Slashdot Mirror
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!
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...
You do realize, that even if there was one world language, that everyone understood by tomorrow, given enough time, dialects would sprout, then entire new languages?
-
ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
Most of the languages that are slated for extinction probably don't have any documents that need to be preserved in their language only. Lots of them never developed writing on their own, so there's nothing to worry about translating in the future. The British Celts, for example, had this problem. No writing means you have to have a class of scholars (or something like it) to preserve and pass on knowledge. In the case of the Celts, kill the druids, as Julius Caesar did, and their wisdom is destroyed forever.
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...
Good point, but I'd say it proves the opposite. Your example just shows that the english language is evolving, which is a clear sign that it's alive and far from dying.
Here is the answer. When the issue came up, the US decided to go it alone and do things their own way. Now that it is twenty five years later, the need to change over is greater than ever and the expense involved is exponentially higher than it was then. The money that the USA wastes now on converting all incoming and outgoing products is considerable. Far more than the costs of conversion.
Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power.
OK, I'll feed the troll.
The issue of what language people should speak was never at hand; your comment is a total non-sequetur, and is off topic.
The issue is the preservation of languages which are fast becoming historical. The reason it is a big deal is that we lose part of history if we do not. The language itself is of significance to historians, but futhermore, all of the literature and linguistic art of that culture is lost to us if the language in which they exist is lost to the knowledge of human kind.
Let me give you a little example. You almost certainly are familiar with the word "troubador". You may have a vague sense that is refers to a sort of medieval minstrel.
What it refers to is an elite of songwriters, "trobadors", in the 12th and 13th centuries, famed for the quality of their lyrics, and for the fact that, unlike the "serious" artists of the rest of Europe at that time who wrote in Latin, they wrote in their vernacular. We now call that language "Old Occitan", though they did not call it that.
For some eight centuries -- right through to the present day -- their fame as lyricists was so great that the word for them has become a common noun. Their craft was legendary for centuries after their home land was conquered in the Albigensian Crusade, and their worldly, sensuous art repressed by the Church.
I'm willing to bet you have never heard a single word of trobador verse, neither in the original nor in translation. This is the single most famous body of literature in the history of Europe, and you have never heard a single word of it.
The reason why is that the trobadors loved word play -- e.g. double-entrendres, extremely tight rhymes -- and invented complicated poetic forms (you have a trobador to thank or curse for the sestina). The result is that while the sense of a troubador song may be translated, translating the form, bringing all the witty word play which was the point of their craft, into another language is pretty close to impossible. They even managed to invent a kind of rhyme (rims derivatatius) which is close to impossible to execute in English, requiring, as it does, a syllable's length difference in congugation of verbs or declention of nouns.
So if you want to appreciate the most famous poetry in the history of Europe, you have to learn Old Occitan and read it in the original.
And that is one example of why it is so important to preserve dead and dying languages. So that, should some weirdo in the future actually care about the bounty of the human artistic acheivement through time, the door to the libraries of the past may yet be unlocked by those crazy enough to learn the keys.
We preserve languages for the same reason we don't burn libraries.
-*- Any technology indistinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced -*-
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
I imagine that if you polled the American populace in general, you might find more support for this than you think exists. I think you would find that the only group strongly opposed would be the very old and the poorly educated.
Now, try polling the populace in
utter rubbish
I'd much rather have one lanuguage with many dialects than the current state of many languages with many dialects. For example, if necessary, even the most uneducated speakers of two dialects of English (take Cockney and Ebonics) could find a common vocabulary on which to build a conversation. They might have to dial it back to the 2nd grade but they'd still find a way to communicate.
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.
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.
"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.
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?
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.
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...