Languages: Why we must save dying tongues (2014) | Hacker News Reader

Languages: Why we must save dying tongues (2014)

bbc.com

99 pointssndean250 comments

It's not a well-liked view, but I'm very glad that humanity is on the path to speaking only a few languages (or perhaps just one).

If you disagree, consider this thought experiment: Imagine if the entire world spoke a single language. Would we ever want to invent new languages, making mutual communication harder? It would be silly.

I do feel for the speakers of these dying tongues, but in the long run, this is a good thing. Do you feel stunted or unsatisfied because your ancestors didn't pass their native tongues down to you? I don't. And most people don't realize how great a cost we pay for having so many languages. Ideally, linguists and historians would document these languages and their cultures, then let them quietly fade. Teaching them to new generations is not only a futile effort, it's less beneficial on net.

We probably would invent new languages, or at least new dialects, to signal group membership. If somebody has made the effort to learn the language then they're probably serious about being part of the group. As a practical example, consider the revival of the Hebrew language, which happened mostly as an expression of Jewish identity. Strengthening group identity is the main motivation for preserving rare languages.

That's an interesting take on it. I wonder if there's much history of groups starting out with common languages, then groups separating and the languages evolving separately, either intentionally to demonstrate group membership, or just due to lack of communication between groups, and continuing to differentiate until they're effectively different languages.

I only speak English, but I've heard several different accents on it so strong that they're hard to understand. I wonder if the speakers of these accents find it impossible to understand other strong accents.

Well there you have it. The vocabulary teens use varies from city to city. The vocabularies of (France) French and Canadian French are different to an extent, as are those of (England) English and American English. It seems to me completely obvious that "one language to rule them all" is an absurd idea bound to fail. It will morph and splinter by itself.

much history? This is exactly the way new languages evolve.

My mother-in-law is from an island off the coast of Honduras. She's a native English speaker, but has a strong accent, and the dialect of English that they speak has grammatical differences, along with some different vocabulary. I suspect that some comes from Spanish and some from Garifuna.

Without modern communications, their dialect of English would've continued diverging, and eventually be considered different enough to be a new language, rather than just a dialect.

> I wonder if there's much history of groups starting out with common languages, then groups separating and the languages evolving separately, either intentionally to demonstrate group membership, or just due to lack of communication between groups, and continuing to differentiate until they're effectively different languages.

Thats basically what sociolinguists investigate. Here's an example of a study that kind of does that: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233713880_A_Quantit...

The maintenance of Yiddish is an extreme example. It's explicitly used to prevent ultra-orthodox Jews from "straying off the path" and joining the larger society.[1] In Israel, the ultra-orthodox speak Yiddish, not Hebrew, and often don't even know Hebrew.

This is the use of a dying tongue as a means of social control.

[1] http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/off-the-path-of-orth...

I think it's a bit different - these communities (which BTW are a minority even among orthodox religious Jews) choose to speak Yiddish and not Hebrew to express their detachment and disconnection with modern Jewry and specifically Israel. Secondary consideration is the status of Hebrew as the holy language, not to be used in mundane and profane matters. This was long the case in the Jewish diaspora, but with the start of the Haskalah project and the idea of Israel as the Jewish state, this has changed. These communities have not accepted these changes and thus try to preserve their way of life as it was beforehand. The use of Yiddish here is more of a consequence than the reason.

Are you willing to stop speaking, reading, thinking, writing in English and use Mandarin?

And what about the fact that some concepts and words are enunciated more succintly or clearly in different languages?

I mean, you have the perfect example in front of you: why are there so many programming languages? Could it be that some language constructs are more difficult in one language vs the other? Why invent new programming languages when you've got C?

Re: "And what about the fact that some concepts and words are enunciated more succintly or clearly in different languages?" We just borrow the relevant words :)

Sometimes it is not just individual words, but grammatical structures which make things more succint. Latin has lots of such like your gerundives or your supines where you can express with a simple word ending what would take a bunch of words in English

I am willing to give up my language in favour of a world language - in fact, I have already done that. I think in English. I write all my poetry, stories and dreams in English, I only communicate in that language unless it's with family or coworkers. I pretty much gave up on my native language. I feel like English is superior in many ways because it has words that my language does not, which forces me to describe awkwardly what I mean instead of using a single word. In German, happiness and luck are merged into one single word (da fuq?). German has no succinct word for contrarian (noun). Or another point for English:

Our language has wisely sensed the two sides of being alone. It has created the word loneliness to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word solitude to express the glory of being alone. - Paul Tillich

Erm, Tillich could have chosen a better example: in French you also have isolement and solitude.

I think Tillich wanted to make a point about solitude and loneliness, not the superiority of English. I find his point interesting in both contexts.

English has these words that your language does not, because it borrowed heavily from several other languages in the past. Having only one language would kill off that source for diversity.

Dutch also has one word for happiness and luck ("geluk"), although in Flanders you can use "chance" to express "luck" specifically (borrowed from French).

In some ways, English allows for more specificity compared to German, but the reverse is also true.

German, however, has schadenfreude, gestalt, eigenvalue, angst, weltschmerz and poltergeist ;)

English had all of these, exactly.

Every child knows poltergeist, from Harry Potter. Every teenager knows angst.

The others are less universal, but I'd expect a university graduate to know them.

Where exactly do you think those words come from?

That's kind of the point - English imported them from German (or, rather, just uses German words). English does that all the time. Same with French - rendezvous, cachet (don't confuse with cache :), passé, etc. So French speakers shouldn't feel bad for taking words from English - that happens all the time, just this time English is more popular so other languages take from it. Before that it was German and French, and in 100 years maybe it will be Mandarin, who knows.

The most important feature of German that I strongly miss in English (and probably other languages, too) is the easiness that one can make new words (in particular nouns) by juxtaposition (and indeed, importantly, you can often rely on the fact that more complicated words are constructed this way). I really wish a lot more English words were built by juxtaposition from more simple concepts instead of being own words that one has to learn without (easily) being able to understand the "atoms" that the word is built of.

Some of smsm42's example do have this property:

"Eigenwert" (eigenvalue): eigen (of (it)self), Wert (value)

"Weltschmerz": Welt (world), Schmerz (pain)

"Poltergeist": poltern (to rumble), Geist (ghost)

Mandarin Chinese does much the same as German.

English prefers to borrow words from other languages. Curiously, it has borrowed hardly any words from Mandarin Chinese.

> English prefers to borrow words from other languages. Curiously, it has borrowed hardly any words from Mandarin Chinese.

Besides that there had been much less contact between English speaking countries and China than to, say, German, French or Spanish speaking countries (at least until the Chinese economy began to boom) there is another reason that I can imagine. Since the Chinese dialects/languages are tonal languages their sound is much more foreign to the ear of people who didn't grew up with a tonal languages. Indeed people who learnt to speak one of the Chinese dialects told me one of the first exercises is learning to even consciously perceive the different tones.

Yes, probably down to historical lack of contact. I don't think that tones are part of the reason. There has been somewhat more borrowing from Cantonese into English, e.g. ketchup, dimsum, kumquat, and cheongsam, and substantial borrowing from Chinese into Japanese and Korean. The tones are simply dropped.

Having more specific or less specific words is not necessarily a weakness or strength of a language - sometimes being able to express both happiness and luck in a single word might be useful, and I imagine it is easy to specify either one or the other concept with a quick paraphrase if necessary.

I have to disagree here. Maybe 'Glück' has more than one meaning (happiness and luck) but you also have particular words for happiness like 'Fröhlichkeit'. Of course in a day to day context you would not use all those different words but still I think German can be used as a language to describe things very precise.

As a native speaker of German I feel often more comfortable to advertise products in English but that is probably because I'm so used to English advertisements and I'm not so exposed to that particular vocabulary in German (or maybe German is too precise to really shine in advertisements). I don't think I could translate an Apple keynote into German and still sounding so 'magical'.

Maybe there are some words you can't translate literally or they don't sound as nice (contrarian: Querdenker, Nonkonformist) still you would miss other awesome things like the German way to combine nouns to infinite length.

The reason we have lots of programming languages is because:

1. They're not that different. Once you've learned a few, picking up new ones is pretty easy.

2. They're much easier to learn than human languages.

To answer your first question: I probably wouldn't stop using english myself, but I don't think I'd teach it to my children.

Have you read the article? The condition has to be stronger than simply not teaching it to your children. You have to absolutely and completely remove the worldview, cultural heritage, geographic knowledge etc that comes with it.

Thus to get my (and the article's) point, you need not just stop teaching it to children, you have to completely erase the underlying knowledge the language holds and start over in a new language. This is the point: you lose much more than what appears on first glance.

And concerning programming languages, I don't see how picking up brainfuck for example is easy, but someone still put the effort into creating it. Imagine a universe in which you'd have to solve every single programming problem in C. You could dream up all sorts of programming language concepts, but you could never use any other language than C. I bet you'd find that a bit boring and tedious...

Make no mistake, I'm not advocating for languages to keep their purity. I think it's a good thing they mix and borrow concepts and words. But I do find the idea of having one world language an utter absurdity.

> Have you read the article?

'Please don't insinuate that someone hasn't read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."'

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Noted. However I think the tone I used is different than what is given as an example. I was really asking the question, since depending on the answer, our disagreement would be on a different level.

True, but it's a burden on mods (read: dang) to have to make that distinction, are far easier, in this case, to self moderate. No problems in any case :-)

Never mind differences: are there any similarities between, for example, C and Prolog?

3. You can teach millions of computers to obey a new language just by copying its implementation onto them. You can make something that reaches countless users even if you're the only person working in your language.

The process you describe is effectively translation. This works with natural languages as well.

The process I describe of installing a translation method in seconds, bringing about instant understanding, doesn't work with natural languages.

Just because it takes more time does not mean the process is fundamentally different.

Right, it's fundamentally different for other reasons. For one thing, no two "installations" of a natural language are identical. The natural language learning process isn't like loading a program into a machine, but a "reverse engineering": forming a refined set of hypotheses about what the rules are, from examples. Thus after years of learning, still no two competent, even native speakers will agree about all the fine points of what they learned.

By contrast, we can easily install the same version of a programming language interpreter/compiler and run-time onto countless machines and get the same behavior. The machines do not have to guess what the language is by forming hypotheses and testing them against more competent "speakers", to obtain either approval or correction. They just receive a ready-made software image.

In essence, a million installations of the same programming language are just manifestations of one image, whereas a million speakers of a language are individuals (not just as people, but as speakers of that language).

If people could receive a language as an image dumped into the brain, it would be a game-changer. It would still be a game changer even if it took five years to complete, rather than an hour. It would make fledgling languages more viable.

Because languages are hard to learn and even harder to learn very well, people tend not to be so interested in fledgling languages that can't be used outside of a small locale with a small number of speakers. Not as a second language, that's for sure.

You're right of course, and this is precisely why preserving languages is important. They are loaded with knowledge, and passing around this knowledge is time consuming, hard, or sometimes unfeasible if not enough speakers still live :)

Languages contain pseudo-knowledge consisting of a set of conventions that people made up. They have no external value.

I'm not comfortable with the idea that something which pops into my head today represents a burden for future generations to preserve, who will have perfectly good heads of their own into which similar stuff can pop just as well.

Linguists require specimens of languages to study so that we can understand language. But we have more than enough non-dying languages to keep linguists busy.

They're not that different. Once you've learned a few, picking up new ones is pretty easy.

Only if you stay in the same family. Going from C to C++, Java, or C# is pretty easy. Try going from C to Haskell or Clojure or Erlang.

You can play the same game with natural languages. It's easy to go between French, Italian, and Spanish. Try going from Icelandic to Mandarin.

> Why invent new programming languages when you've got C?

The practicalities of PLs aren't at all like spoken natural languages. For one thing, all computers can run any PL with little effort.

Secondly:

> Are you willing to stop speaking, reading, thinking, writing in English and use Mandarin?

What the OP thinks is irrelevant, it's whether this would be desirable or not. It would also not be a "do this now" thing and more of "in years to come, humanity will do this".

I think mankind will one day set foot on mars, and this effort will be a good thing - this does not mean I should be willing to be put on a rocket today.

    For one thing, all computers can run any PL with little effort.

A counter example to this is that any children can be taught any language. The fact that an adult can't learn new languages as easily speaks more to the architecture of the computer (brain) than to its capacity to run various languages.

I suppose - although a language would probably die out if children couldn't learn it - or the unlearnable parts in any case.

The clause "with little effort" is not counteracted though - for a computer this represents a short download-and-install of a compiler/interpreter.

Even writing a compiler may take the same amount of time it takes to learn a language from scratch.

> The practicalities of PLs aren't at all like spoken natural languages. For one thing, all computers can run any PL with little effort.

But not with equal effort. Machines have been developed to run specific languages (Burroughs mainframes - Algol 60; Lisp Machines - Lisp), and languages have been developed to run on specific machines (C - PDP-11).

Indeed. And why have multiple OSes - imagine the utilitarian value of having every computer in the world run Windows.

The claim that different computer languages are easier to learn than different human languages betrays an incredible lack of perspective - 99% of humankind cannot manage even a single programming language while the majority worldwide are at least bilingual.

> Are you willing to stop speaking, reading, thinking, writing in English and use Mandarin?

If only 321 people are left in the world speaking English, and billions speak Mandarin, absolutely!

It means that the world has basically said "to hell with English", and you're best off if you do too.

From an utilitarian viewpoint, sharing a single, global language is probably useful. but I feel that such a world would likely also suffer from less variety in culture and viewpoints.

Languages tend to accommodate the way of thinking prevalent in the cultures that speak it, and vice versa the language also shapes the speakers. To learn another language as a non-native speaker, especially one that is sufficiently different from your own, you must also learn a different way of looking at the world; something that I think is a useful experience for anyone.

Before reading the article, had you ever considered that there might exist a word describing exactly why cat videos are popular?

In my opinion, no-one should be satisfied with speaking only one language, so long as they have the means to learn another.

This post is a good one, and that utilitarian idea that unilingualism is good because you can hire people is a claim borne of the kind of short-sighted technocracy that bedevils tech and tech culture. In the appendices of 1984, Orwell was speaking of conscious linguistic malformation to make it difficult to communicate concepts that the manipulators of Newspeak (née English) wished to stamp out. It's not better when you do it because somebody sticks HBO on your television.

People here venerate Paul Graham's Blub Paradox article--I wonder how many stopped to think about the possibility that we're speaking Blub, and the attempt of a unilingual world is incomprehensibly more problematic than that of computer programming languages. From the root comment of this chain:

> Do you feel stunted or unsatisfied because your ancestors didn't pass their native tongues down to you? I don't.

How would you fucking know?

Technocracy in action: we can't think of a black swan, so black swans can't exist.

A single language would never work anyway. It would inevitably split into dialects and regional/generational/racial slang, which would soon become incomprehensible to outsiders.

English patois in some parts of the world makes no sense to British/American speakers, even though it reads and sounds more or less like standard English.

You don't even have to travel to find the split happening. Just try listening to teenagers.

Language isn't just a utility. One of its functions is to define social register and tribal identity, and humans are so attached to both they can't accept homogenisation.

Like Latin after the fall of the Roman Empire. Sumerian is such an interesting language too. I love how Neal Stephenson incorporated it into Snow Crash really got me thinking about languages.

This was readily apparent in The Wire. As a native English speaker from across the sea I could not understand the Baltimore street dialect.

I could, I just needed to turn on subtitles :)

Well another way to look at it. Japanese engineers get paid very poorly. If they spoke English they could easily leave the toxic Japanese work environment but they don't speak English or any other language so effectively they are prisoners of the only country that speaks their default language

I find it hard to believe Japanese engineers don't leave Japan because of the language. Perhaps most of them simply don't want to leave their country?

That is a big assumption. They would still need to get a work visa and have the desire to leave. There is a lot of culture at play as well, which would still be there if everyone in Japan was a native English speaker. English is certainly a valuable skill for traveling and moving abroad, but I hardly see Japanese people as trapped in their own country. According to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan there are 1.3 million Japanese citizens living abroad.

Unfortunately I could only find statistics information in Japanese.

http://www.mofa.go.jp/mofaj/toko/page22_000043.html

http://www.mofa.go.jp/mofaj/files/000162700.pdf (page 11)

> had you ever considered that there might exist a word describing exactly why cat videos are popular?

"cute"?

> Before reading the article, had you ever considered that there might exist a word describing exactly why cat videos are popular?

I feel like that word is pretty close to "squee".

yes, of course we would invent new languages. We do this continually. In any big language there are many different dialects. This is a way to signal group identity. Over time they become new languages. Latin becomes French, Spanish, Romanian, etc. If you disagree why do you not speak your English with a (choose those that don't apply:) English / southern / Indian / Scottish / Irish / South African / Jamaican / New England / etc accent.

As an aside - I'm confused why you care what language I choose to speak or teach my children? How does it hurt you for me to be multilingual? If you desire to see the world only through the prism of a single language, well, fair enough. Likewise you can feel free to eat the same food for every meal, listen to the same music endlessly, re-read the same authors, program in only one language, etc. Lots of us enjoy experiencing more of the great diversity of humanity.

This is still somewhat historical. Latin becoming French, Spanish, Romanian, and all accents are all a product of geography. France, Spain, Romania, etc. It's not group entity, it's location identity. But the generations aren't separated by geography anymore.

Well there may well be intellectual advantages for multilingualism, different unilingualism typically just leads to conflict.

> all accents are all a product of geography

not necessarily, there is often a clear split between social classes of groups of people (i.e. consider the association of "cockney" with working class, or the discussion around "ebonics" for african-american-english)

And there are cases where specific communities evolve their own sub-languages (e.g. cants and argots).

There is surely less separation now then there once was, but it never was only geography, it's just that geography is the strongest separator.

Does it mean, then, that as the people who are anti-immigration such as Donald Trump get elected and geographic mobility (potentially) decreases, we can work our way backwards and say that these languages are less likely to die? In other words, does the trend towards anti-globalization lead to the unexpected side effect that some languages may actually take longer to die?

Yes, but it would hardly be unexpected, and though this gets into iffy and boring questions around definitions, I don't think it's a side-effect either.

Yes.

And it might mean some people get the chance to improve their own countries too, instead of being forced to immigrate (by globalization pressures) and try their luck on another.

It was always about communication. The single deadliest blow that was ever stricken to the existing rich dialect continuums was mass media (newspapers, and later broadcasting). Where before you had populations relatively isolated across a wide geographic area, only conferring with their immediate neighbors, now you had something that would reach all the way to the political border (and beyond). The second blow was the public school system, that usually standardized on a single literary standard country-wide.

In the age where importance of geography is diminished, and with so many channels of communication for both text and voice, a trend towards a single language seems inevitable - there are just too many things that would benefit from it, from science to commerce, and to some extent even art (you trade diversity for audience).

Actually, the impact that standardized language education has had on dialect variation isn't quite clear. It appears to have had some impact, but not as much as laypeople usually think. In fact, standard written American-English has undergone quite a few changes over the last 100 years and things that were non-standard have become standard. Likewise with mass media. There is no evidence that mass media has had any effect on the rate of linguistic change and variation in America. The biggest impact has probably been the increase in ease and speed of modern transportation. Regardless, there is likely more dialect variation in America today than there was 1-200 years ago, though geographic variation may be slightly diminishing (at least intraregionally) and socioeconomic variation may be more important.

The biggest factor in dialect development is time, which is why you see a large variety of dialects in England as compared to the USA. England is much smaller, but has had much longer for dialects to develop.

Divergement of languages, dialects and accent are affected by different groupings, one of which is geographical grouping. Boiling it down to geography alone is a blind oversimplification, even in the historical context.

>But the generations aren't separated by geography anymore.

They are. There's immigration, but that's just a tiny fraction of what goes on. We don't move randomly around the world. Even the immigrants come to a place to settle down and start a family and be integrated eventually.

And different countries are also separated by different outlooks on the world, ideas, ways to each. Which is a good thing (and orthogonal to war etc which historically its more about interests -- war can be just as brutal between brothers and similarly thinking people, as civil wars have told us).

It's an interesting thought that under the Romans (vulgar) Latin displaced a whole variety of Celtic and Germanic languages in France, Spain, and Belgium. Like, within a couple hundred years of the Roman conquest of Gaul the Gaulish language, and its culture, were extinct.

Anglo-American-Capitalist dominance is performing similar functions today.

Like, if we all spoke English?

glesga https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xan2xU-ZFic

Irish "What's filim?" https://youtu.be/UJ1Akr-UBis?t=57s

Geordie https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZY4TT3VtR8o

120 miles from Glasgow to Newcastle. 250 miles from Glasgow to Westport, Ireland.

The British class system plus geography (I grew up in the Midlands and south) means it takes me a few minutes to understand anything at all of the Scottish clip, and a few seconds for the Geordie one. The Irish is no problem, but real (not mainstream tv) Irish would be.

But, in my experience, people speaking these dialects could communicate with someone from elsewhere easily. They're also less different than they would have been decades ago.

Do you feel the same about the rest of your culture too?

On the other hand, maybe having multiple cultures might be a good idea if it provides firewalls against the spread of bad ideas, and allows competition between groups pf people with different cultural outlooks.

If we all started to speak the same language, it would make most of the world's novels, short stories, poetry, song lyrics, and movie dialogue inaccessible, and different ways of looking at the world would be lost. And which language should be chosen? English, Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, Esperanto, or something else?

Ask bilingual speakers if they'd prefer just to speak one language and to forget the other one. Knowing two languages gives you access to two cultures, even if one is dying or dead.

For myself it's more like: I'd like to speak more languages, not have the world reduced to speak the two I already know!

But this is a purely opinion based discussion lacking any real data so far.

I believe that this is one of the best things that TV has given us - the homogenization, and adoption of the English language. It eases communication and trade across cultures.

It also makes it cheaper to recruit people from all around the world with a given skill. Right now, there's a shortage in skilled welders. There's a massive number of skilled welders in Asia that make bit less money than the welders here do. Why can't we bring them across -- cost of certification? No. It's the language. Language enables globalization.

I'm sure there are still advantages to being bilingual that exist as well, but inventing, or adopting obscure languages to become one's mother tongue only seems counterproductive to me in the long run.

Agree there are huge advantages to us all agreeing on standards (English as language of business, metric system, etc). But from that doesn't follow that we all need to be monolingual.

The homogenization and stabilization of language started with the printing press.

Radio, and then TV, started homogenization of pronunciation.

I love English language, but I don't like it, and I find it unfortunate that it is the English language that has acquired the status of the most important international language today. Even the "standard" pronunciation turns out to be extremely hard to do correctly for non-native speakers, for many even after years of speaking it. The distinction between some phonemes is way too subtle for them to get right; some words are pronounced the same while spelled differently; some are the other way around. There is too much reliance on the context in determining the exact meaning of a word... The list can go on. The language was born as one among several used by the tribes living on an island, which may explain why it is so different from the languages of continental Europe.

It will likely get simplified as it keeps evolving as the "common tongue". Both spelling, and shedding phonemes that are just too close to distinguish without a lot of practice, or that are inconvenient for non-native speakers (to remind, most English speakers today are non-native).

There is too much reliance on the context in determining the exact meaning of a word

That is every language in the world

Babies are born with the ability to distinguish between any two frequencies that are important for a phonetic distinction. Within the first year, they begin to lose that ability and only retain frequency distinctions necessary for whatever language they're exposed to. So, when an adult can't tell the difference between two phonemes or has difficulty articulating it, it's because they weren't exposed to it early enough. So, the difficulty you describe would apply to any lingua franca. In the bullshit, completely impossible scenario where everyone in the world speaks one language, this wouldn't be a problem because there would only be one set of phonemes.

We actually do want to invent new languages now - consider Game of Thrones, Star Trek, LOTR etc. In a monolingual world, would any of these have real adherents? Maybe. Even within English, various groups have invented sublanguages - Cockney rhyming slang or Polari https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polari

The idea of "foreignness" implicitly carries with it the notion of approaching ideas and the universe in which we live in a way that isn't the same as ours. So we invent new languages to represent that.

Almost as if that's the point, yeah?

Same as the idea of personal or group identity.

People like to be different -- either themselves to others, or their groups to other groups (because they also like to belong. Belonging and being different at the same times translates to groups and subgroups).

And they show that in many ways, language is but one. From clothing to consumption, tons of other things are used to that effect.

>If you disagree, consider this thought experiment: Imagine if the entire world spoke a single language. Would we ever want to invent new languages, making mutual communication harder? It would be silly.

We do something similar to that already. Kids make up their own lingo when playing, subgroups invent new slangs within a single language, areas make their own dialect, we invent new cultural languages (e.g. music genres) that differentiate us from others, we invent new computer languages despite having existing ones, etc. Heck, even English got developed while other languages already existed.

But that's a question for an alternative reality. It doesn't answer whether it would be better to remove historical languages, and adopt a single (existing or new) one. What I mean is that what would be the best approach in a world that spoke a single language does not really enlighten us about a world that already has many. The world that "spoke a single language" wouldn't have existing living cultures in different languages like us to remove, and thus they'd have nothing to fear of losing.

Besides, languages encode ways of thinking and the culture/history etc of its generations speakers, something that will be lost in a monoculture. Single language = single universal culture = same shit all over the world, no diversity.

And if you think you're still getting diversity within a single country (e.g. because you have stuff ranging from Metallica to the Residents and from Hank Williams and Beyonce to Philip Glass and John Zorn) then you really don't know what actual cultural diversity is.

>you really don't know what actual cultural diversity is //

So a young nomadic Mongolian girl and I (UK, middle-age, male, working in craft/retail) don't represent different cultures because we can both speak English?

Go on, explain, clearly I don't understand.

Didn't you already explain that there were vastly different subcultures within the population of English language speakers? Don't you think there's more to culture than mutual unintelligibility?

Again, the article has a specific definition of what it means to speak "one language" - it means to renounce all knowledge trapped inside the dead language, cultural and all. Therefore yes, if you both only spoke English (in the absolute case at issue) you woudn't have different cultures, by definition.

Language and culture are not linearly independent.

> So a young nomadic Mongolian girl and I (UK, middle-age, male, working in craft/retail) don't represent different cultures because we can both speak English?

I think the person you responded to went too far in their argument. I would've said that speakers of the same language can have very different culture, but that (in your example) the English-speaking Mongolian girl wouldn't be part of the same culture that she would if she were a Mongolian-speaking Mongolian girl.

Language doesn't dictate patterns of thought, but it certainly shapes them. A concept that might be easy to formulate in Mongolian may be difficult to formulate in English, and the reverse applies. People naturally use the patterns that the language encourages. With different patterns, different group behaviors tend to emerge, because they're easy to think about.

Simultaneously, the culture shapes the language to fit its needs. Given time and isolation, it will become more and more distinctly different.

>Language doesn't dictate patterns of thought, but it certainly shapes them.

What you're talking about is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and it is not certain at all. It's highly contested. Language may have an effect on some cognitive processes (again, contested) but definitely not all.

However, language does reflect the cumulative experience of a culture, whether modern speakers are aware of that experience or not. Here's a good illustration: http://youtu.be/kIzFz9T5rhI

So language can reflect a culture, but it probably doesn't dictate it. In the case of the Mongolian girl, she's unlikely to be a nomad these days, and what separates an English speaking Mongolian from a non-English speaking one is usually wealth. So, someone from a wealthy country is probably more culturally similar to her than they might expect.

> What you're talking about is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and it is not certain at all.

Yes, I am. The weak variation of the hypothesis. Coming from a computing background, it's difficult to convince myself that it's the case that the structure of a language (whether artificial or natural) doesn't encourage or discourage specific ways to represent meaning.

>So a young nomadic Mongolian girl and I (UK, middle-age, male, working in craft/retail) don't represent different cultures because we can both speak English

If the Mongolian girl lives in Englang and speaks English as a first language (e.g. second generation immigrant), then obviously she is far less different culturally to you than a Mongolian girl that just arrived from Ulan Bator.

Cultures have degrees. Losing the language of your culture means you lose a lot of connection to it (can't anymore follow its arts and letters for one, or even casual conversations between people from that culture).

And after a few generations in a different country you're mostly a token X (where X your original culture), except if you (and your family) went to great pains to maintain the connection (the default is losing it).

>Didn't you already explain that there were vastly different subcultures within the population of English language speakers?

Vastly different cultures in arts/consumerism/urban lifestyle/etc, but not vastly different national cultures.

A 3rd-gen British Mongolian can be a spiky haired punk, something totally different from a 3rd-gen British Italian dubstep fan, but they're both hardly major representatives of Mongolian and Italian cultures.

>Don't you think there's more to culture than mutual unintelligibility?

Given that all culture is made into some language or another, and more especially in some national cultural context or another, then, yes, there is something more, but not much.

> Single language = single universal culture = same shit all over the world, no diversity.

Like Morocco, Saudi, Turkey, and Indonesia all have the same culture, because Standard Arabic is common due to Islam?

Or England, Kenya, and India are so culturally identical because English is a standard language across them?

Or how it's difficult to tell a Spaniard apart from a Mexican, because they both speak Spanish and hence are culturally identical?

Turkey and Indonesia do not use Arabic for communication. There's an Arabic continuum, and Saudi Arabic is rather different from Moroccan Arabic. There are subtle cultural differences preserved in the diversity of language.

England, Kenya, and India all speak English, but English is merely a common language, and a lot of cultural differences come from the linguistic diversity in each of those countries.

Culture is a result of multiple factors, one of which is language. Monolingualism is certainly one large step towards a homogenous culture.

It takes a few weeks of practice to be able to intelligbly understand someone from India, Kenya, England, the US, or Australia, if you're from one of the others. Cadences and idioms are all off.

This is dramatically overstated. It immediately predicts that British television would have no audience in the US and Australia.

Does it? I think it just means that there's a fair number of things to learn before the dialog makes complete sense. Context fills in many of the gaps, I know that I still miss some cultural references, rhyming slang, and such, even after watching a fair number of British shows.

According to your interpretation, it would be just as fair to say "it takes a few weeks of practice to be able to understand someone from the US, if you're from the US". I feel justified in not interpreting it that way.

If you're an American to whom general-audience American television doesn't make complete sense, and who misses many of the cultural references, then I'm quite relieved that I have a different interpretation.

I've seen a fair amount of British TV, and I'm fairly comfortable with the idioms and vocabulary differences. Less so than American TV, but I think that's fair, since I'm not immersed in the culture.

I've seen much less Australian TV, but a lot of the slang was utterly unfamiliar to me, in what I have seen. I'm sure that if I watched more, it would become more familiar.

I don't understand what is so controversial about the idea that other places use the language slightly differently, and it can take some time to become accustomed to the differences.

> I don't understand what is so controversial about the idea that other places use the language slightly differently, and it can take some time to become accustomed to the differences.

Nothing. What's controversial is equating "other places use the language slightly differently, and it can take some time to become accustomed to the differences" with "it takes a few weeks of practice to intelligibly [sic] understand someone from another place".

The first of those, yours, is a very weak claim. The second is a very strong one.

I said "this is dramatically overstated" and you're trying to contradict me by saying that a much weaker version of the claim is true. Yes, it is, that's what "overstated" means.

What I'm saying is that you took the strongest possible interpretation and knocked it down as a strawman. If there are several possible interpretations of someone's argument, and one of them is obviously flawed, then it's not very generous (or constructive, IMO) to attack the flawed interpretation.

You speak of the principle of charity [0]. Something that has long vanished on many internet forums, where people are quick to take the most absurd and least likely interpretation of a statement and argue against it. Especially when being pedantic about certain word phrasing or word choices (to which the OP would often respond with "You know what I meant.")

My best friend is Australian, the idioms are often nonsensical or require a bit of thinking due to being a variant of an idiom I'm familiar with. e.g "a roo loose in the top paddock"

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity

English is not my native language, and I can barely tell the difference between Indian, Kenyan, British and American English. Cadence and idioms are all equally off. Certainly it's not "weeks of practice".

I think that the qualifier "if you're from one of the others" applies to your case.

I think this is truer than most people realise.

We often modify our speech for the audience - put someone in a party situation where they are the odd one out and it will be harder for them to follow along.

> Ideally, linguists and historians would document these languages and their cultures, then let them quietly fade. Teaching them to new generations is not only a futile effort, it's less beneficial on net.

I agree to this, and only this, from your comment. There's a lot of romanticism in reviving dead or dying languages that recalls a likeness to the Human Zoo.

But on the other hand, languages and dialects are very tied to the political spheres, which are always on the change, and the languages change with them. Dialects form themselves everywhere: even each household has it's own tiny dialect where some phrases make sense only therewithin. And for language in the modern sense is basically a partially constructed dialect based on a dialect spoken by the ruling class of a dialect continuum, and as dialects and politics are ever-changing animals, languages will always change. While some dialects become closer to a given language, others diverge, or even emerge.

And for lingua francas, they change too. It is possible that English will let it's status go to some other language in the coming centuries, just like Latin, French, Aramhaic, etc. did in the past.

> And most people don't realize how great a cost we pay for having so many languages.

Well, we can't ask people to let go of their identities because we'd rather not do internationalisation.

Why can't we ask people to give up their identity? Let's consider the possibility that arbitrary linguistic (and other tribal) divisions are harmful. Consider the possibility that giving the political sphere more levers to pull to manipulate us is not a good thing.

In much the same way, consider the step backwards we've taken in messaging. We had a lingua franca - XMPP. We gave it up so that various powerful actors (google, facebook) could lock us into their unintelligible dialect.

Was this a good thing?

Why can't we ask people to give up their identity?

You're not willing to give up your identity. It's a lot of work, among other things.

> Why can't we ask people to give up their identity?

Because that's how they _be_. Even if we created a monotonous people without any identities, different persons with different abilities and interests will diverge from others and cluster with similar individuals, forming various intersecting groups, and lead to a complex system of group and personal identities. (edit, forgot: Such groups bring together diverging dialects, first diverging metaphors, then words, phrases, etc., so on maybe until mutual intelligibility is lost.)

Your XMPP analogy does not hold because XMPP was popular among some tech geeks whereas even my granny who does not understand the concept of video and blushes and hides when changing her clothes when the TV is on gets to use WhatsApp, with help from my mom who thinks her WhatsApp is locked because of the recent encryption thing they introduced and the yellow little message the app displays related thereto.

If for no other reason, I would be psyched to see a single language win out, especially if it were an alphabetic language that could easily be encoded in 8 bits. Fuck Unicode.

LOL. Only on HN would such a reason for one world language be made.

It wouldn't solve a problem of transcribing the old texts, or when using mathematical notation or other symbols inline. They still need unicode.

This sounds like the view of someone who has never been exposed to more than one language. If one were to try applying that idea to programming languages, they would get laughed off HackerNews. They'd be told to just "pick the right tool for the job." Perhaps you meant that we should only have a few or one dialects of each [major] language, which is more reasonable.

No one language, or any system of communicating intent, is perfect.

There are figuratively countless nuances in each language that you just can't express in another. Which is why even English doesn't have just English words. I almost feel irritated just having to point out things which should be obvious..

Language is also art; even through my limited exposure to Japanese, for example, I've noticed many expressions that just wouldn't work in English, and definitely wouldn't convey the same intent or feelings, or paint the same picture so to speak, no matter how you imported them.

I have yet to come across any concept in any human language that can’t be expressed in English.

Sure in some languages some concept can be expressed more subtly or poetically, but the concept can be expressed provided the assumed knowledge is present. It is the lack of assumed cultural knowledge that prevents these Japanese expressions from making sense in English, not that they can’t be expressed in English in principle.

Sure, you can express pretty much any concept from a foreign language in English, and vice-versa if the language is thorough enough. What you lose is the power and conciseness that comes from having a single word expressing a concept that would take 10 or 18 words to be correctly expressd in English. I have memorized a few interesting ones in some languages: 'Litost' (czech), 'Prozvonit' (czech also),'Tartle'(scottish), 'Mamihlapinatapei' (an idiom from Tierra del Fuego), 'Ya’aburnee' (arabic), and my own language's 'saudade', which to some is just translated as 'longing for something you have lost', but is, for native speakers, of course, something else.

English is very interesting in that if a word makes sense to use (rather than a phrase) then English will borrow that word without hesitation.

Actually because the language of science and technology is English there are lots of concepts that can’t be expressed in any other language. Sure any emotion a human can feel can be expressed in any language, but most higher level scientific concepts can’t be expressed in any language other than English. Out of the total number of human concepts that have ever been communicated, the majority are only available to English speakers.

    most higher level scientific concepts can’t be expressed
    in any language other than English. Out of the total
    number of human concepts that have ever been communicated,
    the majority are only available to English speakers.

Please provide examples to support your baseless claim.

Pick any scientific paper at random. No other language other than English has the terms and concepts required to write the paper - you can’t translate most scientific papers into another language since the complete set of terms and concepts don’t exist in any other languages.

It is not that you can’t write scientific papers in other languages (many are written in other languages), just that we have settled on English as the language of science. The vast majority of new scientific papers are written in English and hence every new concept within them can’t be expressed in any other language since there are no corresponding vocabulary to map the new concept onto. You can of course make up a new term in an another language if you want, but in this is not done for the many new concepts since it is more productive to just work within English.

Of course there are some papers that are written in a foreign language and which contain new concepts. These papers can’t be translated into English without inventing new terms in English. The whole untranslatability issue is purely a numbers game where the papers in English only vastly outnumber those in any other language and hence most of the novel concepts are in English alone.

Well, paraphrasing your post...

Pick any scientific paper related with biodiversity at random. No other language other than latin (or maybe greek) has the terms and concepts required to write it - you can’t translate Oegopsida or Metasequoia glyptostroboides (Taxodiaceae: Conipherophytina) into english, or another language since the complete set of terms and concepts don’t exist in any other languages.

It is not that you can’t write scientific papers in other languages (lots of basic concepts in chemistry or physics developped between 17th and 19th centuries were written and expressed in french and deutsch without any effort), in fact you must use other languages. Consider writing the main parts of your work using math language. There is not much scientific articles or technical ideas developped exclusively in pure english.

You can't write a modern scientific paper in classical Greek or Latin these days as the vocabulary just doesn't exist in these languages. Sure scientific papers borrow terms from other languages, but today you can really only write most papers in English - the required terminology and concepts are missing from most languages. There really is a world of ideas only accessible in English.

As you rightly point out there is nothing about English that makes it suited for science inherently - it is just an accident of history. This does not change the fact that today the language of science is English and hence many scientific ideas are expressed exclusively in English.

    You can't write a modern scientific paper in classical
    Greek or Latin

You're comparing modern day English with languages that have died more than 1500 years ago. Your arguments are incoherent and suggest a serious lack of judgment.

I think it would be more productive to read what I have actually written rather than personally attack me.

I have read what you wrote - that is what upset me. You come up with ridiculous, blatantly false, unfounded claims and don't back them up. I understand it might be annoying to be called out like this, but letting this ignorance pass without calling it out is akin to agreeing with it. I still think you're wrong. But I'm not on a witch hunt, if this is what concerns you.

I can't imagine why you would get upset about something so abstract. Let's have a civilised discussion about if highly technical concepts can be translated into languages other than English, not make personal attacks.

I am upset in the intellectual sense, not the physical.

There is no discussion to be had. You are wrong. If you cannot accept the basic fact that any concept can be translated into any language (efficiency notwithstanding) then fine, just don't pretend you want to engage in "civilised discussion".

Confrontation is not a personal attack. The arguments you gave (and still support) are evidence of someone who is either trolling or has not seen the world. Honest question: do you speak/read multiple languages?

Yes I can read (and speak badly) a few languages (Spanish, French and a bit of Italian) and I have travelled widely - not that it is really relevant.

I think you can’t accept that there are many concepts that can’t be expressed in any language other than English. I am a scientist by background, trained in multiple fields for over 20 years, and yet I only have an understanding of a tiny fraction of all the scientific concepts out there (I can’t say how low, but well under 0.01%).

The vast majority of concepts (distinct ideas) that I personally know are scientific. With almost all the scientific concepts I know it is not possible to communicate to someone about the concept in any language other than English because the background concepts are missing from other languages. This is not because English is inherently superior to any other language, just a consequence of English being the common language of science.

You see this when you go to a scientific conference - people who speak a common language other than English will chit-chat to each other in their own language, but when you hear them talking to each other about science it either totally in English, or a hybrid where ever second word is English - there is often so much English in these conversations that I can follow along even when I have no understanding of the base language.

    I think you can’t accept that there are many concepts that
    can’t be expressed in any language other than English.

I cannot accept such an absurdity, because it is false. I am also a scientist trained in theoretical physics and I have received my education in French, a colleague had his in Portuguese, another in Mandarin, yet another in French/Arabic and our professors and PIs had theirs in German, English, French, Spanish and Romanian (that I know of, could be more).

You are right that at conferences people speak English, and we speak English in group meetings for the simple reason that it's the common denominator. There is no other reason. We have scientific discussions in French and English, some have them in German or Arabic, it doesn't matter because they're all equally capable of describing scientific thought.

I think the point you're trying to make is that the scientific vocabulary in some languages, in some scientific fields, sometimes doesn't keep up with that of English. This I would concede to you. But usually, just like English does, the other languages simply borrow the new words (or craft the usually obvious equivalents using greek/latin or whatever). This has nothing to do with a language's inherent capacity of describing concepts, as you maintain. This argument is a much weaker form than that which you propose.

I think you are finally understanding what I am saying. Of course it is possible to translate all scientific concepts into any human language, just that in practice it is not done since the return is minimal and the cost high. Rather than waste an enormous amount of resources on translating every paper, conference proceeding, report and patent into the thousands of different human languages we have settled on just using English.

Any concept (and all the required prerequisite concepts) that have not been translated to the new language can’t be communicated in that language. Nothing more.

The only interesting aspect of all this is that it makes a large chunk of human thought only able to be communicated effectively in one language. It would probably would have been ideal to have settled on a synthetic language designed specifically for science communication (mathematics is part of the way there), but history didn’t turn out that way.

Gah.... instead of shaking my head in disbelief/disagreement/disappointment/stupefaction once again, I will simply wish you the best of luck in your endeavours and bail out from this impass.

At one point, German was the language of science, however.

Yes it was in some fields and still is to a certain extent in organic chemistry. The only language today other than English where a reasonable amount of new scientific knowledge is published is Chinese, but even in China there is a strong desire to publish in English if you are a scientist.

You are aware of the fact, that Einstein's papers are in German, right?

> The vast majority of new scientific papers are written in English and hence every new concept within them can’t be expressed in any other language since there are no corresponding vocabulary to map the new concept onto.

Non sequitur. But how about _you_ provide an example of a non-translatable concept in an English paper. Should not be hard: 'Just pick any scientific paper at random.'

What you're saying makes absolutely no sense. Do you even speak another language than English? Millions of people each year have their graduate education on languages other than English and are doing fine. They do learn English for broad communication, but what you're implying is that they couldn't even think in their own language since it's inadequate.

I'm sorry to say but you're full of it if you believe what you wrote. It's an absurdity only someone who has never travelled or been exposed to the world could say.

I am implying or saying none of this. I think you need to read carefully what I have written, not what you have projected on to me.

> Out of the total number of human concepts that have ever been communicated, the majority are only available to English speakers.

Wait, I'm not sure if I agree with the rest of your post, but this last sentence is surely an exaggeration, no? You mean over 50% of human concepts that were ever communicated are only available to english speakers?

Yes because so much of novel human knowledge is tied to science and technology. Sure there are millions of novels, movies, poems, etc in thousands of different languages, but the range of ideas contained within them is rather limited.

You know that English only became a lingua franca in the 20th century? Before that, hardly anything of scientific significance was expressed or published in English? The seminal works in physics, chemistry, mathematics, biology were written in German, Latin, etc

Yes of course. But since 1945 the vast majority of papers have been written in English. I think people forget how much science has grown over the last 75 years to the point where everything written pre-1945 is a small minority of the scientific literature.

Do you think that the ideas of Leibniz and Cauchy, that is differential and integral calculus, of Heisenberg and Einstein, that is Quantum mechanics and Relativity, of Curie, Mendelejew, Hahn, Bosch, ... basically, of any non-english speaking scientist with breakthrough insights, are not understood by English speaking scientists, when translated?

What makes you believe people think about concepts "In English", when they are published in English? Certainly Feynman was thinking about QM in English, even though most of the concepts were developed in Norwegian and German.

Also, I'm still waiting for a single example of an english named scientific concept, that is not understandable to a German/French expert in the field. Maybe you have at least _one_ example handy, claiming that "most scientific concepts" are of this type.

None of the scientists you listed are alive let alone at the cutting edge of science and their work proceeds the move of science to English. Interestingly all their papers when they were published were not able to be translated in English without creating new terms which made it hard for English physicists who did not speak German.

Of course German or French scientists can understand modern scientific papers because they all speak English. I have met thousands of scientists who's first language is not English and not a single one can't read English.

As for an example I literally picked the first papers I found on NCBI. Written by a Chinese team in English - good luck translating this paper into any other language [1].

1. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27372578

> I have yet to come across any concept in any human language that can’t be expressed in English.

And all turing-complete programming languages are technically equivalent; what's your point?

That there is no knowledge that can't be communicated in English. Actually not all languages are equivalent because many concepts can only be expressed in English as all other languages lack the vocabulary to express many scientific and technical concepts. Right now English really is the only language that can be used to express a lot of concepts.

And most of those scientific and technical words in English are actually borrowed from other languages in the first place.

Even the words "science" and "technique" and "compute." Latin and French. Basic stuff like "icon." Greek. "Algebra" and "alcohol" and some other words that start with "al-"; Arabic.

I could go on to force the point but it already feels bizarre having to point out the obvious..

If English can wantonly borrow from other languages then pretend it's the only language that can express these things, why can't other languages borrow those words from English and pretend they're a part of them?

It is not that you can’t in principle express any concept in any other language, just that in most cases the vocabulary doesn’t exist in that language. In Newton’s time it was not possible to write most scientific papers in English as English lacked the required terms and concepts (everyone wrote in Latin).

For a whole series of historical reasons English has become the international language of science resulting in most new concepts only being expressible in English. We could of course change to a new language, but we would need to make up new terms to map all the existing concept onto in this new language. It might happen in the future, but right now there is no major effort to move science from English.

> just that in most cases the vocabulary doesn’t exist in that language.

Again you keep insisting that certain vocabulary doesn't exist in other languages, right after I provided some examples of vocabulary that do/did not exist in English!

If a language decides to incorporate, say, "science" into its vocabulary, does that make it any more limited than English when English itself took the word from French/Latin?

The argument in this thread was never about vocabulary, as all languages have been borrowing from each other since forever and are free to keep doing so. English does not have a trademark on words, especially ones that it itself took from other languages.

The initial point was that you lose nuance, intent, conciseness and artistic value. Take "throwing star" versus "shuriken", or "raw seafood" against "sushi." Does English have words for those objects or concepts? "Throwing star" is a clumsy phrase that has to be disambiguated from a solar star, or is it a celebrity known for his or her throwing skills?

Many poems, jokes or idioms fall apart right away when translated literally, or lose their punch or intended effect when "explained" in another language. The world would be an insanely dull and boring place with just one language.

I think you have missed my point. On your final point I don't think the world would be be an insanely dull and boring place with just one language. It would be a different world, but not dull.

> Take "throwing star" versus "shuriken", or "raw seafood" against "sushi." Does English have words for those objects or concepts?

Um, yes. It has the words "shuriken" and "sushi". We didn't invent those words, but we found them useful, so we kept them.

Presumably, if the cultures that used lots of shuriken and ate lots of sushi had been English-speaking, they would still have invented words for them.

Alan Perlis said, "A programming language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing."

Similarly, it might be said that a human language that doesn't affect your world-view is not worth learning. The language is the door to the culture.

Bingo. I've learned more about English itself the past couple years studying Thai than I have since I was a young child; particularly how daft our orthography is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonemic_orthography#Defective...

One of the strengths of English is that it adapts by assimilation from other language; if it were the only language around it would stagnate.

Where another language lacks the vocabulary, the concept could be expressed through explanation, or through assimilation of that word from English, construction of a new word that makes etymological sense, etc. There isn't anything extra that can be done in English that couldn't be done in another language to express new concepts.

This is true, but it is a massive job to do this translation so it does not get done. Many scientific concepts are only known by a handful of people in the world (i.e. those formed at the cutting edge) and are only able to be expressed in English.

There is nothing inherently superior about English as a language (other than it being my native language), just that it is the common language of science and so it is the language in which the majority of new concepts are communicated.

Philosophy for one is full of untranslatable subtle distinctions.

German has "Seiendes" x "Sein". French has "l'étant x l'étre". English has just "being"; and then people think Heidegger is gibberish.

> I have yet to come across any concept in any human language that can’t be expressed in English.

That's an extraordinary statement; how many languages do you speak? In my home we speak a melange of three, different ratios depending on who is speaking to whom. And mixed in are other words that my wife or I acquired from other languages used when younger. Some concepts are just simpler or more intense in one language than another. Even though I have been speaking English from birth, use it every day, and live in an English speaking country, there are some things that are simply not natural in it. It would be like trying to write Lisp code using C -- possible (there are lisp compilers that emit C), but painful.

Do you know of one? I have been looking for one for years and nobody has been able to provide me one. Sure some terms can’t be easily translated into English (especially those that rely on assumed cultural knowledge), but none that I have found can’t be expressed in English.

Your Lisp - C analogy is not a bad one (I would have used assembler as the base rather than C). Sure there are some languages that are able to solve some problem more efficiently or elegantly than assembler, but there is no program that can’t (in principle) be written in assembler. There are however many programs that can be written in assembler that can’t be written in Lisp.

To continue my provocative thesis then you can think of English as the assembler of human thought :)

I believe "expressed" is closer to "there's a concept everybody is familiar with and there's a specific feeling associated with that one word/expression that everyone understands without providing the definition of the word".

Kind of like schadenfreude is now known to English speakers as schadenfreude. You can explain what it means, but there's no direct equivalent that's as easy to bring up.

From my own experience, I found that there's no direct equivalent to "disturbing" in Polish. There are many similar words (equivalents of "shocking" and other), but they just don't have the same feeling associated with them.

Schadenfreude as a concept existed in English long before the word appeared in English and I am sure Polish speakers feel disturbed at times even if they don't have a precise word for it. Human emotions and feelings are universal hence why they can all be expressed in all languages.

The concepts that can't be expressed in all languages are those that are abstract and technical. A nice simple example of this is in some Australian Aboriginal languages there are no words for numbers of objects higher than 3 (they just become many). It really is impossible to translate the number 14 into these languages as the corresponding concept just doesn't exist.

> Do you know of one?

Of course, I use them all the time. I'll give you a couple of silly, yet profound examples. In German and Marathi there are different words for the droppings (crap) of different animals. In fact in German there's a book that teaches the kids different words. Unlike the highly developed squeamishness of the English language around body functions, you might use one of these words to describe something non-scatalogical (say, some dropped bolts under a piece of machinery) Köttel which includes in one word that they are small, scattered, left by some small creature (i.e. by someone careless or simpleminded -- probably insulting yourself or someone else you're talking about) -- something that can be explained in English but by the time you've done so it's not worth it.

Or an example from English: because of the French invasion, English has different words for animals in the field (e.g. swine and pig) and on the table (pork). At home we'll use cow, Kuh, and vache (always humorously) as well as beef or "hamburger" in an English sentence just to emphasize different ways in which the animal is used in different cultures.

Agricultural roots are still current German and Marathi in a way not true in English, again due to the Norman invasion.

(oh yeah, another great German example is the different words for snot depending on its consistency).

German has a rich ontology of earth moving apparatus, and each kind of machine (e.g. Löffelbaggnr) has a descriptive term that even kids know and can understand. If that exists in English I have not seen it (and I've spent some time in construction) except presumably to particular specialists.

At the opposite end, in French you can't say shallow (only peu profond -- "a small depth") which has so much semantic richness it makes the term "shallow" shallow. In general, wordplay in English is pretty thin gruel compared to what you can get away with in French, or even German. Speaking of that the very structure of Arabic lets you say things with a richness (kitab vs katib) that is I find (and I have been speaking English in English speaking countries for more than 40 years) inexpressible in English.

> To continue my provocative thesis then you can think of English as the assembler of human thought

I enjoy speaking English but this statement is hardly true.

All of these are examples of my claim which is that all concepts in other languages can be expressed in English. Sure you might have a specfic term for the droppings of cows in some language (we have the same thing in English not that it matters), but this concept can be translated into English. It might not be as poetic, or it might not have quite the same emotional association, but it is translatable.

The concepts that can't be translated are all highly technical concepts from the cutting edge of science and technology. These often lack the vocabulary in other languages to enable them to be expressed in that language because the limited number of people that understand them only communicate to each other about them in English. There are a very large number of these scientific concepts hence there are a large number of concepts that can only be expressed in English.

I don't get it; can't you just describe the technical things in the other languages?

Brainf* may be turing complete, but I would certainly prefer to use a more ordinary language.

Yes you can, but at the cutting edge of science this is a big job because of the amount of assumed knowledge and concepts you need to explain the new concept. To translate the new concept you need translate all supporting concepts as well to enable the person to understand the new concept.

In practice this requires translating a significant amount of all scientific knowledge from English into the target language (lets pick Swahili for example). Because this is such a huge job with little return, scientists just all work in one common language and for historical reasons this is English.

Of course further away from the cutting edge the easier it is to explain concepts in a non-English language which is why science can be taught to undergraduates in a language other than English. Once you are dealing with the primary literature this becomes very difficult.

I'm not saying that a language can't be more convenient for some things than some other language is for those things. See Brainf* vs python.

It seems strange to me to put English on all that much of a pedestal though. I mean, aren't many of the cutting-edge words recently neologisms anyway? (possibly named after someone)

Like, "anti-deSitter space", deSitter is iirc a guy's name, and anti could be translated or left alone if it is recognized in the language in question, and the word space could be translated, so I don't see what the problem would be there.

I mean I don't really know any cutting edge science because, uh, I'm not a scientist. But, from wikipedia, I'm trying to see if I can remember anything that seems like it would be particularly hard to translate and nothing comes to mind quickly? I suppose I could look at wikipedia articles on new topics in other languages and see what ones are missing or have many english words in them?

I am not putting English on a pedestal, just trying to explain why so much of human thought is only able to be communicated in English.

Any scientific concept can be translated into any language in principle, it is just that in practice nobody does - well at least until the concepts filter down to the undergraduate level.

You will really find it impossible to be a professional scientist if you can’t read and write English these days (speaking is less important). In the past if you could not read and write Latin you couldn’t discuss the latest scientific concepts, now that role is played by English. A very large percentage of all concepts are now scientific concepts and hence accessible only to English speakers (well readers).

> I have yet to come across any concept in any human language that can’t be expressed in English.

Well, no shit? The only language you speak is English. Any concepts that are foreign or difficult to explain in English would probably be out of your realm of understanding.

You don't know what languages I speak (other than English of course), but this is irrelevant. It is not if I can find a concept that can not be expressed in English, but if anyone I speak to can come up with one. Do you know of any?

To translate scientific literature is the easiest part of translation. In fact, a lot of papers don't even get translated because everyone can read them after learning 100-200 words from the respective language. I can tell you that most of my time goes by reading scientific papers in languages that are not my mother tongue.

The question discussed in this thread is _not_: Would it be beneficial to have all scientific papers in one language? It is: Would it be beneficial to have all literature, discussions, jokes, poems and songs in one language. A question, that Newton's work and the amount of NSF funded papers in 2015 has absolutely no relation to.

Do you really think you can understand the concepts in a scientific paper knowing just 200 words of the language they are written in?

In my field of expertise, which is mathematics, this is certainly possible. My French and Russian is bad, to say the least. I doubt I have a vocabulary of more than 200 words in each, but I have no problems reading, for example, EGA [1]. Also there are entire journals in the field publicising translations of articles, which seems to contradict your claim that bleeding-edge scientific concepts are non-translatable.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89l%C3%A9ments_de_g%C3%A9o...

Mathamatics is not like other fields - it isn't even really a science.

The non-mathamtical language used in mathamatics papers is easily translated, but understanding the maths is impossible without the required background and it can't be translated into any natural human language. Maths uses a synthetic symbolic language which mathematicians around the world share allowing them to communicate - in the natural sciences we use English instead.

Some people act so self-entitled, it hurts. Just because you seem to neither have appreciation for beauty nor humanities, doesn't free you from acknowledging it in others.

Your premise seems to be that all languages are 'Turing-equivalent': Given enough time+patience you can "explain" the meaning of every expression in every other language. To be honest, a book that wastes my time "explaining" concepts from the language it was originally written in is not a book I would consider fun.

I hope you can agree, that describing a feeling is not the same as actually feeling it. But you don't accept that there are words that evoke a feeling in a native speaker, that are not evoked by reading a translation in another language?

There are already several examples of phrases in this thread that can only clumsily be explained in English, and some of them are for exactly this reason already used by English speakers. The amount of scientific publications on indivual pieces of literature should also tell you that language as art is more than describing things.

Btw, your example of scientific papers is entirely besides the point because their purpose precisely is to just describe something, instead of evoking feelings or images in the readers mind, tapping into his stream of associations/values/lifelong cultural traditions etc. You also claim that _all_ human thoughts in history are "rather limited" when compared to modern "scientific papers". This is trolling, I hope.

Finally, the fact that you make out your own language as the lingua franka of all humanity does not do much good to your argument, which has a priori nothing to do with a specific language. Rather, it makes you look stereotypical Western-centric.

Please stop assuming who I am and what I think and most especially claiming I said things I have not said.

Usually, the people who espouse such views are never the speakers of dying tongues.

I'm not saying your view is the wrong one, or that it isn't rational. The sentence in the beginning of my post was spoken by an anthropologist who studied a tribe who was losing its language, and yet didn't completely grasp the other, mainstream language, fully. I never forgot that sentence. The youths of the tribe, he said, were in a constant limbo, their language and culture dying, and never part of the bigger, dominating culture. Their children's children will probably be ok, will probably be fully assimilated, but to not think of the fate their parents and grandparents is not right.

Many efforts are futile, but it doesn't make them all wrong. Sometimes it is the right way to act.

Additionally, there is a richness of thought and experience that other languages bring to the human experience. Just google for "untranslateable words that should exist in English" or something similar.

Not to mention that even computer languages have a similar quality: different languages allow one to think about things in different ways. How much would computer science suck if the only language available was Fortran 77?

I'm not so sure about the richness, though I get your point. (I recently pondered about the german word "jenseits" not in the sense of heaven, which it may mean, but rather as a pompous form of beyond).

I agree with the FORTRAN 77 part. But this is a misleading example. This "small" language has a very specific audience in scientists and engineers (not even computer engineers). I think the point the top comment makes assumes we all wrote something like python with C and FORTRAN extensions used when appropriate.

> Imagine if the entire world spoke a single language. Would we ever want to invent new languages [...]?

First: Very few languages are invented but a lot of individual languages fragment over time - the more widespread they are, the more they fragment[1]. Sranan Tongo[2] and Papiamentu[3] are two nice examples of new languages that were quite recently created by speakers of some dominant language. Influences mix, people adapt words from languages spoken nearby or just make up their own words and they stick.

Second: Wittgenstein said that "the limits of my language are the limits of my world". Different languages allow us to think different concepts. Trying to translate something from one language into another that does not have a 1:1 translation is usually a very thought-provoking thing for me and forces me to reflect on my own culture. Great examples are the Japanese "tsundoku" (pile of unread books [4]) or the German "Feierabend" (the time after finishing work for the day).

In summary: I think the desire to have one "global" language is only a technocrat's unrealistic dream and its pursuit would be the attempt to streamline thinking at the expense of everyone's culture and philosophical potentials. Rather, at least superficially, learn a few more languages.

[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1580745/English-will-...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sranan_Tongo

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papiamento

[4] http://www.openculture.com/2014/07/tsundoku-should-enter-the...

I am learning Russian and was just thinking the same thing. That said, I think that the differences between Russian and English lead to a different way of seeing the world (you think in your language, and some ideas that are easy to convey in one language might be harder in another. That said, the vast majority of ideas will be easily expressed in any (universal). I think English is pretty sweet but wouldn't want to have to learn it.

It isn't necessary to have only one language for people to communicate. Humans are perfectly capable of learning multiple languages, and and it may even be good for a child's cognitive development to do so.

It's also unlikely that it is possible to have one global language. People acquire language from the people they grow up around. They get it from their parents, friends, neighbors, etc (note that I omitted teachers). Even if everyone had the possibility to communicate with any other person in the world, from birth, they wouldn't, and so dialects would form and eventually become languages.

> Do you feel stunted or unsatisfied because your ancestors didn't pass their native tongues down to you?

Yes, although I realize that I'm likely in the minority. That's why I started learning one of them at the first opportunity. I feel like it helped solidify one aspect of who I think I am.

Learn a few languages. Learn the variations in connotation that different grammars provide. Learn that the way you structure your thoughts in one language don't fit naturally into another language.

Language provides an imperfect conduit for communication, and every language is imperfect in a unique way. Knowing a few unrelated ones gives you a basis for comparison and contrast.

If the entire world spoke English, Spanish, or Chinese, we still wouldn't be able to understand each other. I live in Denmark, less than 6 million people, and I can pick two guys, put them in a room, and they would not be able to understand one another. They live less than 300 miles from eachother.

You might be biased without knowing it because Danish is one of those languages with lots of dialects in such a small region. I only know this because my girlfriend used to live in Copenhagen and couldn't understand most people outside of the capital. Maybe most countries don't share so many dialects, I'm sure mine (Portugal) doesn't, it's pretty easy to understand most people here with the exception of the Azores Islands.

I know Sweden and Norway are the same, but your point probably stands, as they are very similar to Danish.

This line of reasoning implies there's a benefit in such economy and simplification. But is this really so? Take fonts, for example. One could argue that it would be better to have a single font and then maybe also simplify it to have fewer character shapes and width variations. But from what I see font development goes in an entirely different direction. There's more fonts developed every year, and they're getting more sophisticated, not less: they have much more ligatures, different variants of the same letter for different context, and so on.

Or take the ideographic writing systems. There were many attempts to simplify them, limit the number of ideographs, simplify their shapes, but as the result we now have two Chinese writing systems (simplified and not) and the simplification of Japanese seems to have stopped and even went backward.

Maybe it's not that simple to simplify things :)

https://xkcd.com/927/

+1. Yes, cultural diversity is good. But we have plenty of ways to have that without needing 1000 languages :

- art;

- food;

- social constructs;

- city organisations;

- and slang if you really want your tongue to be part of it.

We don't need to spend time and energy to save old ways of communication. Let's us it to make communication better now.

What's more, anything that live eventually dies, which is something we need to learn to accept. Now we are already spending a lot of energy to save our bodies, and a bit of it to save other living creatures, and I'm on board with that. But saving languages seems a waste to me. Either the system will procude or derive the next linguistic generation, or it will merge the old ones, but all in all, this is something I'd gladly let natural selection kick in.

At the very least, I wish we would all share a minimum of one language. I'm french, I consider my language much more efficient to describe things than english, but I'll be ok to just say "let's make sure everybody at least speak english" and be done with it.

I travel a lot, and the language barrier has never once been a good thing. Best case scenario you have goofy confusion and laughters, worst case scenario you have hate.

Now we don't need to eradicate the language diversity. But it's nor do we need to save it. It's ok to loose some of our knowledge. Yes, even books, stories, ways of thinking. Things die, that's how the system get balanced.

(Plus when we will create galatical aliances with aliens, we will need a earthling language, so let's start now people !)

You would willingly give up the french language if asked to and replace it with english? As a french person too, this is inconceivable for me. I don't think cultural identity is really possible without languages. French culture would not be the same french culture if everyone spoke English.

It's not about giving up french, it's about letting it die if one day it's decaying.

Not saving != killing.

It's not always that "natural" of a selection. Many native Americans were basically kidnapped and forced to learn English. Governments in the past have intentionally tried to eradicate languages with the mistaken belief that one language is superior and more communicative and another is barbaric or degenerative. This still happens in the form of dialect prejudice, which is institutionalized in the American public school system. People tend to project their prejudice towards a particular group of people onto their language. This has been proven many times with dialect perception experiments. I think we have an obligation to preserve cultures and languages that have been eradicated due to ignorance and prejudice, and we need to learn from the past and stop trying to enforce linguistic standards in school. If a single homogenous language is necessary, it should emerge naturally.

Having said that, languages do die naturally for socioeconomic reasons too, and I agree that it's unnecessary, and probably harmful to try to force people to use a language that they have no socioeconomic incentive to use.

Being kidnapped and forced to do anything is the problem here. Being rejected for being different is too. The "learning english" part is really not a big issue compared to it. Actually I'm pretty sure people would accept much more easily somebody speaking a dialect next to them if they knew in the end, they have at least one language in common.

I think you're confusing monolingualism with everyone having a lingua franca. Your argument sounds like "We should all just have one common language; therefore, we don't need others."

Bilingualism has existed in countries for centuries without either language dying out. I'm all for everyone speaking English. I want people to know as many languages as possible. What I don't want is everyone speaking only English.

It's not ok to lose some of our knowledge. Uniformity is bland, dull, uninteresting, and sad. There's a reason why we think knowing a lot of languages is cool. There's beauty to be found in other cultures and their languages. I don't want to force everyone to learn languages, but it'd be tragic if we lost French and with it Hugo, Voltaire, Verne, Baudelaire, Dumas, Asterix and the rest. It just isn't the same in English.

You are the one introducing "monolingualism". In no way not saving dying languages will lead to it. Even if by some act of god suddenly everybody learned english and forgot their own language in a night, very soon you would see emerge variations, slangs, then dialects. Languages are like living creatures, they evolve.

My point is mereley "we got thousand of languages, it's ok to loose some of it, let's spend more energy on making sure we got at least one lingua franca".

If this was intended to be a troll post, it was very successful.

What you are advocating is, essentially, linguistic and cultural genocide. It's an appalling point of view.

In all seriousness, I would suggest you learn another language, or maybe several, and then revisit your perspective.

As much as I feel sad about losing so many amazing languages, these arguments are weak emotional appeals at best.

The only legitimate argument you can make for keeping minority languages around is to basically reframe the context and say your goal as a society is to promote cultural and linguistic diversity because society needs it more than it does a highly effecient raw information processing system.

As a programmer, when you think how much easier everything would be if there were only 1 OS, 1 Web Browser, 1 programming language, 1 data exchange format, 1 byte order, etc, etc. and then you think about languages its clear how much easier everything would be.

Of course, we have different OSes, Browsers, Image Editors, because they are all better at different things and we aren't one organism - we as humans have different needs & preferences - which we bring to the table everytime we choose from one of the zillions of different options available to us.

Its the same with languages, when you want to be amazed by poetic eloquence and the rhythm and rhyme of words you read Pablo Neruda in Spanish, when you want to delve into highly analytical thought processes you read anything by the German Think Tanks such as Freud, Marx, Nietsche, Gauss, in German. When you want to talk to a superior in a formal setting, you adapt a different tone, appearance and language, as opposed to when you are splurting out your particular workplace jargon with collegues. The list goes on and on virtually forever, its even the case that the language we speak i.e. English, Spanish or whatever it may be - is completely unique to ourselves like a fingerprint which can identify us from all the other people on the planet.

Social Scientists study these aspects of our humanity, believing they give us insight not only into how people function but also into the optimization of more subjective qualities of that functioning such as happiness, group behaviors, moral motivations, etc.

But why does society need diversity more than efficiency? Someone else can give that one a try :)

> But why does society need diversity more than efficiency? Someone else can give that one a try :)

You'll soon find yourself in dangerous territory here.

The current mantra is diversity is not only morally good, but also actually beneficial - but the former shrinks to the latter whenever challenged, with an extra helping of bad-faith accusation...

The moral argument is simply one of valuing equality. You don't deserve to have your chosen language canonized, and I don't deserve to have mine relegated to a cultural dustbin.

Valuing equality is valuing equality, not pretending it has virtues that it doesn't. Trying to trick people into doing something by misrepresenting it as beneficial is a sure way to lose trust, and the moral argument (respecting autonomy).

When did 'deserve' enter the argument? Do I deserve to have two arms and two legs?

Right, that's why I didn't do any of that.

What would a moral argument even be about if it's not about deserving things?

I don't know how many arms and legs you have now or how many you deserve, but it's unlikely that anyone else has a moral right to take any away from you.

A common language, and an individuals limbs, differ in this context..

I'm not sure where you're coming from education-wise, but monocultures are viewed as negatives even in computer science [1]. They reduce resiliency to unexpected disasters in both cyber and meat spaces.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monoculture_(computer_science)

What is "efficiency" in the context of an entire society? What are we working toward? What will we do when we get there?

There are lots of great answers to this.

1. Working towards greater productivity. (In case this seems pointless or otherwise unworthy, remember that greater productivity leads to, e.g., people living longer lives).

2. Workings towards more great artistic achievements.

3. Working towards greater scientific achievements, which will bring the above, + more free time, + reaching other planters, + immortality.

You might not agree with all the above options, but if we, as a civilization, want to optimize towards something, there are plenty of great "somethings" to choose from. (and that are better than what most of humanity spends its time on, IMO).

I've personally volunteered for the anthropologist and linguist interviewed in the article sporadically since the 1990s, doing things like OCR'ing early Himalayan journals, setting up and maintaining websites (Digital Himalaya Project, World Oral Literature Project). Eventually I met him for a beer in Cambridge in 2009, shortly before he moved to Yale... great character! I believe he has since moved on to Canada.

That said, as a westerner who has picked up fluent Mandarin (and dabbled in dozes of languages) and who lives nearly full time in China, now raising my own child, I can see the efficacy and likelihood of evolving toward a reduced set of tongues or even a single-tongue. My grandparents spoke English, Croatian, German, and to a lesser extent probably some Russian, Yiddish and Scot. Other than English, only one surviving grandparent (90+) still speaks one of those languages. Similarly on my wife's side, her family have learned and forgotten Arabic and Vietnamese.

If indeed over hundreds of years the world does converge toward a single tongue, I would be surprised if Mandarin Chinese is not a serious candidate: offering simple grammar, huge and well dispersed population, with a pluralistic and pragmatic approach to culinary and other cultural acquisitions from integrated populations. The biggest issue is the number of characters, however a common international subset is perhaps emerging, largely through shared manufacturing supply chains, software interfaces, public signage and media.

They'll have to come up with a better writing system, either settling on pinyin on wade-giles, or something else. Really, ideographs are awful, an alphabet or even a syllabarry would be workable, but needing thousands of characters to read a newspaper is unforgivable.

That's OK, people don't read newspapers anymore and pinyin is a viable and highly consistent Romanization system already used by 1.4 billion. Wade Giles is a historical footnote. A little known fact is that the darling of the 20th century communist party's modern Chinese literary world, Lu Xun, advocated for the abolition of characters. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lu_Xun Perhaps long texts will be read in a Romanized form (Pinyin) and characters will be reserved for use in concise international symbologies, much like Japan's ongoing use of kanji?

Perhaps long texts will be read in a Romanized form (Pinyin) and characters will be reserved for use in concise international symbologies, much like Japan's ongoing use of kanji?

In Japanese, the Kanji are used basically everywhere (and when you are writing, sometimes you wish there were a kanji for a word, so you wouldn't have to write out all the letters. Of course, it's not as bad when you can type it).

I'm not advocating one global language and I think everyone should learn at least one language other than English but let's let the dying languages die. Natural selection is doing a good job. The good ones will survive.

The problem with natural selection as pertaining to language is that the language may be great but die because the culture dies off or shrinks or gets assimilated. For example, I don't consider Spanish an efficient or well-designed language in the slightest, but it's very widely spoken because the Spanish are good at conquest. Ainu is very fascinating and possibly more efficient (in terms of syllables per second over syllables per bit of information). The Ainu didn't have much interest in expansion and got more or less assimilated by Japan. Doesn't mean the language got selected against, the _culture_ got selected against.

While language may have an effect on a culture's success, I suspect a culture has much more impact on a language's success. Natural selection is a terrible metric of “good ones” in that case.

Agree. Culture is what makes the language more beautiful. When a small town turns into a big city, the language will gradually lose its power if everyone goes for profit without the culture carried forward.

Also, like what @gkya said, if the government aggressively enforce an official language on the people, other languages will die more quickly.

> The good ones will survive.

FTFY: the ones with more speakers and more political ties attached.

It's hard to say that a language is better than another one, it's highly subjective. But languages die not because they're worse, but because speaking them is a burden if you are: killed for speaking them, excluded for speaking them, there's no one to speak in the language with, you can't use it to shop or at the doctor's, etc.

Our awareness of language diversity is artificial. It only exists because of the same forces that are reducing it: modern communications and transportation.

Most languages will be fully understood by artificial intelligence soon enough. Anybody that wants to learn them 1000 years from now will be able to.

And once we enhance our own brains with technology, people will be inventing new languages with ease. And integrating the unique features of old ones.

There are probably millions of languages throughout the universe. We may not be the only species that uses language on Earth either.

We are really just at the beginning of discovering language diversity.

Anyone interested in the effort to catalogue all the world's languages should check out the nonprofit Wikitongues: http://www.wikitongues.org

They have a fascinating collection of videos of people speaking in their native languages.

If computer scientists made similar emotional arguments: Save EBCDIC because diversity.

No. Full stop. It's the adherents' of these cultures (speakers' of these languages) duty to compile and/or translate their cultural insights and knowledge. If they fail to do that - good bye, it probably wasn't that important, otherwise the culture or language would have been dominant.

No, it's not the same. The natural languages that "won" did so because of colonisation, not meritocracy - or should computer scientists compete by oppressing their competitors?

You have a point, although technologies don't necessarily win because of merit either. In fact, they often don't...

That's the MS way! ;-D

The point is that the existing speakers would like to preserve the language, but might not have resources for doing so. One good thing is that technology allows us right now to do archiving in an easier way. Recording speech, stories, and songs can be done more conveniently. Learning resources can be created in a better way. Problem is that the tools for all this might not be accessible to people living in remote areas if they do wish to preserve their language.

Maybe we should all program C on Windows - and only teach it - because any alternative that is not "dominant" has no value or importance?

For the record, every IBM iSeries uses EBCDIC and those aren't going away any time soon (actually, the OS on those is very advanced and amazing, minus the EBCDIC part).

Also, discarding intellectual curiosity for strict utilitarianism is awfully short-sighted.

OK, from now on, you can only code in Fortran 77.

Would any of you make your children monolingual [0] speakers of your national language? Wouldn't you feel like you're doing them a disservice?

[0] monolingual in the sense that the national language would strictly be their native language spoken at school/education, with friends and family even if they'd still be learning English

Rosetta Stone works to preserve languages with its products http://m.news9.com/story.aspx?story=30485894&catId=112032

A language carries its philosophy inside the words. Not all philosophical concept can be easily translated in other language. Take a Hindi/Sanskrit word "Aatma/Ātman" for example, it is translated into english as "soul". But it is wrong translation as plant, animal don't have "soul", while even bacteria have "Aatma/Ātman". If Sankrit is lost then the concept of "Ātman" will also be lost.

If an adult wants to learn it, fine. But I will not teach my children a minor language as the first one. Otherwise, record few TB worth of speech and be done with it.

My immediate thought after reading this article was like there is nothing wrong or disadvantageous in having a single language all over the world. It would make communication easy and universal. But the point here, which the author stresses, is that every language has its own perspective of looking at an object, emotion, action etc. If we let a languages die then we are essentially losing this perspective. May be there is some language in this world which can express a particular emotion which other languages, for example English, cannot express no matter what. Won't humanity lose a lot in this scenario? And besides this I think that English is the so called universal language just because English speaking population conquered most of the world. It is not so that English is the easiest or most simple and complete in all aspects.

As a student of science I tend to believe in universality of language. It makes exchange of knowledge easy. But the points that I mentioned above are also important. According to me, letting a set of people try and revive the dying languages is worthy and helpful to human civilization.

I find this ironic that all the comments (both for and against) are in English.

People talk about this topic around the world. HN is just a small place.

If those are all the reason to save dying tongues, then this article proved the opposite of what it meant to prove :)

Many will die, but some are being digitized.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/28/science/28prof.html

https://www.ted.com/talks/wade_davis_on_endangered_cultures

Or: Why Other People must keep having difficulty accessing information and opportunities, for my own aesthetic pleasure, but I bring up my kids only with useful languages.

IMO proposing of speaking only one language because of usefulness on an English speaking site is a bit hypocritical, considering it is not even the most widespread. Surely keeping English around is just emotional appeal.

French is one of those dying tongues. In France we don't speak french anymore, we speak franglais, a mix of french and english words.

And in England we speak a mix of English and French words. Have done since around 1066.

It's a problem of speed of changes, old people can't have a true discussion to young people anymore.

I've noticed that whenever I've been to France. I learned French in school, and I notice there's an age cut-off when I can no longer understand what people are saying.

A small consolation is that the people who no longer speak intelligible French are usually somewhat better at English.

This is nothing unique to French, it is just the generational evolution of language. Listen to a news report in any language from the 1920s. It is vastly different in tone, style, vocabulary and possibly accent than a news report today. Change is the only constant.

French is actually doing very well. First, using a lot of English words doesn't mean we can't speak real French anymore (we use a lot of English words in my group of friends when we speak, but our written conversations are much purer). Secondly France is not the only place where French is spoken (common misconception in France), and among these other locations a lot of African countries speak a very good French, if not better than ours.

French is currently unique in that it's the previous lingua franca, so much so that the term for "world language" in English is a French term.

That French is now using loan words from English doesn't mean that it's dying. Have you tried to speak English without French / Latin / Norse loan words? Good luck.

It just means that French is like any other language now, aggressively borrowing from the current world language. Nothing wrong with that.

not quite. The term "lingua Franca" originally referred to a Mediterranean trading language - certainly a Romance language but not French. Yes for a while French was a lingua Franca in the modern sense but the term doesn't come from French.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediterranean_Lingua_Franca

Quebec is trying to save French through some crazy laws:

- You can't have a company whose name isn't French.

- The company I work for had to replace all keyboards by French keyboards, had to switch to an HR software available in French, had to switch all OSes to French, had to put French stickers on the microwave oven, etc.

- I can't send my kid to an English school if I haven't been to one myself.

"Big Mac is Big Mac, but they call it Le Big Mac" (C)

- You can't have a company whose name isn't French. That's much more nuanced than that. See article: http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/quebec-cracks-down-...

It's about having the language of the work environment in French. If the company decided to switch the keyboard to French and change your microwave in French, that is just a company policy, not a government regulation. The point of having the HR software in French is to allow someone that only speak French to work in HR in the company. Surely you can still use the software in English if you want to, but at least it's available in French.

No, the French police forced us to made these changes.

On the other hand, at this point, anyone under 30 in Quebec is fluent in English, because they had to be to pass school. I've only had trouble making myself intelligible to people 40-60+, and even then, that tends to be when I am way, way north-east towards Baie Comeau.

I think it's a question of usage.

I went for a hike off the beaten track in Quebec City and asked for directions and a 22yo 'kid' confessed to me he hadn't spoken English since he left school.

Further north, everyone in Riviere du loup understood my butchery of their language and replied in English - except at the farmers' market, where local producers don't get many Anglo customers (except the winemaker who offered tours of her vineyard)

And half of this English words are used completely differently than in English or even don't exist in English (parking, shampooing used as names for example)

French is absolutely not endangered at all, there is no risk for the language dying in the next 50 years with that much speakers. The number of speakers is actually growing (along with the other top 15 languages).

The languages we are speaking about might only have a handful of people from the older generation speaking it. The French legacy dialects actually are on the other hand endangered.

  "What’s more, languages are conduits of human heritage. Writing is a relatively recent development in our history (written systems currently exist for only about one-third of the world’s languages), so language itself is often the only way to convey a community’s songs, stories and poems. The Iliad was an oral story before it was written, as was The Odyssey. “How many other traditions are out there in the world that we’ll never know about because no-one recorded them before the language disappeared?” Austin says. ""

The Illiad is doing just fine in the many different languages it has been translated into. Preserving languages as living, spoken tongues is not necessary for the mere preservation of stories and history.

  "Without the language, the culture itself might teeter, or even disappear. “If we are to survive, to continue on and to exist as a people with a distinct and unique culture,” he continues, “then we have to have a language.” “It’s very hard as an English speaker to understand that,” "

This is true. English is now so widely used that it isn't really associated with one particular culture. You can travel to a completely alien country that speaks English, just differently than you.

  “Different languages provide distinct pathways of thought and frameworks for thinking and solving problems,” Harrison says. Returning to Cherokee, unlike English it is verb rather than noun-based, and those verbs can be conjugated in a multitude of ways based on who they are acting upon."

Many languages have unique attributes that let them excel at certain things. German, for example, is fantastic for creating compound words (e.g. Gedankenexperiment). English, however, gleefully swallows up such words and incorporates them.

  "There are also a few examples of languages being revived even after actually going extinct. By the 1960s, the last fluent Miami language speakers living in the American Midwest passed away. Thanks largely to the efforts of one interested member of the Miami Nation tribe, however, the language is now taught at Miami University in Ohio. "

Another example of this is written Mayan. The first archbishop of Yucatan, Diego de Landa, deliberately wiped out every trace of written Mayan he could. Paper codices were burned. Stone monuments were defaced. Literate Mayans were executed. He was so successful that, by the 20th century, written Mayan was a complete mystery. It has since been deciphered, but outside of a very small number of paper codices, all that remains are stone monuments. This is unfortunate. Consider the writing on monuments in Washington as compared to what's in the Library of Congress.

As useful as different languages may be for different things, they're also distressingly good at preventing us from communicating with and understanding each other. Perhaps the rise of more global languages is worth paying the price of losing some of our lingual diversity.

Off-topic: Why are code blocks are used for quotes by many people here? They just scroll horizontally forever and are a burden to read.

When you're quoting a fair bit of stuff, it gets hard to tell what is quote and what is not. I'd love it if there was a <blockquote> equivalent.

The Illiad is doing just fine in the many different languages it has been translated into

I've never heard a translation that captures the rich rhythm of the original.

Yet another super long article that could be summarized in a couple of lines.

i thought it was going to come up with a rational argument. something like the real reason people are doing this and getting paid handsomely to do it. but its just all sentimental nonsense, isn't it?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com