Linguists discover new language in the Himalayas

2010-10-06 07:52:36 GMT+7 (ICT)

WASHINGTON D.C. (BNO NEWS) -- Two linguists on Tuesday announced that they discovered a rare language which is completely new to science. The discovery was made in the foothills of the Himalayas, the Wall Street Journal reported.

The new language was found along the western ridges of Arunachal Pradesh, in India's northeastern-most state, where around 120 languages are spoken. The language is spoken by hunters and subsistence farmers in a dozen villages made of bamboo houses built on stilts.

The scientists identified the language, called Koro, during a 2008 expedition conducted as part of National Geographic's Enduring Voices project. Discovering a language is as rare as finding any endangered species.

"Their language is quite distinct on every level—the sound, the words, the sentence structure," said Gregory Anderson, director of the nonprofit Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages and leader of the project.

The Koro language will be detailed and documented in an upcoming issue of the journal Indian Linguistics. The newly found tongue also offers linguists an unique experience encoded in its mental grammar of words and sentence structure that helps shape itself.

"Languages like Koro construe reality in very different ways. They uniquely code knowledge of the natural world in ways that cannot be translated into a major language," Anderson said.

However, the Koro language faces extinction as only 800 people speak it. Of the 6,909 known languages, about half are expected to disappear in this century, as in the case of Koro. Every two weeks, the last fluent speaker of a language dies.

Koro belongs to the Tibeto-Burman language family, a group of some 400 languages that includes Tibetan and Burmese. Koro is only an oral language as it does not have written form. In India, approximately 150 Tibeto-Burman languages are spoken.

"If we care about the diversity of ideas and knowledge, then we should be concerned about losing these languages," Linguist David Harrison said. "We are losing an immense body of knowledge."

-- © BNO News All rights reserved 2010-10-06

Interesting, so many languages in that group.

Tibeto-Burman language family, a group of some 400 languages that includes Tibetan and Burmese.

Facinating.

I wonder how one would go about preserving a language such as this without adding artificial alphabet?

Maybe they are up there taking videos and recordings of how it's pronounced, with commentary as to the structure, perhaps background stories related to the history of the words or expressions.

Thats a beautiful way to spend your time if your able to.

Interesting, so many languages in that group.

Tibeto-Burman language family, a group of some 400 languages that includes Tibetan and Burmese.

Maybe harsh climate and mountainous terrain has kept them isolated from each other. Yes, an interesting way to spend your time.

Facinating.

I wonder how one would go about preserving a language such as this without adding artificial alphabet?

The linguists will almost certainly use The International Phonetic Alphabet to record and describe the language.