Word: guinea
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...recent study by M.I.T. linguist Ken Hale estimates that 3,000 of the world's 6,000 languages are doomed because no children speak them. Researchers estimate that Africa alone has 1,800 languages, Indonesia 672 and New Guinea 800. If a language disappears, traditional knowledge tends to vanish with it, since individual language groups have specialized vocabularies reflecting native people's unique solutions to the challenges of food gathering, healing and dealing with the elements in their particular ecological niche. Hale estimates that only 300 languages have a secure future...
...island nation of Papua New Guinea, in the Coral Sea, jobless people returning to highland villages from the cities often lack the most rudimentary knowledge necessary to survive, such as which rot-resistant trees to use to build huts or which poisonous woods to avoid when making fires for cooking. Many of the youths, alienated from their villages by schooling and exposure to the West, become marauding "rascals," who have made Papua New Guinea's cities among the most dangerous in the world...
...difficult for an outsider to imagine the degree to which novel ideas and images assault the minds of tribal adolescents moving into the outside world. They get glimpses of a society their parents never encountered and cannot explain. Students who leave villages for schooling in Papua New Guinea learn that people, not the spirits of their ancestors, created the machines, dams and other so-called cargo of the modern world. Once absorbed, this realization undermines the credibility and authority of elders...
...Guinea hens are bald, wattled and graceless. They resemble feathered footballs. Worse, they are surly, loud and unmusical, often at 3 in the morning. But they are voracious gobblers of bugs and are especially fond of the tiny deer ticks that carry the spirochetes of Lyme disease. Which is why model Christie Brinkley, SPORTS ILLUSTRATED's swimsuit sweetie some years ago, learned to love them. She has installed a flock on her estate in East Hampton, N.Y., and hands out chicks (called keets) to her neighbors...
Fear of Lyme disease is justified, and harboring guinea hens is reasonable, if not terribly practical for most people. The nagging affliction often shows itself first as a rash and flulike nausea, fever and aches. Lyme mimics many other illnesses, and in later stages it can escalate to arthritis, meningitis, neurological damage and sometimes physical debility and racking pain. Some 30,000 cases had been reported in the U.S. by the end of last year. From 1986 through 1989, reported cases doubled each year, and a slight drop last year (7,995 cases, from 8,551 the year before...