Kinda creepy...

The Human Speechome Project

The idea: to record 10 hours a day of audio and video of a single child from birth to age 3. The goal is to gather data on language acquisition in a more natural setting: the child's home. It's tough to be the child of a scientist huh?

The toughest part of the project will sure be the data analysis. Can you imagine how many hours will be spent to make the data meaningful? But the possibilities...

Aramaic going extinct? Say that again...

An article on the Brazilian history magazine called "História Viva", by Graziella Beting, states that Aramaic, the supposed language of Christ, is at risk of extinction. But, isn't it already extinct? Yes, old Aramaic sure is. The article says Aramaic, when one should read Western Neo-Aramaic. Western Neo-Aramaic sure descends from Aramaic, but they are not the same languages. Although it might be inspiring for some that Christ's language (although probably not the only one) is still spoken to this today, that is far from accurate.

The aricle also cites one of these vacuous statistics (my translation):

It is estimated that half of the seven thousand languages spoken around the world is at risk of extinction. That means that one language disappears every 15 days

Well, where did that come from? Of course, a person who is non-naive about statistics will notice that this is probably a rough mean, but it still doesn't say much. If we consider that this rate will remain constant (probably not an accurate assumption), it will take almost 144 years for half the world's languages to go extinct. Is it the way it's gonna go down? I don' think we have enough data to make such estimates. Languages, being mostly a social construct, depend on social interaction, politics, economics of each particular society. Any rate of language extinction is necessarily subject to revision.