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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."
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
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!
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.
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
Sanskrit you ignorant maggot :-)
And yes, it is spoken and in active use. Every Hindu religious ceremony is in Sanskrit, and every priest and read/write and speak it. Given that there are 800 millions plus Hindus, that's a lot of Sanskrit out there.
Swahili isn't a tribal language; it's a trade language developed mostly in coastal towns and contains bits and pieces of a lot of other languages. Also, cannibalism is virtually unknown in sub-Saharan Africa. At least know something about a language (and culture) you deride.
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.
Latin isn't being spoken anymore, and not written anymore, but it's not a dead language...
I would be more careful with the phrase "dead language" if I were you. It has a particular meaning. Latin is definately: "no longer used as the primary language of any indigenous human community." Latin is very much a "dead language".
Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes. -- Walt Whitman
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.
Well we're trying at towerofbabel.com
My name is Carlos Montoya. You share files of my music. Prepare to die.
Wrong. Not many "know" Sanskrit. Yes, religious ceremonies are in Sanskrit but not many understand it. And majority of those who understand don't write in Sanskrit. But Sanskrit still prevails as an optional language to study at school - and is never seen in common speech. However, many Indian languages originated from Sanskrit, and borrow vocabulary from it.