Small languages are dying because it's not economically viable for their communities to keep speaking them. But many large languages are also degrading, because of similar reasons.
Computing technology has a big part to play in this. It's still a huge pain to use RTL languages in many places. Bidi text is even worse. Keyboards, character sets and what not are still not standardized.
What is the benefit of keeping a language alive, other than to not lose the knowledge/creativity from books written in the language? If those books are translated into a more widely-used language that isn't dying, would that make it okay for the language to die? Is it purely out of respect for the culture of the language? The only other thing I can think of is that the folks that use the dying language don't know any other languages - which I can understand (no pun intended).
languages facilitate different modes of thinking, I suppose one of the dangers in letting less commonly used languages die off is that it would seemingly promote more homogeneity in human thought.
translation doesn’t always carry the same weight. look at the bible— entire sentences that have different meanings or subtext. in one language, a verb may mean “to do something as your responsibility” and in a translation it may simply be “to undertake a task” — this sort of nuance is lost really easily.
additionally, books and written word doesn’t always equate to having saved knowledge. think about the tribe and kin concepts in many indigenous languages. entire ways of life can be lost. we know a lot from our europe’s ancestral indo-europeans lived from the reconstructions of proto-indo-european by way of the modern languages and written history but there is so much we do not know that is just lost.
> additionally, books and written word doesn’t always equate to having saved knowledge. think about the tribe and kin concepts in many indigenous languages. entire ways of life can be lost. we know a lot from our europe’s ancestral indo-europeans lived from the reconstructions of proto-indo-european by way of the modern languages and written history but there is so much we do not know that is just lost.
Sure, things are lost, but were they valuable other than to students of history?
> Sure, things are lost, but were they valuable other than to students of history?
I detest this line of thinking because it assigns more worth to things that yield immediate results, or places a low importance on the impact of history.
Were Fermat's theorems valuable only to students of Mathematics, or did they inspire some of the greatest minds to later push the envelope in many unrelated fields?
> I detest this line of thinking because it assigns more worth to things that yield immediate results, or places a low importance on the impact of history.
I don't think it does; not all things are equally valuable, and the odds are low that some of the dying languages have anything of value, compared to reading or listening to global affairs.
Personally, I detest this line of thinking: some old/primitive/superstition/traditional thing is valuable just by being.
No, not all existing things are valuable.
> Were Fermat's theorems valuable only to students of Mathematics, or did they inspire some of the greatest minds to later push the envelope in many unrelated fields?
We aren't talking about Fermat, we're talking about primitive languages, for which there are hundreds of multiple better replacements.
The problem with your argument is that it assumes that the value and potential of a product is wholly known in the present, when this is often far from the case: we constantly learn new things about seemingly static entities, and the insights that we develop from them enrich other aspects of our society.
Without studying language we wouldn't have understandings of innate grammars, the psychology that develops from these understandings, the marketability from that subsequent understanding, and then finally how to make money from it (if this is how one defines value....)
> The problem with your argument is that it assumes that the value and potential of a product is wholly known in the present,
No, it doesn't. It uses the fact that the probability of gaining anything of value from dying languages is so low that it's probably a rounding error.
> when this is often far from the case: we constantly learn new things about seemingly static entities, and the insights that we develop from them enrich other aspects of our society.
If you're relying on subjective "it enriches us" type of arguments, I'm afraid that that is not very persuasive.
Many argue that prayer is "enriching", after all.
Look, I get that it's feels better to be enriched, but that is not a good measure of "did we learn anything from this that is at all useful?"
> Without studying language we wouldn't have understandings of innate grammars, the psychology that develops from these understandings, the marketability from that subsequent understanding, and then finally how to make money from it (if this is how one defines value....)
We've got 7000+ languages. As far as learning stuff from them, fully 90% of them are redundant.
Again, "redundant" assumes that they are of no use to us with what we know now, but makes no promises for the future.
Parenting, for example, is a topic that constantly waxes and wanes with paradigms every few years as the prevailing western model is constantly brought under question. One article mentions Inuit parenting[1], a dying language and culture of no use to 99% of people in their daily lives right now, but whose ways of parenting are insightful enough that they could impact future parenting techniques in the western world.
I think we're talking past each other. We're both looking at the same future event - getting something of value out of a relatively isolated and unpopular human language.
I'm looking at this event and pointing out that the expected value of this bet is negative[1]. It is, in fact, so negative that there's a better chance of winning a 'let it ride' bet on roulette.
You're looking at this event and pointing out that the odds are non-zero.
I agree - the odds of a dying language making a positive contribution is indeed non-zero. I just don't think that non-zero is a good bar to base expensive decisions on.
> Again, "redundant" assumes that they are of no use to us with what we know now, but makes no promises for the future.
No, "redundant" is being used loosely - the odds of getting something of value from a dying language is nearly insignificant.
> Parenting, for example, is a topic that constantly waxes and wanes with paradigms every few years as the prevailing western model is constantly brought under question. One article mentions Inuit parenting[1],
And nothing[2] that you discover from the Inuit anger-prevention would make humanity more successful than it is right now; the majority of cultures aren't going to switch parenting styles, which, as the article points out, is cultural itself.
Cultures are resistant to change, and child-rearing is deep in every culture. In order for the Inuit method to be widespread, some other cultures have to lose some of their identity.
And, that's even assuming that the Inuit tradition of child-rearing is more successful, and many would argue that if it was, the resulting population of adults would have successfully competed with other cultures over centuries and yet this did not happen.[2]
[1] Because the effort needed to prevent a dying language from dying is high - see the Hebrew example.
[2] Once again, using "nothing" as "the odds of it happening are so low we may as well ignore it"
[3] Maybe there are confounding factors, but I don't care - I'm anticipating what arguments may come, not making them.
One way of answering this question would be to consider why, for example, Native American children were punished at boarding schools for speaking their language instead of English, why US colonial rule of Hawai'i included bans on Hawai'ian language usage, why Britain published missives against the Welsh language, or why nationalists in Taiwan or communists in China have worked to suppress languages like Taiwanese or Cantonese in favor of Mandarin. Languages are often considered delimiting factors for whether a group should be considered autonomous, a marker of shared ethnic heritage, and as a bulwark against cultural assimilation. Because they are part of a community's history, the eradication or revitalization of a language is often linked to the eradication or revitalization of that group of people as a cultural and political entity, as in Welsh revitalization efforts or protests to retain Cantonese broadcasts. So there is a connection to whether a group can be considered as a distinct culture, with its own distinct political rights, that goes beyond the utilitarian aspect of language as a means of simply transmitting information.
That's just a side-effect less isolated communities.
As more and more people from within different communities interact, the value of a common language increases and the value of the isolated language decreases.
The eventual equilibrium is going to be maybe 3 languages left, with each individual in the world able to speak at least 2 of them.
Any effort expended on keeping languages alive is pointless.
> The Haifa municipality has banned officials from using English words in official documents, and is fighting to stop businesses from using only English signs to market their services.[85] In 2012, a Knesset bill for the preservation of the Hebrew language was proposed, which includes the stipulation that all signage in Israel must first and foremost be in Hebrew, as with all speeches by Israeli officials abroad. The bill's author, MK Akram Hasson, stated that the bill was proposed as a response to Hebrew "losing its prestige" and children incorporating more English words into their vocabulary.[86]
With enough energy (time, money and influence), you can revive any language, even dead ones.
You can do that, and you can continue expending more effort into making sure it doesn't decline again, but eventually whatever is popular globally is going to dominate, even in the face of legislative actions that force the use of the language. Each generation will have less and less use (outside of forced use) for the non-popular language.
Even though Latin is extensively legislated for use in Law, and used popularly in the Sciences, it still died.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 59.9 ms ] threadComputing technology has a big part to play in this. It's still a huge pain to use RTL languages in many places. Bidi text is even worse. Keyboards, character sets and what not are still not standardized.
i agree, though, that computing could be sooo great for these languages if we moved past weatern paradigms
additionally, books and written word doesn’t always equate to having saved knowledge. think about the tribe and kin concepts in many indigenous languages. entire ways of life can be lost. we know a lot from our europe’s ancestral indo-europeans lived from the reconstructions of proto-indo-european by way of the modern languages and written history but there is so much we do not know that is just lost.
Sure, things are lost, but were they valuable other than to students of history?
I detest this line of thinking because it assigns more worth to things that yield immediate results, or places a low importance on the impact of history.
Were Fermat's theorems valuable only to students of Mathematics, or did they inspire some of the greatest minds to later push the envelope in many unrelated fields?
I don't think it does; not all things are equally valuable, and the odds are low that some of the dying languages have anything of value, compared to reading or listening to global affairs.
Personally, I detest this line of thinking: some old/primitive/superstition/traditional thing is valuable just by being.
No, not all existing things are valuable.
> Were Fermat's theorems valuable only to students of Mathematics, or did they inspire some of the greatest minds to later push the envelope in many unrelated fields?
We aren't talking about Fermat, we're talking about primitive languages, for which there are hundreds of multiple better replacements.
Without studying language we wouldn't have understandings of innate grammars, the psychology that develops from these understandings, the marketability from that subsequent understanding, and then finally how to make money from it (if this is how one defines value....)
No, it doesn't. It uses the fact that the probability of gaining anything of value from dying languages is so low that it's probably a rounding error.
> when this is often far from the case: we constantly learn new things about seemingly static entities, and the insights that we develop from them enrich other aspects of our society.
If you're relying on subjective "it enriches us" type of arguments, I'm afraid that that is not very persuasive.
Many argue that prayer is "enriching", after all.
Look, I get that it's feels better to be enriched, but that is not a good measure of "did we learn anything from this that is at all useful?"
> Without studying language we wouldn't have understandings of innate grammars, the psychology that develops from these understandings, the marketability from that subsequent understanding, and then finally how to make money from it (if this is how one defines value....)
We've got 7000+ languages. As far as learning stuff from them, fully 90% of them are redundant.
Parenting, for example, is a topic that constantly waxes and wanes with paradigms every few years as the prevailing western model is constantly brought under question. One article mentions Inuit parenting[1], a dying language and culture of no use to 99% of people in their daily lives right now, but whose ways of parenting are insightful enough that they could impact future parenting techniques in the western world.
1: https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2019/03/13/6855333...
I'm looking at this event and pointing out that the expected value of this bet is negative[1]. It is, in fact, so negative that there's a better chance of winning a 'let it ride' bet on roulette.
You're looking at this event and pointing out that the odds are non-zero.
I agree - the odds of a dying language making a positive contribution is indeed non-zero. I just don't think that non-zero is a good bar to base expensive decisions on.
> Again, "redundant" assumes that they are of no use to us with what we know now, but makes no promises for the future.
No, "redundant" is being used loosely - the odds of getting something of value from a dying language is nearly insignificant.
> Parenting, for example, is a topic that constantly waxes and wanes with paradigms every few years as the prevailing western model is constantly brought under question. One article mentions Inuit parenting[1],
And nothing[2] that you discover from the Inuit anger-prevention would make humanity more successful than it is right now; the majority of cultures aren't going to switch parenting styles, which, as the article points out, is cultural itself.
Cultures are resistant to change, and child-rearing is deep in every culture. In order for the Inuit method to be widespread, some other cultures have to lose some of their identity.
And, that's even assuming that the Inuit tradition of child-rearing is more successful, and many would argue that if it was, the resulting population of adults would have successfully competed with other cultures over centuries and yet this did not happen.[2]
[1] Because the effort needed to prevent a dying language from dying is high - see the Hebrew example.
[2] Once again, using "nothing" as "the odds of it happening are so low we may as well ignore it"
[3] Maybe there are confounding factors, but I don't care - I'm anticipating what arguments may come, not making them.
As more and more people from within different communities interact, the value of a common language increases and the value of the isolated language decreases.
The eventual equilibrium is going to be maybe 3 languages left, with each individual in the world able to speak at least 2 of them.
Any effort expended on keeping languages alive is pointless.
Pointless ultimately, maybe. But languages can even be revived from nothing to have millions of native speakers, see Hebrew.
But, it's a lot of effort and energy expended: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebrew_language#Current_status
> The Haifa municipality has banned officials from using English words in official documents, and is fighting to stop businesses from using only English signs to market their services.[85] In 2012, a Knesset bill for the preservation of the Hebrew language was proposed, which includes the stipulation that all signage in Israel must first and foremost be in Hebrew, as with all speeches by Israeli officials abroad. The bill's author, MK Akram Hasson, stated that the bill was proposed as a response to Hebrew "losing its prestige" and children incorporating more English words into their vocabulary.[86]
With enough energy (time, money and influence), you can revive any language, even dead ones.
You can do that, and you can continue expending more effort into making sure it doesn't decline again, but eventually whatever is popular globally is going to dominate, even in the face of legislative actions that force the use of the language. Each generation will have less and less use (outside of forced use) for the non-popular language.
Even though Latin is extensively legislated for use in Law, and used popularly in the Sciences, it still died.
Arabic probably makes up 1/3 of those "7,168" languages.
I think the claim that there are "7,168" languages is a result of publish-or-perish.