Papuan Linguistical “Schizo” or Traces of Lemuria Again
There are about 3000 distinct languages in the world. Many of them are close to death. Much more are already dead. So, 3000 is an average number. Moreover, there are a lot of debates about status of languages and dialects. For example people who live in former Yugoslavian republic of Macedonia believe that they speak their own language. But Bulgarians guess that they just use dialect of Bulgarian language while Greek people insist that the very name of Macedonia is incorrect for this nation.
As you know almost all languages belong to special branches, families of languages. Russian, English, Albanian, Persian, Welsh - such languages all belong to Indo-European Family though to different branches of it.
There are also some languages which have status of isolated ones. Mainly it’s because of absence of their relative languages. Like the language of the Country of Basques.
Of these 3000 langs 700 are spoken in both Americas with many dialects and tongues, I mean Native people of course.
English is spoken by hundreds of millions people, Chinese (in fact very dialect-rich) is used by more than billion of people.
While many famous langs are dead - like Latin - we can still find speakers of enormously ancient langs, for example Assyrian.
But the most formidable is the situation with languages on the island of New Guinea, which is divided between Indonesia and Papua New Guinea with common population around 8 millions of people.
These millions use to speak about 820!!! languages (mostly number of each language speakers ranges from 500 to 5000). Quite great number but the most interesting is another fact. The “problem” is that the island has tens of completely isolated language families (subdivided into branches) with words and grammar absolutely unintelligible for populations of neighboring villages!!!
This makes me crazy! Scientists had long ago opened the principles of language shifts and mutations. It looks widely accepted to think that a thousand of years is enough for irreversible change of language when only a few are able to read, write and understand ancient forms of languages. We can see it with Old and Modern English. Ha! Ancient Indian (dead but still important) language of Sanskrit is known as one of those languages that stand in a closest position to the basic Indo-European language. Well, but try to understand anything from Sansrkit with English in your brain. You will hardly recognize just some stems whose sound and sense are most stable (like three for 3, tri in Welsh and tri in Sanskrit). So, why did I mention this? The thing is that the fact of such strong difference between these languages looks like result of even tens (if not hundreds) of thousands years of language evolution and separation!!! By the way - last Neanderthals (another type of people) were finally killed by Cro-Magnons (our ancestors) somewhere 40 000 thousand years ago.
I admire our magnificent world.
Photos (Wikipedia). A girl is from the little neighbouring island of Wagifa, the old man is from the South-Eastern coastline and a man with yellowed face is a Highlander.
