August 05, 2004

• From the article: Some language loss, like species loss, is natural and predictable. No language exists forever. Yes, technology is endangering languages. But it's only for the sake of nostalgia that we feel a need to replace them. Cultures with a strong sense of identity will continue to use their language as the primary method of communication, so loos lof language does not equal loss of culture. Look at Wales-- 99% of the 500,000 speakers of Welsh also speak fluent English, and it's been this way for several generations. And despite that all its speakers also speak a major language, the number of Welsh speakers is holding steady. This is because the people of North Wales value their history and culture and don't want to abandon their language. In the same vein, a majority of Finns speak English with a degree of fluency, and no Finns are raising their children to speak English exclusively. My point is that cultural imperialism only goes so far. As for the crappy example given about Australian aboriginal medicine, the author is equating language exactly with culture, as though the disappearance of aboriginal language automatically causes the death of aboriginal culture and its knowledge of local remedies. The argument might have been stronger if it hadn't been "some skin disease was causing sores, and some nurse met some native australian and he knew of some plant that would cure it because he still spoke aboriginal."
• "so loos lof language does not equal loss of culture." = "so loss of language does not equal loss of culture."
• the author is equating language exactly with culture *hides under desk*
• Caution -- possibly depressing. Seabirds in the north are no longer multiplying, The herring and the eels as well are dying. And now we lose our elder tongues with which to mourn The exit of these species from this bourne.
• foundation for endangered languages to the rescue!
• Why is this necessarily bad, again? Actually, I think that a world that spoke only one or two languages might be a world where people got along a bit better, don't you think? It's hard to demonize and de-anthropomorphize someone who you can talk to. Understanding someone's words goes a long way toward understanding them as a person, a fellow human being, and not some gibberish-spouting animal to be shot at.
• funny you should ask, fes, here's what the foundation has to say: This mass extinction of languages may not appear immediately life-threatening. Some will feel that a reduction in numbers of languages will ease communication, and perhaps help build nations, even global solidarity. But it has been well pointed out that the success of humanity in colonizing the planet has been due to our ability to develop cultures suited for survival in a variety of environments. These cultures have everywhere been transmitted by languages, in oral traditions and latterly in written literatures. So when language transmission itself breaks down, especially before the advent of literacy in a culture, there is always a large loss of inherited knowledge. Valued or not, that knowledge is lost, and humanity is the poorer.
• At the same time, not as many of us are yet relying on the tales of our grandfathers to help us survive the wilds of our neighborhood - the planet is pretty much colonized, where it can be, I think. And I don't think that we should underestimate the effect of print on the codifying of that knowledge! The oral tradition is, as it has always been, doomed to failure. Any child's game of "telephone" shows that. Second, perhaps humanity *is* the poorer, but that inherited knowledge - is it valuable for day to day affairs, or valuable as a curiousity, as a window on history? Honestly, I can't see the pragmatics of preserving a curiousity at the expense of keeping a people separated and misunderstood. There are better ways of preserving the stories of a people than artificially forcing the presrvation of a language, in all likelihood, as completed its usefulness. And lastly: not all knowledge is worth preserving. My Uncle Bob has a bazillion idiotic stories, but not one of them is worth the sheet of paper to write them down, believe me. Are the tales of another culture's Uncle Bobs worthy simply because the tales are likely to never again be told?
• There are better ways of preserving the stories of a people than artificially forcing the presrvation of a language, in all likelihood, as completed its usefulness. Arg! My hackles just went up! Language is much more than just words. Lanquage shapes how we think, the concepts we understand. Poetry and literature lose so much when translated from their originals. English evolved as a language for inter-cultural business. It hasn't developed the subtleties and complexities you see in older more mature languages. If English is all we speak, there is much of the world's cultures we will never completely appreciate.
• It would be neat to see a tree showing which languages are "absorbed" into another (such as Native American tongues becoming English)... that way we can see the mechanics of what is happening.
• paging languagehat to this thread....
• It would be neat to see a tree showing which languages are "absorbed" into another (such as Native American tongues becoming English)... that way we can see the mechanics of what is happening. "absorbed" is a bit of a misnomer. If a language is dying, its usually no longer comingling with the major languages replacing it. But I agree with you that it would be interesting to see which languages are taking over endangered tongues. I suspect, however, that it would be pretty obvious in most cases. English would be the biggest usurper because of its importance in global communication. Mandarin chinese would probably be next because of the staggering number of languages spoken in tiny pockets all over China (mostly from the Miao-Yao family), which have been in decline for a few hundred years (or even over millenia if you start with the origins of their isolation). And Spanish and Portugese are steadily replacing aboriginal South American languages. Lastly, this is just a hunch, but I suspect that the end of the Soviet Union has actually been bad for languages under Russian Federation control. The Soviets had a careful policy of preserving many languages that I can't see the "streamlined" Russian government embracing.
• Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't different languages employed in the exact same way? For instance, I can ask for a cup of tea in Spanish. Or I can ask in English. Or any other language with a large enough vocabulary. But either way, I get tea. Who gives a fuck what the words sound like / their order / grammatical construction? I mean, besides poets.
• Fez, you might not like your Uncle Bob's stories, but someone else might think they are a really interesting part of popular culture. It's like how I think tulips are really ugly, but if they were becoming endagered, I wouldn't be happy. Actually, when you talk to most people about history today, what they are most interested in (what people did, how they lived, what they ate and wore, what idiotic stories they told, etc) was exactly what people in the past thought no one could possibly be interested in, and so never wrote down. So we have a kagillion books on theology - and only a handful of popular songs. (NB: numbers are made up) Languages aren't culture, but they are a major part of it. They explain names, they carry concepts - they are part of the poetry and song and stories. They do shape the way you see the world - non-English people often have wonderful ways of describing things I would never think of, but are so much better than my ways. As a historian, I try to be very sensitive to how language of the people I study is not my own language - and I do English history (it has changed that much in 400 years). That the term "middle class" grew in popularity only at the end of the 18th cent and in the 19th says something powerful about how their concepts of their own society were different from the ones we (eg historians) have of it; indeed, "middling sort" didn't even appear before c.1650. Before that, English people had no way to even talk about people who weren't poor or rich - they existed, of course (always have), but they couldn't talk about them - and there was no identity as such. (In case you are interested, which probably no one is, this kind of analysis, which I have shamefully stolen from people much smarter than myself, is called 'the linguistic turn' among historians). The reasons for protecting languages is the same as for protecting endangered animals - do we really believe that elephants are part of the secret for the cure for cancer? No - but our world would be poorer without them.
• Actually - I wrote that last paragraph before I had continued writing the second - and I realised I'm wrong. Loosing languages is bad. There is a reason people still learn Latin - we would loose all that culture if they didn't. The fear is not only that these languages would cease to be spoken commonly, but that they might even disapear altogether.
• If all languages except English are forgotten within the next couple of hundred years, we better hurry up and start translating everything ever written in those funny foreign languages, I reckon.

• Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't different languages employed in the exact same way? For instance, I can ask for a cup of tea in Spanish. Or I can ask in English. Or any other language with a large enough vocabulary. But either way, I get tea. Who gives a fuck what the words sound like / their order / grammatical construction? I mean, besides poets.

  That may hold for simple things but since I'm studying German this summer (and should be studying for a test tomorrow!) I know that in German they phrase things differently than in English. That different phrasing reflects a different conception of the way things work. I mean, how many words in English come from different languages? If English already had words for those concepts then why wouldn't we use the English words? Deja vu is the classic example. I've also heard that lots of other languages use the word cool because their native language doesn't have an equivelent word that expresses the same things that we all instantly understand when we hear the word.
• Klingon Speakers Now Outnumber Navajo Speakers.
• Klingon Speakers Now Outnumber Navajo Speakers. Regardless of the parody. I believe that has been a fact for a while.
• Fes, do you know any other languages? If so, do you not find that you feel somewhat different when speaking them? Another language is not just a different wrapping for the same thing. Language is a huge part of culture.
• Language is a huge part of culture. while I feel way out of my league, I do feel it is more of the dialect(slang, idioms, et al) of the language is more of a huge part of the culture. Cultures evolve and the dialect evolves with it (or the culture evolves because of the dialect?) . If the dialect is absorbed into an existing language or creates a 'new' language, and the origional language obsoleted, the culture still remains. I also don't feel that languages will 'die' at the static linear rate the origional artical suggests.
• .
• Years ago I read (but have no citation/link for) a linguistic/anthropological study where Japanese-American women were interviewed in both Japanese and English, with the same questions each time. A significant majority of the women gave different answers, altering their answers such that while they were substantivly the same, they were markedly different in style/tone. In English, they tended to answer as "Americans" -- mentioning equality and independence, being forthright, etc. while in Japanese, they tended to repond much more passively. Point: the language you speak (and when you speak a language, you 'think' in that language) doesn't merely interpret your world, it *constructs* it, it presents limits on what is actually possible. This goes far beyond the idiom or the local patois. If a language has a tense that allows you to say (fluidly) "I will have in the past been to Spain tomorrow" that reveals a great deal of how a culture understands causality and time. Losing languages, for good or ill, means this particular ontology is entirely lost as the completeness, the ineluctability of this perspective of reality, is un-translatible. Final anecdote, from a crap and discredited ethnography, but: a Pacific Island people called the Dobu believe that yams (their principle food source) go on walkabout every night and you must do witchcraft to entice your yams back home to their proper garden and hopefully, bring some of their yammy friends from your neighbour's garden with them. Not really relevent here, I just like it -- the endless diversity of the human mind to make shit up to explain their world [like shotsy's song there]. Disclaimer: I think Levi-Strauss was pretty much right, so you can take my thoughts on the subject with a large grain of salt.
• I suppose the loss of any unique cultural item, let alone a whole language, inevitably inspires regret. But there are both pros and cons. Certain languages may indeed be better at expressing some ideas or nuances than other languages (though I think the difference is sometimes exaggerated). But for a language with few speakers, the disadvantages of isolation must often outweigh that advantage. Is it better to write a subtle poem that only the people in my own village can read, or a slightly different one in English which millions of people can appreciate?
• damn, I cannot spell at all. Sorry about that.
• Is it better to write a subtle poem that only the people in my own village can read, or a slightly different one in English which millions of people can appreciate? It's better when you can contribute with the poem in both languages and a guide of how to interpret unique concepts in the original. But most of the time those who have a dominion over a specific language rarely bother to share their unique knowledge to other languages. The bastards!
• Languages shouldn't be static artifacts for whom there will be always imprenetable concepts only understood with the use of other artifacts. Languages should evolve and get hold of new concepts and ideas borrowed from other languages as to enrich them. Therefore is not a bad thing if languages die as long as their unique contributions survive inside more flexible languages. Thake for example Latin, there are no unique concepts in latin wich can't be found in other languages since many modern languages evolved from it. Of course I appreciate that there is still people preserving it. But I'm more grateful we are no longer forced to communicate with it. (My two cents)
• I think you're right - though 'no unique concepts in Latin which can't be found in other languages' sounds like a challenge! Incidentally (and rather late in the day), I'm sure Fes knows his own relations best, but I can't help wishing I could hear some of his Uncle Bob's bumper bazillion...
• Fes, do you know any other languages? He knows Frog German! (I'm not stalking you Fes (at least not right now,) but that story was too hilarious to ever forget.)
• An interactive atlas of disappearing languages is being prepared by UNESCO - so far only Africa has been completed.