Drudge Retort: Red Meat for Yellow Dogs
Friday, February 05, 2010

Boa Sr, who was around 85 years of age, died last week in the Andaman islands, about 750 miles off India's eastern coast, Survival International said in a statement. The London-based group, which works to protect indigenous peoples, said she was the last member of one of ten distinct Great Andamanese tribes, the Bo.

"The Bo are thought to have lived in the Andaman islands for as long as 65,000 years, making them the descendants of one of the oldest human cultures on Earth," it noted. With her passing at a hospital, India also lost one of its most endangered languages, also called Bo, linguists say.

Liberal Blog Advertising Network

Menu

Subscriptions

Author Info

ZombieHunter

MORE STORIES

Special Features

Comments

Admin's note: Participants in the discussion of this weblog entry should note the site's moderation policy.

Hey - Hebrew made a comeback...*;)

I find tribes like this very interesting but I'm not sure I agree with the tragic tone of the article. I really don't see the difference between there being only one person (or even 100 people) who speaks a given language and no people speaking that language.

#1 | POSTED BY NANC
"Hey - Hebrew made a comeback"

As did Gaelic and Welsh!
(Which I like, for personal reasons.)

What's odd is the article says "ONE of its most endangered languages".
I mean, if there's only one speaker left, how much MORE endangered could it get?

#2 | POSTED BY SULLY
"I find tribes like this very interesting but I'm not sure I agree with the tragic tone of the article."

I agree. While I'm not a professional linguist by any stretch, it's been a hobby of mine for years.
When a language dies, there's a loss of something, sure, but there weren't a whole lot of speakers of Aka-Bo anyway.
On the bright side, the Aka-Bo language has quite a few "relatives" in the Andaman islands.
The whole language group is spoken in these islands, and they all would have started as simply dialects of the same tongue.

learn to speak english!

;)

I love that island tribe, don't know where, the one that has no words for time. They are the only group in the world like this.

Oh, that rings a bell, Grumpy. I need to find it!

I love that island tribe, don't know where, the one that has no words for time.

en.wikipedia.org

www.spiegel.de

Comments are closed for this entry.


Drudge Retort

Home | News | Comments | User Blogs | Nooner | Back Page | RSS Feed | RSS Spec | DMCA Compliance | Copyright 2012 World Readable