4 ms·

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

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).

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).