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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 everyt
by 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 agoThe 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.