5 ms·

If a language dies because nobody uses it, what is the point of trying to keep it alive? Maybe I'm dense, but it seems to me that the world might be simpler wi

If a language dies because nobody uses it, what is the point of trying to keep it alive? Maybe I'm dense, but it seems to me that the world might be simpler with fewer spoken / written languages rather than more? LEVEL I BASIC is pretty endangered, but who cares at this point?

folkrav 7y ago
Programming "languages" and spoken languages barely can be compared apart from the fact they both have specific syntax. Don't conflate the two just because they both have the word "language" in them. They're even less similar than Java and JavaScript. Language is not only a means of communication, but the living trace of a whole branch of culture and its collective memory of knowledge and history. EDIT: The matter is developed quite extensively in an article [0] linked in their FAQ[1] [0] https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7vQLUpU_2qcV1laYS1mZjc5Vjg/view https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7vQLUpU_2qcV1laYS1mZjc5Vjg... [1] http://www.endangeredlanguages.com/faq/ http://www.endangeredlanguages.com/faq/
- mc32 7y ago
  I’m ambivalent about it. On the one hand it’s interesting patrimony of a sort, and, from a linguistic and separately a historical perspective, it’d be really nice to be witness to some dead languages of antiquity, but, on the other hand, languages have always come and gone. I imagine modern India and Africa are losing languages as the main languages displace lesser languages.
  - jolmg 7y ago
    I think you missed folkrav's point. People write their own history in their own language. If we lose a language, we don't just lose the language. We lose everything that was written or otherwise recorded (exclusively) in that language, most importantly the culture and history of all its users across time. Tomorrow, if English were to be lost, most of the history of the US, Great Britain and other English speaking nations (as well as records written in English but pertaining to other non-English speaking nations) would be lost.
    - 9nGQluzmnq3M 7y ago
      The vast majority of endangered languages don't have a written history. Most don't even have a writing system, much less a widely adopted one and literate writers. Without writing, history devolves into a bunch of creation myths, which can be mildly interesting but tend to be very formulaic. Witness Australian Aboriginal Dreamtime stories, which span 40000 years of history, but can be reasonably replicated with a Markov chain of the (ancestor,kangaroo,goanna,wombat) creating (geographical feature) after it (fought,danced,mated,was cast away) (by,with) another (ancestor,kangaroo,goanna,wombat).
      - crispinb 7y ago
        > Witness Australian Aboriginal Dreamtime stories ... That is a ludicrous and ignorant caricature. Dreamtime stories encode vast amounts of information about locations, topography, history, local survival resources, and more. Read a bit of anthropology, or even just some pop/synoptic works (Lynne Kelly, Bill Gammage, Bruce Pascoe) and see if your prejudices emerge intact.
  - jcranmer 7y ago
    I think there is an element that some languages, the last specimens of their families, are more worth saving than other languages. Even if only 4 languages survived, it would be better for the world to have them be English, Arabic, Chinese, and Tagalog than English, French, Spanish, and Russian. So I would shed less tears for losing Occitan (a language spoken in southern France) than I would for losing Mohawk (an indigenous language along the New York/Canada border).
mikorym 7y ago
I think that knowing a language has many purposes, only one of which is direct communication of semi-objective statements. It's one thing to say: "I am thristy, do you have water?" It's another to say: "She walks in beauty like the night of starry skies and cloudless climes..."
- core-questions 7y ago
  Is there reason to believe that the languages being lost have significant poetic contributions of value?
  - ivraatiems 7y ago
    How would we know? They've been lost. Also, poetic value is subjective. Historical value, in the sense of helping us understand things we didn't previously, much less so. You may not find a phrase in a given language "poetic," but knowing that native speakers of said language did may be quite valuable.
  - mikorym 7y ago
    Yes, all African languages that I know have many metaphors and simile's compared to a proto-English (discounting English loaning from other languages) and these have intrinsic knowledge built into them. For example, in Nortern Sotho: "Ditau ga di adimane meno." This means that "Lion don't lend each other their teeth." But in context it means that you can't expect that other people lend you tools when you have to do a job, everyone needs to bring their own tools (physical or otherwise; software or hardware; etc). I also suspect that this saying alludes to the fact that lions are in competition with each other. Why would a lion lend another lion it's teeth and in the process put itself at a disadvantage? The metaphor encodes this inherent truth about competition.
  - firethief 7y ago
    Yeah, they were used by humans. A lot of people seem to think that writing is what separates humans from animals without any interesting thoughts, but in fact many complex societies have evolved around orally-transmitted knowledge. If poetry is your metric of value, it so happens that often non-literary cultures encode their teachings into verse to increase memorizability and support faithful transmission from person to person. Examples of such works include the Iliad and the Odyssey.
LocalH 7y ago
The problem with the true loss of a language (which I would define not only as the death of its active use, but as the loss of documentation of the language's building blocks) is that you lose access to huge swaths of documented human history. Few, if any, BASICs are endangered to this level. Nobody outside of enthusiasts may actually be significantly using the language, but it's documented and thus programs written in a BASIC are generally able to be interpreted, and if necessary the logic converted to a different language. Many of these endangered languages are at risk of total loss, akin to if all information regarding a given BASIC syntax were irrevocably removed from all of existence.
- ratmice 7y ago
  One instance of this phenomenon is Knuth's TeX program, written in a dialect of Pascal which Knuth calls Pascal-H, accepted by Charles Hedrick's compiler: I believe the sources for the compiler can be found here, https://github.com/PDP-10/rutgers-pascal/ https://github.com/PDP-10/rutgers-pascal/ And at some point Knuth had modified the GNU pascal compiler to compile modified TeX sources. But in practice everyone just translates from Pascal to C, via WEB2C. Programs like XeTeX are even writing new Pascal-H code, which gets translated to C, and seems unlikely to have ever been compiled in the original language.
sterlind 7y ago
I'm not native, but I'm learning Lushootseed (language of the Puget Sound Salish peoples) to help keep it alive, after it technically fell into extinction. Language preservation is huge for native culture and identity, and it helps prevent assimilation (one of the reasons why the language and others like it were forcibly stamped out by the boarding schools which abducted Indian children from their parents.) There are even projects to teach Lushootseed to inmates in tribal jails, as a way of reconnecting prisoners with their culture and heritage. Iirc studies also show that depression and suicide are reduced if the native language stays alive. There's a lot of debate and the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis has fallen out of favor with contemporary linguists, but I also feel like different languages encode different thought patterns. Lushootseed is nothing like English, and there are words specifically for tribal customs, religion and viewpoints that can't translate. Overall, I see languages as living creatures. Extinction of minority languages or cultures is, to me, like species disappearing. Even if the biome doesn't suffer (and it can in both cases - Indians knew how to take care of the land before whites showed up), something sacred is lost v
- jgust 7y ago
  > different languages encode different thought patterns I find this so interesting and I want it to be true. The Guugu Ymithirr come to mind, whose directional prepositions are based on cardinal directions. This difference, when compared to English for example, is thought to be the main factor in why the people have such a strong "internal compass". http://nautil.us/blog/5-languages-that-could-change-the-way-you-see-the-world http://nautil.us/blog/5-languages-that-could-change-the-way-... [paywall] http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-language-shapes-thought/ http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-language-shape...
- senorsmile 7y ago
  I really wanted to do this for a very closely related language to lushootseed about 10 years ago when I had an apartment in one of the tribal areas that were 50% non tribal. I looked into resources and programs, but there didn't seem to be a lot of resources or actual interest by the people group. I eventually moved onto other things (probably Akkadian or Dutch at that time), but this desire still lives somewhere inside me. Would you care to share how you've done the learning you've done and any assimilation you've been able to do?
est31 7y ago
Languages have been created/dying/evolving since when we started using them. Their death/creation/evolution fundamentally reflects changes in human lifestyle: isolation of populations leads to differences while intermixing means the creation of pidgin languages. The reason why there is a large amount of languages dying now is because of lifestyle changes of a large amount of people in recent times from living in small isolated communities to more regionally, sometimes even globally, connected communities. This includes people in the western world. Think of inventions like trains, cars, radios, TVs, internet, etc. that enabled such a change. However, that doesn't mean that languages themselves aren't a terribly interesting field of study and research. Archiving them before they die is very important for anthropologists, historians, etc. For example, they can answer questions about the history of other, still living, languages. They should at least be recorded. Of course, forbidding people from teaching a specific language to their children is different from this natural process and something really bad.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago
I agree with you. We should catalog what we know about the language to preserve it for future anthropologists and historians. However, trying to revitalize languages is likely to be a waste of time and energy. In addition, it is likely to impose a greater burden on the children from those cultures as they get pressured to devote time and energy into something that will not benefit them.

folkrav 7y ago

Programming "languages" and spoken languages barely can be compared apart from the fact they both have specific syntax. Don't conflate the two just because they both have the word "language" in them. They're even less similar than Java and JavaScript. Language is not only a means of communication, but the living trace of a whole branch of culture and its collective memory of knowledge and history. EDIT: The matter is developed quite extensively in an article [0] linked in their FAQ[1] [0] https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7vQLUpU_2qcV1laYS1mZjc5Vjg/view https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7vQLUpU_2qcV1laYS1mZjc5Vjg... [1] http://www.endangeredlanguages.com/faq/ http://www.endangeredlanguages.com/faq/

mc32 7y ago
I’m ambivalent about it. On the one hand it’s interesting patrimony of a sort, and, from a linguistic and separately a historical perspective, it’d be really nice to be witness to some dead languages of antiquity, but, on the other hand, languages have always come and gone. I imagine modern India and Africa are losing languages as the main languages displace lesser languages.
- jolmg 7y ago
  I think you missed folkrav's point. People write their own history in their own language. If we lose a language, we don't just lose the language. We lose everything that was written or otherwise recorded (exclusively) in that language, most importantly the culture and history of all its users across time. Tomorrow, if English were to be lost, most of the history of the US, Great Britain and other English speaking nations (as well as records written in English but pertaining to other non-English speaking nations) would be lost.
  - 9nGQluzmnq3M 7y ago
    The vast majority of endangered languages don't have a written history. Most don't even have a writing system, much less a widely adopted one and literate writers. Without writing, history devolves into a bunch of creation myths, which can be mildly interesting but tend to be very formulaic. Witness Australian Aboriginal Dreamtime stories, which span 40000 years of history, but can be reasonably replicated with a Markov chain of the (ancestor,kangaroo,goanna,wombat) creating (geographical feature) after it (fought,danced,mated,was cast away) (by,with) another (ancestor,kangaroo,goanna,wombat).
    - crispinb 7y ago
      > Witness Australian Aboriginal Dreamtime stories ... That is a ludicrous and ignorant caricature. Dreamtime stories encode vast amounts of information about locations, topography, history, local survival resources, and more. Read a bit of anthropology, or even just some pop/synoptic works (Lynne Kelly, Bill Gammage, Bruce Pascoe) and see if your prejudices emerge intact.
- jcranmer 7y ago
  I think there is an element that some languages, the last specimens of their families, are more worth saving than other languages. Even if only 4 languages survived, it would be better for the world to have them be English, Arabic, Chinese, and Tagalog than English, French, Spanish, and Russian. So I would shed less tears for losing Occitan (a language spoken in southern France) than I would for losing Mohawk (an indigenous language along the New York/Canada border).

mikorym 7y ago

I think that knowing a language has many purposes, only one of which is direct communication of semi-objective statements. It's one thing to say: "I am thristy, do you have water?" It's another to say: "She walks in beauty like the night of starry skies and cloudless climes..."

core-questions 7y ago
Is there reason to believe that the languages being lost have significant poetic contributions of value?
- ivraatiems 7y ago
  How would we know? They've been lost. Also, poetic value is subjective. Historical value, in the sense of helping us understand things we didn't previously, much less so. You may not find a phrase in a given language "poetic," but knowing that native speakers of said language did may be quite valuable.
- mikorym 7y ago
  Yes, all African languages that I know have many metaphors and simile's compared to a proto-English (discounting English loaning from other languages) and these have intrinsic knowledge built into them. For example, in Nortern Sotho: "Ditau ga di adimane meno." This means that "Lion don't lend each other their teeth." But in context it means that you can't expect that other people lend you tools when you have to do a job, everyone needs to bring their own tools (physical or otherwise; software or hardware; etc). I also suspect that this saying alludes to the fact that lions are in competition with each other. Why would a lion lend another lion it's teeth and in the process put itself at a disadvantage? The metaphor encodes this inherent truth about competition.
- firethief 7y ago
  Yeah, they were used by humans. A lot of people seem to think that writing is what separates humans from animals without any interesting thoughts, but in fact many complex societies have evolved around orally-transmitted knowledge. If poetry is your metric of value, it so happens that often non-literary cultures encode their teachings into verse to increase memorizability and support faithful transmission from person to person. Examples of such works include the Iliad and the Odyssey.

LocalH 7y ago

The problem with the true loss of a language (which I would define not only as the death of its active use, but as the loss of documentation of the language's building blocks) is that you lose access to huge swaths of documented human history. Few, if any, BASICs are endangered to this level. Nobody outside of enthusiasts may actually be significantly using the language, but it's documented and thus programs written in a BASIC are generally able to be interpreted, and if necessary the logic converted to a different language. Many of these endangered languages are at risk of total loss, akin to if all information regarding a given BASIC syntax were irrevocably removed from all of existence.

ratmice 7y ago
One instance of this phenomenon is Knuth's TeX program, written in a dialect of Pascal which Knuth calls Pascal-H, accepted by Charles Hedrick's compiler: I believe the sources for the compiler can be found here, https://github.com/PDP-10/rutgers-pascal/ https://github.com/PDP-10/rutgers-pascal/ And at some point Knuth had modified the GNU pascal compiler to compile modified TeX sources. But in practice everyone just translates from Pascal to C, via WEB2C. Programs like XeTeX are even writing new Pascal-H code, which gets translated to C, and seems unlikely to have ever been compiled in the original language.

sterlind 7y ago

I'm not native, but I'm learning Lushootseed (language of the Puget Sound Salish peoples) to help keep it alive, after it technically fell into extinction. Language preservation is huge for native culture and identity, and it helps prevent assimilation (one of the reasons why the language and others like it were forcibly stamped out by the boarding schools which abducted Indian children from their parents.) There are even projects to teach Lushootseed to inmates in tribal jails, as a way of reconnecting prisoners with their culture and heritage. Iirc studies also show that depression and suicide are reduced if the native language stays alive. There's a lot of debate and the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis has fallen out of favor with contemporary linguists, but I also feel like different languages encode different thought patterns. Lushootseed is nothing like English, and there are words specifically for tribal customs, religion and viewpoints that can't translate. Overall, I see languages as living creatures. Extinction of minority languages or cultures is, to me, like species disappearing. Even if the biome doesn't suffer (and it can in both cases - Indians knew how to take care of the land before whites showed up), something sacred is lost v

jgust 7y ago
> different languages encode different thought patterns I find this so interesting and I want it to be true. The Guugu Ymithirr come to mind, whose directional prepositions are based on cardinal directions. This difference, when compared to English for example, is thought to be the main factor in why the people have such a strong "internal compass". http://nautil.us/blog/5-languages-that-could-change-the-way-you-see-the-world http://nautil.us/blog/5-languages-that-could-change-the-way-... [paywall] http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-language-shapes-thought/ http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-language-shape...
senorsmile 7y ago
I really wanted to do this for a very closely related language to lushootseed about 10 years ago when I had an apartment in one of the tribal areas that were 50% non tribal. I looked into resources and programs, but there didn't seem to be a lot of resources or actual interest by the people group. I eventually moved onto other things (probably Akkadian or Dutch at that time), but this desire still lives somewhere inside me. Would you care to share how you've done the learning you've done and any assimilation you've been able to do?

est31 7y ago

Languages have been created/dying/evolving since when we started using them. Their death/creation/evolution fundamentally reflects changes in human lifestyle: isolation of populations leads to differences while intermixing means the creation of pidgin languages. The reason why there is a large amount of languages dying now is because of lifestyle changes of a large amount of people in recent times from living in small isolated communities to more regionally, sometimes even globally, connected communities. This includes people in the western world. Think of inventions like trains, cars, radios, TVs, internet, etc. that enabled such a change. However, that doesn't mean that languages themselves aren't a terribly interesting field of study and research. Archiving them before they die is very important for anthropologists, historians, etc. For example, they can answer questions about the history of other, still living, languages. They should at least be recorded. Of course, forbidding people from teaching a specific language to their children is different from this natural process and something really bad.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago

I agree with you. We should catalog what we know about the language to preserve it for future anthropologists and historians. However, trying to revitalize languages is likely to be a waste of time and energy. In addition, it is likely to impose a greater burden on the children from those cultures as they get pressured to devote time and energy into something that will not benefit them.