A New Human Dialect Named Koro Is Discovered
Linguists check out the discovery of a whole new language as a Christian follower would view the discovery of a new Eden. Once discovered, there’s a brief window of opportunity that scientists have to record this human discovery. The Wall Street Journal reports that National Geographic “Enduring Voices” researchers are going via that process right now with koro, a dialect talked by a mere 800 people in the northeastern India state of Arunachal Pradesh.
Himalayas’ foothills have koro now
English Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge once wrote that “Language is the armory of the human mind, and at once contains the trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquest.” Human history has a ton of conquered individuals and dead dialects in it which is why Coleridge probably knew how essential his words are. In the Arunachal Pradesh region of India, koro was found in a dozen hunter-gatherer villages by two scientists. More than 120 languages are spoken within the state. According to Dr. Gregory Anderson of the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages, koro is “quite distinct on each and every level — the sound, the words (and) the sentence structure.” Reality differs between English and koro. This makes a difference. The elements in the natural world in koro are hard to explain. Anderson states they can’t be translated into nay of the “major” world languages. Koro also has no written form, which makes dissemination more difficult. Koro details could be published in a journal soon. Indian Linguistics is the journal.
7,000 dialects are recognized on the planet at present
Experts predict that of the nearly 7,000 known languages spoken today, roughly half will die before the 21st century is complete. Estimates indicate that thousands of languages have already perished over the course of human history. Also, the WSJ reports that every two weeks, the last recognized fluent speaker of a dialect dies. In the case of koro, the more that youth go off to schools where only Hindi and English are spoken (a common occurrence), the more likely koro is to fade quickly.
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Wall Street Journal
online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703843804575534122591921594.html