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While I totally agree with your pov and sentiment from my personal experience (raised in a bilingual family, now speaking 4 languages), I don't see such loss as

by dpq 8y ago

While I totally agree with your pov and sentiment from my personal experience (raised in a bilingual family, now speaking 4 languages), I don't see such loss as a terrible tragedy. Cultures that have lost the evolutionary race, who failed to instill competitive world comprehension in the carrier population, are not really useful. Imagine a language that has no concept of future tense, no understanding of planning. Do you really believe it ought to exist? Who are the poor souls that you would sentence to having such a limited and uncompetitive world view just for the sake of diversity, while you go on thinking in in much more advanced concepts? Such a handicap is not something I would knowingly impose on any fellow human being.

ergothus 8y ago
> Cultures that have lost the evolutionary race, who failed to instill competitive world comprehension in the carrier population, are not really useful. I was thinking the other day about that language that has no relative left/right and instead everything is based on (effectively) compass direction. The speakers reportedly have excellent direction sense compared to the average non-speaker. Their language is much more efficient at certain tasks we struggle with (English has crutches like "stage left", "starboard", and "your left" to compensate, but unless expected and practiced those are always effort/error prone. I myself fail at simple right/left way too often.) Obviously this is a linguistic (and arguably cultural) trait with some value, without denying the value of also having relative kedtýright. This language is unique (? or at least very rare), which tells me it failed to spread. Logical, as it would be hard for non-native speakers to pick up. But that means "losing the evolutionary race" has no particular relation to the VALUE to us.
foldr 8y ago
If you really mean tense, then there are plenty of languages without tense at all. E.g. Chinese. They seem to be doing ok. It is not necessary to have a grammatical future tense to talk or think about the future. In fact, English does not have a future tense in the technical grammatical sense of 'tense'. More generally, there's no evidence for the existence of human languages with the sort of lack of expressive power that you're talking about. All languages appear to be more-or-less equivalent in their expressive power, although of course that does not imply that exact translation is possible in all instances.
RobertoG 8y ago
There is not such thing as an "evolutionary race". Race to where? Would be OK to forget how to make stone tools because we don't need them for now? Traits are useful in some circumstances and not some useful when circumstances change, who say you would not miss them in the future? Knowledge is knowledge, it adds to our always imperfect understanding of the world.

by dpq 8y ago

ergothus 8y ago

> Cultures that have lost the evolutionary race, who failed to instill competitive world comprehension in the carrier population, are not really useful. I was thinking the other day about that language that has no relative left/right and instead everything is based on (effectively) compass direction. The speakers reportedly have excellent direction sense compared to the average non-speaker. Their language is much more efficient at certain tasks we struggle with (English has crutches like "stage left", "starboard", and "your left" to compensate, but unless expected and practiced those are always effort/error prone. I myself fail at simple right/left way too often.) Obviously this is a linguistic (and arguably cultural) trait with some value, without denying the value of also having relative kedtýright. This language is unique (? or at least very rare), which tells me it failed to spread. Logical, as it would be hard for non-native speakers to pick up. But that means "losing the evolutionary race" has no particular relation to the VALUE to us.

foldr 8y ago

If you really mean tense, then there are plenty of languages without tense at all. E.g. Chinese. They seem to be doing ok. It is not necessary to have a grammatical future tense to talk or think about the future. In fact, English does not have a future tense in the technical grammatical sense of 'tense'. More generally, there's no evidence for the existence of human languages with the sort of lack of expressive power that you're talking about. All languages appear to be more-or-less equivalent in their expressive power, although of course that does not imply that exact translation is possible in all instances.

RobertoG 8y ago

There is not such thing as an "evolutionary race". Race to where? Would be OK to forget how to make stone tools because we don't need them for now? Traits are useful in some circumstances and not some useful when circumstances change, who say you would not miss them in the future? Knowledge is knowledge, it adds to our always imperfect understanding of the world.