which are the most common
They also have highly complex agglutinative grammars that make Hungarian and Finnish seem like a walk in the park.
The languages of the Native American people are quickly dying out.
It's upto us to help keep them alive.
The majority of them have highly complex sound system that would make the click languages of South Africa and the Caucasian languages blush in embarassment.
Queen Ehlana wrote:Also, I don't think I could stay in America just to study a language unless the tribe were very inviting. But none of them seem to be. The smaller ones don't even realize that there are people out there who want to learn their languages besides their own tribe members.
Queen Ehlana wrote:The majority of them have highly complex sound system that would make the click languages of South Africa and the Caucasian languages blush in embarassment.
Now why would you say that? I've listened to a few click languages, and Zulu sounded much harder than Nahuatl and Mayan. And I had a South African teacher who told me there's a small tribe in South Africa that speaks completely in clicks...
pastorant wrote:The languages are about as different from each other as Basque is from Chinese.
pastorant wrote:The majority of them have highly complex sound system that would make the click languages of South Africa and the Caucasian languages blush in embarassment.
pastorant wrote:They also have highly complex agglutinative grammars that make Hungarian and Finnish seem like a walk in the park.
pastorant wrote:There are over 20 Linguistic families, including Algonquian, Athapascan, Uto-Aztecan, Tanoan, Siouan, Iroquoian, Penutian, Eskimo-Aleut and Andean.
pastorant wrote:I specialized in Athapaskan which included Squamish, Tlingit, and Tsimshian.
pastorant wrote:Most indians under 60 do NOT speak their language.
The languages of the Native American people are quickly dying out.
It's upto us to help keep them alive.
do you have some figures to back this up? just looking at the sound system of inuktitut (not inuit - which is the name of the people speaking this language, but surely you'd know this if you'd studied it before) one gets the impression it has fewer phonemes than *english* . a cursory glance at the alphabets of languages like cheyenne, mi'kmaq, chickasaw, mohawk
gives a similar impression.
to my knowledge the only ones that have really impressive sound inventories are various languages (of various families) in the pacific northwest coast region - halkomelem, dakelh, tlingit, haida, and so on.
and last time i checked it was a bushman language that held the world record for most sounds. the previous record-holder was ubykh - a caucasian language.
ultimately, it's up to the "indians" themselves.
alois wrote:If you want to know what Paraguayan Guaraní sounds like then here is the page. Click on the story and then on the sound icon. The files are impressively clear.
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