Comment by mercuryrising | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mercuryrising | Hacker News Reader

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Here's a better link to the actual project. http://www.endangeredlanguages.com/

This is really awesome. One of my good friends is a linguist, and when I first started learning about languages, I couldn't figure out what all the hype was about. Yeah languages are dying... So what? A single language where I could communicate with anyone in the world would be the best, wouldn't it?

A language is like a toolbox for idea transmission, we want to share what we see on the inside, and language is one of our best ways to do it. It's the most universal, it's one of the first things we learn, and it has the ability to incite the most powerful imagery (books vs. a movie).

Say a language is the average mean of a group of people's ability to speak to one another. These people were likely geographically isolated and their language developed on it's own, they saw things in the world and described them with their language. Their culture, their ideas, their perceptions of the world are all encoded into their language. When all the native speakers of a language die, we lose more than just the language, we lose the insights that the language carried, a language that was likely crafted over many thousands of years.

Take for instance color blindness. Attempt to explain to someone with color blindness what colors look like. It will never work, they will never experience what you experience, but they can share your experience through your description of colors, they can imagine what the world could be like if you give a good enough description. We lose analogies for human thoughts when languages die, and if we ever want to begin to understand what a consciousness is, preserving these analogies is an absolute necessity. We could wonder for millions of years whether or not a language could ever come to be that didn't have counting words, but luckily we found the Piranha[1] that do just that [2]. It's like all the species we're losing in the rain forests, what if the cure for cancer was present in one of the now-extinct mushrooms? What if we never could find the cure for cancer because we just didn't have that mushroom? It likely won't happen for cancer, but for consciousness we need every piece of information that we can get.

[1] http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/04/16/070416fa_fact_...

[2] http://phys.org/news/2012-02-math-words.html

There are definitely many important things about languages, but I think attempts to preserve traditional language communities have significant risks and downsides as well, if we're talking about maintaining communities of people speaking them living in the present day, as opposed to scholarly study/preservation (the latter of course has little downside besides time/effort). I'm one generation removed from a dying/nearly-dead language myself, and am vaguely regretful not to be speaking it, but also feel a bit lucky to have "escaped" from it into a larger, less-dying language community, and in particular to have (mostly) escaped the cultural aspects of being an aggrieved minority fighting to preserve some ancient spark of glory.

My grandfather's first language was Pontic, a sibling of modern Greek (both descended from ancient Greek, but not mutually intelligible), and it could be fairly called the language of his community even once almost all of them were, erm, "displaced" to Greece (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_genocide). But he was actually pretty against transmitting it to future generations, because of the strong cultural conservatism that he found among a large proportion of those trying to keep it alive. As you say, it's not just a language, but everything it's tied up in isn't good, either: it was often tied up in things like a strong purist/anti-outsiders/anti-ethnic-mixing mindset, a general anti-West, anti-modern-world outlook, and irredentist nationalism (recapture the old homeland from the colonialist Turks, etc.). He'd just as rather his kids grew up as modern Greeks and lose some of that baggage, in part because he was politically left-ish, and in part because spending your whole life looking for ways to preserve/avenge the 1910s, instead of moving on to a focus on being a Greek citizen in the late 20th century, seemed unproductive. That definitely loses something, I'll admit, but I'm not sure the alternative is better; to some extent you run the risk of having people live their lives as some kind of frozen-in-time living museum, a box I'm glad not to be living in.

Some of these attitudes are familiar with the Irish language aswell.

I'm around 2 generations post-Gaeilge (Irish). Phew...

> We lose analogies for human thoughts when languages die

Exactly. For all it's worth, once I started reading John le Carré or Raymond Chandler novels in original English (I'm a native Romanian speaker) I could never go back to reading them in translation, not that the translations were bad, they weren't, but the texts just didn't have the same feeling.

And when you start reading (and partially comprehending) poetry written in a foreign language is a whole different ball-game.

> For all it's worth, once I started reading John le Carré or Raymond Chandler novels in original English (I'm a native Romanian speaker) I could never go back to reading them in translation, not that the translations were bad, they weren't, but the texts just didn't have the same feeling.

I don't think this argumentation is correct. There are two things that you are assuming -

(1) The authors would not have been capable of expressing their view with similar levels of 'feel' if they were not born to an English Speaking language hence imparting the 'feel' to English and not just to the authors

(2) You are not feeling the 'feel' more intensely because you are not a native English speaker hence the language and wordplay are less obvious to you as those who speak English primarily.

Secondly as beautiful as the description of multiple languages it may be in GP, I fail to see why won't people adapt the one single language to have extensions - words that describe feelings, emotions and expressions not available originally. Any modern language is, in fact, not the same as it was say a 100 years ago. It has been modified to add newly invented objects like for Computers and Televisions, or newly discovered ones like Idli and Dosa. I think that our desire of saving languages is not pragmatic but aesthetic.

> 1) The authors would not have been capable of expressing their view with similar levels of 'feel' if they were not born to an English Speaking language hence imparting the 'feel' to English and not just to the authors

No, paganel is saying that translating from one language to another results in less 'feel', not that 'feel' depends on English.

> You are not feeling the 'feel' more intensely because you are not a native English speaker hence the language and wordplay are less obvious to you as those who speak English primarily.

The parent comment says that the original English is better, not worse. Thus, there is more 'feel' in the original than in translation.

My argument is that if the original material was written in the language that translation is in, as will be the case if there is one universal language, there would have been no loss of 'feel'.

At least as important (and actually more important in my opinion) is that we are losing languages at a rapid clip due to urbanization and mass media just as we are beginning to explore what language is at a fundamental level. The idea that a language could possibly have an OVS (object-verb-subject) order was almost laughable among linguists until very recently. There are elements of grammar that have only really been explored in a relative handful of major languages, and many nuanced things are still hiding in highly idiomatic expressions that are holdovers from earlier stages of existing languages. Trying to find out what makes language tick — what just may be what makes humanity human — with an ever-diminishing sample size is like trying to do astrophysics after everything but the local galactic cluster has receded beyond view.

I can't understand why http://www.endangeredlanguages.com/ is always trying to redirect me to /nojs and say it needs javascript. With blocked redirects I can navigate that site just fine. It clearly works without JS, expect it lacks Google Plus and something else.

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