THE POLYGLOTTER

Diaz (left) and Katsidis (right) gave a great pose prior their fight Saturday night

Juan “Baby Bull” Diaz bagged a split decision verdict from the judges over Michael “The Great” Katsidis.” One of the judges saw the bout 115-113 for Katsidis, while two judges considered Diaz to have shown superior skills by 113-115 and 112-115.

The fight was a thrilling one featured by non-stop exchanges. Though Katsidis gave the more powerful punches, the former three-belted champion from Houston, Texas proved his mettle by releasing voluminous punches which neutralized the aggresiveness of the Australian slugger. No knockdown was noted in the bout but it was an exciting fight between two great warriors in the ring.

The Baby Bull improved his record to 33 wins, 1 loss with 17 knockouts, while Katsidis suffered his second loss (23-2-20) after tasting the first beating from Casamayor.

The lightweight division, where Diaz and Katsidis fought, is an interesting division featured by the best boxers in the planet such as Pacquiao, Marquez, Casamayor, Campbell, Khan, to name a few.

On the same event, Juarez won by knockout in the 11th round over Jorge Barrios on what can be considered as a sudden twist of fate. Barrios appeared to be ahead in the scorecards but a flurries of exchange blew it off when Juarez bombarded Barrios with solid shots in the chin which caused the Argentine boxer to kiss the canvas, bleeding profusely on his mouth. The referee stopped the fight at the middle of the penultimate round.

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A. Language Extinction

An extinct language is a language which no longer has any speakers, whereas a dead language is a language which is no longer spoken by anyone as their main language. Normally this conversion to an extinct language occurs when a language undergoes language death while being directly replaced by a different one. For example: Coptic, which was replaced by Arabic, and many Native American languages, which were replaced by English, French, Spanish, or Portuguese.

Language extinction also occurs when a language undergoes rapid evolution or assimilation until it eventually gives birth to an offspring, i.e., a dissimilar language or family of language. Such is the case with Old English which is the parent of Modern English.

In some cases, an extinct language remains in use for scientific, legal, or ecclesiastical functions. Old Church Slavonic, Avestan, Coptic, Old Tibetan and Ge’ez are among the many extinct languages used as sacred languages.

Hebrew is an example of a nearly extinct spoken language that became a lingua franca and a liturgical language that has been revived to become a living spoken language.

The following are the list of extinct languages(last speakers and date of extinction included)

with last known speaker and/or date of death.

1. Adai: (late 19th century)

2. Akkala Sami: Marja Sergina (2003)

3. entire Alsean family

   1. Alsea: John Albert (1942)

   2. Yaquina: (1884)

4. Apalachee: (early 18th century)

5. Atakapa: (early 20th century)

6. Atsugewi: (1988)

7. Beothuk: Shanawdithit (a.k.a. “Nancy April”) (1829)

8. entire Catawban family:

   1. Catawba: before 1960

   2. Woccon

9. Cayuse: (ca. 1930s)

10. Chemakum: (ca. 1940s)

11. Chicomuceltec: (late 20th century)

12. Chimariko: (ca. 1930s)

13. Chitimacha: Benjamin Paul (1934) & Delphine Ducloux (1940)

B. Language Death

In linguistics, language death (also language extinction, linguistic extinction, and sometimes pejoratively as linguicide) is a process that affects speech communities where the level of linguistic competence that speakers possess of a given language idiom is decreased.

Total language death occurs when there are no speakers of a given language idiom remaining in a population where the idiom was previously used (i.e. when all native speakers die). Language death may affect any language idiom, including dialects and languages.

The study of language loss at the individual level focuses on what is lost - a first language (L1) or a second language (L2) - and where it is lost - in an L1 or L2 environment.

B.1.Manifestations of Language Death

Language death may manifest itself in one of the following ways:

• gradual language death

• bottom-to-top language death

• radical language death

• linguicide (a.k.a. sudden language death, language death by genocide, physical language death, biological language death)

The most common process leading to language death is one in which a community of speakers of one language becomes bilingual in another language, and gradually shifts allegiance to the second language until they cease to use their original (or heritage) language. This is a process of assimilation which may be voluntary or may be forced upon a population. Speakers of some languages, particularly regional or minority languages, may decide to abandon them based on economic or utilitarian grounds, in favour of languages regarded as having greater utility or prestige. Languages can also die when their speakers are wiped out by genocide, disease, or the rare event of devastating natural catastrophe.

A language is often declared to be dead even before the last native speaker of the language has died. If there are only a few elderly speakers of a language remaining, and they no longer use that language for communication, then the language is effectively dead. A language that has reached such a reduced stage of use is generally considered moribund.The process of attrition occurs when intergenerational transmission of a “heritage language”, mother tongue or native language has effectively stopped. This is rarely a sudden event, but a slow process of each generation learning less and less of the language, until its use is relegated to the domain of traditional use, such as in poetry and song. For example, a family’s adults may speak in an older native language, but when they have children, they may not pass on this language, and therefore the language dies in that family. One example of this process reaching its conclusion is that of the Dalmatian language.

B.2. Dead Languages and Normal Language Change

Linguists distinguish between language “death” and the process where a language becomes a “dead language” through normal language change, a linguistic phenomenon similar to pseudoextinction. This happens when a language in the course of its normal development gradually morphs into something that is then recognized as a separate, different language, leaving the old form with no native speakers. Thus, for example, Old English may be regarded as a “dead language”, with no native speakers, although it has never “died” but instead simply changed and developed into Modern English. The process of language change may also involve the splitting up of a language into a family of several daughter languages, leaving the common parent language “dead”. This has happened to Latin, which (through Vulgar Latin) eventually developed into the family of Romance languages. Such a process is normally not described as “language death”, because it involves an unbroken chain of normal transmission of the language from one generation to the next, with only minute changes at every single point in the chain. There is thus no one point where “Latin died”.

1. 1. 1. Endangered Language

An endangered language is a language that it is at risk of falling out of use, generally because it has few surviving speakers. If it loses all of its native speakers, it becomes an extinct language.

While there is no definite threshold for identifying a language as endangered, three main criteria are used as guidelines:

1. The number of speakers currently living.

2. The mean age of native and/or fluent speakers.

3. The percentage of the youngest generation acquiring fluency with the language in question.

Some languages, such as those in Indonesia, may have tens of thousands of speakers but be endangered because children are no longer learning them, and speakers are in the process of shifting to using the national language Indonesian (or a local Malay variety) in place of local languages.

In contrast, a language with only 100 speakers might be considered very much alive if it is the primary language of a community, and is the first (or only) language of all children in that community (most of Andaman languages, actually spoken).

Some linguists (among them, Michael Krauss and Stephen Wurm) argue that at least 3,000 of the world’s 6,000-7,000 languages are liable to be lost before the year 2100.

One view holds that this is a problem and the extinction of languages should be prevented, even at significant cost. A number of reasons are cited, including:

• an enormous number of languages represents a vast, largely unmapped terrain on which linguists, cognitive scientists, and philosophers can chart the full capabilities and limits of the mind;

• languages embody unique local knowledge of cultures and natural systems in the regions in which they are spoken and such diversity is essential for promoting scientific and technological progress since it is the interaction of ideas that is one of the major generators of human invention; and

• languages serve as evidence for understanding human history

The following are examples of endagered languages:

Ainu

• Berawan, a language spoken by the Berawan people, a small group within the Orang Ulu tribe which exists in Sarawak.

• Breton

• Cajun French

• Curonian (Kursh)

• Latgalian

• Defaka, an Ijoid language of Nigeria

• Istro-Romanian

• Livonian

• Manchu

• Maori

• various Sami languages

• Hawaiian

• Sorbian/Wendish/Lusatian

• Tulu

• Wymysorys/Wilamowicean

In addition, nearly all of the spoken Native American languages in the U.S. and Canada are endangered. These include:

• Catawba

• Lakota

• Cowlitz, Eastern Abnaki, Kalapuya, Klamath-Modoc, Lipan Apache, Serrano, and Tagish each have only a handful of speakers left.

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A person who speaks several languages is called a polyglot.

The following individuals are some of the world’s famous polyglots who claimed to speak 10 or more languages:

Pamulaparthi Venkata Narasimha Rao (28 June 1921 – 23 December 2004) was the 12th Prime Minister of the Republic of India. He led one of the most important administrations in India’s modern history, overseeing a major economic transformation and several incidents affecting national security. Narasimha Rao was popularly known as PV. PV studied at Fergusson College and at the Universities of Mumbai and Nagpur where he obtained Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in law. He was a polyglot and could speak 13 languages including Urdu, Marathi, Kannada, Hindi, Telugu and English with a fluency akin to a native speaker. His mother tongue was Telugu. In addition to seven Indian languages, he spoke English, French, Arabic, Spanish and Persian. Along with his cousin Pamulaparthi Sadasiva Rao, PV edited a Telugu weekly magazine called Kakatiya Patrika from 1948 to 1955.

Sir John Bowring, (17 October 1792 – 23 November 1872) was an English political economist, traveller, miscellaneous writer and polyglot, and the 4th Governor of Hong Kong.

Bowring was born in Exeter of an old Puritan family. In early life he came under the influence of Jeremy Bentham, and later became his friend. He did not, however, share Bentham’s contempt for belles lettres. He was a diligent student of literature and foreign languages, especially those of Eastern Europe.

Bowring ranked with Giuseppe Caspar Mezzofanti and Hans Conon von der Gabelentz among the world’s greatest hyperpolyglots — his talent enabling him at last to say that he knew 200 languages, and could speak 100. The first fruits of his study of foreign literature appeared in Specimens of the Russian Poets (1821–1823). These were followed by Batavian Anthology (1824), Ancient Poetry and Romances of Spain (1824), Specimens of the Polish Poets, and Serbian Popular Poetry, both in 1827, and Poetry of the Magyars (1830).

Ziad Youssef Fazah (born June 10, 1954 in Monrovia, Liberia) is a Lebanese polyglot who has at least some notions of almost 60 languages. He has proved this in several television shows, where he successfully has communicated with native speakers of a large number of foreign languages. He was considered the world’s greatest polyglot (greatest living linguist) by the 1993 UK edition of the Guinness Book of Records.

Fazah does not use all of his languages on a regular basis. As can be expected, his fluency is higher in certain languages that he has more contact with (Portuguese, Arabic, German, French, English, Spanish, etc.) and limited in languages that he has hardly spoken in years (Cambodian, Dzongkha, Finnish, etc.). Before being submitted to a televised language test he asks to be told which languages he will be required to speak and the general topics that will be discussed. After about a week of preparation Fazah feels confident speaking on television in any of his languages.

Raised in Lebanon, he has lived in Brazil since the 1970s, where he works as a private teacher of languages in Rio de Janeiro.

List of Fazah’s languages from the cover of one of his books:

Albanian, Amharic, Arabic, Armenian, Azeri, Bengali, Bulgarian, Burmese, Cambodian, Cantonese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Cypriot, Dzongkha, English, Fijian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Kyrgyz, Lao, Malagasy, Malay, Maltese, Mandarin, Mongolian, Nepali, Norwegian, Papiamento, Pashto, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Singapore Colloquial English, Sinhalese, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Tajik, Thai, Tibetan, Turkish, Urdu, Uzbek, Vietnamese and Wu.^{[2] [3]}

Ziad Fazah quotes himself as speaking 59 languages. Although, some may say Cyriot is just a dialect of Turkish, not separate as a language, making his language count 58.

Professor Alexander Arguelles was born in 1964 into an exclusively English-speaking American household. However, he lived in various parts of Europe during his earliest years, and throughout his childhood. Furthermore, his father is a scholarly polyglot whose shelves are filled with books in many different tongues.

A Professor of Linguistics, he spent nearly a decade in Korea following a monk-like life style, while he dedicated his time to studying Korean, Classical Chinese and Japanese in a comparative context, as he taught at the Handong University. Following his marriage and the completion of the Korean studies, Arguelles relocated to Lebanon, where he resided studying Arabic and teaching Linguistics at the American University of Science and Technology in Beirut, until in July of 2006 he and his family were forced to flee Lebanon under the Israeli bombs.

Dr. Arguelles has co-written and published a number of books in his field. He teaches linguistics in California. In his spare time he moderates a language forum on the internet and continues to write. He is also working on a plan of creating a private academy for training polyglots.

Dr. Arguelles has knowledge of more than 34 languages, including Korean, Russian, and Arabic.

Dr. José P. Rizal (full name: José Protasio Rizal Mercado y Alonso Realonda) (June 19, 1861 – December 30, 1896) was a Filipino polymath, nationalist and the most prominent advocate for reforms in the Philippines during the Spanish colonial era. He is considered the Philippines’ national hero and the anniversary of Rizal’s death is commemorated as a Philippine holiday called Rizal Day. Rizal’s 1896 military trial and execution made him a martyr of the Philippine Revolution.

Rizal was a polyglot conversant in at least ten languages.He was a prolific poet, essayist, diarist, correspondent, and novelist whose most famous works were his two novels, Noli me Tangere and El Filibusterismo.

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Leonard Bloomfield (April 1, 1887 – April 18, 1949) was an American linguist, whose influence dominated the development of structural linguistics in America between the 1930s and the 1950s. He is especially known for his book Language (1933), describing the state of the art of linguistics at its time.

Bloomfield was the main founder of the Linguistic Society of America.

Bloomfield’s thought was mainly characterized by its behavioristic principles for the study of meaning, its insistence on formal procedures for the analysis of language data, as well as a general concern to provide linguistics with rigorous scientific methodology. Its pre-eminence decreased in the late 1950s and 1960s, after the emergence of Generative Grammar.

Bloomfield also began the genetic examination of the Algonquian language family with his reconstruction of Proto-Algonquian; his seminal paper on the family remains a cornerstone of Algonquian historical linguistics today.

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Multilingual individuals

A multilingual person, in the broadest definition, is one who can communicate in more than one language, be it actively (through speaking and writing) or passively (through listening and reading). More specifically, the terms bilingual and trilingual are used to describe comparable situations in which two or three languages are involved. A generic term for multilingual persons is polyglot.

Multilingualism could be rigidly defined as being native-like in two or more languages. It could also be loosely defined as being less than native-like but still able to communicate in two or more languages.

Multilingual speakers have acquired and maintained at least one language during childhood, the so-called first language (L1). The first language (sometimes also referred to as the mother tongue) is acquired without formal education, by mechanisms heavily disputed. Children acquiring two languages in this way are called simultaneous bilinguals. Even in the case of simultaneous bilinguals one language usually dominates over the other. This kind of bilingualism is most likely to occur when a child is raised by bilingual parents in a predominantly monolingual environment. It can also occur when the parents are monolingual but have raised their child or children in two different countries.

Definition of multilingualism

One group of academics argues for the maximal definition which means that speakers are as native-like in one language as they are in others and have as much knowledge of and control over one language as they have of the others. Another group of academics argues for the minimal definition, based on use. Tourists, who successfully communicate phrases and ideas while not fluent in a language, may be seen as bilingual according to this group.

However, problems may arise with these definitions as they do not specify how much knowledge of a language is required to be classified as bilingual. As a result, since most speakers do not achieve the maximal ideal, language learners may come to be seen as deficient and by extension, language teaching may come to be seen as a failure. One does not expect children to “speak chemistry” like Nobel prize winners or to have become a professional athlete by the time they have left school, yet for graduating school children anything less than fluency in a second language could be seen as inadequate.

At the other extreme, arguing that someone who can say “hello” in more than one language is multilingual trivializes the language learning process.

Since 1992, Cook has argued that most multilingual speakers fall somewhere between these minimal and maximal definitions. Cook calls these people multi-competent.

Learning language

A broadly held, yet nearly as broadly criticised, view is that of the American linguist Noam Chomsky in what he calls the human ‘language acquisition device ‘— a mechanism which enables an individual to recreate correctly the rules (grammar) that speakers around the learner use. This device, according to Chomsky, wears out over time, and is not normally available by puberty, which explains the relatively poor results adolescents and adults have in learning aspects of a second language (L2).

If language learning is a cognitive process, rather than a language acquisition device, as the school led by Stephen Krashen suggests, there would only be relative, not categorical, differences between the two types of language learning.

Comparing multilingual speakers

Even if someone is highly proficient in two or more languages, his so-called communicative competence or ability may not be as balanced. Linguists have distinguished various types of multilingual competence, which can roughly be put into two categories:

• For compound bilinguals, words and phrases in different languages are the same concepts. That means that ‘chien’ and ‘dog’ are two words for the same concept for a French-English speaker of this type. These speakers are usually fluent in both languages.

• For coordinate bilinguals, words and phrases in the speaker’s mind are all related to their own unique concepts. Thus a bilingual speaker of this type has different associations for ‘chien’ and for ‘dog’. In these individuals, one language, usually the first language, is more dominant than the other, and the first language may be used to think through the second language. These speakers are known to use very different intonation and pronunciation features, and sometimes to assert the feeling of having different personalities attached to each of their languages.

·         A sub-group of the latter is the subordinate bilingual, which is typical of beginning second language learners.

The distinction between compound and coordinate bilingualism has come under scrutiny. When studies are done of multilinguals, most are found to show behavior intermediate between compound and coordinate bilingualism. Some authors have suggested that the distinction should only be made at the level of grammar rather than vocabulary, others use “coordinate bilingual” as a synonym for one who has learned two languages from birth, and others have proposed dropping the distinction altogether (see Baetens-Beardsmore, 1974 for discussion).

Many theorists are now beginning to view bilingualism as a “spectrum or continuum of bilingualism” that runs from the relatively monolingual language learner to highly proficient bilingual speakers who function at high levels in both languages (Garland, 2007)

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