Comment by neilshev | Hacker News Reader

Comment by neilshev | Hacker News Reader

I always pay attention to efforts of restoration for endangered languages. Unfortunately, it seems to be an awfully difficult thing to do. In my home country, Ireland, we have been trying for around a century to restore/preserve Irish. But it has gone fairly poorly. It seems that falling below a critical mass of speakers, the language is nearly always considered 'useless'/'ancient'.

It seems to be very common across countries to have a bi-lingual population. But this is almost always the case where the native language is globally uncommon. So the population see the value of learning English/Spanish etc.

It also appears to be possible to keep languages healthy, active when there are many competing, but regional languages, not used anywhere else.

But it seems near impossible to revive a language where the majority already speak a globally useful language.

The alternative, unfortunately, seems to be to force the language through authoritarianism, like in the case of hebrew.

Irish is different as it was largely dead by the 19th century.

On the other hand, Mayan languages and Nauhatul remain actively spoken across Southern Mexico and Guatemala.

I remember a decade ago the USCIS went on a hiring binge for Mayan interpreters becuase there was an influx of Guatemalan undocumented immigrants due to the economic collapse following their domestic instability.

> Irish is different as it was largely dead by the 19th century.

Absolute bollocks. Irish is still a living language in daily use today , albeit the last monoglot almost certainly died before 1950. Of the Celtic languages Cornish is at best a zombie, revived on the basis of its incredibly close relationship to Breton. Manx has been on life support or at death’s door for 70 years, but there was still at least one fluent nerve speaker when it became something more passed on in classes than in daily life. Welsh is in relatively good health and Irish and Scots Gaelic are living languages used in daily life in small, marginal areas.

> On the other hand, Mayan languages and Nauhatul remain actively spoken across Southern Mexico and Guatemala.

Yes. The Spanish spread them with their empire after the empires that first spoke them were conquered.

By the 20th century. The Irish language was quite alive and Irish speakers made up a majority in several major areas before the Great Famine (which obviously and not at all surprisingly disproportionally affected Irish speakers due to the pseudo-genocidal policies of the British government)

Makes sense. I thought it had died out by the early 20th century, but based on census data it didn't die out but did see a rapid decline.

That said, I was thinking post-famine.

A counter to this that I'm aware of is Ukrainian and Polish. The soviet union tried to exterminate both during its heyday yet they've mostly completely revived despite the effort.

Hindi is probably another example of a language that the british empire tried to exterminate yet it has seen a pretty decent resurgence.

I don't think any of these languages really stayed around via force. They simply had a critical mass of speakers that never went away.

For Irish and Welsh, the British empire arguably committed a genocide to eliminate them. It similarly happened to native american tribes in the US and canada.

By my estimation, the two things that kill a language is the death of the native speakers of that language (discussed above) and the evolution of a language past what native speakers would recognize (Old/proto english and Latin for example).

> Ukrainian and Polish. The soviet union tried to exterminate both

Poland was not in the USSR. Polish remained the working language in the Polish People's Republic

> Hindi is probably another example of a language that the british empire tried to exterminate

Hindi-Urdu was never exterminated by the British. In fact, it was the British that helped make it the de facto language in most of South Asia.

Before the British, Dari was the working language of administration. When the British began co-opting local administrations in the 19th century, Hindi-Urdu was used as the primary register, and my family has ancestral documents showing this change (Dari/Farsi to Urdu/Hindi to English for land documents).

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The only dead language that I can think of that was revived was Hebrew, but modern Hebrew is entirely different from that which was spoken millennia ago, and is a mixture of litigurical Hebrew, Arabic (plenty of Mizrahi influence along with the Sabra movement during the start of Israel), Russian (heavily used for mechanical terms), and German (heavily used to scientific terms).

Parts of Poland were annexed by the soviets and became part of Ukraine and Belarus.

Completely irrelevant to whether the Polish language and cultural identity was suppressed. Most of historic Prussia is now part of Poland. No one claims that German was suppressed in East Germany.

> Parts of Poland were annexed by the soviets and became part of Ukraine and Belarus

I don't want to touch that hot potato, but that region was extremely diverse, with a large Belarusian, Lithuanian, Yiddish (before WW2 sadly), German, and Ukrainian speaking populations. I don't think any ethnic group had an actual definitive majority in that region until after WW2.

Well yes but people who identified as Polish (e.g. upper/middle class and urban residents) were deported or a given a chance to leave west.

> The only dead language that I can think of that was revived was Hebrew, but modern Hebrew is entirely different from that which was spoken millennia ago, and is a mixture of litigurical Hebrew, Arabic (plenty of Mizrahi influence along with the Sabra movement during the start of Israel), Russian (heavily used for mechanical terms), and German (heavily used to scientific terms).

Entirely different my ass. Modern Hebrew is closer to liturgical Hebrew than the language of Shakespeare is to that of Britney Spears. There are some areas with a great deal of borrowing of vocabulary but you could say the same thing of modern Russian or Japanese and no one would say they were “entirely different” from the language of 1800.

> Entirely different my ass

I do NOT appreciate that tone.

.להזדיין

> Modern Hebrew is closer to liturgical Hebrew than the language of Shakespeare is to that of Britney Spears.

Modern English and Shakespearean or Medieval English are very different, and I feel the difference between modern colloquial Hebrew and liturgical Hebrew are similar.

תודה על הדעה. אני מסיים כאן

USSR didn't try to "exterminate" Ukrainian, where did you get this? We spoke Ukrainian all my childhood, it was taught at school, there were TV shows, magazines and newspapers in Ukrainian. It was alive and very actively used, at least in 80's.

I had a Ukrainian friend and I thought he'd told me that Russian was strongly encouraged. I thought the state had a stronger policy towards making sure everyone spoke russian.

I just looked it up and it appears that wasn't something the USSR ever really did.

It would have been the normal thing to do. But the USSR went the other way because it was committed to the idea of being several separate soviet republics, so it pushed the idea of Ukrainian language and culture as something distinct from Russian in order to present the idea of a Soviet Ukrainian Republic as something distinct from the Soviet Russian Republic.

It was "strongly encouraged" in the way that English is "strongly encouraged" in any US company. 3/4 of the company can speak Hindi but in all hands meeting everyone speaks English because it's the only language that everyone in the room understands and speaks (poorly, lol).

I know some Ukrainians who say the exact opposite— Russian was taught in schools, all the big important jobs went to Russians, at firms where Russian was spoken, government business was conducted in Russian, and so on. It’s curious how these accounts can be so different, so I’m going to choose to believe the folks I’ve met in person on many occasions.

Russian was and is used because it's a common denominator, like English here in Canada. French is actually forced into our education, media and public jobs. But yet, English is a standard language in companies, government and so on. Does it mean that Canada "exterminating" French?

> I’m going to choose to believe the folks I’ve met

It's totally up to you who to believe. Just make sure that what they say matches reality. And reality is that Russian is still used in majority of Ukrainian companies as standard language, even after 30+ years of independence. We work with contractors from Ukraine and they all communicate in Russian perfectly well.

> A counter to this that I'm aware of is Ukrainian and Polish. The soviet union tried to exterminate both during its heyday yet they've mostly completely revived despite the effort.

Ukrainian and Belarusian were both standardised and made official languages of education and administration under the early Soviet Union, with substantial state investment. Policies did later shift toward Russification, especially under Stalin, but even then Ukrainian continued to be used widely. There was no consistent Soviet attempt to “exterminate” Polish. Poland remained outside the USSR, and while the Soviets repressed Polish culture during occupations, they never pursued linguistic elimination in the way the Russian Empire once had.

> Hindi is probably another example of a language that the british empire tried to exterminate yet it has seen a pretty decent resurgence.

Hindi/Urdu/Hindustani was one of the main administrative and cultural languages under the Raj, particularly in the north. It coexisted with English and was used extensively by colonial authorities. Far from trying to wipe it out, the British helped entrench it across large parts of India. In Congress India, Hindi has been promoted heavily by the state, often to the frustration of non-Hindi speaking regions.

> I don't think any of these languages really stayed around via force. They simply had a critical mass of speakers that never went away.

Agreed.

> For Irish and Welsh, the British empire arguably committed a genocide to eliminate them.

“Arguably.” In Ireland, British policy during the famine amounted to criminal negligence or depraved indifference, but not genocide in the strict sense. In Wales, there was systematic suppression of the language, especially in education, but nothing close to genocide.

... No? I'm Polish, Soviet Union never tried to exterminate Polish language!

Russian Empire, possibly, but not Soviets. Are you confusing those periods?

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