Languages that have become extinct.

I was really surprised when i seen this site. The number of languages that were in existence at one time but became extinct.
And this list is not complete. I'm sure more were lost in even more ancient times.
This site gives links and brief summaries about each language.Some here may find this interesting.
What i was wondering how did one language disappear from a particular area then the newer one sprout up.

http://linguistlist.org/forms/langs/GetListOfAncientLgs.cfm

 

Is English there?

 

Ogham is such an awesome language

 

Old English is there, which is what you are still using. In English 2.0 the question would be "Is English there, innit blud"?

 

Too many letters it would be more like

Engsh der?

I get texts from my 16 year old and I have to google them.

 

You have a 16 year old, my sympathies. Mine are both pushing 30 and have actually turned into rather nice human beings. Grandkids are great also. My one daughter says grandkids are god's reward for not killing your own children.

 

He's kept at arms length

 

If you didn't see this link within the site you may find this interesting.

http://www.ancientscripts.com/

 

It's a script not a language.

 

I have that problem with my sister and my mother.
Makes matters worse that they are horrible at spelling.

 

I guess we're just old-fashioned but I use punctuation in text messages

 

I don't really text that often but as I use the iPhone instead of the PC for pretty much everything now I'm happy with the keypad

 

Just the comparison and similar type of writing. These two were continents and oceans apart yet they look like they had a common thought in the way they expressed themselves. Looks like to me anyway.One being Chinese and the other Aztec. The Aztec one is more graphic but they both are along the same lines if the Chinese one was drawn out.Makes me think there was a closer connection between peoples of the earth in ancient times than we even know.

 

I'm not so sure there is much of a connection between the Chinese and the Aztecs. In terms of language the written language of both the Chinese and the Aztecs were pictograms. There will be somewhat of a similarity on the level for many ancient cultures.

Though there was a huge amount of travel in ancient times that until recently no one thought was possible. There have been more than a few expeditions using exact as possible replicas of ancient seafaring craft and technology... and they've been relatively successful. The Polynesians, The Chinese, The Vikings and many many other cultures covered massive distances by sea... so the old world wasn't as closed off as we think.

Even in terms of the migration of peoples... during the last ice age if some human migration theories are to be accepted... tribes of people crossed the Bering straight which would have been frozen over - known in that form as Beringia - and in what is thought to be several waves of human migration flowed down into the Americas. This is the reason that many suspect there is so much similarity between Native Americans and those of Siberian. It would have put a direct link to Siberia. The native cultures and indigenous religions (eg. shamanism etc.) are identical in many ways to the people of Siberia - though much of that culture in Siberia was brutally wiped out by the Russians.

Fascinating stuff. Once you start reading on this stuff you won't stop.

 

Such a shame he wasn't an Aussie. Now that would have been ironic

 

No faeces sherlock.

 

Well it seems to me that way back when pyramid structures were around. Those cultures that had them used a lot of pictograph type writings and such.From Egypt to the Mayan world.And the connection between civilization's had to have some knowledge of each other in my way of thinking. And as we all know there are many theories on what was going on at the time.The extreme opinion is alien influence on them and the other end of the thought would be the migration by boat or ice bridge.

 

The management reserve the right to refuse admission

 

It's not a complete answer but warfare and migration often had a large role in the killing off of languages. Irish, for example, which is near the edge, was pushed there largely by English invasions and interdiction of language(can't have natives speak a secret language, they could organise rebellion Solution? Ban Irish, force the children to be educated in English. Kill those who refuse.) and economic(English became advantageous economically - those who were poorest in Ireland were often Irish speakers, who then migrated to America and other English speaking parts of the world, after which they used only English). The same is true in India, Australia, the US and nearly everywhere that the British empire stretched to. Think of all the American Indian, Aboriginal, Gaelic and African languages that have died out because the natives were either killed or assimilated to English culture.

Other times,a language simply changes over the years with contractions of words and people being lazy/creative. Like a giant game of Chinese whispers.

Sometimes, cultural influence can do the same. French is slowly being changed by the American influence. Le jogging, flyer, etc etc. This can happen directly with English words being used instead of French words because people want to look cool(the same way English speakers use French expressions to look intelligent, fashionable). The grammar of French is also changing because of an indirect influence. American shows are very popular in France, but not everyone speaks English so the shows are dubbed in French. If the translator isn't a very good one he will sometimes use English grammar or construction with the French words and voilà a new grammar form is introduced to everyone who watched the show (and understood the strange new expression because it was used in context)

New languages are created through dialectalisation. Take the case of the Roman empire. It stretched its influence over many areas with many different languages. Under the Empire it was politically useful to speak Latin. Sometimes it was seen as so useful that people would simply learn Latin and raise their children as native Latin speakers. In isolation, when villages or areas were far enough away from others, there were pockets of people speaking Latin, each changing it in a different way until each dialect was incomprehensible to someone from another village or region. French and Spanish aren't uniform languages, but what a bunch of aristocrats agreed would be the standard. They took a bunch of dialects(sometimes just their own) wrote down some rules and words in a big dictionary and said "This is proper French. Speak it or else". Funnily enough, French as it is today, only really took hold as the native language of most Frenchmen after the First World War, when Frenchmen from all over the country had to work together and so had to spend years speaking the common language French between themselves - even thought it wasn't their native dialect. They taught it to their children and boom. One French language for one French people. (Leaving aside other languages like Breton, which the French government has been spending a long time trying to erase).

Technically, there are thousand of languages that are on the brink of extinction, with only one or two native speakers left. In today's world, minority languages are undervalued. It makes much more economic sense to speak one of the five main languages of the world than your own little language that you and 20 neighbours speak.

The great great majority of languages are oral. So once a group of people stop speaking that language it's gone forever.

There is a lot of debate as to how to define a language. It's hard to draw the line between language and dialect. Whose is to say, for example, that Romance languages -French, Spanish, Italian, Romanian and others- aren't just funny dialects of Latin? Many people who can speak one relatively fluently can read the others with a reasonable amount of accuracy. Should American English be consider a dialect, an accent or a completely different language? Should a person from Texas and a person from New York be considered to be speaking dialects or just with an accent?

Not having seen the giant ****ing match that is the last two pages, I'd like to add that although the examples given in my post speak of modern languages, that is simply because these are the ones people are familiar with. Gaelic fairly handily wiped out pictish, the various native languages of the Americas were busy merging, coming into conflict and undergoing random changes(American Indian l33t speak). It's been going on from the dawn of language, and though it's unfortunate, it happens.