basic word list

[r valentine]

Another potentially interesting vocabulary set is that of Charles Ogden's
Basic English, which you can easily find on Wikipedia (look up Basic English
for background and links). Any endangered language documentation/promotion
project would benefit from being aware of it and thinking through functional
equivalents.

Rand Valentine
University of Wisconsin-Madison

On May 24, 2010, at 9:26 PM, Xavier Barker <meibitobure.gaunibwe at GMAIL.COM>
wrote:

> 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
>>>     
>> 
>> 
>>   


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