So they went to the camp on the outskirts of Bagram where many interpreters live and found one who could speak the rare language.
Page C1 EXPOSING A RARE LANGUAGE Dan Everett, a linguist who studies Pirah?the language of a small tribe in the Brazilian Amazon, is raising academic hackles again with a new book, and a documentary is on the way.
Already, a manuscript with Georgian on the surface turned out to have a bottom layer in a rare language called Caucasian-Albanian: it was spoken by a nearly extinct Christian people that once flourished in present-day Azerbaijan but is now confined to a few villages.And there is an excellent chance of some new information about those monastic heroes from the Celtic fringe.
Created mainly for actors and other performers, it suggests an untapped possibility for rare languages on the Internet.
The House of the Small Languages says it plans to serve as a collection of audio files of rare languages (www.burgaud.demon.nl/index.htm).htm
Navajo is one of the rare languages to have survived the onslaught of the English juggernaut that laid waste to North America's native linguistic diversity.
Placing one hand across her chest and swaying gently back and forth, she quoted a line from Davis's 2003 talk, about the disappearance of the world's rare languages, the way someone might recall a favorite line of Byron.
The International Dialects of English Archive, an audio site run out of the University of Kansas (www.ukans.edu/idea), is an interesting site for training the student's ear, although it does not deal with rare languages.
But efforts like the record-a-thon and other large-scale digitalization projects, like Google Books and the Gutenberg Project, which aims to translate 10 million books in the public domain into 100 languages, could go far toward keeping rare languages alive.
But we also rely on rare languages to communicate securely and disrupt the enemy's espionage.
The Dreamers will only make the cut, however, if they successfully fill out a 127-page form that asks whether they have been terrorists, hold advanced degrees, and can speak Cebuano, Igbo, Yoruba, and a host of other rare languages.
