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Dying Languages, Fading Formats
utopyr writes "A story on BBC News looks briefly at the problems in preserving human languages in digital formats. The scope of the problem? Of the world's roughly 6,500 languages (of which, fewer than 500 are listed here), half will be extinct within the century, as the last speakers die. However, formats are proving even more ephemeral than human memory."
... but why?
If no one is going to speak it again, and it isn't written anywhere, why should it be preserved?
Reminds me of people that are 'pack rats.' Why must you feel compelled to keep something you don't use?
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
The world should have a common language. Why is it of concern if old, decrepit languages are put out of their misery? I'm sure scholars, academics, and other out-of-touch people who have never shed sweat in their lives are interested in such things, but the less languages on Earth, the better.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
An interesting problem. Many laymen think a language can be reduced to raw data simply and easily, as if it were computer code. The problem is that we quite simply don't have any tool that can ecapsulate an entire language. According to modern linguistics, the only real version of a human language is that which comes with a human being who speaks it. That's why we distinguish "dead" languages from the others: We may know how to read and understand Ancient Egyptian to some degree, but there is a vast amount of information about that language that is now irretrievable, because there are no living speakers to demonstrate it.
Of course, the flip side of the coin is that there are no living native speakers of Old English either. That is, languages are born and they die just as species do, and this is a natural process. Trying to preserve them all completely intact is simply not possible, any more than freezing a few condor embryos is going to teach us what ecological role the animal played during its heyday.
Libraries, grammars, lexicons are all the genetic information of a language. But there is so much besides that will be lost...
collectors set (extras) the number of languages being spoke in the world has been cut by half during the past 20 years.
I believe most of this is due to the world becoming more connected. English appears to be the universal language for the new world structure, probably due to the (former)vastness of the British empire and the influence of American media.
I don't think this is a bad thing. It will bring the whole world closer together, making it easier to solve regional economic problems. This will also help people from developing nations.
The old languages of course should be preserved in various forms for archelogical purposes and perhaps the development of a Star Trek style universal translator.
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Personally I think everyone should learn English. A lot of problems will be solved if everyone uses the same language. It will be a lot cheaper in the long run and remove many of the problems inherent in international commerce.
This is one case where I say "Fuck cultural diversity". The benefits of a global language are just too great to ignore.
BTW, English is NOT my first language.
People couldn't type. We realized: Death would eventually take care of this.
When speaking of dying languages, you can look on the english language for example. More and more kids use expressions like "U" for "you", and "tnx" for "thanks". In my home country we have the the same problem, and we start to look on it as a serious threat to the language.
I think this will somehow make a change to future languages.
Note to self: get smarter troll to guard door.
I would like to see languages preserved for translation of old documents. Think about the rosetta stone and how important it was in translating the bible. If would be nice to have languages with some form of context so that in the future if translation would be easier if all the natural speakers were dead
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
Qantel? Off topic...just curious as there are so few of us left.
Word Axis
Languages are more than just a collection of syntax. They are the embodiment of the way a culture lived. What do people use more than language?
We communicate in words, whether spoken of written, all of the time, and the way in which we speak reflects more about us than we might realize. But it is not purely a one-way relationship. Our language changes over time to adapt to us, and thus reflects broader trends in society.
Language is a huge piece of the puzzle, and just trying to learn it from a text somewhere along the line is insufficient. We imbue human language with subtlety and nuance which can't be put into digital format.
While in school I was the research assistant to a linguist who was trying to preserve a dialect of Mongolian. Sadly, my professor died prior to finishing that work, and the last generation of people who speak that particular dialect will all be gone within about 20 years.
I've seen quite a few posts asking WHY we need to preserve these kinds of things...
there are many reasons- language is simply a physical representation of our thoughs, or more generally our though process~ how we speak shows largely how we think...saying why should we preserve languages is akin to saying why do we write history books~
LosT
"We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams."
What we need is some Standard Format Mark-up that allows us to describe the formats the langauges are in. That way, when you copy the data from older media to newer media, there is still some way of interpreting it.
The problem is the same as the formats themselves, though. How do you go about making a formatting language that is so good that it will remain unchanged?
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
Yoda is the only known speaker of FORTH.
(or in FORTHese:
FORTH known speaker yoda only is.
)
Unfortunately, it is a dying language.
(or in FORTHese:
language dying unfortunately it is
)
It must be preserved.
(or in FORTHese:
Perserved, it must be.
)
It's those damn twos that occasionally slip in that screw everything up!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
C#
Wonder what the 6500 languages are and where they are spoken? Check out: http://www.ethnologue.com/
Sanskrit? You're majoring in a 5,00 year old dead language? Hmmm... Latin, best I can do. Phys Ed? Get out of here. I mean, no, really get out of here.
Great Movie!
100% Insightful
This is all part and parcel of the so called "digital amnesia" that is taking place. What memories will people have twenty years down the road if everything was comunicated via email. Digital cameras are great for the present but again, how are they preserved over long time periods. Burning stuff onto CDs will work, but most CDs are quite unstable (Verbatim excepted, they use a AZO dye but are more expensive). Even the first video disks made in the 80's aren't playable by anything today, what's to guarantee that CDs will be playable in 20 - 30 years. Printing out digital pictures is no more archival than CDs, most people will print it out on paper which typically is not acid-free and will yellow quickly. Compare this to Kodachromes which look great 50 years later. Cibachromes will last centuries. There's nothing in our new digital media arsenal that can compare. Enjoy your memories now, cause they won't last...
is a good thing just like species diversity is. Losing various species of plants or animals means losing potentially valuable chemicals, drugs, etc. Losing languages means loss of potentially valuable ideas and viewpoints. We don't really know what good any of this will do us, but something might prove useful, which makes the effort worthwhile.
By storing the Data in open formats, and link them with recordings, it should be possible to preserve the languages and their unique history.
I am working right now with LingoTeach and a US university to add a Native American language that is almost extinct to the Free LingoTeach Database, so that future generations have the choice to revive it. Can't say more here, because we are still working out details.
Any help is of course welcome. http://www.lingoteach.org
get 7 free Japanese lessons.
During WW2 the navajo language was used to transmit secret messages. How best to encrypt your messages than to translate it into a language only a very few people know. Now you take a language that is completly dead and you get the advantage. I would not be suprised if the US intellegence does not have most of these languages catalogued by now.
later,
"Im drowning here, and you're describing the water!"
At the same time other languages are swelling and swelling fast. Think of all the new technical terms, abbreviations and even new lingo terms. Personally, I think there is an explosion of linguistic communities. They still speak basically the same language but they definitely spend a certain part of the day in a linguistic bubble where comprehension by an outsider is increasingly difficult if not, in some cases, impossible.
The basic argument was that preserving linguistic diversity would have the corollary effect of preserving cultural diversity (which is good). I found this indirect logic to be somewhat weak. After finishing the book, I did not feel that the authors had given me a good reason to be concerned about the loss of so many languages.
Note that the book focused more on the problem of preserving the languages in society. The authors considered an archive to be a poor substitute for a living, breathing language, much like a recording is a poor substitute for a concert.
Check out Chad's News
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Here is more info.
Most certainly, YES, we should record and document the inner workings of a soon-to-be-extinct language.
So much of our past is recorded in these languages - so much will be lost if we allow these languages to become indecipherable.
For example, Yiddish, a mixture of hebrew russian and german spoken by the Jews in the Northeastern part of Europe (of which my grandparents were part of), is soon to be extinct.
And yet, Yiddish was used to record legal documents (Jews were often the only bankers in the middle ages, as Christianity forbade loans), medicine, and stories about life, humor, love. The story, 'Fiddler on the Roof' is an adaptation of a story entitled "Tevye and His Daughters" by Sholom Aleichem, written entirely in Yiddish. I have an entire book of Sholom Aleichem's stories, which, unfortunatley since I am horrible at understanding Yiddish, I cannot read.
Documenting the inner workings of "extinct" languages is useful - not to promote these languages into common use - but to allow us to read all the wealth of information which others have put down on paper/stone/beads to be read, before it is too late.
Tepp
No one is more anal about their language than the french. They have a damn board to approve the proper inclusion of new words.
...)
Anyone who thinks the french are ethnocentric should look in the mirror (USA, Japan,
No it isn't. Every machine that ships with Openboot has a forth interpreter built right in!
Check it out.
The whole concept of 'media-death' is the most overblown meme in common use today. The idea that you can't read something because the media format is no longer in common use is insipid. As long as the hardware still exists it can be plugged in or at least reverse-engineered and used. Even if the orgional hardware dosn't exit, the media can be examined directly and reverse-engineered.
Obviously some media degrades physically over time, just like some paper.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
What does that have to do with anything, I'm sure you're asking... Well, there's a fun little hypothesis that understanding language, linguistic properties (prosodic, semantic, phonotactic, syntactic, mophologic, etc.), and language acquisition gives us a better idea of the physiology of the brain. We know of areas in the brain discovered by Broca and Wernicke that create specific language impairment... that must tell us something about where language cognition takes place. We know that babies can acquire almost everything they need to know about a language between 18 and 30 months of age, and syntacticians study WHY; the presumptive encoding of some base set of language rules (universal grammar) that is present in the typically-developing human brain.
The reason keeping indigenous languages alive is important, beyond that of the Sapir-Whorf angle, is that some of these languages exhibit features that simply aren't found in other languages. We've been able to document enough universality in language that we can say it's not just an arbitrary sort of collection of sounds that make words, words that make sentences, and sentences that make stories. It would be tragic to allow bits of significant evidence to slip through the cracks that might allow us to unearth the key to, say, developing a new treatment for specific language impairment, or the key to adequately parsing English via computational algorithms.
Now if only I could've written that coherently... ;)
I doubt that all 6500+ languages are 100% unique. In fact I bet there are probably on only a few hundred language families. Languages are permeated with the culture of the speakers and that is how they live and grow. Once the language has lost its critical mass of speakers passing it on and changing it, it is dead. If it is a written language, some of that culture can be preserved by recording the text. If a language is spoken only, no linguist is going to preserve what it ment to each generation that spoke it. At best they can record some of the folklore and technical stuff (lexicon, syntax, pronunciation) from the lastest generation.
Sorry, I'm not Quantel.
I like qbasic because I like old computers.
And now /. effect will take care of these remaining 500 languages.
You can't handle the truth.
There are still many ancient texts, from dead languages, that have never been deciphered, and some, not from such a distant past. Maybe you would like to give your best shot at some of them. Here is a list of texts and writing systems awaiting to be understood:
Rongorongo, the hieroglyphic script of Easter Island
The Voynich Manuscript, 200 pages, probably written in the 13 century
Indus Valley scripts from Mohenjo-daro in Pakistan, 4000 years ago
Etruscan
The Disc of Phaistos, from Crete, 3700 years ago
Meroitic hieroglyphs of ancient Nubia
Zapotec script
Have fun!
Everyone should speak Klingon! Why should any one group of people have it any easier than any other group? To be completely fair to everyone, the language we unify on should be Klingon.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
And which English is the Standard then ?
British English (English English?)
Canadian English
American English (Or as the current US prez says 'Merican)
Indian English
Or one of the many Dialects that are spoken in those lands (Can you understand Scots, Scouse, Cockney, Newfe & Jamaican Just for starters, Be honest)
Where is this wonderful World Standard?
D.A.K.D.A.E.---- Deny all Knowledge, Destroy All Evidence
Thank god the article only means spoken languages. When I first glanced at the Subject, I thought in meant the death knell for Fortran IV.
Use your head, can't you, use your head,
You're on earth, there's no cure for that - S. Beckett
Can we add whatever language they speak in Iraq to the list? ;)
IOException - Can't Speak
I spent a few hours watching some of the extras, it will take at least an entire day to go through it all. The languages were covered in the part about the inspiration for Elvish, and how the language that inspired it is dying. The bad thing is I don't remember if it was on the National Geographic disk or one of the extras disk.
Lots of good technical behind the scenes stuff to. It's amazing what they did with perspective.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
It is not needed. It is ill-conceived anyway, basing itself on abritrary new (at the time) base measurements instead of existing measurements. No need to waste money converting.
Just because there is one or more languages used in the world for wider communication does not mean that there is not a role or place for less-widely used languages. Languages with lesser prestige than, say, English, or Putonghua (AKA Mandarin Chinese) or ki-Swahili are often used for different purposes by individuals and cultures that have instituionalized multi-lingualism. Even in the West, you can find countries like Switzerland and Belgium that are not so impoverished by monolingualism that they have forgotten how to function multilingually.
Lanuages are not barriers to communication, languages are a means to communication. Controlling more than one language means you have more tools at your disposal.
Who do you respect more as a coder - someone who can use just one language well, or someone who is fluent in all the tools that are needed to accomplish a given task.
Take a person who attempts to use PHP (because it is the only thing they know) to do a job that is better accomplished in perl (because they don't want to learn another language) - is that smart? or myopic?
(It's just an example, I like PHP!)
Coptic; cop
Wow, I didn't know the police had their own language!
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
I learned metric so I wouldn't confuse my Aussie wife.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
They ought to just get an account with a univeristy that has AFS space. Encode in JPEG and MP3, those formats are SOFT and so less likely to die. The people running all the AFS servers will make sure the hardware doesn't get too out of date.
Granted this is 'over simplified' even in some sense ridiculous, but I think the basic idea has merit. There are architecutures in place that will 'automatically' migrate data from an old hardware format to a new one (an example is any half competent ISP). MP3's and Jpegs aren't going to die any time soon as data formats, since it's trivial to include support for them in applications that 'do that sort of thing'. Stuff only has to be migrated/encoded once, after that, let the hosting company handle it.
Or did anyone else expect to see COBOL on the list?
Oh, wait. Human languages...sorry.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
"When the issue came up, the US decided to go it alone and do things their own way. "
When the issue came up, the government wasted a lot of money and time on "metric education". The people said "so what?".
The answer to this, as with many things, is for government to stay out of it. Let the people decide for themselves; leave it to the free market. If enough people demand it, the government will slowly change. In the mean time, leave well enough alone.
Our company recently won a contract with the local Justce Department court reporters. They use FTR Gold to record court transcriptions. Recently, this very same technology has been implemented to record the spoken languages of the local aboriginal population. Because the aboriginals have only a spoken language and because the language is dying (fast!) this seems like a perfect implementation of the technology.
It's true, almost the whole world are polyglots. It has also been shown that children with more than one native toungue develops their language quicker and better than single-languaged children.
Also, I wouldn't want my descendants to be unable to read most of the literature of the world (translations suck).
While a lingua france is a good thing, there is every reason to keep other languages alive.
Actaully I'm friendly to the idea of a artificial language as a lingua franca, preferably one designed to be free of ambiguity and easy to process in a computer, such as lojban.
Languages should be preserved as best as we can hope for for archeological reasons, but the world needs less lingual diversity.
I propose 7 languages for now based on the number of people who speak them. Which I mean everyone should know atleast one of these 7 languages. I do think being multilingual is still a good idea.
And that's it. If you don't speak one of these languages, go learn one. If you do speak one of them, learn another one of them. and unless you have a particular reason to learn a different language than these, don't bother. For instance, If you are Jewish you should learn Hebrew, if you live in England and have to take the chunnel to France, you ought to learn French. But all of the French should learn one of these 7 other languages, since theirs didn't make my list - Sorry Francophones, you should have have even more imperialistic aspirations back in the day.
It's still ok to speak Gaelic, Welsh, Basq or French Creole, nothing wrong with it, but you should speak one of the 7 languages if you expect to be understood by anyone. Language is about understanding, once a language is on it's deathbed it does no one any practical good.
And then maybe in the future we'll elimate some more.
You know your language is on it's deathbed once governments start using it to communicate securely.
See the Pictures of the Flood of '08
The site you presented is "propaganda" from a pro-metric organization. Can you find something that is not so strongly biased (and this invalid)?
STEAL THIER AIR!
It's easier than you'd think, they use the same combination as what I use on my luggage.
If you think education is expensive, you should try ignorance -- Derek Bok, president of Harvard
My own mother language is in serious risk in the mid term. Most of you are native English speakers, so I think that you can not imagine what does this situation mean for us. It is good that there are "large" languages like English that are used arround the world, but the "small" languages are as rich and respectable as English or Spanish or Chinese, and it is important to protect and preserve them as they are part of the cultural heritage of humanity.
I don't want to say the name of my language because I would like to speak in the name of all the speakers of "small" languages. Every word of my son, who is 16 months now, makes me feel very proud. I hope that the sons of my son will one day learn and be proud of our language (and also learn English to be able to read slashdot !)
The thousandth sequential copy of a data CD will be identical to the original, assuming you're verifying the copies each time. You keep copying to new media every few years, which is annoying, but the data will be identical to the original.
The same cannot be said for any analog based data system such as film. If the original is damaged, you're left with an imperfect copy. Of course, pay enough money and your analog copy will be a close reproduction of the original, but it won't be identical.
Dr Fish
The Summer Institute in Linguistics has a much more comprehensive list of languages in their compendium entitled the Ethnologue (Available for perusing online.
UNESCO, an agency of the United Nations has compiled The Redbook of Endangered Languages listing many endangered languages around the world.
Another source for those interested in endangered languages is The Foundation For Endangered Languages.
For those more interested in creating languages of their own, or "conlangs" like Tolkien created, might I suggest Langmaker, Mark Rosenfelder's excellent Virtual Verduria (including his Language Construction Kit), and for those interested in Tolkiens' tongues (such as Quenya, almost unanimously considered the most beautiful conlang created) there is the very informational Ardalambion.
Hope those links will help people interested in the topics of endangered and model languages.
From the list of languages and their abbreviations:
Ewe; ewe
That's what sheep speak, right?
This space for rent, inquire within.
Yes, there is L'Acadamie Francais, but it isn't like most of 'em really care. They will happily steal words like "le hot dog", and "le weekend", because even they understand that "la fin du semaine" is just too long.
And German has the same thing. They publish the Duden and make the schools teach Hoch Deutsch.
But if you want serious linguistic hardasses, look no further than Iceland. They can still read texts from the 13th century. I met an American who was trying to move there (his wife is Icelandic) and the government was requiring that he adopt a traditional Icelandic name so his name wouldn't polute the language.
While taking the many history classes at my university, it was mentioned that more than half of the lanuages in the world come from South Asia. On the same token, the discussion went on to the extinction of languages. What people don't understand is that with the powers of globalization, language has become one of the non-material casualties. Every nation has a standardized language and only rural speakers are keeping a bulk of these smaller languages alive.
Actually, we shouldn't call them languages but dialects. It's funny but once I read the only difference between a language and a dialect is one has an army behind it, the other doesn't. =)
Before starting, I should mention that the given estimate for the number of languages spoken today is just that: an estimate. There are areas in the world such as Cameroon, Papua New Guinea, the Congo basian, and the Amazon basin that are constantly yielding new languages. Compounding the problem of an accurate number is the fact that, unfortunately, records and data are not available for all spoken languages and counting all of them is quite difficult. I have personally seen figures in the range of four thousand to fifteen thousand currently spoken languages so don't take that number as gold. (It is, however, as close to being accepted as any other estimate can be.)
OK. Why should a dying language be preserved? People have pointed out the parallel to preserving endangered animal species through environmental efforts or the scramble scientists made to save Mesopotamian artifacts from Iraq before the war broke out and these are both excellent analogies: just because a language is not a physical thing does not mean it is not worth the time, money, and effort to preserve. Wildlife activists fight for the rights of endangered species because they are unique and part of the natural environment of this world. Archeologists do the same for artifacts of human eras long gone and disappeared. Why shouldn't the same be made for languages? A language and the culture surrounding it are inseparable; a language is a living thing, a product of the unbelievable mechanism of the human mind. Chimpanzees can use basic tools to scrape termites out of their mounds but they are unable to communicate using spontaneous, creative language. Ultimately this is what lifts the human race above the rest of this planet's fauna. Preserve a dying language because it is part of the heritage of the entirety of mankind.
Of course, saving a language for its aesthetic value is not the only reason. Linguists (notably Noam Chomsky and Joseph Greenberg) have been trying for at least decades to document and discover the underlying reasons for the existence of language universals. Using simple examples, every language has the concept of a noun and a verb. Why is that? Is it just to facilitate the processing of communication in the human mind or is it innate? Every language that has evolved naturally is complex in its own manner and can express any concept found in any other language; no language is inferior or superior to any other language in facilitating communication. Is this natural? Are there languages out there that are simply empirically inferior to others and die out as its native speakers learn the value of another, superior tongue? Has every language ever spoken been this way?
There are still untold numbers of questions that cannot or have not been answered by contemporary linguistics. Joseph Greenberg is the father of the movement to uncover linguistic universals by studying large sets of data representative of the distribution of the genetic makeup of the world's languages. This approach has yielded many valuable insights into the human creation of language. If a universal is absolute, then perhaps it reveals part of the inner workings of our own minds. The sad truth, however, is that so many languages have been lost before the advent of the written language and since that no universal can ever be proven to be 100% absolute. Does this mean linguists should give up? No, of course not! Perhaps some unique language in the valleys of Papua New Guinea will manifest some exception to an absolute universal, forever changing our views on the human mind. For instance, the language Hixkaryana, spoken by less than 400 natives in the Amazon basin, has a default word order of Object-Verb-Subject. Before the discovery and documentation of Hixkaryana it was thought this word order was so counter to normal human thinking that it probably did not exist. What would have happened if no efforts had been made to document Hixkaryana? Linguists would have been unknowingly deprived of a valuable insight into language typology.
Vilk, from the ranks of the freaks
The best and most complete online language reference for over 6,800 languages is "Ethnologue: Languages of the World", created by SIL International.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
The Ethnologue is a great language resource with information about pretty much every language spoken on the planet organized by language family and also by country. If you enjoy learning about languages and how they relate to each other it's a great resource.
You seem to think English is the end all language of all things. Honestly, that's what others thought of Latin and yet look at how many languages outlived it!! Don't bother counting, the list is huge.
:-)
Do your homework... storing these languages will be a way for some with some interest to research how and possibly WHAT factors influenced the language development of various groups through history. For example, Latin may be dead, but it influenced many languages, and in some cases you could trace invasions via accents borrowed from Latin. (Romania is in the middle of the slavic/gallic area yet their language is based on Latin, quite significantly at that.Hungaria is right west of Romania and they speek a completely different language than all those around them (Huns settled there.) All in all at least some study will at least keep track of where we are coming from.)
It is almost like taking family pictures or writing a family tree, only this time with languages. It may not seem like much to the consumerist point of view prevalent now, especially among those of us here in the USA that have NOT been outside the country...
Destroy variety and you'll be left eating hot dogs for the rest of your life. They're not bad, but if it was all you had you'd soon understand why many seek the unusual and the break from the status quo. Preserving some cultures or parts of cultures other than our own might even count as being civilized. (remember our ancestors commiting genocide of entire peoples when they landed here? you should. it is our heritage and forgetting it will let those in power commit those crimes again)
Plus our studies of evolution have barely begun... we need to record some things that aren't fossilized such as art and language. Even if just to leave to future civilizations digging out our leftovers from the ashes of our own stupidity. (ala A.I.)
-DaedalusHKX
PS - parts of this post were not related completely to the article but more to your rants of "its better if everyone spoke english" but I guess many would also say "its better if everyone agreed with the status quo, even if GW threatens to smash all our rights into the gutter so the RIAA and the rest of the corporate world can fatten its portfolio).
PPS - mod as you see fit
" What luck for rulers that men do not think" - Adolf Hitler
"I think you would find that the only group strongly opposed would be the very old and the poorly educated."
If you favor such a waste of taxpayer dollars and time, perhaps you are the one who is "poorly educated".
Just because it might be a good idea doesn't mean that the government has to force it on everyone.
As long as you understand that research and knowledge cannot be measured until they have fruited; how studies of dead frogs a hundred years ago give us computers now, and how studies of multiple languages and cultures now give us ??? a hundred years later. Indifference is okay, as long as it's not a hostile indifference :)
GPL Deconstructed
I agree that if a language is dying then it should not be saved to perpetuate its use. If the language is dying then it has essentially shown itself to be an inadequate means of expression for the modern world and that it is unable to adapt itself to express new ideas.
That said, I do believe that languages ought to be preserved for academic study since every language is a reflection of its culture and expresses ideas and concepts that are not easily expressed in other languages. For instance, you'll find in a language like Arabic, spoken by desert dwellers and nomads, figures of speech, proverbs, and other expressions depicting the importance of water which would not be found, for instance, in languages spoken by populations in lush, agricultural societies. Something similar could be said regarding regions that experience an abundance of water like South East Asia which has the monsoon season. Although the preceding example is mundane, what I'm getting at is that letting a language disappear is depriving oneself of novel modes of thought and expression.
I think every language has rich concepts to offer other languages. If we don't preserve the languages we do have, we may very well be shielding ourselves from potentially revolutionary ideas.
Counterpoint: Singlish
Singapore, like most former British colonies, has an education policy to teach its school-kids primarily in English. Curiously enough, it's produced a generation that needs a campaign to speak proper English and another campaign to speak Mandarin, the mother-tongue of more than 70% of Singaporeans. One naive, probably superficial, comment we'd make is that young Singaporeans are neither here nor there; they insist on mixing Mandarin grammar and Hokkien words to produce English sentences. The government, apparently, is so worried that Singapore might lose its "natural advantage", that it has a set of "approved" words to be used in locally-produced English-language television shows.
Clearly, it has been very difficult to teach and sustain a standard, uniform, international language for 30 years in a population of 4 million. Now consider the challenges involved in doing this for the entire world.
Let's face it; even if everyone learns and speaks in English, there will still be geographical differences in dialect. The differences will lead to new languages. Just as it has been happening over the last few millenia.
More than mere navel gazing.
> If no one is going to speak it again, and it isn't written anywhere, why should it be preserved?
One reason to preserve a record of them is scientific. There is a limit to how much you can learn about a phenomenon by studying a small number of examples. The more examples you have to study, the more you can learn. Biologists, for example, are always discovering new surprises about life when they turn their attention to previously-unexamined species. Likewise, the more examples of languages that linguists have available to study, the more they can discover about the phenomenon of language. It is especially important to preserve the small, isolated languages for this purpose because they are the ones that tend to hold undiscovered surprises. The languages that are likely to survive the next century are the ones that have already been studied in detail, and which have been modified through contact with one another. It is the dying ones that offer the most scope for new discoveries.
Man what an article title!
At least the article content didn't follow suit, "I would rather become a ghost language drifting by your side than be remembered by posterity without you. Because of your love, I will never be a forgotten laguage"
--
Was it the sheep climbing onto the altar, or the cattle lowing to be slain,
or the Son of God hanging dead and bloodied on a cross that told me this was a world condemned, but loved and bought with blood.
"...how we speak shows largely how we think..." That's true to some extent, but linguists have had to back away from the Whorfian hypothesis in recent decades. The Whorfian hypothesis was the theory that language influenced thought. If an Eskimo has more words for snow (this idea has also been successfully challenged in recent years, just do a Google search) it stood to reason that he/she thinks about snow differently than an Englishman for example. Eleanor Rosch did some research with the Dani in New Guinea that suggests this might not be true. While the Dani only have 2 words for different colors in their language, Rosch found that they were quite competent at differentiating a wide range of colors, and that they could successfully remember colors that they didn't have words for either.
One motivation for preserving languages is that some are better at expressing certain concepts than others. An extreme example of this is Heinlein's "Stranger in a Strange Land" where students acquire stunning psychic powers after learning the Martian language. This is also called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that some languages express special ideas better than others due to exotic grammar or vocabulary. Languages such as Latin, Hebrew, Sanskrit, Tibetan, Hopi, etc. are often the language of magical incantations because they (accidentally?) became the liturgical language of major religions.
The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis has come under fire lately. Commonly cited examples like the Eskimos have 30 words for snow, so they perceive the northlands more vividly, just isnt true. Rebuttlist argue that any sufficiently developed language can express the ideas of another language. There 30 words in English for snow used by mountain climbers. Another cited example is Chinese verbs dont have tenses, so time is perceived differently. However, they use time adverbs, making the time as clear or ambiguious as English.
Perhaps computer programming might be the strongest example in support of Sapir-Worf. Many people claim you can write more powerful and less-buggy algorithms in language "X" due to its grammar, etc. Other scientific dialects such as mathematics, logic,etc. have similiar claims.
I see your point, but in many cases, it is not simply a matter of specific or general vocab available...for example, the 'levels of respect' built into Korean (and other asian languages)- how you phrase something doesn't always have to do with the vocabulary (in the strict sense of the word)~ "respect" is built into the language, which HAS to shape, to some extent how the thoughts are formed. And since we are talking about ancient/dying languages, most likely the written or recorded expression of thought is all we will have to work with at some finite time in the future...
*shrug*
Good conversation, I like it.
LosT
"We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams."
If it is such a good idea to waste money on this not-needed action, do it yourself. Let each person choose. Just don't have the government force it on everyone.
It's something a totalitarian government would do, and it would indeed be post 9/11 !!!
Language is probably a bigger barrier on the internet than any firewall or censorware. You can only search Google with words you know. If there are web sites written in a language no one knows anymore, they are effectively lost.
For those who don't know (which is almost all non-Tamilans), Tamil is considered one of the four oldest languages in the world and is spoken in India, Sri Lanka, Singapore, Malaysia and a few other countries.
All your favorite sites in one place!
destroyed the last remnants of the Klamath language. (The Klamath is a tribe of native Americans along the border of Oregon and California). There was a project to document the entire language on a set of CD-ROM's, since the only person left alive did not have too many days left. After the CD-ROM's were recorded, 3 teens from the tribe stole the CD's and destroyed them for whatever reason. As a result, the Klamath language is now lost forever.
There are a huge number of yeast infections in this county. Probably because we're downriver from the bread factory.
http://hcs.harvard.edu/~igp/glass.html
We must finish the collection of languages before it is too late! Once the last speakers have passed on, nobody will ever know how to say "I can eat glass, it does not hurt me", and the world will forever be a sadder place.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
I don't have a slashdot account, so I'll exhibit my language's syntax and what it means, as I speak to the SlashAdmin Michael...
...Truly, the only ones I've seen speaking Lezghian now-days are PORNSTARS; specifically the butch dyke ones. Anyone have anything to share on that? I am planning to return to mother Lesbos this summer and ketch-up on the summer water sports and other events.
I'strapoth-Ont_y00z backside.
I am holding the back of your hand.
phist! phist! shuv_it_upinov!
Hello! Hello! May I come in?
J00 like-it, guffah!
I like your house.
l'aime phux j00 tieth anoos!
Wow I have tight shoe laces!
I have nothing to say; hence, I am finish.
Yooth Both Speaketh Gayo.
Nothin'th moreth needth be spokenth or I hath castrateth your toenailths...
Maybe they can preserve that other system that will soon be obsolete? I speak of capitalism of course.
Certainly throughout history the tendancy seems for new languages to develop, but is that true anymore? Doesn't this massive language extinction amid great population growth suggest that we are moving towards a few common languages? I think that if everyone woke up tomorrow speaking the same language, the world is interconnected enough that few, if any, dialects would spring up, and even then it would only be among the most underdeveloped or intentionally isolationist regions.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
..they speak the language we all should be speaking. (Sorry, I couldn't resist.)
We're way too busy bickering about "nynorsk" and "bokmål", both official written version of Nrwegian, to notice that English words and expressions are overflowing the language. Particularly the internet-savvy grab words and expressions from English, for example I say stuff like "brb" or "lol" even when we're otherwise conversing in Norwegian.
Never mind that most of my textbooks are in english, as well as most computer programs I have to use. Not that I really mind that, I find myself about as comfortable with english as with norwegian anyway. Writing my thesis now in English as well. And I usually see English (read: American) DVDs and DivX movies without subtitles...
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
"the problem is that a highly US-driven mono-culture is sweeping the world."
Now, if it were French that was the basis of the the mono-culture, then the development of a common language would be considered giving culture to to world...not taking culture from the world.
The really funny thing about what is happening now is that the US is not as actively trying to create a mono-culture as the French, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Russian and other imperialist nations did in the past.
When the Europeans were the great imperialist powers, you would find great and glorious writings about bringing culture to the backwards people of the world. Even in Bush's war with Iraq, there is a rhetoric of giving back the country to the Iraqis...the war lacks the imperialist overtones of most historic military excursions.
I suspect that the main reason we hear so much yapping about the issue now is that much of the "mono-culture" is being influenced by a country (the USA) that the French and other Europeans consider to be filled with lesser people. If the world were learning French, the development of a monoculture would likely be considered an enlightenment.
Hay this language stuff is very interesting, but can the same things be applied to tech?
What are my great grandchildren going to do with my "record" collection? Will they know how to use a turntable?
When the "h2" powered cars come out, there will be musiems to visit the antique 2005 suv. Will there be the same for a fully functioning IBM Pc Jr.?
how much media has been lost due to the inability to playback a 78rpm record or 8-Track?
I don't know, I wasen't here when that happened, It was like that when I got here, Second shift musta done that.
Will I retire or break 10K?
There's no decent online translation
Say what?
(The revenge of Sapir-Worf!)
Under the Sapir-Worf hypothesis, wouldn't the strongest language be Klingon?
It's a synthetic language
So is English after the early-19th-century reforms that tweaked its structure to match classical Latin forms. The most obvious changes at that time were the deprecation of double negatives and the deprecation of clause-final prepositions.
It's little endian.
How do you define "little endian" with respect to human languages? Didn't the people of Lilliput and Blefuscu of Gulliver's Travels speak roughly the same language? Or are you referring to head-initial vs. head-final typology?
Will I retire or break 10K?
We need federally protected LISP online communities and e-casinos to preserve the heritage. Tourist shareware crafted with time-honored LISP artwork. Movies and songs promoting LISP battles of valor against JAVA and C oppression on the wide open e-frontier. Our flag will bear the symbol of dead parantheses to represent our suffering!
Happy Fembots are made with LISP!
Exactly right.
And some gentle soul mentioned Sapir-Whorf. Man, what a doozy!
Sapir-Whorf Theory
GPL Deconstructed
it's XML, of course!
"Good, bad, I'm the guy with the gun."
Do you have any links to examples of this Singaporean language? (the mixed one, not the "clean" ones)
Sounds interesting.
This Like That - fun with words!
We are currently at a cusp which endangers information storage like no other time in history.
We can still see paintings on cave walls and cuniform clay tablets that are thousands of years old. We have books that have outlasted entire empires. At the same time, we're having a hard time reading records that are merely a few decades old, and with the imminent passing of the CDROM format, that time limit is going to shrink.
This is bad. However, this is also temporary, and already starting to reverse itself.
Our new medium of storage is becoming the network. Human information is gradually moving towards a distributed and redundant storage model, which has one fantastic advantage: It isn't a format at all! At least not in the usual sense. A network is constantly being upgraded to the 'new thing,' in pieces. It will always be available, always current, and always readable.
Did I say always? OK, not always--who knows what's coming in the future. BUT, with the massive change in storage formats and density (from day to day, year to year); AND the incredible amount of information we're generating/storing, paper won't work anymore, and physical formats are too ephemeral.
So let's work on putting storage online. The information from 1950 to the present is ironically the most endangered, so we'll have to work at it.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
This Like That - fun with words!
Those supporting English should take care of the spelling.
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
Folks, let us allow it to die in peace.
Here's a Google search on Singlish. My personal favourite is the Coxford Singlish Dictionary.
More than mere navel gazing.
This is an old joke, which I had absolutely no part in creating. Read aloud for best enjoyment, and to annoy your surrounding cube-mates: The European Union commissioners have announced that agreement has been reached to adopt English as the preferred language for European communications, rather than German, which was the other possibility. As part of the negotiations, Her Majesty's Government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a five-year phased plan for what will be known as EuroEnglish (Euro for short). In the first year, "s" will be used instead of the soft "c." Sertainly, sivil servants will resieve this news with joy. Also, the hard "c" will be replaced with "k". Not only will this klear up konfusion, but typewriters kan have one less letter. There will be growing publik emthusiasm in the sekond year, when the troublesome "ph" will be replaced by "f". This will make words like fotograf" 20 persent shorter. In the third year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible. Governments will enkorage the removal of double letters, which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling. Also, al wil agre that the horible mes of silent "e"s in the languag is disgrasful, and they would go. By the fourth year, peopl wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing "th" by "z" and "w" by " v". During ze fifz year, ze unesesary "o" kan be dropd from vords kontaining "ou", and similar changes vud of kors be aplid to ozer kombinations of leters. After zis fifz yer, ve vil hav a reli sensibl riten styl. Zer vil be no mor trubls or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi tu understand ech ozer. Ze drem vil finali kum tru.
There has been some controversey about abbrivations such as "u" for "you" "ur" for "your" etc. Me and my friends often use these over AIM for the ease of use. I would never put these in a paper I was writing for school our I expected teachers/parents/adults in general to read. I don't expect these to be used in anything but e-mail or AIM.
Language is a city to the building of which every human being brought a stone. --Ralph Waldo Emerson
Well we're trying at towerofbabel.com
My name is Carlos Montoya. You share files of my music. Prepare to die.
Doesn't anyone believe in a sort of "Turing-completeness" for human languages?
Just a thought.
After reading the posts, has anyone noticed that the grammar, diction and spelling of those who are pro-preservation of dying languages, is, for the most part, better than the grammar, diction and spelling of those who wouldn't mind languages dying off?
My point being that the awkwardness of cursing in esperanto limits it's expressiveness.
You were saying?
I was trying to bring to mind the typical endian flamewars.
And I was just curious as to which of head-initial vs. head-final corresponded to which of little- vs. big-endian. (Head-initial means noun-adjective and preposition-noun as in Spanish; head-final means adjective-noun and noun-postposition as in Japanese.)
Will I retire or break 10K?
Ha! That was good! R/W priests! What happened to the read-only ones?
Some people here say that disused human langauges are better off forgotten. And yet I bet the same people would prize every new computer languages ever invented. Even Intercal. And Parrot.
No matter how cynical you become, it's never enough to keep up.
That's not a dialect. That's just bullshit colloquial any English speaker could pick up if they spent a month in Singapore.
Yo mama showing half-ball, man!
the Romansch language used in southern Switzerland (one of the four official languages of Switzerland) is a dialect of Latin that was originally spoken around Rome.
Actually, all of Italian came originally from dialects of Latin. Until the unification of Italy, the speakers didn't consider their language "Italian" according to a book by Mario Pei that I once read.
Will I retire or break 10K?
This is exactly why we do not know our past. The percentage of us who care about it is always just low enough that it does not get done well enough in the end.
Not that we are bad, it's that we have other more pressing matters like survival.
Those languages combined tell us a story we will have a much harder time understanding without many of them.
I have often wondered about religion and why it exists. This question is always tied up with our lost roots.
Since each of us always asks these questions at some point, work done to save these languages makes sense. It also makes their loss real once you think past the purely practical matters.
Blogging because I can...
We have invented SMS txt msgs and l33t-sp34k!
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
For me, this is a clear example of ignorance from people who havn't had to work with archival of information. This topic (not connected with language preservation) of data rot has seemingly been done to death on Slashdot in the past, but it still is an important message. For those who are really geninuely researching this topic, please dig into the Slashdot archives for some wonderful gems of posts with some really good examples too.
I was working with a archivist at Utah State University and he was one of the lucky people who got to open a time capsule that was buried in 1950 to be opened for Y2K (there were several of these). One particularly interesting item was a recording that was done with a wire tape recorder. For those not familiar with the system, this is litterally a spool of wire wound around a wheel that looks like a bunch of soldering wire if you didn't know any better. In this case the archivist even was familiar with the equipment, because he was old enough to have used it back in the 1950's. His shock was trying to find some playback equipment for this media. Dispite the fact that hundreds of thousands of these machines were made, very few are left. Even in museums or other places that even had wire recording archives. In a couple of places who claimed to have the equipment, it ended up that the machines were broken and (of course) they couldn't find any spare parts. Sure, they could hire an electrical engineer to make replacement circuits for the vacuum tubes that were broken, but do you honestly think this is possible on a typical archive budget?
The happy story here was that a playback machine was found, and the recording transfered to CD-ROM Redbook audio.
As mentioned in this thread, how long is this medium going to last? Don't count on it for 50 years and I mean it.
I've also written software that has been stored in just about every format that you can think of. Some of the first programs that I wrote were stored on the old Hollerath punch cards, and I (still) have a few 5 1/4" floppy discs formatted for an Apple ][. In this case I have an old Apple ][ that I rescued from a local thrift store for $10, but I am still amazed how many generations of equipment computer hardware has gone through.
Floppy disc drives on most computers currently in use are a joke compared to what was made even ten years ago, partly because the manufacturer is no longer worried about data retrival quality, and the profit margins are so slim that they really can't keep any engineers to tweak and improve performance. This is even discounting discs that accidentally get too close to a strong magnetic field, rough temperature changes (from getting stored in a box in the car garage), or other hazards to archived data.
Frankly, I'm surprised that any of the data has survived. I got a couple of CD-R discs now that are more than five years old, and I'm also seeing a significant bit rot with those archives. Many of these newer CD-ROM drives just won't even read some of the files, or I have to take it from one machine to another just to find one that will read a couple of critical files I've had to pull off. And there is some data that I produced personally that I know I will never be able to retreive, even though I still have the physical media.
This really is a big deal.
Go to www.takingcock.com for sample
Thanks for bringing the url to Dead Media Project again. It was quite a fun some time ago to browse it and read about telex and such things. :-)
Unfortunately it was not updated for quite a long time. Dead Media Project a dead medium?
Look here for further information. Bet Klingon can't match that, even if Shakespeare sounds better in the original Klingon version.
what, you mean like cobol and fortran?
While you're at it, can you retrain them to never again use mm/dd/yy?
Thanks
Ceci n'est pas un sig.
Marklar is the language from South Park from the episode of Starvin' Marvin in Space.
May your Marklar be Marklar. We should Marklar Marklar so we are never confused with Marklar. Marklar is the best Marklar ever, and may Marklar be with Marklar.
Thank you very Marklar!
The guy from deadmedia.org, Tom Jennings ... is the same Tom Jennings of Fidonet fame? :-m
If so, I bow before you, master! ;-)
My weblog in spanish
Haven't you seen enough TV and movies to know that space aliens speak ancient Egyptian?
See Stargate, Battle Star Galactica, X-Files, and many more for references.
Here's an example. Suppose some dying-out tribe has a word for cancer, and a similar (but negated) word for a small plant that grows near their village, because said plant is used to treat cancer. If we lose the language, we lose any hope of retaining the knowledge.
For those not familiar with the system, this is literally a spool of wire wound around a wheel that looks like a bunch of soldering wire if you didn't know any better. In this case the archivist even was familiar with the equipment, because he was old enough to have used it back in the 1950's. His shock was trying to find some playback equipment for this media.
If something was built once, it can be built again. Obviously. In the case of a wire-recorder, I can't imagine that it would be very difficult to build a new wire playback machine. All you would need to do would be to run it through a small electrical coil, and amplify the signal that gets induced. The reason the archivist has so much trouble was because he was ignorant, not because it was hard.
Some of the first programs that I wrote were stored on the old Hollerath punch cards,
Oh my god. All you need to do is look at them to read the data!
I (still) have a few 5 1/4" floppy discs formatted for an Apple ][.
The fact that something is formatted for another computer doesn't mean it can't be read on another computer. Of course, a 5.25 inch drive would be a bit harder to make then a wire-recording playback machine, but there are plenty of 5.25 inch drives out there.
But ultimately, how hard is it to keep the hardware if you want to keep the data? It's your own damn fault for throwing out (or whatever) your apple ][.
I got a couple of CD-R discs now that are more than five years old, and I'm also seeing a significant bit rot with those archives.
Well, I specifically excluded physical degradation from my discussion.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
And some of those constructs are pretty weak -- "everyone's woman" for prostitute.
Is Latin any better?
First, you need a basic grabbag of short expletives that are easily shot off in the heat of passion.
Eventually, semantic change will derive the shorter Esperanto words for private parts into such a function, just as it drove "cunt" from a semi-polite word for vagina to the most offensive word in English.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Of course .. I was kidding (to a degree) about everyone learning Mandarin. English is politically the most "important"/widespread language at the moment. It might not be that way anymore 50 years from now, but it is that way now.
I have been learning esperanto and I have to say that it rocks! It's much more expressive than other languages and FAR easier to learn and use correctly. It actually makes rational sense, which makes it unlikely to become unintelligible over time (many dialects form because the original way to say something was arbitrary anyway while rules have tended to stay put, like the -ed past tense suffix in many indo-european languages). At the same time, because it is so rational you can easily add words and alter words for shades of meaning using a universal system of prefixes and affixes. It is an exciting mental challenge to speak in esperanto because of the degreee of creativity you can use and still be clearly understood. You can change word order for emphasis, as one example. Not the same way, spoken language of english is! It also has some neat modern features like a consistent verb formation of the hypothetical and formation for the rational reasons explaining things. Ancient languages that evolved from a time before people did much speculating and reasoning use strange kludgy adapted verb forms for these things. In my experience, nearly everyone who puts down esperanto doesn't really understand what they are arguing against. It is a language well ahead of 'natural' languages.
and esperanto is still a toy language compared to lojban in terms of expressiveness, creativity, and clarity
Just asking. Qantel is an ancient MRP system that uses qbasic for its programs. It's what I do.
Word Axis
I think you meant:
http://www.talkingcock.com
Thank god no one has put up what one would expect at the URL you gave.
Esperanto is easily the greatest overlooked invention in human history.
And if you think Esperanto is dead, type it in a search engine and see what little results you'll get.
The webpage I master has over 100 links to Esperanto groups and organizations around the world (a quarter of which are in English speaking countries, so if you don't speak E-o yet, you'll still be able to read parts of those sites)
Lernu Esperanton!
Fek! It only seems awkward because it's foreign. Cussing in English is very awkward to those who don't speak it (or just learned it). :)
Esperanto estas fikante esprima.
(Esperanto is -bleep-ing expressive.)
Seemed natural to me. :)
I checked out some websites about Lojban and from experience in trying to promote a constructed language, I must say that one thing that will hinder Lojban are the difficult to follow lessons. Is it a language for the intellectual elite only or for everybody including Joe Sixpack? A true universal language will be spoken by both the Stephen Hawkings and Pauly Shores of the world. It's an interesting concept. Make easier more comprhensible lessons and you might attract more speakers. But probably not since Esperanto rocks! :) Any genius or idiot can learn Esperanto.
...I want to tell you this is the single best post on Slashdot I have read in four years. I have just spent an entire day following up on your erudite and fascinating post. Thank you.
Yes, the northern Indian languages developed from Sanskrit. These include Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, and Bengali. Additionally, the Prakit languages, such as Pali or Magadhi, are important, for one, because many Buddhist scriptures are written in them.
Besides a truly voluminous religious literature, Sanskrit in its Classical development is the language of a rich and diverse body of literature, ranging from epics such as the Ramayana and Mahabharata, to plays by such dramatists as Kalidasa, to political treatises, and even linguistic tracts written several hundred years ago that still amaze today, such as Panini's Vyaakaranasutraah (and various commentaries upon it). The amount of texts in the Sanskrit corpus, in either its Vedic, Epic, or Classical iterations, is staggering.
Sanskrit is certainly not dying out. Its continued existence is crucial for understanding and preserving the ancient and medieval civilization of India, and indeed the world, for it is a rich legacy.
When Alexander Graham Bell died in 1922, the telephone people interrupted
service for one minute in his honor. They've been honoring him intermittently
ever since, I believe.
-- The Grab Bag
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