I'm not sure what's sad about it. What good is a language if no one speaks it? In the ideal world, wouldn't everyone speak the same language?
Why don't we all just listen to one song, wear the same outfit and live in identical homes?
Regardless of whether they're useful, unique and irreplaceable information will be lost when minority languages are gone, as this information exists only in the minds of the remaining speakers. It isn't possible to back up this kind of information like we do with the Internet Archive or something.
Language isn’t the barrier here.
Not necessarily. Sometimes creativity may flourish better if developed independently without common influences.
>the internet
Websites could be analogous to language in this case. Why use hacker news when you could use twitter or reddit? Independent subgroups can produce more interesting or unique discussion.
Right but the point is that all of these independent subgroups use the same protocols to communicate (i.e. web standards). Anyone who has a client that can understand these is able to interact with the entire internet. As we can see, standardizing protocols does not limit the ideas which can be expressed over those protocols.
Having shared languages is awesome, allowing people to communicate together. But having only one language would be a great tragedy. It'd be like saying all paintings can only use one color.
Some are not phased by the loss of historic culture in that brave new world, but not everyone feels the same way.
But isn't it exactly why in the ideal world everyone would speak the same language? Otherwise, due to the untranslatability, every Shakespeare is lost to the rest of the world that doesn't speak his language.
Ideas and experiences precede words and inform language, not the other way around.
And on whatever lingua franca you choose to adopt, there will be an unbounded number of yet-to-be-written-works-of-shakespeare, that this language would lack the ability to express.
Just?
Given how complex every language is, and the level of mastery that is required to read and appreciate the hypothetical Shakespeare of that language, and the time and effort that is required to achieve this level of mastery, this is highly impractical.
I’m not sure there are any examples which cannot be expressed with a short English sentence, but here’s one from Tariana:
Masitetakakakadekaɾupidanapitaniki.
‘We did not make each other smoke again at all, so I leant from someone else.’
The problem with this translation is that it doesn’t completely get across the ‘feel’ of the original — e.g. the fact that this information was learnt from someone else is an integral part of the original sentence, whereas specifying this in English feels somewhat unnatural.
> I'm sure the same would be true the other way around.
Exactly. A Kalam example:
Bin ak ñapanŋaŋ anup sop ak wki d ap tan d ap yap geb.
‘The woman is soaping her child.’
> And that the differences lie in which ideas can be expressed concisely and which must be expressed verbosely?
This is not something I entirely disagree with. Generally speaking, anything which can be expressed in one language can be expressed in another. The differences go beyond verbosity though: it is often the case that such a complete translation sounds really unnatural. For instance, Kalam sentences make it easy to express motion, so you get a lot of sentences like:
Bin pataj ogok am yg pak dad ap-elgp-al…
woman young the go dig hit carrying come-PST.HAB-3PL…
This is quite true in evolutionary biology (from which you are even borrowing the term ecosystem), where the ever-changing environment puts different evolutionary pressures on a population of organisms, and the more genetically diverse a population is, the higher its chance to adapt to the pressure.
I am not sure that this biological model holds true when applied to social systems. I find it hard to imagine that artificial barriers to information flow in human populations are particularly adaptive (unless, perhaps, an isolation from the frenzied social media due to a natural language barrier is considered adaptive).
Why exactly?
It could just as easily have the opposite effect, of eliminating a wide range of expression and nuance, thus reducing the capacity for clear communication in absolute terms.
Why would that happen?
Expression and nuance is produced by the speakers of a language. Therefore, if different groups of speakers of a hypothetical common language had a need to express different nuances, they would evolve the language in such a way that it would become capable of expressing these nuances.
Consider how dominant modern languages can serve hugely different social groups: scholars, petty criminals, soldiers, scientists, sports fans, social justice warriors, and so on, with each group having different ranges of nuances of expression.
But everyone else that didn't evolve that couldn't understand it even though they speak the same language? Isn't how an evolution for a new language begins?
Consider evolution in biology. A species becomes distinct from another species when their individual members can no longer interbreed to produce fertile offspring. For an ancestor species to split into new ones, its populations have to be separated — either geographically (in the so-called allopatric speciation), or by the difference in reproductive timing (allochronic speciation). The point is, something needs to happen that breaks the free mixture of organisms between populations.
It should be similar with languages — the societies that speak them get separated, and the language they speak evolves separately in different directions to become mutually incomprehensible. Which, with the current state of communication, is only likely to happen if humans become an interplanetary or an intergalactic species. On the same planet, we have plenty of opportunities to mix together and talk to each other, which, were there a hypothetical common language, should prevent it from splitting into multiple languages.
Consider a major modern language. It will contain multiple jargons/slangs/argots that are barely comprehensible to each other (e.g. the medical jargon, or the physics jargon, or Cockney rhyming slang, and so on); and yet they contain a large mutually comprehensible common core that makes television, radio, shopping, conversations between strangers, and so on possible.
That is an assumption. In this day and age of globalism, multiculturalism and fast technology advancement the measurement of geographically distance for creating a split can paradoxically be an inverse.
Two groups of people can live next to each other geographically but have hard time understanding each other and not only that both can be uninterested in changing that.
What this means is that you can live geographically at one point and share nothing with those around you but communicate to galaxies far away far away with people you do.
Isn't this description also an assumption? Do you have an example of this? Groups of people who have the same language, but have hard time understanding each other? The closest I can think of is dialects, e.g. regional dialects of British English or British English as opposed to Australian English or South African English, or Australian English; but again, they are mutually comprehensible, and the more cultural exchange happens between these communities the more comprehensible they should be.
There are two obscure tribes found in a remote part of the North American continent in which this phenomenon can be observed. I believe one calls itself ‘the Democrats’ and the other ‘the Republicans’.
Would they? Or would they need to fork the language away from the common base?
Nuance and expression are produced by the speakers of the language having distinct experiences and finding distinct ways to express them.
Understanding other people doesn’t magically come from having the same language. It requires learning to understand their experiences.
One does not simply fork a language :-) There must be a strong centrifugal (nationalist, separatist) political force for people to do so.
> Nuance and expression are produced by the speakers of the language having distinct experiences and finding distinct ways to express them.
Yes. Take a fisherman, a doctor, a frontend web developer, a fashion model, or a homeless beggar. They all have vastly different experiences. They all, however, can speak the same natural language to talk to each other. That language has the power to encompass the experiences and the nuances of all these different groups of people. I would not understand the professional jargon of a fisherman or a fashion model, while the homeless beggar may not understand the professional jargon of a frontend web developer; but we will all share the same grammar and the same core vocabulary, so that we can communicate what we want when we occasionally bump into each other.
> Understanding other people doesn’t magically come from having the same language. It requires learning to understand their experiences.
I am not sure what this means, and I am not after that kind of understanding anyway. I would be plenty happy if people shared the same native language when speaking at web conferences or writing documentation. Or if I could go to a shop anywhere and buy what I need, without resorting to a ridiculous pantomime; or listen to news, or to stop announcements in the public transport, or chat with a stranger, and lots of other small mundane things that we use our language for. I have no desire to understand the experiences of the most part of the humanity anyway; only some that I am interested in.
Nobody is arguing that a common language wouldn’t make mundane everyday transactions more convenient.
The argument is that a significant range of expression, nuance, culture and even experience would be lost in service of your goal of easier to use public transport, shopping etc.
It’s fine for you not to be interested in the experiences of the most part of humanity. Let’s just not pretend that there is a trade-off that many people do care about.
> Let’s just not pretend that there is a trade-off
There are several assumptions behind this position.
One, that there are human experiences that require a very particular natural language to be expressed. That you need a whole unique system of phonology, morphology, syntax, etc. to be able to express your experience. I am not sure that this is the case.
The other is that the co-existence of a multitude of languages allows us to capture and communicate human experiences better.
Finally, as the life goes on, and the language — any language — evolves, we lose access to the previously expressed experiences anyway. So one language or many, we won't preserve human experiences.
You might think it's a problem you can remedy by borrowing words from other languages until you have all the concepts. But it's not that simple. Languages are a whole ecosystem -- words, idioms, culture, ways of seeing and being, grammars -- they come together into an inimitable whole. The whole system is like those words; if you cannot have it, you lose ways of seeing the world.
Borrowing words still loses things -- it loses connections and connotations. Maybe I don't need the German "handschuh" (hand-shoe) because I have "glove", but I gain something by the perspective even if the literal meaning is the same. A favorite word of mine from ancient Greek is apo-kara-dokia -- it means eager, expectant watchfulness, that feeling the moment the lights go low and the movie is about to start, but sustained and persistent, like watching the tunnel at the airport waiting for someone you love to arrive, waiting and knowing they will. Like "handshoe", it has a literal breakdown -- "watching from the head" -- that captures those wide eyes and forward leaning alertness in the moment. English has "anticipation" or any number of shabby substitutes, but there's no competing with the Greek.
You can't just add onto vocabulary endlessly in one language. English doesn't have 'handshoes' precisely because it does have 'gloves', and it doesn't have 'watching-from-the-head' precisely because it does have anticipation. Words die out if you don't use them, and you lose whole ways of seeing the world.
Another thing you lose is when one word has two meanings, but they're really sort of related. For example, ancient Greek 'pharmacon' means "drugs" (like pharmacy), but it also means "sorcery", and I very much enjoy the connection that those are sort of subjectively similar things. The more expansive concept doesn't have an equivalent in English, and I'm the poorer for it -- but the richer for another language having taught me to see things that way.
It's easy to explain with words. It's harder to explain with grammar. But you encounter the same phenomenon. Some languages have tenses and cases with more precise or less precise or just different meanings that the ones you grew up with -- and like the different words drawing bigger or smaller or just different circles around concepts, they give you another window into thinking about the world.
But it all works together. The breaking-down-and-constructing aspect of German as a language is related to the way Germans are given to engineering, and the way German philosophers approach the world. If you encounter them in something other than their native language, you miss something of the whole. Translators will sometimes borrow words to try to fill the gap, but it's a poor substitute. Likewise, the logical precision and colorful concepts of ancient Greek inform the way its epic poets and ancient philosophers moved through the world -- and again, they are poorer in translation.
Even idioms enrichen. The Chinese "Heaven is high and the emperor is far away" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heaven_is_high_and_the_emperor... -- is so very Chinese in experience, and the fact that the Chinese saying itself is a pithy four words makes it work all the better in the context in which it is apropos. If we lost the Chinese language and its experience and culture, perhaps we could still say literally the same thing, but could not say quite exactly this, not with all its force of experience and history and character. And we would be poorer.
Languages and cultures and philosophies and histories and environments all feed back on each other, and they are this phenomenon of creating ways of seeing things, happening over and over in many contexts, building into a cohesive whole. This is why they are valuable to study and valuable to preserve.