Word: boing
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...thought to have been around 85 years old at the time of her death, was the last living member of the Bo, one of 10 tribes that comprise an ethnic group known as the Great Andamanese people. Like some other indigenous groups on this archipelago 745 miles (1,200 km) east of the Indian mainland, the Great Andamanese evolved in isolation for millenniums until the 1850s, when the colonial British began to settle the Andamans. Since then, the population has plummeted, from at least 5,000 to just 52 people now lumped together in a sprawl of cottages...
...Experts say the vanishing of the Bo language comes at a particularly perilous moment in the history of human speech. "There's a consensus [among linguists] that we are seeing an unprecedented pace of language extinction. And it is accelerating," says David Harrison, a professor of linguistics at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania and co-founder of the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages. Of the world's roughly 7,000 spoken languages, over half are spoken by only 0.2% of all the people on earth. Nearly 80% of the world's population speaks just 83 languages, a proportion that...
...that something vital gets lost with the death of each oral language. Anvita Abbi, a professor of linguistics at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi who spent the better part of the past decade studying the languages of the Andamans, says the speech of hunter-gatherer societies like the Bo carry an intimate, encoded understanding of the natural world and its biodiversity. Though the Bo seldom strayed from the few islands they inhabited, they have at least 67 words for varieties of birds and some 150 for fish. "There's a vast knowledge base slipping from our grasp," says Abbi...
...life of the Great Andamanese (whom the Bo belonged to) was dramatically disrupted once the British set up a penal colony in the archipelago in 1858. Punitive raids as well as the spread of diseases brought in by settlers decimated their ranks. After Indian independence, New Delhi attempted to save the Greater Andamanese by forcibly relocating all the tribes' remaining members to one isle, but that led to the gradual loss of distinct hereditary tribal customs and lore. Today, says Abbi, alcoholism is rife among the men, and there is no infrastructure to teach children the language of their forefathers...
...very tragic," says Wen Bo, China co-director for the NGO Pacific Environment. "It's more evidence that the oil companies are not prepared for such an ecological crisis." The accident mirrors a 2005 explosion that released 100 tons of toxic benzene into the Songhua river in northeastern China, tainting the water supply for several million residents of the city of Harbin. While that disaster helped sparked new public awareness of the extent of the nation's water pollution, the lessons of 2005 are still being painfully relearned today.(See pictures of the world's most polluted places...