Switzerland's mysterious fourth language
bbc.com
bbc.com
e.g. https://i.redditmedia.com/VEUcNGVHkNv6E03iKnczBLELoqL4prdSsw...
That sounds reasonable, except for the fact that many, if not most, of the modern European national languages are in fact, newfangled mashups. National language standards are by and large the invention of the past few hundred years, where they either took a single regional language and called it the language language (such as French) or they kind of "mashed up", artificial standard (such as German). And yet somehow, these languages eventually took hold.
If Romansch doesn't die out in the next century, it's highly likely that a single standard will emerge.
We have put activities in place to try to save Mirandese.
In Spain likewise, after the civil war, regions got active to ensure their local languages strive alongside Spanish.
In Germany some states have the option of children having after school activities in the regional dialects.
https://www.sk-kultur.de/inhalte/themen/akademie-foer-uns-ko...
An initiative to teach Bavarian in the schools
http://m.spiegel.de/lebenundlernen/schule/bayerisch-lehrer-i...
There are similar initiatives for other dialects.
Sorry they are in German, just wanted to provide direct links, instead of Google translate.
The people are speaking their own dialects which differ that much that you can easily locate from which part of the country the speaker is from.
The native German Swiss only speak their Swiss German dialects among each other, with no single one dominating. In writing OTOH, standard German is used, although of course the usage of standard German has a much longer history than in the case of Romansh.
[1] This is not too different from the situation with High German being used in education even though everyone speaks in dialects.
Italian German, French, an yea, e'en English, have mutually all-but-unintelligible variants.
Well heck, the same thing can almost be said of German.
Also, if I got it correctly, Romansh is one of Switzerland's national languages, so theoretically one could move to Graubünden and acquire Swiss citizenship through Romansh, and not French, German, or Italian?
In total number of speakers, it's possible, and I think it's been the case historically (just by general population growth). In relative numbers (fraction of the population), it's been shrinking and I don't see this changing. Main reasons are that:
a) as mentioned in the BBC article, people move, and it's very difficult to keep the language after one or two generations if you don't live in that region,
b) even if you were to move to a Romansh-speaking area (as a Swiss national or as an immigrant), the incentive to learn is low because almost everyone also speaks (Swiss-)German.
> national language
It has a slightly different status than the other 3 languages, Wikipedia explains it well [1]. I don't know if you could get citizenship that way but you'd definitely be on the news.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romansh_language#Official_stat...
Sample (from The Fox And The Crow):
La vulp era puspè ina giada fomentada.
Qua ha ella vis sin in pign in corv che
tegneva in toc chaschiel en ses pichel.
Quai ma gustass, ha ella pensà, ed ha clamà
al corv: «Tge bel che ti es! Sche tes chant
è uschè bel sco tia parita, lur es ti il
pli bel utschè da tuts».Be interesting to hear more about that.
Similar languages exist in Italy, by the way:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ladin_language
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friulian_language
And there are also Germanic dialects that are isolated within Italy:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Italy#Non-Romance...
Fascinating stuff!
So when speaking with others that share the same language knowledge, it is just less effort to do so than pause while trying to remember.
Never change, rappers, never change...
You can use Google search in Romansch and they was a translation of Windows 7 and Office.
Western half speak french as a primary language and visiting cities there reminds me of france, except there werent any ghetto train stations. Northeastern parts speak german. Going down south the primary language was italian. Once you move to the outskirts of italy the infrastructure looked like it hadnt been maintained in ages.
Also police at the train station are armed with assault rifles too, but switzerland is not like this so yeah
Also because both germany and switzerland are beautiful in all regards :)
Spoken by a few South Tyrolian friends of mine, either as mother or as second tongue.
They can effectively learn 4 languages in the school:
* Ladin (elementary) * Italian (elementary) * German (elementary) (South Tyrol is ~60% German speaking autonomy in Italy) * English (when I went to school (started in 1999) it was introduced in middle school, nowadays it's late elementary AFAIK)
- More people speak Portugese in Switzerland than Romansch
- More people speak Albanian in Switzerland than Romansch (there are 350k Kosovars in Switzerland, almost 5% of the population)
https://www.eda.admin.ch/aboutswitzerland/en/home/infografik...
BTW, the Swiss government has several amazing infographics about the country, extremely well designed an informative:
https://www.eda.admin.ch/aboutswitzerland/en/home/infografik...
As former resident in the French cantons, it is quite easy to bump daily into Portuguese.
German, French, English, and Japanese
Over 1/3rd of the of the starters of the Swiss Soccer National team are Albanian. (Shaqiri, Xhaka, Berhami, Dzemaili).
They have scored 60% of the Swiss goals in the world cup tournament so far
Also, Dzemaili's roots are Macedonian, not Albanian.
I live in the US, and this country recognizes both the differences of citizenship and ethnicities (at it actually celebrates it). Eg. If you immigrated from Italy to the US, you are still italian. Your ethnicity doesn't just disappear. If you get the citizenship, you become Italian-American, and you are free to claim both.
Also, Blerim Dzemaili, is Albanian. (btw, about 30% of Macedonians are ethnic albanians). If he wanted he could get the Albanian citizenship, and actually be eligible to play for Albania as many other ethnical albanians have done. (G. Xhaka's older brother, Taulant actually plays for Albania).
Džemaili was born to Fekredin and Shemije Džemaili,[4] an Albanian family from Bogovinje, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blerim_D%C5%BEemaili#Childhood...
No. Google translate. I really disagree with this idea that the death of a language somehow means we are cut off from the culture that used the language. Nobody speaks ancient Egyptian but we can still translate their hieroglyphs. Universally common language promotes communication, cultural exchange, understanding and general world peace. I'd rather focus on the promotion of wold languages than the maintenance of isolated regional dialects. I'd rather learn Arabic than Welsh, Cantonese over Romansh.
Wow. "Romansh" is recognized by my spellchecker. But "Shia" of Shia Islam is not. Makes one think.
What is now China with a few local variants was once covered in numerous dialects like India today, though not as numerous. However, one unifying language has led to a less fractured nation compared to say India or even Europe.
I'm not sure requirements can be said to be strict when the locals will tell you to your face that the mountains are high and the emperor far away.
Just because something is doesn't mean it's right. Tooth decay is also a natural process, as is myopia, and cancer.
I'm sure common language helped Russia and Ukraine when they went into war.
What you're looking for is single worldwide culture. But I doubt that could happen. E.g. colonies in "New World" soon departed from their parent cultures. Even if someone would establish a single culture, it's set to collapse and split into a myriad of smaller ones.
There're a lot of things that define culture. Looking at US coasts-vs-flyover divider, language is not what keeps people together. Even if they shared a somewhat similar culture, different environments make people go in different ways.
> I really disagree with this idea that the death of a language somehow means we are cut off from the culture that used the language.
Culture is much more than just translating words. Different people care more about different things. That PoV is lost when nobody speaks the language natively. Well, it may exist in a book in a library. But there's no way to experience the culture anymore. So yes, it's dead, but not lost.
Maybe a brash conclusion would be to think that small cultures hamper progress by elevating the barriers to communication and spending energy pointlessly (from an utilitarian point of view) on little artisanal trinkets that are vastly more inefficient compared to, albeit somewhat dystopic, modern manufacturing and unified cultural anglosaxon mish mash.
I don't think art is a linear progression.
> It might be a sensitive topic
You're telling people of non-dominant cultures that their art and "artisanal trinkets" are, at best, a worthless waist of time.
True, I lumped it together with technology. The case with art is, it benefits from perspiration from other artists which ocurrs mostly at the scale of bigger cultures.
> You're telling people of non-dominant cultures that their art and "artisanal trinkets" are, at best, a worthless waist of time.
Well, that's the logical conclusion from a pragmatic viewpoint, but emotion bends logic, therefore causing many inefficiencies (which may look "efficient", but just because of looking at them through the filter of emotion).
However, I don't follow the dogma of pragmatism on a personal level, which is just another point that explains the human paranoia between logic and emotions.
Even the instinct to survive is an emotion. An emotionless agent wouldn't care about survival.
Logic can show you how to arrive to any place, but only e-motion will compel you to move and go.
By now, we don't have an coherent answer as our main method of value assesment is money (whose value is shared as a belief).
Also, before we proceed we should try to strip our incentives of every trace of emotion, which we'll assume as flawedly disposed against us, as it lags by millenia behing our rational brain, which makes most emotional feedback futile nowadays.
We should first strive to develop a framework that encompasses and evaluates every aspect of existence (which money can't capture yet), and then deny our emotions and work towards achieving the goals of said framework. That or wander aimlessly on this planet guided by our hormonal responses and never leaving the Solar System, just living by our feelings. Unless, of course, we'll manage to reduce the lag of experience-emotions to one comparable to that of reason.
That was the fundamental belief behind the eurocentric approach to anthropology, and other ethnocentric supremacist belief systems which from ignorance brought a lot of hardship to the world.
You don't have to look far enough to see how your culture, not long ago, was just as niche and pointless as the ones you're criticising now. You should also know that dominating cultures have already succumbed into irrelevance in spite of all the supremacist beliefs. Perhaps there's something to be learned about poopooing other cultures
However, this optimization makes also our civilization more fragile, so the tradeoffs are more complex than in your version of the theory.
Maybe that wasn't your intent, but that's certainly what you did. You basically said that all they have to contribute is knowledge of herbs.
https://numberwarrior.wordpress.com/2010/07/30/is-one-two-ma...
I've been interested in the general idea since reading 1984... where language shaping and limiting thought is a central idea. But I'd be curious to know how much scientific support this idea has.
The Wikipedia article you linked has some of the details, but they are obscured a bit if you aren't looking for them. The linked main article on Linguistic determinism has some more direct details in its Criticism section: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_determinism
Linguistic determinism is something more among the lines of Newspeak from 1984 or Apple's Emoji Gun Control: By making it harder to talk about something, you make it harder to think about it, and harder to put into action. Thus, you can force language into a certain direction and culture will follow.
"Harder" is actually the weak hypothesis. The strong hypothesis is much more "impossible".
The common critical dissent to the strong hypothesis is often the Piraha and their lack of numbers and counting words, but demonstrated ability to count and do simple arithmetic even if not name the results verbally in their language. In the strong hypothesis, they wouldn't be able to count at all. Certainly they exhibit some symptoms of the weak hypothesis, because they may have a harder time at it than those with words to describe the effort. (The common criticism to the Piraha criticism is that we've also taught horses, pigs, dolphins, primates, etc to count and do simple arithmetic with no mutually distinguishable language whatsoever, so maybe that's not an impressive example, because maybe counting/arithmetic are outside of the linguistic faculties of the brain.)
> You can always invent things first and name them later.
I find a more impressive example of a disproof of the strong hypothesis and implication for the weak hypothesis to be the Calculus. Though the example is still in the domain of math, I feel that particularly as math trends towards more abstracted thought its entanglement with language seems ever stronger (see computing and programming languages as further examples).
Newton and Liebniz were both polymaths that spoke multiple languages and referenced many of the same primary sources (in those primary sources' own languages), but they had distinct native languages and cultures (Newton's English and Liebniz's German), yet both co-evolved the Calculus independently (to most accounts; let us dismiss the accusations of theft in one direction or the other). They evolved very different notations/jargon/language for the same concepts, but you could still see the underlying concepts as isomorphic, and that those concepts didn't particularly have names or words until the pair invented names and words for them.
Liebniz's notation was superior, in that it made it easier to see similar concepts as similar and easier to work with some of the more complex concepts, which is why the notation we use today is closer to Liebniz's than Newton's (though still somewhat of a pidgin/fusion of the two). Yet, Newton, despite using an "inferior" notation to do so is still best known for discovering so many more of the Calculus' implications to other sciences, especially Physics. In that case a potential disproof of even the weak hypothesis, or rather one anecdotal outlier of the weak hypothesis that seems to indicate how particularly "weak" it may be.
http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/lexicon_valley/2014/0...
I was thinking the other day about that language that has no relative left/right and instead everything is based on (effectively) compass direction. The speakers reportedly have excellent direction sense compared to the average non-speaker. Their language is much more efficient at certain tasks we struggle with (English has crutches like "stage left", "starboard", and "your left" to compensate, but unless expected and practiced those are always effort/error prone. I myself fail at simple right/left way too often.)
Obviously this is a linguistic (and arguably cultural) trait with some value, without denying the value of also having relative kedtýright.
This language is unique (? or at least very rare), which tells me it failed to spread. Logical, as it would be hard for non-native speakers to pick up.
But that means "losing the evolutionary race" has no particular relation to the VALUE to us.
It is not necessary to have a grammatical future tense to talk or think about the future. In fact, English does not have a future tense in the technical grammatical sense of 'tense'.
More generally, there's no evidence for the existence of human languages with the sort of lack of expressive power that you're talking about. All languages appear to be more-or-less equivalent in their expressive power, although of course that does not imply that exact translation is possible in all instances.
Would be OK to forget how to make stone tools because we don't need them for now?
Traits are useful in some circumstances and not some useful when circumstances change, who say you would not miss them in the future?
Knowledge is knowledge, it adds to our always imperfect understanding of the world.
Idioms. Metaphors. Reference to background material. Such things may not be expressible in as few words, but there is no idea that cannot be expressed eventually.
Which is not intended as celebration, just conversation.
I've no problem with Cymraeg, it's interesting, part of my ancestry, part of British history, half of its fluent speakers prefer it. But if the government stopped putting it up, and supported more learning of major World languages in its place, then I think Wales as a whole would be better off.
Just because something is old, arose in one's own country, etc., doesn't mean it's automatically more valuable (not even culturally) than other things. [And vice-versa of course.]
Handwriting is giving way to typing and other means of writing (I'm swyping this), should we make computing lessons include handwriting in order not to let that "culture" die out. Sure, support those who choose it, but don't hobble those who don't.
Propping up a language at great expense is costly. I don't wish Cymraeg to be discarded (far from it, historic languages are fascinating), I wish other languages - ones suitable for widespread communication - to be fostered.
As a statistic 19% of the population is in the 20-30 year age bracket and so will have had 6 or more years of compulsory Cymraeg (it's been compulsory for 20 years). The number of adults in total that can _speak_ any Cymraeg is <15%. The response to this natural move to using English - spend more and more money on Cymraeg, make it compulsory within every other primary school lesson.
Pushing Cymraeg in this situation has a great cost directly, but indirectly there's an economic cost in the damage to children's education (our numeracy and literacy scores have dropped relative to the rest of the UK).
Culture changes and "progresses", spending more and more to try and halt that progress is misguided.
Trying to prevent the natural decline of one language in the face of a populations preferred use of another costs time and money. There's a cost involved directly and indirectly in not having those resources to spend elsewhere.
If the language dies before a substantial amount is written down, the training data will never exist.
Bad example. We know how to decipher hieroglyphs because we discovered that there were actually equivalent to another language that was well known at the time. There's tons of other languages we have no idea idea how to decipher, such as Linear A.
The standard knee-jerk reaction of wailing at the passing of yet another little-spoken language always fails to take into account the other side of the equation: a huge number of problems on this planet stem from the fact that people speak different languages and profoundly fail to understand one another.
Paying the price of losing little-spoken languages and the bits of culture that tag along with it is a very cheap price to pay when compared to what is gained.
I strongly disagree with whatever led you to believe such a thing.
How much of this do you really attribute to different languages? By and large everyone in America speaks English, but the past couple years in particular has very much demonstrated that we profoundly fail to understand one another. To me the language is obviously important for literal communication, but to an extent pretty irrelevant to the communication barriers in society.
That was the original thought behind Esperanto... the idea was that there was strife between different groups of people because they speak different languages, and that a universal language would solve this (or at least bring them closer together). [1] Whether this worked out or not is left as an exercise to the reader. ;-)