Re: Japanese "good", consonant clusters etc.

Quoting R J <robertmjung@...>:

> These q's are for a school assignment; I need the answers very soon... :(
>
> 1. How do you say "good" in Japanese?
No idea.

> 2. Could anyone give me some sxamples of insane consonant clusters?
/rnstskts/ is pretty insane in my book. Georgian is supposed to be a
particularly serious offender in this matter, but ATM I can find no worse
example than 'Tkvarcheli'. Assuming the translit system used where I found
that is based on the one for Russian used in the same atlast, that "ch" is
[tSx] or similar. At any rate, there's a hacek on the 'c'. Back to Swedish,
_västkustskt_ us pretty unpronounceable too.

> 3. How many langs are endangered?
Nobody knows. For starters, there's no agreement on what are languages and
what are "only" dialects.

> 4. How many langs are expected to die in the next century?
Depends on the answer to 3, on how pessimistic you are re: the possibilities
of saving threatened or dying languages, and whether you recon there's likely
to be any major nuclear wars during that time.

                                                            Andreas

PS Less unhelpfully, the idea that there are about 6000 languages are, and
that about half of those are likely to disappear this side of 2100 AD has been
floating around for a while. It's quite possibly even based on real research
and reasonable questimates. If you're teacher are anything like (most of) mine
were, this sort of reassuring-sounding numbers are what they want to hear
anyway.