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."
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.
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.
This is similar to observing animals in zoos versus the wild. Preserving and observing charismatic macrofauna in zoos is a far cry from the understanding and marvel of observing them in their natural habitat. Somethings you may never understand until you see them in the wild. Take flamingos, they eat a crustatian that eventually makes them pink (they are born white.) If we feed them bird food we would never know what they really look like.
Reality is that which refuses to go away when I stop believing in it. --Phillip K. Dick (remove SPAM to email)
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.
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.
And how much anthropological information are we losing because languages change anyway? How many people know or understand the roots of a phrase like "the devil's in the details" now, let alone 1000 years from now? And that's in a language that is active and growing and studied by tens of thousands of people every day. Sure, it's a scientific loss when a tribe shrugs its shoulders and wanders out of the brush and into suburbia, but it's a scientific loss every time I scratch an itch and a few mutated DNA strands get stranded in the foresaken purgatory beneath my fingernails. And what would have folks do about this? Forbid tribal members from seeking what they see as a better life elsewhere? Force some of us to learn a tongue that fewer speak than Innuit? I'm sorry, but there are bigger things for most of us to be concerned about, but if it concerns you, then pick a dying culture and dedicate your life to its preservation, because that's the only fair and rational solution that I can see.
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 !)
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.
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
History, as they say, bears repeating until you learn from it. Ignorance towards its preservation, study, and understanding is one of the greatest problems of our time. History helps people understand what is going on in the world *today* and how that will shape the future.
I'm working on a project right now called the Omushkego Oral History Project for the University of Winnipeg and Canadian Heritage, whose goal is to preserve the Cree language spoken around Northern Manitoba and Ontario. It has opened my eyes to a really large tragedy in North America.
We have a chance to learn about the history of North America from another perspective than the "winners", something you currently don't learn about in high school history class. This is important for Canada as a country because it allows us to understand our history more fully, and to understand how prior actions have resulted in social issues, including racism, that exist today. This helps us improve our decision making process by being more aware of what the results of our decisions might be. It is also necessary to help us solve the problems we have today, which is necessary in order to move forward. History and cultural preservation, or at least documentation and understanding, is a necessary part of this.
In Star Trek Nemesis, Picard stated that to be human was to seek to improve oneself. One of the crucial ways of doing that is by learning about our history. Without that, we're a lost cause.
I agree that culture is both moving and unique, and is not shared just as a society or community, but cultural differences exist between individuals as well. In order to build a more effective culture and sense of morality for yourself, you need more than just your own perspective, or your potential for growth cannot be realized.
putfwd.com - 1GB Free file storage with a twist
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.
There will be in the not so distant future. That language will be called English. It may not be the English you and I speak, but it will be a form of it. Why? English is common, and is a simple language. Don't let others tell you it isn't. It doesn't have multiple cases, declination (or declension), etc. There are many exceptions in English, but the same as many languages.
However, there is a good reason to keep other languages around, beyond academic interest. Take German, for example. The language is fairly complicated, but as I learned German, my understanding of English increased. I speak and write better English than before I learned German. Now, while you and I wouldn't learn or study dead languages, a researcher could see something useful, use it in their writing, others pick up on it, and it spreads, until you and I use it daily. I think its a great idea to preserve languages. Granted, I like language, so I may be biased.
Slashdot is a waste of time. I enjoy wasting time.
Language is a city to the building of which every human being brought a stone. --Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ah! The metric system is really superior. Do you know how many feet in a yard, how many feet in a mile, how many yards in a mile? 12 inches in a foot. Have you ever measured something in thought, is that 3/8 of an inch or 5/6. Which is smaller. 2 cups in a pint, 8 pints in a gallon, but how many teaspoons in a cup? How many ounces in a pound? 16. How many pounds in a ton? 2000. All seems arbitrary to me.
The US system is stupid and as an American I'd love to see that switch. Then I'd know the answer to mostly everything measurement wise is a factor of ten! 10 millimeters to a centimeter. 100 centimeters to a meter. How many millimeters to a meter? Easy! Is there an in between? I think it's a decameter but I could be wrong. Anyway divide by 10. How many meters in a kilometer? 1000! Easy. How many grams in a kilogram? Read the last question stupid! ^.^
The canadians way back when (I think 20's or 30's) switched driving from the left handed side (like the brits) over to the right handed side. How did they do it? Overnight they had their army switch the road signs while not allowing anyone to drive and voila, it was done.
How did the Europeans switch from their currencies to the Euro? Several years planning and public discussion, but when it came time, overnight (I think) they made it official and the actual conversion took place over the course of several months.
That is how metric conversion should be done. Everything from now on is labeled metrically. No ands, ifs, or buts. People will complain, but if forced to use it, they will, and this standard nonsense will be forgotten in less than a generation. Metric education as it is now is stupid, a waste of money, and worthless on my 'use it or lose it' principle on how human minds work.
I guess it's hardly suprising really. People interested in languages, dying or not, are much more likely to have studied languages at some point because of their interest. Although obviously everybody learns grammar at the intuitive level, being taught grammar from a text book appears to be a lot less common - in England for instance we are not taught english grammar at all in most schools. The only place we have exposure to grammar rules is in learning foreign languages. Although this won't necessarily improve your knowledge of your native grammar, the sheer thought you have to apply to writing in another language could make you consider the structure of your own.
I speak reasonable German and have studied French, Russian and Spanish to varying degrees. I always type out text messages in full words and sentances , it vexes me when I receive "c u l8r" type messages.
It might be interesting to know the educational background with respect to languages of the various GrammarNazi people who at least used to prowl slashdot.
Cheers,
Roger
Do you have any better hostages?
But even if you aren't interested in a particular dead language and culture, other people might be. Especially future generations. Linguistic diversity was one of the great wonders of the human mind for the past 5000 years or more -- and now it's dying out. Anyone who's learnt a foreign language, especially one that is fairly unrelated to their native tongue, will vouch for the value and power that learning a different way of thinking provides. Words that are not directly translatable between languages remind us sharply that the little part of the world we grew up in is a tiny part of a much bigger place.
And this is ignoring all the value to be gained for both soft and hard sciences, and indeed other fields of thinking, in understanding other cultures. To take only an obvious example, if we can't translate readily between different dead human languages, we'll find it much more difficult to translate any non-human language we might encounter in a SETI search.