I agree that there's some value in documenting and preserving minority languages.
At the same time, each language is a barrier between people, one that prevents ideas to be shared and stories to be told. The fewer such barriers we have, the easier it becomes to understand others. Literally.
> At the same time, each language is a barrier between people, one that prevents ideas to be shared and stories to be told. The fewer such barriers we have, the easier it becomes to understand others. Literally.
I agree, the language barrier means a lot is lost. But at the same time each story and even way of thinking is flavored by the language it is expressed in. Certain things cannot be fully expressed in another language, the words don't hold the same charge and history.
If the entire world were to speak one language tomorrow and nothing else, there would be a great diminishment in the world's art, culture and mythos.
What's the point in the world having more art, culture and mythos if it doesn't have more that's accessible to any single individual? The best way for each new cultural artifact to reach the most people is for it to be created in a language and culture that the most people share.
This view seems harsh to me because it seems to treat languages and cultures as 100% interchangeable. I can imagine what you described as an extremely important factor for many people, but you seem to view it as the only possible factor.
(I'm currently at a crossword puzzle tournament in a foreign language in a foreign country, when I could of course find many such tournaments in my own country... so I guess I've been spending the whole weekend enjoying an experience of appreciating a foreign language in a way that's in some tension with what you describe.)
Obviously it would be the best if it was accessible to everybody at all times, but that's not the case right now. And my argument is, just getting "rid" of all languages except one would also entail getting rid of a lot of the things you wish to preserve and share.
Different languages yield different way of thinking about things. I might not have ever grokked functional programming with Python, even if it's doable, but in Javascript it made sense, and now even makes sense in Python.
I didn't understand how to use "whom" in English until I learned (some) German, and I feel that I understand more nuance and subtlety in my own tongue as a result. Same goes for the (sadly nearly dead) subjunctive form.
Language appears to be the tool we use not just to communicate, but to encode our thoughts. It gives us a way to wrangle the abstract from something ethereal and unmanageable into a conceivable thing we can handle. Having many different languages yields many different ways of thinking, not just communicating, and we are impoverished for their death.
This is a fascinating story about the experience of a deaf person who had no language until their 20's. It affected their thinking in an utterly profound fashion - not just their communication.
The language preservation community's answer to this is usually that multilingualism is extremely possible and even common -- although some speakers of extremely powerful languages like English and Chinese might not have as much experience with it. :-)
A huge number of people around the world speak at least a local or family language as well as a "language of wider communication"; depending on their situation, they may easily be fully fluent in both. So a preservation-oriented policy or culture would encourage this kind of bilingualism. This was also the traditional view of the Esperanto movement, which wanted Esperanto to be the unique world-wide language of communication while preserving all of the existing languages through bilingualism. [Edit: A commenter below says this approach is less traditional in Esperantism than I thought.] But a similar result could be achieved with, say, English as the main world language, or with people speaking just a handful of regional languages as well as their family languages.
One challenge to bilingualism is that a lot of governments don't like it (for many different reasons), while another challenge is economic. Bilingualism is very possible, but people in various circumstances could easily stop viewing it as desirable or important, because language A will get them a job in the city and language B won't, and each language takes at least some time and effort to use and keep up with. (Or if people habitually move far away from their families, they'll have fewer opportunities to practice speaking with their families.)
Anyway, there are significant tensions here, but these possibilities don't have to be mutually exclusive as long as people continue to care about their family and local languages and have access to social situations that give them opportunities to use them. And it can even be government policy to try to preserve minority languages while also promoting bilingualism in other more widely-spoken languages.
> This was also the traditional view of the Esperanto movement, which wanted Esperanto to be the unique world-wide language of communication while preserving all of the existing languages through bilingualism
This is inaccurate. L.L. Zamenhof hoped that Esperanto – or at least something like it – would eventually replace all other languages. He didn’t care much for language diversity as we would understand it today, and he saw such differences between peoples as divisive and an obstacle to overcome.
Naturally, even with Zamenhof’s dreams, in the short term Esperanto or another international auxiliary language would only coexist with the native languages of its speakers. However, it wasn’t until the last fifty years or so that a certain segment of the Esperanto movement has begun to advertise Esperanto specifically as a way to safeguard language diversity by letting people keep their native language but have access to an international auxiliary language.
Not all Esperantists agree with this, and through such campaigns one gets the impression that World Esperanto Association and similar organizations are only trying to jump on the wider anti-globalization bandwagon in order to get more attention for Esperanto. Furthermore, Esperanto organizations take a quite schizophrenic approach: if Esperanto is supposed to be only an auxiliary language, why do so many Esperanto organizations praise the creation of original literature (and other cultural output) in Esperanto? Why isn't it encouraging people to write solely in their native language and then only translate it to Esperanto?
> This is inaccurate. L.L. Zamenhof hoped that Esperanto – or at least something like it – would eventually replace all other languages. He didn’t care much for language diversity as we would understand it today, and he saw such differences between peoples as divisive and an obstacle to overcome.
Thanks for the correction! I've heard exactly the opposite from Esperantist sources, but it's quite possible that people are sort of retroactively attributing their views to Zamenhof even if he would have felt quite differently -- which I guess isn't unusual in movements with a respected charismatic founder. Maybe this approach emerged somewhat later and people then described it as the "traditional" view of the movement. Can you suggest any sources or references that might clarify this issue?
Zamenhof's complete works have been gathered and published by a Japanese Esperantist, though I cannot recall his name at the moment – it has been many years since I did anything with Esperanto. Zamenhof's own statements are all about this kind of cultural diversity eventually falling away, and humanity being united under one language (and, in his advocacy for "Homaranismo", one religion, too).
The vast majority of Esperantists have never read more than one or two brief writings from Zamenhof himself and all they know of the Esperanto movement's goals are what later publications tell them. When Esperanto organizations have been claiming for a few decades now that they care about language diversity, it is no surprise that Esperantists tend to ascribe that belief to Zamenhof too, but it is very anachronistic.
Thanks, that's a very interesting point! I'll have to look into this a bit further further.
I've frequently read Zamenhof's famous congress speech that includes the part about "Ofte kunvenas personoj de malsamaj nacioj kaj komprenas unu la alian; sed kia grandega diferenco estas inter ilia reciproka kompreniĝado kaj la nia!" and the idea that human relations will be more equitable with an international auxiliary language... except now I don't know whether he in fact considered it "auxiliary" or merely "international". Now I'm thinking about the other interpretation in which he perhaps doesn't want other languages to survive in the long run.
Notably I guess he called Esperanto only "la internacia lingvo" at first until other people started to call it "Esperanto", and perhaps the concept of "helplingvo" largely postdates him, although apparently "auxiliary language" was used toward the end of Zamenhof's own lifetime (Wikipedia suggests maybe first by Otto Jespersen), and these terms seem to suggest supplementing other languages rather than replacing them.
Language is also about culture and identity. When you give up a language you also give up some of your identity and things you value.
For instance I write and use english more than my native Norwegian, however I am highly ambivalent towards making english the national language of Norway. With english comes many ways of looking at the world.
For instance for nordic people gender equality is important. I don’t like how the english language is used with respect to women. You got words such as “slut”, “slut shaming” which there are no equivalent to in Norwegian. There isn’t really any good way of describing a women as a slut. Just as there are no good words in english to describe a man as a slut.
There are many Norwegian words I am fond of related to our shared values like “dugnad” which is about working togheter doing maintenance, repair, upgrades in your local community. There is no word for it in english because the tradition does not exist in the US or UK.
It is something that genuinly worries me as I see shared scandinavian values gradually year after year getting erased and replaced with anglo-saxon values.
Actually, the word it is derived from still exist in Norwegian (ludder), though it feel a bit archaic in modern Norwegian, and is much less used than "slut" is in English.
True story, but I don't know if the goal of everyone being able to communicate is more important than culture.
On the other hand, many europeans have no problem in speaking two to three languages, so making English the second language would preserve that culture?
English is one of the most commonly spoken languages in the world, and it's the language of the country with the largest economy. It's also a germanic language, so even though it's probably tougher to learn than other languages, it wouldn't be as difficult as Mandarin.
Why else would you learn a language? You wouldn't learn it for the past and you wouldn't learn it for the future. English is widely spoken right now, and so is useful to know.
> I'm trying to avoid being snarky at the false dichotomy.
I suppose I could have been more clear. Part of the utility of English is that it's spoken by the Western superpower, the US. By speaking English, that makes your country's economy interact with the US's economy easier. You could learn other superpowers' languages as well like China's and Russia's, but for other Germanic languages, it's much easier to learn English than Russian or Mandarin.
Heh, I thought you were addressing a much more abstract consideration about the global average difficulty of learning languages based on both their relatedness to other languages and their internal complexities are irregularities (see my reply elsewhere in the thread). I didn't realize you were actually thinking more about economic and political considerations.
Edit: I feel like many people do learn languages "for the past" or "for the future". For example, many people study ancient languages partly to learn about ancient cultures and ancient history, while many Mandarin learners in the U.S. through the 1990s and 2000s said one motivation was that "China is going to be more important in the future" or something to that effect.
Of course, this classification is explicitly meant for native English speakers and includes the degree of relatedness to English as a contributing factor. I don't know if someone has done research about the average difficulty of each language as L2 considered across everyone in the world, but clearly there will be some that are easier and harder on average, considering factors such as unusual phonemes, non-alphabetic writing systems, irregular orthography, irregular inflections, presence or absence of inflections, similarity of sentence structure to most common sentence structures, and so on.
Chinese probably has advantages as L2 due to the lack of inflections but disadvantages due to the extremely difficult writing system and (maybe?) tones -- just because I think most languages worldwide are not tonal. English has advantages due to the alphabetic writing system and disadvantages due to irregular verbs, irregular orthography, and some relatively unusual phonemes.
Also, a lot of non-Chinese speakers already speak languages that are related to Chinese and/or share part of their writing system with Chinese, while a lot of non-English speakers already speak languages that are related to English and/or share part of their writing system with English.
Anyway, we need to look into this a lot more before just saying that one language is a clear winner, but the idea is not at all meaningless and should in principle have an answer. Although clearly there will be some people who will be at a huge advantage or a huge disadvantage in learning any given L2, which is, again, a big part of what the State Department ranking is showing (not just the inherent ease or difficulty of learning each of these languages in the abstract).
That's an interesting resource, although, as you say, it measures more "how close this language is to English" than "how easy it is to learn for everyone". I agree with your entire comment, though, there is probably an answer for "which language is easiest for a group of X languages speakers to learn?".
Another aspect to consider is how many languages a learner already speaks. Mandarin is far from simple but I'm having a relatively smooth ride learning it as my L6.
I've experienced this a lot (with myself, but especially with some hyperpolyglot friends who are or have been conversational in over 7 languages), and I'm kind of curious which way the causality runs!
My intuition is to believe myself and others when we say that "knowing about more ways things can work" in languages makes it smoother to learn and assimilate new ones. But I also wonder if there could be an effect of "people who enjoy learning languages enjoy learning languages"?
> Chinese probably has advantages as L2 due to the lack of inflections but disadvantages due to the extremely difficult writing system and (maybe?) tones
Tones aren't much of a problem. The main problem is the script, combined with the lack of vocabulary sharing between Mandarin and English (no cognates, very few loans in either direction. It isn't particularly difficult - it just requires lots of tedious memorization of thousands of printed characters and spoken words.
Cantonese and other Chinese languages have very little printed material. (All Chinese speakers use the same written language, which is based upon spoken Mandarin.)
I'm a native German speaker so germanic languages feel rather "regular" to me, while I find romanic languages grammatically simpler but they still feel more exotic to me.
Compared to German, very much so. In German, you can read a word and know how it is pronounced, and hear a word and know how it's written. I'm not in love with the five noun declensions or the grammatical genders that aren't derived from the word itself, but I'll take them over a language that's a big ball of stolen words.
I'd prefer something more regular over both of those, though, perhaps Spanish. I've also heard that Korean, Arabic and Japanese are super regular.
I learned a bit Japanese and it was very regular, but your have to learn 3 alphabets. The first one, hiragana, is only for small "filler" words, the second one, katakana, is for foreign words that got somehow included into Japanese and the third one, kanji, has thousands of "letters" each for one word. While the first two are rather easy to learn, you can't read or write anything meaningful without kanjis.
Many of my friends started studying Japanology and switched to Koreanology because it was easier :D
Not necessarily just "one word" as western language speakers would understand it, since each kanji usually has at least two readings and potentially many more, often with different meanings. (Other people have even compared them to morphemes because the same kanji can be used with related meanings in different multi-kanji words.)
Even putting the writing system aside, there's multiple styles of speech too; casual, formal, super-formal, etc. There's also regional dialects. Not to mention Internet lingo.
English has historical spelling and that's pretty much all the crazy that there is to it
The problem in German is not the declensions, it's how they mix and match
Like 'der' can mean masculine in one case and feminine (or plural) in other cases. Or the 'er' ending can mean a lot of things.
> I've also heard that Korean, Arabic and Japanese are super regular.
I can't say anything about Korean but in Arabic it's common to drop vowels (they also have 2-plural) and Japanese with its thousands of symbols with no easy way to derive their meanings and no hint to how each one are pronounced are anything but regular. Especially Japanese.
There are in fact very strong hints on how to pronounce most Chinese characters, at least their Chinese reading (on-yomi, used in compound words). A vast majority of characters are made up of two parts, one giving the (reading and one the area of meaning. When it comes to their Japanese readings (kun-yomi) it sort of follows when you know what the character means and what that word is in Japanese.
I hardly think the Normans invading England and forcing their language onto the Britons hardly qualifies as stealing (and of course before the Normans, the Germanic Angle and Saxon tribes invaded and forced their language on the peoples). When something is forced onto you, would you say that thing was stolen?
Korean spelling is pretty regular (because it was standardized in the early 20th century), but the language itself is very difficult for average English speakers.
For one thing, each verb can have several thousand different forms: in fact I don't think anyone can enumerate them all. (Sometimes people even make up new forms!)
> In German, you can read a word and know how it is pronounced, and hear a word and know how it's written.
So there are no dialects in Germany, do they really pronounce all words the same in the dockyards of Hamburg as they do in the university at Heidelberg? What about Austrian German, Swiss German, and the German speakers in Argentina and Brazil.
And you never 'steal' words? What about spaghetti (or is it spagetti now?). If German had been the most used auxiliary language for the last two hundred years I think it too would have borrowed a few more words.
> So there are no dialects in Germany, do they really pronounce all words the same in the dockyards of Hamburg as they do in the university at Heidelberg?
No, but they pronounce the words consistently in each dialect, as opposed to English where bow and bow are pronounced differently.
> What about Austrian German, Swiss German, and the German speakers in Argentina and Brazil.
What about them?
> And you never 'steal' words?
Fine, "borrowed" then. I didn't mean it pejoratively. Also I'm not a native speaker of either English or German.
> If German had been the most used auxiliary language for the last two hundred years I think it too would have borrowed a few more words.
What do you mean? That, say, the word "fraternity" is French-derived because the French spoke English? It seems to me that it's exactly the other way around.
The only thing truly insane about English is its writing system. Grammatically, it's one of the simplest Indo-European languages; the only thing hard about it is the inconsistent remnants of the Germanic ablaut system for verb conjugation (i.e., all of the "irregular" verbs).
Arguably that makes it easier to learn for people who speak either Germanic or Romance Languages. The hard part about english is our vocabulary, compared to any Germanic or Romance language its huge, because of the history of english we have two or more words for many things - some are context based, some are just archaic, and some are in every day common use.
That's kind of a tradeoff, though. It makes half the language easy for other Germanic language speakers, the other half easy for Romanic language speakers, but speakers of neither just end up having a harder time because they pretty much have to learn two different vocabularies.
This cultural conflict is occurring in the United States as well. For various reasons, Spanish is becoming much more prevalent in certain parts of the country. While large chunks of the country try to take a multiculturalist approach and embrace the lingual and cultural change, other parts want to maintain their cultural and communal identity and have them integrate. It's actually causing quite a bit of conflict between areas with different approaches.
This is becoming an increasingly large problem in Canada as well with Chinese, especially with ethnic enclaves and lack of cultural integration. And any discussion similar to that of the parent comment to yours would be considered near hate speech by most people under 35, particularly those who are university educated.
I meet your age limit so I hope I can ask why is it a problem to have ethnic enclaves? Are they not doing fine in their own communities living their own lifestyles?
Real in the sense that it's how people interact. I think cultures evolve so people can co-exist effectively, but they're also full of random useless or harmful behaviours that might be holdovers from when they used to be useful.
I find cultural enclaves to be both needed, sometimes dangerous, and in some cases disrespectful.
It's needed, because often people bring their parents and grandparents over with them, to act as a support network to help prosper and raise children - its unreasonable to expect people older than 50 or so to learn english - nor is it practical. It becomes dangerous when you have second and third generation immigrants not learning english and joining the larger culture of whatever nation their parents or grandparents immigrated to - and its disrespectful, because frankly, my people moved here from the 'old county' (norway among other places) they didn't speak english, but they learned, and they wanted to join in all of the benefits of being a part of this new country of theirs.
An example, I'm an American - if I moved to Spain or Germany, I'd want to participate as fully as I could in the culture and society of my newly adopted country, I'd want to localize myself to the my new found home, to me, its disrespectful to the hospitality of my new home country if I do not - it's as if they gave me a gift, and I'm not reciprocating by keeping up my part of the bargain by becoming a true citizen of that place. If I'd wanted to continue the old ways/if the old ways were working for me, I could just stay at home.
I strongly suspect a blend of the two approaches will win over time, which is to say, even in the spanish dominated regions, it will be english first, spanish second. This has happened with every immigrant group eventually here - the dominant culture is all smothering.
English has never been shy to import words. And I would argue that 'barn raising' is an example of something similar (that is, it is implicit that the barn raising requires the neighbors help and happens in the community).
I do not know Norweigian well enough, but in Denmark we have 'so' (meaning sow), which is not quite the same as 'slut' (it is basically the same as 'bitch') but in something that is only used against women. 'svin' (pig) would be a non-gendered insult. I guess the closest thing to slut would be 'luder' (lit whore), also a gendered insult.
If that's your culture, you'll find a way to express it in whatever language you use. If it's not your culture anymore - maybe only your parents and beyond, then you're already lost it, despite having the language.
My point is that culture exists or dies on its own. It doesn't depend on a language.
Language and culture should not be conflated. A farmer in New Zealand, a surfer in Hawaii, a professor in New York and an oil rigger in Alberta all speak the same language but have vastly different cultures.
As for lost nuances, loan words are constantly adopted when people find them valuable enough to them, so nothing important needs to be lost.
This is entirely true, but it's also worth mentioning that English varies more than it gets credit for, too. Plenty of vocabulary, expressions, and even grammar differ by dialect, and if one isn't making an effort to speak in standard English a fair bit of what they say won't be understood by the whole anglosphere.
Be more cooperative, more trusting, and more trustworthy, see the best in people, etc. Of course I don't know you so please don't take this as meaning that you personally are not trustworthy.
My point is that, in the UK for instance, there seems to be an air of distrust in some English speaking communities that seems not to exist in Norway, at least not to the same degree. I doubt it has much to do with the language. I was born in and grew up in the UK (1955 to 1985) and I'm quite sure that the town where I grew up was then much more similar to the place I now live in than it is now. The country has changed.
Of course, I have been outside the flow of things in the UK for thirty years so my view of the current situation probably owes a little too much to the media than it should, so take the specifics with a pinch of salt.
As fluent speaker in several languages, and given that European travellers speak on average three languages (native, resident country and English) I completely disagree.
Languages are a way to express culture of a country and there are many words that never translate well between languages, because they express ideas or points of view not present in the target languages.
Usually this idea of one language to rule them all, seems to keep coming up from cultures not able to bother to learn anything else other than English.
Becoming a new work won't be the same as in the original culture, just yet another case of lost in translation.
You might translate saudade to mean home sick, missing someone, missing a place, missing an event, not being able to do something, feeling blue, among a few other possibilities.
However none of them actually express 100% the same meaning as a native Portuguese speaker might be feeling when he/she says that word, because there is a mix of feelings and situations related in that single word.
Or for example, the ways an Eskimo might describe a frozen landscape.
But after reading the definition I completely understand the meaning of it. And if saudade becomes popular enough, eventually it will be usable in everyday english. For example look at schadenfreude.
> Usually this idea of one language to rule them all, seems to keep coming up from cultures not able to bother to learn anything else other than English.
That's not the case in my experience. The drive for the "international auxiliary language" movement, one global language for communication, largely arose from Europe, particularly Eastern Europe. Esperanto was created by a Pole, Volapük a German, the first Interlingua an Italian, the second Interlingua a German who emigrated to the US.
There have always been international languages since mankid has been able to speak and started travelling on the old world, that grew organically from the interaction between those travellers.
Or imposed by the new rulers after conquering a new territory.
Artificial created languages never gained any meaningful ground.
Other fun fact: Volapük has no letter r, because Schleyer though it would be difficult for Chinese speakers to pronounce. It is difficult for Cantonese speakers, but prevocalic and postvocalic r are both present in Mandarin, so its speakers (i.e. the majority of Chinese) have no trouble pronouncing it.
> At the same time, each language is a barrier between people, one that prevents ideas to be shared and stories to be told. The fewer such barriers we have, the easier it becomes to understand others. Literally.
This is an easy opinion to harbor when you speak a language whose future is pretty much secure.
Imagine if you woke up one day and you were the last person who knew a word of English. All the English-language music you've ever heard, all the books and movies, etc., are now totally incomprehensible to everyone you'll ever meet. All copies of them, and indeed, all English text except for whatever's in your pockets, is gone. All the place names you know are removed from the map. All English words borrowed by other languages are gone. Every native English speaker (aside from you) has disappeared, and their very names are unpronounceable to the world's remaining population. Maybe even the Latin alphabet is gone.
You get to keep all your memories, but naturally nobody shares them or has reason to believe they actually happened. Most people don't care to hear about them. If they do, they see them as a curiosity, a museum piece to be put in a display case, not something with the slightest relevance to their own lives.
You can't even tell English-language jokes anymore. They aren't funny in translation.
Of course this leaves you isolated. And of course there's a solution anyone can offer you: Forget about English. Adopt a whole new life where you're a normal person who speaks a normal language that other normal people understand. Your identity as an English speaker is entertaining for about five minutes, but ultimately an inconvenience to society. Hurry up and let it go.
If this sounds harsher than what you were trying to say, perhaps you've underestimated what a language is to the people who speak it. It's more than just a list of words.
That is not a fair statement of what he said - you assume that the culture has not had a long time to preserve its cultural knowledge and that a dying culture produces much (after all it is dying for a reason) and you assume that the person can only speak the dying language.
And even then everybody would try convince that person to translate his culture into the new language or at least to codify the original language so that it isn't lost.
But the real solution would have to start doing those things decades ago.
Is life not harsh? Should the world just stop adjusting to the new global interaction just so that some people can avoid some discomfort?
edit: To those downvoting me, can you please explain why? I was asking a serious question. The post above made it sound like that person's comfort was more important than adapting to changing times.
Either I'm getting downvoted because my argument was weak or didn't advance the conversation, or because I went against the site's hivemind. In either case, this site as a whole benefits when either are pointed out or explained. Either I become a little less ignorant, or someone else learns to question their beliefs a bit more.
Perhaps they felt that your point was badly made or that the world adjusting and someone's comfort were not connected in the way that you seem to be saying.
I think my point is that both you and they could have explained a bit more.
The first time I read your post, I completely misunderstood it, probably because my idea of comfort is diametrically opposite to how you put it.
To me, the harshness of life is that there are different languages in existence, and that people are in no hurry to converge on one. And the discomfort is the necessity to translate between languages, or to learn multiple languages, or to get in communicative situations when either you or your interlocutor are not particularly fluent in the language you are trying to communicate in. For me, the less discomfort of such kind the better, even if it means that multiple cultures will become inaccessible to non-scholars. I do not believe we (common folks, I mean) are terribly missing the Roman, or the Ancient Greek, or the Mayan culture, etc.
A major factor in language death is parents choosing not to speak the language to their children. So apparently people are plenty willing to give up those things.
The flip side is it's easy to wax poetic about the importance of preserving language and culture when you will not face major barriers because of your language or dialect.
Your observation is valid, but there can sometimes be quite a bit of angst and suffering in this process, both when parents choose not to pass on heritage languages (that their children wish had been passed on) and when children choose not to speak heritage languages (that their parents wish they'd continued to speak). I've experienced this within my own family and heard about it very often in other families -- even where the languages in question aren't endangered in the least!
Sometimes the parents or children involved found this to be quite a hard and quite a stressful decision, and the people on the other side of the generation gap don't always feel entirely comfortable with the decision.
But you're right to point out that this doesn't have to involve any sort of coercion or compulsion; it's often just people making choices about what they think is best for their own families at a given point in time.
>A major factor in language death is parents choosing not to speak the language to their children.
And this happens with even major languages. I have a coworker who's grandparents immigrated to the US from Spain. Her parents knew Spanish, but didn't speak it to her. Now she has no way to communicate with her grandparents because she only knows English.
Spanish is one of the most widely spoken languages on the planet. I have lived over half my life in Norway and my children have lived all their life here it would never have occurred to me to bring them up monolingual in Norwegian.
I was going to write "Why on earth did they not speak it to her?" but of course it is quite likely that there were perfectly good reasons in the time and place. And I know it isn't quite as simple because my language is English but I think the point still stands that she was ill served by the decision to not speak Spanish at home. Not only because she can't speak to her grandparents but also because she cannot experience Spanish culture quite as directly as she might have.
You sure made some assumptions about me and ran with them. An assumption you could have made, but didn’t, is that I was speaking entirely from first-hand experiences and/or the experiences of people close to me. And an observation you could have made, but didn’t, is that only one part of my post resembled any kind of actionable advice: The solution anyone can offer.
I don’t know that there is a different solution. If your community dies, you can move on or die with it. But if someone’s going to celebrate that, I hope they realize what they’re saying.
English is my third language, and I'm studying a fourth. This has made me keenly aware of the effort it takes to be a polyglot. One of the languages I speak is spoken by only three million people, and it can't disappear fast enough as far as I'm concerned. Language should not be conflated with culture.
I sort of hate to impose, but since it came up in a parent post… can you translate a joke from your 3 million person language into English which is not funny in English? I promise to use it as an example in conversation and preserve it!
That's not really a fair comparison. The languages that are dying out do not have even remotely as much existing cultural material as English.
Even Latin, which has no native speakers and dramatically less published material than English is in no danger of dying out. People learn it just to access the existing material.
There are a ton of languages I would love to learn but I have no access to any substantial amount of written or spoken content, like you mentioned.
Hell even being in America, your access to pop culture media created in most widely-spoken European languages is severely restricted. If I want to read a German language book I only have a few choices to pick from that aren't specifically written for learning language. Movies are even harder to come by, and German is very much a living language.
I'm not arguing that niche languages shouldn't be saved, just refuting the argument that we need to keep speaking them in order to retain access to their cultural materials. Like you said, they need written or recorded cultural material to begin with.
> This is an easy opinion to harbor when you speak a language whose future is pretty much secure.
I speak one of UN's big 6 languages and it's future is secure.
I care little for it's jokes, new ones will be made.
But if it disappeared tomorrow in it's entirety then I would not only not be disappointed, I would celebrate instead. The barriers are gone, the people are united. And that annoying "learn English" advertisement spam would also disappear, that's perhaps one of the best parts.
Honestly, I would be delighted if my first language somehow never existed and everybody speaking it was suddenly an English speaker. By what I listen around, most people in my country agrees.
And it's one of the top 6 languages of the world. I can't even imagine how somebody stuck with a niche language feels.
Some day soon, the last person who genuinely cares about the Howdy Doody TV show will die. No one else will truly care about it after they're gone, because no one will have fond childhood memories of watching it.
All this stuff dies even if the language lives on. The jokes stop being funny, and the stories stop being enjoyable. We just end up with a few preserved works that we label "classics" and force school children to read.
> At the same time, each language is a barrier between people, one that prevents ideas to be shared and stories to be told. The fewer such barriers we have, the easier it becomes to understand others. Literally.
That is a strong case for having some language, like English, that everyone knows worldwide, in addition to their own languages.
Languages aren't a barrier between people. Not having at least one language in common is. The difference is subtle but enormously significant given that people can and do speak more than one language, and that full fluency in 2 or 3 languages is the norm in parts of the world.
There is a large amount of culture in every language. My own native language is quite small with no more than 2 million speakers, and for that language to disappear would also mean the loss of a lot of culture, and I do not just mean books and songs but also "everyday history" such as people's diaries, etc. And the loss of stuff we sometimes call untranslateable - not because it's impossible to translate per se perhaps but because there are often words or phrases that carry a particular cultural meaning.
This would be lost anyway as language evolves over time. You really have to study in order to understand old english as an english speaker, or latin as an italian.
(1) Having easy access to the last several generations' literature is very nice!
(2) Knowing the modern form of the language is often a huge help to learning the ancient form, so losing native proficiency in modern languages would still be a hindrance to understanding older texts.
Old English is a fairly poor example because it was basically replaced by another language through conquest.
While languages do evolve, it's a gradual process and they remain understandable for centuries. Shakespeare, Dante and Goethe are quite understandable to speakers of modern English, Italian and German. A speaker of Spanish or Italian can learn to read Latin texts even now with relatively little study. When the language of Julius Caesar is separated from modern Italian by 2000 years, the change process was so gradual that culture of the Roman Empire is still very visible in modern societies. That is not comparable to, for example, Mesoamerian cultures that were wiped out in a shorter period of time.
I think breaking down the language barrier between cultures is key to prosperity and peace. I wonder how many wars, diplomatic incidents and other issues could have been prevented with a common language.
> At the same time, each language is a barrier between people, one that prevents ideas to be shared and stories to be told.
If all we had was Cobol as the One True Programming Language, we sure would have saved a lot of time reimplementing things. Would we also have missed out on anything important though?
Calling multilingualism a barrier between people seems a bit myopic to me. What about all anthropologic richness that language diversity teaches us? What about the stuff it's taught us about human psychology? What about the cooperative understanding that is built between people through the act itself of learning a language?
> If all we had was Cobol as the One True Programming Language, we sure would have saved a lot of time reimplementing things. Would we also have missed out on anything important though?
The question is: do we use programming languages to share ideas and tell stories, or do we use them to get computers to do stuff for us?
The only reason COBOL is a useful language is because there exists a translator (compiler), that can transform COBOL into a language spoken by all CPUs (machine code).
In that sense, COBOL is more a dialect of assembly than a separate language. And it’s only useful because it’s a dialect of this common language — assembly.
> do we use programming languages to share ideas and tell stories, or do we use them to get computers to do stuff for us?
Well, it's both of them, just like spoken language
Another question is: is the diversity among our spoken languages large enough for this to even matter? My impression is that any single language has enough internal diversity to host any number of paradigms, but they don't change enough to allow for much different things.
As a meta-observation, I think this is a great thread which includes a lot of relatively respectful, informed discussion about somewhat controversial topics... and not a lot of flames so far. That makes it a great opportunity to upvote comments that you disagreed with but found interesting.
Related: Speaking of word origins, here's a fun example.
How a Mistake Gave Us the Word 'Cherry'[+]:
[quote]
The Old North French word for 'cherry' is 'cherise'. English speakers heard the 'se' at the end of the word and assumed it was plural, 'cherries', and that the singular form of the word must then be 'cherry' (ok, they spelled it 'chery').
[/quote]
The Merriam-Webster article mentioned below goes into some more depth & gives other examples.
I speak a tiny language and used to be of the opinion that we should just document it while we can and then expedite its death while moving to English instead.
This is a very easy and naive stance to take. However I have completely abandoned it!
With the years I have come to unravel some of the incredible knowledge encoded in the structure of my language. It is amazing how idioms and structural qualities of languages can define a culture through their influence on the way people think. Now I have gotten very curious about learning some exotic languages and I suspect I will need to dedicate a portion of my life to that pursuit :)
Trying to preserve this through translation is never going to work for many reasons, mainly because turning meaning from something continuous into discrete words is done differently in different cultures so a words true meaning can be hiding between several words of the language you wish to translate to. Therefore some things become hard to say which used to be common phrases. This has obvious consequences for culture but it also means that often when you as an individual move from one language to another you unlock more of your innate assumptions and see how your language defined your approach to problems in some ways. Gaining understanding of these assumptions gives more 'room to move in', perspective wise, I find.
>Trying to preserve this through translation is never going to work for many reasons, mainly because turning meaning from something continuous into discrete words is done differently in different cultures so a words true meaning can be hiding between several words of the language you wish to translate to. Therefore some things become hard to say which used to be common phrases. This has obvious consequences for culture but it also means that often when you as an individual move from one language to another you unlock more of your innate assumptions and see how your language defined your approach to problems in some ways. Gaining understanding of these assumptions gives more 'room to move in', perspective wise, I find.
I get what you mean, but you should give some examples, if possible. Nothing cements abstract notions in the mind quite like examples - in my experience, anything hard requires 1. an example that demonstrates the phenomena, then 2. the theory necessary to properly understand which aspects of the example you're referring to that demonstrate the phenomena, before you finally understand the phenomena as it acts in the example and 3. can model the concept in your mind independent of the example.
I'm not sure if this is exactly what the commenter above was referring to (or what you're looking for), but a really tricky aspect of translation is humor.
Things like alliteration, rhyming, and homophones are all incredibly difficult to move across languages and those are _easy_ compared to the slang and idioms.
An example:
In Tagalog, the word for blue is "asul" which more or less directly leads to an English/Tagalog joke about how "People have been telling me to cheer up all week, they keep calling me an 'asul'".
Which to understand, you need to be fluent in Taglog, English slang and have the cultural background to understand that "blue" means sad (which isn't universal).
To support your point, blue (the color) is "azul" is Spanish, but blue (the feeling) is "triste". As a native Spanish speaker, I was lost for a few seconds with your example.
Eventually your language (which language, please? :- ) will cease to be. You really ought to record these curious details as you come across them, because they may never be noticed ever again once you're gone. This goes for nuances of living languages, too. Who alive today remembers using the Japanese kana ゑ in a casual setting? Will remember not using the English word for kitchen in Japanese? Even English only has cultural memory for facets of the language which made it into popular literature, people can remember that hour and whore used to make enough the same sound that Shakespeare interchanged them poetically, but who remembers using ð to write ðe?
Linguistic diversity is a direct expression of cultural isolation. When people live together, when more people can afford to travel, when more people can't afford not to travel, languages will inevitably be obsoleted or combined.
When there is no cultural isolation left in the world, we will all inevitably speak one language.
I think you forget that cultural isolation is something that people can actively pursuit. Look at any newspaper: Catalunya wants to use its own language. Wales all but resurrected its own language. Croats and Slovens dug hard to separate back their languages from Serbs. And of course, Jews have successfully fought linguistic and cultural integration for millennia; they still trade and move across the Earth like the best of them.
Cultural isolationism is an ideological position that naturally generates diversity, and it’s incredibly lively in the modern world despite, or even in opposition to, distances shrinking dramatically in all paths of life.
Indeed, there are plenty of cultures actively seeking to distinguish themselves from the norm. The people of Cataluña have a whole host of legitimate reasons to want to distinguish themselves from Spain, and yes, language comes along with that.
I have no particular horse in the race, I can't really decide if it's a good thing or a bad thing to self-isolate. I personally would like to reach out and assimilate mutually, but somewhere in my mind I want to see Japan continue to isolate itself somewhat, I'll have a fun time squaring that circle over my lifetime.
> Language is not knowledge or culture. It is merely a tool for communication
A lot of culture co-evolves with language. In a language are myths and legends, some of which contribute to the words in the language, which then give birth to other proverbs and stories,
and so on. All of which and fragments of which become available for communication. The more knowledge and culture a language loses, the more bland communication in that language becomes and the information density of the language decreases. This in turn affects communication because to maintain the same amount of information it has to become longer, so the attitude towards communication changes. And so does the message.
The tool of communication is part of the message itself.
For most intents and purposes, Italian is already a “fairly obscure and unintelligible language”. Unless you are a historian, you don’t need it. The influence it used to wield in music and cuisine has long been codified in a few specific words and nobody needs to understand anything of the surrounding structures. Outside of Italy, it’s kept around as a fashionable preserve of certain upper classes because it helps while on holiday, but anywhere else it’s completely irrelevant.
On the other hand, imagine a world with only one written and spoken language. Where everyone can easily communicate with everyone else, regardless of the accident of their nationality.
I for one hope that's where this trend is leading, as I think it'd be a worthwhile trade off against the loss of cultural knowledge that results from language death.
I'd like to live in a world where even nationality eventually fades to the background - but I don't think that will happen until we make contact with another species from off of this planet.
I think that will happen, eventually. National groups would have seemed inconceivable to our tribal ancestors in pre-history. I _hope_ that eventually our descendants will be horrified by the idea of nationalism.
Yesterday (21 October 2017) I chaired a gathering of Esperanto speakers in Conwy, north Wales, UK. Present were speakers of Welsh, Tagalog, Slovene, Estonian, Brazilian Portuguese and maybe a few others besides English. We had Esperantyo as our common language. I have spoken Esperanto for precisely fifty years, and throught that time I have seen Esperanto as an aŭiliary language (sorry, my keyboard has just gone into Esperanto mode!), i.e. a language which values our native tongues while enabling trouble-free communication. I speak Welsh, French and German, by the way, and have an ability to bluff my way in a few more languages. Life is too short to learn them all. Keep on fighting for your smaller languages. There is plenty of room in the world for them - and for Esperanto.
Two, one poorly - English, and Maori (the native language of New Zealand). I spent many years of my childhood in kura kaupapa Maori[1] classes (within regular NZ schools). I was at best conversational in spoken Maori, better at written, but it's been many years.
It isn't just languages that pass out of existence. I know a lot about my parents, probably about .1% of that about my grandparents, and pretty much nothing going back further than that. There are essentially no records. What kind of lives they lived, what was important to them, how they viewed the world, etc., all gone.
If one of your ancestors was a historical figure, or kept a diary, maybe you have much more. But that's hardly ordinary.
It's just the way things are, and probably the way it has to be.
Your grandchildren will be able to see minute details of your life, using social media archival tools. They may be able to read all your HN and reddit comments. Would they be interested in that? Who knows. But things are about to change nevertheless.
> They may be able to read all your HN and reddit comments. Would they be interested in that?
Maybe not, but many AI agents are trained on our Reddit, HN and Twitter comments. In the future I expect that every person alive today should be documented from logs in order to run simulations of the human society as it was pre-singularity. The previous generations have very little data, and the next generations will be influenced by AI, so the only 'pure', large size sample is us. AGI is going to want to know how it came to be, and future humans will want to rebuild an authentic human society so they will need a good reference.
So your comments are surely going to be studied in detail, maybe you're going to be simulated from your comments and other crumbs of data you leak.
The only factor in the diversity of language, is the isolation of cultures. The less isolated cultures are, the less any individual could be bothered to speak a different language.
As the world becomes more integrated, and less isolated, even major languages will begin to disappear.
I see this happening with one of my favourite languages: Japanese. Colloquial Japanese is slowly replacing words with close English approximations (just as it took on German vocabulary in the early 20th century), dialects are at once becoming more widely understood, and more similar.
You can no more preserve a language than you can preserve a human being.
I'm probably going to sound harsh, but diversity of spoken language is
way different than diversity of programming languages or frameworks.
We need to have a common cultural ground, a shared language: Esperanto was created because the world was deeply culturally divided at the time, nationalist movements and totalitarian mandate of us-vs-them only worked because you have different cultures and languages competing in the same area. Death of languages is not bad.
Having cross-cultural exchange and business links probably is the biggest contributor to world peace, all because of people speaking a common language.
Having one shared language has numerous benefits :
It increases efficiency by eliminating translation and adaptation to each country:
instead of making N editions of something for each language you have one.
Lack of cultural barrier: you can read sites/books/articles watch movies without subtitles and dubbing, also making content production cheaper and simpler.
News and communications become fast and unimpeded by borders and cultures:
no need to translate anything.
A standard term for something being as precise as the shared language definition:
instead of two languages competing for a descriptor word which covers different areas the meaning is made more accurate by settling on a single word.
Less of misunderstanding where content can have hidden/insulting meaning in another language due translation(often a quick translation can have subtle mistakes),
Diplomacy and travel become easier, with people less alienated from each other.
Cultural differences that depend on the language disappear, preventing bias and prejudice for the unknown and foreign.
A great counter-example to "benefits of language diversity" is tribes: they have languages unique for each tribe and constant warfare and tensions: us-vs-them mentality preventing progress and cooperation.
The best argument for preserving endangered languages, ironically, is the strong form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis--which linguists flatly reject. Given how hostile most of them are (if Pullum and his gang on Language Log are anything to go by) to even the soft Whorfianism of Boroditsky et al., it's quite galling that these same linguists, who assert the absolute fungibility of human languages, also stress the vital importance of preserving each and every one of them.
And given that linguists use as an insult the term "prescriptivist"[1] for anyone who wishes to preserve or establish particular linguistic usages--even if for wholly benevolent reasons, such as the removal of inconsistencies for the benefit of non-native speakers--how can they then go and support efforts to actually increase the number of speakers of some dying tongue? Isn't that awfully prescriptivist of them, dictating not just how others should use a particular language, but even which languages they should be speaking?
If the vast majority of experts in a field of study reject some hypothesis in that field; it is a good indication that that hypothesis is likely wrong.
The linguistics' reasoning for wanting to preserve language is largly selfish; their job is to study language, and the loss of language is an irreplaceable (on the scale of human lifetime) loss of data that will fundamentally limit our ability to understand human language in general.
The linked article explicitly is not arguing for saving dying languages (which it views as a lost cause), but rather for studying them while they are still alive. Doing at least this should be non-controversial to the extent that one values the study of linguistics.
Also, not that it is relevent to the article, but even if people are speaking a language by conscious choice to preserve it, does not mean that that language use becomes invalid. As an extreme example, take modern Hebrew. Even though it was brought to life through explicit choice, it is still a valid language for study, because children have grown up exposed to it as their native language. If children are exposed to a language like system as their native language, they will learn it as a human language, and from how those children speak, a linguist can learn about human language in general.
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 204 ms ] threadAt the same time, each language is a barrier between people, one that prevents ideas to be shared and stories to be told. The fewer such barriers we have, the easier it becomes to understand others. Literally.
I agree, the language barrier means a lot is lost. But at the same time each story and even way of thinking is flavored by the language it is expressed in. Certain things cannot be fully expressed in another language, the words don't hold the same charge and history.
If the entire world were to speak one language tomorrow and nothing else, there would be a great diminishment in the world's art, culture and mythos.
So it's not a black and white issue.
(I'm currently at a crossword puzzle tournament in a foreign language in a foreign country, when I could of course find many such tournaments in my own country... so I guess I've been spending the whole weekend enjoying an experience of appreciating a foreign language in a way that's in some tension with what you describe.)
I didn't understand how to use "whom" in English until I learned (some) German, and I feel that I understand more nuance and subtlety in my own tongue as a result. Same goes for the (sadly nearly dead) subjunctive form.
Language appears to be the tool we use not just to communicate, but to encode our thoughts. It gives us a way to wrangle the abstract from something ethereal and unmanageable into a conceivable thing we can handle. Having many different languages yields many different ways of thinking, not just communicating, and we are impoverished for their death.
This is a fascinating story about the experience of a deaf person who had no language until their 20's. It affected their thinking in an utterly profound fashion - not just their communication.
http://www.radiolab.org/story/91725-words/
A huge number of people around the world speak at least a local or family language as well as a "language of wider communication"; depending on their situation, they may easily be fully fluent in both. So a preservation-oriented policy or culture would encourage this kind of bilingualism. This was also the traditional view of the Esperanto movement, which wanted Esperanto to be the unique world-wide language of communication while preserving all of the existing languages through bilingualism. [Edit: A commenter below says this approach is less traditional in Esperantism than I thought.] But a similar result could be achieved with, say, English as the main world language, or with people speaking just a handful of regional languages as well as their family languages.
One challenge to bilingualism is that a lot of governments don't like it (for many different reasons), while another challenge is economic. Bilingualism is very possible, but people in various circumstances could easily stop viewing it as desirable or important, because language A will get them a job in the city and language B won't, and each language takes at least some time and effort to use and keep up with. (Or if people habitually move far away from their families, they'll have fewer opportunities to practice speaking with their families.)
Anyway, there are significant tensions here, but these possibilities don't have to be mutually exclusive as long as people continue to care about their family and local languages and have access to social situations that give them opportunities to use them. And it can even be government policy to try to preserve minority languages while also promoting bilingualism in other more widely-spoken languages.
This is inaccurate. L.L. Zamenhof hoped that Esperanto – or at least something like it – would eventually replace all other languages. He didn’t care much for language diversity as we would understand it today, and he saw such differences between peoples as divisive and an obstacle to overcome.
Naturally, even with Zamenhof’s dreams, in the short term Esperanto or another international auxiliary language would only coexist with the native languages of its speakers. However, it wasn’t until the last fifty years or so that a certain segment of the Esperanto movement has begun to advertise Esperanto specifically as a way to safeguard language diversity by letting people keep their native language but have access to an international auxiliary language.
Not all Esperantists agree with this, and through such campaigns one gets the impression that World Esperanto Association and similar organizations are only trying to jump on the wider anti-globalization bandwagon in order to get more attention for Esperanto. Furthermore, Esperanto organizations take a quite schizophrenic approach: if Esperanto is supposed to be only an auxiliary language, why do so many Esperanto organizations praise the creation of original literature (and other cultural output) in Esperanto? Why isn't it encouraging people to write solely in their native language and then only translate it to Esperanto?
Thanks for the correction! I've heard exactly the opposite from Esperantist sources, but it's quite possible that people are sort of retroactively attributing their views to Zamenhof even if he would have felt quite differently -- which I guess isn't unusual in movements with a respected charismatic founder. Maybe this approach emerged somewhat later and people then described it as the "traditional" view of the movement. Can you suggest any sources or references that might clarify this issue?
The vast majority of Esperantists have never read more than one or two brief writings from Zamenhof himself and all they know of the Esperanto movement's goals are what later publications tell them. When Esperanto organizations have been claiming for a few decades now that they care about language diversity, it is no surprise that Esperantists tend to ascribe that belief to Zamenhof too, but it is very anachronistic.
I've frequently read Zamenhof's famous congress speech that includes the part about "Ofte kunvenas personoj de malsamaj nacioj kaj komprenas unu la alian; sed kia grandega diferenco estas inter ilia reciproka kompreniĝado kaj la nia!" and the idea that human relations will be more equitable with an international auxiliary language... except now I don't know whether he in fact considered it "auxiliary" or merely "international". Now I'm thinking about the other interpretation in which he perhaps doesn't want other languages to survive in the long run.
Notably I guess he called Esperanto only "la internacia lingvo" at first until other people started to call it "Esperanto", and perhaps the concept of "helplingvo" largely postdates him, although apparently "auxiliary language" was used toward the end of Zamenhof's own lifetime (Wikipedia suggests maybe first by Otto Jespersen), and these terms seem to suggest supplementing other languages rather than replacing them.
More like the easier it is to maintain the pretense of understanding others.
For instance I write and use english more than my native Norwegian, however I am highly ambivalent towards making english the national language of Norway. With english comes many ways of looking at the world.
For instance for nordic people gender equality is important. I don’t like how the english language is used with respect to women. You got words such as “slut”, “slut shaming” which there are no equivalent to in Norwegian. There isn’t really any good way of describing a women as a slut. Just as there are no good words in english to describe a man as a slut.
There are many Norwegian words I am fond of related to our shared values like “dugnad” which is about working togheter doing maintenance, repair, upgrades in your local community. There is no word for it in english because the tradition does not exist in the US or UK.
It is something that genuinly worries me as I see shared scandinavian values gradually year after year getting erased and replaced with anglo-saxon values.
On the other hand, many europeans have no problem in speaking two to three languages, so making English the second language would preserve that culture?
For now.
> and it's the language of the country with the largest economy.
Also for now.
> It's also a germanic language, so even though it's probably tougher to learn than other languages, it wouldn't be as difficult as Mandarin.
I'm trying to avoid being snarky at the false dichotomy.
Why else would you learn a language? You wouldn't learn it for the past and you wouldn't learn it for the future. English is widely spoken right now, and so is useful to know.
> I'm trying to avoid being snarky at the false dichotomy.
I suppose I could have been more clear. Part of the utility of English is that it's spoken by the Western superpower, the US. By speaking English, that makes your country's economy interact with the US's economy easier. You could learn other superpowers' languages as well like China's and Russia's, but for other Germanic languages, it's much easier to learn English than Russian or Mandarin.
Edit: I feel like many people do learn languages "for the past" or "for the future". For example, many people study ancient languages partly to learn about ancient cultures and ancient history, while many Mandarin learners in the U.S. through the 1990s and 2000s said one motivation was that "China is going to be more important in the future" or something to that effect.
Because you have a foreign-partner, or because you've moved countries? (Though I appreciate neither of those would be super-common.)
https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikibooks:Language_Learning_Di...
Of course, this classification is explicitly meant for native English speakers and includes the degree of relatedness to English as a contributing factor. I don't know if someone has done research about the average difficulty of each language as L2 considered across everyone in the world, but clearly there will be some that are easier and harder on average, considering factors such as unusual phonemes, non-alphabetic writing systems, irregular orthography, irregular inflections, presence or absence of inflections, similarity of sentence structure to most common sentence structures, and so on.
Chinese probably has advantages as L2 due to the lack of inflections but disadvantages due to the extremely difficult writing system and (maybe?) tones -- just because I think most languages worldwide are not tonal. English has advantages due to the alphabetic writing system and disadvantages due to irregular verbs, irregular orthography, and some relatively unusual phonemes.
Also, a lot of non-Chinese speakers already speak languages that are related to Chinese and/or share part of their writing system with Chinese, while a lot of non-English speakers already speak languages that are related to English and/or share part of their writing system with English.
Anyway, we need to look into this a lot more before just saying that one language is a clear winner, but the idea is not at all meaningless and should in principle have an answer. Although clearly there will be some people who will be at a huge advantage or a huge disadvantage in learning any given L2, which is, again, a big part of what the State Department ranking is showing (not just the inherent ease or difficulty of learning each of these languages in the abstract).
My intuition is to believe myself and others when we say that "knowing about more ways things can work" in languages makes it smoother to learn and assimilate new ones. But I also wonder if there could be an effect of "people who enjoy learning languages enjoy learning languages"?
> Chinese probably has advantages as L2 due to the lack of inflections but disadvantages due to the extremely difficult writing system and (maybe?) tones
Tones aren't much of a problem. The main problem is the script, combined with the lack of vocabulary sharing between Mandarin and English (no cognates, very few loans in either direction. It isn't particularly difficult - it just requires lots of tedious memorization of thousands of printed characters and spoken words.
Cantonese and other Chinese languages have very little printed material. (All Chinese speakers use the same written language, which is based upon spoken Mandarin.)
I'm a native German speaker so germanic languages feel rather "regular" to me, while I find romanic languages grammatically simpler but they still feel more exotic to me.
I'd prefer something more regular over both of those, though, perhaps Spanish. I've also heard that Korean, Arabic and Japanese are super regular.
Many of my friends started studying Japanology and switched to Koreanology because it was easier :D
Not necessarily just "one word" as western language speakers would understand it, since each kanji usually has at least two readings and potentially many more, often with different meanings. (Other people have even compared them to morphemes because the same kanji can be used with related meanings in different multi-kanji words.)
The problem in German is not the declensions, it's how they mix and match
Like 'der' can mean masculine in one case and feminine (or plural) in other cases. Or the 'er' ending can mean a lot of things.
> I've also heard that Korean, Arabic and Japanese are super regular.
I can't say anything about Korean but in Arabic it's common to drop vowels (they also have 2-plural) and Japanese with its thousands of symbols with no easy way to derive their meanings and no hint to how each one are pronounced are anything but regular. Especially Japanese.
Not only is there a dual number, there's the most complicated system of agreement of numerals with nouns that I've ever seen in any language:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_grammar#Numerals
(But despite that it is a hard language to learn, I'm making only small amounts of progress despite having lived in Finland for two years.)
For one thing, each verb can have several thousand different forms: in fact I don't think anyone can enumerate them all. (Sometimes people even make up new forms!)
So there are no dialects in Germany, do they really pronounce all words the same in the dockyards of Hamburg as they do in the university at Heidelberg? What about Austrian German, Swiss German, and the German speakers in Argentina and Brazil.
And you never 'steal' words? What about spaghetti (or is it spagetti now?). If German had been the most used auxiliary language for the last two hundred years I think it too would have borrowed a few more words.
No, but they pronounce the words consistently in each dialect, as opposed to English where bow and bow are pronounced differently.
> What about Austrian German, Swiss German, and the German speakers in Argentina and Brazil.
What about them?
> And you never 'steal' words?
Fine, "borrowed" then. I didn't mean it pejoratively. Also I'm not a native speaker of either English or German.
> If German had been the most used auxiliary language for the last two hundred years I think it too would have borrowed a few more words.
What do you mean? That, say, the word "fraternity" is French-derived because the French spoke English? It seems to me that it's exactly the other way around.
So I have to know which dialect the author used in order to know how to pronounce a word.
This is the problematic part, but a lot of people don't believe there is such a thing.
It's needed, because often people bring their parents and grandparents over with them, to act as a support network to help prosper and raise children - its unreasonable to expect people older than 50 or so to learn english - nor is it practical. It becomes dangerous when you have second and third generation immigrants not learning english and joining the larger culture of whatever nation their parents or grandparents immigrated to - and its disrespectful, because frankly, my people moved here from the 'old county' (norway among other places) they didn't speak english, but they learned, and they wanted to join in all of the benefits of being a part of this new country of theirs.
An example, I'm an American - if I moved to Spain or Germany, I'd want to participate as fully as I could in the culture and society of my newly adopted country, I'd want to localize myself to the my new found home, to me, its disrespectful to the hospitality of my new home country if I do not - it's as if they gave me a gift, and I'm not reciprocating by keeping up my part of the bargain by becoming a true citizen of that place. If I'd wanted to continue the old ways/if the old ways were working for me, I could just stay at home.
I do not know Norweigian well enough, but in Denmark we have 'so' (meaning sow), which is not quite the same as 'slut' (it is basically the same as 'bitch') but in something that is only used against women. 'svin' (pig) would be a non-gendered insult. I guess the closest thing to slut would be 'luder' (lit whore), also a gendered insult.
My point is that culture exists or dies on its own. It doesn't depend on a language.
As for lost nuances, loan words are constantly adopted when people find them valuable enough to them, so nothing important needs to be lost.
-Oscar Wilde
My point is that, in the UK for instance, there seems to be an air of distrust in some English speaking communities that seems not to exist in Norway, at least not to the same degree. I doubt it has much to do with the language. I was born in and grew up in the UK (1955 to 1985) and I'm quite sure that the town where I grew up was then much more similar to the place I now live in than it is now. The country has changed.
Of course, I have been outside the flow of things in the UK for thirty years so my view of the current situation probably owes a little too much to the media than it should, so take the specifics with a pinch of salt.
Languages are a way to express culture of a country and there are many words that never translate well between languages, because they express ideas or points of view not present in the target languages.
Usually this idea of one language to rule them all, seems to keep coming up from cultures not able to bother to learn anything else other than English.
Then it becomes a new word in that language. I think this is why english gains ground, because it eats new words constantly.
You might translate saudade to mean home sick, missing someone, missing a place, missing an event, not being able to do something, feeling blue, among a few other possibilities.
However none of them actually express 100% the same meaning as a native Portuguese speaker might be feeling when he/she says that word, because there is a mix of feelings and situations related in that single word.
Or for example, the ways an Eskimo might describe a frozen landscape.
That's not the case in my experience. The drive for the "international auxiliary language" movement, one global language for communication, largely arose from Europe, particularly Eastern Europe. Esperanto was created by a Pole, Volapük a German, the first Interlingua an Italian, the second Interlingua a German who emigrated to the US.
Or imposed by the new rulers after conquering a new territory.
Artificial created languages never gained any meaningful ground.
This is an easy opinion to harbor when you speak a language whose future is pretty much secure.
Imagine if you woke up one day and you were the last person who knew a word of English. All the English-language music you've ever heard, all the books and movies, etc., are now totally incomprehensible to everyone you'll ever meet. All copies of them, and indeed, all English text except for whatever's in your pockets, is gone. All the place names you know are removed from the map. All English words borrowed by other languages are gone. Every native English speaker (aside from you) has disappeared, and their very names are unpronounceable to the world's remaining population. Maybe even the Latin alphabet is gone.
You get to keep all your memories, but naturally nobody shares them or has reason to believe they actually happened. Most people don't care to hear about them. If they do, they see them as a curiosity, a museum piece to be put in a display case, not something with the slightest relevance to their own lives.
You can't even tell English-language jokes anymore. They aren't funny in translation.
Of course this leaves you isolated. And of course there's a solution anyone can offer you: Forget about English. Adopt a whole new life where you're a normal person who speaks a normal language that other normal people understand. Your identity as an English speaker is entertaining for about five minutes, but ultimately an inconvenience to society. Hurry up and let it go.
If this sounds harsher than what you were trying to say, perhaps you've underestimated what a language is to the people who speak it. It's more than just a list of words.
And even then everybody would try convince that person to translate his culture into the new language or at least to codify the original language so that it isn't lost.
But the real solution would have to start doing those things decades ago.
edit: To those downvoting me, can you please explain why? I was asking a serious question. The post above made it sound like that person's comfort was more important than adapting to changing times.
I upvoted you btw, I assume some downvotes were because your choice of words was a bit too callous for their liking.
I think my point is that both you and they could have explained a bit more.
To me, the harshness of life is that there are different languages in existence, and that people are in no hurry to converge on one. And the discomfort is the necessity to translate between languages, or to learn multiple languages, or to get in communicative situations when either you or your interlocutor are not particularly fluent in the language you are trying to communicate in. For me, the less discomfort of such kind the better, even if it means that multiple cultures will become inaccessible to non-scholars. I do not believe we (common folks, I mean) are terribly missing the Roman, or the Ancient Greek, or the Mayan culture, etc.
The flip side is it's easy to wax poetic about the importance of preserving language and culture when you will not face major barriers because of your language or dialect.
Sometimes the parents or children involved found this to be quite a hard and quite a stressful decision, and the people on the other side of the generation gap don't always feel entirely comfortable with the decision.
But you're right to point out that this doesn't have to involve any sort of coercion or compulsion; it's often just people making choices about what they think is best for their own families at a given point in time.
And this happens with even major languages. I have a coworker who's grandparents immigrated to the US from Spain. Her parents knew Spanish, but didn't speak it to her. Now she has no way to communicate with her grandparents because she only knows English.
I was going to write "Why on earth did they not speak it to her?" but of course it is quite likely that there were perfectly good reasons in the time and place. And I know it isn't quite as simple because my language is English but I think the point still stands that she was ill served by the decision to not speak Spanish at home. Not only because she can't speak to her grandparents but also because she cannot experience Spanish culture quite as directly as she might have.
If you had children you wouldn't even try to bring them up in a dying minority language, why should Other People?
Why do you want to keep Other People from joining in the world's culture?
That's what you are wishing for here.
I don’t know that there is a different solution. If your community dies, you can move on or die with it. But if someone’s going to celebrate that, I hope they realize what they’re saying.
People aren't going to compromise their lives to maintain someone else's cultural zoo.
Even Latin, which has no native speakers and dramatically less published material than English is in no danger of dying out. People learn it just to access the existing material.
Hell even being in America, your access to pop culture media created in most widely-spoken European languages is severely restricted. If I want to read a German language book I only have a few choices to pick from that aren't specifically written for learning language. Movies are even harder to come by, and German is very much a living language.
I'm not arguing that niche languages shouldn't be saved, just refuting the argument that we need to keep speaking them in order to retain access to their cultural materials. Like you said, they need written or recorded cultural material to begin with.
I speak one of UN's big 6 languages and it's future is secure.
I care little for it's jokes, new ones will be made.
But if it disappeared tomorrow in it's entirety then I would not only not be disappointed, I would celebrate instead. The barriers are gone, the people are united. And that annoying "learn English" advertisement spam would also disappear, that's perhaps one of the best parts.
And it's one of the top 6 languages of the world. I can't even imagine how somebody stuck with a niche language feels.
All this stuff dies even if the language lives on. The jokes stop being funny, and the stories stop being enjoyable. We just end up with a few preserved works that we label "classics" and force school children to read.
That is a strong case for having some language, like English, that everyone knows worldwide, in addition to their own languages.
Languages aren't a barrier between people. Not having at least one language in common is. The difference is subtle but enormously significant given that people can and do speak more than one language, and that full fluency in 2 or 3 languages is the norm in parts of the world.
There is a large amount of culture in every language. My own native language is quite small with no more than 2 million speakers, and for that language to disappear would also mean the loss of a lot of culture, and I do not just mean books and songs but also "everyday history" such as people's diaries, etc. And the loss of stuff we sometimes call untranslateable - not because it's impossible to translate per se perhaps but because there are often words or phrases that carry a particular cultural meaning.
(1) Having easy access to the last several generations' literature is very nice!
(2) Knowing the modern form of the language is often a huge help to learning the ancient form, so losing native proficiency in modern languages would still be a hindrance to understanding older texts.
(3) People can try to slow down language change in order to at least slightly reduce the magnitude of this effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_planning
While languages do evolve, it's a gradual process and they remain understandable for centuries. Shakespeare, Dante and Goethe are quite understandable to speakers of modern English, Italian and German. A speaker of Spanish or Italian can learn to read Latin texts even now with relatively little study. When the language of Julius Caesar is separated from modern Italian by 2000 years, the change process was so gradual that culture of the Roman Empire is still very visible in modern societies. That is not comparable to, for example, Mesoamerian cultures that were wiped out in a shorter period of time.
If all we had was Cobol as the One True Programming Language, we sure would have saved a lot of time reimplementing things. Would we also have missed out on anything important though?
Calling multilingualism a barrier between people seems a bit myopic to me. What about all anthropologic richness that language diversity teaches us? What about the stuff it's taught us about human psychology? What about the cooperative understanding that is built between people through the act itself of learning a language?
The question is: do we use programming languages to share ideas and tell stories, or do we use them to get computers to do stuff for us?
The only reason COBOL is a useful language is because there exists a translator (compiler), that can transform COBOL into a language spoken by all CPUs (machine code).
In that sense, COBOL is more a dialect of assembly than a separate language. And it’s only useful because it’s a dialect of this common language — assembly.
Well, it's both of them, just like spoken language
Another question is: is the diversity among our spoken languages large enough for this to even matter? My impression is that any single language has enough internal diversity to host any number of paradigms, but they don't change enough to allow for much different things.
How a Mistake Gave Us the Word 'Cherry'[+]:
[quote]
The Old North French word for 'cherry' is 'cherise'. English speakers heard the 'se' at the end of the word and assumed it was plural, 'cherries', and that the singular form of the word must then be 'cherry' (ok, they spelled it 'chery').
[/quote]
The Merriam-Webster article mentioned below goes into some more depth & gives other examples.
[+] https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/cherry-history...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebracketing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back-formation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folk_etymology
This is a very easy and naive stance to take. However I have completely abandoned it!
With the years I have come to unravel some of the incredible knowledge encoded in the structure of my language. It is amazing how idioms and structural qualities of languages can define a culture through their influence on the way people think. Now I have gotten very curious about learning some exotic languages and I suspect I will need to dedicate a portion of my life to that pursuit :)
Trying to preserve this through translation is never going to work for many reasons, mainly because turning meaning from something continuous into discrete words is done differently in different cultures so a words true meaning can be hiding between several words of the language you wish to translate to. Therefore some things become hard to say which used to be common phrases. This has obvious consequences for culture but it also means that often when you as an individual move from one language to another you unlock more of your innate assumptions and see how your language defined your approach to problems in some ways. Gaining understanding of these assumptions gives more 'room to move in', perspective wise, I find.
I get what you mean, but you should give some examples, if possible. Nothing cements abstract notions in the mind quite like examples - in my experience, anything hard requires 1. an example that demonstrates the phenomena, then 2. the theory necessary to properly understand which aspects of the example you're referring to that demonstrate the phenomena, before you finally understand the phenomena as it acts in the example and 3. can model the concept in your mind independent of the example.
Things like alliteration, rhyming, and homophones are all incredibly difficult to move across languages and those are _easy_ compared to the slang and idioms.
An example:
In Tagalog, the word for blue is "asul" which more or less directly leads to an English/Tagalog joke about how "People have been telling me to cheer up all week, they keep calling me an 'asul'".
Which to understand, you need to be fluent in Taglog, English slang and have the cultural background to understand that "blue" means sad (which isn't universal).
Linguistic diversity is a direct expression of cultural isolation. When people live together, when more people can afford to travel, when more people can't afford not to travel, languages will inevitably be obsoleted or combined.
When there is no cultural isolation left in the world, we will all inevitably speak one language.
Cultural isolationism is an ideological position that naturally generates diversity, and it’s incredibly lively in the modern world despite, or even in opposition to, distances shrinking dramatically in all paths of life.
I have no particular horse in the race, I can't really decide if it's a good thing or a bad thing to self-isolate. I personally would like to reach out and assimilate mutually, but somewhere in my mind I want to see Japan continue to isolate itself somewhat, I'll have a fun time squaring that circle over my lifetime.
I deliberately chose not to teach my children my or my wife's fairly obscure and mutually completely unintelligible languages.
On the other hand, I ensured that they studied Latin, Italian, French and Sanskrit in addition to their L1 ( English )
I am a polyglot and know around a dozen languages to various levels, including several semi-obscure minority languages.
A lot of culture co-evolves with language. In a language are myths and legends, some of which contribute to the words in the language, which then give birth to other proverbs and stories, and so on. All of which and fragments of which become available for communication. The more knowledge and culture a language loses, the more bland communication in that language becomes and the information density of the language decreases. This in turn affects communication because to maintain the same amount of information it has to become longer, so the attitude towards communication changes. And so does the message.
The tool of communication is part of the message itself.
I for one hope that's where this trend is leading, as I think it'd be a worthwhile trade off against the loss of cultural knowledge that results from language death.
I don't. Out of curiosity, how many languages do you speak?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kura_Kaupapa_M%C4%81ori
If one of your ancestors was a historical figure, or kept a diary, maybe you have much more. But that's hardly ordinary.
It's just the way things are, and probably the way it has to be.
Maybe not, but many AI agents are trained on our Reddit, HN and Twitter comments. In the future I expect that every person alive today should be documented from logs in order to run simulations of the human society as it was pre-singularity. The previous generations have very little data, and the next generations will be influenced by AI, so the only 'pure', large size sample is us. AGI is going to want to know how it came to be, and future humans will want to rebuild an authentic human society so they will need a good reference.
So your comments are surely going to be studied in detail, maybe you're going to be simulated from your comments and other crumbs of data you leak.
As the world becomes more integrated, and less isolated, even major languages will begin to disappear.
I see this happening with one of my favourite languages: Japanese. Colloquial Japanese is slowly replacing words with close English approximations (just as it took on German vocabulary in the early 20th century), dialects are at once becoming more widely understood, and more similar.
You can no more preserve a language than you can preserve a human being.
And given that linguists use as an insult the term "prescriptivist"[1] for anyone who wishes to preserve or establish particular linguistic usages--even if for wholly benevolent reasons, such as the removal of inconsistencies for the benefit of non-native speakers--how can they then go and support efforts to actually increase the number of speakers of some dying tongue? Isn't that awfully prescriptivist of them, dictating not just how others should use a particular language, but even which languages they should be speaking?
[1] http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?cat=5
The linguistics' reasoning for wanting to preserve language is largly selfish; their job is to study language, and the loss of language is an irreplaceable (on the scale of human lifetime) loss of data that will fundamentally limit our ability to understand human language in general.
The linked article explicitly is not arguing for saving dying languages (which it views as a lost cause), but rather for studying them while they are still alive. Doing at least this should be non-controversial to the extent that one values the study of linguistics.
Also, not that it is relevent to the article, but even if people are speaking a language by conscious choice to preserve it, does not mean that that language use becomes invalid. As an extreme example, take modern Hebrew. Even though it was brought to life through explicit choice, it is still a valid language for study, because children have grown up exposed to it as their native language. If children are exposed to a language like system as their native language, they will learn it as a human language, and from how those children speak, a linguist can learn about human language in general.