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78 Indigenous Languages Are Being Saved By Optical Scanning Tech (fastcompany.com)
Researchers at UC Berkeley are using futuristic technology to save a piece of the past. From a report: Project IRENE is using cutting-edge optical scan technology to transfer and digitally restore recordings of indigenous languages, many of which no longer have living speakers, Hyperallergic first reported. The recordings were gathered between 1900 and 1938 when UC anthropologists asked native speakers of 78 indigenous languages of California to record their songs, histories, prayers, and vocabulary on wax cylinders. Many of those cylinders are housed at Berkeley's Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology, and they are in a state of disrepair, degraded and broken. It's a frustrating state of affairs, as many of the languages recorded on the cylinders have fallen out of use or are no longer spoken at all. The "Documenting Endangered Languages" initiative, which has support from the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, is hoping to save this important history.
I hope COBOL is in there somewhere.
This isnt an example of West Germanic turning into Anglo-Saxon. Most indigenous languages were victim to active campaigns to stamp them our.
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"Salvaging the language recordings themselves might be useful to linguists and people studying the human brain..." Speaking as a linguist who has worked on endangered languages (and other languages), agreed. Language, in the sense of a means of communication with a syntax at (at least) the context free (and possibly higher) level in the Chomsky Hierarchy, is a uniquely human ability. (Well, I keep waiting for ET to phone home so I can find out how his language works, but no luck so far.) Every child (apart from the extremely retarded) picks up a first language (and in the right situation, a second language, or even more), while no linguist has ever completely and accurately described the grammar of any language. Which is very odd, when you think of it.
So agreed, language is a unique window into the human mind.
Kurdish, a number of Japanese aboriginal languages, and others in Russian, China, Africa and other parts of the world are *STILL* being actively stomped out through forced education only in a national language that regions inhabitants had forced on them for cultural conversion reasons, rather than a choice given over time.
As a result many other languages are dying out today not because there are no speakers, but because it is illegal for regional schools to teach them and they are instead forcibly taught the nationalist tongue in an effort to separate them from their heritage.
The purpose of a language is to communicate.
If there is nobody left who speaks or writes that language, why is it suddenly important (other than in an abstract way) to preserve it?
The Canadian government is currently spending $90 million (Canadian, about $70 million USD) to preserve endangered aboriginal languages.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/indigen...
The first line of that article says "Indigenous languages in Canada are dying out at an alarming rate and in desperate need of saving".
My question is why, and what makes it worth spending all of that taxpayer money on?
If someone is interested in an obscure language to want to preserve it and learn it, I see no problem with doing that as an academic exercise. But I honestly don't see why it's suddenly a responsibility for governments to preserve it.
Again, a language is intended to facilitate communication. If nobody's communicating in that language any more then it's obsolete.
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However, if we the human race are going to finally band together and solve our problems as a species, we are going to need one language.
Doesn't mean it has to be one and only one language though. Most people are more than capable of being bi-lingual, their native language and the common language.
It's purpose is for communication.
Yes - but also from one generation to the next, passing down a heritage. It would be very strange to not speak or write the language of my parents and their generation.
And as we are seeing in our digital age. English is winning the Darwinian race. It's perfect for representation with computers - unlike languages like Chinese and it has the leg up of being the language of the Creators of the Digital Age.
English is a cluster fuck of a language and the single reason it's becoming the global language and not yet another regional language like Russian, Chinese or Arabic is the British Empire. It's the only language with reach in Europe (UK), North America (US & Canada), Africa (bunch of former colonies), Asia (India) and Oceania (Australia and New Zealand). And with the Germans losing two World Wars and the French being insufferable they cornered the market as the business language in Europe too. It helps that the Internet was started in the US, but if nobody else spoke English other countries would just make their own enclaves. There's many Russian, Chinese, Spanish etc. speakers that don't know the English-speaking part at all.
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The Postmodernists were a briefly popular academic cult whose polysyllabic but totally non-referential coined language, though impenetrable to outsiders, once dominated at liberal arts schools and was the written language of numerous papers.
Because the Pomo tribe has been exclusively vegan and abstains from heterosexual relationships it has been unable to pass on its culture to new generations, so its numbers have been steadily declining in recent years as older tenured chieftains die off. Today, native speakers are confined to a few small campuses in northern California.
We could always start using Esperanto. :)
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
I don't see the cause as particularly relevant though. Languages die out, whether stamped out, or naturally. One is as deserving of preservation as another.
I do find it notable that were no less than 78 different languages (they claim languages, not mere dialects) in just the California area alone, which is indicative of how fragmented, tribal, and culturally segregated the native Americans actually were.
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
Not trying to troll...if it can't be expressed in English, why can't it be "borrowed" into the language like other words/concepts? Or any other language for that matter.
It could be borrowed, but then you would just have a bunch of different English dialects that are incompatible so it wouldn't really help much.
To give you an idea, the entire Japanese way of thinking is impossible to express in English because it's based around linguistic concepts that simply don't exist in that language, and adding enough Japanese to support them would make it incomprehensible. For example, the concept of animate and inanimate things.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
They managed to recover Egyptian hieroglyphic language through a single stone tablet which had a peace treaty written in four languages.
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It's no different than how Europe was up until the 19th century, when efforts to create common universal dialects became more formalized and proscriptive. There were "dialect continuums", whether they were the continuums in the Romance languages stretching from Italy all the way to the Iberian Peninsula, the Adriatic and into France, or the Germanic languages which stretch from the various West Germanic languages (like English, Dutch and German), with mutual intelligibility of some degree between neighboring languages, but going further geographically reduced that mutual intelligibility, until finally an Austrian had a hard time understanding someone from Saxony, and had no hope in hell of understanding someone from the Low Countries.
The fact is that most people historically did not travel, so dialects and regional languages were far more persistent. Even in England, from the Scots English all the way to London there was wide variation in pronunciation and vocabulary, but that has faded significantly with universal education and mass media. They still exist, as the final traces of the original Anglo-Saxon invasions, when different Anglo-Saxon tribes had already diverged in their language even on the Continent by the 5th and 6th century, and carried their dialects with them to England. But just a century and a half of effort has caused those dialects to merge and begin to fade.
So when you look at pre-industrial populations that remained fairly static, where families might have called the same village or territory home for centuries, if not thousands of years, you can understand why even a relatively contained geographical area might have harbored dozens of different dialects and even different languages, sometimes languages in entirely different language families. But what happened in many places; whether it be overt campaigns to kill a language (like the long-standing English campaign to stamp out anything vaguely Gaelic in Ireland), or the even more overt efforts in North America to wipe out Native American culture and language, this isn't simply natural evolution of languages.
From a purely linguistic, anthropological and archaeological point of view, preserving even deal and dying languages is of an enormous importance. Studying the relationships between languages, when coupled with genetic and archaeological studies, can give us a very good picture of migration patterns, and can tell us how existing populations came into existence. A lot of effort has been put into the major Old World language families; Indo-European languages are probably the most studied languages in the world, with the Afro-Asiatic and Sino-Tibetan close behind, because these are language families with a fairly lengthy written record, and where comparative and genetic linguistics have allowed us to actually map the evolution of proto-languages into the diversity we see today.
From a cultural point of view, language, more than any other human construct, defines who we are. When you look at an indigenous people; whether they're in the Americas, or Africa, or Australia, these people are trying to recover something of themselves after centuries of active hostility and benign neglect by their colonial masters. Why shouldn't a Native American tribe try to at least retain as much of their linguistic tradition as possible? I doubt there's any expectation in many cases that they will produce any large number of new speakers, but like the preservation of languages like Welsh and Irish and Scots Gaelic, these languages are a part of those peoples' identity, and even if only a small number speak it actively, it still represents an important part of what makes those people who they are.
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