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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!
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...
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.
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
Translating the bible? And here I've been thinking that it helped in translating Egyptian hieroglyphs. Boy is my face red.
You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here.
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.
)
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...
I agree. Let's start by retraining the 275 million people in the United States to all use the metric system like the other 5.8 billion people on the planet do. Then we'll move on to language.
Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
The world does have a common language. English. Just ask any English speaking person. If you're talking to someone that doesn't appear to understand english you just have to speak slower and louder.
All Space Aliens also speak english.
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?
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 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
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 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.
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.
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?
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...