Re: World Lingos

Raymond Brown wrote:

>Languages die very hard.  Welsh not merely survives, but has now gained
>official recognition for the first time in centuries and there is no
>shortage of people who want to learn it.   Gaelic, I understand, is
>experiencing some sort of revival in the Scottish Highlands.  And Cornish,
>which just struggled on to the last century has now been revived and there
>are now some who have Cornish as their first language.
>
>Languages do not die easily.
To the contrary.  Languages die very easily.  The ones you mention are
exceptions, not the rule.  To see that, all you have to do is look at the
linguistic history of the Americas.  Only half the languages spoken when
Europeans arrived are still spoken.  This is not completely the result of
massacre and genocide, but is due in large part to the opression of linguistic
minorities.  There is no chance of reviving them in some Hebrew-like fashion,
because they were largely unwritten and undocumented.  Even today many of the
languages dying have poor documentation and virtually no written record.

Marcus