Extinct Tongues
Lost and Found Sound: Lost South African Languages
The CD "EXTINCT: South African Khoisan Languages." hide caption
Lost and Found Sound producer, Jay Allison, showcases a tip on a lost language from listener Bonny Sands in Flagstaff, Arizona. She's a linguist who's been working on languages that have become extinct.
A colleague of Sands, Tony Traill from South Africa, found 1936 wax cylinder recordings of now-extinct languages of the bushmen. He's put out a CD of what he found. Some of the sound could not be cleaned up with the usual digital techniques which remove ticks and surface scratches from old recordings, because the language itself contains remarkable clicking sounds of the palate that would fool the sound restoration software.
CONTACT ABOUT THE CD
Anthony Traill
atraill@icon.co.va
Johannesburg, SA