The IDEA

We begin the new series on facts on fact sources. These fact collection for the 31 days is my own work and is partly based on the very base of the factorium. The facts in this series will be more of articles than facts... so brace yourselves!

My inspiration for the very idea was on my hobby... that of collecting the facts pages that used to be there at the end of every classmate notebook. This coupled up with competition from other classmates to collect the most number of pages prompted me and made me think, "There has to be a better way to know, dig and put up facts! I then thought of making a blog with a catchy name. As I could not come up with something better, I thought a portmanteau would be a good choice!

Turning to the facts behind the Classmate notebooks, they are presented in a very user friendly way, with a lot of humor and less content. In contrast, the facts in this blog have been presented in a degree of detailedness. My friends have a collection of about 55 pages from the classmate notebooks, and I will try to post the facts behind the notebooks on this blog in the next few days.

This, I believe will be a very unique compilation second to none, as not many people bother to collect the facts, leave aside compiling them and posting them on the internet. I have asked my friends to help me out, and I will present the facts to the Visitors!

The Happening Month that WAS

I know it is a bit late... but anyways... heres the monthly report for August.

We have an accelerated graph of the visitors here!! I hope all of you love the blog!!! For the last month, I did not pay much attention to the blog due to my co-curriculars, so the facts were not that stupendous, but this month, we have a series called "Classmate Facts" which promises to be my best work ever... where I will be posting facts printed behind Classmate Notebooks from my own little collection.

So let us continue in our quest for more facts!!!

@@J

Languanologue # 16

Today is the last day for our series, let us end it by facting on dead languages.

By contrast to an extinct language which no longer has any speakers, a dead language may remain in use for scientific or legal functions. Sanskrit (India) Language is an example. There has been language revival in the case of Sanskrit and it is still spoken by everyone in Mathoor Village (Karnataka), India. Recently, another Indian language, the Aka-Bo language became extinct when its last known speaker, Boa Sr. died on Indian Republic Day, 2010. The Red Book of Endangered Languages was published by UNESCO and collected a comprehensive list of the world's languages currently facing extinction. It has been replaced by the UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger.

See ya later... Let us close the pages of the Languanologue until next time...

Languanologue # 15

Today is the penultimate post for this month and for this series. For the next 2 days, we will see something on Extinct Languages of the world and dead languages.

In very simple terms, An extinct language is a language that no longer has any speakers. Extinct languages may be contrasted with dead languages, which are no longer spoken by anyone as his or her native language. Normally the transition from a dead to an extinct language occurs when a language undergoes language death while being directly replaced by a different one, as we saw in earlier posts. Language extinction may also occur when a language evolves into a new language or family of languages. An example of this was Old English, the previous version of Modern English.

More tomorrow...

Languanologue # 14

Up for today is more on endangered languages.

The SIL Ethnologue lists 516 out of 6,912 living languages inventorized (7.5%) as "nearly extinct", indicating cases where "only a few elderly speakers are still living". This includes 210 Pacific languages, 170 American languages, 78 Asian languages, 46 African languages and 12 European languages. Another interesting fact about endangered languages is in order to judge if a language is endangered, the number of speakers is less important than the age distribution; An example of this can be seen in Indonesia where it is reported that there are languages with as many as two million native speakers alive now, but all of advancing age, with little or no transmission to the young. So here, the young, the children matter the most and the transmission of a language on to the next generation is very important. Experts predict that even in a conservative scenario, about half of today's languages will go extinct within the next fifty to one hundred years.

From tomorrow for the last 2 days we will see something on extinct languages of the world.

Languanologue # 13

Today we will see something more on endangered languages of the world. Specifically, we will also see on a phenomenon called Language Death, feared by linguists all over the world.

Language Death is a gradual process where the given number of fluent or native speakers of any language or dialect is decreased, eventually resulting in no native speakers of that variety. The most common process leading to language death is one in which a community of speakers of one language becomes bilingual in another language. A language is often declared to be dead even before the last native speaker of the language has died as 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.

Languanologue # 12

Only 5 days are left for the month to end... these 5 days will see facts on Endangered and Extinct languages in the world. We will start off with Endangered languages, then move on to Extinct Languages and see some examples of these, along with minor statistical facts.

As promised, I will be soon remodeling the Factorium step by step...

An endangered language, as the name suggests is any language rapidly falling out of use. The total number of exact endangered languages in the world is not known. Michael Krauss, a linguist defines languages as safe if children will probably be speaking them in 100 years; endangered if children will probably not be speaking them in 100 years; and "moribund" if children are not speaking them now. He estimates 15-30% (or 900-1800) of languages are moribund.The criteria for a language to become endangered is based on 3 factors: The number of speakers currently living, the mean age of native and/or fluent speakers and the percentage of the youngest generation acquiring fluency with the language in question. Once a language is determined to be endangered, there are two basic steps that need to be taken in order to stabilize or rescue the language. The first is language documentation and the second is language revitalisation. Tomorrow we shall see more on this topic.