>> Michigan. Your tax dollars at work.
> 
> At 8/5/2013 03:29 PM, David A. Daniel wrote:
>> Y'all probably know all about this but it was new to me and I thought it was
>> interesting so I figured I'd send it along.
>> DAD
>> 
>> New language discovered in remote desert town
>> http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/national/new-language-discovered-in-remote-
>> desert-town/story-fni0xqrb-1226679750797

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