Linguists working in a remote area of the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh discovered a language spoken by 800 people that is totally unlike any language that's ever been cataloged. It's called Koro.
This language has no written form, so researchers are working quickly to learn its grammar and vocabulary in order to preserve it against extinction.
Link via Ace of Spades HQ | Photo: National Geographic
"Their language is quite distinct on every level—the sound, the words, the sentence structure," said Gregory Anderson, director of the nonprofit Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages, who directs the project's research. Details of the language will be documented in an upcoming issue of the journal Indian Linguistics.[...]
Languages like Koro "construe reality in very different ways," Dr. Anderson said. "They uniquely code knowledge of the natural world in ways that cannot be translated into a major language."[...]
Moreover, it was masked by the unusual language diversity of the area, where so many languages are spoken that they seem to intermingle effortlessly in streams of thought. Indeed, the local Koro speakers themselves didn't consider theirs a separate language, even though it is as distinct from those spoken by other villagers as English is from Russian, the researchers said.
This language has no written form, so researchers are working quickly to learn its grammar and vocabulary in order to preserve it against extinction.
Link via Ace of Spades HQ | Photo: National Geographic
Anyway, I hope they study further into this language. I'm curious what makes it really stand out from other languages.
One can say that each language represents an unique way of encoding human knowledge about the world. Reading the article I was under the impression that the researchers have stumbled upon another language isolate. Perhaps one with truly unique grammar and syntax. However, the second part of WSJ report reveals that Koro is firmly placed among other Tibeto-Burman languages. This being a sub-family of an even larger Sino-Tibetan family of languages.
With all due respect to uniqueness of this particular language, no language which can be so decidedly placed in such a large family can be considered as special as languages such as Basque or ancient Sumerian or many languages of American natives which defy any attempt of classification, and quite often exhibit truly unique ways of encoding information.
Speaking of linguists, thank god there are Wikipedia editors who know something about linguistics and can help sort out what is clearly a load of hyperbole in that linked article.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koro_language
Database designers got it right (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unique_key). A unique key in a database index makes the value unique, not very unique or more unique than another - just plain unique. Why doesn't everyone want to get it right as well?
Do you accept that "it's" isn't possessive? Or do you think that since people misspell it all the time it's OK to use it that way? You don't need to check with a linguist to answer. I'm not the grammar police. I thought it was ironic that the title of this article used incorrect language to describe a language.