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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."
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...
I have to agree with this...the only loss will be cultural, but cultures aren't static things frozen in amber in the first place. I wish folks who view the world as rigid and unchanging would learn that reality is dynamic. Nothing lasts forever. Clean out your old baggage and move on.
How can you say that?
Latin isn't being spoken anymore, and not written anymore, but it's not a dead language...
People learn it to enjoy great literature such as Virgilius' Aeneas in the language it was originally written in! Or Catulus his poems, translations aren't even half as good. It also is the foundation of current languages, consult an etymological dictionary and you'll see!
Losing these languages is a very sad thing IMHO.
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.
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...
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.
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 -*-
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
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.
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Call this flamebait but... I think you guys don't appreciate the value of language diversity. When languages die, stuff dies with them. Beyond just cultural reference points. You couldn't possibly take a language spoken by some isolated tribe and convert it word-for-word into English. Things would be lost. Just like there's stuff you can do in COBOL but not in C and vice versa.
It's only through knowing these rare, dying languages that scientists have been able to talk to indigenous people and discover so-called wonder drugs in remote jungles etc.
IANAL (that's L for Linguist) but I know that diversity is a good thing. If we all spoke English, well, damn that would be like if we all used Windows.
G4 Hackintosh
People aren't eating McDonald's hamburgers because they've been forced to under an imperialistic dictum...they're eating them because they like a cheap, easy meal
Indeed. This for me seems to be the "trap" of "modern" western culture. The technology and conveniences are powerfully alluring, and ultimately any non-isolated culture is going to voluntarily gravitate towards it, seeking its benefits (and perceived status). You can't stop it. Most kids of other cultures will pick Playstations over traditional toys. People like things like cellphones. Not to mention the benefits of western medicine and medical technologies.
Some people of other cultures (e.g. here in South Africa) would like to see their people return to a "traditional" lifestyle, but it can never happen as long as new generations are exposed to "our" (western) culture - its like a Pandora's box, it cannot be closed again. Its unstoppable, because no rational person can argue against the obvious benefits of the technologies our culture has produced. None of this is really a bad thing, as such, because people are ultimately just choosing what they believe is best for them, and surprise surprise, they like cellphones, cars, Playstations etc. So this isn't necessarily a bad thing. But it can be. Language and culture form an important part of how people define themselves, of their identity. This shouldn't be underestimated. Many people are attracted by all the "shiny things" our culture has to offer in terms of material wealth and 'fancy gadgets' and nice houses, nice cars etc, and in many cases choose to give up (either partially or entirely) their own language and culture. And once its too late, they may find out just how empty, unfulfilling and alienating our culture can be (not saying it inherently is, but it clearly can be).
But on the whole, people nowadays are making their own choices, and they are voluntarily choosing things like McDonalds.
In a certain sense though, people don't really have a "choice", as such: people have to choose our culture, because it is really the only option available that makes sense in today's society. You need to make money to pay rent and buy food, you need a job to make money, you need an education to get a job, better education = better job, you need a car to get around, etc etc. So in a certain sense people are, very loosely speaking, "forced" to choose this culture.
All the same reasons apply to why its difficult as a "westerner" to choose another cultural lifestyle even if you want to. Sure I would like to go live in the middle of nowhere somewhere or in some central Amazonian rainforest, catching and/or growing my own food etc. But some obvious questions arise, apart from luxuries ("give up Internet?"), but more practically, "where would I get my contact lenses / glasses from?", "what happens if I get sick or break a leg?" etc.