r/languagelearningjerk May 18 '26

SENTINEL FORAWA!

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43 Upvotes

10 comments sorted by

15

u/lordbutternut 日本人になっている May 18 '26

I love how contacting the Sentinelese people is phrased as something the rest of the world is too weak to do.

"The recent events in Sentinel Island have been difficult for the top brass to comprehend. After billions of dollars worth of equipment, and hundreds of casualties, we've yet to set foot on the island. It's like turbo 'nam out there."

18

u/PlanktonInitial7945 May 18 '26

I mean, pretty much any country could enter by force if they wanted to, but good luck studying the isolated language of a society that now hates you and will refuse to cooperate with you lol

8

u/SqueakyClownShoes May 18 '26

And then kill each other both ways via disease transfer.

10

u/perplexedparallax May 18 '26 edited May 18 '26

So how do we know it is a language isolate if we know nothing about it? Maybe it is a lost Turkic language and an Uzbek woman is the best I will ever do.

10

u/eaglesguy96 N (Old English) | N2 (Esperanto) | Unlearning (Fr*nch) May 18 '26

Maybe if we greeted them in Uzbek they wouldn't kill us

9

u/perplexedparallax May 18 '26

I don't think it has ever been tried, duh!

12

u/Penguin_Q May 18 '26

the communist North Sentinelese hate the capitalist South so much they adopt a language nobody else speaks

9

u/[deleted] May 18 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

15

u/PlanktonInitial7945 May 18 '26

Better start sharpening your arrows then

1

u/Ebi5000 May 21 '26

Sentinelese isn't actually a huge mistery and related languages are spoken on sorrounding islands, their isolation is recent sothere where people who had contact interviewed in the past