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Can Multilingualism Survive?: How cities preserve and abandon languages

52 points by tokenadult 10y ago

timthelion 10y ago
In my experience, every langauge is broken into two dialectual parts: 1. The formal communications dialect 2. The bedroom + dinner table dialect People who live in a european contry may notice that the formal dialect of their native langauge is dissapearing, and even, that many new concepts cannot be expressed in their native toung. But that doesn't mean that the bedroom + dinner table aspect of their langauge is going away. Germans don't have tummy aches, neither do Czechs. But both, "compile" their software and both preform a "git commit".
- ginko 10y ago
  Germans certainly have "Bauchweh"
  - 0xffff2 10y ago
    That's exactly the point... German speakers have "Bauchweh" where English speakers have a "tummy ache", but both "compile" their code.
    - germanier 10y ago
      German speakers certainly use the word "kompilieren" which developed independently of the English "compile" a few hundred years ago. For computer programs it is used of course following the English example. They don't have their own word for "commit". Instead they use the English one as a loan word. However, it follows all the regular grammar rules ("Ich habe das gestern committet"). Loan words are nothing new. They are adopted and merged into languages and often they reach a point where people don't notice anymore that they are foreign to the language. Nowadays English is the major source of loan words. Before that it was French, and before that Latin. English is not taking over any more than the other two did.
- Typhon 10y ago
  It's much more complicated than that, and unless you know french, I doubt you'd guess what a "logiciel" is or an "ordinateur". Furthermore, there is no such thing as a "concept that cannot be expressed" in a language. More often than not when people say a language has "no word for X", they turn out to be wrong, and even when they're right, the concept can be expressed through paraphrase.
  - Swizec 10y ago
    There are many concepts in many languages that cannot be expressed in another language with the same connotations and subtext. That's why we have loanwords. Why else would a bouquet not be called "a bunch of flowers". Because a bunch of flowers is something different than a bouquet.
    - hermannj314 10y ago
      We call them floral arrangements in the midwest United States, not "bunch[es] of flowers". We also call them bouquets, nevertheless, I think the English language can handle that one just fine.
      - MichaelGG 10y ago
        But a floral arrangement can be of various shapes, laid out in a wreath or across a table right? At least as I've heard it used, bouquet doesn't really refer to a wreath or other designs. Maybe I'm splitting nonexistent hairs.
      - csydas 10y ago
        I think what the above poster was referring to was the cultural connotations that are immediately invoked by a word or phrase that isn't really transmissible to someone not familiar with the language and its culture. The example of "bouquet" was likely to touch on the idea that the literal translation of the word would be more akin to their example of "bunch of flowers". Since the word has now integrated into English, there is an immediate understanding that you're not just referring to a bunch of flowers, but something meant to be aesthetically pleasing and usually to signify an event of some importance. I suppose the English language did handle the word, but it did so by just integrating the word, not by translating it. The response to the parent comment was more to debate that there are a lot of words, concepts, and idioms that may carry an actual translation or similar concept in another, but the translations fail to capture the immediacy of the idea conveyed by the original word or phrase. It's not to say that there is no way to understand or interpret these bits of language unless you're a native speaker, it's that in many cases you lose a lot of the meaning without the cultural context surrounding it. Culture and language are pretty inseparable; it's why transliteration is often frowned upon when doing translation works, and localization is considered important to helping the audience understand without imparting too high of a burden of knowledge of their part. Sometimes this burden of knowledge is simply unavoidable. But the ability of a word or phrase to evoke a specific idea/image/feeling in one language and to not do so in another is not impossible. If you know anyone for whom English is a second language (and has not spent extended time in the US), try to explain why "cut the cheese" is funny in English. They may understand conceptually that there is a rude meaning to the phrase, but I'm willing to bet they'd be more than happy to tell you that they'll cut the cheese in the kitchen.
- guard-of-terra 10y ago
  But we don't all use "compile" or "git commit" as barewords in our languages, do we? That would be silly and out of place. We use those as stems, over which we add our own orthography, morphology and syntax.
- cm2187 10y ago
  I see lots of French milleniums writing each others in english on social networks. I don't think because they want to be understood by a foreign audience. Just because english has become the language of the internet, english expressions are becoming a sort of habit.
  - zanny 10y ago
    If the Internet pushes English enough to get every digital citizen to learn it, that would be one of the most compelling reasons for its social good. I always hate all the talk about multilingualism as a good thing, when the consequence of language diversity is, one, people are wasting time in their youths learning languages for other peoples benefit, ie, those that want to "preserve" it, when the marginal utility of having excess languages is at best questionable. And two, if you do not know the primary language used for, you know, communicating with other human beings, especially English, your potential economic mobility is catastrophically crippled on a global scale.
    - Typhon 10y ago
      Tu as tout à fait raison. Pourquoi perdrais-je mon temps à apprendre ta langue pour ton bénéfice, c'est une perte de temps total. Merci de m'avoir ouvert les yeux. J'aime bien aussi ta deuxième phrase qui sous-entend qu'on ne peut communiquer avec les autres qu'en anglais. Je me demande comment je faisais pour discuter avec mes parents quand j'étais petit. C'est sans doute de là que vient la tragique incommunicabilité qui a marqué mon enfance.
      - _kyran 10y ago
        Exactement. Quand j'étais plus jeune, je voulais de comprendre et communiquer avec des Francophones. Je ne saisis pas que le majorité des jeunes en France apprennent et utilisent Anglais tout les temps. Donc à le début, c'était très difficile d'avoir un conversation sans les changent à anglais. Maintenant je peux parler juste un peu le Français, mais l'expression quand un francophones réalise que je peux le comprendre est absolument fantastique :) Bravo pour apprendre Anglais. Je souhaite que plus gens ont apprécié la lutte que les locuteurs non natifs ont quand ils apprennent un nouveau langue.
x5n1 10y ago
Tower of babble must come down. We are so obsessed as a civilization with at the same time destroying languages through things like global capitalism, while at the same time preserving them. It's a weird combo.
- wolfram74 10y ago
  You're mixing your metaphors, the tower of babel was struck down the same time ADMIN invoked the curse of babble upon the land.
Typhon 10y ago
I'm quite pessimistic concerning the future of multilingualism. Small, isolated communities manage to preserve their language for century, but a community the same size in a big city can lose its language in the space of a generation or two. EDIT : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8IBfgUNpRsY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8IBfgUNpRsY Note that the title is kinda stupid, it's obviously not their native language if they can barely speak it, and that's kind of the point. Note also that their parents come from a huge language community which is in no danger of disappearing anytime soon and nevertheless, it's not enough.
- sridca 10y ago
  That's obvious though, isn't it? People are going to gravitate towards adopting the language with highest economic and social capital (presumably why English took over French as an international language?).
  - guard-of-terra 10y ago
    English is also less weird than French, written English is pretty easy language. Spoken English not so much. Italian is perhaps much easier, but of course economic and social capital matters too.
    - Typhon 10y ago
      Weirdness of a language is completely subjective, and easyness too. Overall, the intrinsic qualities of a language matter little if at all in driving its adoption.
      - theoh 10y ago
        Inflected and irregular languages are more complex than uninflected and regular. That's one kind of weirdness that it's difficult to dismiss.
        rvense 10y ago
cm2187 10y ago
Most european languages are bound to disapear if Europe wants to achieve anything in common. You just can't if people don't understand each others, and if people all have to speak a common language, within a couple of generations, French, Spanish or German will be that old dialect that some old people insist on speaking but that new generations don't understand anymore. Everything has a begining, a peak and an end. Languages too.
- zanny 10y ago
  Languages are incredibly complex and information-intense things to learn, store, and maintain in ones brain. It almost feels aggressive for high-tower liberals to talk about how important it is that minorities preserve their languages, when there can be real costs to their economic prosperity associated with having to divide their childhoods between a "native" tongue that is for practical use worthless, and English. Even worse when English proficiency is harmed in favor of a less useful tongue. And that is not to say English is in any way a good language. It is dreadful. But language is not valuable for how well it pleases a gramaticist, but for its ability to facilitate communication, and right now English is so far and away #1 globally in that regard doing anything but trying to press every civilization to teach their citizens it is almost condemning them to poverty for some upper crust and downright selfish ideals of cultural diversity.
  - realusername 10y ago
    Languages are not only strictly for communication and not everything has to be linked to increasing economic value either surprisingly.
- Typhon 10y ago
  Europe wants to achieve anything in common It's unclear if "Europe" wants anything of the sort at this point, and you seem to assume that English would be the common language, which is not unreasonable since it's the one currently being used, but it's not politically acceptable, and it'll be worse if the UK finally decides to leave. Note also that Europe is probably the part of the world where minority languages are in better shape. E.g Catalan is spoken by 4 million native speakers, which is more than all of the native american language speakers combined.
broadbear 10y ago
There are a lot of factors here. Some communities fiercely protect their local tongue. Take Brittany in France for example. They still teach their native language, completely distinct from French, in public schools. This is how long after French has been the official language of France? Additionally, some countries in Europe, such as the Netherlands, have high rates of multilingualism. It is supposedly easier when you are born into it. This enables you to speak the administrative languages fluently while still speaking a native language at home only a few million people on the planet still speak. Loyalty to one's culture can have a lot to do with sustainability of a language. To an outsider, it may seem futile to learn a language like Italian for any kind of practical reason. To an Italian, to abandon their language would be sacrilege. Globalism may be weakening some languages in the near term as it may make sense for people around the world to learn English or even Chinese, and maybe a few other languages. However, imagine if translation technology became advanced enough to conduct a normal conversation with each party speaking a different language. We might even hold on to that mysterious 4th official language in Switzerland (Romansh) after that. There are plenty of people who would love to go back to their hometown and speak nothing other than the language their parents taught them.
voodootrucker 10y ago
Uniting in language is a sign of increased communication and opportunity. The sooner we have a global language, the better. More opportunity, less war. I would think a bunch of engineers trying to create stuff would agree on that. All of that being said, the study of language is very important, and the differences that exist should be recorded for scientific study. Maybe it even makes sense to preserve the real outlying communities (http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Sleep-There-Are-Snakes/dp/0307386120 http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Sleep-There-Are-Snakes/dp/0307386...) by forcibly cutting them off from the global economy. But major languages (English, Spanish, Portuguese) are redundant standards that should be consolidated ASAP.
- onion2k 10y ago
  A common global language doesn't have to be a human language though. Technology to translate in real-time already exists, and is likely to improve far more quickly than anything that requires a rewrite of our cultural and political systems. It's a great deal more likely we'll speak as many languages as we do now but use technology to understand many more.
  - WildUtah 10y ago
    "Technology to translate in real-time already exists" No. It does not. I do some translation work and a lot of multilingual interaction. There is no decent translation technology even for written communication outside technical documents. Even that is only barely decent between European languages. A serious attempt at usable translation of even the simplest texts between Asian languages and others does not yet exist. Real time translation would multiply the speech recognition problem onto that still-imaginary translation technology. I will admit there is a lot of hype but there is no substitute for human translators nor for simply learning a new language anywhere on the horizon.
    - onion2k 10y ago
      It's early days, but the cutting edge stuff works for some limited value of "works". It's just about usable for casual conversations. But that's not the point I was making; what I'm saying is simply that the likelihood of getting working real-time translation on a computer is considerably higher than getting everyone to agree on a universal single language. I can see computer-based real-time translation getting to the point where it's putting translators out of jobs in the next few decades. I can't ever imagine humanity transitioning to a single language, or even a limited scope single language for business. It just won't happen.
known 10y ago
"The greater the diversity in a community, the fewer people vote and the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects; In the most diverse communities, neighbors trust one another about half as much as they do in the most homogenous settings." http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2007/08/05/the_downside_of_diversity/ http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2007/08/05/t...

52 points by tokenadult 10y ago

In my experience, every langauge is broken into two dialectual parts: 1. The formal communications dialect 2. The bedroom + dinner table dialect People who live in a european contry may notice that the formal dialect of their native langauge is dissapearing, and even, that many new concepts cannot be expressed in their native toung. But that doesn't mean that the bedroom + dinner table aspect of their langauge is going away. Germans don't have tummy aches, neither do Czechs. But both, "compile" their software and both preform a "git commit".

ginko 10y ago
Germans certainly have "Bauchweh"
- 0xffff2 10y ago
  That's exactly the point... German speakers have "Bauchweh" where English speakers have a "tummy ache", but both "compile" their code.
  - germanier 10y ago
    German speakers certainly use the word "kompilieren" which developed independently of the English "compile" a few hundred years ago. For computer programs it is used of course following the English example. They don't have their own word for "commit". Instead they use the English one as a loan word. However, it follows all the regular grammar rules ("Ich habe das gestern committet"). Loan words are nothing new. They are adopted and merged into languages and often they reach a point where people don't notice anymore that they are foreign to the language. Nowadays English is the major source of loan words. Before that it was French, and before that Latin. English is not taking over any more than the other two did.
Typhon 10y ago
It's much more complicated than that, and unless you know french, I doubt you'd guess what a "logiciel" is or an "ordinateur". Furthermore, there is no such thing as a "concept that cannot be expressed" in a language. More often than not when people say a language has "no word for X", they turn out to be wrong, and even when they're right, the concept can be expressed through paraphrase.
- Swizec 10y ago
  There are many concepts in many languages that cannot be expressed in another language with the same connotations and subtext. That's why we have loanwords. Why else would a bouquet not be called "a bunch of flowers". Because a bunch of flowers is something different than a bouquet.
  - hermannj314 10y ago
    We call them floral arrangements in the midwest United States, not "bunch[es] of flowers". We also call them bouquets, nevertheless, I think the English language can handle that one just fine.
    - MichaelGG 10y ago
      But a floral arrangement can be of various shapes, laid out in a wreath or across a table right? At least as I've heard it used, bouquet doesn't really refer to a wreath or other designs. Maybe I'm splitting nonexistent hairs.
    - csydas 10y ago
      I think what the above poster was referring to was the cultural connotations that are immediately invoked by a word or phrase that isn't really transmissible to someone not familiar with the language and its culture. The example of "bouquet" was likely to touch on the idea that the literal translation of the word would be more akin to their example of "bunch of flowers". Since the word has now integrated into English, there is an immediate understanding that you're not just referring to a bunch of flowers, but something meant to be aesthetically pleasing and usually to signify an event of some importance. I suppose the English language did handle the word, but it did so by just integrating the word, not by translating it. The response to the parent comment was more to debate that there are a lot of words, concepts, and idioms that may carry an actual translation or similar concept in another, but the translations fail to capture the immediacy of the idea conveyed by the original word or phrase. It's not to say that there is no way to understand or interpret these bits of language unless you're a native speaker, it's that in many cases you lose a lot of the meaning without the cultural context surrounding it. Culture and language are pretty inseparable; it's why transliteration is often frowned upon when doing translation works, and localization is considered important to helping the audience understand without imparting too high of a burden of knowledge of their part. Sometimes this burden of knowledge is simply unavoidable. But the ability of a word or phrase to evoke a specific idea/image/feeling in one language and to not do so in another is not impossible. If you know anyone for whom English is a second language (and has not spent extended time in the US), try to explain why "cut the cheese" is funny in English. They may understand conceptually that there is a rude meaning to the phrase, but I'm willing to bet they'd be more than happy to tell you that they'll cut the cheese in the kitchen.
guard-of-terra 10y ago
But we don't all use "compile" or "git commit" as barewords in our languages, do we? That would be silly and out of place. We use those as stems, over which we add our own orthography, morphology and syntax.
cm2187 10y ago
I see lots of French milleniums writing each others in english on social networks. I don't think because they want to be understood by a foreign audience. Just because english has become the language of the internet, english expressions are becoming a sort of habit.
- zanny 10y ago
  If the Internet pushes English enough to get every digital citizen to learn it, that would be one of the most compelling reasons for its social good. I always hate all the talk about multilingualism as a good thing, when the consequence of language diversity is, one, people are wasting time in their youths learning languages for other peoples benefit, ie, those that want to "preserve" it, when the marginal utility of having excess languages is at best questionable. And two, if you do not know the primary language used for, you know, communicating with other human beings, especially English, your potential economic mobility is catastrophically crippled on a global scale.
  - Typhon 10y ago
    Tu as tout à fait raison. Pourquoi perdrais-je mon temps à apprendre ta langue pour ton bénéfice, c'est une perte de temps total. Merci de m'avoir ouvert les yeux. J'aime bien aussi ta deuxième phrase qui sous-entend qu'on ne peut communiquer avec les autres qu'en anglais. Je me demande comment je faisais pour discuter avec mes parents quand j'étais petit. C'est sans doute de là que vient la tragique incommunicabilité qui a marqué mon enfance.
    - _kyran 10y ago
      Exactement. Quand j'étais plus jeune, je voulais de comprendre et communiquer avec des Francophones. Je ne saisis pas que le majorité des jeunes en France apprennent et utilisent Anglais tout les temps. Donc à le début, c'était très difficile d'avoir un conversation sans les changent à anglais. Maintenant je peux parler juste un peu le Français, mais l'expression quand un francophones réalise que je peux le comprendre est absolument fantastique :) Bravo pour apprendre Anglais. Je souhaite que plus gens ont apprécié la lutte que les locuteurs non natifs ont quand ils apprennent un nouveau langue.

x5n1 10y ago

Tower of babble must come down. We are so obsessed as a civilization with at the same time destroying languages through things like global capitalism, while at the same time preserving them. It's a weird combo.

wolfram74 10y ago
You're mixing your metaphors, the tower of babel was struck down the same time ADMIN invoked the curse of babble upon the land.

Typhon 10y ago

I'm quite pessimistic concerning the future of multilingualism. Small, isolated communities manage to preserve their language for century, but a community the same size in a big city can lose its language in the space of a generation or two. EDIT : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8IBfgUNpRsY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8IBfgUNpRsY Note that the title is kinda stupid, it's obviously not their native language if they can barely speak it, and that's kind of the point. Note also that their parents come from a huge language community which is in no danger of disappearing anytime soon and nevertheless, it's not enough.

sridca 10y ago
That's obvious though, isn't it? People are going to gravitate towards adopting the language with highest economic and social capital (presumably why English took over French as an international language?).
- guard-of-terra 10y ago
  English is also less weird than French, written English is pretty easy language. Spoken English not so much. Italian is perhaps much easier, but of course economic and social capital matters too.
  - Typhon 10y ago
    Weirdness of a language is completely subjective, and easyness too. Overall, the intrinsic qualities of a language matter little if at all in driving its adoption.
    - theoh 10y ago
      Inflected and irregular languages are more complex than uninflected and regular. That's one kind of weirdness that it's difficult to dismiss.
      - rvense 10y ago

cm2187 10y ago

Most european languages are bound to disapear if Europe wants to achieve anything in common. You just can't if people don't understand each others, and if people all have to speak a common language, within a couple of generations, French, Spanish or German will be that old dialect that some old people insist on speaking but that new generations don't understand anymore. Everything has a begining, a peak and an end. Languages too.

zanny 10y ago
Languages are incredibly complex and information-intense things to learn, store, and maintain in ones brain. It almost feels aggressive for high-tower liberals to talk about how important it is that minorities preserve their languages, when there can be real costs to their economic prosperity associated with having to divide their childhoods between a "native" tongue that is for practical use worthless, and English. Even worse when English proficiency is harmed in favor of a less useful tongue. And that is not to say English is in any way a good language. It is dreadful. But language is not valuable for how well it pleases a gramaticist, but for its ability to facilitate communication, and right now English is so far and away #1 globally in that regard doing anything but trying to press every civilization to teach their citizens it is almost condemning them to poverty for some upper crust and downright selfish ideals of cultural diversity.
- realusername 10y ago
  Languages are not only strictly for communication and not everything has to be linked to increasing economic value either surprisingly.
Typhon 10y ago
Europe wants to achieve anything in common It's unclear if "Europe" wants anything of the sort at this point, and you seem to assume that English would be the common language, which is not unreasonable since it's the one currently being used, but it's not politically acceptable, and it'll be worse if the UK finally decides to leave. Note also that Europe is probably the part of the world where minority languages are in better shape. E.g Catalan is spoken by 4 million native speakers, which is more than all of the native american language speakers combined.

broadbear 10y ago

There are a lot of factors here. Some communities fiercely protect their local tongue. Take Brittany in France for example. They still teach their native language, completely distinct from French, in public schools. This is how long after French has been the official language of France? Additionally, some countries in Europe, such as the Netherlands, have high rates of multilingualism. It is supposedly easier when you are born into it. This enables you to speak the administrative languages fluently while still speaking a native language at home only a few million people on the planet still speak. Loyalty to one's culture can have a lot to do with sustainability of a language. To an outsider, it may seem futile to learn a language like Italian for any kind of practical reason. To an Italian, to abandon their language would be sacrilege. Globalism may be weakening some languages in the near term as it may make sense for people around the world to learn English or even Chinese, and maybe a few other languages. However, imagine if translation technology became advanced enough to conduct a normal conversation with each party speaking a different language. We might even hold on to that mysterious 4th official language in Switzerland (Romansh) after that. There are plenty of people who would love to go back to their hometown and speak nothing other than the language their parents taught them.

voodootrucker 10y ago

Uniting in language is a sign of increased communication and opportunity. The sooner we have a global language, the better. More opportunity, less war. I would think a bunch of engineers trying to create stuff would agree on that. All of that being said, the study of language is very important, and the differences that exist should be recorded for scientific study. Maybe it even makes sense to preserve the real outlying communities (http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Sleep-There-Are-Snakes/dp/0307386120 http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Sleep-There-Are-Snakes/dp/0307386...) by forcibly cutting them off from the global economy. But major languages (English, Spanish, Portuguese) are redundant standards that should be consolidated ASAP.

onion2k 10y ago
A common global language doesn't have to be a human language though. Technology to translate in real-time already exists, and is likely to improve far more quickly than anything that requires a rewrite of our cultural and political systems. It's a great deal more likely we'll speak as many languages as we do now but use technology to understand many more.
- WildUtah 10y ago
  "Technology to translate in real-time already exists" No. It does not. I do some translation work and a lot of multilingual interaction. There is no decent translation technology even for written communication outside technical documents. Even that is only barely decent between European languages. A serious attempt at usable translation of even the simplest texts between Asian languages and others does not yet exist. Real time translation would multiply the speech recognition problem onto that still-imaginary translation technology. I will admit there is a lot of hype but there is no substitute for human translators nor for simply learning a new language anywhere on the horizon.
  - onion2k 10y ago
    It's early days, but the cutting edge stuff works for some limited value of "works". It's just about usable for casual conversations. But that's not the point I was making; what I'm saying is simply that the likelihood of getting working real-time translation on a computer is considerably higher than getting everyone to agree on a universal single language. I can see computer-based real-time translation getting to the point where it's putting translators out of jobs in the next few decades. I can't ever imagine humanity transitioning to a single language, or even a limited scope single language for business. It just won't happen.

known 10y ago

"The greater the diversity in a community, the fewer people vote and the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects; In the most diverse communities, neighbors trust one another about half as much as they do in the most homogenous settings." http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2007/08/05/the_downside_of_diversity/ http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2007/08/05/t...