Endangered Languages Project | Hacker News Reader

Endangered Languages Project

endangeredlanguages.com

49 pointssndean29 comments

Let me share something related I learned about recently.

Mansa Musa was a king of Mali. He was the richest man alive during the 14th century, possibly the richest of history. He owned about half of the world's production of gold.

He is mostly known through the pilgrimage he did to Mecca, where he distributed gifts in such a generous fashion that he possibly crashed the Egyptian economy. He is also known for ordering the building of the Djinguereber Mosque.

Thing is, we only know him through the eyes of foreigners. Either because of his pilgrimage or because of the european architects he brought. We only know the things that involve foreigners.

I would like to know more about his predecessor, who, according to a single Arab source citing Musa, transmitted the crown as he was decided to sail west on the pacific to make a trip around the world. Unlike Colombus, he had calculated the trip duration correctly and allegedly led an expedition of 3000 (!) boats. They were never heard from again. However, some pre-columbian historians suspect they have found some possible places where trade occurred in south America.

Why have I never heard about it? Why don't we have more sources about it? Then I remembered another piece of news I have read a few years ago. My country (France) was involved in a conflict in Mali recently. I followed it a bit. I remember reading an article about a heroic museum director who, upon seeing islamist fighters approaching and knowing what they do to historical artifacts [1] decided to disregard all typical precaution, loaded all he could in a pick-up truck and drove like crazy to the safe territories.

A lot of what he saved were manuscripts from Mansa Musa's period and the next century. Most were undigitized and untranslated.

This is why we need to save knowledge of ancient languages. Can you imagine the numerous epic stories we are missing? Maybe along those burnt books are the discussions of the western expedition. Maybe similar expeditions are sketched out. Maybe they give insights of civilizations or trading routes we did not know exist.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jan/28/mali-timbuktu-...

That's an awesome story indeed!

For me, it was the Nag Hammadi library discovery, which recovered certain texts from the earliest days of Christianity and Gnosticism that has brought me into this subject.

Those writings, including "The Gospel of Thomas" and "The Gospel of Truth" (great reads btw) were purged as herethical years ago. The original greek copies cannot be found. But thanks to the foresight of some Egyptian scribes to preserve this history, we have amazing copies that were translated into Coptic. Coptic is unfortunately no longer widely spoken outside the Coptic church, and due to the lack of knowledge on it and having only that one copy, it took a very long time for good English translations of these works to become available. Still, the historical value of those texts is unbelievable so it has really made me wonder what else is out there waiting to be found and translated? And how hard will it to be translated when they're found?

Totally agree with what you're saying. Wish we had a single digitized source for these sorts of things.

I think this points more to the need to preserve source material. Even if the language is known, if the source material is gone, the information that was in the source material may be gone forever. On the other hand, with enough source material, languages that have no living speaker( and in fact, have had no living speakers for centuries) have been successfully decoded (for example ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphics, ancient Sumerian, etc).

Yes, you need the source material, but the things you can infer from it alone are less numerous.

With no living speakers, you can map writing to meanings but not to phonetics, which are one of the main sources to trace language lines.

Is the city of "Ass'n" in one language the city of "Hassim" in another? Are two sources talking about the same person or are the names different?

Is this text poetry? Is this word here for the rhyme or does it have a specific meaning?

I have a particular interest in the languages of Mozambique. Many of these languages are heavily used in their local areas, but endangered by lack of acceptance in schools, lack of media in the language, and lack of resources (Possibly one of the reasons Moz is blank in the linked map).

I've found most of the best resources for actual text in smaller languages comes from religious translations, which can be a bit outdated but usually offer a fair amount of text. And beyond that I've gotten lucky with a few google drives and other repos mostly containing educational packets put together by various volunteer and missionary groups.

Unfortunately I'm not sure the copyright on many of those. I think that's why most of the language projects[1] I've seen wind up being mainly repos of titles of papers published on various languages. Which can be hit or miss for educational purposes.

[1] From the linked site I mainly poked at a couple African languages and didn't see much beyond the paper titles. There may be others with much more info.

> I've found most of the best resources for actual text in smaller languages comes from religious translations, which can be a bit outdated but usually offer a fair amount of text. And beyond that I've gotten lucky with a few google drives and other repos mostly containing educational packets put together by various volunteer and missionary groups.

This weird source bias affects ML models; the results can get portentous:

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/j5npeg/why-is-google-tran...

Seems like a good candidate for something to throw the way of the Internet Archive.

That's a good idea. I'll have to make a few uploads there.

This is really cool! Back when I was in college, I tried to raise awareness of all the languages spoken in my hometown (Fresno, CA)... We even shot a video about it!

FresnoLanguageProject.com

If a language dies because nobody uses it, what is the point of trying to keep it alive?

Maybe I'm dense, but it seems to me that the world might be simpler with fewer spoken / written languages rather than more?

LEVEL I BASIC is pretty endangered, but who cares at this point?

Programming "languages" and spoken languages barely can be compared apart from the fact they both have specific syntax. Don't conflate the two just because they both have the word "language" in them. They're even less similar than Java and JavaScript.

Language is not only a means of communication, but the living trace of a whole branch of culture and its collective memory of knowledge and history.

EDIT: The matter is developed quite extensively in an article [0] linked in their FAQ[1]

[0] https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7vQLUpU_2qcV1laYS1mZjc5Vjg...

[1] http://www.endangeredlanguages.com/faq/

I’m ambivalent about it. On the one hand it’s interesting patrimony of a sort, and, from a linguistic and separately a historical perspective, it’d be really nice to be witness to some dead languages of antiquity, but, on the other hand, languages have always come and gone.

I imagine modern India and Africa are losing languages as the main languages displace lesser languages.

I think you missed folkrav's point. People write their own history in their own language. If we lose a language, we don't just lose the language. We lose everything that was written or otherwise recorded (exclusively) in that language, most importantly the culture and history of all its users across time.

Tomorrow, if English were to be lost, most of the history of the US, Great Britain and other English speaking nations (as well as records written in English but pertaining to other non-English speaking nations) would be lost.

The vast majority of endangered languages don't have a written history. Most don't even have a writing system, much less a widely adopted one and literate writers.

Without writing, history devolves into a bunch of creation myths, which can be mildly interesting but tend to be very formulaic. Witness Australian Aboriginal Dreamtime stories, which span 40000 years of history, but can be reasonably replicated with a Markov chain of the (ancestor,kangaroo,goanna,wombat) creating (geographical feature) after it (fought,danced,mated,was cast away) (by,with) another (ancestor,kangaroo,goanna,wombat).

> Witness Australian Aboriginal Dreamtime stories ...

That is a ludicrous and ignorant caricature. Dreamtime stories encode vast amounts of information about locations, topography, history, local survival resources, and more. Read a bit of anthropology, or even just some pop/synoptic works (Lynne Kelly, Bill Gammage, Bruce Pascoe) and see if your prejudices emerge intact.

I think there is an element that some languages, the last specimens of their families, are more worth saving than other languages. Even if only 4 languages survived, it would be better for the world to have them be English, Arabic, Chinese, and Tagalog than English, French, Spanish, and Russian. So I would shed less tears for losing Occitan (a language spoken in southern France) than I would for losing Mohawk (an indigenous language along the New York/Canada border).

I'm not native, but I'm learning Lushootseed (language of the Puget Sound Salish peoples) to help keep it alive, after it technically fell into extinction.

Language preservation is huge for native culture and identity, and it helps prevent assimilation (one of the reasons why the language and others like it were forcibly stamped out by the boarding schools which abducted Indian children from their parents.) There are even projects to teach Lushootseed to inmates in tribal jails, as a way of reconnecting prisoners with their culture and heritage. Iirc studies also show that depression and suicide are reduced if the native language stays alive.

There's a lot of debate and the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis has fallen out of favor with contemporary linguists, but I also feel like different languages encode different thought patterns. Lushootseed is nothing like English, and there are words specifically for tribal customs, religion and viewpoints that can't translate.

Overall, I see languages as living creatures. Extinction of minority languages or cultures is, to me, like species disappearing. Even if the biome doesn't suffer (and it can in both cases - Indians knew how to take care of the land before whites showed up), something sacred is lost v

I really wanted to do this for a very closely related language to lushootseed about 10 years ago when I had an apartment in one of the tribal areas that were 50% non tribal. I looked into resources and programs, but there didn't seem to be a lot of resources or actual interest by the people group. I eventually moved onto other things (probably Akkadian or Dutch at that time), but this desire still lives somewhere inside me.

Would you care to share how you've done the learning you've done and any assimilation you've been able to do?

actually, I just looked up the language, and it's technically one of the dialects of lushootseed; so same language continuum as whatever you're learning more than likely.

> different languages encode different thought patterns

I find this so interesting and I want it to be true. The Guugu Ymithirr come to mind, whose directional prepositions are based on cardinal directions. This difference, when compared to English for example, is thought to be the main factor in why the people have such a strong "internal compass".

http://nautil.us/blog/5-languages-that-could-change-the-way-...

[paywall] http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-language-shape...

The problem with the true loss of a language (which I would define not only as the death of its active use, but as the loss of documentation of the language's building blocks) is that you lose access to huge swaths of documented human history.

Few, if any, BASICs are endangered to this level. Nobody outside of enthusiasts may actually be significantly using the language, but it's documented and thus programs written in a BASIC are generally able to be interpreted, and if necessary the logic converted to a different language. Many of these endangered languages are at risk of total loss, akin to if all information regarding a given BASIC syntax were irrevocably removed from all of existence.

One instance of this phenomenon is Knuth's TeX program, written in a dialect of Pascal which Knuth calls Pascal-H, accepted by Charles Hedrick's compiler:

I believe the sources for the compiler can be found here, https://github.com/PDP-10/rutgers-pascal/

And at some point Knuth had modified the GNU pascal compiler to compile modified TeX sources.

But in practice everyone just translates from Pascal to C, via WEB2C. Programs like XeTeX are even writing new Pascal-H code, which gets translated to C, and seems unlikely to have ever been compiled in the original language.

I think that knowing a language has many purposes, only one of which is direct communication of semi-objective statements.

It's one thing to say: "I am thristy, do you have water?" It's another to say: "She walks in beauty like the night of starry skies and cloudless climes..."

Is there reason to believe that the languages being lost have significant poetic contributions of value?

How would we know? They've been lost.

Also, poetic value is subjective. Historical value, in the sense of helping us understand things we didn't previously, much less so.

You may not find a phrase in a given language "poetic," but knowing that native speakers of said language did may be quite valuable.

Yes, all African languages that I know have many metaphors and simile's compared to a proto-English (discounting English loaning from other languages) and these have intrinsic knowledge built into them.

For example, in Nortern Sotho: "Ditau ga di adimane meno." This means that "Lion don't lend each other their teeth." But in context it means that you can't expect that other people lend you tools when you have to do a job, everyone needs to bring their own tools (physical or otherwise; software or hardware; etc). I also suspect that this saying alludes to the fact that lions are in competition with each other. Why would a lion lend another lion it's teeth and in the process put itself at a disadvantage? The metaphor encodes this inherent truth about competition.

Yeah, they were used by humans. A lot of people seem to think that writing is what separates humans from animals without any interesting thoughts, but in fact many complex societies have evolved around orally-transmitted knowledge. If poetry is your metric of value, it so happens that often non-literary cultures encode their teachings into verse to increase memorizability and support faithful transmission from person to person. Examples of such works include the Iliad and the Odyssey.

Languages have been created/dying/evolving since when we started using them. Their death/creation/evolution fundamentally reflects changes in human lifestyle: isolation of populations leads to differences while intermixing means the creation of pidgin languages. The reason why there is a large amount of languages dying now is because of lifestyle changes of a large amount of people in recent times from living in small isolated communities to more regionally, sometimes even globally, connected communities. This includes people in the western world. Think of inventions like trains, cars, radios, TVs, internet, etc. that enabled such a change.

However, that doesn't mean that languages themselves aren't a terribly interesting field of study and research. Archiving them before they die is very important for anthropologists, historians, etc. For example, they can answer questions about the history of other, still living, languages. They should at least be recorded.

Of course, forbidding people from teaching a specific language to their children is different from this natural process and something really bad.

I agree with you. We should catalog what we know about the language to preserve it for future anthropologists and historians. However, trying to revitalize languages is likely to be a waste of time and energy. In addition, it is likely to impose a greater burden on the children from those cultures as they get pressured to devote time and energy into something that will not benefit them.

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