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The World's Languages Are Fast Becoming Extinct
Ant sends news of a report, released a couple of weeks back by the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages in Oregon, on the alarming rate of extinction of the world's languages. While half of all languages have gone extinct in the last 500 years, the half-life is dropping: half of the 7,000 languages spoken today won't exist by the year 2100. The NY Times adds this perspective: "83 languages with 'global' influence are spoken and written by 80 percent of the world population. Most of the others face extinction at a rate, the researchers said, that exceeds that of birds, mammals, fish and plants."
I for one welcome our new Chinese/English speaking overlords.....its the first step to having Firefly back on TV.
Wouldn't this be a good thing? Less languages will mean more people speaking the same one, thus promoting better communication.
So, in the future, it will be easier for people to communicate globally. Who cares about the old cruft?
Not everything that is old, traditional, or entrenched has the value nostalgia makes us want to apply to it.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
The less barriers for global human communication, the better. No, we haven't lost anything important. Human language always has the same features, just different sounds and grammar.
"I don't know that atheists should be considered citizens, nor should they be considered patriots." George HW Bush
Improving the ability for people to communicate is a postive thing, not a negative.
Just curious why this is a big deal. It would be nice if we all spoke some common language, like Minnesotan.
Lojban will consume all.
To me, extinction of lots of languages is a good thing ( especially if it includes COBOL :). With one common language, we may have a better chance of understanding each other. Remember the biblical tale of Babel, in which the profusion of languages was supposedly a punishment? How did we acquire the idea that languages have some values of their own? A language is a tool, to be replaced with a better one when it comes along.
I want to stop this unmanaged fishing of languages before they all go extinct! Where's my big rubber boat? Let's stop these language trawlers and hit them where it hurts!
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
Good. Communication is a good thing. Less languages == better chance of communication with other people from all over the planet == human race evolves towards a better future.
Heh. That reminds me of an old joke. What do you call a person who knows 3 languages? 'trilingual' What do you call a person who knows 2 languages? 'bilingual' What do you call a person who knows 1 language? 'American'.
A few decades from now, we'll all be speaking spanish!
This is my sig.
Not quite sure how yet, but have a feeling that SUV's are in part responsible for this.
Table-ized A.I.
forty or fifty different languages consisting only of clicks? Many of these languages are spoken only by one or two tiny tribes many in papua new guinea alone. Sure it's sad but c'est la vie.
I think this has to do with globalization. It's become easier to move around, so one has to learn the most common languages (English and French) in order to succeed. It's not necessarily a bad thing, but it might not be all that good for certain things either, as seen here...
US businesses that currently accept chip and PIN/signature
What will happen to the grammatical, pronunciation, and spelling differences between British English and American English (as well as others)?
For example, British English uses collective nouns (Microsoft are instead of Microsoft is) while American English thinks of the collective noun as singular.
In the contrary, American English uses subjunctive form while it seems British English doesn't use it .
Then you have all of the people that don't understand the differences between intransitive (takes no object) and transitive. (Lay and lie, anyone?)
What is going to happen to the English language? Increasingly, I see blatant grammatical errors on signs in big box stores, advertising, and even documentation!
Is grammatically correct English where the native speakers understand the differences of English in different countries?
How students possible learn a native language like German and hope to speak it correctly with the proper articles if they don't even the grammar rules of a language with commonalities with the language that they would like to learn?
Is this why foreign languages are dying? Or is it imperialism? Or is modern communication technology giving English even more priority over other languages?
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Protected mode > real mode
Maybe things will turn out like Firefly/Serenity predicted: Mandarin Chinese and English would be left as the two languages spoken by all humans.
I know that Mandarin is slowly taking over in China with its a hundred plus dialects of Chinese. Even dialects with millions of speakers are falling into disuse by the younger people who prefer to speak Mandarin instead of their native dialect. The government has put no effort into this but since they use Mandarin in school everyone in my generation can speak it. It then becomes a networking effect or Metcalfe's law. Mandarin is just much more useful than the other dialects because you have a billion speakers instead of just a few million. Why bother using those? Plus the regional dialects are what the parents and grandparents use. Mandarin is the cooler, hipper dialect.
It'll be sad when the regional dialects die out because some of them are much older than Mandarin and some classical Chinese poems only rhyme properly in the south dialects such as Cantonese.
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Damn you global warming.
According to a report released Monday by the Modern Language Association, speakers of the Star Trek-based Klingon language outnumber individuals fluent in Navajo by a margin of more than seven-to-one.
"Navajo, a 3,000-year-old Native American tonal language belonging to the Athabaskan/Na-Dené group of tongues, is clearly dying and will likely be extinct by 2010," MLA president Frederick Toback said. "Fortunately, though, the sad, steady decline of this once-proud Native American tongue has been more than offset by a rising interest in Klingon culture."
And it makes it easier for law enforcement to understand what is said in wiretaps.
Hope the next one to go is 1337speak.
You forgot Spanish.
"Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars then anything else in the history of creation."
I recently heard that a language goes extinct every 14 days, which for some reason pisses me off. No, I'm not pissed off that languages are going away (though I can see more value in them than some here), but rather that it would be expressed that way. Clearly it is meaningless to talk about this kind of change in a time frame of days, so the only reason to state "every 14 days", instead of a more meaningful figure like 250/decade would be to try to manipulate the listener into action.
But while linguists would like to make this out to be a calmity similar to wildlife extinction (hence the manipulation), there really is no practical solution to this situation; you can't force a language to live on - people either have a use for it, or they don't.
70% of the world can't even read or write their own languages.
a single language will go a long way towards resolving disputes and possibly even wars.
Different cultures must assimilate into the global culture or become obsolete.
On the other hand, these disappearing cultures have a lot to teach us.
Tribal wisdom must be translated and passed down to be preserved for the remainder of human history.
They're using their grammar skills there.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Languages have always come and gone... actually, I guess they've mostly gone as communication over wider geographies has become possible.
Anyway, I propose that we make giant stone cut modern day equivalents of the Rosetta Stone so that future archaeologists will have something to kickstart translation efforts when they pull fragments of text off of buried DVDs or whatever we leave behind.
This is merely another symptom of humanity lurching steadily toward a drab, gray, intellectually sterile future, where cultural diversity will be eclipsed by monotony. In a monolingual, monocultural future, people all around the globe will be able to talk alright, but there will be much less to talk about.
Ah, well. As the late great Kurt Vonnegut wrote, "So it goes."
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
> Maybe things will turn out like Firefly/Serenity predicted: Mandarin Chinese
> and English would be left as the two languages spoken by all humans.
Japanese apparently survived into the Firefly era. I can't recall actually hearing any dialogue in it, but there were definitely several instances of written Japanese (hiragana and katakana) visible in the series.
cya,
john
Imagine all the people...
YEAH BT NU 1S R BEN UZD EVRY DAY TO AIGHT
(Stoopid lameness filter)
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
The (in)ability of the world to communicate with each other has very little do with language and syntax, rather semantics, tolerance, and understanding are the issues. The loss of languages is sad. It's a sign of losing the past that has much to offer. No, the good old days weren't always perfect but when a language is lost, the songs of the past are also lost. No, translations aren't the same.
I've been to Papua-New Guinea, which alone has 800 languages. One village I stayed in spoke a language that 10,000 people spoke. They sang a song for me about an old story, a myth if you may, of a girl and boy who were separated by a river but also separated by things that went way beyond a river. I have no idea what a single word was that they sang but it had an effect of me that wouldn't have been there if they sang in English. It's their story, in their language. It's their songs of the past that are worth preserving for the future. If there should come a day when those words are forgotten, I will mourn.
nt
Often wrong but never in doubt.
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Everyone knows me.
I eagerly await finding out how George Bush is to be blamed for this.
It's the culture. Expiring languages take with them many different cultures. When the world "normalizes" the language, we will all become culturally similar.
Of the thousands of remaining languages, hundreds are ancient American Indian languages spoken by four or fewer living persons, all over the age of eighty. Once, maybe ten years ago, my Dad and I looked these old languages up. I can't imagine how many of those five hundred or so have died since then. Perhaps the languages we should be most concerned about are the ones with written literature and history. If someday, no one can speak some arbitrary hunting language with no writings or recorded history, I don't believe humanity has lost anything particularly important.
Yes! Now that everyone is finally picking up on THE language, Esperanto, soon everyone will understand everyone else!!
tm
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I don't know how to say how I feel about that report. Maybe the right word has gone extinct.
Other than "So what"...I don't think there is much more to say....
For everyone saying "good, getting rid of languages to use a few common ones will facilitate better communication", you forget that while there are plenty of words with common ground (the same definition usually), having different languages breeds different concepts. One of the most important tools humanity has at it's disposal, besides language, is imagination, which is related to randomly or selectively combining different ideas, concepts and other data. By filtering out languages to favor one language, solely for the advantage of improved communication between individuals, you are _also_ filtering out perceptions generated by the different base concepts found in different languages.
In short, losing diversity of language is akin to losing the diversity of species in nature, which nobody in their right mind considers a good thing. You're losing differences that encourage change and even growth, especially when you bring two different cultures of language together. After they had gone their separate ways in days of old, we've brought them together again in modern times and learned what each culture discovered by looking at the world in various different aspects. But just like so many people in technology see the advantage of NOT having an OS mono-culture, we should also see the advantage of not having a mono-culture of human language.
I'd even go so far as to say that separation and re-merging of cultures of languages should be an encouraged social cycle in my opinion. Learn separately, come together later and compare notes, and repeat process. Is that a perspective anyone else bothered to think of, or were you too interested in making sure anyone in the world could understand you when you asked for food, clothing, shelter, money, internet access and/or porn?
Just as it's annoying when people act like English/French/Chinese/etc are some great, special, uniquely wonderful language...I don't find some language spoken by 1 person in some remote area special either.
However, human language capability IS amazing and unique.
There have been thousands of cultures that have developed, sometimes to world-conquering levels, then faded and disappeared. Some did so naturally through being unable to self-sustain, others were the result of genocide or forced assimilation. Whether you feel sad about it or not, if Hitler had succeeded the Jewish culture would definitely not be the first to disappear through violent means. Not by a long shot.
The difference now is that there are forces that speed up the extinction of non-self-sustaining types of cultures. Here in Canada there are more than a few First Nations languages which no more than a couple of people still speak. These are being recorded and documented as quickly as possible but it is understood that these will die out as soon as there is no one who needs to use them as part of their daily existence.
Is it sad that this is happening? Only if you don't realize the fact that the only reason there are so many different languages on earth is because of historic geographic isolation of all the different peoples. With instant worldwide communication and the ability to travel to just about any spot on the earth within a day or two, the conditions that allowed disparate languages and cultures to develop in the first place no longer exist.
That being said, languages are still developing and evolving, but now due more to artificial forces such as intentional introduction of slang as personal identification and new technologies and methods that need new terms to describe. e.g.: "Double-click the minimize control to select the desired HDMI input". Perfectly understandable to you and me, complete gibberish to most people over 50. And that's just in English.
We live in interesting times. The second case of technological development having a profound effect on all mankind, the first being the industrial revolution. I believe this second phase will have a much greater effect than the first.
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
Click click, bloody click... PANCAKES!
Various words just have no real translation. "Gesellig" (Dutch) just means so much more than the dictionary equivalents: genial, social. Similarly "mana" (Maori) means more than just pride or spirit.
Kill a language and you kill a culture. Kill a culture and you end up with disaffected people. You just need to look at Inuit, Uustalian Aboriginal and various other groups to see that this is a bad thing.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
would it be a good things if most of the worlds religions are facing extinction, wouldn't that be a good thing? Less wars? ...
Just out of curiosity,
What religion was China with 129,000,000 dead in the 20th century?
What religion was the USSR with 72,000,000 dead in the 20th century?
What religion where the Nazi's with 21,000,000 dead?
What religion was Cambodia with 2,035,000 dead?
That brings us to ~200,000,000 for Communism, and atheist creed, and 21,000,000 for Nazism a pseudo-religious creed (IIRC, its official religious view was a state concocted Lutheranism with Paganism and a heavy dose of militarism, obviously designed to ween the population off Christianity and onto state controlled propoganda)
Yeah, obviously religion is the problem.
In fact, the only major religion that has Holy War as a major tenet of its religion is Islam. Islam actually divides the world into The House of Submission and the House of War.
Christianity doesn't have it. Not anywhere in the New Testament. The Crusades where a response to Islamic Holy War. Christianity didn't have the concept until then. And, the Crusades started because the Byzantines requested Frankish aid to defend against the Muslims (and got much more than they bargained for).
Judaism may have religious war in the Mosaic books, but they haven't practiced religious war since they Assyrians (IIRC).
In fact, most major religions have that "Do not murder" thing (The King James Bible mis-translated the Hebrew as "Do not kill"). So, wars occur despite the moral constraints put in place by religion.
Yes, it is good that people can communicate as we move towards a one-world language. It breaks down a powerful barrier to understanding, as language is deeply intertwined with culture, history, and worldview.
So thats good, practically speaking.
Unfortunately, since language is so powerful in molding minds, we lose a lot when a language dies. We lose profound knowledge about a culture and the way it sees the world. To an anthropologist or linguist, this loss is irreplacable, which is why there are projects about whose goal is to record native languages before thier last speaker dies. Piecing together the natural history of humanity becomes that much harder when language dies.
Like everything else, you take the good with the bad.
Basically, here is what's in store for future Americans in the next 50 years.
1. English is still the primary language, but learning Spanish is a *requirement* in public education.
2. Not an official requirement, but learning Chinese is required if you wish to maintain competitive via tapping into the Chinese market.
So one could say that future Americans will learn English, Spanish, and Chinese. Combine them, and you've got Spanglishinese!
Life is not for the lazy.
There are many languages that are spoken, not written. It is passed from generation to generation. I met with a Professor Lori Levin at CMU. She was involved in a project to preserve these languages.
Fight Spammers!
An ignorant racist joke gets moderated funny.
But an actual fact from the latest government census is marked flamebait, not informative?
Now here's an opinion, Slashdot moderation needs a serious overhaul.
My father spoke five languages - none of which I learned to speak more than a few mumbles here and there. But I could see how different languages were better at expressing different emotions, different ideas, different viewpoints in life. Some languages have such a strong system of honorifics and class in them - others are deviod of that, but have different terms spoken by the different sexes as a reflection of cultural differences. There are some with phonetic alphabets, others more pictoral, some with a blend of the two. The variety and beauty of human languages is every bit as beautiful as works of music, painting, sculpture.... Should we let the last man who knows how to build a piano die because there are enough other musical instruments out there?
Forget the structure of languages - what about all the ideas WRITTEN or SPOKEN in them that become forever inaccesable? How many of the Shakespeare's, Archemedes', Sun-Tzu's will be gone forever?
Should we apply the same concepts to computer languages? Data structures? 'Who cares, we have better stuff now, we'll never need to read that old stuff again.'
Language is a unique expression of humanity, and I think it is something worth preserving - even if it is not as practical as having Chinglish taking over the world.
Damn, Hollywood! I blame you!
..if not, how come the Bible is written in English when Jesus was a Hebrew?
We're seriously behind schedule on that Tower of Babel project.
About the only good thing here is the introduction of newer materials. Labor costs have gone way up, and you can't even get slaves anymore.
Deliberate extinction as a tool to force others to conform is not something that I approve of, but if the people voluntarily switch, I couldn't care less and would probably call it a good thing. I mean, language is not like cuisine or dress. It has it's value only in that other people understand it. I imagine that the members of the groups who spoke these languages will still eat the same stuff; they'll just require fewer translators.
...most of those 'l33t' languages are now seen for what they are, and people who use them are being ridiculed.
Now if only I could get my mother to stop trying to 'unthaw' the turkey before dinner. Thawing it would be much more effective than trying to cook a frozen-solid bird.
If two people with obscure and different languages both learn a useful (common in trade) language, then suddenly they can talk with each other. They learn to say things like "Let me get you a cup of coffee", "You look lovely", "Why don't you come up to my place for lunch", "I love you", "Marry me", "Why don't you come to bed with me" and "Fuck me!".
The kids will be bi-lingual or tri-lingual, sure, but the useful language is most important in their lives. It works with both parents, and it works in trade. They can use the better schools and get the better jobs. The other languages rot in their minds.
Then come the grandkids. The grandkids might learn a few words of the obscure languages. They learn the equivalents of "hello", "goodbye", "grandma", and "grandpa". The language is really lost at this point.
In the next generation or two, even that is forgotten. Good riddence.
But seriously. This reminds me of the Futurama episode where Prof. Farnsworth shows Qbert his universal translator that, "unfortunately only translates into some incomprehensible dead language." Qbert says "hello" into the machine which translates it as "Bon Jour."
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Go ahead. Learn an obscure language, then refuse to speak/listen/read/write with anything else. See how far that gets you in life.
Your employment value will be nearly zero. If you have a wife, she will probably leave you. Dating will be near impossible; you'll have to rely on pity when your money runs out.
For bonus points, you can refuse to use arabic numerals and/or the decimal system.
Oh, you think you can have a second language? No. Survival of obscure languages depends on isolation. Obscure languages quickly die when there is an alternative. French and Spanish can survive next to each other long-term because neither one dominates the other. An obscure language is not so secure.
Even though we loose all or most languages or may it become one, we are still forgetting the fact that the deaf have their own language. Sign language will unify society. We can all get along if we all learn to sign since the start of birth. http://www.lifeprint.com/
The Living Languages Institute is just the latest of a number of organizations devoted to the study and/or maintenance and revitalization of endangered languages. Here are some other organizations and sources of information:
I am just stunned. I realize the majority of people here are probably monolingual and probably living in North America, but the majority of posts here seem to be along the lines of "Well it doesn't affect me, so who gives a f**k?" or "If they are dying out, they are just cruft". At least some people see the value in everyone having a common language - but thats the best argument for everyone to learn a SECOND language, not for us to just abandon all of the smaller languages out there.
You see, a lot of those languages are dying out because the speakers of the more monolithic languages have forced them into extinction. We have made speaking many Native American languages illegal in the past, abused the cultures and people involved and slowly strangled their native language speaking populations to the point where they have all died off or are doing so daily. We have marginalized many small linguistic groups by the overwhelming power of Western culture and advertising, by refusing to learn their languages and insisting they learn ours or suffer the consequences. Thats a tragedy, nothing less.
Each language is more than just a medium of communications between people, its the encapsulation of an entire way of thinking, of a cultural world-view. When a language dies out, a small piece of humanity and human achievement goes with it. We are all lessened by the death of each language, and with it each culture that dies out.
I would think the programmers here would be the first to get it: You can program some things in certain programming languages, express some concepts, much more effectively and efficiently than in others. You can do anything in any language certainly, but some lean one way or another, some are more expressive and some more rigidly defined. Luckily we rarely lose a programming language, they just go out of style for the majority of users, but as long as someone is willing to write a compiler, we can keep using one. That is not true of human languages. Once they are gone, they are gone completely, and with them a unique way of thinking, and a unique way of viewing the world and expressing ideas about it. Languages quite honestly give you a completely different way of thinking and its a shame to lose that.
New languages effectively don't happen, or at best rarely and I imagine its almost impossible for a new language to evolve in the modern day. Human linguistic evolution is essentially a living version of the Highlander maxim "there can be only one", or at best maybe 2. It doesn't have to be inevitable though, we can preserve dying languages, and with them the cultures they belong to. It just takes more effort than most people are willing to engage in, and sadly - like the majority of posters here - it doesn't seem to worry those who speak the major languages, particularly the world's piranha of a language English.
If you want to have some good insight into this issue, I would suggest reading this book: Spoken Here and perhaps: When Languages Die: The Extinction of the World's Languages and the Erosion of Human Knowledge The steady extinction of our world's languages is a human crisis in my opinion, and we all lose when another language dies, even if we don't realize it."The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
Alarming rate? It's not like some (important) animal species is / are becoming extinct, which could potentially have devastating consequences for life on earth; less languages means a higher chance that two people speak the same language, thus facilitating communication. Nothing wrong with that, as far as I can tell.
I hope PHP goes extinct soon, and people come up with more standard everyday idioms (libs) for Lisp (sure you can make up your own macros but talking to yourself all the time gets old quite fast).
Oh you mean like stuff spoken by a tribe of 60 people in Papua New Guinea? Who cares? Only the linguists care, and they make up their own languages all the time, it's no big deal. Tolkien made up a few (based on Finnish or something).
Sure it's a good thing if people are able to speak in more than one language - if only to be more familiar with the idea of not being able to express a thought in a particular language. But don't need thousands of languages around to do that.
Go get the linguists to prove that keeping those languages alive is so important. I'd rather they just take the best of the useful ideas, syntax, grammars and document them for later use.
Since I am currently employed as an English Teacher in Korea, does that make me part of the problem? I don't see it as a big issue if a language dies off because no one chooses to speak it anymore. I think it is important to record and document the languages before they are gone forever, but when a language dies due to a lack of interest, who cares? I do have a problem with languages being forced out of people. My grandmother was beaten if she spoke Gaelic in school. Now they invest millions to support the language. go figure.
-I only code in BASIC.-
I can't wait until there only a handful of languages. Maybe we'll understand each-other better and have fewer wars (as for the Babel fish reference: I'd argue that the LACK of understanding and misunderstandings / mis-translations caused MORE wars than good communication...)
Language is primarily a means of communication.
Have too many and the meaning will get lost in the noise.
There are plenty of other avenues to express cultural identity that do not hinder mankind.
Having maybe 3-4 different languages would be fine, just to keep things interesting, but hundreds is a total waste of human brain power.
By the way, English is not my native language, and I'd be happy to "drop" my native language for a "universal" one.
Languages are NOT just a form of inert communication, but are help form a culture with all its variety, richness and tradition. Check our Benjamin Lee Whorf's research. Here in Papua New Guinea there are over 800 languages - nearly a fifth of the world total - and they represent a unique, valuable and diverse way of seeing the world, expressing a culture and provide a Noah's Ark for cultural traditions (music, dance, stories). Don't underestimate the value of any language! For example there are thoughts and ideas experessed in certain languages which cannot be translated effectively into say English. Eg how many Inuit words are there for snow? Do you know there is a tribe here in PNG which count in a base 30 number system (a product of their language/culture/history)? To lose even one more language is a loss to all humanities cultural heritage. There are words for ceremonies and beliefs in my wife's language (she is from the PNG Highlands) which have no English equivalent. Her language is spoken by only around 200,000 people Do you really have no regrets about losing this? Wakai wei diwaa!!!
You might be interested in knowing that there is a huge effort here at the University of Alaska to preserve the various languages (at least 20) that are spoken by indigenous Alaska natives http://www.uaf.edu/anlc/ . The cool thing that ties it to where I work on campus (the supercomputing center) is that the language center is digitizing many of the tapes of Native speakers and archiving the data on our mass storage system. It's a really neat blend of using modern tech to preserve ancient knowledge (some of the languages are only now spoken by 2 or 3 people).
Right, if Arabic and Hebrew were replaced by English there would be a lot less violence because everyone would be spending all of their time trying to figure out the stupid spelling!
Sorry guys, but most comments are just ridiculous.
When a particular sentence gets a stigma of NewSpeak, many people are suddenly quoting Orwell and 1984. But when a whole language disappears, it's more efficient and therefor good ??
*Does not compute*
We will all speak Common. The intelligent ones will still get bonus languages.
A good, working knowledge of grammar is very important. I find it very difficult to read anything that is littered with blatant spelling and grammar errors. If you want to learn another language, you better understand your own. For example, unlike English, German has many indefinite articles that are not interchangeable. If you don't understand the difference between a subject, direct object, and an indirect object, good luck learning German well enough to be understood by native speakers of German.
By the way, you modified a verb with an adjective.
I provide links to the current government census data, and state facts. Your defense and excuse, is that you are American, and have a French wife. Ok, my father's mom & dad are both French (born), is that how I'm supposed to respond? How about some facts, how about you read and educate yourself before regurgitating old racist jokes, based upon ignorant sterotypes.
In my local area, WE provide voting materials in Spanish, English, Chinese, Vietnamese, and Tagalog. So tell me again how WE "are way behind other cultures".
Wikipedia is your friend, and dictionaries aren't that bad either.
A bigoted joke where one group of people, ignorantly belittles another group of people, is in fact racist.
I don't care what Universal Language we choose: English, Mandarin, Zulu, whatever.
Just pick one, already! The longer it takes to decide the more entrenched in English I become.
Seems to me that the biggest tragedy about all this isn't that the languages THEMSELVES are lost, but that the stories, knowledge, and cultural traditions are lost with them.
.doc file...
A lot of people take this as evidence that we should strive to keep these languages alive. I take it the other way - get everyone speaking a universal (or at least popular) language quickly, so that all those people's NEW stories and knowledge can be communicated widely.
Here comes the crappy analogy I promised. When Slashdotters complain that Microsoft's formats lock us in and may one day be obsolete, do we suggest preserving for all time the true Microsoft Word '95 binaries, so that we may always gaze upon those documents in their original splendor? Hell no! We try to get everyone using our shiny new formats as soon as possible, and we hope that the "open" nature of those new formats will keep our documents intelligible for longer. (I'm not gonna try to work "vendor lock-in" into the analogy too much, but it should be obvious why something written in Spanish or English or Mandarin will be easier to read a thousand years from now than something written in a rare dialect that we've got almost no written records of.)
Heck, it may well be that most obscure Native American dialects are already better-understood than a twenty-year-old
TROLL??? +5 Funny! I demand it!
I realize that much, though certainly not all, of the Slashdot crowd is monolingual, and I do realize that there are great benefits to having a single lingua franca.
But as one who speaks 2 additional languages (Spanish and French) at an advanced conversational level and a third additional language (Arabic) at a very basic (and I mean very basic) level, I can't say I'm fond of this.
It's hard to understand if you haven't learned another language, but certain thoughts are more easily expressed in a foreign language once you've learned it. Certain phrases and words are simply idiomatic - they don't translate. "Che Pibe" is one that, for example, can kind of be explained in English, but loses its real meaning. I still want to say "trucho", a word without an adequate translation, when I see something that meets the characteristics. English contains a great deal of French words, true, but the real meaning, tied to cultural context, just can't be conveyed unless you are speaking in French. Arabic and, I imagine, Chinese are light years away from English.
I can accept a lingua franca, but language is an extremely important element of culture and expression. Most languages now dying were, arguably, dead long ago. But I shudder to think what would happen if the world adopted a "one language" stance rather than simply a lingua franca.
I'm not trying to start an argument, but in both cases (language and bio-diversity), are they decreasing? Just because some (languages / species) are becoming extinct, does this mean that there are less? Surely new species and new languages are being created REGULARLY.
I think there's a fundamental confusion of abstract concepts vs. languages by those who prefer to have thousands of languages.
All languages evolve with culture, so:
If language A has a word for idea X today, but language B doesn't, it won't mean that we will be unable to express idea X when language A dies out.
That is plain silly.
When speakers of a language on the verge of extintion switch to a new, more universal language, they will carry with them those concepts and eventually the new language will be able to express them too.
I speak 2 languages fluently and 2 others "poorly" and I personally don't think in any "language".
I think in abstract constructs with images, sounds etc (it's way more efficient and natural). If I need to express those verbally, it will become whichever language I need to use in that situation.
Unless I need to say it out loud, I don't actually "say" my head in English or Hungarian or whatnot that "I'm hungry, I'll go get a sandwich". I just get a feeling of emptiness in the stomach and have some vague image of a sandwich and my fridge appear in my head etc...
Any multi-lingual person will tell you that if you thought in one native language and then "translated" it to another, it would be way to slow and awkward.
The clear winner will be English. We can see this happening all over the globe. Language tends to follow money and technology.
The 2nd pony is probably Mandrin. China has a HUGE economy and with their one child policy they have a built in reduction over the next few decades which will leave the Chinese with say guess 500 million in population... about 2x the USA.
Meanwhile Europe and many parts of Asia are already speaking English. My guess is that English wins the race. It doesn't win because its best mind you.
The internet and OSS developed in English will have a lot to do with this.
The world converted to Latin a few centuries ago for the same reasons. I can still remember going to church and listening to the Priest spouting off in Latin. I was quite young and at the time I wondered what he was trying to accomplish. I always thought the purpose of Language is to facilitate communication.
I chose to not become a priest.
In comment to others who point out the history of the languages which are dying and the folklore and the culture..... yes. I agree 100%. We should record everything we can while we have the time to do it.
This is an interesting story on slashdot. Good going!
Given that I'm posting this rather late for the whole moderation thing....
... perhaps. But those subtleties are mostly due to cultural connotations surrounding the word and less the word itself. But seriously.... This means... a jackrabbit with a lame right foot that can be easily caught by hand... but we tended to use it to make fun of losers... soo it's either the jackrabbit thing or someone who can't seem to get their shit together.... there I just translated sure my representation isn't as compact. But the meaning and the spirit of the word can be expressed in other languages. We're not losing the thought we're losing the compactness of expression and sorry I just don't see the huge loss in that. All these people recording the language and it's meaning... aren't doing it in the native tongue.. they have to translate it to some other language somewhere along the lines or else it's just so much meaningless scribbles. Also I'm willing to bet all these 'lost ways of thinking' have alot more to do with hunting down a reindeer than most people in today's culture would be entirely comfortable with.
Anyways I just feel the need to reply to people constantly saying words don't have a translation in another language. if you can't translate a word to another language then it really isn't that useful a concept. Sure there are subtleties that may be lost in the translation
I don't care what you say, all I need is my Wumpabet soup.
I'm OK with the linguists trying to mothball those old languages for the sake of knowledge and history.
But the priority for a universal understanding should be to teach new generations a logical language instead of trying to keep these alive.
http://www.transparency.org
No, there are not Inuit words for snow. This is a piece of general ignorance that is widely spread.
There is even a freaking wikipedia article about this one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eskimo_words_for_snow
Also, Eskimos do not rub noses, the rickshaw was invented by an American and Joan of Arc was not French.
In New Zealand, the Maori language was arguably "dying out" a few decades ago. It was certainly on the decline. It is likewise arguable that Maori culture was going the same way. A concerted effort was put in place to teach Maori language and culture both in purpose built schools (Kohanga Reo) and to a lesser extent in mainstream schooling.
Since the 70's, there has been a marked resurgence in Maori language, but more interestingly, in the culture itselft and pride in it. This has led to Maoridom pushing itself out onto the global stage in a much more assertive and confident manner than I think it had in the past. Something which I would argue has not only been of benefit to Maori, but to NZ society in general.
I'm not opposed to there being a 'lingua franca' of the modern world, and if that happens to be English, I will be all the more pleased. But I also see that there is a real cost of languages disappearing from the world, because the words are not all that is lost: there are whole lives, whole other worlds wrapped up in particular languages. It seems to me, however, that languages do not save themselves. Unless there are a group of people willing to actually teach and actively support the usage of languages (Maori is an official language of NZ) then the task will not be managed.
I don't think we can nor would want to save all languages, but where a significant chunk of unique culture is bound up with a disappearing language, I would encourage the guardians of the culture to make real moves to save it because the alternative is to lose much more than you bargained for.
Come on, moderators. This is not flaimbait, and even though he speaks of a hot-button issue, he's still communicating useful ideas.
Please don't let your own sensitivities cloud your judgement. Language is a big part of many such conflicts, and is in this one, so please don't shoot the messenger.
I myself do not deny that language is a cultural phenomenon worthy of being considered beyond just its use for basic communication, but there are other facets to its use which can be negative.
I am a Sri Lankan. My mother tongue is something called "Singhala" (native language in Sri Lanka, guess it is extincting as well). I have been using it until around age 18. Then I went abroad to study in English medium and now working back in Sri Lanka. Since the time I entered university, I never ever used my mother tongue, except for day-to-day communication with my family, friends and other people in my country.
What happens is,.. after one level, everything converts to English. In my case... since the day I enter university.. everything there onwards was in english. Text books, lectures, exam papers... even my job interview and whatever the documents come & go. Even I am writing here in English. Why french, german, chinese lived on because its the national language and they exist (and you can use it) well beyond your schooling years.
In a way.. its good to have one language. At least it reduces the communication barrier. I really suffer when I travel abroad, when I meet local people there, couldn't even tell you the price of a good in english.
However... having a single language also will suffer from regional dialects. Like here in Sri Lanka.. there is a popular slang called "Sri Lankan English". If you goto Singapore/Malaysia, there is "Singlish". So... even having a single language doesn't help. As in.. when I try to speak in RP (Reserved Pronunciation) in those contries.. people suddenly don't understand. (WTF, I am speaking in English, They also speak in English.. why the hell they don't get what I say ???)
However.. as for the computer languages... all I want to see is extinction of all other languages except C/C++.
I've read several comments in this thread lamenting the extinction of cultures as a result of the loss of their language, as if the two are inextricably linked. I'd argue that traditions and customs will continue to exist if they're still relevant independently of the language. Granted, old documents (if they exist) will eventually become inaccessible, but those are only part of a group's culture. This depends on the speed of extinction, though. If a language is lost gradually because its speakers become bilingual and then switch to their second language, their culture should remain intact.
As for old documents becoming unreadable:
this article puts the number of dying languages at 3500, with half of those having no written form. Those 3500 languages are spoken by 0.2 % of the world's population.
Above, I said indefinite articles. I intended to say definite articles. The definite article used in German depends on whether the noun is masculine, feminine, neuter. or plural. Whether the noun is the subject, indirect object, or direct object also affects the article and even the spelling of the noun.
With the loss of languages, we lose another connection to various historical documents that will no longer be readable.
Translating only goes so far. When translating, it is generally difficult to carry across the original prose or meaning of the original document.
The second problem with the unification of languages is the innevitable homogenization of cultures that follows. I pity people that travel to the otherside of the world and still go in-search of a MacDonalds...
Language is an integrale part of people's culture and the loss of a language is a sad thing.
-- "To ask a question is to show ignorance; Not to ask a question means you'll remain ignorant."
I am just stunned. I realize the majority of people here are probably monolingual and probably living in North America, but the majority of posts here seem to be along the lines of "Well it doesn't affect me, so who gives a f**k?"
Stop your flapping mouth and think a little: who it DOES affect? No one. It simply affects no one but linguists.
I'm not living in US, and not living in a country where English is official language. I know my language, and I know English. Anything affecting me negatively so far? Let's say I move to US (as I got several job offers already) and have kids there. My kids will likely know only English. Are they affected? They get to learn English, and this is ok to them, they don't need to learn a language (my native) which they can't use.
It's a simple mechanism of changing generations and the older generation dying out with some of their unique professions, abilities, knowledge.. and languages.
This is why we don't live forever, and have kids which start anew. So people like you, who prefer to panic at the face of constant change, don't have the chance to sit forever, stopping natural development and progress of cultures.
I know you're just joking, but, just in case, consider this: how much manipulation is facilitated by the fact that those doing it can cherry-pick what they translate, and rely on a mass of sheep who don't know the other language and can't be arsed to check?
If someone in, say, America were to tell you that the Canadians as a whole are preaching holy Jihad upon the infidel Americans, everyone would just call him nuts. There are maybe millions of people who live close to the border or travel across the border, and can tell you relatively first hand what the Canadians actually say. Or if not, you can just order a newspaper and read for yourself what they do say. Even if they were to manage to find one nutcase preaching holy war, everyone would point out just that: it's just one idiot that noone else takes seriously.
Now try Americans vs Arabs, Arabs vs Jews, or whatever other manipulation across a language barrier. Now that works much better, doesn't it? You can cherry-pick which extremists (on both sides) to translate out of context, to make it sound like a whole language or ethnic group is hell-bent on wiping you off the face of the Earth. (Never mind that no group that size ever agreed on anything else, for as long as we have a recorded history.)
It goes sorta like this: Some fringe group on side A does a bit of fist shaking and maybe sabre rattling. Idiot politicians or journalists on side B take that out of context, maybe even mis-translate it a bit, present it as "Look what side A is saying about us!" Then some easily excitable nutcase on side B goes, basically, "yeah, well, I say nuke the idiots until they glow and let their god sort them!" Then idiot politicians or journalists on side A (or whoever has a vested interest in stirring up the pot) take _that_ out of context, maybe even take a pick of words when translating to sound even more ferocious, and present it as "Look what side B is saying about us!" Loop.
Sometimes even the subtle meaning of one word can be altered enough in translation to cause a big rift, although technically it is a honest-to-god translation.
E.g., a lot of the relatively early Christian problems leading schisms and heresies, a good thousand years before Hus and Luther, were... translation problems. Stuff that made sense about Christ in Greek, sounded like a major heresy when translated in Syriac, because the nuances of some words were different.
And that was guys who did a good faith effort to translate the scriptures and the dogmas decided in the church councils. Now imagine what you can do when you aren't that honest, and don't stop short of outright distorting the other side's words.
Or the even shorter version: if that quote was right, the USA, the UK, Canada and Australia should be the greatest enemies in history.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
"a lot of those languages are dying out because the speakers of the more monolithic languages have forced them into extinction.": Sad, but unrelated to the issue at hand. This is consequence of oppression. There are several organizations that address that: Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, ...
"Languages quite honestly give you a completely different way of thinking": Now there's a statement that requires a lot of backup. Language does not encapsulate ways of thinking; it's a means of conveying thoughts. Do you think that the Chinese cannot understand Plato? Their languages are about as far apart as possible.
"New languages effectively don't happen": well, there's a plainly wrong statement. New languages do arise. Not very frequently, but they do. Usually Creole, but there are more interesting cases. Check e.g. the sign language developed by deaf Nicaraguan children.
"the world's piranha of a language English": that's funny, but not really true either. Chinese is really gobbling up large portions of Asia and Spanish also seems to be spreading still.
I honestly think there is no way to stop the process of language extinction. It has always happened: my native tongue (Dutch) is quite different from what it used to be and that holds for many languages. They develop. Small groups tend to disappear. That also has always been the case. You can find remains of settlements everywhere with signs of a lost culture, and probably a lost language.
There is nothing inherently bad about that. It's not a question of ethics. Join Amnesty, support the Kurds and the Tibetans, but don't do it to save their language. Human life and thought is worth more than the precise way that they use to communicate.
Slashdotters should think programming languages. Imagine a world where there were no programming languages except visual basic. Even if you love Ruby, even if you love c#, even if you love assembly... Removing everything except one is not an improvement, because different languages have different strenghts ans weaknesses.
This is also true for human languages. I forgot the details, but there was a story about a one particular primitive tribe that could easily grasp the theory of relativity - because their language was built with a different way of expressing time.
Language is the OS of our brains.
I lost my sig.
Ya know, screw both English and Chinese. That's a problem created by humans, so maybe we should just take a step back. A UK cat has no problem communicating with an Asian breed, for example. (Well, when it can be arsed to communicate, anyway;) It's a global language. So I say let's all learn to meow.
.txt file, is it in UTF-8, UTF-16 -- big or small endian at that? --, or one of the two dozen ISO-8859 flavours, or EBCDIC, or what?) Good old fashioned 7 bit is enough for whole words.
On the upside, IIRC they have like 100 words total, so we can give up on the whole character set madness. (If I give you a
Plus, it'll be easier to know if your cat is actually plotting against you.
Plus, think how much easier poetry will be. E.g., you have to rhyme with "meow", you can't go wrong with "mew" or "mrow".
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
There, I hope I got your attention there: I really just wanted to add a few points here about languages, their uses and development.
Firstly, I speak 5 languages fluently (English, Afrikaans, Dutch, German, Swiss-German and French) and can get by in two more (Spanish and Turkish). I'm a South African, my girlfriend is Afrikaans, I've lived in Switzerland for some 17 years now, and in Germany and Spain before that and in Turkey for a year as well. My father was French speaking. I'm not reciting all this to brag. The knowledge of different languages has been of vital use to me in my life and has actually saved my life on a number of occasions, literally.
When I first got to Europe 21 years ago, I could only really speak English and Afrikaans. I knew a smattering of French from my dad, but I only really learned from my French girlfriend at the time. I worked in what was then West Berlin for the US Airforce, but before that, for my first year, I survived by doing odd jobs and basically pestering people to let me stay somewhere, and I learned German really quickly, because in those days, not many Germans could or wanted to speak English. The USAF people I knew, on the other hand, lived in American bases, went to American shops and watched American movies, and almost none of them understood a word of German. They had no need, but they had plenty of problems when out in the city doing shopping etc.
When I worked in Turkey, as usual, I made the effort to communicate with the locals, who surprise surprise, generally only spoke Turkish and perhaps enough German to sell stuff to tourists. Knowing Turkish made me friends and made my life that much more pleasant, and cheaper, since I could order in Turkish I paid the prices that locals paid for drinks and food which is considerably less than tourists pay.
A tidbit of info is that the Turkic languages are so closely related that knowledge of Turkish will enable you to make yourself understood from Turkey to Kazakhstan, including parts of Russia where Tartar is spoken, which is quite a span of territory. Not that I ever plan on visiting that part of the world, but if I ever do get the chance to see the Altai mountains, I'll be able to get around without too much trouble.
Another tidbit of info is that Turkic grammar gives you a head start if you ever need to learn Hungarian, Finnish or want to chat up a blond Estonian beauty. They all work the same way.
Another one is traveling in France. The French are also somewhat monolingual, like most English speakers, and I know a lot of Americans having a bad time in France because they find the French resentful of having to speak English. The joke is that the French generally don't mind if you don't speak French, but they really appreciate it if you just try a few words.
Switzerland is another special case. Swiss German is a dialect of Alemannic that is unintelligible to most Germans from the North of Germany, with some subdialects that are incomprehensible to almost all Germans. It is the most spoken language in Switzerland, but it is not a written language. The written language of Switzerland is German. You can get by perfectly with standard German in Switzerland, but knowledge of the spoken language is what will make you friends or get you business contacts with the locals. There is even a local language that is endangered, called Rumantsch, which is a direct descendant of the vulgar latin the Romans soke here 2000 years ago. It is kept alive by the Swiss not for its practical value, since all of its speakers are also fluent in German, but for its cultural heritage. It adds colour to the landscape, so to speak.
I'm telling all these stories in an attempt to show that just because you think English is a universal language doesn't make it so. In Zurich, where I work, everyone in my company speaks English to some degree, but the one guy who only spoke English at work constantly had to fight against the language barrier. I don't think he was very happy. It's often the same in large parts of
"Double-click the minimize control to select the desired HDMI input". Perfectly understandable to you and me, complete gibberish to most people over 50. And that's just in Engrish.
Fixed.
Small consolation, but I got it.
1/3 of jokes get modded OT. If you get the joke, mod 1 in 3 insightful/interesting/underrated to restore karma balance.
Who's panicking? You're panicking that you won't have a primary language to live on.
English follows other languages down dark alleys, hit them over the head, and rifles through their pockets for loose grammar.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
A language is just a communication protocol. Would you say that having 7000 incompatible networking protocols is a good thing? No, it patently isn't. Thousands of incompatible languages simply help create pockets of ignorance and deprivation. The only people who benefit are those who can translate.
Having said that. The corollary is that learning multiple languages is a good idea for an individual. If you live in the UK and speak only English then you are excluded from the largest economies on the continent; France Germany etc. The French and Germans all speak English. If their economies tank, they can always look for work in the UK.
Speaking of which, I have a German lesson this evening.
Deleted
x2.
Who's panicking? You're panicking that you won't have a primary language to live on.
You gotta honestly tell me, how did you manage to read my post and understand 100% the opposite of what I said O_O.
83 languages spoken by 5,000,000,000 people (and a great many people speak more than one,) means that its no tragedy when an obscure language lapses into disuse.
Comparing a language to a species is the kind of muddle-headed thinking that makes me wonder if English is a dying language in this ass-hack writer's tongue.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Of course it's going to be easier to communicate. But we'll lose a lot. Mostly, a lot of people will lose their way of thinking, having to conform to a language that does not fit into their thinking pattern.
When you look at a language and its composition, you'll notice that every language reflects its users and their culture. No, I'm not going for the 20 words for snow in Inuit. I'm going for the very, very finely tune nuances of reverence in Japanese, something that cannot even remotely be reproduced in any other language I know. And of course, that way you simply cannot understand the culture that is behind it. You can promote and punish a coworker with the use of a syllable.
How to translate it? Not at all. There is no way to translate it. There is not even a way to express it. Because explaining it or using "stronger" words (that would have to be used in English or other languages) would, you guessed it, already break the unwritten laws of etiquette. You're not supposed to really 'hear' it, you're supposed to know it from listening closely.
And I can only assume it's similar with other cultures and languages. Maybe (or most likely) in other areas, areas in everyday life that are more important than social status, but nontheless parts of their culture. This will most likely suffer from a lack of an own language that lends itself to the needs of the culture.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I'm relatively monolingual, and while I'm proud of my English skills (I write and edit with PhD's pretty regularly, and they don't point and laugh derisively at me) I'm ashamed of my overall knowledge of language, and I know it holds me back somewhat in life and my career.
I took a grand total of 2 years of Spanish in high school, long ago and far away, so I've got some Spanish, but it's very rusty. My German, French, Italian, Mandarin, Japanese and Hawaiian are even more minimal. And I'm limited to greetings in Russian, Arabic, Swahili, Luganda, Ankole, Turkish, Hindi, Maori, Cook Islander, Korean and some others.
I work in a field where the world's top facility complexes use English and/or Spanish. I live and work somewhere English, Hawaiian and Japanese are all widely spoken, with speakers of Chinese, Korean and Tagalog also easy to find. I collaborate regularly with people in France. And I attend conferences where simultaneous translation occurs in up to six languages - English, French, Spanish, Arabic, Chinese and Russian.
Improving my skills in any of those languages has value to me, the people I work with, and the people I work for. And I mean value in a basic dollars-and-cents, professional advancement way.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
I'm fluent in Norwegian and English, almost fluent in German, can hold a simple conversation in French, and am beginning to learn a bit of Swiss German, and I say *good* (or *yawn*, depending on the mood). Some examples why:
Yes, you have things like articles with gender which don't have an equivalent in English. But do they help communication in any way? "Das Haus" or "huset" don't have more semantic value than "the house". They all convey the same information. The only exception I can think of is if you're trying researching whether cultural values or biases toward either gender can somehow be wrestled from them. For everybody else, it's just a lot more to learn by heart.
Words with special meanings not found in another language can easily be imported. This happens all the time - Consider "zeitgeist", "laissez-faire", or "quisling".
Has any of the former colonies' culture or wisdom died out because they started using another language? No, even taking over the country for decades doesn't do that - Just look at the colonies of France and the U.K..
"When I wake up in the morning I piss cryptographic excellence." - Bruce Schneier
It's called evolution of the species. The less languages used on the planet, the more efficiently we can communicate globally. Therefore ideas will be more free-flowing, and global average advancement will happen at a more rapid pace. Thus it is advantageous to us as a species.
Start learning Sumerian next week.
I agree also. This really is the wrong forum for the cognoscenti.
The point that is being made, is that fewer languages would be spoken by more people in an effort to communicate on a day-to-day basis. This they hold is good. It does make sense having a defacto world language that English may just be, just for communicating prices, needs etc. Shopping language. I don't think that we need to lose a tongue to achieve that.
There is also the intonation that each language and dialect has. No one seems to have mentioned that as yet. Words for cuisine, music, instrumentation, poetry, song verses and rhythms cannot be 'replaced' by an all encompassing language.
As for English being the dominant language? Well the Romans were an inclusive race and presumed that Latin would be spoken everywhere, yet the fall of their civilization also meant the death of Latin.
Loan words are excellent criteria of the history and origins of people and the diaspora.
If we preserve languages and the people who speak them, then it can only lead to cultural enrichment for the whole world.
For example, the Ubykh language (Circassian) is no more, with the last speaker dying in 1992. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubykh_people
As a culture, they had skills and methods that are now lost to us. The skills may not be important to a Chinese trying to understand an Indian speaking English on front line support, but they were damn good horse breeders and riders and could foretell the future by casting beans or looking at a shoulder blade of an animal. After a few more generations, the cuisine would be gone, their music and poetry already vanished as a performance art and their unique folk histories and knowledge of lineage gone forever.
This should never happen, but it does on a regular basis. Cultures are vanishing and we are less for it.
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
This is just horrible! We have to get the U.N. to start massive programs to preserve all these different languages. We can't let them become extinct. What will future generations do? We have to keep things as diverse as possible. This is worse than global warming. I wonder if Al Gore knows about this!
Why are so many people worried about languages dying off? In the long run this may solve some of the major problems we have in this world. If there were better communications between people we might not have so many misunderstandings that seem to be the cause of so many of the conflicts that are going on now. Just imagine the difference if most of the world spoke the same language? This is something that would bring everyone closer together on issues instead of dividing us.
We have to strive to reach common ground. But if this goes like most things there will be groups that will push to preserve all these languages. I can see it now, there will be walls erected around certain sections in each country where only the local dialect can be spoken under penalty of law. How else to preserve the spoken language but to isolate groups of people that speak that particular dialect?
Your post reminds me of arguments I used to hear in Intro to Ethics about Moral Relativism. It is an inescapable fact that actions viewed by a given society as immoral at any given time may not be viewed as immoral by another society, or by that same society at a different time. This invariably led to someone arguing that the morality of individual actions was also relative, and therefore an individual's action could not be judged as moral or immoral. Almost inevitably, the argument was trotted out by someone who wanted to justify their own questionable behavior.
Likewise, grammar and spelling are a set of arbitrary rules set forth by a society to allow easier interaction between those members. While there may not be a "One True English", the commonly accepted rules of grammar and spelling make it easier for English speakers to understand each other. To say that, since spelling and grammar are not cast in stone, therefore I can spell and speak any damned way I choose would be inconsiderate in the least. It is an insult to the people to whome you are speaking to force them to try to decipher your speech because you can't, or don't want to, follow the commonly accepted rules. And people will react to that insult by treating the speaker with disdain, derision, or pedantry. And the speaker is invariably outraged that someone would dare question their speaking and writing habits; after all "you can't really speak your native tongue in any way but the right one"
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"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
Save a language today! Buy a dictionary!
Send email from the afterlife! Write your e-will at Dead Man's Switch.
FLik tor ebok chusloa taka bor undwue pandi pandi? akalwoq cnavien skjdle paodi cnoaojs!!!!!! Apeodjs bokretuuhun cuika cuika.
There is nothing that can evoke a more powerful emotion than dance! Especially, the Electric Slide, the Cabbage Patch, and lately the Cupid Shuffle. Even more powerful when danced by middle age white people!
Our world's language families are suffering. Please, think of the language children...
Good god! I'm starting to have nightmares about me, thirty years in the future, not being able to communicate with my refrigerator because no languages are left. I'm trying to scream "EGG SALAD!!!" but nothing comes out. Silence. We need to correct this probablem as soon as possible before it gets as bad as AIDS, etc.
Once you start despising the jerks, you become one.
The sign was put up to differentiate themselves from their main competitor, who are "Systems Intragrators"
Personally, I believe there are two types. English, in its proper form, and what we here in the states use. I think we talk "American" English. Plus, depending on what part of the country (USA) you live, you can have a different dialect.
Your argument here makes no sense at all.
Everyone should learn a second language, for many reasons. However, everyone learning a second language will do nothing to halt or even slow language extinction. The languages that are dying are languages spoken by tiny handfuls of people in remote, generally near-wilderness, locations. There is no one who lives near you who can teach you one of these languages, the people who speak them are uninterested in travel, and even their children lack the fluency to be good instructors.
I have personal experience with one of these dying languages, an obscure dialect of Zapoteco[*], spoken only in a single village near Temascal, Mexico. Actually, I'm sure the language is now dead. When I was there in 1990, there were only a dozen speakers of the language left, and they were all very old. The youngest was about 60, the oldest maybe 75 -- they live a hard life and medical care is very poor, so very few reach 80. They all understood varying amounts of Spanish, and could speak pidgin Spanish. Their children understood Zapoteco just fine, and could speak it, but not fluently. Their grandchildren understood very little Zapoteco and could not speak it at all, though they knew a few words.
There is almost nothing anyone could have done to preserve this Zapoteco dialect as a living language, because even the native speakers felt it was more important for their children and grandchildren to speak good Spanish. They thought it was a little sad that the language of their ancestors was going to disappear, of course, but considered it vastly more important that their children be able to live and work in modern Mexico, which speaks Spanish, not Zapoteco. Even if you were to have traveled thousands of miles and spent a couple of years living with them in order to preserve their language, you wouldn't succeed in keeping it alive, because you would be the only one who speaks it.
The only way to prevent one of these languages from dying is to get a group of people to learn it, and to form those people into a community who speak the language as their primary tongue. But that's never going to happen -- not even the children and grandchildren, who have a much greater cultural imperative to learn and speak the language than anyone else could ever have, are interested in doing this.
While I wholeheartedly agree that it's a good idea for everyone to learn another language or two (I'm American and so speak English, but I also speak fluent Spanish and can get by in Italian), but people who study another language will invariably learn one that is alive and useful, which will do nothing whatsoever to preserve these dying languages.
[*] Although Spanish-speakers in Mexico call the variants of Zapoteco "dialects", many of them are quite distinct languages, with disjoint vocabularies and even different grammatical structures. The people I talked to called their language "Zapoteco", but were aware that there existed people in many other villages that spoke different languages also called it Zapoteco. These dialects also have other names, but even those names are often applied to multiple, mutually-unintelligible languages. The people I talked to said their variant of Zapoteco was "Choapan", but that they found it easier to communicate with people in a nearby (about 80 km) village in Spanish, because they spoke a different "Choapan".
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Sorry but you're wrong. Other posters have already pointed out some of the reasons why, so I'll just add this:
A language is not just a communication protocol. It's also a thinking tool
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
1) Watch the Colbert Report
2) Post on Slashdot about it a few days later
3) ???
4) Profit!
By the way, I heard that the number one threat to America today is bears.
FORTRAN would go with them...
But seriously you might never even have thought that bears are evil had you not encountered that language (even if at 2nd hand). I think Wittgenstein said it best -
Your thoughts are shaped remarkably by the language you express them in - if that language lacks certain idioms or grammatical forms, it will affect what thoughts you're likely to have. If you consider all the phrases that you use in everyday life, you'll likely find that most of them you have heard at least once before - none of them are unique, they're almost entirely learned combinations of words, none of your thoughts are unique (well, virtually none)! Thus losing unique languages, which contain unique concepts, without at least having a record of them is a serious business. Thankfully some people are attempting to preserve languages, like The Rosetta Project.
n/t
Is this another example of Information Entrophy? Some systems reduce to a more crystaline form as they lose information.
Blame Noah Webster. For he single-handedly caused the major differences between British and American English. He was the one that decided on a single 'o' instead of "ou" in words like "color" and "honor". He also made many many other "simplifications".
In all fairness though, had he stuck with a 100% phonetic spelling ruleset, it probably still wouldn't have really helped since English absorbs so many foreign words, including their spellings, and makes them its own that no single ruleset would work unless all languages followed that same ruleset.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Compared to claims of averting wars, I guess you can't offer much against that. Still, while I'm not a linguist, it strikes me that language not only reflects how we think, but shapes how we think. Take the E Prime syntax as a random example of the possibility (English without the to-be verb). Perhaps having a greater variety of languages encourages different viewpoints, which ultimately, while it may cause wars, helps us to adapt to whatever comes and overcome whatever obstacles may come. Complete uniformity is a weakness. Then again, so is so much diversity nothing can emerge from the chaos. Maybe somehow having less, but vastly different languages could be a good thing. While it can be argued the best ideas will emerge in whatever new language evolves, and that bad unusable ideas may fall out, I think people get the wrong idea about how evolution works. It isn't about reaching the pinnacle of success and perfection. It's about who can adapt the best when things change. Just a thought.
When people who speak one language increasingly come to speak another that can't quite convey the shade of meaning they intend, they do something that's been done since the beginning of time -- forcibly integrate the old language with the new one. Most such integrations eventually fall by the wayside. A few survive and become an integral part of the new language. The truly important shades of meaning relevant to modern life go on; the 270 subtly-different words and expressions for "footprints left in the ground" fall by the wayside.
Ultimately, the expanded language can be a positive influence upon its new adopters. Someday, people in India might internalize the difference between a "question" (inquiry arising from personal lack of knowledge) and a "doubt" (uncertainty as to truth or credibility). Or for that matter, properly distinguish between "might" (uncertainty as to likelihood of happening) and "may" (permissive authority to do something, without regard to its actual likeliness).
I'm not an expert in the field, but just a guy who's read Steven Pinker's books (really fascinating stuff if you're interested in linguistics and/or how the brain works). Basically linguists, psychologists, and other cognitive scientists have learned a ton about how the human brain functions and evolved by examining differences in the world's languages... especially native languages of small indigenous populations that have been cut off from the rest of global civilization. As those populations and their languages get assimilated (insert Borg joke) and disappear, much of this research will become impossible.
I'm not sure that the drawbacks outweigh the advantages overall, and there's probably nothing we could do about it even if they did... but this does mean that an important branch of science has to work against the clock to make all the breakthroughs they can before their test data dries up.
This would be awesome!!!!
The world really only needs 3 languages.
English, Spanish and 1 version of chinese.
Think how inclusive the world would be if we all could communicate with each other.
So many problems gone.
You ever watch a news conference with some middle east crazy on there talking and being translated?
He says a bunch of stuff, then the interpreter says something stupid or just crazy. You then wonder if something wasn't lost in translation, or if that guy really is that closed minded and religiously intolerant.
If we could all understand one another's language, we wouldn't give so much credibility to intolerant crazies like this. We'd laugh their ideas out of the world. Its only when we are confused, or when we think there *must* be more to what they are saying than the translation allows, that we give credence to their nonsense.
Forget about the extinction of human languages, none of us speak 'em anyway! Let's all take a moment to reflect on the shocking death of so many beloved programming languages...
:'(
When was the last time you came across BASIC in the wild? You know, 100 PRINT "HELLO" 200 GOTO 100? None of that mongrel "Visual" junk! How about Turbo Pascal? Or 68000 assembly language? To say nothing of rare species, like INTERCAL!
Heck, even a language that's near and dear to my Linux-geek heart is dying: Perl. The reason? Too ugly to reproduce, a situation that we here on Slashdot can all understand!! Perl may flash the $dollar $signs $all $$over $the{$place}, but let's face it... the ladies are going for Python these days. With its clean-cut good looks and plethora of web frameworks, Python is just irresistible. To say nothing of Ruby, Perl's one-time protégé which has now become the coolest kid in town.
Yes, folks, though it grieves me to say so, Perl is dying in my heart. The other day, I quietly shed a tear when I realized it was nothing more to me than a way to run one-liner regular expressions from the shell prompt
My bicyles
When languages die out, it's because of an 'official language' that children must learn ( and learn in ) in school, and also use to interact with the government and other official entities. When children live in environments of multiple ethnicities with relatively similar levels of power, they learn many languages. When there is one dominant ethnicity and language, the members of which run the schools, government, businesses, and churches, children learn that dominant language ( and get ridiculed for speaking any of that silly country language ). The child quickly learns that speaking the dominant language means being successful, while speaking your mother tongue ( or grandmother's tongue ) means poverty and low social status ( i.e. being a 'dirty indian' or 'po white trash/black folk'). It's a matter of assimilation, not natural evolution.
Personally, I believe with projects like the OLPC, a global lingua franca will arise, or perhaps continentally regional lingua francas, for communications on the global communications network. However, people will continue to speak their native language at home. I have friends in Finland who are very conversant in 'digital english' -- written English over the internet. You would never guess they weren't English speaks from their online writings. More formal written English, not so good, and spoken English, sometimes pretty bad. However, they all continue to speak Finnish at home.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
"Unfortunately, since language is so powerful in molding minds, we lose a lot when a language dies."
Like what? I've seen you and several others say this, then wave their hands about and move on as though the case were made and decided.
WTF is this "a lot" that we are supposedly losing?
"We lose profound knowledge about a culture and the way it sees the world."
NO, we don't. We lose a tool that those people used to describe the world, but you're making the absolutely ungrounded assumption that the toll they're using is somehow necessary, or better, than other tool that they will have available.
What kind of world do you live in where knowledge is dependent on the tool used to transfer it?
Again, you, like all the other have waved your hands, insisted diversity was desirable without an iota of supporting evidence, then acted as though the matter is closed.
I only go to buffets for the unlimited soft serve.
People will fit whatever language their talking into their cultural pattern. Look at English; its a very international language and very diverse.
Basically I'm saying its possible to have a variety of related languages that are mutually intelligible. Indian English, American English, British English, Scot, southern English, Ebonics etc.
Now when I went to Scotland I could hardly understand Scot (the only English language where I've really had that problem), but I'm sure I could have picked up with a bit of practice; 5 years of study wouldn't be needed like it was for me to learn Spanish OK.
The effect of barriers of communication put up by languages are really horrible in my opinion. For instance, having decent English skills is a prerequisite to making contributions to most open source projects.
- 'an siud' means 'yonder' is pronounced "an shit"
- 'iad siud' means 'those yonder' is pronounced "ee-at shit"
- 'thuit siud' means 'that fell' is pronounced "who-it shit"
It is an endangered language. Though it didn't provide as many loan words as Spanish or French, it does provide some rather well known ones including a few English slang terms:- whisky (uisge beatha) water of life
- galore (gu leor) plenty or enough
- smashing ('S math sin) that's great
- snogging (snog) nice slang for kissing
- cheerio (tioraidh) bye
- claymore (claidheamh mor) great sword
The other obvious advantage learning a minority language is that you can say things like pog mo thon (kiss my ass)."You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
Right now, all the people who are thinking I'm a "Grammar Nazi" for pointing out the 'lose -> loose' error above are using language to think it.
Even when language is being used for communication, it must first be used for cognition. You can't properly communicate what you don't yourself understand.
[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
"Language is a unique expression of humanity"
No, language is a tool used because it was the only tool available to those equipped with it. You make the common mistake of equating conveninence with necessity.
Stop romanticizing the equivalent of a pencil.
I only go to buffets for the unlimited soft serve.
It'll be nice when the european / asian languages collapse with the rise of the internet. Can anyone honestly justify the existence of French anymore? In 100 years it will seem quaint that we once associated languages with country boundaries. In 1000 years, sci-fi's dreams of "common" will become a reality.
Hopefully it's either Japanese or English (or a combination of them). Japanese has the advantage of handling new words quickly, and a more advanced future tense. English has an advantage of having all the cruft from the other European languages, with the most complete timeline until you get to russian/czech.
Sean
I live in a giant bucket.
Unfortunately, two languages most deserving of being thrown into the dustbin of history, languages whose primary purpose has been to separate one group of people from the rest of the world, will likely survive: Arabic and Hebrew.
So the fact that two disagreeing nations speak different languages now means that those languages were invented to drive a wedge between them? Were French and German invented to piss each other off? All languages 'seperate one group of people' (i.e. the people that speak it) from 'the rest of the world' (i.e. those that can't), by virtue of not being able to understand one another. Also, bringing the Arabic/Jewish problem into it is ludicrous - the people at the crux of the problem (the Israelis and Palestinians) both have a working knowledge of each other's languages, and the issues between them run a lot deeper than differing syntax.
Also, If the very existence of Hebrew scares you, well... mifached. It isn't going away.
Dealing with lawyers would be a lot less tedious if they all looked like Casey Novak.
"but the majority of posts here seem to be along the lines of "Well it doesn't affect me, so who gives a f**k?" or "If they are dying out, they are just cruft"."
I have yet to see any such posts. If they are present, they're not moderated very highly.
"You see, a lot of those languages are dying out because the speakers of the more monolithic languages have forced them into extinction."
Bullshit, they're going extinct because the cultural isolation they enjoyed is at an end, and communication over distances is easier than ever before. This is a technological issue, and has not one thing to do with your boogeyman of "speakers of the more monolithic languages" doing anything.
With that said, I stopped reading your post right there. The kind of overwhelming cultural bias you display, combined with your clear desire to misrepresent facts leads me to believe I made a good decision in not reading on.
I only go to buffets for the unlimited soft serve.
Knowing about our origins is fine, but people put too much importance on the past. Let the archaeologists and anthropologists worry about the past. The rest of us would be better off concentrating on the future. The past won't kill us, but the future sure as hell might! Better communications has got to be a plus going forward. I for one would welcome a universal language that replaces all the current languages... I couldn't care less which one, a long as it is logical and straightforward. I have no special place in my heart for English, other than the fact that it is my native tongue. If something better comes along and I'd have no problem switching. It won't happen overnight though - look how little progress we've made in converting to the metric system. That we should convert is obvious.
...I just came for the free beer.
When I look at statements like this, I feel like I'm looking at an Onion article.
"Dwayne Snickworth of Boyse, Idaho goes to his death taking a lifetime of experience with him"
Certainly the analysis of a language would hold many fine insights into the world we live in, but the vast majority of those insights are redundant or trivial, and I doubt any of them are untranslatable. The primary thing we lose when a language dies is the history that went into the creation of that language, left on its structure like a million bird-tracks in the sand. Histories are cheap, though, and we'll get over it. I have more important things to concern myself about.
Wake up - the future is arriving faster than you think.
While the benefits of having one and only lingua franca are obvious and easy to enumerate, the other side of the coin -- diversity in languages -- is not too obvious. I can provide two arguments for diversity off the top of my head:
1) Language and Culture. Language is a vessel for communicating and embodying culture. Different cultures provide different viewpoints to the same problem, which is very important for the overall adaptability of the humanity. Each culture has its own "fuzzy set" (NB: not Fuzzy Set Theory) of values and starting points when making decisions, and language is the wrench shaped in just such a manner. Different viewpoints provide for different paths to solving a problem, which means that you're more likely get closer to optimal solution.
2) More Connected is Not Always Better. Research in social networks has shown that fully connected graphs (everybody can talk to anybody else) perform worse than partially connected graphs. In short, if a group of agents is searching the problem space and one of them hits an early local maximum, most agents (being able to see its high yield) will probably copy its solution and remain stuck until they break out and innovate. This is not such a big deal with some other network types, for example Small World topology, where the network is comprised of several loosely connected groups with high degrees of intra-connectivity (think clusters of grapes on a vine). Early local maximum will not propagate too fast, so chances are much better that the network as a whole will indeed find a better solution to the search problem (more here, for example). Maintaining local languages is what provides a barrier slowing down information exchange: most of the time it is unwelcome, but the system as a whole benefits from pockets of isolated randomness.
Being a True neutral that I am, however, I am pretty certain that the humanity will adopt the close-to-optimal language topology to further its own ends. (No pun intended.)
I am just stunned. I realize the majority of people here are probably monolingual and probably living in North America, but the majority of posts here seem to be along the lines of "Well it doesn't affect me, so who gives a f**k?" or "If they are dying out, they are just cruft". At least some people see the value in everyone having a common language - but thats the best argument for everyone to learn a SECOND language, not for us to just abandon all of the smaller languages out there.
If I learned a second language, it would never be one of the smaller languages. I'd learn either Spanish or Japanese. If people are going to spend the effort to learn other languages, and they have a choice in the matter, usually they'd pick secondary languages spoken in their region or a language with a lot of content that they are interested in expressed solely in one language. Why did I pick either Spanish or Japanese? There are many local Spanish speakers and a few Spanish only businesses in my town so that could be useful. I picked Japanese because I read manga and some of the Japanese to English translations seem off when read.
Survival of the fittest. *
The languages that adapt better succeed, those that remain enclosed in themselves and can't stand the competition face extinction. It's been like this for a long time, in many many things.
* - Yes, I know, it isn't his words
echo 'cat sig | sh' > sig
Then how did the people who first invented that language come up with the concept of bears being evil ?
Wittgenstein was wrong, then. Or else how do you think a child learns the word for "soft", if the concept is beyond him before learning the word (and associating it with the concept) ? In fact, how is anyone able to learn anything ?
No it doesn't. I do my thinking mostly nonverbally, and only bother with words when I'm trying to put my thoughts into communicable form; and when I do, I can come up with new words on the spot, as shown above, or simply go the long road and say: "the type of evil associated with bears".
So, who made you memorize that particular sentence ? Anyway, it is obvious that the majority of sentences you utter in any paricular day are likely to be similar to the sentences you say most other days, for the simple reason that days tend to be similar and contain similar events, which require similar reactions - including communications - from you. What is this supposed to prove, exactly speaking, beyond the presumption that most people have boring lives ?
And, if my thoughts are nonunique, then perhaps you could kindly tell me who I'm plagiarizing currently, and who was he plagiarizing, and so on ? That is, who is the original thinker who's thoughts we nonunique ones are merely imitating ?
And yet, strangely enough, it seems quite possible to translate text from German to English, from Japan to Finnish, and from English or German to Finnish. Is this because the mysterious hypnotic messages the translators embed in the translated text force my poor mind to adopt any concepts my own language lacks but the original language has as I read, or could it be that the underlaying concepts are not different from one language to another ?
Sure, my native language, finnish, doesn't have a single-word equivalent for the english concept of "defenestration", but I can still understand the concept of throwing someone out of the window just fine - so well, in fact, that I can come up with a new descriptive word at the spot: "ikkunastaheitto". Hey... my native language supports this kind of word-creation, so if language defines cognitive capabilities of the one speaking it, then bow before my linquistically-enabled superiority as I begin to rule the world !
Muahahahaaa!
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
If you ask me, I bet this organization lives off of government grants, my question is so what. Also nice to know that /. now published information shown 2 weeks ago on the Cobert Report.
Respect the Constitution
As one person intimated above, the vast majority of recognized languages in the world are only spoken in Papua, New Guinea. So, if we're losing a thousand languages in a time period, there's a good chance that more than 900 of them are spoken by fewer than 100 people who are joining larger language communities. This is not going to threaten humanities survival, although the language geek in me would like to see as many of those languages recorded for a possible resurrection in the future, as we've seen with Hebrew and many of the American Indian languages. But if the speakers of a language no longer find it profitable to use a language, and they move to a language that serves their needs better, I'm not seeing the foul.
Note to your sig:
"When I wake up in the morning I piss cryptographic excellence." - Bruce Schneier
___
Yeah, he sure is full of entropy.
(boooo hisss hyuck!)
Languages going extinct just means it's more likely that any two people can communicate with one another, and communication is Good. Animals going extinct...that's alarming.
Learn to spell: nickel, missile, lose, solely, amendment, speech, kernel, probably, ridiculous, deity, hierarchy, versus
That is a LOT of people pissing in a gale force wind.
Now here's the real question: Between Spanish, English, and Mandarin, eventually there will be a highlander moment "There can BE only ONE!", and which one do you think will win? My money's on English. I think it's got a strong lead already via the Internet, hollywood, rock music, and Corporate logos. I've been wrong before though.
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
Bumbling, fumbling idiots. As a multi-language individual (English as a native speaker, French second, Japanese third, and a smattering of others...:-) anyone who speaks more than one language well can tell you that there are ideas/thoughts/concepts that are difficult and in some cases not possible to translate. It is similar to 'language features' in programming languages, i.e. some languages have GOTO, some don't...some have strong typing, some have weak typing. Different languages have different strengths/weaknesses. We should do everything we possibly can to at least digitally store as much info as we can about dying languages before they become extinct. Otherwise, it is nothing less than that disaster of many centuries ago, the burning and loss of priceless, now unknowable knowledge at the world's first library of Alexandria...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3707641.stm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Alexandria
P.S. Get away from the TV and/or computer and find and learn about a dying language. Document it. Computerize it. Do something useful for mankind.
Preserve some knowledge before it is lost!
So what? Who cares if 3500 languages get stinct, it's not that we're gonna loose diversity or something. Wouldn't it be better if the whole world spoke just one tonge?
The Tamarians, their language: Shaka, when the walls fell.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
Can't say I feel too bad that languages are dying faster than living species! I'd rather go without Esperanto than without killer whales. (Some of my best friends are killer whales.)
ancient chinese curse;-)
Eurobarometer survey on language skills makes interesting reading:
http://ec.europa.eu/public_opinion/archives/ebs/ebs_243_en.pdf
56 % of Europeans can have a conversation in 1 foreign language
28 % with 2 foreign languages
11 % with 3 or more foreign languages
Clearly, there are lots of benefits from knowing another language in Europe, and it's probably also a status symbol to some extent. For a college educated European being able to speak 2 foreign languages is a norm. This is what I've always loved about in Europe - an endless supply of true cosmopolitans.
Extinction is natural. Millions upon millions of organisms and memes have come and gone.
Effectively, this story post and your post are attempting to appeal to emotion by using guilt. "How dare you monolinguals not care! A piece of you dies with each language. How can you live with yourself for not caring about your humanity?" This point is exemplified by calling it a "crisis". Coincidently, this is the same tactic people use when they talk about dying species.
On somewhat of a tangent, I see commonalities between your argument and preserving all information in the digital age. It seems to be of utmost urgency that we preserve anything and everything that is a product of the digital age. You know, just in case that email from 9 years ago about the color of socks to buy somehow becomes important to remember in 80 years when your grandchildren are researching if you bought your socks from K-Mart or JC Penney. I know I'm guilty to some extent, though I try to be more liberal with the delete button in gmail than the creators of gmail want me to be ("why delete when you can archive?"). We are so hyper-concerned about storing digital data that we mostly ignore that we have no long-term, permanent method for storing digital data. But I digress.
Everyone has topics they are passionate about and that's fine with me if dying and dead languages is your topic, but stop trying to force your passion onto other people. At the end of the day I think it's more important to live than to remember how any and every culture and micro-culture has lived. I'm not advocating a 100/0 stance on this, but it's nowhere near 50/50 to me nor even 90/10. It's been long ago that we modern humans could be generalists and also know a lot about everything.
Our understanding of science alone has outgrown the bounds of understanding of any one person. If you want to understand everything about even a niche of knowledge then you have to dedicate your life to it. You can't name every living plant; speak every language; write texts on quantum chromodynamics; explain the life story of Captain Kirk; and know the World of Warcraft better than your own neighborhood. If it's ignorance and selfishness on my part that puts dying and dead languages out of my "scope of caring" because I have my own list of passions, then so be it.
I'm sorry for you that you do not understand this, but I hope your exploration of dead & dying cultures and languages teaches this to you some day. Maybe then you'll stop guilting people for it.
:wq
Klatu Barata Nikto!
Just talk louder and slower; enunciate and they have to understand you...maybe throw in a few hand gestures.
I've never done anything to make any language or other cultural aspects illegal.
Please be careful with your "we's".
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
By my work alone, it lives on, with support by a component of a Javada application I made, on a government computer buried deep within a building within a building in the middle of nowhere. For a considerable sum of US taxpayer money, a full kilobyte of information can be transferred across the Pacific Ocean through a dedicated circuit over a period of no less than one second.
I've done my part. Have you done yours?
If the King's English was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for me!
I'm a rabbit startled by the headlights of life
Now we can finally get rid of all that Unicode crap and go back to ASCII like God intended!!!
No need to put it at such an abstract, insubstantial level. Language death is just one easy to understand part of a much bigger tragedy: globalization reaches people who lived independent lives, tied to their localities, destroys their way of life, and makes them into subordinates, defined not by what they have but rather by what they lack.
> Slashdotters should think programming languages. Imagine a world where there were no programming languages except visual basic
That's a poor analogy. How about a world in which there is only one CPU architecture (real like x86 or virtual like the JVM), meaning that any program can run on any system. Sure, you lost some of the specific benefits of particular architectures, but gain in increased compatability.
Languages aren't dying out, people are consolidating their means of communication. That isn't 'alarming' its a breath of fresh air. Multiple languages only developed in the first place due to isolation it is time to consolidate. There will still probably be local variations of a the common tongue.
Now if only we could get the damn cubans and mexicans migrating to the US to stop speaking spanish and start calling themselves americans.
That works well if your language has words for "throw" and "window", but you'd have a hard time translating it into a language with no concept of either one.
The libertarian solution to the failures of capitalism is to apply more capitalism til the failures are fixed.
I think the problem is that we're all programmers here, or we've been (somewhat ironically) trained to think that way.
...
All programming, and hence all programming languages are ultimately based on mathematics, and not only that, but discrete math in particular. In the computer world, there are no ambiguity, no nuances, no uncertainty. And so all programming languages are disposable, because the underlying code will always produce the same results. Subsequently, because of this, we can create metrics to determine what language is "better." Programming languages are constructs we invent in order to bridge the gap between man and machine, between how we think and how a machine "thinks."
And therein lies the problem. We cannot look at human languages from this perspective, because to do so would imply that there is a countably infinite set of abstractions to which all human languages can be reduced. But humans are not machines, where there are two and only two states for every bit. The number of states of human psychology is uncountably infinite, and each language effectively is a different set of such "irrational" elements. Translation, in this respect, is the process of rounding of these "irrational" elements into rational elements from which we can create unions, but that's tangental. This means that the loss of any one language is the loss of a whole set of irreplicable symbols. And not only do we lose a whole set, but a set wherein the the elements have a relationship on an even higher level of abstraction, and hence we lose that information as well.
So we don't just lose the parts--the methods of expressing thoughts--we lose the sum, which is, in part, the culture and the history that led to such ways of thinking. And that's what people here, and everywhere, have to start realizing. It might be great to standardize the world on certain languages or certain sets of languages to facilitate communication. But it's bad if in that process of standardization, we lose every other language. And it doesn't have to be that way. True multilinguals, can and do exist.
What I can't believe is that I just made an analogy between mathematics and human language
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
"Pushing out through an opening in a wall meant to let in light but not for passage", or in finnish, "seinänvaloasisäänpäästämäänmutteikulkuuntarkoitetustareiästäulostyöntäminen". The latter is meant to be a single word, but the Slashcode will propably slash it in two.
Not that anyone would actually use a monster like that, but it is technically legal in finnish. Besides, since defenestration has connotations of political dissent, the correct finnish term might be "paskantaminen", which is a vulgar term for emptying ones bowels - very appropriate, considering the quality of politicians here.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Not trying to start a flame war, but I honestly don't see why it should concern anyone if any number of languages die off from lack of use or popularity. Extinction is a natural process.
RU serious?
Have gnu, will travel.
I blame the ambiguities of written language.
Is it really necessary that we have so many languages? Seriously, what does it buy us as a species? Nothing except increased miscommunication ("Israel should be wiped off the map") and increased costs (most people can't imagine the amount of money a company spends ensuring its products, most specifically things with MSDS, can be read by almost everyone). Most countries have a national language for a reason: it makes life easier for everyone living there. Imagine how much easier the world would be with just one language.
Which is more painful? Going to work or gouging your eye out with a spoon? Find out!
http://www.workorspoon.com
The problem with the English language was perfectly described, imho, in the movie "Idiocracy".
Narrator: "Unaware of what year it was, Joe wandered the streets, desperate for help. But the English language had deteriorated into a hybrid of hillbilly, valley girl, inner-city slang and various grunts. Joe was able to understand them but when he spoke in an ordinary voice he sounded pompous and faggy to them."
http://www.gotwavs.com/php/sounds/?id=bst&media=MP3S&type=Movies&movie=Idiocracy"e=englishlanguage.txt&file=englishlanguage.mp3/Darmok and kdawson at drunk tank.
Eloi are stupid, throw morlocks at them!
We can treat languages as technologies because they are products of human mind. The extinctions of many world languages can be thought of as people migrating to a more compatible global standard in communications technology.
Engrish Mo*%#^ Fu*%@^#! Do you speak it?!
if english is your mother tongue you will not understand. Other languages suit themselves better to different forms of expression. As a matter of fact, I find english rather boring and lifeless compared to my native language. It is good for expressing ideas but bad for expressing certain types of emotion.
Hm... this makes me think that researchers should start documenting these languages and cultures, instead of watching them die out. Sure hassles like funding and bureaucratic red tape will hinder such operations, but int he interests of human kind, this needs to be done. Thousands of great cultural tales will be lost soon... sad.
So the fact that two disagreeing nations speak different languages now means that those languages were invented to drive a wedge between them?
Hebrew and Arabic weren't "invented" specifically to drive a wedge between Israel and the Arab world, they have simply been used again and again to drive a wedge between the respective believers and non-believers in general.
And, come on, that's not some wild idea of mine, it's in the Koran and the Torah. Both groups go through a great deal of trouble creating differences from non-believers and resisting assimilation (including cutting off a piece of you-know-what and bizarre dietary rules), the Koran stresses the supposed uniqueness of Arabic, and the story of Babel tells us about the conflicts that arise when people speak different languages. Islam and Judaism are about creating distinctions and they explicitly recognize the role of language to do it. How much more clearly do you need it spelled out than in the primary texts of those religions themselves?
Were French and German invented to piss each other off?
Not quite. French and German were each created (and they were created!) to unify a lot of squabbling little principalities and regions into large nations in which people lived peacefully together, and they succeeded at that (unfortunately, those nations then became powerful enough to go raping and pillaging across the globe).
Also, If the very existence of Hebrew scares you, well... mifached. It isn't going away.
It scares me about as much as a bunch of Star Trek nerds speaking Klingon.
"That being said, languages are still developing and evolving, but now due more to artificial forces such as intentional introduction of slang as personal identification and new technologies and methods that need new terms to describe. e.g.: "Double-click the minimize control to select the desired HDMI input". Perfectly understandable to you and me, complete gibberish to most people over 50. And that's just in English."
You're confusing jargon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jargon with language http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language.
"There is no "study" to prove this, because it is a normative claim"
In other words, a claim you can't support with factual evidence.
Which just about says it all about you and your points.
"Additionally, this isn't about some kind of touchy-feely "diversity" - more languages means more data to work with, which presumably, is "good"."
Based on your repeated claims, which are based on nothing.
I don't know why you think you're going to get anywhere claiming it's not about touch feely diversity then giving me nothing but your feeling that diversity is just plain better period, in the absence of scientific fact.
I only go to buffets for the unlimited soft serve.
How would all the programmers here feel about there only being ONE programming language?
Great.....just great.
Now I have to listen to the idiots next door in Berkeley whine about the "Horrendous and tragic mass extinction" of some obscure language that I could give a rat's ass about.
What's next? A Michael Moore/Al Gore film blaming the Republicans for it?
Hmmmmm..... Must be a slow news day on SlashDot.
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Just out of interest, can you give examples of the two uses above? [1]
As you say German is very regular. The two oddities are:
1) It has a neuter gender but chooses not to use it properly.
2) It has the same odd have/be past tense formation (as do the Latinate languages) depending on whether it's moving or not (or is it transitive/intransitive - never grokked that totally).
[1] I suppose the correct word order is "could you to me some examples give?"
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
The world-shrinking communications tech that has made so many languages a hindrance to commerce and cooperation is also the cheapest most effective way to preserve for future use, the spoken and written forms of these languages we are pushing aside. If comms and internet have truly gotten us to the point that you cannot find two people on the planet who are more than 6 degrees of separation apart then WTF do you need 7000 languages for?
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
Now, can we zap all languages that have
1. needless use of gender?
2. character-based alphabets?
before moving on to simplify the few reasonable ones remaining:
"I go", so why can't it also be "she go"? It's stupid to have variations that make learning difficult, and yet which convey no information at all.
tone
tone
OH NO... what will happen to Babel Fish? http://world.altavista.com/
programming myself into obsolescence
Not really as I'm referring to longer terms. Jargon that survives the initial fad phase gets assimilated into the language over time. I'm sure you can recall quite a few words that were once jargon restricted to a small group which have since become part of common English.
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
Sujatlh 'e' yImev! tlhIngan maH!
today is a good day to die.
l00k 4t wh4t5 c0mm1ng t0 l1f3!!!
I lost my sig.
Bah, they're just two forks of the same OS.
You should install Hindi or Chinese. No, wait, this is Slashdot, Finnish!
I lost my sig.
"Each language is more than just a medium of communications between people, its the encapsulation of an entire way of thinking, of a cultural world-view. "
Yes, and nobody will ever be able to think that way again, now that the language is lost. That precious concept could only be create and encapsulated once. Gone forever, that thought.
Yeah right.
The reality is that we are moving to a new paradigm. There isn't one standard english anymore. There is english as spoken in world of warcraft, english as spoken in the boardroom, english as spoken over the operating table, and so on. Each craft/occupation/whatever out there ends up with its own dialect.
Anyways, doesn't matter. I don't like the word "prolly" for whatever reason, but that isn't going to stop it from coming into the language. This is one area where voting really, really works, and your concerns (or mine) mean little to nothing.
-Jeff
Please learn the difference between a dissenting opinion and a troll before you moderate.
"But they also maintain a secret language to encode information about thousands of medicinal plants, some previously unknown to science, that the Kallawayas use as remedies. The navigational skills of peoples in Micronesia, meanwhile, are similarly encoded in small, vulnerable languages, Harrison said."
Fascinating... so languages can be sort of like embodied data structures (or the Lisp idea of procedural knowledge representation)... without those words, we lose that knowledge. We *could* learn each language, deconstruct the word forms, and port all that subtle knowledge into something like English... but that's a heck of a lot of legacy, debugged code to be ripping through. Seems like it would be simpler to preserve the culture and thus keep that code running.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
Can you hear me now?
It would suck if we lost, say certain kinds of cuisine, and the entire planet was stuck eating McDonald's, but with something like a language, it permits people to communicate. Communication is key to getting along with each other. So while homogenization can be "bad", anything that helps us get along is "good".
I feel extinction is too harsh a word. We generally use it when we imply that the absence of the item in question is a bad thing. I see absolutely nothing wrong with the entire human race speaking one, single language. Even if it isn't the one I learned as a child.
I'm stuck at an institution that prioritizes "diversity" over almost everything else, including educational outcomes. But a language is not who somebody is. A single language does not imply discrimination of a person any more than selecting only strong athletes for a professional team is. Discrimination is about penalizing somebody for who they are; for attributes they have no control over. But language is something we can choose. I can choose to learn a specific language or I can choose to ignore it and I should have to live with the consequences of my choice.
I'm glad to see languages dying off at a high rate. It's not "extinction", which I think implies destruction of living organisms. It's a move towards are more unified world where there is greater understanding between everybody. There is nothing special about any language that indicate that resources should be spent to "save" it. Yes, some people will feel nostalgic about their mother-tongue... get over it.
I will never live for sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.
While modern day English uses an apostrophe to indicate the possessive, it wasn't always the case. It evolved from the English genitive form, which looked like either "-his" or "-es" (and a few other variations) depending on your location.
So to say "The stone's" it'd be "stones" Or "stonhis". Eventually the h was lost (H's are are common to be dropped, they don't sound too much) and the ' replaced the "i" in the written language, as little written aid. So in a sense it is still to indicate a missing letter.
As much as possible records of the dying languages should be made and recorded for further study. But I find the article a bit alarmist in its tone. The push a few years ago was to wipe out world hunger. We've gotten much closer to that than we were, say, 30 or 40 years ago. But in so doing, we have introduced new ecomonies to peoples that never had it before, and for them to live and thrive in those new ecomonies, they must speak the languages of those new ecomonies. Plain and simple. I get the impression that Stefan Lovgren would rather see us return to the old ways of isolation and poverty just to sustain language diversity.
And a child shall lead them. Yes, children do represent the future, and those children want to grow into successful individuals. They do not want to live the way their parents have. And can you blame them, really? Anderson is unrealistic in his approach of "The only way to ensure the survival of a language, the pair said, is to ensure that six-year-olds feel it is valued." Just how do you do that? And if you are successful, do you also cheat that 6-year-old's future from being a more prosperous one to being doomed to be the same "failures" as their parents? Not to say that the old ways have "failed", per se, but really, in a way they have, and we should just own up to that. Celebrate the 6-year-olds for seeing the writing on the wall and seizing their own futures. To hell with suffering just to keep the academics happy! You academics out there should get off your collective butts and preserve what you can while you can, not try to make people feel bad for wanting a better future.
Ruby Neural Evolution of Augmenting Topologies
But seriously you might never even have thought that bears are evil had you not encountered that language (even if at 2nd hand).
No, I have, but only due to The Colbert Report.
good riddance to bad rubbish
Who needs language protectionism? Let language evolve to fit our changing needs. I think it's quite obvious that we live in a communications culture where communication happens much more often, between more people, and much faster than ever before. If anything we're becomming better at expressing ourselves. English and Japanesse are probably the most used languages among this high-communications culture with bits of other languages likely to be mixed in as needed and to fit native speakers of other languages. Words are getting more abbreviated and less punctuation is being used. What punctuation remains has been changed into emoticons. The written language is undergoing a massive change but I don't think it's a problem.
If you want to use a given language or stick to rigid adherence to rules of grammar and spelling then go for it. There is plenty of room for everyones way of expressing themselves. I encourage you to put content online so that future generations can use it as a reference. Eventually the language will decide to move back towards a more rigid grammar and spelling and by leaving content online it'll be easier for future generations to fo this.
I expect language will mostly move in the direction of a single language with a lot of flux though. Our technology is tearing down the walls of distance and culture and causing our society to undergo increasingly rapid changes. Language needs to be able to deal with that. Unknown words are easy to look up now - if you find a word you don't grok then just Google it.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
like it needs 7,000 Linux distributions.
But English isn't wiping other languages out. Regional lingua francas, in general, are wiping other languages out. The extinction of languages is probably more to the benefit of Mandarin, Cantonese, Portuguese, Russian, Hindi, Bangla, Punjabi, Spanish, Javanese, Wolof, Lingala, Swahili, Hausa, Yoruba, Tagalog, Bambara and several dozen others, than it is to the benefit of Enlgish.
Are you adequate?
No, to indicate the possessive, English uses an inflectional suffix (with weird syntax/morphology, but I digress).
You're making a Linguistics 101 error: the grammar of a language must be stated in terms of its spoken form, not in terms of its orthography. Orthography is a very imperfect and inconsistent rendition of the language.
Are you adequate?
Says who? You can repeat that statement as much as you like, and it doesn't make true even the unstated presupposition that there is such a thing as a "primary" function of language.
There are some functions of language that you're not acknowledging at all, too, like establishing and maintaining group boundaries, with the obvious political and economical consequences.
Are you adequate?
Aren't you assuming here that whether a culture is "self-sustaining" is an independent fact about the culture itself? This statement, as I read it, is profoundly circular, because the cultures in question are quite likely "non-self-sustaining" precisely because of the forces in question.
Are you adequate?
Iglaa't migl nagart hooglak. Binjar viq' favvty glagit! Glawby jambil roozh?
Heh, that Wittgenstein quote is totally out of context. Wittgenstein says that in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which is his early work, that he later repudiated (and I'm not sure that it means in context what GP thinks it does; I don't understand the Tractatus very well). In his latter work, he makes exactly the same argument you're making here: "only someone who already knows how to do something with it can significantly ask a name" (Philosophical Investigations, 31).
Are you adequate?
You and GP both share a bad assumption that's common among non-linguists when they discuss language. To put it very roughly, it's the assumption that a language is a bag of words.
One of the important things in learning linguistics is to understand that, contrary to what lettered people in your culture would have you believe, words are boring little details; what's important about the language isn't whether it has words for such and such concept, but rather, how it organizes the encoding of situations into utterances; what aspects of the situation, given the system of choices that the grammar forces upon you, must obligatorily be encoded by the sentence, which may optionally be so, and which require circumlocution to encode.
Good examples are evidentiality and spatial relations. Evidentiality is when a language's grammar requires you to encode, as part of your sentence, the nature of the evidence that supports it: whether you saw the situation described with your own eyes, whether somebody told you it, whether you inferred it from other things, etc. Spatial relations have to do with whether you encode the spatial relation between two objects referred to in a sentence in, for example, terms that are relative to the orientation of your own body ("sit on the chair to my left"), or, as another example, in absolute directional terms ("sit on the northern chair").
Yes, the claim that other languages are special because they have words for concepts that yours don't is a bit of a red herring (when you try to give it substance, you're really going to end up talking about anthropology, not about linguistics). But the reason it's a red herring is because words are not very important.
Are you adequate?
c) The descendants of recent immigrants to the USA are adopting English and losing their native language at a faster rate than in the past.
Are you adequate?
I'll bet he even puts anthrax in the salt shakers at the Ihop just for kicks!
I would be tempted to 'chroot' his rectum with a fence post,'chdir' his head to his colon, then recompile his kernels with a swift kick to his scrotum.
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
While to some people clinging onto dead languages means the world to them, language like just about everything in the universe is subject to evolution. English is a perfect example of that, starting with West Germanic roots and moving through to modern day English. All languages are subject to the rules of change in evolution.
Ungainly and less used languages like their living counterparts in the animal kingdom are bound to slowly die out and become extinct. Where some people see a culture drain, I see a culture explosion. Whatever language we end up speaking in 1000 years from now, even if it is English, it will not be familiar to those of us around today.
Change is inevitable, and its normally for the best. Evolution has a way of choosing whats most efficient and what works the best.
primary adj 1 : first in order of time or development
Before you could communicate that to me, you had to think of it first. And even when you have no intention of communicating with anyone, and you're just thinking, you're still using language to do most of it.
Are you suggesting that one of those functions is primary?Those are interesting things to discuss, though. For instance, by teaching various ethnic groups primarily in languages other than English, we encourage them to maintain group boundaries, with the obvious economic consequence of lower-paying jobs. Was that what you wanted me to acknowledge?
What was that name you just thought of that might apply to me? That's use of language for thinking.
[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
Ultimately, english will evolve into another language and the present day english will be as strange to a year 3000 speaker as latin is to a today's spaniard or middle english to a british today. Of course, the writing of a language and the aphabetisation and the media, these all promote the perenisation of english. But in an era of k-sms writing, and given the rampant functional illiteracy of most under 30, as seen from english natives writing on Slashdot, I think all civilisation conquests we have amassed from the high middle ages 'till today may die off in a couple of generations.
That worries me both as a parent and as an avid reader.
In a globalisation era (not the first), languages will die off. What did the etruscans spoke in Italy before the romans, or the iberans in Spain? Nobody knows. Languages will always die off, because ultimately a language is a tool that allows me to talk to the other. While it is true that a language promotes of at the least shows a particular view on an universe, it would be quite stupid if I invented a language nobody could speak but me just to show my view of the universe.
Ultimately, like in the roman empire (I have read onve about the roman acculturation in my region), or in Africa today (lived there), people communicate in two or three languages: the mother tongue (used by the family), the neigburhood tongue and the official tongue (french, english, spanish or portuguese in Africa and greek or latin in the old roman empire).
I do not pity thus when a tongue becomes extinct. It just served no purpose to the people, so they left it in their own will. All I wish is that the language is recorded, both in writing and phonographic form, for future reference from archeologists and historians. And then, may it die in peace. What I would not like at all is someone impose me the language I should speak because my tongue, that serves me no more, is about to get extinct, coming from english speakers, whose tongue s not and is more useful as a transmission languages.
BTW, I speak fluently four tongues, and speak and write well three more.
"The World's Languages Are Fast Becoming Extinct"
Good.
Fewer languages means more people can talk to each other. That's good imho. It means the world is shrinking. If the world becomes small enough, maybe we'll have less reason to hate each other. Or at least we can hate each other for better reasons than not being able to understand each other.
What? Was i supposed to say something about hegemony, imperialism or monoculture? Sorry.
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
Here in Malaysia, I don't know a single person who is not bilingual. The overwhelming majority of my friends are trilingual or more.
There are multiple major languages for cultural and political reasons; the people are living side-by-side with each other - no geographic isolation required.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
I) Er sagte mir, daß er nach Hause gehe, aber ich weiß, daß er zum Kino geht.
II) Wäre ich da, hätte ich ihm den Arsch aufgerissen.
Yeah, have/be is annoying but at least consistent, three genders I have learned to deal with, but prefer the implicit single one of English, excepting pronouns, which is fine. As a kid, I always thought "transitive" meant "in transit" and "intransitive" meant "not in transit" (IE not moving), which, as you said, is quite confusing.
Says who? That's not an empirical claim. It's a philosophical claim, and a controversial one. E.g., Fodor supports this ("language of thought"), while (late) Wittgenstein was very much against it. When you get down to concrete and realistic psychological models, how do you propose to distinguish the parts that constitute "thinking" from those that constitute "speaking"? How are you going to reconcile this with pervasive parallel processing in the brain, or with clear evidence that people start to say their sentences before they've managed to formulate them completely?
No, I'm suggesting that there do not exist principled criteria by which we can take a set of agreed-upon functions of language, and decide which of them is "primary." That's value-talk, not fact-talk. (And in fact, I don't even agree that there are criteria that we can use to individuate "functions" of language in a discrete manner. Which doesn't mean that language serves no functions, just that there is no well-defined set of functions that language serves.)
Are you adequate?
Good God, this sub-thread has devolved into one pathetic wankfest.
Alas poor cognoscenti, if only The Last Ubykh had spent more time in the gym and less time tossing his beans, maybe you could have interrogated him before he kicked it, and unlocked the secrets of the future. Armed with his ancient knowledge, you'd spend your days in the zoo, reading the shoulder blades of its inhabitants just as if they were tomorrow morning's newspaper.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
Or are you suggesting that you were able to read what I'd said, and post a reply to it, without doing any thinking about what you'd read or written? You just open your mouth (or place fingers to keyboard) and let words fall out without thinking of them first? If that is your habit, then no wonder the idea is so controversial to you.
[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
And I suppose you understand the art of divination by casting beans? Or do you prefer reading tea leaves? Chicken entrails?
Perhaps the art of reading carpets is more your style?
At what point would you give up your culture and your name?
Once the name of Kabir disappears, there will only be 98 names of God left.
That is the seriousness of losing a language; losing the culture and the meanings behind all those parts that make it up.
Sure, we do need a universal speak, but let's not lose what we already have.
(Whiteox)
Well, I managed to peruse this far. (yawn)
Then I saw the dreaded reference to "Chomsky" introduced. And gave up.
A pox on all your apostrocalyptic arguments.
.
- aqk
F U
Then I saw the dreaded reference to "Chomsky" introduced. And gave up. First off, you're responding to the wrong post. I didn't bring up Chomsky. That said, unless you've been a linguistics professor since the 60s and are recognized as an expert in the field, I really don't think you get to hand-wave at Chomsky like that. If you want to make specific points about his work that you feel contradict his findings or the way his work is interpreted, then I'd welcome the discussion. Otherwise, you're just a kid the schoolyard complaining that "these damned structural engineers" get bridge design all wrong.
It is not languages that embody unique cultures and ways of thinking. It is PEOPLE who embody unique cultures and ways of thinking. This planet now holds 6.5 billion unique cultures and ways of thinking. If you want more, then you want a breeding program, not a language preservation program. Languages, in and of themselves, are just a coding scheme. Trying to assign them more weight than that is simply romanticizing the subject, and irrational.
.01% of each that I cannot say in English, and I will gladly learn it. Until then, it is not an efficient use of time or brainpower.
Even if it were true that languages embody ideas -- not all ideas are equally valuable. Each dying language was contained within a culture that was in contact with neighboring cultures. If we grant, arguendo, that there are ideas being lost with the languages, then they are ideas that had so little appeal and vigor that none of the neighboring cultures felt the ideas were worth being assimilated, emulated, or spread -- otherwise the ideas would also be embodied within other languages that are not being lost.
Presuming that some derivative form of English will be one of the final few dominant languages (or the very final one) is not mono-lingual prejudice. I once asked a multi-lingual Vietnamese what the EASIEST "second" language was, for him to learn. He said, "Oh, English by far!" If you understand that, and you understand that humans are genetically programmed to trend toward the easiest paths, then the outcome is inevitable. Overall numbers of speakers as of today is almost an irrelevant issue. In the end, it will simply come down to which language is the easiest to learn. If your language of choice is not as easy for a non-native to learn as English, then your language will eventually die. I'll wager money on it. Conduct your own poll -- see for yourself.
I also disagree about the wondrous value of learning multiple languages. I spent several years learning to say the same things in French that I can say in English. 99.99% of every one of those 7000 languages is devoted to communicating identical content. This is extremely inefficient. Condense out the interesting
Please note, too, that NOT ONE CULTURE in all of recorded history has lasted forever. So for those here who are weeping about how painful it is to lose your cultural heritage -- that may very well be true, but it is historically inevitable for every culture, and every language. It's just a matter of time.
One other thing: we have now entered the digital age. Many people start with an outdated basic assumption that info and understanding about cultural differences is hard to find, and therefore precious. But it won't be long until all this multicultural info is available at your fingertips. In 20 years, you will have 10 lifetime's worth of learning about cross-cultural differences sitting right in front of you at any moment. In that upcoming era of overabundant info on cultures and language, much of this debate will look silly.
Fair dinkum, mate!
IDK....my BFF, Jill?