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Well it's dead to you, obviously. My counter-advice to the above is that on an extremely deep, life experience level it doesn't matter how popular a language i
by dreamweapon 12y ago
Well it's dead to you, obviously.
My counter-advice to the above is that on an extremely deep, life experience level it doesn't matter how popular a language is, in numerical terms. Or what will come of that language 500 years from now.
What matters is what experiences open up to you, as individual, when you go visit (and live) in those countries, in this life, right. It's the people you meet -- and become friends with, perhaps fall in love and start a family with -- and the literature, the music, and poetry that keeps reading and listening into the dead of night and into your dreams -- that matter. Not the gender/case system, of the fact that can speak some generic version of it in 54 countries.
In that sense nearly every (major) language community is infinite, and unique. Maybe the one that's most meaningful for you will be a globally dominant language, like Spanish, Mandarin, or Arabic. Or maybe it will something far more "marginal", like Basque or Pashto.
But whichever it ends up being: whether that language is "alive" or "dead" to you will be a direct function of the energy and enthusiasm you invest in learning it, and (correspondingly) your love for the people who speak it, and their culture.
And not a function of whether you can go to a Barnes and Noble right now and find a shelf with 50 (mostly) mediocre books and interactive learning tools for it.
- barry-cotter 12y agoI was giving you the benefit of the doubt until you put Arabic in the same category as Mandarin or Spanish. Vernacular Arabic is as much a single language as vernacular Germanic. Not at all. Mutually unintelligible languages that qualify as Germanic; Nynorsk, Bokmal, Swedish, Danish, Hochdeutsch, Allemanic, at least 4 varieties of Swiss German, Dutch, Frisian, Scots, English, Jamaican Patois, Tok Pisin. [Incredibly vulgar abuse] Learn a language if you feel like it, or it will be useful. Don't learn it for the money or the career. Trust me that aside from English all useless unless you can work in them well enough to translate to English.
- contingencies 12y agoLearn a language if you feel like it, or it will be useful. Don't learn it for the money or the career. I agree, this is good advice. Trust me that aside from English all useless unless you can work in them well enough to translate to English. Useless in career - not necessarily. Useless in life - definitely untrue.
- dreamweapon 12y agoIn and of themselves, these languages may not be that "useful." That said, breaking out of the English-only mindset, and practicing the discipline required to become truly fluent in another language (which can carry over to other endeavors in your life) can be incredibly useful -- and perhaps one of the best long-term strategic decisions regarding your intellectual development that you can make.
- dreamweapon 12y agoCould you provide some metrics, please? I'll be happy to confess my ignorance, but I was under the impression that among countries where some form of Arabic is counted among the official languages spoken, these variants were much closer to Modern Standard Arabic than, say, Swedish is to German. Mutually unintelligible languages that qualify as Germanic; Nynorsk, Bokmal, Swedish, Danish, Hochdeutsch, Allemanic, at least 4 varieties of Swiss German, Dutch, Frisian, Scots, English, Jamaican Patois, Tok Pisin. BTW, you forgot Kiezdeutsch.
- barry-cotter 12y agoI don't have any metrics on Arabic but here's what Wikipedia has to say on intelligibility > From a linguistic standpoint, it is often said that the various spoken varieties of Arabic differ among each other collectively about as much as the Romance languages.[34] This is an apt comparison in a number of ways. The period of divergence from a single spoken form is similar—perhaps 1500 years for Arabic, 2000 years for the Romance languages. Also, while it is comprehensible to people from the Maghreb, a linguistically innovative variety such as Moroccan Arabic is essentially incomprehensible to Arabs from the Mashriq, much as French is incomprehensible to Spanish or Italian speakers. This suggests that the spoken varieties may linguistically be considered separate languages. I also fogot Afrikaans. Arabic ia really, really diglossic so all educated Arabs will be able to speak and understand fusha but people don't talk like that outside of extremely formal situations. Speaking fusha at home would be as weird as a Romance speaker raising their kids in Latin.
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- contingencies 12y agoPoetic! I'm an Australian whose wife is Chinese, we just had our first child, who is German, in Thailand and are thinking to move - after 8+ years in China - to France. Neither of us speak French, but we sometimes translate classical Chinese together. You only get out of languages what you put in to them. Speaking of which, there's a great Arabic calligraphy torrent around at the moment... PS. Pashto's pretty close to Farsi, isn't it? It's not that marginal. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/65/Moderniranianlanguagesmap.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/65/Modernir...
- dreamweapon 12y agoI meant "marginal" in an facetious sense. None of these languages are "marginal" to those who grow up speaking them (or who end up meeting a soul mate, of one kind or another, from which they learn them). That's the main point I was trying to make.
- cylinder 12y agoSorry but could you clarify? How is the child of an Australian and Chinese couple German?
- contingencies 12y agoI have three nationalities. Under German law, children of Germans are considered German no matter where they are born.
- dreamweapon 12y agoEDIT: "in this life, right." => "right now."