Languages XXI. century

1997/03/01 Elhuyar Zientzia Iturria: Elhuyar aldizkaria

• Giza zientziak

German linguist Martin Haspelmath has pointed out that 90% of the 7,000 languages currently spoken in the world will be lost in the XXI. throughout the 20th century. About 15,000 languages have been spoken in the history of mankind, but more than half of them have died forever.

The Council of Europe has programmes to protect endangered languages, including Jidish. In Central and Eastern Europe, eight million Jews spoke before World War II, but now only two million understand it. The transmission of this language is only religious and jidisha literature and press are in a critical situation.

Another of the last is the Txagatai language. Only a 62-year-old man named Makhsud Shafigi of Kazakhstan knows this language that is a mixture of Turkish, Kazakhstan and Mongolian is written in Arabic letters. Emperors Gengis Khan XIII. In the twentieth century he imposed his empire to “unify”. Mr. Shafigi is developing a bilingual Kazakh//txagatai dictionary to keep track of everything possible.