Slashdot Mirror
Google Launches Endangered Languages Project
redletterdave writes "About half of all of the languages in the world — more than 3,000 of them — are currently on the verge of extinction. Google hopes to stem the tide with its latest effort that launched Thursday, called The Endangered Languages Project. Google teamed up with the Alliance for Linguistic Diversity, a newly formed coalition of global language groups and associations, to give endangered-language speakers and their supporters a place to upload and share their research and collaborations. The site currently features posts submitted by the Endangered Languages community, including linguistic fieldwork, projects, audio interviews, and transcriptions."
.. kudos.
I can entirely understand why linguists value having as many different language samples to work with as possible, and I am similarly aware that active campaigns against various languages have usually closely accompanied active campaigns against their speakers(anything from harassment and discrimination up to and including wholesale slaughter). However, there is also a lot of language homogenization that occurs quite peacefully, with kids wanting to watch TV or speakers of some fairly obscure tongue looking for access to opportunities, culture, and company in more common languages.
Given the value of language in communication between people, and the rather dubious history of the various things that make messy tribalism even easier than it already is, is this 'Linguistic Diversity' stuff actually a good thing(beyond the relatively narrow; although certainly important, value as a research sample for linguists and as a useful rallying point for resistance to other flavors of attack on relatively powerless groups)?
aka What Women Say And What They Really Mean
Not even Google has enough hardware to translate this language, let alone preserve it
Save ALGOL68 before it's too late!
Can I upload the language that I created to talk to my invisible best friend when I was 6 years old?
sudo make me a sandwich
The goal of language is communication, but multiple languages greatly hinder this.
Can someone give me a good reason for language diversity?
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
Damn Punctuation too.
Well... in fact having a diversity can be pretty good. A lot of our thought process is based on associations and if you know a couple of languages (for me Swedish, English, Dutch and German - in order of proficiency) you also know that nuances are very hard to translate - there is simply no 1:1 perfect relationship between certain concepts within different languages. Those ambigous meanings and cultural associations are a fundamental part of the thought process. I am all for having English as a "lingua franca" and it should definitely be considered a second official language in most countries (especially within the EU institutions). On the other hand, there is a great strength in having different frameworks to form your thoughts in and, given this perspective, coming from a different language is clearly an advantage.
One of the languages I know (Udmurt) is in the list :(
It'd be nice to preserve it, but even I don't see that much value in it.
... annnnd immediately upon launch, the project was added to the Endangered Projects Project.
Great idea, but how long will it be supported? Sadly, I think it will share a fate with Google Health.
There are some languages which are better off dead. VisualBasic for example.
I look forward to eating Soylent Green in our dying world monoculture!
You're forgetting the beauty of say Klingon poetry on a midsummer's night, and how sublime that can appear to an audience who understands neither Klingonese or poetry. It would be a tragedy to see that kind of thing disappear.
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
...attributes imo.
To that I would say; incorporate those 'in-between' words and concepts into English (or other language). Cross pollination of languages has happened throughout history of course, and suffice to say: A universal single language with all the subtlety of each existing language are not mutually incompatible goals.
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
This is frequently stated, but not really all that true.
Actual complexity of tax codes increases the effort tax lawyers must expend to deliver the same value to clients, which is disadvantageous to them.
Perceived (by non-tax lawyers) complexity of the tax code increases the perceived value of the services of tax lawyers (and, therefore, the prices purchasers of those services are willing to pay), and is therefore advantageous to them.
Insofar as tax lawyers have a vested economic interested in the complexity of the tax code, its not in maximizing the actual complexity of the tax code, but in maximizing the difference between the perceived and actual complexity of the tax code.
Go raibh míle maith agaibh!
down with everything but English
I was with you until that point. A single world language would certainly do more good than harm, but English is a horrible choice. It's like deciding to standardize on a single OS circa 1999, and then picking Win95 because it's the most common one.
I'm genuinely curious; why do you consider English to be the Windows 95 of languages? What language do you think the world should "standardize" on?
I find thinking in German to be far more efficient. I mutter to myself in German although English is my first language. It confounds the illegal aliens at my workplace and I hear a lot less Espanol.
On the other hand I have the understanding of William Burroughs/ Laurie Anderson that:
Language is a virus from outer space and...
It's better to hear your name, than to see your face...
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
What do you suggest? Klingon?
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
Bad analogy. Languages don't expire in the same sense as OS's do. Also, are you implying that there exists a language that everyone should be switching to? Because there isn't really any 'good' universal language out there.
In Soviet Union, you speak Russian.
I'm sure their research has shown that people respond better to advertising in their native tongues, or some equally self-serving privacy intrusion that's best wrapped in a facade of socio-linguistic altruism.
How do you say "Big Brother is Watching" in Assyrian?
Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis about how language is related to the culture that uses it? That would make it more than a practical communication matter.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
I'm genuinely curious; why do you consider English to be the Windows 95 of languages?
Its spelling is horribly mismatched with pronunciation, and its morphology has a lot of irregularities (e.g. irregular verbs).
I don't think the world should standardize on any existing natural language; a constructed one would be a better fit. But so long as we stick to natural languages, I'd much prefer, say, German over English (but then of course I'm also biased in favor of Indo-European group).
Of course, in practice, the only way the world might standardize on a single language is by a process similar to Pax Romana. Today, that's Pax Americana, so that language is English, unfortunately. I sure hope Chinese are not going to be the next to run the world, because their writing system is so crappy English looks like Esperanto in comparison.
If humanity were to standardize on one language:
It would make sense to consider what's already popular.
English can be hard to learn because of the irregular verbs; Mandarin can be hard because of the tones.
Not sure about other major languages such as Spanish, Hindi or Arabic.
And language is more than a practical means of communication; the cultural issues create a shitstorm.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Bad analogy. Languages don't expire in the same sense as OS's do.
You misunderstood the analogy. The point wasn't that Win95 is an expired OS; the point was that, even at the time of its dominance shortly after release, it was still crappy from design point of view. Similarly, English, while dominant, is rather poorly designed, largely due to its unfortunate origin as a marriage of two languages from different language groups, and then an uneasy and rather turbulent evolution.
Also, are you implying that there exists a language that everyone should be switching to? Because there isn't really any 'good' universal language out there.
It depends on your definition of "good". From my subjective POV, no natural language is good for that purpose, but artificial ones like Lojban might be.
An artificially designed language that is actually easy to learn, convenient, expressive, logical and unambiguous.
But then I suspect it might present a bit of a problem when it comes to Bible translations. ~
We have Esperanto. Not too many people speak it.
Let's not forget sayings like "If you can read this, thank a teacher. If you can read it in English, thank a soldier". Even if the imperialist project wasn't successful, language imposition is taken as a symbol of it.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
The idea of one world language - no matter which one - is a cloud in the sky in the first place. For people who say English is "it", you forget about Chinese and Latin America. And so long as we're dreaming about things, might as well dream about those things done right.
Are the branches of Quenderin, Khuzdul, and Black Speech to be considered as endangered?
English is the exact opposite of "orthogonal". Nothing makes sense.
Let's just look at the rules for taking a singular noun, and making it plural (paraphrased from Wikipedia's article):
1. If the noun ends in a sibilant consonant sound, suffix -es
1a. unless it ended with a silent E, in which case merely suffix an -s and pronounce the E
2. If it ends with a non-sibilant unvoiced consonant, suffix -s
3. For all others, suffix -s, but pronounce it as -z
3a. Unless it ended with -o, in which case suffix -es and pronounce as an S (provided it is not a loanword from Italian)
3b. Unless it ended with -y, in which case replace with -ies (but ONLY if there is not a vowel before the Y)
3c. Unless the last consonant was an unvoiced fricative, in which case replace with a voiced fricative. Whether or not you should change the spelling varies by word
3d. Unless it is one of the special words that do not change at all between singular and plural
3e. Unless it is one of several Old English words that are suffixed with -en, often changing other parts (ie. brother -> brethren)
3f. Unless it is one of several other Old English words that change certain vowels (ie. foot -> feet)
3g. Unless it is derived from Latin and ends in -a, in which case follow the Latin rules and replace with -ae
3h. Unless it is derived from Latin and ends in -us, in which case follow the Latin rules and replace with -i
3i. Unless it is derived from Latin and ends in -um, in which case follow the Latin rules and replace with -a
3j. Unless it is derived from Latin and ends in -[i|e]x, in which case follow the Latin rules and replace with -ices
3k: Unless it is derived from Greek and ends in -on, in which case follow the Greek rules and replace with -a
3l: Unless it is one of certain words from Hebrew, in which case suffix -im or -ot as appropriate
3m: Unless it is one of other certain exceptions that occur for only one or two words.
Got it?
Now try to list every possible way to pronounce "gh" in a word. You *will* miss some.
Now realize that you have to learn the entire nominative/accusative system common to European languages *just* for a handful of pronouns (see: I vs. Me, We vs. Us). At least in most languages that do that, it applies everywhere.
Yeah, English follows the philosophy of "rules are meant to be broken". *Every* rule has at least one exception. Like how adjectives normally come before the noun, except in weird structures like "notary public".
There's even more things. You know that "th" sound (or rather, sounds, because there's actually two distinct ways to pronounce it)? Yeah, that's pretty much one of the rarest phonemes on the planet. It's in English, Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, Spanish, Swahili, and *nothing* else of note (no, Arapaho is not notable). That's why so many foreigners can't pronounce "th" properly - it doesn't exist in their language.
My vote for lingua franca? Esperanto. That's literally what it was designed for.
It's very orthogonal - that massive list at the start of "how to convert a noun from singular to plural" is just one rule: add a -j. That's it. Auto becomes autoj. Kapo becomes kapoj. Letters are pronounced only one way.
It's not perfectly culture-neutral, but it at least makes a significant effort. It's already widely-spoken enough to have an "installed base", unlike most other invented languages (I'm looking at you, Lojban!)
And it's Indo-european enough that anyone who knows English, German, French, Russian, or any of those other related languages, will be able to sort-of understand you. Not perfectly, not even half the full meaning will get through, but if I say "mia komputilo estas rompita", you should be able to guess at least "my computer is ____", and hopefully the blue smoke leaking out will tell you the rest.
English like C are both programming languages. All languages have the same basic principles. While natural languages have a great deal more exceptions, the purpose is the same.
what about a nice Gin and Tonic?
Bible translations....+1 interesting.
Youtube a Klingon giving the Sermon on the Mount...Priceless.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
All a part of natural selection, mates. However, what's more interesting is when a factor of preservation enter the cycle of natural selection. Maybe the languages that are actively recognized as "endangered languages" will then survive oblivion, whereas certain seemingly non-endangered languages might just pass out of existence gradually, simply because no one feared it going extinct and didn't decide to preserve it. Of course, it won't happen to languages like English, Mandarin or Hindi. But it may just happen to local dialects and minor variations on major languages such as Coorgi . It is a primary language for a large enough community (~500,000) of people in Southern India. It belongs to the Dravidian family of languages and is similar to the major Dravidian languages of Tulu, Kannada, Tamil and Malyalam. Is it conceivable that gradually such traditional languages become less common due to communication issues and start phasing out as the newer generations speak more of the major/popular languages (still local though, such as Tamil), as no one really sees them being endangered?
Hell, I'm not sure I myself know fully what I just implied there.
English is needlessly complex and highly irregular.
Esperanto is the ideal language for standardization.
Doubleplusungood.
"Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?... Has it ever occurred to your, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?... The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact, there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking-not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.
A study discussed on NPR recently found that when people think specifically in not-their-first language they are more rational and thoughtful. It was hypothesized that thinking in your primary language made it easier for your brain to take emotional shortcuts, making you less rational and coherent.
If a language "dies" from lack of interest (nobody wants to learn it, use it and pass it down to their children), that is a natural thing that should be left to take its course.
I mean, what is the alternative? Surely, you can't force people to learn a language they are not interested in. How do you motivate people to revive a language that, say, only a few thousand people know?
This project, how does it actually protect "dying" languages? If some aspect of a language is kept in a museum, is that language really alive? I would say that it's rather like specimen in a jar, if we are to keep with this analogy of language as a living thing.
A language is only alive to the extent that it has native speakers, or at least very highly proficient quasi-native speakers.
Now if the disappearance of a language is due to, say, genocide, then that's a whole different problem, isn't it! People dying versus a language simply falling out of use.
I'd much prefer, say, German over English (but then of course I'm also biased in favor of Indo-European group).
I wouldn't, and I bet a lot of people are with me on this one. Even some germans.
that's Pax Americana, so that language is English, unfortunately
American English. But yeah, you're right on the money.
I sure hope Chinese are not going to be the next to run the world, because their writing system is so crappy English looks like Esperanto in comparison.
Can you explain why (traditional/simplified) chinese is that bad?
A language that can't be used for bible translations is a win in my book (pun intended).
Which German are you talking about? Probably the standard Haupt. Low German (Platt Deutsch) is facing extinction.
It makes sense to choose what's most common because there is a huge established base toward the purpose of choosing one, "intercommunicating with as many people as fast as possible." And your comments seem to assume some serious problems in the language: I'll be dealing with those in a reply to this comment, http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2931057&cid=40406061
English also has an incomparably large amassed amount of literature for all sorts of purposes, which are not useful simply to get ideas, but as guides to the language.
Intelligent idiots are we. | Evil men do not understand justice.
A lot of our thought process is based on associations and if you know a couple of languages (for me Swedish, English, Dutch and German - in order of proficiency) you also know that nuances are very hard to translate - there is simply no 1:1 perfect relationship between certain concepts within different languages. Those ambigous meanings and cultural associations are a fundamental part of the thought process.
I agree with this, but only to the extent the "to be saved" language was a written language.
There are several languages and dialects that are vanishing which were never written, and the only sample of them is the few examples of recorded speech by people trying to save the language. Most, if not all of the native speakers of these languages have passed, except a very few individuals.
In this case you have nothing but a curiosity, a museum piece like an old rusty shovel. There is no body of literature upon which to apply it, and (at least among north american native and Eskimo populations) its historical legacy consisted of aural traditions, embellish and modified stories which change with each generation (if not each telling), so at best you have something that bears no resemblance to the original story.
Most of these 3000 languages are merely dialects of some common root language, and have very little value either to the study of linguists, or history unless there exists a fairly large body of writing.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
People are actually translating the Bible into Klingon. Just looked it up: Google "Klingon Bible".
Intelligent idiots are we. | Evil men do not understand justice.
Changed my mind: I don't really want to go into a huge mass of linguistic details.
Intelligent idiots are we. | Evil men do not understand justice.
A language that can't be used for bible translations is a win in my book (pun intended).
I guess that would be "winning", especially since so many prominent formally atheist societies have been such successes.
Alas, it is your destiny to be frustrated.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
English is what it is because of history.
It is the most eclectic language on earth.
Esperanto? Please. Most people don't know ONE person that speaks or understands it.
I know people that are fluent in languages from all over the world, (Yes, even Inupiat), I can throw a stone and
hit the windows of people who speak Russian, German, Italian, French, Spanish, Norwegian, Tlingit, Swedish, Dutch, and a few others.
Not one Esperanto.
The world will speak one language when Aliens arrive and teach it to us. Not a moment before.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
I guess the message was clear enough that you feel the need to correct its grammar. But I'm not shure, since I'm agnostic. I'm just not into perpetuating misinterpretations and lies.
ghuy'cha
Are you sure this isn't just an excuse for multilingual people to feel superior?
Wrong.
Why? For every language you learn, your brain will gain about 5 years before showing the effects of aging.
Cultures that lose their language eventually die and, in cases such as the Bo, the population itself loses the will to live. We know that biodiversity is essential for a healthy ecosystem so why not assume linguistic/cultural diversity follows the same rule?
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Wonder if Na'vi will end up there now that all the cool kids have moved on to learn the Dothraki language.
I wouldn't, and I bet a lot of people are with me on this one. Even some germans.
Well, it's certainly more regular.
On a second thought, if I had to pick a European language that would be both easy to learn and reasonably popular, I'd say Spanish. At least you can read all the words without knowing them.
American English.
Not really. The strength of English today comes not from native speakers (Spanish and Chinese both have more), but from all the rest of us who learned it as a second language. And how close that is to American English varies from region to region - e.g. Indians contribute a lot there, and theirs is closer to British. Europe is probably 50/50. Most Latin American countries go straight for American. In the end, the "international English" dialect is certainly closest to American English, but it's not quite it.
Can you explain why (traditional/simplified) chinese is that bad?
Because ideograms are a particularly silly way of writing things down, very hard to learn (even for native speakers), and do not mesh well with computers, and generally any form of storage/writing other than scribbling them by hand.
It's no coincidence that there were numerous attempts in the history of countries who have adopted Chinese writing system to move away from it to improve literacy rates for common people. Koreans have done that with Hangul, and even Chinese themselves came up with a simplified script under commies to make learning more manageable. But it's still fundamentally a mess, and I see alphabetic and syllabic writing systems as vastly superior.
Then also, of course I'm biased towards my own culture, which means that I prefer Latin/Greek or something derived from them. Though I do find Hangul very neat, and wouldn't mind using it just because it's so well designed.
It can be used for Bible translations; the only "problem" is that you'd get a visibly different translation depending on which denomination/sect does it because they'd have to explicitly resolve all ambiguities, or at least deliberately mark them as such. Which, as far as I'm concerned, would be a good thing, but I suspect Christians might find it inconvenient.
Back in the day, yes, they did. But the reason why English remains a global language today (and for the last 70 years or so) is solely due to US, not UK.
It makes sense to choose what's most common because there is a huge established base toward the purpose of choosing one
Well, if you really want it, you can start learning Chinese today. ~
On a more serious note, yes, English is the greatest by total number of speakers (if you count all people who speak it just barely), but Chinese is pretty damn close, and both Chinese and Spanish have more native speakers, and Spanish has a wider geographic spread of countries or regions where it's pervasive.
Anyway, as I said in another reply, realistically we're not going to have a single common primary language anytime soon. So if I'm dreaming about nice things that will never be in my lifetime, I might as well dream about them being done right (rather than the way it usually happens, which is mostly accidental).
Why? For every language you learn, your brain will gain about 5 years before showing the effects of aging.
And the reference for that would be?..
Cultures that lose their language eventually die
That's not strictly true, different cultures can exist very well under the umbrella of a single language; US itself is a prime example of that. Anyway, I don't care much about cultural diversity for the sake of it. I think that being able to communicate directly, without the need for intermediaries (who often have an agenda of their own - a recent example is the mistranslation of Ahmadinejad's quote that's known more widely in US than his actual words - something that would be impossible if he spoke the same language), outweighs it.
The system of grammar tenses is also very interesting and powerful (Russian doesn't have an analog of present perfect, for example)
As another Russian speaker I disagree with you. Tenses are cumbersome and redundant.
The difference is that English is a language current among people with means and interests to conduct transactions. ; ) "Chinese" is a misnomer--there are many varied languages in China covered by "Chinese", with the "Chinese" that Americans are accustomed to (or were for quite a while), being that found in Chinatowns (same sort as in Hong Kong, "Cantonese"); "Cantonese" is the form found throughout Southeast China and it is altogether a different language--far more than, say, Italian and Spanish differ: not compatible at all (knew a guy from Hong Kong). It was also the form traditionally found in places full of Chinese but outside of China's borders, and remains the more common form outside today, though some of these places now teach "Mandarin" given the PRC's position on Mandarin; the form now most prevalent in media and being the form promulgated by the Chinese government as official, but which much of China, being very "ethnic" (often totally separate peoples who happen to be in their jurisdiction) actually *does not speak: they're working on educating everyone in that language, but it will be a while--when China says it's providing universal this or that, or doing this or that, it may actually be making face: it even struggled to re-build strategic bridges and the communities that supported strategic economic routes in its country after earthquakes (and that said, Dear Chinese folks, that's not meant to be antagonistic criticism or insulting, and it's also not altogether secret knowledge, it was even broadcast on English language Chinese news services, and it is not meant to demean, degrade, or ruin your face: please don't take it that way**).
So often "Chinese" is overplayed as being on par with English: it may largely be, in fact, not only used far less, but like English, many more are still being taught: probably only half of the population there--if we are being generous--actually speaks Mandarin with proficiency. Meanwhile, "Spanish" happens to spread across various jurisdictions and countries with very different histories, suffer major divergences, and happens to be used by...many people who may or may not be accessible or able for said transactions: in some places things for this end are improving, in some places getting worse for them, e.g. Chavez, anyone...anyone? It is mixed-up extremely with various local languages--if it isn't often just those instead; its phonologies sometimes vary too widely for natives from backwater places to be understood (and backwater populations are significant). Then, Portuguese, of course, is quite handy given many speakers in Brazil, which is economically rising; but Brazil is still brimming with excessively impoverished people, is very corrupt, very inefficient (I believe the word of one Brazilian that I read was "hedonistic" instead, and that his is a country that could be competitive but they would all rather leave the offices early and hit the beaches); still, Brazil has a population around three hundred million, most using Portuguese, though some contact languages (of Spanish with Portuguese), besides mere forms of one or the other with extra vocabulary that often fall under the same names e.g. 'Fronterizo/iço" or "Portuñol/hol", have developed in very old points of contact that stretch back continuously, and have significant populations using them. I would guess that, in terms of people using a Romance language that is a standard dialect, with a standard vocabulary, with a standard set of concepts and meanings, without a lot of difficulties, Brazilian Portuguese stomps Spanish: the advantage of being one, unified country. (Don't get me on Italian, with its innumerable dialects, and even separate languages that the government since Fascist times has simply denied are separate at all!)
A "primary" language is just one given precedence--it needn't be so prevalent that nearly all use it. That said, I don't really care whether any single language becomes predominant in the world, as I like languages. : ) Having to learn another's to communicat
Intelligent idiots are we. | Evil men do not understand justice.
I love Spanish, but I wouldn't pick it as the lingua franca of the world - there's no neuter gender. I think any language without a proper neuter gender which works in a logical manner is just not the right language for a "world language". German noun genderrules also IMHO disqualifies German as a world language.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
I was with you until that point. A single world language would certainly do more good than harm, but English is a horrible choice. It's like deciding to standardize on a single OS circa 1999, and then picking Win95 because it's the most common one.
Except for the small practical detail that English is already the de-facto lingua franca (God, that just pinned the needle on my irony meter!) in the EU and anywhere else that gets British/US music, TV and movies. The reason we Brits are so crap at languages is partly because its generally the most useful language to travel with. You can't "impose" a made-up language on the world - you have to build on what is already there.
One of the reasons that English is so illogical that it is the Borg of languages - your language's cultural distinctivness will be assimilated. It is defined by usage rather than committee. That also makes it easy to tailor to your culture: if you don't have an English phrase for your concept, just liberate one from any other language...
Oh, and yes, if you wanted to establish a universal computer OS in 1999 then your choices would have been (a) choose Win 95 and succeeed or (b) choose something better and fail.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
I'm genuinely curious; why do you consider English to be the Windows 95 of languages?
Its spelling is horribly mismatched with pronunciation, and its morphology has a lot of irregularities (e.g. irregular verbs).
Apart from this, however, English has a lot of good things going for it. First of all, it is a "mutt language" being a primarily Germanic language (with some Celtic remnants) with a massive Latin influence (via French) . Other languages either de-Germanized (like French) during the Roman empire to become fully "latinized" or remained on the other side of the border (actually pretty cool that the linguistic borders still follow the borders of the Roman empire).
This gives it a unique advantage compared to many languages, and in addition to that the very pragmatic and tolerant attitude within English-speaking cultures towards its language and towards non-native speakers of it is really a great feature for an international language. In fact, many international companies have "Bad English" as company language (which often means that native Brits with peculiar accents need to slow down during meetings... Americans can normally speak like they always do).
If we are to play "how should we change the way we communicate", I would rather like to rally against the standard alphabets and propose strict phonetic spelling (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet) with a possible augmentation using notations to indicate emphasis and melody. This would put the spoken language first and the written second with some clear advantages (especially for dyslectics). Closely related languages like Swedish, Norwegian and Danish would basically be groups of dialects with no clearly defined official borders (now with official spelling rules, the written variants of those languages look quite different). Litterature would be given an entirely new dimension where people easily can read exactly how things should be pronounced in different dialects or even made-up languages. (I remember being a bit annoyed about not being able to imagine how the dialect written out in the Innocent Mage books actually should be pronounced/sound like, which probably required some native English cultural background).
...especially since so many prominent formally atheist societies have been such successes.
Communists have never been atheists. They've always had the deity in form of Marxism-Leninism. It's just like Abrahamic religions (authoritarian, dogmatic, expansionistic etc.), only the deity isn't antropomorphic. But that's about it.
Ezekiel 23:20
German noun genderrules also IMHO disqualifies German as a world language.
Wait, there are rules?
- a native German speaker
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
The variant spoken the last couple of centuries by German settlers in Kansas?
No, interesting, just plain old "Rosetta Stone" German, off the computer.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
Other languages either de-Germanized (like French) during the Roman empire to become fully "latinized"
I don't think there was much to de-Germanize in France during the Roman Empire. Wasn't France basically a Celtic language territory, with the Gaulish family and some Brythonic being spoken and basically wiped out and replaced by Latin under the Romans?
On the topic of phonetic spelling, I do somewhat like the idea, but still the IPA is not an exact rendering of pronunciation - in particular when it comes to vowels, which are notoriously hard to clearly define, being on non-discrete sliding scales like open-closed, back-front, rounded-unrounded and the like. If you want real precision, you got to go all-out on diacritic use, and that would make for a completely unworkable spelling for anyone but linguists and language nerds...
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
Yeah, not trying to insult linguistics, I actually quite like reading up on rarely used languages or dead languages
In that case, you actually are insulting linguistics. Linguistics is not about making people shake their heads while reading about "how weird those silly exotic languages are".
Ezekiel 23:20
I don't think there was much to de-Germanize in France during the Roman Empire. Wasn't France basically a Celtic language territory, with the Gaulish family and some Brythonic being spoken and basically wiped out and replaced by Latin under the Romans?
You're basically right, except the Brythonic arrived later from Great Britain in the fifth century or so, and settled in Brittany, giving modern Breton (which is also on the list of threatened languages).
French is basically derived from Latin, with traces of Gaulish in the lexicon, and a strong later Germanic influence.
There's nothing like $HOME
Wonderfully reasoned argument there. I like how you referenced the works of Ancient Greek philosophers to support your points.
No colour or religion ever stopped the bullet from a gun
To that I would say; incorporate those 'in-between' words and concepts into English
Good idea - it's been working great for the last thousand years or so, long may it continue :)
No colour or religion ever stopped the bullet from a gun
No. I'm fluent in German and mostly fluent in English (and suck at Romance languages) and there are times when the languages just work entirely differently. Let's take the German "doch". It's the proper answer given to express that the assertion made by a negative question is wrong. For instance, for "Haven't you mown the lawn?" the answer "Doch." expresses that I have indeed mown the lawn. While English can approximate the answer with "Yes, I have.", the subtext is different. "Doch" is a negative answer; it implies wrongness on the part of the asker. "Yes, I have", on the other hand, answers in the affirmative.
Now, this is a simple language construct that could be imported into the English language (although English is already such a hodgepodge that the relationship between spelling and pronounciation is often unintuitive even to native speakers*). But there are other things where it's not as easy. When you hear the word "cadence" you would think of music or perhaps My Little Pony. A German or an Italian might think of guns. Why? The German "Kadenz" can mean both "cadence" and "rate of fire". Similarly, "cadenza" can be extended to "cadenza di tiro" to similar effect. These relations might give a German or an Italian an idea relating to music and guns that would be entirely unintuitive to an American who might only make the connection through Kurt Cobain.
I'm not going to go all Sapir-Whorf and declare that speaking another language means that you think entirely differently - but you do make different connections simply because often concepts are related differently in certain languages or even jargons. It's not about speakers of certain languages not being able to understand the color blue or polyglots being hyper-intelligent; it's about speaking multiple languages giving you more opportunities for unusual ideas because you have more conceptual relations to work off.
And no, I'm not a linguist although I briefly considered studying it. Language is pretty interesting.
* Including people who should really know better. Ghoti anyone?
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
English is completely inadequate for a country like Australia because it cannot describe the flora, fauna and weather - and that is one reason why Australians have a disconnect with the land. English has the word "newt" but I bet 99.9% of Australians don't know what a newt is. When Swiss hunters do forest-lore tours, they have real difficulty talking in standard German because it doesn't have the words they need - so they have to do it all in their local dialect which is rich enough and deep enough to explain the natural phenomena they learnt from their predecessors.
Why do you think we should get rid of other languages, specifically? Is it only the inconvenience of translation? And why do you chose English to be the 'standard'?
Now try to list every possible way to pronounce "gh" in a word. You *will* miss some.
Ghoti?
Netcraft now comfirms: Miami-Illinois is dying.
Standard? Not quite. But there are three different methods, all based around replacing non-ASCII characters with a sequence of two ASCII characters. And each of them is common enough that you'll see them in use.
My own preference is for the use of the caret: ie. rego (with a circumflex over the G that I know /. won't parse) becomes reg^o.
Other systems use H (regho) or X (regxo) for the same purpose. H has the problem of being ambiguous as to whether it's an actual H, or if it's a diacritic replacement. X is not (X is not a letter in Esperanto) but it doesn't quite look as good.
Let's take the German "doch". It's the proper answer given to express that the assertion made by a negative question is wrong. For instance, for "Haven't you mown the lawn?" the answer "Doch." expresses that I have indeed mown the lawn. While English can approximate the answer with "Yes, I have.", the subtext is different. "Doch" is a negative answer; it implies wrongness on the part of the asker. "Yes, I have", on the other hand, answers in the affirmative.
Wouldn't a US teenage "duh?" or "hello?"work, with the right tone of voice? (implying "well I'm looking at a mown lane, and I've just been pushing a noisy lawn mower around for an hour, so what do you think, genius?")
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
No matter what you may find of endangered languages, it's always worth preserving it. Because what if we had not, and in the future we'd encounter a civilization (doesn't have to be from other worlds) and have no way to decipher their language relatively fast?
English is completely inadequate for a country like Australia because it cannot describe the flora, fauna and weather - and that is one reason why Australians have a disconnect with the land.
When the original white settlers in Australia first saw a kangaroo, they asked some passing natives what they called that "fucking big rabbit thing". They replied "kangaroo" which is the native for "fucking big rabbit thing" and the name has been used ever since.
(With apologies to Douglas Adams.)
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Wouldn't work, because "doch" (or "si" in French) isn't inherently snarky, not even necessarily adversarial. It can be merely informative.
I'm French, and I learned German before English (which was admittedly unusual even by then), and when I started the latter I've been kinda confused by the absence of an equivalent to French "si" or German "doch".
There's nothing like $HOME
As someone currently learning traditional Chinese and finding it personally easier, I agree that overall the roman alphabet is superior. The roman alphabet is tied to sound only, and therefore can be used with any spoken language. Minor discrepancies in pronunciation aside, once you know the sounds you can sound out a word you don't know. You can't do that in Chinese. That feature of the alphabet makes it infinitely more adaptable than the character system, where your main choices are memorization and more memorization. It literally is the difference in learning 30-odd characters and 1200. (the 30-odd number is leeway to reintroduce some characters that American English doesn't have at this time, such as one for the 'ch' and the 'sh' sounds.)
And just so you know I personally like the character system better, and I think it is due to my rather severe dyslexia. These roman letters are used over and over again and it can be hard to tell what it is supposed to be. Easiest example to give is 'p', 'b', 'd', and 'q'. Maybe you haven't noticed, but I sure have. They are all the same fucking letter.
Its spelling is horribly mismatched with pronunciation, and its morphology has a lot of irregularities (e.g. irregular verbs).
At least English doesn't have three "genders". The idea of gender in language is surely the most pointless concept ever invented. A blue boy, girl or sky are just blue, there is absolutely no advantage in having a different definite or indefinite article to refer to them, nor to changing the ending of the adjective to agree to the "gender".
I agree that most other Indo-European languages other than English have a lot closer match between spelling and pronunciation, the problem is that simplifying or regularising English spelling generally leads to their etymology being obscured for no other advantage than ease of learning for beginners.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
I love Spanish, but I wouldn't pick it as the lingua franca of the world - there's no neuter gender.
That's a good thing. The ideal number of genders is one, but two is better than three.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Back in the day, yes, they did. But the reason why English remains a global language today (and for the last 70 years or so) is solely due to US, not UK.
Things like the worldwide popularity of languages take more than a few decades to change. If the US had ended up French or Spanish speaking, there would still be a large number of English speaking countries due to the UK's historical involvement (India, South Africa, Australia, etc.)
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
English is like every other language, in that the time it takes to get from 0% to 50% fluent is the same as from 50% to 75% and the same as from 75% to 87.5% and so on.
People always act as though you can learn all of something like Latin really easily, just because it has lots of rules. In fact, no language is perfectly logical and rule-based, so at least with English you don't get lulled into a misguided sense of perfect understanding too easily
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Part of the subtlety is in the information you are required to give.
In German for example you can't talk for very long about someone without revealing their sex, or rather, it becomes very noticeable that you are avoiding revealing their sex.
Try to explain about the heart-shapeded carrot(s?) you are growing in your garden in English, without revealing wether it's one or several.
In Japanese the listener wouldn't notice that you are trying to avoid giving out that information. Can you do that in English?
It's not only the language. There are cultures and histories associated with them.
What do you suggest? Klingon?
It will certainly come in handy when those bumpy-headed bad-tempered aliens discover our planet. Just be sure you don't accidentally challenge one to a bat'leth duel.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
You misunderstood the analogy. The point wasn't that Win95 is an expired OS; the point was that, even at the time of its dominance shortly after release, it was still crappy from design point of view. Similarly, English, while dominant, is rather poorly designed, largely due to its unfortunate origin as a marriage of two languages from different language groups, and then an uneasy and rather turbulent evolution.
Good point. The "problem" of languages in general is that they weren't "designed". They evolved. Often rather messily. English probably is worse than most because of all the Latin stuff tacked onto a Germanic language, but all natural languages are pretty messy.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
Not really, he has a point there. The ideal number of genders is two regular ones for animate objects (where it's obvious how they are applied), and one neuter for everything else. Having objects that don't have actual gender to speak of have a grammatical one is rather pointless, and does make the language harder to learn.
That said, it's not all that bad when grammatical gender is regular - i.e. where you can look at the word and tell right away what gender it is without knowing what it means. Spanish is almost there, with very few exceptions.
Can you explain why (traditional/simplified) chinese is that bad?
Because ideograms are a particularly silly way of writing things down, very hard to learn (even for native speakers), and do not mesh well with computers, and generally any form of storage/writing other than scribbling them by hand.
It's no coincidence that there were numerous attempts in the history of countries who have adopted Chinese writing system to move away from it to improve literacy rates for common people. Koreans have done that with Hangul, and even Chinese themselves came up with a simplified script under commies to make learning more manageable. But it's still fundamentally a mess, and I see alphabetic and syllabic writing systems as vastly superior.
Then also, of course I'm biased towards my own culture, which means that I prefer Latin/Greek or something derived from them. Though I do find Hangul very neat, and wouldn't mind using it just because it's so well designed.
Very hard to learn - yes!
Mesh quite well with computers, provided you use an auxiliary input system. Seems to me most people learn an alpabeth script for that use.
And there are Hangul, and other systems in other countries, created to suplement chinese ideograms. As for literacy of the common people, are you sure anybody cared? More than they cared about being Modern (Western) and stopping Chinese imperialism?
Both Korea and Vietnam have abandoned Chinese ideograms in modern times, are there others? Do you have examples that precede western influence?
For those who don't know: Please note that the creation of Hangul, and in some sense the Japanese kanas, seriously predates western influence in the region, but they were (are) use intermixed with Chinese Ideograms. (I believe Vietnamese had some such system too, but now they use an alphabeth.)
"Lingua franca" is not quite the same as "world language" in the meaning of the word that I and GP have used. The latter is literally the primary language for everyone, rather than an auxiliary communication language between two people who speak different native languages.
One of the reasons that English is so illogical that it is the Borg of languages - your language's cultural distinctivness will be assimilated. It is defined by usage rather than committee.
English is certainly not unique in that regard, and in recent years (or rather centuries) is has assimilated less than most others. A dominant language generally doesn't assimilate that many words - rather, other languages assimilate words from it.
No, the reason why English is so illogical is because it's hodge podge of a Germanic language (Old English) with a Romance language (Old Norman). It's a bit like writing C++ with HTML tags, and then wondering why that feels wrong. ~
Apart from this, however, English has a lot of good things going for it. First of all, it is a "mutt language" being a primarily Germanic language (with some Celtic remnants) with a massive Latin influence (via French) .
And how is that good? It makes the grammar much more distinct from most other European languages (both Germanic and Romance), without doing much for the vocabulary.
If we are to play "how should we change the way we communicate", I would rather like to rally against the standard alphabets and propose strict phonetic spelling
That would be hard to do for English because of its sheer variety of dialects. Remember that IPA is pretty accurate about various sounds it represents, so e.g. a Brit, a Texan and an Indian writing down the same word with strict phonetic spelling according to how they speak it would give you different results. So it would make it easier to write, but not so much easier to read.
If you look at other successful languages that use phonetic spelling, they usually stick to some standard alphabet and use a good approximation of phonemes, but base them on a single dialect which then becomes normative - usually it's the one that's most popular, or else the one spoken in the capital. But that works well for single countries, less so for something like English that's already spread around.
I would also argue that traditional linear alphabets are not the best thing from the ease of learning perspective, because humans don't actually pronounce phonemes standalone (and many of them can't be pronounced that way in the first place!). The smallest units that are clearly pronounceable on their own are syllables. On the other hand, having completely distinct symbols for them as in a syllabary makes for too many to learn. I think Hangul has a good approach there - make a clear visual grouping of syllables, but define them from letters that themselves describe individual phonemes.
And there are Hangul, and other systems in other countries, created to suplement chinese ideograms.
Hangul doesn't really supplement them so much as it subsumes them. at least as originally designed.
. As for literacy of the common people, are you sure anybody cared?
Actually, yes. If you read the history of Hangul, it was quite intentionally designed for that purpose, long before imperialism was an issue. As for commies, they've always had a penchant for improving literacy - among other things, that makes it easier to spread propaganda far and wide (newspapers and posters are cheap and efficient, but you must be able to read them in the first place).
At least English doesn't have three "genders". The idea of gender in language is surely the most pointless concept ever invented. A blue boy, girl or sky are just blue, there is absolutely no advantage in having a different definite or indefinite article to refer to them, nor to changing the ending of the adjective to agree to the "gender".
Genders for animate objects which have them make sense (though gender agreement does not).
Then again, when gender follows the word shape closely (like Spanish -o/-a), it's not really such a big deal.
I agree that most other Indo-European languages other than English have a lot closer match between spelling and pronunciation, the problem is that simplifying or regularising English spelling generally leads to their etymology being obscured for no other advantage than ease of learning for beginners.
But that's the point - for a good language of universal communication, ease of learning for beginners (esp. as a second language) is by far the most important factor. And even outside of it... sure, when you look at "knight", you know that etymologically it's the same as German "knecht", which may probably be useful on some rare occasion - but, really, how often that is? On the other fact, pronouncing it right flies in the face of everything a person learning the language knows if they had learned virtually any European language before that.
. As for literacy of the common people, are you sure anybody cared?
Actually, yes. If you read the history of Hangul, it was quite intentionally designed for that purpose, long before imperialism was an issue. As for commies, they've always had a penchant for improving literacy - among other things, that makes it easier to spread propaganda far and wide (newspapers and posters are cheap and efficient, but you must be able to read them in the first place).
Fascinating! Someone in 144331444 really cared that much.
Thank you!
In most languages, when a word is taken from another language, it's modified to fit their own grammar and phonology. If I decided Esperanto really needed the word santorum (the noun, not the proper noun), I would modify it so the rules of Esperanto apply (in this case, it would become santoro (santoron in the accusative, santoroj and santorojn in the plural, although I suspect the word is already in use).
English, in a truly out-of-character show of cultural sensitivity, tends to keep the rules of the original language. Which is a problem when you steal (excuse me, *pirate*) words from as many languages as English. So if I decide to import a word from Esperanto that has no English equivalent, I would keep the rules of the original language. Only thing I would probably do is make the spelling fit the pronunciation (ie. santoroy or santoroi, to re-use an example).
I think you don't quite know what orthogonal means. Or perhaps it is I who misused it - what I meant was that it is a regular language that tries to follow the "principle of least astonishment".
Esperanto is actually pretty good at being flexible. For example, word order is "whatever the hell you want". Subject-Verb-Object? Fine! Subject-Object-Verb? You bet! Verb-Object-Subject? Why not! You want to put the adjectives next to the opposite nouns from the ones they describe? Perfectly valid, and probably actually useful for some nice wordplay.
Can you explain why (traditional/simplified) chinese is that bad?
I see alphabetic and syllabic writing systems as vastly superior
Well, the meaning of a Chinese ideogram can often be gleaned from the combination of strokes/other ideograms used, even if you can't pronounce it (although there's often some guide to pronunciation in obscure characters too). This is kind of the reverse of English, where the pronunciation is more-or-less clear, but the meaning not.
So, should the written form represented the phonetics or semantics of what is said? English only approximates the first and doesn't come close on the second, while Chinese only sometimes approximates the first but often represents the second.
"You only get ONE LIFE." Richard Rahl, Faith of the Fallen - Terry Goodkind
When James Cook ran the Endeavour aground on a shoal in north Queensland on June 11, 1770, (18 years before the first convicts arrived in Sydney) his men went ashore for 7 weeks to make hull repairs. They met the Guugu Yimithirr people and collected a long list of words including "Kangooroo - the leaping quadrapod". (And because Slashdot doesn't support Unicode I can't show you the pronunciation - look at Unicode-capable Wikipedia).
The account of the encounter is quite fascinating and very interesting with the hindsight we have now in the 21st century. The Aborigines did not want their chickens or pigs and burnt fires around their tents. We now know that the peoples of the Pacific did not want pigs because they would dig up tubers - taking away food and causing environmental damage. They were also likely aware of diseases.
Doubleplusungood is an understatement, even were it possible to do as Twinbee suggests.
Language speciation is alive and well, and evident to anyone who has traveled extensively in predominantly "monolingual" areas. The very concept of unifying (to the exclusion of others) language on any sort of large scale is at odds with basic human psychology and sociology.
Ah, Japanese. A language were you can be incredibly precise and confoundly vague at the exact same time. :)
Of course, but the rules of a language are frequently clearer to those who do not speak it natively. :)
Well, the meaning of a Chinese ideogram can often be gleaned from the combination of strokes/other ideograms used, even if you can't pronounce it (although there's often some guide to pronunciation in obscure characters too). This is kind of the reverse of English, where the pronunciation is more-or-less clear, but the meaning not.
So, should the written form represented the phonetics or semantics of what is said? English only approximates the first and doesn't come close on the second, while Chinese only sometimes approximates the first but often represents the second.
Luckily, we have real world experience to go by to decide which is better - and it is decidedly not in favor of ideograms. Every single language that used them (and especially Chinese ones) and switched to something else saw a consequent rise in basic literacy rates - see Korea and Vietnam for an example. Even PRC is itself an example in that they had to simplify the writing system somewhat to make it more palatable to quickly teaching to illiterate peasants during commie education campaigns.
Agreed, phonetic and syllabic scripts are much easier to learn and to use - far fewer things to remember. But 'better'...? :p Better for the masses, yes. Better for creating beautiful, compact writing? Not necessarily. (For a language to have a truly perfect phonetic orthography, everyone must pronounce every word the same - have you seen IPA renditions of different accents/dialects? And the moment you have two dialects with slightly different phonology, even a phonemic orthography won't be perfect.) Ah, sorry, I'm probably wandering off-topic. And I'm just being a devil's advocate here too. I'm currently learning Pashto (written in a modified Arabic script), and them not writing vowels in their writing drives me nuts - it makes it impossible to read the damn thing >:/
"You only get ONE LIFE." Richard Rahl, Faith of the Fallen - Terry Goodkind
Yes, I know the issues with phonetic alphabets and such. The usual way around is to pick the most common dialect and render that; sometimes, pick several and declare them all valid options (as in Serbo-Croatian), which of course complicates things somewhat. But then, presumably, for a newly constructed language it would not be a problem.
Of course, "better" is not really a valid metric in and of itself - it all depends on what you want the language to do. I would argue that for a single world language, ease of learning is probably the single most crucial factor, though.
"Haven't you mown the lawn?"
This is a strangely phrased question. If you expand the contraction of Haven't it makes no sense, "Have not you mown the lawn?". That may be how native speakers of another language construct a sentence but its isn't how English is supposed to be used, disregarding that "mown" isn't a word, the word you're looking for is "mowed". The question should be rephrased "Have you mowed the lawn?", which a simple yes or no would provide a succinct answer with no confusion.
English isn't designed to mix affirmative and negative words together like German is.
I stand corrected on "mown" but I often see questions that begin with a negation like that. For example:
"Do you know X?" - "Isn't that the guy who does Y?"
"Why was X fired?" - "Didn't he screw up project Y?"
"People use nonstandard English!" - "Wouldn't life be better if they didn't?"
I admit that "Haven't you mowed the lawn?" is a strange question to ask but similar questions seem to be used fairly commonly when someone tries to ascertain a fact they think might be true but aren't entirely sure about. I see the non-negated versions too but the subtext seems to be different – the non-negated version seems to imply less certainty while the negated one seems to imply that they assume the topic of the inquiry to be true but inquire whether it actually isn't.
This may, of course, be something that has only recently started leaching into colloquial English from other languages. I couldn't say; I only know what I deal with.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
only three major types of Spanish verbs IIRC: -ar, -er, -ir, just with pronouns and present/future tense modifications of the same word.
Also, gendered nouns with the same root word, like hijo/hija instead of son/daughter
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.