Last speaker of ancient language of Bo dies | Hacker News Reader

Last speaker of ancient language of Bo dies

news.bbc.co.uk

50 pointsfogus38 comments

Just like with biological species, the moment when the last (or even last few members) die is just a symbolic event, most of the diversity is lost much earlier. (It is a small subset of language/folklore/traditions/etc. one person can keep in their head, just as one individual carries just a small part of the genetic diversity of the species).

Diversity in languages is more like diversity in open source licenses. The fewer the better. I like being able to exchange ideas with people.

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis would tell you differently. The very ideas that you can hope to have depend on the language you use to interpret the world. Lose a language, lose a perspective.

This is also one of the things 1984 is about.

I don't disagree with your point. However, my understanding is that the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis says the language you speak determines the range of things you can think about. But that doesn't seem to preclude the existence of a "super-language" that encompasses the range of every currently used language. Maybe we could make one? Or maybe one will evolve naturally over time?

This is an old program of the philosophers. Can you, even in principle, find the language at the back of reality? Can you eliminate all ambiguities when you refer to ordinary objects? Are we all talking about more or less the same things? How could we talk about exactly the same things?

The picture gets a little muddled when you think of the choices and distinctions each language makes. Some of them will contradict each other.

Suppose Language 1 has 150 words for snow, but only one for love, while Language 2 has 150 words for love, but only two for snow. Would the uber language preserve the distinctions for each word? Maybe you're losing something by learning all this detail.

You can do the same thing with the intensional meanings of words (connotations). I think one of the original Sapir-Whorf examples traces the meaning of a word for corn in Language A to words in Language B that mean "enemy food". Would the uber language remove connotations? It would probably lose the word from Language B.

But this gets into an even deeper point, which is that when you use a language, words aren't isolated. They frame a certain outlook on the world that hangs together. There were probably a bunch of words in Language B that talk about foreign or "enemy" things. Can you really say those words and mean them without taking on their perspective?

There are many more examples. We have this kind of thing in English too. We have "kill" and "murder". We have the Anglo-Saxon words and the Norman words.

And finally and most importantly, what perspective on the world does the super-language take? Objective? Involved but fair? Polemical? Propagandizing?

Well chances are you weren't getting any perspectives from a Bo speaker anyway. Societies spend considerably more energy teaching the current lingua franca than in preserving dying languages, which leads me to think the value of a language is largely in communication. Besides, there's a lot of variation among just english speakers.. the ease of communication sort of disguises that.

I would not look to what societies spend energy on as a definition of value. There's a wisdom of crowds, but there's a folly of crowds too.

If your perspective focuses on English, then yes, you can notice lots of e.g. sociolinguistic and geographical diversity. But what do you see when you look beyond it?

You can ask a similar question about American cultural hegemony, or the Internet. What kinds of expression do you lose or diminish by co-opting millions of viewers into the Hollywood frame of mind? Or the Facebook news feed?

I totally disagree with this point, I think it is inherently violent and I think you also contradict yourself. Let me explain:

- You are saying that you'd prefer if there were fewer languages, in order to be able to exchange ideas with people.

- On the other hand, in another comment you say that there's not much perspective that one can gain from a speaker of Bo.

I can think of only two ways in which I can interpret your point (the fewer languages the better):

1) if the speaker of Bo would learn English, she would suddenly possess insights that you will consider worthy to listen to.

2) if the speaker of Bo just wouldn't exist, there would be more resources available for speakers on English, who would be able to exchange ideas that you consider worthy to listen to.

The first is absurd, as you are also implying that language is just the tool that transmits the idea. If it weren't so, and there would be an intrinsic value in languages, you would have to advocate diversity, which you aren't.

So I imagine your point reduces to case 2) which is why I consider it violent and tasteless. Correct me if I missed some other interpretation.

"Languages in the Andamans are thought to originate from Africa. Some may be 70,000 years old."

Wow - I wouldn't mind a linguist vetting that claim. How would we even know that a language hasn't evolved enough to become an entirely different language in over ten times the length of recorded human history?

That claim is utterly bogus. There's no indication that the languages have anything in particular to do with Africa, and indeed, no evidence that the language has 'evolved' more or less than any other. There is nothing unique to Andamanese languages to support the rapidly multiplying claims that they're 'ancient' or 'neolithic'. They're just isolated.

Yes, you're right, they're not "ancient" in any meaningful way. However, studying long isolated languages is still interesting, since whatever similaraties can still be discerned between (say) Indo-European and Andamanese languages were presumably present in the common ancestor of these languages, which probably existed more than 60k years ago. Thus by studying an isolated language, we might learn something about an ancient language.

There have been some attempts to study language drift over time and geography. The proponent that springs to mind is Joseph Greenberg. His work is an attempt to work backwards to the common core of language, the starting place.

If you knew approximately how fast language changed, and you saw two related languages, you would know when they drifted apart. There are also linguistic isolates like Basque where you can't really play this trick.

I don't believe that's something you could do with any accuracy with a claimed timespan of 70ky.

This article doesn't mention any efforts that might have taken place to preserve the language, did they record her speaking it? Did she try to teach anyone else the language? etc.

I thought the same thing -- if this is such a big deal, did they try to preserve the language by having someone else learn it? I would have liked it if they at least commented on this; maybe there's a good reason they weren't able to.

Shouldn't that be an event when second to the last speaker dies? The one left has no one to talk to anyway :(

One could still teach someone new.

Very true--she could have been making it up. Who's to say you don't know the language when no one else does?

Isn't every language "made up"? Whether you sit down and invent it all at once, or it naturally evolves from an existing language, someone had to be the first to "know the language when no one else" did.

Look on the bright side, one day the last person who likes VB6 will die too.

And Pascal will go down with me:) I loved that language. Now and then I will code Pascal for fun.

Rumors of pascal's demise are greatly exaggerated. I still end up doing an awful lot of coding/maintaining in object pascal. A royal ton of old process management and accounting systems seem to run on it. There was this little patch of time starting in the mid 80s and extending all the way through the 90's where it seems like a lot of stuff was done in pascal.

Just when I think I can finally ditch that windows 2000 VM with Delphi 7 on it, another project dinosaur comes stomping out of the mist.

Then what will happen to our banking system?

Maybe they will have have migrated to something other than that by then....one can only hope

http://www.coboloncogs.org/INDEX.HTM

A solution to all our problems.

and then the last person browsing on IE6.

Am I the only one who read that as "ancient language of Bodies?"

The picture with the subtitle "Professor Abbi and Boa Sr became firm friends" is rather striking evidence of the diversity of human types present in that area of the world.

Some Google searching brings up an article with a descriptions of mitochondrial sequencing done on the Andamanese. Apparently they are of African pygmoid descent.

It's a rather good object lesson -- if you want to be a professor (the one on the right), don't let your ancestors get trapped in a genetic backwater for tens of thousands of years, missing out on all those good brain gene selection events.

EDIT: Not pygmoid after all. The pygmoid features are the product of convergent evolution. The evolutionary trend towards small stature seems to be due to resource competition from living on an island with barely enough space to support human habitation. It looks like they came through southern Asia.

Don't you think it's a little premature to conclude that the quality of her brain (and not, say, geography) accounts for the difference?

Uh, no, this subject is a tangent and we shouldn't really get into it here.

However, a couple of general statements: There are reams of genetic and psychometric data available. More than enough to develop pretty good idea when and where the most probable selection events for good brain genes occurred and how fast they spread. Your word 'premature' tells me something about your acquaintance with that data.

Also, there is one very simple rule: totally genetically isolated communities only have access to their own mutations. Their population is small, so the number of mutations is also small. Non-isolated communities get swept by every positive selection event that comes along.

I agree that this is a tangent - my point was that it's not a relevant tangent because (without disagreeing on any of your genetics) this woman's odds of becoming a professor after being born in a tiny soon-to-be-extinct tribe on a tiny island in the Bay of Bengal were negligible regardless of her intelligence or genes.

It's tangent, but I'm interested. Are you alluding to particular events in recent history or kinds of events?

Any pointers to reading on this?

A recent book on this and various other topics related to recent human evolution is "The 10,000 Year Explosion" by Cochran and Harpending.

He was too lonely.

It was a woman.

She, not it.

Expletive 'it'. As in, 'It was a woman who died.'

Does that mean that she was the face of Bo?

I'll get my coat.

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