If the only remaining speaker is a bird and no one can understand the bird, I don’t think this counts as saving a language from destruction. I don’t see even a whole 2% chance we’ll ever regain that knowledge. It’s just noises now.
Even if it’s just an apocryphal story, it’s at least a crazy-interesting concept that I hadn’t even considered before.
Great TIL, however flawed:
Humboldt’s encounter with the parrot that saved a language from extinction is often dismissed as nothing more than linguistic legend—even the great linguist and professor David Crystal calls the story “probably apocryphal.”
They do continue on to make it seem more truthfull, failing, however, to diminuish the apocryphality. I mean they even link to an article that basically disproves what they claim ffs.
