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Comment by cassieramen | Hacker News Reader

While the loss of languages is certainly hard to stomach, the biggest detriment to society is that is often signifies the loss of information. One common language used globally dramatically decreases the chances of information getting lost. It also has the benefit of increasing access to information over time. A great breakthrough can be shared globally, not insulated in one region.

I question the need to preserve a language if it inhibits the positive spread of information. Why should a country hold on to their traditional language if it holds back the potential of its citizens?

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> I question the need to preserve a language if it inhibits the positive spread of information.

It's possible to believe that a unified language is useful and still mourn the loss of other languages. I think it would be useful for society if we had a single common language. I still think it's sad that so many indigenous languages are dead and dying. I'm sad for the same reason I'm sad when some rain forest species goes extinct. It doesn't affect me in any meaningful way, but it's still a loss to us all. We can't get it back.

I think the ongoing efforts to preserve (in recordings) the languages likely to go extinct is valuable and useful.

Actually unlike a dead species we can get back dead languages. As long you record the language in enough detail before its death then any human can learn to speak it.

This is thankfully something of a possibility now, if well recorded via audio. Previous languages recorded only in writing cannot be fully reconstructed. Even with audio there is probably some loss of subtlety that would only be learned through conversation with native speakers, but it can probably be pretty close.

With enough recordings it should be possible to get close and no living language is static anyway so any error is likely to be less than natural drift.

Eh, these days it's pretty easy to translate technical ideas between languages, so I doubt major breakthroughs are confined to the language they're discovered in. I think there probably is some siloing of more subtle cultural artifacts, but linguistic context of those artifacts may be part of why they're so valuable.

This is a just a vague opinion, but I think different languages use really different idioms and concepts about how the world works. Having access to those idioms and concepts may have value in enabling lateral thinking. Someone with a slightly different conceptual toolset might approach a philosophical, political, or even technical problem in a different way and find new of useful solutions.

As a monolingual English speaker I have always wondered what these different ways of thinking actually are that speakers of other language have. I have been asking native speakers of other languages for years if there any concepts in their language that can't be expressed in English and apart from some poetic concepts I have yet to given an example - it seems there is no human thought that can be expressed in one language and not English.

Why would a traditional language hold back its speakers? People can learn more than one language. The choice isn't whether to learn the traditional language or learn English. The choice is whether to learn English exclusively, or learn the traditional language too.

Considering that there are many benefits and basically no drawbacks to learning multiple languages, the best course of action here seems obviously to be to preserve the traditional language.

Unfortunately, a lot of languages have been greatly harmed or driven completely extinct by evil people who either didn't understand the concept of being bilingual, or saw some advantage to their side in destroying the language.

> I question the need to preserve a language if it inhibits the positive spread of information.

I think that language diversity is bad for the communication of information, but language preservation is good because there are words in other languages that are difficult to articulate in English. If you still have a few people that speak their native language (Even as a second language), then those exact concepts are preserved.

> there are words in other languages that are difficult to articulate in English.

We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us.

"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and riffle their pockets for new vocabulary." - James Nicoll

The congenital deaf do think differently which is why there is opposition to cochlear implants in their community. Even if taught to sign, children with implants develop abstract thought akin to the hearing.

> If you still have a few people that speak their native language (Even as a second language), then those exact concepts are preserved.

Huh? No they're not. All languages change; concepts will be preserved exactly as long as people want them.

Consider that Latin distinguished between equus [horse] and caballus [horse of low quality, old nag]. A Roman soldier who fought mounted on a horse was an eques. Latin never died out -- it is still with us today! But the Spanish word for a knight is caballero, a person who rides... what?

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