How many languages are there in the world? | Hacker News Reader

How many languages are there in the world?

linguisticsociety.org

23 pointsPsylentKnight11 comments

I always found it interesting that Swiss German speakers don't seem to have much interest in having their 'dialect' be recognized as it's own language.

It's amazing just how different (the many many varieties of) Swiss German are from other German dialects. Perhaps as different as Dutch and standard German are from eachother.

Speculating here but I think "Swiss German" itself isn't one dialect and is made up of various dialects (as you mention) and I wonder if having it recognized would mean deciding on what a "standard" variant of that would look like - opening up a whole lot of other questions and complications.

As another user remarked, it might have to do with the stark variance of dialects even across neighbouring settlements - deciding on a canonical "dialect" is impossible.

Yet i also have to add, the contrast is not comparable with Dutch/German. As a native Austrian-German speaker i can understand swiss German quite okay after a little while, it's still German at it's base - with Dutch i can relate and get the gist, but I'll struggle.

Some dialects are harder to understand, just like some dialects in Austria are riddled with odd words that are specific to the region, but the grammar is the same and the origin of idiosyncratic words is largely understandable.

Of course ,as long as all Swiss German speakers continue to learn Standard German in school and use it for writing, their dialect will not drift too far away. Also, a person from Northern Germany might find some dialects in the Netherlands easier to understand than Austro-Bavarian or Swiss German.

quoting --- Some would say that the death of a language is much less worrisome than that of a species. After all, are there not instances of languages that died and were reborn, like Hebrew? And in any case, when a group abandons its native language, it is generally for another that is more economically advantageous to them: why should we question the wisdom of that choice?

But the case of Hebrew is quite misleading, since the language was not in fact abandoned over the many years when it was no longer the principal language of the Jewish people. During this time, it remained an object of intense study and analysis by scholars. And there are few if any comparable cases to support the notion that language death is reversible. ---

I think the author's statement is problematic in that it implies that hebrew was only if interest to people studying it. But that's not true. Hebrew was the foundational language for internal discussions of judaism's legal system, which was alive and evolving.

while it might have not been the day to day vernacular that people spoke it, the vast majority of religious legal texts were written in it over those years (or to rephrase it, the legal texts that survived, which would reinforce the value that being written in hebrew had over the "native" tongue). i.e. it was in constant use, just not for normal conversation.

TLDR: 6909, or 230, or 2197, or 832, or 2508. It depends how you measure.

Or maybe 1 if you want to sell a book about how humans are, like, all the same on the inside bruh.

1 is definitely wrong, if two varieties aren't even related they must be different languages.

It's quite likely that all human languages are related if you go back far enough (except for a few exceptions like Nicaraguan Sign Language). They're just not demonstrably related.

The article says "1", because human language is different than bird language. So therefore all human language is the same.

Yes it's stupid. You'd only follow that reasoning if you were looking to sell a book.

Interesting question and I'm looking forward to the answer too!

Please check this Austronesian basic vocabulary language database [1]. Apparently Austronesian language family is the largest family in the world containing around 1,000 and 1,200 languages including Hawaiian language.

Recently I was checking an HN post regarding 'garum', a long lost ancient Roman fish sauce that was once very popular in Pompeii[2]. The most similar sauce's ingredients to garum is the fish sauce from Vietnam and during the time of ancient Pompeii, Champa Empire was ruling the place and most of South East Asia [3].

The Cham language is the precursor to the modern day Malay-Indonesian language (top ten most popular language in the world). The Austronesian database contains 210 basic vocabulary words for more than 1000 Austronesian languages and conveniently one of the included common words is salt. Garam (salt), Masin/asin (salty) and sira (salt-licks) are the most common words across the database being used to represent 'salt' in this largest family of languages in the world. Proto-Malayo-Polynesian, Proto-Chamic and Proto-Malayic do not contain the word 'garam' but Proto-Aceh does, and most likely it is a loan word from ancient Roman that used garum as the main source for fish taste (umami) and salt for cooking. The Aceh language was originated from Cham during 1 AD around the time of ancient Pompeii flourished before its calamity befell.

[1]https://abvd.shh.mpg.de/austronesian/

[2]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27310179

[3]https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/140616-so...

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