9 ms·

Why save a language?

60 points by gpvos 12y ago

tzs 12y ago
I don't remember which language this is [1], but I read about some tribal language that did not have any words for relative direction. If you were facing North and I wanted to warn you to watch out for a snake approaching from your left, I'd have to tell you to look out for the snake coming from the West. [1] googling turned up this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relative_direction#Cultures_not_using_relative_directions http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relative_direction#Cultures_not...
- desas 12y ago
  The Amazonian Piraha tribe have "to the river", "to the jungle", "up the river" and "down the river" rather than directions.
  - rimantas 12y ago
    How do they say "to the jungle on the left" while being in the river?
  - davidw 12y ago
    For that matter, most people here in Italy look at you a bit funny if you talk about cardinal directions, and are more comfortable with "towards Venezia" or "in the direction of Verona" or that kind of thing. The latter is probably handier for navigating towns that are, outside of a very small Roman core (in some cases) not exactly linear in their layout.
    - caio1982 12y ago
      It's the same in Brazil, and it's a big place to use relative directions but we prefer it that way too :-)
  - herge 12y ago
    There's a huge tribe in the Americas who use the terms "Lower", "Midtown", "Upper West Side" and "Upper East Side" for geographical locations. I hear they're at continual war with the "Bridge and Tunnel" people.
anonymfus 12y ago
"A rendering of the visible spectrum on a grey background" image from Wikipedia with added English and Russian colour range names: http://i.imgur.com/XnmMRQ6.png http://i.imgur.com/XnmMRQ6.png Original: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Rendered_Spectrum.png http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Rendered_Spectrum.png
- codingdave 12y ago
  This is interesting, but I don't feel it is significant. Names of colors, at least in English, do not typically imply a complete range of color, but major points on the spectrum. We have hundreds of words for different shades of colors, and pseudo-words like, "Yellowish-green". Painters will know the different between Cerulean blue and Cobalt blue, and Wikipedia has a whole category of shades of blue, with varying English names. If we need to limit ourselves to a 1st grade vocabulary to make a point about our language, it isn't a very strong point.
  - ehurrell 12y ago
    I think it might be significant, or at least hint at a significance worth exploring. Taxi drivers' brains apparently adapt and grow a much better awareness of maps and routes than the regular person, and this might be the same thing happening with painters and their more precise sensitivity to colour. It's worth study anyway.
- guard-of-terra 12y ago
  Why did they use such low-saturation colours? I would never call any those colors how they are marked - except maybe for green.
austerity 12y ago
As the man in the back row, I am not convinced. He reduces the need to save languages to the need to save cultures and leaves it at that, implicitly assuming the latter to be an axiom. To me it's even more obviously false. Plus, he completely fails to consider the downsides of people speaking different languages which are enormous (as pointed out in the Old Testament). Yes, I realize a person can speak more than one language. And I am all for preserving for the sake of understanding. But using humans as storage devices sounds a little selfish coming from a linguist.
- caio1982 12y ago
  What exactly are the downsides of people speaking different languages according to a religious book? Please try not to use terms like efficiency in the answer. And it's not simply like "a person can speak more than one language". It's actually more than half of the freaking world speaking more than one language. If you happen to live in a region (and I'm not saying "country") where people only speak one single language then it's quite possible you're the exception in fact.
  - treerock 12y ago
    I presume he's referring to Babel. "Indeed the people are one and they all have one language, and this is what they begin to do; now nothing that they propose to do will be withheld from them. "Come, let Us go down and there confuse their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech. "So the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they ceased building the city. "Therefore its name is called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth; and from there the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth."
  - austerity 12y ago
    Why shouldn't I use terms like efficiency? Because it's exactly about efficiency. Or ease of collaboration and communication if the e-word offends you for some reason. The languages are a barrier to distribution of knowledge. Yes you can learn a second language (I did that), but it takes lots of time and energy that could be spent elsewhere (and this doesn't really depend on where you live).
pain 12y ago
I can't help but think the social issue of saving is a memory processing issue. (Whether it is language extinction or link rot..) So much falls (fails..) to judgement of point and term of saving, when maybe we need to focus on just saving better and judging why after.
kovrik 12y ago
I think that it's some kind of natural selection among languages/cultures. Languages are just tools. If this tool is effective - people use it. Otherwise it "dies".
- caio1982 12y ago
  It's not just a tool, it's a mechanism to express thought. Different cultures, different people, different ways to put in other people's mind what's inside yours. Also, remember Chomsky, languages usually have an army and navy, so it's not as simple as "natural selection".
  - unhammer 12y ago
    Actually, the quote is from "an audience member at one of Max Weinreich's lectures" (well, logically that could be Chomsky, but most likely not ;)) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_an_army_and_navy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_a...
    - caio1982 12y ago
      Indeed, thanks!
  - pandaman 12y ago
    It's exactly as simple as natural selection. Because a language is not just expressing thought - it's driving it as well. Actually, it's exactly as the whole evolution in the animal world: languages are inheritable (parents teach their language to the children at the very least), mutable and there is a selection process among them, involving armies and navies among many other things.
- atlantic 12y ago
  Tools - effectiveness. It sounds obvious - when you're speaking English, where "think" and "thing" are related, and language has a pragmatic orientation. You're coming from an Anglo-Saxon paradigm, and you're not even aware of it. Your response exemplifies just why it's so valuable to preserve a diversity of languages.
phn 12y ago
This is only tangentially related to the article. I find we (humans) have some kind of emergent "gene pool variety preservation" behavior, even when talking about non-directly-genetic stuff: culture, language, knowledge, ways of thinking, animal species, etc. It looks like we are wired to avoid natural selection over-fitting at a cultural level.
- dalke 12y ago
  Indian schools in the US and the Stolen Generation in Australia, prohibitions on non-approved religions (the Edict of Expulsion, Edict of Fontainebleau, the Alhambra Decree, and many, many more), the forceful spread of Christianity in the Americas, the Indian Removal Act of 1830, the Armenian Genocide, the Final Solution, the anti-bourgeois re-education camps of Cultural Revolution, and even the former President's call to "bring democracy to the world" all strike me as good counter-examples to there being some "wired" behavior of the sort you mean.
  - marcosdumay 12y ago
    Counter-examples do not make the examples inexistent. People are complex, and populations even more so. The fact that our actions can't be explained by a superficial set of coherent principles shouldn't even be surprizing.
    - dalke 12y ago
      I don't understand your point. Would you explain further? The g'parent poster wrote "It looks like we are wired to avoid natural selection." I see no evidence for that. I see evidence that it's not true. The conservation ideal of preserving ecosystem diversity is a rather recent cultural invention. I don't think Alexander III of Macedon ordered the massacre of the men of Tyre, or the slaughter of the people of Massaga, in order to preserve cultural diversity. I don't think the death and destruction under the Mongol Empire was because of their wired desire to avoid natural selection. My comment is to ask why I should believe that the conjecture has any merit. I don't know what you mean by your response.
  - 12y ago
hyperliner 12y ago
The problem I have with this article is that it fails to recognize that language also is an anchor in a negative way. Yes, Hebrew can help form a stronger Jewish community, but a language spoken by 3000 people in the middle of the Amazon can only serve to keep those people hostage forever. What is wrong with teaching those people's kids to speak Hebrew or Spanish or English and let them join a broader, stronger community or nation? The alternative is that those people's children will not be able to prosper because, to highlight the obvious, many of these obscure languages are correlated with impoverished environments. Yes, it helps some academic in some fancy University in the northeast of the United States have "intellectual debates" about the issue while sipping on a starbucks latte, but it certainly does not help those people. The second point is that the nuances that the author has observed don't have to be lost. If there was value in knowing that an object was "on" another object horizontally, or vertically, or slanted (using the example in the article), we could always incorporate those notions into any major language.
Htsthbjig 12y ago
Languages are tools but also barriers of thought. The main reason Americans can't understand China or Russia, or Arab countries and vice versa is language. People in the UK for example, do not listen to Putin 2 hours long Q&A and think for themselves. They listen to intermediaries, like Andrew Wood, because they don't understand Russian. People would be shocked to know what Mr Putin is really saying, compared with what they are being told he is saying. The same happens on the other side, too. The China and Russia media can portray a controlled picture of the rest of the world for most of their population. The printing press changed the world because it made possible for people to read the Bible themselves instead of using the intermediaries interpretation(that sometimes were not in their best interest). Science advanced enormously when the status quo could be criticized(thanks access to books and the knowledge those carried).
- diego_moita 12y ago
  Sorry, you used bad evidence. Truth is: politicians' words are irrelevant, in Russia, the West, the East and the 3rd World. What matters is what they do, not what they say. I live in a 3r World country (Brazil). In a 3rd world perspective the Russian invasion of Ukraine is imperialism, plain and simple, just like what Russians accuse the western powers of doing. Russians have been dreaming of imperialism long before Lenin denounced it. And they never stopped dreaming about it.
  - guard-of-terra 12y ago
    Was the Vietnam invasion of Cambodia imperialism? One that disposed of Khmer Rouge.
    - diego_moita 12y ago
      I don't know and I don't understand how it relates to the subject of this thread.
- guard-of-terra 12y ago
  I assure you that Putin's Q&A doesn't contain any language tricks not available for Americans or UK peope. In fact, Putin's Q&A doesn't contain much of anything. It's not about the language, it's more about shared history or lack thereof.
hedgew 12y ago
Many of us "care" about languages – they have emotional significance – but what is the practical value of near-dead languages to society? How would you even measure the impact of lengthening the lifespan of a dying language? If we taught hundreds of children to speak an ancient language that no one else uses, would that make anyone happier? Should we teach children extinct professions just to keep some cultures alive? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_cutting http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_cutting
kiliancs 12y ago
I speak three languages and appreciate the language diversity as each of them provides a unique window to perceive and express the universe. We need, however, a common (universal) language that allows mankind to create a global culture, a global identity (above and including all national identities) and to enable general understanding and practical communications in all matters. This language should be taught everywhere in addition to the local language. We cannot expect to for the different linguistic communities (or the world in general) to renounce to a language, but at the same time the general well-being calls for a common language.
DavidWanjiru 12y ago
It's not that important to talk about language preservation without talking about the anthropological reasons why some languages die out and others gain ascendancy. The birth and death of languages speaks to issues much bigger than the languages themselves, and when we talk about preserving languages, it's those bigger issues we are somehow trying to speak to, but doing so at the abstraction/generalization "layer" we call language. As to the question of why should we care, for me the question is why would we not care?
DavidWanjiru 12y ago
It's not that important to talk about language preservation without talking about the anthropological reasons why some languages die out and others gain ascendancy. The birth and death of languages speaks to issues much bigger than the languages themselves, and when we talk about preserving languages, it's those bigger issues we are somehow trying to speak to, but doing so at the abstraction/generalization "layer" we call language. As to the question of why should we care, for me the question is why would we not care?
GuiA 12y ago
Like other commenters in this thread, I find the author's arguments to be weak and tautological and/or based on invalid premises. I don't think we should care about keeping as many languages spoken as possible. Collective human culture is fluid, and subject to evolutionary pressures. If the human species converges to fewer languages because it allows us to do whatever we do more effectively, great. Going against that is just not practical and a waste of time. In France, the modern French language has been pushed onto the population a few hundred years ago, at the detriment of local dialects ("patois"). In the recent years, there have been government initiatives to force schools in certain regions to teach their former dialects. What's the point? Those dialects are close to dead anyway, and take up valuable teaching times. Kids are already graduating high school barely able to write and read French properly- they have very little to benefit from by spending time learning such dialects. Sure, they are important to ~archive~ culturally and historically, and there's nothing wrong with funding a few scholars working on that, but that's it. What is important to preserve is the knowledge that allows one to learn a language. In other words, if German were to disappear, that's fine, and we shouldn't make any efforts at attempting to preserve it. What we should do, however, is document German as much as possible (its vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation, idioms, native works, etc.) such that if one needs to learn German 100 years later, it's possible to do so. The basis for that is two-fold: practicality (if an ancient German text is discovered but no one speaks German daily anymore, at least scholars can still decipher it), and preservation of human culture (but in a way that doesn't go against pragmatism, which the approach described by the author in the article is). The same debate applies to other things, e.g. flora/fauna. Of course, when species are becoming close to extinct because of humans destroying environments, we should do something about it. But species go extinct all the time because that's just how nature works, and how it worked much before we got here. In this light, what's the sense of trying to preserve plants or animals artificially?
sravfeyn 12y ago
Language is a reflection of speaker's model of the world, a different unique perspective on the same world we all live in and hence can provide diverse solutions to the same problems we face. Diversity in thought process makes it faster to decipher that beautiful Nature. So it will be sad if these languages die. Of course, this is not the only reason, but I think is one of the important reasons. I speak three languages, I think in two languages. I go on different paths when thinking in different languages when trying to solve a geometry problem.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
chalimacos 12y ago
What some people who don't see the need to preserve languages are missing is that each living language is in itself a Noah Ark that preserves lots of dead languages and world views. English preserves latin, greek, yiddish... Consider the word "consider". It comes from latin Considerare (cum + sidera) 'to consult the stars'. Each language that dies is a tragedy that kills many precedent languages. Moreover, current status is no guarantee for the future, even English could one day be at risk. I am a Catalan speaker, a language that once ruled the Mediterranean and now is struggling.
phlakaton 12y ago
The author claims that real, measurable differences in how people think based on how they speak is too insignificant, because it doesn't constitute a "worldview." I rather think he sells short the importance of seeing actual empirical ways in which language does indeed "speak us". Say there are thousands, maybe millions, of such minute alterations in metaphor or thought pattern – is it really so hard to imagine that the aggregate of these alterations form unique, interesting ways to interpret and respond to the world? Do we not see evidence of this when we read, say, the poetry of different cultures? (It's a rhetorical question – I certainly think we do!) I got a book last year about learning Old English. I haven't gotten very far into it yet, but just the fact that I can go back a thousand years in human history and see where the roots of my language came from is an incredibly cool thing. I am also inspired by the alliterative schemes of old Anglo-Saxon poetry, and have it on the back-burner to see how or how not that could work in modern language (e.g. in Rebsamen's "Beowulf" translation). Similarly, whether or not I actually "speak" programming languages like Lisp, Forth, and APL in my daily work, they are a mine of cool ideas and experiments that I can still draw inspiration from, decades after the machines that they were originally built on crumble back into sand. Which probably emphasizes the "cold storage" value of language, not necessarily the "active speaking" value of it. I think the cold storage value of retaining language is indisputably massive, and projects like the Rosetta Project are really interesting to me for that reason. What's the value of actively speaking it, even when the community of speakers dwindles? Perhaps it is in helping to cement our understanding of the language before it fades away.
MichaelGG 12y ago
This ignores the negative impact of keeping smaller groups limited by preserving their language. In Guatemala, many of the "Indians" have their own languages it dialects, some of which are incompatible with each other. There's little opportunity for use of these languages apart from the town they live in. To be involved in commerce, read about current events, or even be treated well, you need to have great Spanish. My parents have a medical clinic in one if these villages. When the government started making some of the classes be taught in the local language, the parents were upset, knowing that this would hurt their children. They viewed it as another way to keep the "indian" population back. And they're correct. So while there may be good reasons to preserve languages (like preserving art, or historic towns), someone should be funding that directly, rather than externalizing the costs on to these indigenous groups.
LunaSea 12y ago
http://youtu.be/OvlQXPNwrqo http://youtu.be/OvlQXPNwrqo

60 points by gpvos 12y ago

tzs 12y ago

I don't remember which language this is [1], but I read about some tribal language that did not have any words for relative direction. If you were facing North and I wanted to warn you to watch out for a snake approaching from your left, I'd have to tell you to look out for the snake coming from the West. [1] googling turned up this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relative_direction#Cultures_not_using_relative_directions http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relative_direction#Cultures_not...

desas 12y ago
The Amazonian Piraha tribe have "to the river", "to the jungle", "up the river" and "down the river" rather than directions.
- rimantas 12y ago
  How do they say "to the jungle on the left" while being in the river?
- davidw 12y ago
  For that matter, most people here in Italy look at you a bit funny if you talk about cardinal directions, and are more comfortable with "towards Venezia" or "in the direction of Verona" or that kind of thing. The latter is probably handier for navigating towns that are, outside of a very small Roman core (in some cases) not exactly linear in their layout.
  - caio1982 12y ago
    It's the same in Brazil, and it's a big place to use relative directions but we prefer it that way too :-)
- herge 12y ago
  There's a huge tribe in the Americas who use the terms "Lower", "Midtown", "Upper West Side" and "Upper East Side" for geographical locations. I hear they're at continual war with the "Bridge and Tunnel" people.

anonymfus 12y ago

"A rendering of the visible spectrum on a grey background" image from Wikipedia with added English and Russian colour range names: http://i.imgur.com/XnmMRQ6.png http://i.imgur.com/XnmMRQ6.png Original: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Rendered_Spectrum.png http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Rendered_Spectrum.png

codingdave 12y ago
This is interesting, but I don't feel it is significant. Names of colors, at least in English, do not typically imply a complete range of color, but major points on the spectrum. We have hundreds of words for different shades of colors, and pseudo-words like, "Yellowish-green". Painters will know the different between Cerulean blue and Cobalt blue, and Wikipedia has a whole category of shades of blue, with varying English names. If we need to limit ourselves to a 1st grade vocabulary to make a point about our language, it isn't a very strong point.
- ehurrell 12y ago
  I think it might be significant, or at least hint at a significance worth exploring. Taxi drivers' brains apparently adapt and grow a much better awareness of maps and routes than the regular person, and this might be the same thing happening with painters and their more precise sensitivity to colour. It's worth study anyway.
guard-of-terra 12y ago
Why did they use such low-saturation colours? I would never call any those colors how they are marked - except maybe for green.

austerity 12y ago

As the man in the back row, I am not convinced. He reduces the need to save languages to the need to save cultures and leaves it at that, implicitly assuming the latter to be an axiom. To me it's even more obviously false. Plus, he completely fails to consider the downsides of people speaking different languages which are enormous (as pointed out in the Old Testament). Yes, I realize a person can speak more than one language. And I am all for preserving for the sake of understanding. But using humans as storage devices sounds a little selfish coming from a linguist.

caio1982 12y ago
What exactly are the downsides of people speaking different languages according to a religious book? Please try not to use terms like efficiency in the answer. And it's not simply like "a person can speak more than one language". It's actually more than half of the freaking world speaking more than one language. If you happen to live in a region (and I'm not saying "country") where people only speak one single language then it's quite possible you're the exception in fact.
- treerock 12y ago
  I presume he's referring to Babel. "Indeed the people are one and they all have one language, and this is what they begin to do; now nothing that they propose to do will be withheld from them. "Come, let Us go down and there confuse their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech. "So the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they ceased building the city. "Therefore its name is called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth; and from there the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth."
- austerity 12y ago
  Why shouldn't I use terms like efficiency? Because it's exactly about efficiency. Or ease of collaboration and communication if the e-word offends you for some reason. The languages are a barrier to distribution of knowledge. Yes you can learn a second language (I did that), but it takes lots of time and energy that could be spent elsewhere (and this doesn't really depend on where you live).

pain 12y ago

I can't help but think the social issue of saving is a memory processing issue. (Whether it is language extinction or link rot..) So much falls (fails..) to judgement of point and term of saving, when maybe we need to focus on just saving better and judging why after.

kovrik 12y ago

I think that it's some kind of natural selection among languages/cultures. Languages are just tools. If this tool is effective - people use it. Otherwise it "dies".

caio1982 12y ago
It's not just a tool, it's a mechanism to express thought. Different cultures, different people, different ways to put in other people's mind what's inside yours. Also, remember Chomsky, languages usually have an army and navy, so it's not as simple as "natural selection".
- unhammer 12y ago
  Actually, the quote is from "an audience member at one of Max Weinreich's lectures" (well, logically that could be Chomsky, but most likely not ;)) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_an_army_and_navy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_a...
  - caio1982 12y ago
    Indeed, thanks!
- pandaman 12y ago
  It's exactly as simple as natural selection. Because a language is not just expressing thought - it's driving it as well. Actually, it's exactly as the whole evolution in the animal world: languages are inheritable (parents teach their language to the children at the very least), mutable and there is a selection process among them, involving armies and navies among many other things.
atlantic 12y ago
Tools - effectiveness. It sounds obvious - when you're speaking English, where "think" and "thing" are related, and language has a pragmatic orientation. You're coming from an Anglo-Saxon paradigm, and you're not even aware of it. Your response exemplifies just why it's so valuable to preserve a diversity of languages.

phn 12y ago

This is only tangentially related to the article. I find we (humans) have some kind of emergent "gene pool variety preservation" behavior, even when talking about non-directly-genetic stuff: culture, language, knowledge, ways of thinking, animal species, etc. It looks like we are wired to avoid natural selection over-fitting at a cultural level.

dalke 12y ago
Indian schools in the US and the Stolen Generation in Australia, prohibitions on non-approved religions (the Edict of Expulsion, Edict of Fontainebleau, the Alhambra Decree, and many, many more), the forceful spread of Christianity in the Americas, the Indian Removal Act of 1830, the Armenian Genocide, the Final Solution, the anti-bourgeois re-education camps of Cultural Revolution, and even the former President's call to "bring democracy to the world" all strike me as good counter-examples to there being some "wired" behavior of the sort you mean.
- marcosdumay 12y ago
  Counter-examples do not make the examples inexistent. People are complex, and populations even more so. The fact that our actions can't be explained by a superficial set of coherent principles shouldn't even be surprizing.
  - dalke 12y ago
    I don't understand your point. Would you explain further? The g'parent poster wrote "It looks like we are wired to avoid natural selection." I see no evidence for that. I see evidence that it's not true. The conservation ideal of preserving ecosystem diversity is a rather recent cultural invention. I don't think Alexander III of Macedon ordered the massacre of the men of Tyre, or the slaughter of the people of Massaga, in order to preserve cultural diversity. I don't think the death and destruction under the Mongol Empire was because of their wired desire to avoid natural selection. My comment is to ask why I should believe that the conjecture has any merit. I don't know what you mean by your response.
- 12y ago

hyperliner 12y ago

The problem I have with this article is that it fails to recognize that language also is an anchor in a negative way. Yes, Hebrew can help form a stronger Jewish community, but a language spoken by 3000 people in the middle of the Amazon can only serve to keep those people hostage forever. What is wrong with teaching those people's kids to speak Hebrew or Spanish or English and let them join a broader, stronger community or nation? The alternative is that those people's children will not be able to prosper because, to highlight the obvious, many of these obscure languages are correlated with impoverished environments. Yes, it helps some academic in some fancy University in the northeast of the United States have "intellectual debates" about the issue while sipping on a starbucks latte, but it certainly does not help those people. The second point is that the nuances that the author has observed don't have to be lost. If there was value in knowing that an object was "on" another object horizontally, or vertically, or slanted (using the example in the article), we could always incorporate those notions into any major language.

Htsthbjig 12y ago

Languages are tools but also barriers of thought. The main reason Americans can't understand China or Russia, or Arab countries and vice versa is language. People in the UK for example, do not listen to Putin 2 hours long Q&A and think for themselves. They listen to intermediaries, like Andrew Wood, because they don't understand Russian. People would be shocked to know what Mr Putin is really saying, compared with what they are being told he is saying. The same happens on the other side, too. The China and Russia media can portray a controlled picture of the rest of the world for most of their population. The printing press changed the world because it made possible for people to read the Bible themselves instead of using the intermediaries interpretation(that sometimes were not in their best interest). Science advanced enormously when the status quo could be criticized(thanks access to books and the knowledge those carried).

diego_moita 12y ago
Sorry, you used bad evidence. Truth is: politicians' words are irrelevant, in Russia, the West, the East and the 3rd World. What matters is what they do, not what they say. I live in a 3r World country (Brazil). In a 3rd world perspective the Russian invasion of Ukraine is imperialism, plain and simple, just like what Russians accuse the western powers of doing. Russians have been dreaming of imperialism long before Lenin denounced it. And they never stopped dreaming about it.
- guard-of-terra 12y ago
  Was the Vietnam invasion of Cambodia imperialism? One that disposed of Khmer Rouge.
  - diego_moita 12y ago
    I don't know and I don't understand how it relates to the subject of this thread.
guard-of-terra 12y ago
I assure you that Putin's Q&A doesn't contain any language tricks not available for Americans or UK peope. In fact, Putin's Q&A doesn't contain much of anything. It's not about the language, it's more about shared history or lack thereof.

hedgew 12y ago

Many of us "care" about languages – they have emotional significance – but what is the practical value of near-dead languages to society? How would you even measure the impact of lengthening the lifespan of a dying language? If we taught hundreds of children to speak an ancient language that no one else uses, would that make anyone happier? Should we teach children extinct professions just to keep some cultures alive? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_cutting http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_cutting

kiliancs 12y ago

I speak three languages and appreciate the language diversity as each of them provides a unique window to perceive and express the universe. We need, however, a common (universal) language that allows mankind to create a global culture, a global identity (above and including all national identities) and to enable general understanding and practical communications in all matters. This language should be taught everywhere in addition to the local language. We cannot expect to for the different linguistic communities (or the world in general) to renounce to a language, but at the same time the general well-being calls for a common language.

DavidWanjiru 12y ago

It's not that important to talk about language preservation without talking about the anthropological reasons why some languages die out and others gain ascendancy. The birth and death of languages speaks to issues much bigger than the languages themselves, and when we talk about preserving languages, it's those bigger issues we are somehow trying to speak to, but doing so at the abstraction/generalization "layer" we call language. As to the question of why should we care, for me the question is why would we not care?

DavidWanjiru 12y ago

GuiA 12y ago

Like other commenters in this thread, I find the author's arguments to be weak and tautological and/or based on invalid premises. I don't think we should care about keeping as many languages spoken as possible. Collective human culture is fluid, and subject to evolutionary pressures. If the human species converges to fewer languages because it allows us to do whatever we do more effectively, great. Going against that is just not practical and a waste of time. In France, the modern French language has been pushed onto the population a few hundred years ago, at the detriment of local dialects ("patois"). In the recent years, there have been government initiatives to force schools in certain regions to teach their former dialects. What's the point? Those dialects are close to dead anyway, and take up valuable teaching times. Kids are already graduating high school barely able to write and read French properly- they have very little to benefit from by spending time learning such dialects. Sure, they are important to ~archive~ culturally and historically, and there's nothing wrong with funding a few scholars working on that, but that's it. What is important to preserve is the knowledge that allows one to learn a language. In other words, if German were to disappear, that's fine, and we shouldn't make any efforts at attempting to preserve it. What we should do, however, is document German as much as possible (its vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation, idioms, native works, etc.) such that if one needs to learn German 100 years later, it's possible to do so. The basis for that is two-fold: practicality (if an ancient German text is discovered but no one speaks German daily anymore, at least scholars can still decipher it), and preservation of human culture (but in a way that doesn't go against pragmatism, which the approach described by the author in the article is). The same debate applies to other things, e.g. flora/fauna. Of course, when species are becoming close to extinct because of humans destroying environments, we should do something about it. But species go extinct all the time because that's just how nature works, and how it worked much before we got here. In this light, what's the sense of trying to preserve plants or animals artificially?

sravfeyn 12y ago

Language is a reflection of speaker's model of the world, a different unique perspective on the same world we all live in and hence can provide diverse solutions to the same problems we face. Diversity in thought process makes it faster to decipher that beautiful Nature. So it will be sad if these languages die. Of course, this is not the only reason, but I think is one of the important reasons. I speak three languages, I think in two languages. I go on different paths when thinking in different languages when trying to solve a geometry problem.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

chalimacos 12y ago

What some people who don't see the need to preserve languages are missing is that each living language is in itself a Noah Ark that preserves lots of dead languages and world views. English preserves latin, greek, yiddish... Consider the word "consider". It comes from latin Considerare (cum + sidera) 'to consult the stars'. Each language that dies is a tragedy that kills many precedent languages. Moreover, current status is no guarantee for the future, even English could one day be at risk. I am a Catalan speaker, a language that once ruled the Mediterranean and now is struggling.

phlakaton 12y ago

The author claims that real, measurable differences in how people think based on how they speak is too insignificant, because it doesn't constitute a "worldview." I rather think he sells short the importance of seeing actual empirical ways in which language does indeed "speak us". Say there are thousands, maybe millions, of such minute alterations in metaphor or thought pattern – is it really so hard to imagine that the aggregate of these alterations form unique, interesting ways to interpret and respond to the world? Do we not see evidence of this when we read, say, the poetry of different cultures? (It's a rhetorical question – I certainly think we do!) I got a book last year about learning Old English. I haven't gotten very far into it yet, but just the fact that I can go back a thousand years in human history and see where the roots of my language came from is an incredibly cool thing. I am also inspired by the alliterative schemes of old Anglo-Saxon poetry, and have it on the back-burner to see how or how not that could work in modern language (e.g. in Rebsamen's "Beowulf" translation). Similarly, whether or not I actually "speak" programming languages like Lisp, Forth, and APL in my daily work, they are a mine of cool ideas and experiments that I can still draw inspiration from, decades after the machines that they were originally built on crumble back into sand. Which probably emphasizes the "cold storage" value of language, not necessarily the "active speaking" value of it. I think the cold storage value of retaining language is indisputably massive, and projects like the Rosetta Project are really interesting to me for that reason. What's the value of actively speaking it, even when the community of speakers dwindles? Perhaps it is in helping to cement our understanding of the language before it fades away.

MichaelGG 12y ago

This ignores the negative impact of keeping smaller groups limited by preserving their language. In Guatemala, many of the "Indians" have their own languages it dialects, some of which are incompatible with each other. There's little opportunity for use of these languages apart from the town they live in. To be involved in commerce, read about current events, or even be treated well, you need to have great Spanish. My parents have a medical clinic in one if these villages. When the government started making some of the classes be taught in the local language, the parents were upset, knowing that this would hurt their children. They viewed it as another way to keep the "indian" population back. And they're correct. So while there may be good reasons to preserve languages (like preserving art, or historic towns), someone should be funding that directly, rather than externalizing the costs on to these indigenous groups.

LunaSea 12y ago

http://youtu.be/OvlQXPNwrqo http://youtu.be/OvlQXPNwrqo