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Comment by pamqzl | Hacker News Reader

What is the benefit of preserving rarely-spoken languages?

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It is not a rare language as it is spoken by more than 72 million people[1]

Yet, there are languages that are in decline, because the population has dispersed or has been assimilated into other cultures. Some have less than 100 speakers, some are extinct. These languages are not just only tools for communication. They have evolved along with their speakers and thus reflect their culture and history.

Just as examining the DNA of a species can shed light on where it originated from, its habitat, challenges it evolved against and so on, so can the morphological analysis of the language text and word etymologies, enable one to map out invasions and associations with different cultures, periods of famine and plenty, the important aspects of the culture etc. For example, Eskimos have numerous words for snow because their lives depend on nowing the nuances of different types of snow and adapting to it. The movement of people in Central Asia, thousands of years ago, can be deduced from the tree of languages that have branched out from the original settlers. I will try to add references soon.

Languages are a part of history, a part of human culture, a part of us. Death of a language is death of a civilization, a way of life (though the people themselves may live on). Preserving the vestiges of a dying language is a noble act in service of the human civilization, future and past.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telugu_language

Edit:fixed typo

I apologize if I misunderstood your post, but I feel as though you still did not answer the parent's question. (And I'm aware Telugu is not a dead language, but I ask following questions in general)

What is the tangible benefit (in excess of the time investment) of dead languages?

And this may be a little naive but, it is nice to preserve human history in its original format, but how can that help the average person?

It's often said [0] that every language is conducive to a unique worldview - in my personal experience, I see the world very differently in Polish than I do in English. Yet even if that worldview perspective may be intangible (i.e. hard to prove), the simple cultural value of each language is tremendous. Losing a language is like burning the Mona Lisa - along with every photo, copy, or file of her ever made.

[0]: https://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/12/07/opinion/sunday/why-sav...

Your personal experiences are probably swamped by the fact that individuals have different personalities when speaking in different languages, due to the experiences that they've had speaking those languages. For example, it's not uncommon at all for an immigrant to have a very confident and assertive personality in their native language, compared to their personality when speaking the language of the country they live in. I know some people who are like this.

When I speak other languages I tend to be more serious. Perhaps this is because I was very serious when I was studying them? (Perhaps causation goes the other way?)

Even if this wiki citation was in error by an order of magnitude, 74.2 million native speakers[1] can hardly be considered rarely-spoken.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telugu_language

Telugu is spoken by at least 74 million people in India. It ranks third in the list of mother tongues spoken in India. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of... for more information.

And in fact it's the 15th most-spoken language worldwide: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of...

According to wikipedia, Telugu has more native speakers than French, Italian, Tagalog, or Dutch, to name a few.

With ~75 million Native speakers, it is not that rarely spoken.

What makes you think Telugu is a rarely-spoken language?

The context of the post above certainly making it sounds like Telugu was a dying, rarely-spoken language. If you, like myself, knew nothing about Telugu except the suggestion that it needed preserving, then you'd probably have assumed that too. This brings up the question of why (or whether) Telugu does need preserving if it's so active.

sounds like you guys don't want anything preserved. Questioning both the preservation of dying and popular languages.

The whole point of wikipedia is to preserve everything. Especially since people who speak the language are clearly underserved online.

It sounds to me like they may not see the value in preserving languages (not "anything"), whether widely spoken or not.

I don't see much value in maintaining the regular, daily use of any particular language, but I see tremendous value in preserving the written works (and nowadays spoken audio) of every language. It provides informative data to anyone seeking to understand language, history, and culture, today and in the future.

For the same reason, I support preserving all source code, even from discontinued or unfinished or shitty software. I have no idea what types of analysis might be possible in 500 years, but I don't want to deny them the opportunity to try it.

You misread me: I passed no judgement value on whether it should be preserved I just asked whether it needed preserving.

I am a native speaker of Telugu and working to grow digital knowledge resources in the language. So, I am also a Telugu Wikipedian. I would like to present few insights of Telugu speaking world. Telugu, like some other Indian languages, has a lot of colonial influence, especially in the fields of education and knowledge sharing. Telugu Native speakers learn Engineering and Medicine only in English Medium. No college offers a course of Medicine in Telugu, this is true with other Technical, Higher education courses. Majority of Telugu Native speakers educate from their middle or primary school in English Medium. This resulted in a negative phenomenon where you can find virtually no knowledge source about some Scientific and Advanced fields in Telugu. Many Language activists are worried that current generation and upcoming generations are brought up in an environment where they can speak Telugu and can be a doctorate holder but couldn't literally read and write in their native language. But as the language is spoken by millions 74.2 million native speakers, Entertainment (Telugu Film industry is so popular in India), News & Media, Literature, History and some other such fields persist to produce Fiction & Non-fiction works and knowledge base in Telugu. But as I mentioned above, A Scientist, who is a Telugu Native speaker won't publish his works in Telugu and unfortunately, that work even didn't get translated generally into Telugu. Telugu Wikipedia, as a free knowledge collaborative project, helps language in improving one of its biggest knowledge repositories and partly trying to fill this specific gap. I don't know if this context represented well in this article, but this is the context of the story.

I don't know how common this phenomenon is in India, but anecdotally, most of the Tamil people I know who graduated from college can barely read and write Tamil. They have no problems speaking it, but they'd struggle to write an essay in Tamil, let alone a thesis. No such problems in English, obviously.

You often hear the concern that regional languages could disappear because most parents would prefer that their kid studied in an English medium school.

Thanks for this information!

What's the harm?

Of a guy writing wiki articles? Nothing. It's a pretty valid question in general though as people do receive grant money for language preservation projects I'm pretty sure.

Hey HN, can you not downvote people for asking questions? Seeking knowledge (assuming good faith here) is something to reward, not punish.

I agree with the sentiment, but in this case the reply inserted "rarely-spoken" with a question of preservation. Not only that, but the addition made it predictable that "nobody does that anymore, why remember it?" would get a negative reaction.

Dravidian languages - Tamil, Telugu , Malayalam, Kannada & sub Dravidian languages still spoken by tribes came into existence in advanced civilisations when still majority of the world where inside caves.

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