Half of World's Languages Face Extinction (fwd link)

[Phillip E Cash Cash]

*Half of World's Languages Face Extinction*

Ted Landphair
August 20, 2012

Latin is considered a "dead" language because it has ceased to evolve, but
millions of people study it in school. That's because Latin pops up in
medicine and law and is the root of many words in Spanish, Portuguese,
French, Romanian and English.

So there's dead, like "Latin dead," and really dead - completely
obliterated, never to be spoken again, like hundreds of the early languages
of the Americas.

Or written, either, because almost none of them were written in the first
place. The tribes that spoke them disappeared entirely or adopted their
region's dominant English or French. So elders stopped speaking their
language and handing it down to the young.

But there's work afoot to revive many of these dead languages, and not just
for sheer academic pleasure.

Access full article below:
http://www.voanews.com/content/half-of-worlds-languages-face-extinction-by-2100/1491466.html
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