The world’s most exotic languages are vanishing in a puff of smoke

Rare Tongues: The Secret Stories of Hidden Languages Lorna Gibb

Atlantic, pp.342, 20

It is one of academia’s horrible ironies that linguistics, the subject devoted to human communication, has managed to communicate nothing about its many startling and fundamental discoveries to the world outside its university departments. So any book such as this linguistic tour of some of the world’s exotic, hidden and endangered languages is to be welcomed with sobbing gratitude.

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Taggedclicks, El Sibo, Gaelic, Khosian, Linguistics, Maori, Native Americans, Papua New Guinea, phonetics, smoke signals, syntax, whistles

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The world’s most exotic languages are vanishing in a puff of smoke

Among the many ‘rare tongues’ explored by Lorna Gibb is the use of smoke signals by native north Americans, the oldest form of long-distance communication

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