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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)?
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
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.
I'm more than a bit skeptical myself(and, frankly, suspect some of the 'language diversity' types of basically just wanting to keep the natives from doing the same boring stuff we do so that we can continue to gawk at them); but there is also a major historical... sore point... that makes talk about not preserving languages a bit troublesome.
Yes, there are the utopian esperantists and various outcroppings here and there of "Oh, we could have peace if only we could understand one another!" flavored optimism; but much of the highly visible work in language homogenization has been directly associated with the pointy end of various imperialist projects. If you are planning on grabbing some savage's land and de-heathenizing them for god and country, it is practically a given that you'll give wiping out their language and culture, usually with good, old-fashioned violence and brutal child abuse, a try.
This tends to mean that, in practice, various 'save the languages!' pressure groups are, operationally, more of a 'don't allow group X to be shoved off its land for bauxite mining, impoverished, and forced to migrate to some gigantic developing world slum and become day laborers' groups, with language loss being a visible symbol of the more dramatic annihilation of people with the temerity to live on top of valuable resources(let's just say that 'property rights' seem to become steadily more...flexible... as one heads toward the bottom of the heap.)
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.
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.
As a linguist myself (working with a few different revitalization projects), you can think about linguistic diversity as being like biodiversity: Examining the differences across many different, unrelated (or nearly so) languages gives better insight into Language (with a capital L) on the whole. Sure, losing an individual language doesn't destroy everything, but each language that's lost is one less (incredibly rich) datapoint which can be used to better understand how people do language, and what other ways things can be done.
For instance, in Wichita, a language which may or may not be dead based on the health of its last few speakers, one could express "the buffalo ran up and down the village several times while scaring people" using a single, very long, very complex word. There are other languages which act like this ("polysynthetic languages"), but Wichita is really, frighteningly good at it. Don't you think that it'd be fascinating to do some MRI studies to see how Wichita people are parsing words, compared to speakers of, say, Mandarin Chinese, which isolate nearly every concept, grammatical or otherwise, into single words?
In addition, as other people have pointed out, when you lose the language, you lose the culture very easily (and vice versa). Even if you're not interested in the specifics of how language works in the mind (or just in general), understanding different cultural approaches to the world provides more information on the human condition. If your culture doesn't permit or believe in the idea of "selling land", that's interesting data, and food for thought for most other cultures.
In short, practically, in terms of trade or war or politics, there's little reason to have a group of 50,000 people speaking three languages rather than one. But if you're interested in how human language, culture, and cognition works, that diversity and those comparisons offer data that a homogenous group would not.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Anyway, even if one would impose one universal language on the whole population of the earth, it would probably fragment into dialects and finally multiple mutually unintelligible languages within 2 or 3 generations.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
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)