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I think the thing that doesn't make sense to me about all of these language preservation efforts is the idea that a language has to have people actively speakin

by dimmke 5y ago

I think the thing that doesn't make sense to me about all of these language preservation efforts is the idea that a language has to have people actively speaking it. That's a gigantic lift, that takes a ton of effort. Even if you teach a new generation they likely won't keep using it in their day to day. Why not just catalog it? Get the most experienced speakers to record hundreds of hours of audio of it, if it had a writing system catalog that too. Problem solved. Language preserved. Otherwise you're fighting a losing battle trying to keep a language actively being used when only a few thousand people know it still.

bradrn 5y ago
Because you need to have native speakers in order to properly analyse the language. Let’s say you have a corpus and you’ve found two words that seem nearly synonymous: what’s the difference between them? A native speaker might be able to tell you about such subtle differences, but it can be impossible to know otherwise. Or, let’s say you’ve found an affix with an unusual distribution — if you want to test your theory of where it is allowed, you’ll need to have a native speaker to double-check if you’re using it correctly. Or even at a more fundamental level, one of the first things any book about field linguistics mentions is that it’s nearly impossible to transcribe audio without going through it with a native speaker, because you won’t necessarily be able to perceive all the sounds at first. (Disclaimer: I’m not a linguist myself, but I’ve seen this advice mentioned several times.) Problems like this are why language preservation generally ends up as a race against time until the last native speaker dies.
- dimmke 5y ago
  It sounds like the main argument you're making is that having a record wouldn't catch every single edge case. But maybe that's okay? If you get 90% of the value of preserving the language and you miss the 10%, it's probably still worth doing vs. trying to artificially keep a language alive. If you read about this language, it emerged from Old Norse. Do you think there was some kind of "Preserve Old Norse" movement? I just don't see how an effort like this could possibly succeed. If you make kids learn it, the chances of them retaining fluency in it are pretty low I'd think? They'd have to be using it a lot. And I think most people would probably rather their kids learn English as a second language. I guess a solution would be to teach the kids English and Elfdalian instead of English and Swedish, and then when they need to talk to people from other regions they just use English as the lingua franca.
  - bradrn 5y ago
    > It sounds like the main argument you're making is that having a record wouldn't catch every single edge case. But maybe that's okay? If you get 90% of the value of preserving the language and you miss the 10%, it's probably still worth doing vs. trying to artificially keep a language alive. The problem is, it probably won’t be 90/10. I worry that it may be more like 50/50 or even 10/90, though to be sure I’d have to ask a linguist who’s actually worked in the field. > If you read about this language, it emerged from Old Norse. Do you think there was some kind of "Preserve Old Norse" movement? There’s a difference between evolution into a new language and language death. The former makes no difference to language diversity: the old language is just as interesting as the new one. (Or, in many cases, it increases diversity, because one language can split into multiple daughter languages.) The latter decreases language diversity, as a spoken language is irretrievably lost. > I just don't see how an effort like this could possibly succeed. If you make kids learn it, the chances of them retaining fluency in it are pretty low I'd think? They'd have to be using it a lot. And I think most people would probably rather their kids learn English as a second language. I don’t disagree. Language revival rarely if ever succeeds. This is why it’s important to do as much linguistic work on each language as possible while native speakers are still alive — simply making records of the language is not enough.
    - dimmke 5y ago
      >may be more like 50/50 or even 10/90 Maybe for some languages that are at the point of only having 2 speakers left. But at that point, you likely couldn't revive the language anyways. For this language, they absolutely should be able to record it in its current state in an extremely comprehensive way. >There’s a difference between evolution into a new language and language death. But Old Norse did die. It happened to sprout several new languages, most of which are not in danger of dying out like Danish and Swedish. The original Old Norse is gone though. You seem to only be valuing a language based on if it's a net plus or minus to the "Language Diversity" which as you're using it seems to mean the number of distinct languages that are currently spoken natively by currently alive humans. Old Norse dying was -1 but sprouted many new languages so +n. Where Elfdalian dying would just be -1. I would think a language would be of value based on the content of the language itself, for linguists to study. >simply making records of the language is not enough. I would consider doing linguistic work on the language with native speakers to be part of making records of the language. I don't think we're in disagreement here. The original idea I was pushing against was trying to artificially keep a language alive by trying to keep large population groups speaking it natively. It goes against how language has always worked.

by dimmke 5y ago

bradrn 5y ago

Because you need to have native speakers in order to properly analyse the language. Let’s say you have a corpus and you’ve found two words that seem nearly synonymous: what’s the difference between them? A native speaker might be able to tell you about such subtle differences, but it can be impossible to know otherwise. Or, let’s say you’ve found an affix with an unusual distribution — if you want to test your theory of where it is allowed, you’ll need to have a native speaker to double-check if you’re using it correctly. Or even at a more fundamental level, one of the first things any book about field linguistics mentions is that it’s nearly impossible to transcribe audio without going through it with a native speaker, because you won’t necessarily be able to perceive all the sounds at first. (Disclaimer: I’m not a linguist myself, but I’ve seen this advice mentioned several times.) Problems like this are why language preservation generally ends up as a race against time until the last native speaker dies.

dimmke 5y ago
It sounds like the main argument you're making is that having a record wouldn't catch every single edge case. But maybe that's okay? If you get 90% of the value of preserving the language and you miss the 10%, it's probably still worth doing vs. trying to artificially keep a language alive. If you read about this language, it emerged from Old Norse. Do you think there was some kind of "Preserve Old Norse" movement? I just don't see how an effort like this could possibly succeed. If you make kids learn it, the chances of them retaining fluency in it are pretty low I'd think? They'd have to be using it a lot. And I think most people would probably rather their kids learn English as a second language. I guess a solution would be to teach the kids English and Elfdalian instead of English and Swedish, and then when they need to talk to people from other regions they just use English as the lingua franca.
- bradrn 5y ago
  > It sounds like the main argument you're making is that having a record wouldn't catch every single edge case. But maybe that's okay? If you get 90% of the value of preserving the language and you miss the 10%, it's probably still worth doing vs. trying to artificially keep a language alive. The problem is, it probably won’t be 90/10. I worry that it may be more like 50/50 or even 10/90, though to be sure I’d have to ask a linguist who’s actually worked in the field. > If you read about this language, it emerged from Old Norse. Do you think there was some kind of "Preserve Old Norse" movement? There’s a difference between evolution into a new language and language death. The former makes no difference to language diversity: the old language is just as interesting as the new one. (Or, in many cases, it increases diversity, because one language can split into multiple daughter languages.) The latter decreases language diversity, as a spoken language is irretrievably lost. > I just don't see how an effort like this could possibly succeed. If you make kids learn it, the chances of them retaining fluency in it are pretty low I'd think? They'd have to be using it a lot. And I think most people would probably rather their kids learn English as a second language. I don’t disagree. Language revival rarely if ever succeeds. This is why it’s important to do as much linguistic work on each language as possible while native speakers are still alive — simply making records of the language is not enough.
  - dimmke 5y ago
    >may be more like 50/50 or even 10/90 Maybe for some languages that are at the point of only having 2 speakers left. But at that point, you likely couldn't revive the language anyways. For this language, they absolutely should be able to record it in its current state in an extremely comprehensive way. >There’s a difference between evolution into a new language and language death. But Old Norse did die. It happened to sprout several new languages, most of which are not in danger of dying out like Danish and Swedish. The original Old Norse is gone though. You seem to only be valuing a language based on if it's a net plus or minus to the "Language Diversity" which as you're using it seems to mean the number of distinct languages that are currently spoken natively by currently alive humans. Old Norse dying was -1 but sprouted many new languages so +n. Where Elfdalian dying would just be -1. I would think a language would be of value based on the content of the language itself, for linguists to study. >simply making records of the language is not enough. I would consider doing linguistic work on the language with native speakers to be part of making records of the language. I don't think we're in disagreement here. The original idea I was pushing against was trying to artificially keep a language alive by trying to keep large population groups speaking it natively. It goes against how language has always worked.