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A Loss for Words: Can a Dying Language Be Saved?

43 points by benbreen 12y ago

benbreen 12y ago
An interesting blog post about the camouflage-style initiation paint and masks of the tribe this article is about: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selknam_people http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selknam_people
markbnj 12y ago
>> It is a singular fate to be the last of one’s kind Well, obviously.
waqf 12y ago
Should a dying language be "saved"? Preserving cultural heritage is all very well, but expending a child's language-acquisitive resources on a language which won't connect them to the rest of contemporary humanity seems far too high a price.
- LesZedCB 12y ago
  My girlfriend is a linguist with a particular passion for dying languages and cultures. I often find myself asking the same question every time she talks about it. I think the more important factor than usefulness in society is the fact that, like the article said, being the last of anything is lonely. For me, at least, that is a particularly hard position to empathize with because my culture is incredibly widespread and probably isn't going anyway. So, while I can't or don't understand the feeling, I think it's important to allow these people at least the little justice of trying to respect and preserve their cultural heritage.
  - jacquesm 12y ago
    > because my culture is incredibly widespread and probably isn't going anyway. Give it some time.
    - LesZedCB 12y ago
      sure, I didn't mean to make it seem impossible, just that for now, it's not facing the same danger as other much smaller ones.
- intopieces 12y ago
  This comment is predicated on an assumption that I'm not sure has a foundation in science: that a child's "language-acquisitive resources" are finite in some way, or that a child learning a minority language won't "have room" for other subjects because of it. Because many, many children in the world speak one language at home and another at school, I'm not sure there is any foundation for this assumption.
  - benbreen 12y ago
    Agreed (in fact, given my anecdotal experiences with polyglots from places like Switzerland or Scandinavia, I wouldn't be at all surprised by the finding that learning one language at a young age actually increases facility in other languages). And taking another tack, I think it's important to keep in mind that languages are also vehicles for irreplaceable cultural information that might not be translatable. When we talk about the loss of a language, we're also talking about the loss of conceptual models, epistemologies, turns of phrase, oral traditions, jokes, etc that may be the result of tens of thousands of years of cultural continuity.
  - freehunter 12y ago
    What does have a foundation in science (or reality) is that the teaching of another language means a child won't have room in their daily schedule for other things. There's only so much time in the day. If a child is learning math and science and their main language and other skills for seven hours, sleeps for eight hours, and eats for two hours, that only leaves seven hours in the day to fit in everything else, including play time and exercise. That's the limit on learning languages. We're only good at our first language because we spend our entire lives practicing it. It takes hours and hours and hours of practice and studying to learn another, even as a child. Double that if it's not a commonly spoken language. In Switzerland, it might be possible for everyone to speak English, German, French, Italian, and Romansh if you're around people who speak it for your entire life. But if a child is actually being taught these languages, let's say an hour each day... well what time is there left for anything else? Sure it might not push other knowledge out of their brain, but if it pushes other knowledge out of their reach due to not having time to learn other subjects, that's even worse. How much time will they put in learning a dying language, and what other, more useful knowledge could they have gained otherwise? It's the opportunity cost.
- bsho 12y ago
  “The older people are the only ones who can tell you what their youth stands to lose,” he said. “The young are the only ones who can articulate the loss of an identity rooted in a mother tongue that has become foreign to them.” I work in Navajo language education. Most insecurity in Navajo adults derives from this single disconnect. It seems later in life, in those that have connected "to the rest of contemporary humanity" at the expense of learning their language, give up because of the complexity of the language, especially the verb.
  - Potando 12y ago
    This just means the last speakers are hoping to pass their insecurity problem on to another group of new "last speakers" to suffer it for them. Nothing against an individual having that desire, but for a 3rd party to help them, it's really doing any overall good. It's just moving the problem to somebody else.
- bkurtz13 12y ago
  There is a particularly human egotism with respect to "saving" things that have outlived their usefulness and purpose, or preserving things that should be changing. If language can be viewed through its evolutionary purpose, these dying languages are simply experiments that did not pan out, and should be allowed to become extinct.
  - yrlson 12y ago
    That's not really reasoning, just self-fulfilling prophecy. Hebrew was revived, and I can't see a solid reason why the same could not be done on a smaller scale.
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
    - gizmo686 12y ago
      The question isn't can a language be revived, it is should a language be revived. I am of the opinion that it was a mistake to revive Hebrew, as doing so has needlessly introduced language barriers.
      - _ak 12y ago
        It also turned out to be a consensus language for Jews from around the world that moved to Mandatory Palestine and later Israel.
      - panglott 12y ago
        As I understand it, there was already a language barrier in Yiddish vs. Judeo-Arabic.
  - JulianMorrison 12y ago
    Many of these cultures (including their language) were forcefully banned, obliterated by law, lynching, displacement. discriminatory treatment, and the stealing of children. I do not exaggerate. So don't pretend they are dying of natural causes when the knife is still sticking out of their back.
- japhyr 12y ago
  Yes. Because each language holds concepts that are unique. A language is more than a collection of symbols that can be replaced arbitrarily with another language. Languages, particularly indigenous languages, contain ideas and ways of understanding that are not directly translatable. When we lose the language, we lose that people's take on the world. It is a sad thing, intellectually and spiritually, to lose the unique perspective of a people who have survived for millennia. Globalism is great; homogeneity is not so great.
  - DanAndersen 12y ago
    Would you be able to provide some examples of these untranslatable concepts or ways of thinking? I suspect that the fact that you can provide them, in English, means that English is as capable as any other language to at absorbing that idea and making it expressible. If different languages contain unique ways of thinking that can't be expressed in other languages, then what benefit is there to the preservation of that language? If the idea cannot be communicated outside its language, then what impact can it have on the world outside it? If it can be communicated, then why not simply use loanwords (as languages like English are very prone to doing) to absorb that particular concept into the set of concepts that can be expressed in the language?
    - japhyr 12y ago
      I'll try to share some examples in a bit. Short reason this approach is "lossy": it's a huge game of telephone. Translation retains most of the translated concept, but not all of the concept's subtleties. The farther removed we get from the original, the less faithful the translation. We see this most clearly where it takes a paragraph of English to start to communicate the meaning contained in one word from some languages. Simple example: translate namaste into one English word. I come at this from a context of living in Alaska, and seeing firsthand the value of language retention, and the tragedy of language loss. I've also had great benefit from digging into other cultures' world views, and each of those experiences was heavily dependent on paying attention to the nuances of older languages. These concepts are hard to grasp if this whole topic is approached from a strictly academic context.
- monocasa 12y ago
  When you're a child, language acquisition isn't a zero sum game.
  - maaku 12y ago
    Nonsense, of course it is. I'm raising bilingual children and every one of them has developmental delays. Of course the plural of anecdote is not data, but as a result I've been quite motivated to keep up with the research. My family is not exceptional among bilingual families. Developmental delays are common, as are poor performance in elementary school as multi-lingual children struggle to integrate disjoint systems of knowledge. Of course I wouldn't be doing it if I didn't think it was absolutely worth it, but the idea the children are sponges that pick up language without trouble at all is a myth that needs to die. Children do learn languages faster and better than adults, but IMHO that is mostly due to (a) time, (b) motivation, and (c) adult learners rationalizing their failures rather than actually trying to learn. EDIT: But to be clear, although it is not my place to tell anybody what to do, I do wish speakers of dying languages would pass on their words and culture to their children. It's hard, but worthwhile IMHO.
    - japhyr 12y ago
      Are the developmental delays long term, or just focused in primary/ else tardy grades? I've been envious of my peers who grew up bilingual; none appeared delayed when I knew them in late middle school and beyond. In fact, they seemed more academically capable than my monolingual peers.
      - maaku 12y ago
        Early. They seem to pull it together around age 10 plus or minus a few years. Statistically speaking -- every child is different. Mine are still young enough to have persistent problems.
    - S4M 12y ago
      An anecdote to counter yours: I am French, my wife is Japanese and we live in Barcelona in Spain where the school is in catalan. Our four years old understands Japanese and Catalan quite well (similar to a monolingual kid) and can speak French, English and Spanish a bit (I speak to him in French, adn with my wife we speak English) but not as well as a monolingual kid. Ofmcourse we have to see how it will turn out for him, but to me in terms of languages he's pretty much like a sponge.
- DanAndersen 12y ago
  That's a good point. I think there's a tendency to conflate the idea of "lost knowledge" with "inactive practice" when it comes to dying languages. Record, preserve, archive information about a language, as much as possible, but to say that all languages must remain "alive" means that we're saying that some portion of humanity must expend the time and effort to remain multilingual in languages that they may not receive practical benefits in. Maintenance costs of "in-brain preservation" are relatively high, and in doing so that's allocating time that may or may not be spent in pursuits that are beneficial to the actual people whom some want to be vessels for a dying language.
  - panglott 12y ago
    Languages don't "die", they are smothered by a society hostile to the community that speaks them. That may be outright genocide (as in the article), or it may be something as simple as forcing children to go to attend school in a language foreign to them, that offers zero recognition of their mother tongue. The kids may have to learn the content in a foreign language, and they are denied even so much as a hour-a-week class on the literature of their native language. A system that is intent on eradicating the cultural heritage of a people is not trying simply to do only what is beneficial for the kids. =/
- indubitably 12y ago
  There is no general answer to this question.
- canjobear 12y ago
  There's a substantial scientific literature arguing that learning multiple languages as a child actually confers many cognitive benefits. I don't know how credible it is. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_advantages_of_bilingualism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_advantages_of_biling...
- mmphosis 12y ago
  UGTR :)
- panglott 12y ago
  Diglossia and bilingualism is very, very common in the world and probably the norm for humans: large monolingual countries are exceptional. Even in monolingual situations, people invent different registers for different formal situations. There is no reason that different linguistic codes cannot coexist for different functions. This argument can easily be extended to the other national languages: Preserving a national language like Italian or French is all very well, but English is the language of international communication, science, and technology, and expending a child's language-acquisitive resources on a language which won't connect them to the rest of contemporary humanity seems like too high of a price. The reason some languages are "dying" is because colonial powers attempted to exterminate those people and their community, through a variety of uses of power. In the article, the colonists exterminated more than 90% of the population and sent the survivors to a concentration camp. Just horrible. There's no reason to pretend that this community's precarious cultural position occurred through ethically neutral events.
christophmccann 12y ago
In Scotland, there is a big movement to preserve the teaching of Gaelic. Whilst I think it is important to preserve culture and to preserve history, I don't think, in terms of youth education, that should outweigh the utility of skills and languages necessary for the modern world. It seems slightly obtuse to me that whilst do not teach computer science, programming, engineering or science particularly well in schools, we should worry about the preservation of teaching of old languages. That being said, I think it is extremely important to teach kids (and the public in general) about history as a way of avoiding past mistakes so I don't think we should eliminate it - I just think there are more important things we need to fix first.
- tragomaskhalos 12y ago
  That said, it's interesting that language has only a very limited input into the Scots' sense of nationhood, as contrasted with the Welsh for whom it is far more central.
- maccard 12y ago
  The scots preservation of Gaelic is much less than in Ireland. When I was in school, I took Irish classes from when I was 5 until I left, as do the vast majority of children. Most Irish people have at least a handful of words and phrases they know. All of the road signs and government communications are translated into Irish.
  - redacted 12y ago
    (Disclaimer: I am Irish, and I do not agree with the mandatory nature of Irish lessons.) The fact that 12-13 years of taking Irish classes daily leads to most Irish people having a few words and phrases is a damning indictment of our education system. It is also a perfect example of how saving a language that has fallen out of use is incredibly difficult. All that effort teaching a language to a country and, because it is almost never used outside of the Gaeltacht (Irish-speaking areas, mostly in the west of the country) it has been my experience that most people very rapidly lose their ability in Irish after leaving school. I have long held the position that forcing children to learn a dead (or at the very least, on advanced life support) language is doing more harm than good. It instilled antipathy towards Irish more than love for Irish in my peers. Making it an optional subject would mean only people who cared would study it, and they would perhaps be more likely to try and use it.
codewithcheese 12y ago
Some descriptive YouTube videos about the Selk'nam people with English subtitles https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psJ5tg6Pqcc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psJ5tg6Pqcc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAgcA0JEQkk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAgcA0JEQkk
- kazagistar 12y ago
  Holy shit, they actually had a real Patriarchy: All the guys were in a secret conspiracy to keep the women down?
lesu 12y ago
I'm wondering if the people who are railing against saving languages are equally against organizations such as the Internet Archive? My thinking is that, as tech-savvy computer whizzes, many folk on Hacker News are happier to preserve something that makes sense to _them_ (media or website snapshots) than things that don't (languages and foreign cultural history). It's difficult to say what is useful without the benefit of hindsight, by which time it is a moot point -- the resource is long gone and will never be again. Anyways, just my two cents as an incredibly biased amateur archivist.
- DanAndersen 12y ago
  I see that as an apples to oranges comparison. When we say "saving languages," do we mean archiving them, backing them up, creating stores of references and recordings that can be easily recalled yet inexpensively preserved? If so, then I am definitely for that. If "saving languages" means accepting nothing less than the descendants of the speakers of a dying language needing to expend mental energy and time to remain active speakers of that language, placing them at a disadvantage when compared with those who have free time for other pursuits and contributing to segregating that group from others, I don't know if that's as beneficial. In general, all knowledge should be preserved when possible. The question is whether it's better for it to be stored on hard drives or in brains.
  - lesu 12y ago
    Good question :) not sure I have a good answer for that one, although I'd like to point out that many people elect to expend mental energy on otherwise unproductive minutia (aka. hobbies) so perhaps the task of carrying on a spoken tradition is less onerous to some than one might expect. Language contributing to group segregation is a very strong claim, however, and if you have any case studies (or, like, newspaper articles, this isn't academia) I'd be interested in seeing them.
  - robryan 12y ago
    Yes, I think most people would agree that creating a record of as many languages as possible before they die out is a good idea.
sumedh 12y ago
I just feel that the whole humanity should speak one common language. Now whether you like it or not that language is going to be English. I just dont understand why do we need multiple languages anymore. If anyone says we need them to preserve the culture, I dont understand that either. My native language is not English, just in case anyone feels I want to force English down your throat.
- Animats 12y ago
  It may end up being Mandarin. Although Beijing, despite half a century of trying, hasn't been able to convert the Guangdong and Hong Kong areas. Only about 53% of China's own population has good fluency in Standard Chinese.
  - morgante 12y ago
    I doubt it. There might be more people with Mandarin as a native language, but English has far more adoption amongst non-native speakers. Most Europeans, for example, know some English.
- Dewie 12y ago
  > My native language is not English, just in case anyone feels I want to force English down your throat. But you speak fluent English, so it's basically the same thing if you don't care about preserving your own language for cultural reasons. You're just as much of a privileged, spoilt child that is demanding that the rest of the world should get in line with something you already know, as native English speakers with the same demand are.
- sidekick 12y ago
  I agree a common language is beneficial, but choosing English as the one is not without drawbacks. As someone who speaks both English and a tad of Chinese, I am aware of instances where there are words in either language that can't be easily said in the other. You'd think with a good enough command of English and logic you could necessarily translate any word of any other language in the universe. However, I suspect it is not that simple. Some words invoke particular neuronal activity that encodes a particular thought which may be hard to replicate through the usage of a clumsy translation. Thus a difference in language may also be a reflection of a difference in culture and way of thinking. Since people around the world care about different things, they will use different words more frequently, attach different connotations to them, and even invent new words whose usage you'd find to be isolated to particular geographical regions. So, the selection of a common language is almost like the selection of a particular way of thinking. The notion of cultural uniformity/superiority can rub people the wrong way. So if there is to be a common language, it would be more considerate if it incorporated features from different languages, rather than be entirely from one language (English), and it should probably be engineered to be somewhat culturally agnostic.
the_gipsy 12y ago
Maybe an artificially revived language is worse than a dead language.
crusso 12y ago
It would be nice if the human mind were flexible enough to use different spoken languages the way that we use different computer languages. Would we discover that like computer languages, certain languages are just better at expressing some concepts? Would we talk about love in French and about science in English or German? Or would our easy use of language just encourage us to merge the best of all languages into some optimized hodge-podge general-use language?
MrPatan 12y ago
To all the tourists that want to stop people from talking to each other in order to have the vague aesthetic feeling that "the world is diverse" or whatever floats your tourist boat: Why don't you go and do that with your own child? Go on, raise them in a language that will limit their life choices and potential. See how that works for them. Then have them tell us how that went. Oh, sorry, that won't happen so easily, now, would it? "Linguistic diversity" Is just another way to say "Communication barriers". Funny how is is always something that should happen to other people.
- Dylan16807 12y ago
  I would agree with you if it wasn't easy to learn five languages as a child.
- EdwardDiego 12y ago
  > raise them in a language that will limit their life choices and potential. False dilemma. You can raise a bilingual child, in no way limiting their life choices and potential. In fact, there is evidence that suggests that bilingualism provides cognitive benefits later in life.
  - waqf 12y ago
    You're a false dilemma. Raising a child bilingual in English and Mandarin, good. Raising a child bilingual in Gaelic and Navajo, not so good.
    - EdwardDiego 12y ago
      Another false dilemma. Raise a child bilingual in English and Navajo, nothing bad. Gee, why did you omit _that_ combination?
      - deleted 12y ago
        [deleted]
- Grue3 12y ago
MichaelGG 12y ago
>"Mohawk isn’t just a form of speech,” he said. “It’s a holistic relationship to the cosmos.” What's that supposed to mean? Apart from as a tautology because we're part of the cosmos.
- panglott 12y ago
  It's just an effort to raise the prestige of Mohawk. Like all the disinformation about how English is just essential to everyone's economic future. The prestige of English is wide but shallow: everyone's just in it for the money, and if something nicer shows up, the world will abandon English in a heartbeat. If a language has spiritual value (like Latin, Sanskrit, or Classical Arabic), that's tapping into a narrower but deeper source of prestige.
vorg 12y ago
> The mother tongue of more than three billion people is one of twenty, which are, in order of their current predominance: Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, English, Hindi, Arabic, Portuguese, Bengali, Russian, Japanese, Javanese, German, Wu Chinese, Korean, French, Telugu, Marathi, Turkish, Tamil, Vietnamese, and Urdu. Arabic listed as one language? Can Gulf Arabic and Moroccan Arabic speakers understand each other? I've heard people speak to each other where one speaks Spanish and the other Brazilian Portuguese. The main difference between Hindi and Urdu is the different script. Don't those languages have more justification for being counted as one than those of Arabic? It's even a bit iffy to count English as one language -- put 3 people speaking Indian English, Ebonics, and Geordie in a room together and see how well they communicate!
- panglott 12y ago
  Quantifying the difference between a language and a dialect is always going to be a problem. English dialects differ, but most English speakers also know well a standard variety of American or Commonwealth stock (which are mutually intelligible). Distangling the Chinese languages is another huge problem, since the government of China sees them as all dialects of a single language, but any real comparison of phonology, syntax, or lexicon shows them to be quite distinct indeed. My understanding is the syntax of Hindi and Urdu are very similar, but the lexicon is quite distinct. Since each has either a relatively more a Persianized or Sanskritized vocabulary.
Potando 12y ago
These articles appear from time to time but they never give any sensible reason. Just take it as given that languages must be saved. This one has a long diversion into indigenous medicine - not something that needs a language, but rather needs knowledge, using any language. Here's the closest thing I found to a reason though I only read half way: "But the loss of languages passed down for millennia, along with their unique arts and cosmologies, may have consequences that won’t be understood until it is too late to reverse them."
cjsthompson 12y ago
Can those who believe it's ok for languages (cultural diversity) to die out be saved ?

43 points by benbreen 12y ago

An interesting blog post about the camouflage-style initiation paint and masks of the tribe this article is about: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selknam_people http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selknam_people

markbnj 12y ago

>> It is a singular fate to be the last of one’s kind Well, obviously.

waqf 12y ago

Should a dying language be "saved"? Preserving cultural heritage is all very well, but expending a child's language-acquisitive resources on a language which won't connect them to the rest of contemporary humanity seems far too high a price.

LesZedCB 12y ago
My girlfriend is a linguist with a particular passion for dying languages and cultures. I often find myself asking the same question every time she talks about it. I think the more important factor than usefulness in society is the fact that, like the article said, being the last of anything is lonely. For me, at least, that is a particularly hard position to empathize with because my culture is incredibly widespread and probably isn't going anyway. So, while I can't or don't understand the feeling, I think it's important to allow these people at least the little justice of trying to respect and preserve their cultural heritage.
- jacquesm 12y ago
  > because my culture is incredibly widespread and probably isn't going anyway. Give it some time.
  - LesZedCB 12y ago
    sure, I didn't mean to make it seem impossible, just that for now, it's not facing the same danger as other much smaller ones.
intopieces 12y ago
This comment is predicated on an assumption that I'm not sure has a foundation in science: that a child's "language-acquisitive resources" are finite in some way, or that a child learning a minority language won't "have room" for other subjects because of it. Because many, many children in the world speak one language at home and another at school, I'm not sure there is any foundation for this assumption.
- benbreen 12y ago
  Agreed (in fact, given my anecdotal experiences with polyglots from places like Switzerland or Scandinavia, I wouldn't be at all surprised by the finding that learning one language at a young age actually increases facility in other languages). And taking another tack, I think it's important to keep in mind that languages are also vehicles for irreplaceable cultural information that might not be translatable. When we talk about the loss of a language, we're also talking about the loss of conceptual models, epistemologies, turns of phrase, oral traditions, jokes, etc that may be the result of tens of thousands of years of cultural continuity.
- freehunter 12y ago
  What does have a foundation in science (or reality) is that the teaching of another language means a child won't have room in their daily schedule for other things. There's only so much time in the day. If a child is learning math and science and their main language and other skills for seven hours, sleeps for eight hours, and eats for two hours, that only leaves seven hours in the day to fit in everything else, including play time and exercise. That's the limit on learning languages. We're only good at our first language because we spend our entire lives practicing it. It takes hours and hours and hours of practice and studying to learn another, even as a child. Double that if it's not a commonly spoken language. In Switzerland, it might be possible for everyone to speak English, German, French, Italian, and Romansh if you're around people who speak it for your entire life. But if a child is actually being taught these languages, let's say an hour each day... well what time is there left for anything else? Sure it might not push other knowledge out of their brain, but if it pushes other knowledge out of their reach due to not having time to learn other subjects, that's even worse. How much time will they put in learning a dying language, and what other, more useful knowledge could they have gained otherwise? It's the opportunity cost.
bsho 12y ago
“The older people are the only ones who can tell you what their youth stands to lose,” he said. “The young are the only ones who can articulate the loss of an identity rooted in a mother tongue that has become foreign to them.” I work in Navajo language education. Most insecurity in Navajo adults derives from this single disconnect. It seems later in life, in those that have connected "to the rest of contemporary humanity" at the expense of learning their language, give up because of the complexity of the language, especially the verb.
- Potando 12y ago
  This just means the last speakers are hoping to pass their insecurity problem on to another group of new "last speakers" to suffer it for them. Nothing against an individual having that desire, but for a 3rd party to help them, it's really doing any overall good. It's just moving the problem to somebody else.
bkurtz13 12y ago
There is a particularly human egotism with respect to "saving" things that have outlived their usefulness and purpose, or preserving things that should be changing. If language can be viewed through its evolutionary purpose, these dying languages are simply experiments that did not pan out, and should be allowed to become extinct.
- yrlson 12y ago
  That's not really reasoning, just self-fulfilling prophecy. Hebrew was revived, and I can't see a solid reason why the same could not be done on a smaller scale.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - gizmo686 12y ago
    The question isn't can a language be revived, it is should a language be revived. I am of the opinion that it was a mistake to revive Hebrew, as doing so has needlessly introduced language barriers.
    - _ak 12y ago
      It also turned out to be a consensus language for Jews from around the world that moved to Mandatory Palestine and later Israel.
    - panglott 12y ago
      As I understand it, there was already a language barrier in Yiddish vs. Judeo-Arabic.
- JulianMorrison 12y ago
  Many of these cultures (including their language) were forcefully banned, obliterated by law, lynching, displacement. discriminatory treatment, and the stealing of children. I do not exaggerate. So don't pretend they are dying of natural causes when the knife is still sticking out of their back.
japhyr 12y ago
Yes. Because each language holds concepts that are unique. A language is more than a collection of symbols that can be replaced arbitrarily with another language. Languages, particularly indigenous languages, contain ideas and ways of understanding that are not directly translatable. When we lose the language, we lose that people's take on the world. It is a sad thing, intellectually and spiritually, to lose the unique perspective of a people who have survived for millennia. Globalism is great; homogeneity is not so great.
- DanAndersen 12y ago
  Would you be able to provide some examples of these untranslatable concepts or ways of thinking? I suspect that the fact that you can provide them, in English, means that English is as capable as any other language to at absorbing that idea and making it expressible. If different languages contain unique ways of thinking that can't be expressed in other languages, then what benefit is there to the preservation of that language? If the idea cannot be communicated outside its language, then what impact can it have on the world outside it? If it can be communicated, then why not simply use loanwords (as languages like English are very prone to doing) to absorb that particular concept into the set of concepts that can be expressed in the language?
  - japhyr 12y ago
    I'll try to share some examples in a bit. Short reason this approach is "lossy": it's a huge game of telephone. Translation retains most of the translated concept, but not all of the concept's subtleties. The farther removed we get from the original, the less faithful the translation. We see this most clearly where it takes a paragraph of English to start to communicate the meaning contained in one word from some languages. Simple example: translate namaste into one English word. I come at this from a context of living in Alaska, and seeing firsthand the value of language retention, and the tragedy of language loss. I've also had great benefit from digging into other cultures' world views, and each of those experiences was heavily dependent on paying attention to the nuances of older languages. These concepts are hard to grasp if this whole topic is approached from a strictly academic context.
monocasa 12y ago
When you're a child, language acquisition isn't a zero sum game.
- maaku 12y ago
  Nonsense, of course it is. I'm raising bilingual children and every one of them has developmental delays. Of course the plural of anecdote is not data, but as a result I've been quite motivated to keep up with the research. My family is not exceptional among bilingual families. Developmental delays are common, as are poor performance in elementary school as multi-lingual children struggle to integrate disjoint systems of knowledge. Of course I wouldn't be doing it if I didn't think it was absolutely worth it, but the idea the children are sponges that pick up language without trouble at all is a myth that needs to die. Children do learn languages faster and better than adults, but IMHO that is mostly due to (a) time, (b) motivation, and (c) adult learners rationalizing their failures rather than actually trying to learn. EDIT: But to be clear, although it is not my place to tell anybody what to do, I do wish speakers of dying languages would pass on their words and culture to their children. It's hard, but worthwhile IMHO.
  - japhyr 12y ago
    Are the developmental delays long term, or just focused in primary/ else tardy grades? I've been envious of my peers who grew up bilingual; none appeared delayed when I knew them in late middle school and beyond. In fact, they seemed more academically capable than my monolingual peers.
    - maaku 12y ago
      Early. They seem to pull it together around age 10 plus or minus a few years. Statistically speaking -- every child is different. Mine are still young enough to have persistent problems.
  - S4M 12y ago
    An anecdote to counter yours: I am French, my wife is Japanese and we live in Barcelona in Spain where the school is in catalan. Our four years old understands Japanese and Catalan quite well (similar to a monolingual kid) and can speak French, English and Spanish a bit (I speak to him in French, adn with my wife we speak English) but not as well as a monolingual kid. Ofmcourse we have to see how it will turn out for him, but to me in terms of languages he's pretty much like a sponge.
DanAndersen 12y ago
That's a good point. I think there's a tendency to conflate the idea of "lost knowledge" with "inactive practice" when it comes to dying languages. Record, preserve, archive information about a language, as much as possible, but to say that all languages must remain "alive" means that we're saying that some portion of humanity must expend the time and effort to remain multilingual in languages that they may not receive practical benefits in. Maintenance costs of "in-brain preservation" are relatively high, and in doing so that's allocating time that may or may not be spent in pursuits that are beneficial to the actual people whom some want to be vessels for a dying language.
- panglott 12y ago
  Languages don't "die", they are smothered by a society hostile to the community that speaks them. That may be outright genocide (as in the article), or it may be something as simple as forcing children to go to attend school in a language foreign to them, that offers zero recognition of their mother tongue. The kids may have to learn the content in a foreign language, and they are denied even so much as a hour-a-week class on the literature of their native language. A system that is intent on eradicating the cultural heritage of a people is not trying simply to do only what is beneficial for the kids. =/
indubitably 12y ago
There is no general answer to this question.
canjobear 12y ago
There's a substantial scientific literature arguing that learning multiple languages as a child actually confers many cognitive benefits. I don't know how credible it is. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_advantages_of_bilingualism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_advantages_of_biling...
mmphosis 12y ago
UGTR :)
panglott 12y ago
Diglossia and bilingualism is very, very common in the world and probably the norm for humans: large monolingual countries are exceptional. Even in monolingual situations, people invent different registers for different formal situations. There is no reason that different linguistic codes cannot coexist for different functions. This argument can easily be extended to the other national languages: Preserving a national language like Italian or French is all very well, but English is the language of international communication, science, and technology, and expending a child's language-acquisitive resources on a language which won't connect them to the rest of contemporary humanity seems like too high of a price. The reason some languages are "dying" is because colonial powers attempted to exterminate those people and their community, through a variety of uses of power. In the article, the colonists exterminated more than 90% of the population and sent the survivors to a concentration camp. Just horrible. There's no reason to pretend that this community's precarious cultural position occurred through ethically neutral events.

christophmccann 12y ago

In Scotland, there is a big movement to preserve the teaching of Gaelic. Whilst I think it is important to preserve culture and to preserve history, I don't think, in terms of youth education, that should outweigh the utility of skills and languages necessary for the modern world. It seems slightly obtuse to me that whilst do not teach computer science, programming, engineering or science particularly well in schools, we should worry about the preservation of teaching of old languages. That being said, I think it is extremely important to teach kids (and the public in general) about history as a way of avoiding past mistakes so I don't think we should eliminate it - I just think there are more important things we need to fix first.

tragomaskhalos 12y ago
That said, it's interesting that language has only a very limited input into the Scots' sense of nationhood, as contrasted with the Welsh for whom it is far more central.
maccard 12y ago
The scots preservation of Gaelic is much less than in Ireland. When I was in school, I took Irish classes from when I was 5 until I left, as do the vast majority of children. Most Irish people have at least a handful of words and phrases they know. All of the road signs and government communications are translated into Irish.
- redacted 12y ago
  (Disclaimer: I am Irish, and I do not agree with the mandatory nature of Irish lessons.) The fact that 12-13 years of taking Irish classes daily leads to most Irish people having a few words and phrases is a damning indictment of our education system. It is also a perfect example of how saving a language that has fallen out of use is incredibly difficult. All that effort teaching a language to a country and, because it is almost never used outside of the Gaeltacht (Irish-speaking areas, mostly in the west of the country) it has been my experience that most people very rapidly lose their ability in Irish after leaving school. I have long held the position that forcing children to learn a dead (or at the very least, on advanced life support) language is doing more harm than good. It instilled antipathy towards Irish more than love for Irish in my peers. Making it an optional subject would mean only people who cared would study it, and they would perhaps be more likely to try and use it.

codewithcheese 12y ago

Some descriptive YouTube videos about the Selk'nam people with English subtitles https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psJ5tg6Pqcc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psJ5tg6Pqcc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAgcA0JEQkk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAgcA0JEQkk

kazagistar 12y ago
Holy shit, they actually had a real Patriarchy: All the guys were in a secret conspiracy to keep the women down?

lesu 12y ago

I'm wondering if the people who are railing against saving languages are equally against organizations such as the Internet Archive? My thinking is that, as tech-savvy computer whizzes, many folk on Hacker News are happier to preserve something that makes sense to _them_ (media or website snapshots) than things that don't (languages and foreign cultural history). It's difficult to say what is useful without the benefit of hindsight, by which time it is a moot point -- the resource is long gone and will never be again. Anyways, just my two cents as an incredibly biased amateur archivist.

DanAndersen 12y ago
I see that as an apples to oranges comparison. When we say "saving languages," do we mean archiving them, backing them up, creating stores of references and recordings that can be easily recalled yet inexpensively preserved? If so, then I am definitely for that. If "saving languages" means accepting nothing less than the descendants of the speakers of a dying language needing to expend mental energy and time to remain active speakers of that language, placing them at a disadvantage when compared with those who have free time for other pursuits and contributing to segregating that group from others, I don't know if that's as beneficial. In general, all knowledge should be preserved when possible. The question is whether it's better for it to be stored on hard drives or in brains.
- lesu 12y ago
  Good question :) not sure I have a good answer for that one, although I'd like to point out that many people elect to expend mental energy on otherwise unproductive minutia (aka. hobbies) so perhaps the task of carrying on a spoken tradition is less onerous to some than one might expect. Language contributing to group segregation is a very strong claim, however, and if you have any case studies (or, like, newspaper articles, this isn't academia) I'd be interested in seeing them.
- robryan 12y ago
  Yes, I think most people would agree that creating a record of as many languages as possible before they die out is a good idea.

sumedh 12y ago

I just feel that the whole humanity should speak one common language. Now whether you like it or not that language is going to be English. I just dont understand why do we need multiple languages anymore. If anyone says we need them to preserve the culture, I dont understand that either. My native language is not English, just in case anyone feels I want to force English down your throat.

Animats 12y ago
It may end up being Mandarin. Although Beijing, despite half a century of trying, hasn't been able to convert the Guangdong and Hong Kong areas. Only about 53% of China's own population has good fluency in Standard Chinese.
- morgante 12y ago
  I doubt it. There might be more people with Mandarin as a native language, but English has far more adoption amongst non-native speakers. Most Europeans, for example, know some English.
Dewie 12y ago
> My native language is not English, just in case anyone feels I want to force English down your throat. But you speak fluent English, so it's basically the same thing if you don't care about preserving your own language for cultural reasons. You're just as much of a privileged, spoilt child that is demanding that the rest of the world should get in line with something you already know, as native English speakers with the same demand are.
sidekick 12y ago
I agree a common language is beneficial, but choosing English as the one is not without drawbacks. As someone who speaks both English and a tad of Chinese, I am aware of instances where there are words in either language that can't be easily said in the other. You'd think with a good enough command of English and logic you could necessarily translate any word of any other language in the universe. However, I suspect it is not that simple. Some words invoke particular neuronal activity that encodes a particular thought which may be hard to replicate through the usage of a clumsy translation. Thus a difference in language may also be a reflection of a difference in culture and way of thinking. Since people around the world care about different things, they will use different words more frequently, attach different connotations to them, and even invent new words whose usage you'd find to be isolated to particular geographical regions. So, the selection of a common language is almost like the selection of a particular way of thinking. The notion of cultural uniformity/superiority can rub people the wrong way. So if there is to be a common language, it would be more considerate if it incorporated features from different languages, rather than be entirely from one language (English), and it should probably be engineered to be somewhat culturally agnostic.

the_gipsy 12y ago

Maybe an artificially revived language is worse than a dead language.

crusso 12y ago

It would be nice if the human mind were flexible enough to use different spoken languages the way that we use different computer languages. Would we discover that like computer languages, certain languages are just better at expressing some concepts? Would we talk about love in French and about science in English or German? Or would our easy use of language just encourage us to merge the best of all languages into some optimized hodge-podge general-use language?

MrPatan 12y ago

To all the tourists that want to stop people from talking to each other in order to have the vague aesthetic feeling that "the world is diverse" or whatever floats your tourist boat: Why don't you go and do that with your own child? Go on, raise them in a language that will limit their life choices and potential. See how that works for them. Then have them tell us how that went. Oh, sorry, that won't happen so easily, now, would it? "Linguistic diversity" Is just another way to say "Communication barriers". Funny how is is always something that should happen to other people.

Dylan16807 12y ago
I would agree with you if it wasn't easy to learn five languages as a child.
EdwardDiego 12y ago
> raise them in a language that will limit their life choices and potential. False dilemma. You can raise a bilingual child, in no way limiting their life choices and potential. In fact, there is evidence that suggests that bilingualism provides cognitive benefits later in life.
- waqf 12y ago
  You're a false dilemma. Raising a child bilingual in English and Mandarin, good. Raising a child bilingual in Gaelic and Navajo, not so good.
  - EdwardDiego 12y ago
    Another false dilemma. Raise a child bilingual in English and Navajo, nothing bad. Gee, why did you omit _that_ combination?
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
Grue3 12y ago

MichaelGG 12y ago

>"Mohawk isn’t just a form of speech,” he said. “It’s a holistic relationship to the cosmos.” What's that supposed to mean? Apart from as a tautology because we're part of the cosmos.

panglott 12y ago
It's just an effort to raise the prestige of Mohawk. Like all the disinformation about how English is just essential to everyone's economic future. The prestige of English is wide but shallow: everyone's just in it for the money, and if something nicer shows up, the world will abandon English in a heartbeat. If a language has spiritual value (like Latin, Sanskrit, or Classical Arabic), that's tapping into a narrower but deeper source of prestige.

vorg 12y ago

> The mother tongue of more than three billion people is one of twenty, which are, in order of their current predominance: Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, English, Hindi, Arabic, Portuguese, Bengali, Russian, Japanese, Javanese, German, Wu Chinese, Korean, French, Telugu, Marathi, Turkish, Tamil, Vietnamese, and Urdu. Arabic listed as one language? Can Gulf Arabic and Moroccan Arabic speakers understand each other? I've heard people speak to each other where one speaks Spanish and the other Brazilian Portuguese. The main difference between Hindi and Urdu is the different script. Don't those languages have more justification for being counted as one than those of Arabic? It's even a bit iffy to count English as one language -- put 3 people speaking Indian English, Ebonics, and Geordie in a room together and see how well they communicate!

panglott 12y ago
Quantifying the difference between a language and a dialect is always going to be a problem. English dialects differ, but most English speakers also know well a standard variety of American or Commonwealth stock (which are mutually intelligible). Distangling the Chinese languages is another huge problem, since the government of China sees them as all dialects of a single language, but any real comparison of phonology, syntax, or lexicon shows them to be quite distinct indeed. My understanding is the syntax of Hindi and Urdu are very similar, but the lexicon is quite distinct. Since each has either a relatively more a Persianized or Sanskritized vocabulary.

Potando 12y ago

These articles appear from time to time but they never give any sensible reason. Just take it as given that languages must be saved. This one has a long diversion into indigenous medicine - not something that needs a language, but rather needs knowledge, using any language. Here's the closest thing I found to a reason though I only read half way: "But the loss of languages passed down for millennia, along with their unique arts and cosmologies, may have consequences that won’t be understood until it is too late to reverse them."

cjsthompson 12y ago

Can those who believe it's ok for languages (cultural diversity) to die out be saved ?