basic word list

[Xavier Barker]

Hi Mary,
I'd agree with Eduardo: in the case of Nauruan, whilst it still enjoys 
pretty solid intergenerational transmission, much of the kinship terms 
have disappeared over the last 70 years.  'cousin' has replaced about 6 
different terms, for example.   In addition, a lot of syntactic loss has 
happened - the expansion of a couple of once-quite-specific noun 
classifiers to cover about 25 'lost' classifications comes to mind.  
Maybe to add confusion, i remember reading an article (which i can't 
remember) which was trying to flag rapid phonological change as a 
indicator of endangeredness.

Cheers,
Xavier

On 25/05/10 12:08 PM, Eduardo Ribeiro wrote:
> Dear Mary,
>
> I think that's a fascinating question.  In my experience with
> endangered South American languages (Ofayé and the Xambioá dialect of
> the Karajá language, for instance), lexical loss is indeed one of the
> consequences of language decline, but I don't think that can be
> generalized as a diagnostic tool.  In many cases, the exact opposite
> happens: the language may disappear as a functioning means of
> communication, but all that is left are highly- specialized vocabulary
> items, including religious and kinship terms.  In that case, grammar
> and phonology would be better diagnostic tools.
>
> The loss of lexical items, even in fields such as kinship terminology,
> may be a sign of cultural change, but not necessarily of language
> decline.  With numerals, for instance, there is a strong preference,
> among Lowland South American languages, to replace higher native
> numerals (which tend to be morphologically rather complex) with
> simpler, borrowed ones from Spanish and Portuguese.  The native
> languages, however, may remain rather vigorous.  In Karajá, even a
> rather domestic word such as "father" tends to be replaced by a
> Portuguese loan, but there are no signs of language obsolescence.
>
> I guess a possible answer would be that "it depends": which language
> is it? does it have a complex, highly developed numeral system, or is
> it something more similar to the Lowland South American scenario? are
> the grammar and phonology still intact?  are cultural changes, instead
> of linguistic ones, to blame? etc.).
>
> Abraços,
>
> Eduardo
>
> -----
> Eduardo Rivail Ribeiro
> http://wado.us
>
>
> On Mon, May 24, 2010 at 6:16 PM, Mary Holbrock<maryholbrock at gmail.com>  wrote:
>    
>> can anyone direct me to what might be considered a basic word list that
>> people should know in their native language?  or word categories perhaps? in
>> other words, if speakers of a given language no longer know family member
>> words or numbers, might the language be considered to be in decline? thanks
>> for any help in this area
>>      
>
>
>