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We Can’t Stem the Tide of Language Death

65 points by diodorus 9y ago

david-gpu 9y ago
I agree that there's some value in documenting and preserving minority languages. At the same time, each language is a barrier between people, one that prevents ideas to be shared and stories to be told. The fewer such barriers we have, the easier it becomes to understand others. Literally.
- caio1982 9y ago
  That’s why lingua francas develop over time. It does not mean linguistics barriers/gaps should be eliminated, they should be bridged.
- Drakim 9y ago
  > At the same time, each language is a barrier between people, one that prevents ideas to be shared and stories to be told. The fewer such barriers we have, the easier it becomes to understand others. Literally. I agree, the language barrier means a lot is lost. But at the same time each story and even way of thinking is flavored by the language it is expressed in. Certain things cannot be fully expressed in another language, the words don't hold the same charge and history. If the entire world were to speak one language tomorrow and nothing else, there would be a great diminishment in the world's art, culture and mythos. So it's not a black and white issue.
  - waqf 9y ago
    What's the point in the world having more art, culture and mythos if it doesn't have more that's accessible to any single individual? The best way for each new cultural artifact to reach the most people is for it to be created in a language and culture that the most people share.
    - schoen 9y ago
      This view seems harsh to me because it seems to treat languages and cultures as 100% interchangeable. I can imagine what you described as an extremely important factor for many people, but you seem to view it as the only possible factor. (I'm currently at a crossword puzzle tournament in a foreign language in a foreign country, when I could of course find many such tournaments in my own country... so I guess I've been spending the whole weekend enjoying an experience of appreciating a foreign language in a way that's in some tension with what you describe.)
    - Drakim 9y ago
      Obviously it would be the best if it was accessible to everybody at all times, but that's not the case right now. And my argument is, just getting "rid" of all languages except one would also entail getting rid of a lot of the things you wish to preserve and share.
    - CalRobert 9y ago
      Different languages yield different way of thinking about things. I might not have ever grokked functional programming with Python, even if it's doable, but in Javascript it made sense, and now even makes sense in Python. I didn't understand how to use "whom" in English until I learned (some) German, and I feel that I understand more nuance and subtlety in my own tongue as a result. Same goes for the (sadly nearly dead) subjunctive form. Language appears to be the tool we use not just to communicate, but to encode our thoughts. It gives us a way to wrangle the abstract from something ethereal and unmanageable into a conceivable thing we can handle. Having many different languages yields many different ways of thinking, not just communicating, and we are impoverished for their death. This is a fascinating story about the experience of a deaf person who had no language until their 20's. It affected their thinking in an utterly profound fashion - not just their communication. http://www.radiolab.org/story/91725-words/ http://www.radiolab.org/story/91725-words/
- schoen 9y ago
  The language preservation community's answer to this is usually that multilingualism is extremely possible and even common -- although some speakers of extremely powerful languages like English and Chinese might not have as much experience with it. :-) A huge number of people around the world speak at least a local or family language as well as a "language of wider communication"; depending on their situation, they may easily be fully fluent in both. So a preservation-oriented policy or culture would encourage this kind of bilingualism. This was also the traditional view of the Esperanto movement, which wanted Esperanto to be the unique world-wide language of communication while preserving all of the existing languages through bilingualism. [Edit: A commenter below says this approach is less traditional in Esperantism than I thought.] But a similar result could be achieved with, say, English as the main world language, or with people speaking just a handful of regional languages as well as their family languages. One challenge to bilingualism is that a lot of governments don't like it (for many different reasons), while another challenge is economic. Bilingualism is very possible, but people in various circumstances could easily stop viewing it as desirable or important, because language A will get them a job in the city and language B won't, and each language takes at least some time and effort to use and keep up with. (Or if people habitually move far away from their families, they'll have fewer opportunities to practice speaking with their families.) Anyway, there are significant tensions here, but these possibilities don't have to be mutually exclusive as long as people continue to care about their family and local languages and have access to social situations that give them opportunities to use them. And it can even be government policy to try to preserve minority languages while also promoting bilingualism in other more widely-spoken languages.
  - Mediterraneo10 9y ago
    > This was also the traditional view of the Esperanto movement, which wanted Esperanto to be the unique world-wide language of communication while preserving all of the existing languages through bilingualism This is inaccurate. L.L. Zamenhof hoped that Esperanto – or at least something like it – would eventually replace all other languages. He didn’t care much for language diversity as we would understand it today, and he saw such differences between peoples as divisive and an obstacle to overcome. Naturally, even with Zamenhof’s dreams, in the short term Esperanto or another international auxiliary language would only coexist with the native languages of its speakers. However, it wasn’t until the last fifty years or so that a certain segment of the Esperanto movement has begun to advertise Esperanto specifically as a way to safeguard language diversity by letting people keep their native language but have access to an international auxiliary language. Not all Esperantists agree with this, and through such campaigns one gets the impression that World Esperanto Association and similar organizations are only trying to jump on the wider anti-globalization bandwagon in order to get more attention for Esperanto. Furthermore, Esperanto organizations take a quite schizophrenic approach: if Esperanto is supposed to be only an auxiliary language, why do so many Esperanto organizations praise the creation of original literature (and other cultural output) in Esperanto? Why isn't it encouraging people to write solely in their native language and then only translate it to Esperanto?
- apocalypstyx 9y ago
  >The fewer such barriers we have, the easier it becomes to understand others. More like the easier it is to maintain the pretense of understanding others.
- jernfrost 9y ago
  Language is also about culture and identity. When you give up a language you also give up some of your identity and things you value. For instance I write and use english more than my native Norwegian, however I am highly ambivalent towards making english the national language of Norway. With english comes many ways of looking at the world. For instance for nordic people gender equality is important. I don’t like how the english language is used with respect to women. You got words such as “slut”, “slut shaming” which there are no equivalent to in Norwegian. There isn’t really any good way of describing a women as a slut. Just as there are no good words in english to describe a man as a slut. There are many Norwegian words I am fond of related to our shared values like “dugnad” which is about working togheter doing maintenance, repair, upgrades in your local community. There is no word for it in english because the tradition does not exist in the US or UK. It is something that genuinly worries me as I see shared scandinavian values gradually year after year getting erased and replaced with anglo-saxon values.
  - unabridged 9y ago
    Slightly ironic since slut is thought to be derived from the Norwegian words sludd or slutr
    - alephnil 9y ago
      Actually, the word it is derived from still exist in Norwegian (ludder), though it feel a bit archaic in modern Norwegian, and is much less used than "slut" is in English.
  - k__ 9y ago
    True story, but I don't know if the goal of everyone being able to communicate is more important than culture. On the other hand, many europeans have no problem in speaking two to three languages, so making English the second language would preserve that culture?
    - StavrosK 9y ago
      If you were going to "make" a language a second language, you'd probably want to go with a language less insane than English.
- pjmlp 9y ago
  As fluent speaker in several languages, and given that European travellers speak on average three languages (native, resident country and English) I completely disagree. Languages are a way to express culture of a country and there are many words that never translate well between languages, because they express ideas or points of view not present in the target languages. Usually this idea of one language to rule them all, seems to keep coming up from cultures not able to bother to learn anything else other than English.
  - unabridged 9y ago
    >there are many words that never translate well between languages Then it becomes a new word in that language. I think this is why english gains ground, because it eats new words constantly.
    - pjmlp 9y ago
      Becoming a new work won't be the same as in the original culture, just yet another case of lost in translation. You might translate saudade to mean home sick, missing someone, missing a place, missing an event, not being able to do something, feeling blue, among a few other possibilities. However none of them actually express 100% the same meaning as a native Portuguese speaker might be feeling when he/she says that word, because there is a mix of feelings and situations related in that single word. Or for example, the ways an Eskimo might describe a frozen landscape.
      - Klockan 9y ago
        It works, see for example smörgåsbord -> smorgasbord. They have exactly the same meaning.
      - unabridged 9y ago
        But after reading the definition I completely understand the meaning of it. And if saudade becomes popular enough, eventually it will be usable in everyday english. For example look at schadenfreude.
  - 9y ago
- Hemospectrum 9y ago
  > At the same time, each language is a barrier between people, one that prevents ideas to be shared and stories to be told. The fewer such barriers we have, the easier it becomes to understand others. Literally. This is an easy opinion to harbor when you speak a language whose future is pretty much secure. Imagine if you woke up one day and you were the last person who knew a word of English. All the English-language music you've ever heard, all the books and movies, etc., are now totally incomprehensible to everyone you'll ever meet. All copies of them, and indeed, all English text except for whatever's in your pockets, is gone. All the place names you know are removed from the map. All English words borrowed by other languages are gone. Every native English speaker (aside from you) has disappeared, and their very names are unpronounceable to the world's remaining population. Maybe even the Latin alphabet is gone. You get to keep all your memories, but naturally nobody shares them or has reason to believe they actually happened. Most people don't care to hear about them. If they do, they see them as a curiosity, a museum piece to be put in a display case, not something with the slightest relevance to their own lives. You can't even tell English-language jokes anymore. They aren't funny in translation. Of course this leaves you isolated. And of course there's a solution anyone can offer you: Forget about English. Adopt a whole new life where you're a normal person who speaks a normal language that other normal people understand. Your identity as an English speaker is entertaining for about five minutes, but ultimately an inconvenience to society. Hurry up and let it go. If this sounds harsher than what you were trying to say, perhaps you've underestimated what a language is to the people who speak it. It's more than just a list of words.
  - tomjen3 9y ago
    That is not a fair statement of what he said - you assume that the culture has not had a long time to preserve its cultural knowledge and that a dying culture produces much (after all it is dying for a reason) and you assume that the person can only speak the dying language. And even then everybody would try convince that person to translate his culture into the new language or at least to codify the original language so that it isn't lost. But the real solution would have to start doing those things decades ago.
  - TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
    Is life not harsh? Should the world just stop adjusting to the new global interaction just so that some people can avoid some discomfort? edit: To those downvoting me, can you please explain why? I was asking a serious question. The post above made it sound like that person's comfort was more important than adapting to changing times.
- ACS_Solver 9y ago
  > At the same time, each language is a barrier between people, one that prevents ideas to be shared and stories to be told. The fewer such barriers we have, the easier it becomes to understand others. Literally. That is a strong case for having some language, like English, that everyone knows worldwide, in addition to their own languages. Languages aren't a barrier between people. Not having at least one language in common is. The difference is subtle but enormously significant given that people can and do speak more than one language, and that full fluency in 2 or 3 languages is the norm in parts of the world. There is a large amount of culture in every language. My own native language is quite small with no more than 2 million speakers, and for that language to disappear would also mean the loss of a lot of culture, and I do not just mean books and songs but also "everyday history" such as people's diaries, etc. And the loss of stuff we sometimes call untranslateable - not because it's impossible to translate per se perhaps but because there are often words or phrases that carry a particular cultural meaning.
  - skummetmaelk 9y ago
    This would be lost anyway as language evolves over time. You really have to study in order to understand old english as an english speaker, or latin as an italian.
    - schoen 9y ago
      Still, (1) Having easy access to the last several generations' literature is very nice! (2) Knowing the modern form of the language is often a huge help to learning the ancient form, so losing native proficiency in modern languages would still be a hindrance to understanding older texts. (3) People can try to slow down language change in order to at least slightly reduce the magnitude of this effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_planning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_planning
    - ACS_Solver 9y ago
      Old English is a fairly poor example because it was basically replaced by another language through conquest. While languages do evolve, it's a gradual process and they remain understandable for centuries. Shakespeare, Dante and Goethe are quite understandable to speakers of modern English, Italian and German. A speaker of Spanish or Italian can learn to read Latin texts even now with relatively little study. When the language of Julius Caesar is separated from modern Italian by 2000 years, the change process was so gradual that culture of the Roman Empire is still very visible in modern societies. That is not comparable to, for example, Mesoamerian cultures that were wiped out in a shorter period of time.
- Aloha 9y ago
  I think breaking down the language barrier between cultures is key to prosperity and peace. I wonder how many wars, diplomatic incidents and other issues could have been prevented with a common language.
- xelxebar 9y ago
  > At the same time, each language is a barrier between people, one that prevents ideas to be shared and stories to be told. If all we had was Cobol as the One True Programming Language, we sure would have saved a lot of time reimplementing things. Would we also have missed out on anything important though? Calling multilingualism a barrier between people seems a bit myopic to me. What about all anthropologic richness that language diversity teaches us? What about the stuff it's taught us about human psychology? What about the cooperative understanding that is built between people through the act itself of learning a language?
  - runeks 9y ago
    > If all we had was Cobol as the One True Programming Language, we sure would have saved a lot of time reimplementing things. Would we also have missed out on anything important though? The question is: do we use programming languages to share ideas and tell stories, or do we use them to get computers to do stuff for us? The only reason COBOL is a useful language is because there exists a translator (compiler), that can transform COBOL into a language spoken by all CPUs (machine code). In that sense, COBOL is more a dialect of assembly than a separate language. And it’s only useful because it’s a dialect of this common language — assembly.
    - marcosdumay 9y ago
      > do we use programming languages to share ideas and tell stories, or do we use them to get computers to do stuff for us? Well, it's both of them, just like spoken language Another question is: is the diversity among our spoken languages large enough for this to even matter? My impression is that any single language has enough internal diversity to host any number of paradigms, but they don't change enough to allow for much different things.
- noonespecial 9y ago
  There's bound to be times where the language is the story.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
schoen 9y ago
As a meta-observation, I think this is a great thread which includes a lot of relatively respectful, informed discussion about somewhat controversial topics... and not a lot of flames so far. That makes it a great opportunity to upvote comments that you disagreed with but found interesting.
kashyapc 9y ago
Related: Speaking of word origins, here's a fun example. How a Mistake Gave Us the Word 'Cherry'[+]: [quote] The Old North French word for 'cherry' is 'cherise'. English speakers heard the 'se' at the end of the word and assumed it was plural, 'cherries', and that the singular form of the word must then be 'cherry' (ok, they spelled it 'chery'). [/quote] The Merriam-Webster article mentioned below goes into some more depth & gives other examples. [+] https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/cherry-history-origin https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/cherry-history...
- schoen 9y ago
  For much more on this, with many other examples, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebracketing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebracketing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back-formation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back-formation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folk_etymology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folk_etymology
openfuture 9y ago
I speak a tiny language and used to be of the opinion that we should just document it while we can and then expedite its death while moving to English instead. This is a very easy and naive stance to take. However I have completely abandoned it! With the years I have come to unravel some of the incredible knowledge encoded in the structure of my language. It is amazing how idioms and structural qualities of languages can define a culture through their influence on the way people think. Now I have gotten very curious about learning some exotic languages and I suspect I will need to dedicate a portion of my life to that pursuit :) Trying to preserve this through translation is never going to work for many reasons, mainly because turning meaning from something continuous into discrete words is done differently in different cultures so a words true meaning can be hiding between several words of the language you wish to translate to. Therefore some things become hard to say which used to be common phrases. This has obvious consequences for culture but it also means that often when you as an individual move from one language to another you unlock more of your innate assumptions and see how your language defined your approach to problems in some ways. Gaining understanding of these assumptions gives more 'room to move in', perspective wise, I find.
- Qwertious 9y ago
  >Trying to preserve this through translation is never going to work for many reasons, mainly because turning meaning from something continuous into discrete words is done differently in different cultures so a words true meaning can be hiding between several words of the language you wish to translate to. Therefore some things become hard to say which used to be common phrases. This has obvious consequences for culture but it also means that often when you as an individual move from one language to another you unlock more of your innate assumptions and see how your language defined your approach to problems in some ways. Gaining understanding of these assumptions gives more 'room to move in', perspective wise, I find. I get what you mean, but you should give some examples, if possible. Nothing cements abstract notions in the mind quite like examples - in my experience, anything hard requires 1. an example that demonstrates the phenomena, then 2. the theory necessary to properly understand which aspects of the example you're referring to that demonstrate the phenomena, before you finally understand the phenomena as it acts in the example and 3. can model the concept in your mind independent of the example.
Ice_cream_suit 9y ago
Language is not knowledge or culture. It is merely a tool for communication. I deliberately chose not to teach my children my or my wife's fairly obscure and mutually completely unintelligible languages. On the other hand, I ensured that they studied Latin, Italian, French and Sanskrit in addition to their L1 ( English ) I am a polyglot and know around a dozen languages to various levels, including several semi-obscure minority languages.
- has2k1 9y ago
  > Language is not knowledge or culture. It is merely a tool for communication A lot of culture co-evolves with language. In a language are myths and legends, some of which contribute to the words in the language, which then give birth to other proverbs and stories, and so on. All of which and fragments of which become available for communication. The more knowledge and culture a language loses, the more bland communication in that language becomes and the information density of the language decreases. This in turn affects communication because to maintain the same amount of information it has to become longer, so the attitude towards communication changes. And so does the message. The tool of communication is part of the message itself.
- toyg 9y ago
  For most intents and purposes, Italian is already a “fairly obscure and unintelligible language”. Unless you are a historian, you don’t need it. The influence it used to wield in music and cuisine has long been codified in a few specific words and nobody needs to understand anything of the surrounding structures. Outside of Italy, it’s kept around as a fashionable preserve of certain upper classes because it helps while on holiday, but anywhere else it’s completely irrelevant.
duncan_bayne 9y ago
On the other hand, imagine a world with only one written and spoken language. Where everyone can easily communicate with everyone else, regardless of the accident of their nationality. I for one hope that's where this trend is leading, as I think it'd be a worthwhile trade off against the loss of cultural knowledge that results from language death.
- Aloha 9y ago
  I'd like to live in a world where even nationality eventually fades to the background - but I don't think that will happen until we make contact with another species from off of this planet.
  - duncan_bayne 9y ago
    I think that will happen, eventually. National groups would have seemed inconceivable to our tribal ancestors in pre-history. I _hope_ that eventually our descendants will be horrified by the idea of nationalism.
- imron 9y ago
  > I think it'd be a worthwhile trade off against the loss of cultural knowledge that results from language death. I don't. Out of curiosity, how many languages do you speak?
  - BillChapman 9y ago
    Yesterday (21 October 2017) I chaired a gathering of Esperanto speakers in Conwy, north Wales, UK. Present were speakers of Welsh, Tagalog, Slovene, Estonian, Brazilian Portuguese and maybe a few others besides English. We had Esperantyo as our common language. I have spoken Esperanto for precisely fifty years, and throught that time I have seen Esperanto as an aŭiliary language (sorry, my keyboard has just gone into Esperanto mode!), i.e. a language which values our native tongues while enabling trouble-free communication. I speak Welsh, French and German, by the way, and have an ability to bluff my way in a few more languages. Life is too short to learn them all. Keep on fighting for your smaller languages. There is plenty of room in the world for them - and for Esperanto.
WalterBright 9y ago
It isn't just languages that pass out of existence. I know a lot about my parents, probably about .1% of that about my grandparents, and pretty much nothing going back further than that. There are essentially no records. What kind of lives they lived, what was important to them, how they viewed the world, etc., all gone. If one of your ancestors was a historical figure, or kept a diary, maybe you have much more. But that's hardly ordinary. It's just the way things are, and probably the way it has to be.
- slimshady94 9y ago
  Your grandchildren will be able to see minute details of your life, using social media archival tools. They may be able to read all your HN and reddit comments. Would they be interested in that? Who knows. But things are about to change nevertheless.
  - visarga 9y ago
    > They may be able to read all your HN and reddit comments. Would they be interested in that? Maybe not, but many AI agents are trained on our Reddit, HN and Twitter comments. In the future I expect that every person alive today should be documented from logs in order to run simulations of the human society as it was pre-singularity. The previous generations have very little data, and the next generations will be influenced by AI, so the only 'pure', large size sample is us. AGI is going to want to know how it came to be, and future humans will want to rebuild an authentic human society so they will need a good reference. So your comments are surely going to be studied in detail, maybe you're going to be simulated from your comments and other crumbs of data you leak.
microcolonel 9y ago
The only factor in the diversity of language, is the isolation of cultures. The less isolated cultures are, the less any individual could be bothered to speak a different language. As the world becomes more integrated, and less isolated, even major languages will begin to disappear. I see this happening with one of my favourite languages: Japanese. Colloquial Japanese is slowly replacing words with close English approximations (just as it took on German vocabulary in the early 20th century), dialects are at once becoming more widely understood, and more similar. You can no more preserve a language than you can preserve a human being.
FrozenVoid 9y ago
I'm probably going to sound harsh, but diversity of spoken language is way different than diversity of programming languages or frameworks. We need to have a common cultural ground, a shared language: Esperanto was created because the world was deeply culturally divided at the time, nationalist movements and totalitarian mandate of us-vs-them only worked because you have different cultures and languages competing in the same area. Death of languages is not bad. Having cross-cultural exchange and business links probably is the biggest contributor to world peace, all because of people speaking a common language. Having one shared language has numerous benefits : It increases efficiency by eliminating translation and adaptation to each country: instead of making N editions of something for each language you have one. Lack of cultural barrier: you can read sites/books/articles watch movies without subtitles and dubbing, also making content production cheaper and simpler. News and communications become fast and unimpeded by borders and cultures: no need to translate anything. A standard term for something being as precise as the shared language definition: instead of two languages competing for a descriptor word which covers different areas the meaning is made more accurate by settling on a single word. Less of misunderstanding where content can have hidden/insulting meaning in another language due translation(often a quick translation can have subtle mistakes), Diplomacy and travel become easier, with people less alienated from each other. Cultural differences that depend on the language disappear, preventing bias and prejudice for the unknown and foreign. A great counter-example to "benefits of language diversity" is tribes: they have languages unique for each tribe and constant warfare and tensions: us-vs-them mentality preventing progress and cooperation.
tomjm 9y ago
The best argument for preserving endangered languages, ironically, is the strong form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis--which linguists flatly reject. Given how hostile most of them are (if Pullum and his gang on Language Log are anything to go by) to even the soft Whorfianism of Boroditsky et al., it's quite galling that these same linguists, who assert the absolute fungibility of human languages, also stress the vital importance of preserving each and every one of them. And given that linguists use as an insult the term "prescriptivist"[1] for anyone who wishes to preserve or establish particular linguistic usages--even if for wholly benevolent reasons, such as the removal of inconsistencies for the benefit of non-native speakers--how can they then go and support efforts to actually increase the number of speakers of some dying tongue? Isn't that awfully prescriptivist of them, dictating not just how others should use a particular language, but even which languages they should be speaking? [1] http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?cat=5 http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?cat=5
- gizmo686 9y ago
  If the vast majority of experts in a field of study reject some hypothesis in that field; it is a good indication that that hypothesis is likely wrong. The linguistics' reasoning for wanting to preserve language is largly selfish; their job is to study language, and the loss of language is an irreplaceable (on the scale of human lifetime) loss of data that will fundamentally limit our ability to understand human language in general. The linked article explicitly is not arguing for saving dying languages (which it views as a lost cause), but rather for studying them while they are still alive. Doing at least this should be non-controversial to the extent that one values the study of linguistics. Also, not that it is relevent to the article, but even if people are speaking a language by conscious choice to preserve it, does not mean that that language use becomes invalid. As an extreme example, take modern Hebrew. Even though it was brought to life through explicit choice, it is still a valid language for study, because children have grown up exposed to it as their native language. If children are exposed to a language like system as their native language, they will learn it as a human language, and from how those children speak, a linguist can learn about human language in general.

65 points by diodorus 9y ago

I agree that there's some value in documenting and preserving minority languages. At the same time, each language is a barrier between people, one that prevents ideas to be shared and stories to be told. The fewer such barriers we have, the easier it becomes to understand others. Literally.

caio1982 9y ago
That’s why lingua francas develop over time. It does not mean linguistics barriers/gaps should be eliminated, they should be bridged.
Drakim 9y ago
> At the same time, each language is a barrier between people, one that prevents ideas to be shared and stories to be told. The fewer such barriers we have, the easier it becomes to understand others. Literally. I agree, the language barrier means a lot is lost. But at the same time each story and even way of thinking is flavored by the language it is expressed in. Certain things cannot be fully expressed in another language, the words don't hold the same charge and history. If the entire world were to speak one language tomorrow and nothing else, there would be a great diminishment in the world's art, culture and mythos. So it's not a black and white issue.
- waqf 9y ago
  What's the point in the world having more art, culture and mythos if it doesn't have more that's accessible to any single individual? The best way for each new cultural artifact to reach the most people is for it to be created in a language and culture that the most people share.
  - schoen 9y ago
    This view seems harsh to me because it seems to treat languages and cultures as 100% interchangeable. I can imagine what you described as an extremely important factor for many people, but you seem to view it as the only possible factor. (I'm currently at a crossword puzzle tournament in a foreign language in a foreign country, when I could of course find many such tournaments in my own country... so I guess I've been spending the whole weekend enjoying an experience of appreciating a foreign language in a way that's in some tension with what you describe.)
  - Drakim 9y ago
    Obviously it would be the best if it was accessible to everybody at all times, but that's not the case right now. And my argument is, just getting "rid" of all languages except one would also entail getting rid of a lot of the things you wish to preserve and share.
  - CalRobert 9y ago
    Different languages yield different way of thinking about things. I might not have ever grokked functional programming with Python, even if it's doable, but in Javascript it made sense, and now even makes sense in Python. I didn't understand how to use "whom" in English until I learned (some) German, and I feel that I understand more nuance and subtlety in my own tongue as a result. Same goes for the (sadly nearly dead) subjunctive form. Language appears to be the tool we use not just to communicate, but to encode our thoughts. It gives us a way to wrangle the abstract from something ethereal and unmanageable into a conceivable thing we can handle. Having many different languages yields many different ways of thinking, not just communicating, and we are impoverished for their death. This is a fascinating story about the experience of a deaf person who had no language until their 20's. It affected their thinking in an utterly profound fashion - not just their communication. http://www.radiolab.org/story/91725-words/ http://www.radiolab.org/story/91725-words/
schoen 9y ago
The language preservation community's answer to this is usually that multilingualism is extremely possible and even common -- although some speakers of extremely powerful languages like English and Chinese might not have as much experience with it. :-) A huge number of people around the world speak at least a local or family language as well as a "language of wider communication"; depending on their situation, they may easily be fully fluent in both. So a preservation-oriented policy or culture would encourage this kind of bilingualism. This was also the traditional view of the Esperanto movement, which wanted Esperanto to be the unique world-wide language of communication while preserving all of the existing languages through bilingualism. [Edit: A commenter below says this approach is less traditional in Esperantism than I thought.] But a similar result could be achieved with, say, English as the main world language, or with people speaking just a handful of regional languages as well as their family languages. One challenge to bilingualism is that a lot of governments don't like it (for many different reasons), while another challenge is economic. Bilingualism is very possible, but people in various circumstances could easily stop viewing it as desirable or important, because language A will get them a job in the city and language B won't, and each language takes at least some time and effort to use and keep up with. (Or if people habitually move far away from their families, they'll have fewer opportunities to practice speaking with their families.) Anyway, there are significant tensions here, but these possibilities don't have to be mutually exclusive as long as people continue to care about their family and local languages and have access to social situations that give them opportunities to use them. And it can even be government policy to try to preserve minority languages while also promoting bilingualism in other more widely-spoken languages.
- Mediterraneo10 9y ago
  > This was also the traditional view of the Esperanto movement, which wanted Esperanto to be the unique world-wide language of communication while preserving all of the existing languages through bilingualism This is inaccurate. L.L. Zamenhof hoped that Esperanto – or at least something like it – would eventually replace all other languages. He didn’t care much for language diversity as we would understand it today, and he saw such differences between peoples as divisive and an obstacle to overcome. Naturally, even with Zamenhof’s dreams, in the short term Esperanto or another international auxiliary language would only coexist with the native languages of its speakers. However, it wasn’t until the last fifty years or so that a certain segment of the Esperanto movement has begun to advertise Esperanto specifically as a way to safeguard language diversity by letting people keep their native language but have access to an international auxiliary language. Not all Esperantists agree with this, and through such campaigns one gets the impression that World Esperanto Association and similar organizations are only trying to jump on the wider anti-globalization bandwagon in order to get more attention for Esperanto. Furthermore, Esperanto organizations take a quite schizophrenic approach: if Esperanto is supposed to be only an auxiliary language, why do so many Esperanto organizations praise the creation of original literature (and other cultural output) in Esperanto? Why isn't it encouraging people to write solely in their native language and then only translate it to Esperanto?
apocalypstyx 9y ago
>The fewer such barriers we have, the easier it becomes to understand others. More like the easier it is to maintain the pretense of understanding others.
jernfrost 9y ago
Language is also about culture and identity. When you give up a language you also give up some of your identity and things you value. For instance I write and use english more than my native Norwegian, however I am highly ambivalent towards making english the national language of Norway. With english comes many ways of looking at the world. For instance for nordic people gender equality is important. I don’t like how the english language is used with respect to women. You got words such as “slut”, “slut shaming” which there are no equivalent to in Norwegian. There isn’t really any good way of describing a women as a slut. Just as there are no good words in english to describe a man as a slut. There are many Norwegian words I am fond of related to our shared values like “dugnad” which is about working togheter doing maintenance, repair, upgrades in your local community. There is no word for it in english because the tradition does not exist in the US or UK. It is something that genuinly worries me as I see shared scandinavian values gradually year after year getting erased and replaced with anglo-saxon values.
- unabridged 9y ago
  Slightly ironic since slut is thought to be derived from the Norwegian words sludd or slutr
  - alephnil 9y ago
    Actually, the word it is derived from still exist in Norwegian (ludder), though it feel a bit archaic in modern Norwegian, and is much less used than "slut" is in English.
- k__ 9y ago
  True story, but I don't know if the goal of everyone being able to communicate is more important than culture. On the other hand, many europeans have no problem in speaking two to three languages, so making English the second language would preserve that culture?
  - StavrosK 9y ago
    If you were going to "make" a language a second language, you'd probably want to go with a language less insane than English.
pjmlp 9y ago
As fluent speaker in several languages, and given that European travellers speak on average three languages (native, resident country and English) I completely disagree. Languages are a way to express culture of a country and there are many words that never translate well between languages, because they express ideas or points of view not present in the target languages. Usually this idea of one language to rule them all, seems to keep coming up from cultures not able to bother to learn anything else other than English.
- unabridged 9y ago
  >there are many words that never translate well between languages Then it becomes a new word in that language. I think this is why english gains ground, because it eats new words constantly.
  - pjmlp 9y ago
    Becoming a new work won't be the same as in the original culture, just yet another case of lost in translation. You might translate saudade to mean home sick, missing someone, missing a place, missing an event, not being able to do something, feeling blue, among a few other possibilities. However none of them actually express 100% the same meaning as a native Portuguese speaker might be feeling when he/she says that word, because there is a mix of feelings and situations related in that single word. Or for example, the ways an Eskimo might describe a frozen landscape.
    - Klockan 9y ago
      It works, see for example smörgåsbord -> smorgasbord. They have exactly the same meaning.
    - unabridged 9y ago
      But after reading the definition I completely understand the meaning of it. And if saudade becomes popular enough, eventually it will be usable in everyday english. For example look at schadenfreude.
- 9y ago
Hemospectrum 9y ago
> At the same time, each language is a barrier between people, one that prevents ideas to be shared and stories to be told. The fewer such barriers we have, the easier it becomes to understand others. Literally. This is an easy opinion to harbor when you speak a language whose future is pretty much secure. Imagine if you woke up one day and you were the last person who knew a word of English. All the English-language music you've ever heard, all the books and movies, etc., are now totally incomprehensible to everyone you'll ever meet. All copies of them, and indeed, all English text except for whatever's in your pockets, is gone. All the place names you know are removed from the map. All English words borrowed by other languages are gone. Every native English speaker (aside from you) has disappeared, and their very names are unpronounceable to the world's remaining population. Maybe even the Latin alphabet is gone. You get to keep all your memories, but naturally nobody shares them or has reason to believe they actually happened. Most people don't care to hear about them. If they do, they see them as a curiosity, a museum piece to be put in a display case, not something with the slightest relevance to their own lives. You can't even tell English-language jokes anymore. They aren't funny in translation. Of course this leaves you isolated. And of course there's a solution anyone can offer you: Forget about English. Adopt a whole new life where you're a normal person who speaks a normal language that other normal people understand. Your identity as an English speaker is entertaining for about five minutes, but ultimately an inconvenience to society. Hurry up and let it go. If this sounds harsher than what you were trying to say, perhaps you've underestimated what a language is to the people who speak it. It's more than just a list of words.
- tomjen3 9y ago
  That is not a fair statement of what he said - you assume that the culture has not had a long time to preserve its cultural knowledge and that a dying culture produces much (after all it is dying for a reason) and you assume that the person can only speak the dying language. And even then everybody would try convince that person to translate his culture into the new language or at least to codify the original language so that it isn't lost. But the real solution would have to start doing those things decades ago.
- TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
  Is life not harsh? Should the world just stop adjusting to the new global interaction just so that some people can avoid some discomfort? edit: To those downvoting me, can you please explain why? I was asking a serious question. The post above made it sound like that person's comfort was more important than adapting to changing times.
ACS_Solver 9y ago
> At the same time, each language is a barrier between people, one that prevents ideas to be shared and stories to be told. The fewer such barriers we have, the easier it becomes to understand others. Literally. That is a strong case for having some language, like English, that everyone knows worldwide, in addition to their own languages. Languages aren't a barrier between people. Not having at least one language in common is. The difference is subtle but enormously significant given that people can and do speak more than one language, and that full fluency in 2 or 3 languages is the norm in parts of the world. There is a large amount of culture in every language. My own native language is quite small with no more than 2 million speakers, and for that language to disappear would also mean the loss of a lot of culture, and I do not just mean books and songs but also "everyday history" such as people's diaries, etc. And the loss of stuff we sometimes call untranslateable - not because it's impossible to translate per se perhaps but because there are often words or phrases that carry a particular cultural meaning.
- skummetmaelk 9y ago
  This would be lost anyway as language evolves over time. You really have to study in order to understand old english as an english speaker, or latin as an italian.
  - schoen 9y ago
    Still, (1) Having easy access to the last several generations' literature is very nice! (2) Knowing the modern form of the language is often a huge help to learning the ancient form, so losing native proficiency in modern languages would still be a hindrance to understanding older texts. (3) People can try to slow down language change in order to at least slightly reduce the magnitude of this effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_planning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_planning
  - ACS_Solver 9y ago
    Old English is a fairly poor example because it was basically replaced by another language through conquest. While languages do evolve, it's a gradual process and they remain understandable for centuries. Shakespeare, Dante and Goethe are quite understandable to speakers of modern English, Italian and German. A speaker of Spanish or Italian can learn to read Latin texts even now with relatively little study. When the language of Julius Caesar is separated from modern Italian by 2000 years, the change process was so gradual that culture of the Roman Empire is still very visible in modern societies. That is not comparable to, for example, Mesoamerian cultures that were wiped out in a shorter period of time.
Aloha 9y ago
I think breaking down the language barrier between cultures is key to prosperity and peace. I wonder how many wars, diplomatic incidents and other issues could have been prevented with a common language.
xelxebar 9y ago
> At the same time, each language is a barrier between people, one that prevents ideas to be shared and stories to be told. If all we had was Cobol as the One True Programming Language, we sure would have saved a lot of time reimplementing things. Would we also have missed out on anything important though? Calling multilingualism a barrier between people seems a bit myopic to me. What about all anthropologic richness that language diversity teaches us? What about the stuff it's taught us about human psychology? What about the cooperative understanding that is built between people through the act itself of learning a language?
- runeks 9y ago
  > If all we had was Cobol as the One True Programming Language, we sure would have saved a lot of time reimplementing things. Would we also have missed out on anything important though? The question is: do we use programming languages to share ideas and tell stories, or do we use them to get computers to do stuff for us? The only reason COBOL is a useful language is because there exists a translator (compiler), that can transform COBOL into a language spoken by all CPUs (machine code). In that sense, COBOL is more a dialect of assembly than a separate language. And it’s only useful because it’s a dialect of this common language — assembly.
  - marcosdumay 9y ago
    > do we use programming languages to share ideas and tell stories, or do we use them to get computers to do stuff for us? Well, it's both of them, just like spoken language Another question is: is the diversity among our spoken languages large enough for this to even matter? My impression is that any single language has enough internal diversity to host any number of paradigms, but they don't change enough to allow for much different things.
noonespecial 9y ago
There's bound to be times where the language is the story.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

schoen 9y ago

As a meta-observation, I think this is a great thread which includes a lot of relatively respectful, informed discussion about somewhat controversial topics... and not a lot of flames so far. That makes it a great opportunity to upvote comments that you disagreed with but found interesting.

kashyapc 9y ago

Related: Speaking of word origins, here's a fun example. How a Mistake Gave Us the Word 'Cherry'[+]: [quote] The Old North French word for 'cherry' is 'cherise'. English speakers heard the 'se' at the end of the word and assumed it was plural, 'cherries', and that the singular form of the word must then be 'cherry' (ok, they spelled it 'chery'). [/quote] The Merriam-Webster article mentioned below goes into some more depth & gives other examples. [+] https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/cherry-history-origin https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/cherry-history...

schoen 9y ago
For much more on this, with many other examples, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebracketing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebracketing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back-formation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back-formation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folk_etymology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folk_etymology

openfuture 9y ago

I speak a tiny language and used to be of the opinion that we should just document it while we can and then expedite its death while moving to English instead. This is a very easy and naive stance to take. However I have completely abandoned it! With the years I have come to unravel some of the incredible knowledge encoded in the structure of my language. It is amazing how idioms and structural qualities of languages can define a culture through their influence on the way people think. Now I have gotten very curious about learning some exotic languages and I suspect I will need to dedicate a portion of my life to that pursuit :) Trying to preserve this through translation is never going to work for many reasons, mainly because turning meaning from something continuous into discrete words is done differently in different cultures so a words true meaning can be hiding between several words of the language you wish to translate to. Therefore some things become hard to say which used to be common phrases. This has obvious consequences for culture but it also means that often when you as an individual move from one language to another you unlock more of your innate assumptions and see how your language defined your approach to problems in some ways. Gaining understanding of these assumptions gives more 'room to move in', perspective wise, I find.

Qwertious 9y ago
>Trying to preserve this through translation is never going to work for many reasons, mainly because turning meaning from something continuous into discrete words is done differently in different cultures so a words true meaning can be hiding between several words of the language you wish to translate to. Therefore some things become hard to say which used to be common phrases. This has obvious consequences for culture but it also means that often when you as an individual move from one language to another you unlock more of your innate assumptions and see how your language defined your approach to problems in some ways. Gaining understanding of these assumptions gives more 'room to move in', perspective wise, I find. I get what you mean, but you should give some examples, if possible. Nothing cements abstract notions in the mind quite like examples - in my experience, anything hard requires 1. an example that demonstrates the phenomena, then 2. the theory necessary to properly understand which aspects of the example you're referring to that demonstrate the phenomena, before you finally understand the phenomena as it acts in the example and 3. can model the concept in your mind independent of the example.

Ice_cream_suit 9y ago

Language is not knowledge or culture. It is merely a tool for communication. I deliberately chose not to teach my children my or my wife's fairly obscure and mutually completely unintelligible languages. On the other hand, I ensured that they studied Latin, Italian, French and Sanskrit in addition to their L1 ( English ) I am a polyglot and know around a dozen languages to various levels, including several semi-obscure minority languages.

has2k1 9y ago
> Language is not knowledge or culture. It is merely a tool for communication A lot of culture co-evolves with language. In a language are myths and legends, some of which contribute to the words in the language, which then give birth to other proverbs and stories, and so on. All of which and fragments of which become available for communication. The more knowledge and culture a language loses, the more bland communication in that language becomes and the information density of the language decreases. This in turn affects communication because to maintain the same amount of information it has to become longer, so the attitude towards communication changes. And so does the message. The tool of communication is part of the message itself.
toyg 9y ago
For most intents and purposes, Italian is already a “fairly obscure and unintelligible language”. Unless you are a historian, you don’t need it. The influence it used to wield in music and cuisine has long been codified in a few specific words and nobody needs to understand anything of the surrounding structures. Outside of Italy, it’s kept around as a fashionable preserve of certain upper classes because it helps while on holiday, but anywhere else it’s completely irrelevant.

duncan_bayne 9y ago

On the other hand, imagine a world with only one written and spoken language. Where everyone can easily communicate with everyone else, regardless of the accident of their nationality. I for one hope that's where this trend is leading, as I think it'd be a worthwhile trade off against the loss of cultural knowledge that results from language death.

Aloha 9y ago
I'd like to live in a world where even nationality eventually fades to the background - but I don't think that will happen until we make contact with another species from off of this planet.
- duncan_bayne 9y ago
  I think that will happen, eventually. National groups would have seemed inconceivable to our tribal ancestors in pre-history. I _hope_ that eventually our descendants will be horrified by the idea of nationalism.
imron 9y ago
> I think it'd be a worthwhile trade off against the loss of cultural knowledge that results from language death. I don't. Out of curiosity, how many languages do you speak?
- BillChapman 9y ago
  Yesterday (21 October 2017) I chaired a gathering of Esperanto speakers in Conwy, north Wales, UK. Present were speakers of Welsh, Tagalog, Slovene, Estonian, Brazilian Portuguese and maybe a few others besides English. We had Esperantyo as our common language. I have spoken Esperanto for precisely fifty years, and throught that time I have seen Esperanto as an aŭiliary language (sorry, my keyboard has just gone into Esperanto mode!), i.e. a language which values our native tongues while enabling trouble-free communication. I speak Welsh, French and German, by the way, and have an ability to bluff my way in a few more languages. Life is too short to learn them all. Keep on fighting for your smaller languages. There is plenty of room in the world for them - and for Esperanto.

WalterBright 9y ago

It isn't just languages that pass out of existence. I know a lot about my parents, probably about .1% of that about my grandparents, and pretty much nothing going back further than that. There are essentially no records. What kind of lives they lived, what was important to them, how they viewed the world, etc., all gone. If one of your ancestors was a historical figure, or kept a diary, maybe you have much more. But that's hardly ordinary. It's just the way things are, and probably the way it has to be.

slimshady94 9y ago
Your grandchildren will be able to see minute details of your life, using social media archival tools. They may be able to read all your HN and reddit comments. Would they be interested in that? Who knows. But things are about to change nevertheless.
- visarga 9y ago
  > They may be able to read all your HN and reddit comments. Would they be interested in that? Maybe not, but many AI agents are trained on our Reddit, HN and Twitter comments. In the future I expect that every person alive today should be documented from logs in order to run simulations of the human society as it was pre-singularity. The previous generations have very little data, and the next generations will be influenced by AI, so the only 'pure', large size sample is us. AGI is going to want to know how it came to be, and future humans will want to rebuild an authentic human society so they will need a good reference. So your comments are surely going to be studied in detail, maybe you're going to be simulated from your comments and other crumbs of data you leak.

microcolonel 9y ago

The only factor in the diversity of language, is the isolation of cultures. The less isolated cultures are, the less any individual could be bothered to speak a different language. As the world becomes more integrated, and less isolated, even major languages will begin to disappear. I see this happening with one of my favourite languages: Japanese. Colloquial Japanese is slowly replacing words with close English approximations (just as it took on German vocabulary in the early 20th century), dialects are at once becoming more widely understood, and more similar. You can no more preserve a language than you can preserve a human being.

FrozenVoid 9y ago

I'm probably going to sound harsh, but diversity of spoken language is way different than diversity of programming languages or frameworks. We need to have a common cultural ground, a shared language: Esperanto was created because the world was deeply culturally divided at the time, nationalist movements and totalitarian mandate of us-vs-them only worked because you have different cultures and languages competing in the same area. Death of languages is not bad. Having cross-cultural exchange and business links probably is the biggest contributor to world peace, all because of people speaking a common language. Having one shared language has numerous benefits : It increases efficiency by eliminating translation and adaptation to each country: instead of making N editions of something for each language you have one. Lack of cultural barrier: you can read sites/books/articles watch movies without subtitles and dubbing, also making content production cheaper and simpler. News and communications become fast and unimpeded by borders and cultures: no need to translate anything. A standard term for something being as precise as the shared language definition: instead of two languages competing for a descriptor word which covers different areas the meaning is made more accurate by settling on a single word. Less of misunderstanding where content can have hidden/insulting meaning in another language due translation(often a quick translation can have subtle mistakes), Diplomacy and travel become easier, with people less alienated from each other. Cultural differences that depend on the language disappear, preventing bias and prejudice for the unknown and foreign. A great counter-example to "benefits of language diversity" is tribes: they have languages unique for each tribe and constant warfare and tensions: us-vs-them mentality preventing progress and cooperation.

tomjm 9y ago

The best argument for preserving endangered languages, ironically, is the strong form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis--which linguists flatly reject. Given how hostile most of them are (if Pullum and his gang on Language Log are anything to go by) to even the soft Whorfianism of Boroditsky et al., it's quite galling that these same linguists, who assert the absolute fungibility of human languages, also stress the vital importance of preserving each and every one of them. And given that linguists use as an insult the term "prescriptivist"[1] for anyone who wishes to preserve or establish particular linguistic usages--even if for wholly benevolent reasons, such as the removal of inconsistencies for the benefit of non-native speakers--how can they then go and support efforts to actually increase the number of speakers of some dying tongue? Isn't that awfully prescriptivist of them, dictating not just how others should use a particular language, but even which languages they should be speaking? [1] http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?cat=5 http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?cat=5

gizmo686 9y ago
If the vast majority of experts in a field of study reject some hypothesis in that field; it is a good indication that that hypothesis is likely wrong. The linguistics' reasoning for wanting to preserve language is largly selfish; their job is to study language, and the loss of language is an irreplaceable (on the scale of human lifetime) loss of data that will fundamentally limit our ability to understand human language in general. The linked article explicitly is not arguing for saving dying languages (which it views as a lost cause), but rather for studying them while they are still alive. Doing at least this should be non-controversial to the extent that one values the study of linguistics. Also, not that it is relevent to the article, but even if people are speaking a language by conscious choice to preserve it, does not mean that that language use becomes invalid. As an extreme example, take modern Hebrew. Even though it was brought to life through explicit choice, it is still a valid language for study, because children have grown up exposed to it as their native language. If children are exposed to a language like system as their native language, they will learn it as a human language, and from how those children speak, a linguist can learn about human language in general.