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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.
"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.
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
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.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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.