13 ms·

> Utility had defeated tradition. Is that supposed to be self-evidently bad?

by jey 12y ago

adamnemecek 12y ago
Indeed. I feel like languages/scripts dying out has some advantages too.
- alieteraz 12y ago
  Languages do evolve and die. English itself is changing all the time. Same goes for Urdu. The question here is whether the changes are organic or is there simple oversight going on. My view is that the problem is of oversight, and of disregarding the Urdu speaking and writing user. If the world's most popular operating systems were designed in Pakistan or Iran and they were not offering enough English language letters as a default on the devices, I think we would be plenty upset.
  - adamnemecek 12y ago
    The question is whether languages are really worth preserving. I'm not a native English speaker yet I don't really have much emotional attachment to my first language. In fact, my life would have been easier if I grew up speaking English. And it's not that I think that English is somehow inherently a better language, it's more that there is a lot more people speaking it. It's kind of like if you are deciding what open source project to use. Having a big community around it is a major deciding factor, if not THE deciding factor.
    - ibrahima 12y ago
      I feel much the same way (though, considering I learned English at the age of 4 and never really learned much more of my parents' language after that, calling English my second language is grossly misleading). I feel a vague attachment just because my grandfather was a professor of Bengali literature and I'd like to be able to read his work, but I don't sweat over the fact that my grasp of the language is very basic. I don't need to use it too often, and people back in the "motherland" can worry about preserving the language or not. The analogy to open source projects is spot on; while you might have some "emotional" attachment to a library/technology that you learned early on, you probably wouldn't make significant decisions based on that. I learned to program in VB5, yet I dropped it as soon as I learned Java because it was just an awful language (though I guess human languages don't really have notions of superiority or inferiority like some programming languages might).
      - llllllllllll 12y ago
        The analogy to open source projects is spot on Except that when an open source project dies, its code remains in full -- to study, take ideas from, or even potentially be revived at a later time. When a language dies though, it's pretty much gone. Even if it's received a lot of attention from field linguists, it's near impossible to fully codify the grammar and document the nuances of any language.
        oblio 12y ago
        I doubt that a language dieing in 2014 would be completely gone from all record. Almost all the languages that we "lost" did not have a rich literature or sometimes even an alphabet.
        llllllllllll 12y ago
        There are plenty of extant languages that don't have an alphabet either. They will be "lost" in every sense of the word. The # of languages currently spoken is typically pegged somewhere between 3000-6000 and it's thought that we lose around one a week. Most have almost no documentation whatsoever, and even so a couple papers written in the 1970s aren't going to capture any potential unique aspects of a language let alone allow for reconstruction at a later point. The analogy to code is way off.
      - sampo 12y ago
        Just a guess: (1) It's maybe difficult to separate one missing their country, and missing the language of their country. (2) Also it's maybe easier to miss the homeland, when the homeland is a rich western country, and moving back home would not mean any decrease in standard of living or safety (might even be an improvement over US or UK).
    - pjmlp 12y ago
      Although English is seen as the lingua franca of the 21st century, it wasn't always like that. In the several millions we are able to speak and write, there have been lots of languages taking that role. And even English is not as common as many people think, just traveling around the world will teach people that there are many places where knowing English will be of no help. Besides languages represent culture, not all concepts are expressible across all languages and they are also a door to our past as mankind, sure they are worth preserving.
      - adamnemecek 12y ago
        > Although English is seen as the lingua franca of the 21st century, it wasn't always like that. I'm aware of that. > And even English is not as common as many people think, just traveling around the world will teach people that there are many places where knowing English will be of no help. I guess it's not just about sheer numbers but also about what sort of stuff is produced in the language. E.g. the expert books are mostly written in English. You don't even have to go that far, e.g. there aren't all that many say compiler books that were not translated from English, that are up to date and not terrible. This is for me more important than being able to have a discussion with Bhutani farmer. > Besides languages represent culture, not all concepts are expressible across all languages and they are also a door to our past as mankind, sure they are worth preserving. Well it's a tradeoff. And I think that at some point the cost of preserving them outweighs the benefits.
        pjmlp 12y ago
        > the expert books are mostly written in English. This depends very much on the domain.
      - Rapzid 12y ago
        Just out of curiosity, what concept is not expressible in English?
        pjmlp 12y ago
        There are lots of examples. Citing just two out of my mind. Feierabend (German) - expresses the concept you are finished with the work duties for the day and can enjoy your private time with family and friends Saudade (Portuguese) - a mixture of loneliness, melancholy, sense of loosing part of you feelings, even mixed with a kid of sad joy, while remembering something that is no longer there.
  - kijin 12y ago
    "Organic" change is little more than the result of repeated oversight. It is often triggered by changes in hardware availability. Scripts that were developed in the age of stone tablets will change when the tablet and chisel are replaced with paper and brush, and again when the brush is replaced with a fountain pen, and again when the whole setup is replaced with a computer. People will naturally adopt the style that allows them to convey meaning the most conveniently in a given medium. Chinese, Japanese, and Korean were all written vertically from right to left (|||) until only a few decades ago. Now they are very often written horizontally from left to right (≡). A lot of factors have contributed to the change, such as the ease of embedding Western, mathematical and scientific symbols in a CJK sentence, the need to keep one's hands clean when writing with a modern pen, and of course the introduction of computerized typesetting. Nobody forced anyone to write horizontally. People just gravitated towards what they found more convenient given the availability of new writing tools. And of course, many artists and calligraphers continue to write vertically when it suits their intentions better. Even better, new calligraphical techniques have been developed to take advantage of unique opportunities that horizontal writing offers. As long as everyone gets what they need (art for artists and utility for utilitarians), I don't see any problem with this arrangement.
  - VLM 12y ago
    "English itself is changing all the time." As a writing style, cursive is basically dead. This would have made an awesome analogy for the original article essay. Very few Americans in gen X and younger actually write cursive and there are efforts to remove it from the curriculum. I can sign my name in cursive when I write a legacy paper check (a couple times a year) or sign forms. Thats about it. I now write legacy paper checks in block capitals and only use cursive for my .sig. I would have to check wikipedia to see how to make a cursive capital "F" and some of the weirder letters (what is a cursive Q?) It presents some problems to genealogy, I have trouble reading centuries old census forms because I haven't read cursive since grade school, some decades ago. In grade school we were told we will have to write all our papers in cursive in middle school and up; not so; all typed, mostly on computers.
DCKing 12y ago
I don't think it's a bad thing either. Those scripts will not be forgotten soon because of the way information is preserved in our current age. Nothing of their historicity is lost to us at all. Yet this script (and many others) do not present compelling reasons to stay in use. The same goes for Chinese characters; the knowledge of this script among Chinese youth is waning simply because these characters are not as useful as pinyin romanization is. It's "natural selection". From my limited knowledge, only some "effective" scripts in the world that translate efficiently to a digital age. From the top of my head, only Latin, Cyrillic, (other descendants of Greek) and Hangul script feature a small enough 'standardized' amount of characters to express a wide variety of information. That is what is needed to survive in a digital age methinks.
- mchaver 12y ago
  I haven't noticed that about Chinese. Pinyin and Bopomofo are useful input methods but I hardly ever see material actually written in pinyin other than children's books. My kids have never really complained about having to learn characters and find a lot of pleasure in being able to read and write characters. Most people I hear calling for the eradication of Chinese characters are just a few non-native speakers. Of course, that is just anecdotal, I am sure there are also a few native speakers that hold that view but it seems to be a very small minority. Post-education most people hand write characters a lot less, but they are still reading characters and producing texts with pinyin/bopomofo/cangjie, etc. There are huge amounts of information being written Chinese with the increase of internet usage in China and increase in education. Unless there is another massive education reform in China, I don't see Chinese characters going anywhere.
coldtea 12y ago
For people who value tradition, yes. For people who value utility, no.
Yardlink 12y ago
Sadly popular opinion seems to be that languages and other traditions must be preserved because, well, we can't lose them. It's certainly good to preserve them in museums so people can use them for research, etc. But there's little or no actual need for more than one language in the world, let along more than one writing system for the same language! People don't mourn the loss of codepage 437. For many people that's a big part of their growing up. But now it's not in common use and the world is better for it. We don't see people trying to slow the adoption of UTF8 because it's making the world one big dull homogenous borg that's unable to express box drawings. Nowadays, there's quiet revolution going on in the form of many small dialects disappearing. That's wonderful. It's giving millions the opportunities that come with being able to communicate with more other people by sharing common language. We should be celebrating the massive advantages that keep growing each time another obscure script or dialect becomes nobody's native language.
- mkaziz 12y ago
  I think the concern is more the loss of literature written over the ages in a language. Equally importantly, language - as an extension of culture - shapes the way people think. Different people thinking differently is how problems can get solved, instead of monstrous uniformity you seem to be envisioning.
  - thaumasiotes 12y ago
    This doesn't make any sense. Ancient literature will be lost no matter how many languages the world holds at any time -- language change means that it isn't possible to understand ancient works. Sure, it's easier for an English speaker to pick up Old English than Ancient Egyptian, but both take years of effort. > Different people thinking differently is how problems can get solved, instead of monstrous uniformity you seem to be envisioning People think plenty differently while speaking the same language. They don't think any more differently if they speak different languages.
    - mkaziz 12y ago
      Are you bilingual? If so, that perhaps you'll know what I'm talking about.
Dirlewanger 12y ago
These kinds of people decrying losses of languages have existed throughout the ages. It's just that now they have a large slice of the world as their audience instead of their town square/academic halls/whatever. I say as long as we ("we" being...fuck I don't know) make a concerted effort to translate any ancient texts not yet translated into English, then let it die gracefully. The people crying for these losses will eventually pass and...well, such is life.
- stan_rogers 12y ago
  Translation is an admirable goal, but so is preseervation. Not necessarily the "preservation" that implies that the languages will remain in day-to-day use forever; rather the "preservation" that implies that a complete (or nearly complete) grammatical description of the language, along with a relatively comprehensive vocabulary, will be recorded. That has more than historical interest, since the varieties of language and linguistic structures can tell us an awful lot about how language itself works in humans. It's sort of like doing astronomy/cosmology now (or at least recording the observations we can make now) will tell us very different things than we could possibly find out after the cosmic microwave background has become undetectable and galaxies outside of our gravitationally-bound local cluster have receded beyond the visibility threshold (where space between us and them is expanding at a rate faster than the speed of light). Before Hixkaryana was described, it was thought that OVS was "impossible". Amharic "made no sense" until Greenberg noticed something going on with adpositions (mostly prepositions, but a few incipient postpositions) that indicated that it was only partway through the process of settling into SOV from the ancestral VSO. That, in turn, indicates that there is something to the idea of markedness hierarchies, which, in turn, might be giving us an insight into something more fundamental about the way we're wired up.
NoMoreNicksLeft 12y ago
I think that it is bad. Technology should help us preserve, not dictate what words and letters we're allowed to use.

> Utility had defeated tradition. Is that supposed to be self-evidently bad?

by jey 12y ago

> Utility had defeated tradition. Is that supposed to be self-evidently bad?

adamnemecek 12y ago

Indeed. I feel like languages/scripts dying out has some advantages too.

alieteraz 12y ago
Languages do evolve and die. English itself is changing all the time. Same goes for Urdu. The question here is whether the changes are organic or is there simple oversight going on. My view is that the problem is of oversight, and of disregarding the Urdu speaking and writing user. If the world's most popular operating systems were designed in Pakistan or Iran and they were not offering enough English language letters as a default on the devices, I think we would be plenty upset.
- adamnemecek 12y ago
  The question is whether languages are really worth preserving. I'm not a native English speaker yet I don't really have much emotional attachment to my first language. In fact, my life would have been easier if I grew up speaking English. And it's not that I think that English is somehow inherently a better language, it's more that there is a lot more people speaking it. It's kind of like if you are deciding what open source project to use. Having a big community around it is a major deciding factor, if not THE deciding factor.
  - ibrahima 12y ago
    I feel much the same way (though, considering I learned English at the age of 4 and never really learned much more of my parents' language after that, calling English my second language is grossly misleading). I feel a vague attachment just because my grandfather was a professor of Bengali literature and I'd like to be able to read his work, but I don't sweat over the fact that my grasp of the language is very basic. I don't need to use it too often, and people back in the "motherland" can worry about preserving the language or not. The analogy to open source projects is spot on; while you might have some "emotional" attachment to a library/technology that you learned early on, you probably wouldn't make significant decisions based on that. I learned to program in VB5, yet I dropped it as soon as I learned Java because it was just an awful language (though I guess human languages don't really have notions of superiority or inferiority like some programming languages might).
    - llllllllllll 12y ago
      The analogy to open source projects is spot on Except that when an open source project dies, its code remains in full -- to study, take ideas from, or even potentially be revived at a later time. When a language dies though, it's pretty much gone. Even if it's received a lot of attention from field linguists, it's near impossible to fully codify the grammar and document the nuances of any language.
      - oblio 12y ago
        I doubt that a language dieing in 2014 would be completely gone from all record. Almost all the languages that we "lost" did not have a rich literature or sometimes even an alphabet.
        llllllllllll 12y ago
        There are plenty of extant languages that don't have an alphabet either. They will be "lost" in every sense of the word. The # of languages currently spoken is typically pegged somewhere between 3000-6000 and it's thought that we lose around one a week. Most have almost no documentation whatsoever, and even so a couple papers written in the 1970s aren't going to capture any potential unique aspects of a language let alone allow for reconstruction at a later point. The analogy to code is way off.
    - sampo 12y ago
      Just a guess: (1) It's maybe difficult to separate one missing their country, and missing the language of their country. (2) Also it's maybe easier to miss the homeland, when the homeland is a rich western country, and moving back home would not mean any decrease in standard of living or safety (might even be an improvement over US or UK).
  - pjmlp 12y ago
    Although English is seen as the lingua franca of the 21st century, it wasn't always like that. In the several millions we are able to speak and write, there have been lots of languages taking that role. And even English is not as common as many people think, just traveling around the world will teach people that there are many places where knowing English will be of no help. Besides languages represent culture, not all concepts are expressible across all languages and they are also a door to our past as mankind, sure they are worth preserving.
    - adamnemecek 12y ago
      > Although English is seen as the lingua franca of the 21st century, it wasn't always like that. I'm aware of that. > And even English is not as common as many people think, just traveling around the world will teach people that there are many places where knowing English will be of no help. I guess it's not just about sheer numbers but also about what sort of stuff is produced in the language. E.g. the expert books are mostly written in English. You don't even have to go that far, e.g. there aren't all that many say compiler books that were not translated from English, that are up to date and not terrible. This is for me more important than being able to have a discussion with Bhutani farmer. > Besides languages represent culture, not all concepts are expressible across all languages and they are also a door to our past as mankind, sure they are worth preserving. Well it's a tradeoff. And I think that at some point the cost of preserving them outweighs the benefits.
      - pjmlp 12y ago
        > the expert books are mostly written in English. This depends very much on the domain.
    - Rapzid 12y ago
      Just out of curiosity, what concept is not expressible in English?
      - pjmlp 12y ago
        There are lots of examples. Citing just two out of my mind. Feierabend (German) - expresses the concept you are finished with the work duties for the day and can enjoy your private time with family and friends Saudade (Portuguese) - a mixture of loneliness, melancholy, sense of loosing part of you feelings, even mixed with a kid of sad joy, while remembering something that is no longer there.
- kijin 12y ago
  "Organic" change is little more than the result of repeated oversight. It is often triggered by changes in hardware availability. Scripts that were developed in the age of stone tablets will change when the tablet and chisel are replaced with paper and brush, and again when the brush is replaced with a fountain pen, and again when the whole setup is replaced with a computer. People will naturally adopt the style that allows them to convey meaning the most conveniently in a given medium. Chinese, Japanese, and Korean were all written vertically from right to left (|||) until only a few decades ago. Now they are very often written horizontally from left to right (≡). A lot of factors have contributed to the change, such as the ease of embedding Western, mathematical and scientific symbols in a CJK sentence, the need to keep one's hands clean when writing with a modern pen, and of course the introduction of computerized typesetting. Nobody forced anyone to write horizontally. People just gravitated towards what they found more convenient given the availability of new writing tools. And of course, many artists and calligraphers continue to write vertically when it suits their intentions better. Even better, new calligraphical techniques have been developed to take advantage of unique opportunities that horizontal writing offers. As long as everyone gets what they need (art for artists and utility for utilitarians), I don't see any problem with this arrangement.
- VLM 12y ago
  "English itself is changing all the time." As a writing style, cursive is basically dead. This would have made an awesome analogy for the original article essay. Very few Americans in gen X and younger actually write cursive and there are efforts to remove it from the curriculum. I can sign my name in cursive when I write a legacy paper check (a couple times a year) or sign forms. Thats about it. I now write legacy paper checks in block capitals and only use cursive for my .sig. I would have to check wikipedia to see how to make a cursive capital "F" and some of the weirder letters (what is a cursive Q?) It presents some problems to genealogy, I have trouble reading centuries old census forms because I haven't read cursive since grade school, some decades ago. In grade school we were told we will have to write all our papers in cursive in middle school and up; not so; all typed, mostly on computers.

DCKing 12y ago

I don't think it's a bad thing either. Those scripts will not be forgotten soon because of the way information is preserved in our current age. Nothing of their historicity is lost to us at all. Yet this script (and many others) do not present compelling reasons to stay in use. The same goes for Chinese characters; the knowledge of this script among Chinese youth is waning simply because these characters are not as useful as pinyin romanization is. It's "natural selection". From my limited knowledge, only some "effective" scripts in the world that translate efficiently to a digital age. From the top of my head, only Latin, Cyrillic, (other descendants of Greek) and Hangul script feature a small enough 'standardized' amount of characters to express a wide variety of information. That is what is needed to survive in a digital age methinks.

mchaver 12y ago
I haven't noticed that about Chinese. Pinyin and Bopomofo are useful input methods but I hardly ever see material actually written in pinyin other than children's books. My kids have never really complained about having to learn characters and find a lot of pleasure in being able to read and write characters. Most people I hear calling for the eradication of Chinese characters are just a few non-native speakers. Of course, that is just anecdotal, I am sure there are also a few native speakers that hold that view but it seems to be a very small minority. Post-education most people hand write characters a lot less, but they are still reading characters and producing texts with pinyin/bopomofo/cangjie, etc. There are huge amounts of information being written Chinese with the increase of internet usage in China and increase in education. Unless there is another massive education reform in China, I don't see Chinese characters going anywhere.

coldtea 12y ago

For people who value tradition, yes. For people who value utility, no.

Yardlink 12y ago

Sadly popular opinion seems to be that languages and other traditions must be preserved because, well, we can't lose them. It's certainly good to preserve them in museums so people can use them for research, etc. But there's little or no actual need for more than one language in the world, let along more than one writing system for the same language! People don't mourn the loss of codepage 437. For many people that's a big part of their growing up. But now it's not in common use and the world is better for it. We don't see people trying to slow the adoption of UTF8 because it's making the world one big dull homogenous borg that's unable to express box drawings. Nowadays, there's quiet revolution going on in the form of many small dialects disappearing. That's wonderful. It's giving millions the opportunities that come with being able to communicate with more other people by sharing common language. We should be celebrating the massive advantages that keep growing each time another obscure script or dialect becomes nobody's native language.

mkaziz 12y ago
I think the concern is more the loss of literature written over the ages in a language. Equally importantly, language - as an extension of culture - shapes the way people think. Different people thinking differently is how problems can get solved, instead of monstrous uniformity you seem to be envisioning.
- thaumasiotes 12y ago
  This doesn't make any sense. Ancient literature will be lost no matter how many languages the world holds at any time -- language change means that it isn't possible to understand ancient works. Sure, it's easier for an English speaker to pick up Old English than Ancient Egyptian, but both take years of effort. > Different people thinking differently is how problems can get solved, instead of monstrous uniformity you seem to be envisioning People think plenty differently while speaking the same language. They don't think any more differently if they speak different languages.
  - mkaziz 12y ago
    Are you bilingual? If so, that perhaps you'll know what I'm talking about.

Dirlewanger 12y ago

These kinds of people decrying losses of languages have existed throughout the ages. It's just that now they have a large slice of the world as their audience instead of their town square/academic halls/whatever. I say as long as we ("we" being...fuck I don't know) make a concerted effort to translate any ancient texts not yet translated into English, then let it die gracefully. The people crying for these losses will eventually pass and...well, such is life.

stan_rogers 12y ago
Translation is an admirable goal, but so is preseervation. Not necessarily the "preservation" that implies that the languages will remain in day-to-day use forever; rather the "preservation" that implies that a complete (or nearly complete) grammatical description of the language, along with a relatively comprehensive vocabulary, will be recorded. That has more than historical interest, since the varieties of language and linguistic structures can tell us an awful lot about how language itself works in humans. It's sort of like doing astronomy/cosmology now (or at least recording the observations we can make now) will tell us very different things than we could possibly find out after the cosmic microwave background has become undetectable and galaxies outside of our gravitationally-bound local cluster have receded beyond the visibility threshold (where space between us and them is expanding at a rate faster than the speed of light). Before Hixkaryana was described, it was thought that OVS was "impossible". Amharic "made no sense" until Greenberg noticed something going on with adpositions (mostly prepositions, but a few incipient postpositions) that indicated that it was only partway through the process of settling into SOV from the ancestral VSO. That, in turn, indicates that there is something to the idea of markedness hierarchies, which, in turn, might be giving us an insight into something more fundamental about the way we're wired up.

NoMoreNicksLeft 12y ago

I think that it is bad. Technology should help us preserve, not dictate what words and letters we're allowed to use.