Re: [tied] Re: Europeans descend from Basques...

The Ethnologue at SIL (http://www.ethnologue.com/family_index.asp) shows about 160 familes and 30 isolates. (Basque is considered a family of three languages, one Spanish and two French -- but Korean is listed as a Language Isolate.) But yes, about six families dominate the globe: IE, Afro-Asiatic, Niger-Congo, Altaic, Sino-Tibetan, Austronesian.

SIL lists 6,809 living language, but 407 are considered "nearly extinct".

Just some useless trivia.

~Danny~

----- Original Message -----

From: jdcroft

To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com

Sent: Monday, June 10, 2002 2:38 AM

Subject: [tied] Re: Europeans descend from Basques...

1. The number of languages spoken today largely belong to one of a dozen or so different major language families (with about as many isolates thrown in for good measure). This is only a very small number of the 10,000 or so langauges that existed 10,000 years ago.