Not funny or that pertinent, but pretty interesting...
According to UNESCO, 2500 languages are threatened with extinction. The world has lost Ubykh in Turkey and last year Alaska's last native speaker of Eyak, Marie Smith Jones, died, taking the aboriginal language with her. Yes, I consider Turkey part of the region, and why not include Alaska? It used to be Russia.
There are 199 languages in the world spoken by fewer than a dozen people, including Karaim which has 6 speakers in Ukraine. According to Wikipedia, The Karaim language is a Turkic language with Hebrew influences, in a similar manner to Yiddish or Ladino. And apparently even though there are only 6 speakers left, there are 3 dialects of the language. Really? 6 people can't agree on how to pronounce a language? Really?
Feb 20, 2009
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8 comments:
Sheesh, there are still over 200 Karaims in Lithuania:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimean_Karaites#Lithuania
"In 1392 Grand Duke Vytautas of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania relocated one branch the Crimean Karaites to Lithuania."
Supposedly he like their cooking.
According to some uncorfirmed reports the first chief of staff of Azerbaijani Army was a Karaim, though majority now agrees that he was a Polish tatar.
Here
6 speakers and 3 dialects...How is that even possible?
No wonder it's so hard to build a coalition in Ukraine.
I'd actually heard of those Karaims in Lithuania who were moved there by the Grand Duke ... I've read too much random stuff.
Polish tatars?
After some quick wikipediaing of Polish Tatars, I came across the following sentences:
"The lower and middle Lipka Tatar nobles adopted the Ruthenian language and later the Belarusian language as their mother tongue. However, they used the Arabic alphabet to write in Belarusian until the 1930s. The upper nobility of Lipka Tatars spoke Polish."
I wonder if any of the old writings survive. Anyone here want to learn to write Belarusian in the Arabic alphabet?
Belarusian in Arabic...that made my brain cells shiver.
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