|
 |
L1/L2 spoken at HTLAL with fewest speakers | ||
Share with:
| ||
 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| outcast Bilingual Heptaglot Senior Member China Joined 4950 days ago 869 posts - 1364 votes  Speaks: Spanish*, English*, German, Italian, French, Portuguese, Mandarin Studies: Korean | Message 1 of 11 15 November 2011 at 11:23pm | IP Logged | ||
|
I was just wondering out of all the active (or even past) members here, which was the rarest language claimed to be spoken by any partipant on the forum, specially in the sense of fewest number of speakers. Either native, or as an L2.
Edited by outcast on 15 November 2011 at 11:23pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7157 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 2 of 11 16 November 2011 at 6:25am | IP Logged | ||
|
Based on the choices for languages here, I'm guessing that it's Ancient Egyptian (~ Coptic) with its "handful" of fluent speakers and liturgical use in the Coptic Church according to this article from 2007. akkadboy has advanced fluency in it per the forum's records.
If that wouldn't count then perhaps Cornish with its 2000 speakers per a survey as reported by the British Council would. TheElvenLord was one of the two fluent speakers here. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| fomalhaut Groupie United States Joined 4904 days ago 80 posts - 101 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German | Message 3 of 11 20 November 2011 at 1:29pm | IP Logged | ||
|
wow a Coptic speaker? that's astounding, and sad. that's a language i'd love to be thriving
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6583 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 4 of 11 20 November 2011 at 1:57pm | IP Logged | ||
:( 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| akkadboy Triglot Senior Member France Joined 5409 days ago 264 posts - 497 votes Speaks: French*, English, Yiddish Studies: Latin, Ancient Egyptian, Welsh | Message 5 of 11 15 December 2011 at 1:28pm | IP Logged | ||
Just to clarify that I do not claim advanced fluency in spoken Coptic. The forum does not provide any way (or at least I didn't find it) to distinguish between fluency in dead languages which is mostly fluency in reading and writing (although I'm well aware that some manage to gain a working knowledge of spoken Latin/Ancient Greek/...). So I ticked the "advanced fluency"-box because I can now read pretty much anything written in Coptic. However, it does not mean that I can speak it (except of course for short small talk). Sorry if I was misleading, maybe I should not have used the "fluency" category so lightly. Dead languages are a kind of blackspot of fluency ratings : how would you rate someone who can read the Aeneid without the help of dictionary but can not speak more than a few latin sentences ? Edited by akkadboy on 15 December 2011 at 1:39pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6704 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 6 of 11 15 December 2011 at 4:34pm | IP Logged | ||
Very true. Actually the text in our language profiles to the left demands that you can speak a language before you can move above "studies" so even the most fluent reader wouldn't qualify even for basic fluency. Which is totally fair. It is slightly more problematic that a totally fluent writer also would fall short of the requirements because writing is at least an active skill, but the solution would of course be that such a person sat down to learn also to speak Latin. Precisely Latin may have a decent population of speakers (presumable mostly nonnative learners at different levels of competence), but most other dead languages are only learnt by scholars who want to read the original texts. In grammar-translation minded textbooks you may find translations in both directions, but hardly any encouragement to write free texts - and even less to speak those languages. However there is a movement which tries to establish a Neolatin community, and these people do see Latin as something you can and should speak - and so do I. The archeologists and linguists who can read for instance Egyptian hieroglyphs may be able to put a few words together to illustrate some grammatical point, but anybody who tried to speak the old language would probably be seen as a freak by his/her collegues. Akkadboy may know more about attitudes among Egyptologists, but I have yet to hear about somebody who has made a speech in the venerable old language of Nefertiti and co - unless you accept Coptic as the same language. Some invented languages may also be spoken by exceedingly few persons - and in some cases I have read that not even the inventor of a language could speak it. One curious thing: I remember vaguely that somebody here at HTLAL tried to learn Volapük, and if that went well then that person would be member of a very limited language community -Wikipedia quotes an estimate of just 20-30 Pük-speakers in the world. However there must be a fair number of writers (or the few there are must be extremely active) because the very same article mentions that the Volapük 'Vükiped' has no less than 119.000 articles and lies at rank 35 according to the number of articles. So either there are a lot of hidden speakers, or Volapükians just learn that language in order to write articles in Wikipedia. Edited by Iversen on 15 December 2011 at 5:09pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6471 days ago 2608 posts - 4866 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Esperanto, Greek, Mandarin, Latin, Dutch, Italian Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swahili, Indonesian, Japanese, Modern Hebrew, Portuguese | Message 7 of 11 15 December 2011 at 5:22pm | IP Logged | ||
|
My guess is that Toki Pona has less conversational speakers than Volapük - it is more
attractive, but also a very recent invention. Or possibly Klingon, because Klingon is so freaking hard and most trekkies are happy to just know a few phrases.
Actually no, the Volapük Wikipedia was written by robots. Someone had a large database of towns and communities and then had a robot insert the relevant information into a pre-made template. This caused a lot of debate among Wikipedians. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Cabaire Senior Member Germany Joined 5600 days ago 725 posts - 1352 votes | Message 8 of 11 15 December 2011 at 5:23pm | IP Logged | ||
|
There were nasty discussions that Vükiped cheated by producing huge amounts of automatically generated articles mainly on geographical topics without writing anything original in order to gain the high rank among the wikipedias.
But my dears, let every volapükist seek heaven in his own fashion. PS. Oh, Sprachprofi, you were a minute faster to make this observation! Edited by Cabaire on 15 December 2011 at 5:26pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
|  | 
Printable version
|
| Copyright 2024 FX Micheloud - All rights reserved No part of this website may be copied by any means without my written authorization. |
