Barely four people, the oldest among them a 70-year-old tribal, speak a language which is on the brink of extinction. Spoken in a tiny village in Tripura, ‘Saimar’ has been identified as a “severely” endangered language.
The old man, Sukurthang Saimar, who was the guest of honour at the 44th Foundation Day of the Central Institute of Indian Languages here, was overjoyed when he was honoured by eminent linguists on Tuesday.
Welcoming Mr. Saimar, CIIL Deputy Director, R. Subbukrishna, said: “This small group of Saimar-speaking people has sent Sukurthang to Mysore, as CIIL wanted to collect data from him [through a translator] on the language for its archive.”
According to CIIL, the four Saimar-speaking persons belong to an isolated tribe. More.
See: The Hindu
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I feel so sad when I read this...
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No other word for it.
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Everything dies.
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[Edited ... See more
[Edited at 2012-08-01 10:10 GMT] ▲ Collapse
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Languages can be preserved -- there are scientific methods of doing it. It takes a really huge effort later on to reconstruct languages. I am sure this language will survive, it there are still four users.
I'm sure it won't. There is a reason why the number of users fell to such a low level, so I'd fully expect the language to die out with the eventual death of these four speakers, or maybe continue for a generation or two if they have children who still speak the language. I certainly can't see a small language like that continuing to live organically indefinitely into the future, and I'm not sure that's such a tragedy. If the language is interesting linguistically, let the linguists record as much of it as they can and that's the end of it. If people find that a more widespread language suits their life better - if, heaven forbid, they wish to communicate with people other than the 3 other speakers of their language or seek better emplyoment, erudition etc. for themselves or their children - they should switch.
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I hope they can preserve this language as long as they ... See more
I hope they can preserve this language as long as they can, and that some expert gets interested in it to save it with today's technology or something... ▲ Collapse
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There's nothing you can do to "save" the language at this stage. The best you can do is record as many linguistically interesting examples of it as possible so that at least there's some kind of a historical record of it.
I'm always amazed at how people wait until a language is effectively extinct before then making a plea to "save" it. You should really start making your plea when ther... See more
There's nothing you can do to "save" the language at this stage. The best you can do is record as many linguistically interesting examples of it as possible so that at least there's some kind of a historical record of it.
I'm always amazed at how people wait until a language is effectively extinct before then making a plea to "save" it. You should really start making your plea when there are 40,000 speakers, not when there are 4...! ▲ Collapse
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and also it would be useful to create a dictionary. It should not take that long, just a year might be enough to do that kind of a project. It is not so bad if there are still four speakers left. Do they speak another language to a certain degree, another Indian language that has more speakers?
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