Unwelcome Neighbors

But What About Esperanto?

Nearly half of the world's 6,000 spoken languages are near death or dying, say experts who are mounting a multimillion dollar effort to document and record languages in danger of disappearing.

Language scholars gathered in May at National Science Foundation headquarters in Arlington to brief journalists on plans to document more than 70 of these vanishing tongues and explain why they are worth preserving before they become extinct.

The efforts include a project by scientists at Cornell University and Northern Arizona University, who will gather ultrasound and airflow data to determine how the "click" sounds of South Africa's N/u language are produced.

There are only 13 fluent N/u speakers still living. Kristine Stenzel from the University of Colorado will document and analyze Piratapuyo -- a language from the Amazon region with a rare word order: object-verb-subject, the opposite of standard English.

(That reminds me of the old joke mocking the quirky sentence construction once favored by Time magazine writers: "Backward ran sentences until reeled the mind.")

All told, the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities will spend more than $4 million on more than two dozen projects.

No word yet on whether there's going to be a grant to record proper English, which some language purists also claim is fast disappearing.

Killer Toilets?

Our heart goes out to the families of the three teenagers in Florida who were attacked by sharks last week, one fatally. These tragic and unsettling incidents made the Unconventional Wiz wonder about the relative danger of such attacks.

Here's reassuring news, just in time for summer beach season: The odds are greater that you'll be killed or injured by a deer or a bathroom appliance than by a marauding shark, according to the latest statistics complied by the International Shark Attack File maintained by the Florida Museum of Natural History.

Its numbers show that in the 1990s, an average of 130 people were killed each year in the United States when they slammed their cars into deer.

Over the same period, the average death rate for shark attacks was fewer than one per year. In fact, you're slightly more likely to be killed by a mountain lion or an alligator than by a shark -- perhaps good reason to stay out of the mountains and swamps.

Stay out of the bathroom, too. Injuries involving toilets number in the tens of thousands each year. In addition, bathroom bowl products (things such as plungers, cleansers and, we presume, those ghastly deodorant cakes found in rest stop toilets) annually account for more than a thousand injuries.

Killer sharks? Statistically, no problem. I'm worried about those toilets.

morinr@washpost.com