الامويّر

I came across a french cultural group which has a similar name: "Mille et Une Langues" and offers language classes in Lyon. They also founded a group called KoToPo, which is probably both a creative acronym and a Niger-Congo language spoken in Nigeria and Cameroon (where it is known as Peere).
But this then led me to another site on the Mille et Une Langues du Petit Prince which makes the astounding claim that the Little Prince is the best-selling work of fiction in the world. On our them of books I had to check that out, and verify it with the librass: In fact it does not come on any sort of top ten according to Wikipedia's list, nor according to Russel Ash's top 10 of everything which I remember reading quite a while back and being surprised that the "What Would Jesus Do?" book was number 9. (Incidentally I bought a postcard 2 days ago on the WWJD? theme - slightly irreverent, but not as bad as this). But I digress... The bit that was interesting about the Little Prince was that it has been translated into 150 many languages, and especially now (drum roll please...) Amazigh! It was disappointing to find out that Le Petit Prince wasn't originally written in French, despite it being Saint-Exupery's mother tongue - that my well have been the first book I ever read in French. But back to the Amazigh Principito, which is in Tifinagh script, and translated by a Québecois Moroccan, Fouad Lahbib. Though I haven't gotten very far in my berber studies, it appears that the title is Aglden not the article's stated Ageldun Amezzan. Which made me wonder if this is just the diminutive of Prince (as in Principito) or if the title is cut off. I think it sounds better with a diminutive rather than two words, and was really hoping I would find some creative Arabic diminutives, like امويّر (amweyer) as we might hear in Hassaniya. Instead, the only creativity was a disappointing replacement of رحالة for امير by one of the syrian translators... the only other noteworthy section of the little prince article was this bit on Argentinian language Toba: Il y a deux ans, la parution du Petit Prince en toba, dialecte parlé par une petite communauté aborigène du nord de l’Argentine et intitulé So Shiyaxawolec Nta’a, a permis aux membres de cette communauté de pouvoir lire autre chose que le Nouveau Testament.

Triglossia, and cinematic linguistics

Enough of this "diglossia" business, I want something a little more challenging.  Let's try "tri-" !

Actually, while I was thinking about the whole diglossia issue a month ago with my friend in Switzerland, we shot a short film called "Anatomy of a decision" in which three characters act out the internal "monologue" of an individual whose will, reason, and emotions are debating... in three different languages of course.  You can see it here.  The quality is not great so it is tough to see what is going on visually, but the figures (all of them played by me) are supposed to appear as hollow mesh mannequins hovering over a brook.  They are conversing (trilingually) about whether they should answer the phone call that was just made.  My favorite line was that of the emotions, saying (in Spanish):  "Or maybe it's the police asking me to identify a body at the morgue!" 

     But enough tooting of my own horn... I have been meaning to do a little movie review of "The Linguists" which I saw the UK premiere of at SOAS just last week in London, with commentary and Q&A by Swarthmore prof David Harrison.  David said the inspiration for the film was the feeling of a couple Jewish filmmakers that Yiddish was dying.  When they realized actually it wasn't, they decided to try to do a movie on some languages that actually were.

Here is a further convo with David about dying languages:

I thought the Bolivian language Kallawaya was the most interesting (and in true praeteritian fashion I will gloss over the appalling fact that though David and Greg claim to speak 33 languages between them, they don't know spanish!). The Kallawaya language, which even Bolivian linguists believed to be dead, or absorbed into Quechua, is actually passed down only through transmission from Adult-male medicine men to adolescent male trainees. I am not sure what one would call this sort of unnatural language transmission, but it reminds me of Lameen's observation about Kwarandzie, that it is only learned in adolescence, and only used in certain social situations (and I guess football matches and occult healing ceremonies are both frenzied religious experiences in a manner of speaking).  So the question is what does one call that kind of language acquisition, where no "native speakers" learn the language from birth? Any suggestions?  Could they be "latent languages," or "teenanguages," to take the portmanteau a bit further?