New Mexico is losing a form of Spanish spoken nowhere else
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I mean, this dialect formed because Northern New Mexico was so isolated. The Manhattan Project changed a lot of that. Suddenly, Los Alamos labs and Sandia labs connected New Mexico with the rest of the world. It wasn't as isolated anymore.
People have told me I could learn it, but I've tried. It's hard when I talk with my family, I'd rather have an adult conversation now rather than basically a preschool level one to learn the language. They say to really learn it, you have to immerse yourself. I lived with my grandmother for several months once while working at Sandia Labs. She insisted on speaking English with me, she was stubborn about it, and I was having a hard enough time understanding her in English.
Let me leave you with a funny story. My uncle had hired a contractor to help with his house. The contractor spoke common Spanish. And he angrily confronted my uncle in Spanish: "You stole my belt!" or at least that's what my uncle heard. "[You stole] mi cinta!" However, in New Mexico "cinta" means belt, but in Mexico it's short for "cinta métrica" or tape measure. (or so I'm told, I don't speak Spanish!) My uncle assured him he did not steal it and went ahead and gave him one of his own.
I have the same reasoning. I speak a language that is not necessary anymore even in the place my parents came from, since the national language and English are what official business is done in.
My grandparents taught me the language, but none of my cousins have a similar grasp of the language. I still speak it with the older generations in my family, but they do not live near me to interact often enough with my kids, so I would effectively be teaching them a language they will have no use for by the time they are adults.
Dad wouldn’t talk to me in Spanish when I was little - I only heard him speaking it when talking to family on the phone.
Add that to the fact that until I was 9 we were away from the family and I don’t have much
At least my grandparents would talk to me in Spanish so what’s in there is all because of them.
And same experience with HS Spanish - they talk funny this doesn’t sound like anything I know.
More to the point: Speaking multiple languages expands your ability to express and describe everything, which leads to having more variety in your lines of thought. Different languages have different ways of thinking, thus speaking multiple languages nurtures an open mind.
Source: Me, native English and Japanese speaker.
For example, I remember after finding out what "tsukkomi" and "boke" are in Manzai I started seeing it play itself out in English conversations with my friends. It's kind of weird seeing a concept play out that was there the whole time, but you re-shaped your thinking to observe and categorize it.
Anecdata: I'm a native English speaker but as a little kid I was completely bilingual in French (dad was a USAF officer stationed at a NATO base in rural France; my sisters and I did our first few years of school in the local village schools). I've long had the impression that native fluency in both languages had benefits; it certainly gave me easy A+ grades in high-school and college French classes, but otherwise I couldn't begin to articulate what those benefits might be.
These days my French is pretty rudimentary, but my wife and I like to watch some English-subtitled French TV series on Netflix and Acorn, e.g., Call My Agent, Candice Renoir, and Munch; it's fun to recognize idioms and sometimes not even need the subtitles.
Besides, my mom speaks only English anyways. I don't know any bilingual kids I grew up with that ended up having a hard time with English.
I think that if you want to, you could learn "standard" Spanish and still have an understandable conversation with you family. At least for me (I'm Mexican) the people in those videos were easier to understand compared to the average Cuban Spanish, for example, which is one of hardest variants for me.
And the differences in vocabulary is something you'd have to face regardless of the language variant. For example, I usually call a belt "cinturón" except for martial arts belts which I always call "cinta", but right now I just searched for "cinta negra" images and all the results were black adhesive tapes and black ribbons.
But yeah, doing so would take many years of "talking like a preschooler", there's no escape from that.
> [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdAGJz4NvAg
As a native spanish speaker these are completely understandable, I wouldn't even call them a "different form of Spanish". Sure, they occasionally use a word or structure I wouldn't, but it's all very clear. No more different to my ears than variations in the language from country to country.
> average Cuban Spanish, for example, which is one of hardest variants for me
Interesting. Do you have some sample videos of what's difficult? I don't find Cuban Spanish at all different, but I did have a few Cuban friends growing up so perhaps my ear is used to it from that.
Some examples:
from Granada: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvpHcX2Ksac
from Cadiz (which they really pronounce Ca'i): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRh9OjCW6Y8
The Penitentes, an ascetic Catholic group. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penitentes_(New_Mexico)
The Crypto-Jews, usually thought to be a hundreds-years-old vestige of Judaism fleeing the Inquisition. The truth is probably more complicated. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2000/12/mistake...
New Mexico is also home to a bunch of different Native American languages and cultures, many of which did not have the trauma of being forced to move to new land and thus have a different relationship with their history.
(This post feels clumsy of me, apologies if as an outsider I mis-characterized something.)
In the same way security researchers are not responsible for security vulnerabilities, but may take heat for pointing them out.
That being said, just because they try to appropriate the terms doesn't mean it has to work. They can be reappropriated back to their original meaning.
Moreover, when unopposed, nazi and antisemitism do not die out. Instead, they get stronger and larger in numbers. It is an actual ideology and those who believe it are actively trying to spread it.
It is not "reanalyzed" as such. It is that antisemitic use it as such.
New Mexico's a strange place. Technically "New" Mexico is older than regular Mexico by over two centuries in that New Mexico earned its name as early as 1563.
Same for pigs (Cerdo, chancho) and pork (puerco).
Did you know that the X-Men's Gambit has pronounced the word "cher" incorrectly every single time he's ever used it in mass media? From Shreveport to Grand Isle, we pronounce it "sha." Usually used as a term of endearment for a male to a female, we also use it when we agree with anyone with the phrase "Mais yeah, cher!"
Saying there should be fewer spoken languages is frankly a very unempathetic thing to say.
Having less major cultures has the same effect on potential conflict
You're basically asking people to sacrifice their lives to a less useful language, a mere social utility, so you can maintain a sort of "cultural linguistic zoo" ... and yes you are by this analogy relegating them to the role of animals in a theme park.
Think of what that entails: "No, you can't be taught in the language that will get you into university and get you the best jobs. You must dedicate a significant portion portion of your life to something we already know is a dead end for you personally, because we have decided that it is more important that a legacy tool be kept alive than that you prosper as a person."
You've inverted the role of language. Language is what we use to communicate the things we feel, we gain essentially nothing from the words themselves. Even when you think you're communicating something very specific with the words you are using, there's little reason to believe that the person on the other end of the conversation really gets what you're trying to communicate. In a practical sense, you can easily communicate, but these deep, almost mystical, meanings you're implying... it's just not really something that can be known.
The is the point of the indeterminacy of translation illustrated by W.V. Quine.
Consider this: each additional language improves humanity's capacity to evolve and shift, a particularly valuable trait considering the pace of environmental and socioeconomic change. More languages increases the likelihood that humanity will continue to survive and maybe even thrive. (Reality one hundred, one thousand, and ten thousand years from now will each demand different models or languages.)
I am personally doubtful that humanity will be able to succeed for more than a few hundred years as a mono-culture. It needs variance (multiple languages) and experimentation (new languages) to evolve and respond to change.
My argument is not about individuals speaking multiple languages, it's about different groups of people adopting different models of reality and trying them out.
Closer to home, I see my Asian American friends who never grasped the language of their original culture being frustrated that they cannot pass down the language to their kids. A couple we are close with is a Taiwanese husband and Korean wife. The husband knows virtually no Chinese and the wife knows virtually no Korean. They want to teach their son both, but can’t.
I suppose this is the start of the process of how we ended up with the current generations of say, Italian Americans or German Americans or Irish Americans who mostly lost the ability to speak the language of their ancestors several generations ago.
Yes, they can. It is very easy.
Each parent only speaks to the child in their own language. That is all.
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The children of immigrants lose languages because their parents are ignorant of basic pedagogy (in most cases the parents just raise the kids in English, then get mad they don't magically know the language they were barely exposed to.)
Presumably, they think they should have full conversations with each other in Korean and Chinese to expose the kid - however as a baby understands that they speak all 3 languages, the baby would default to the most common one (English).
The key here is to establish boundaries of language use e.g.: "I speak Chinese to dad. I speak Korean to mom." The parents should not respond to the child in English - they have to preserve the boundary to encourage the kid to use the other languages.
If one of them uses English with the child, it will greatly weaken or ruin the effect. Adding cartoons, other speakers etc. for these languages helps but isn't as fundamentally necessary as this. You can even add multiple nannies which only speak their own language to the child. (There is some amount of regular exposure needed, but that's not an issue for 2 parents.) The child will pick up English from other children and tv.
If the grandparents lived close, that could sort of be an option, but apparently they do not.
And yet I don't recall ever having heard of a discrete NM dialect.
TIL!
As a Deaf person, this is readily apparent in local flavors of ASL. I noticed this with deaf people I came into contact with at RIT as a student there. There were many slight variations. You could tell who were new to the school, or those who's been there for a while. The ones new to the school were still doing it the way they learned at home, and the ones who has been there for 2-3 years were signing in a similar style. It was interesting to see.
Language is a living, constantly evolving, thing - you can't 'preserve' it any more than you would preserve a living tree in a book.
I don't know about languages, but for dialects, I think the answer is the same as the number of people who have died over the centuries.
No one speaks a language exactly like anyone else, so ultimately, every person has a slightly different dialect. There's no way to preserve them all. Your analogy about preserving living trees in a book is apt.
I’ve always found it amusing they grew up six miles from each other but met in California.
>thought to be Tlaxcalan Indians, who spoke Náhuatl, the lingua franca of the Aztec Empire.
Why would a dialect of Spanish in southern Spain have indigenous native American words?
They can be found in a recognizable form even as far away as Finnish, Korean, Indonesian, Japanese and Emoji.
Chocolate from Xocolatl
Tomato from Tomatl
But I guess I was under the impression what was meant was a small area of southern Spain and its language was more heavily affected that loanwords. Perhaps structure too not just using words for items that didn't exist in the Old World.
Such as "babuchas" for sneakers/slippers instead of zapatillas.
But of course lots of words from the New World's Native Trives arrived to Spain: poncho, chocolate, coyote, cacahuete...
Say what now? Israelis don't speak Hebrew to "decrease migration", they speak Hebrew because it's their ancestral language with a greater than 3,000 year history.
Mandatory Palestine was not a country at that time, and had nothing unifying it.
The reason all those migrants switched to Hebrew is that it was the only common tongue among all of them.
Why in the world would they pick a European language? If anything maybe Yiddish, but as you write there were lots of people from Arab countries who didn't speak it.
But everyone knew Hebrew. It's really the only language that made sense. And it was not extinct, everyone knew it. Maybe it wasn't their cradle language, but everyone could make themselves understood in it.
You have this weird subtext that the place was Arab and Jews came in - that's not accurate at all, Jews never left Israel (Palestine). The migrants joined existing Jews.
There were always Jews there, and they didn't push anyone out - the land was very sparsely inhabited. The incoming Jews bought land like anyone would when they move someplace.
The Arabs responded with massacres, instead of just living near their new neighbors. If they had not done that history would be quite different.
Is the bog life really worth preserving? You basically just want to preserve these weird cultures for the sake of it, not because anyone benefits from it. Obviously children want electricity or to speak an actually used language rather than follow the meme culture. Why should we force them to suffer just to preserve that suffering?
Preserving the culture and language doesn't lead to the things you are describing. Those results are separate.
Examples you should look to are how French has been preserved and protected in Montreal, Creole in the South, Catalan in Spain, on and on. Those places have managed to preserve their language and culture while also improving their standard and quality of life on par with modern western standards.
If the world ever turns into grey goo, it won't be because of an out of control AI, it will be because actual people have willed it into the world.