Study uncovers lost 'golden age' of languages
news.yale.edu
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There really isn't any good incentive to learn a language with very few speakers, since unless you already know a speaker, you really can't practice the real language. People were a few years ago at least hoping llms could help preserve the languages, but more most of them, there just aren't enough samples for any real preservation. I knew some dudes in college that were linguists that worked on recording native speakers of endangered languages, and while I hoped they would succeed, I never really had much hope of it working.
You could probably convince me to join a hypothetical “Worshipful society of Gentlemen speaking Sumerian”.
Learn Sanskrit. You were writing in a descendant language just now. If you learnt the roots, you would understand the descendants better. And they are your tools, and knowing your tools is important.
Other more obscure languages? Well, as implied, languages are related... So studying the network clarifies the whole.
Sanskrit entered into Greek, Greek into Latin, Latin into English.
Edit: downvoter, express yourself clearly. I cannot see how the above sentence could be considered false, apart from gross interpretations of the chosen terms.
Again: you have a relation with "jñāna, gnō̃́sis, gnosco, knowledge"; then you have relations in other dimensions (jña, jñāti, gnṓmōn, gnṓmōn...): the awareness of those details enriches the awareness of the language. That is through the relation between Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, post-Latin - it is just there. What is contended is not clear.
English has borrowed words from many languages, as all but the most isolated languages have.
You are taking 'ancestor' in a strict technical sense, which was clearly not my intention.
> though both English and Sanskrit do share a common ancestry several thousand years ago
And those roots can be found and recognized in the subsequent languages, and there lies the value.
You did not express that clearly enough then.
It's just that I cannot allocate the safest amount of effort in composing. I thought it was clear enough.
These languages are indeed relatives, literally part of the same family, but we usually distinguish whether they are lineal ancestors or not. If you said "Julia is your grandmother" when Julia was actually the person's aunt, that person might get very confused about your claim!
People's aunts do often have a cultural effect on them, but we can still be more specific and distinguish them from their grandmothers.
The literal matter (of direct inheritance) was meaningless to me in the composition, because the whole point was not and is not "what took from what": the whole point is the contribution that those languages give in the understanding of the current languages they informed.
Only, simply, non technically, that Sanskrit literature happened, then (non-committal irrelevant sketchy for-purpose-of-representation "then") Greek literature happened and you can find the Sanskrit terms modified (not literally them Sanskrit terms, more crisply the presence of the roots) into the Greek terms, and then (again) Latin literature happened, and you can find the Sanskrit and Greek terms modified into the Latin ones, etc.
Phenomenon: "one [as-if] entered into the other"; reality: "a common Language is revealed in their terminology"; the important part: "we can better define the terminology of current languages that share that property through the consideration of the languages that _substantially_ constitute their roots".
Blutly, this was not obvious, and what you suggested would have been equally true if you'd said:
Learn Lithuanian. You were writing in a descendant language just now. If you learnt the roots, you would understand the descendants better.
It is that consideration of the several implementations (so, include Sanskrit - it augments the material importantly) clarifies the cones of meanings in the roots.
Like Greek and Latin, Sanskrit is an anciently written language associated with major states and ‘civilizations’ - and, crucially, is like Greek and Latin in that it is still remembered if only by some thin intellectual or priestly stratum of societies.
So by use of those three, Indo European unity could be especially well validated by pure textual scholarship (especially if the scholar was British or German and thus on another branch). It is surprising as the result is intuitively scientific — how could I arrive at it if all I do is read and write?! - and was indeed of massive importance to the framing of Darwin’s quite different scientific enterprise, which needed different evidence .
but "the thing with" Sanskrit is also about the prominence of its literature. The wealth of relations between the terms in those languages is enlightening, and there is an important literary corpus behind it.
(I am not quite prepared about Kurdish literature.)
--
Edit:
> still remembered if only by some thin intellectual or priestly stratum of societies
You are "setting the bar" so incredibly low...
I started learning it because it is India's civilizational language and I wanted to read the itihāsas in the original.
Do languages have value in themselves?
Gilgamesh deserves that. I'm only a beginner but the refinement of the poetry is already obvious even as someone who doesn't know the language.
Euphony was very important to the Mesopotamian poets. They liked rhythms and alliteration and assonance. And the late editions of Gilgamesh reflect about two thousand years of iterative improvement:
> ilū işinu iriša. ilū kima zūmbē eli bēl niqi iptaḫru. ("The gods could smell the fragrance. They gathered around the sacrificiant like flies.")
The ş is probably an affricate like ts, š is sh, q like in Arabic, ḫ like German ch. Vowels like in Spanish or the phonetic alphabet. Macron means a long vowel. Stress on the penultimate. (Edit: fixed ş / š)
It really rolls off the tongue, doesn't it?
> ibri kudanu ťardu akkannu ša šadi nimru ša şēri ("my friend the swift driven mule, wild ass of the mountains, panther of the wild")
> ibri ša arammušu danniš ittīa ittallaku kalu marşāti ("my friend, whom I loved greatly, who journeyed with me through every hardship")
> ikšudāššu šimat ("fate overtook [him...]" the tablet breaks off here)
The very moral in Gilgamesh deserves that. "I went in a quest for immortality; I did not achieve it and came back, and while returning I saw in the distance the City I built, and I understood what my immortality was...".
(A "must" of an insight for engineers, architects, builders...)
In the Bible the city builder was Cain, and he built it because he was a criminal and needed protection from the world when he lost God's grace.
I.e., the message is that a city is a kind of protective exoskeleton or "safe space" when man becomes estranged from God (the Universe).
It's a story about man's fragility and ultimate futility.
A more orthodox interpretation is that Cain's line is the urban, civilization-creating line, you have metallurgy, music, cities, trade, all coming from that line. This is because Cain represented agriculture, whereas Abel represented cattle herding, thus nomadic, not rooted lifestyles.
After Cain killed Abel (e.g. sedentary agriculture replaced nomadism in most places), it was natural for Cain to build a city as he was not nomadic. It was not for "protection" from his fellow man, but merely the continuation of his choice to be a tiller of the soil rather than a wandering nomad. God's demand for Cain to be a "wanderer" in the land of "nod" ("literally 'land of wandering' in Hebrew") is thus the opposite of what Cain did -- he settled down and built a city. This creates a nice picture: Cain choose not to be a wanderer (nomadic cattle herder) but to be a farmer (settle in one place). God told him "You will be a wanderer" but then it says that Cain built a city. So is the message -- those who are rooted in one place on earth are spiritual wanderers, and those who wander are the rooted ones?
Of course everyone is free to read Genesis and get all sorts of meanings out of it, it is ultimately a personal exercise according to your own conscience, but when you say that your reading is the correct one and other people are "mistaken", then you better be able to back it up with some kind of consensus view.
FYI, more modern scholarship has noticed that the seven generations of Cain line up with the 7 "sages" in Sumerian accounts, these were the sages that came from the deep and taught the Sumerians agriculture, metallurgy, etc, and people have been exploring associations between the names of these sages and the names in the line of Cain.
Another interesting area of the study is that the lines of Shem are basically the same names as that of Cain, but Shem has three more figures. That certainly isn't an accident - the documentary hypothesis people say it is the same line, just copied over from different places, but that is an old view and I think a minority one. There are all sorts of discussions about that similarity.
No, it's the standard Christian exegesis.
That's not even Biblical, as God provides Cain with protection via the mark that he placed on Cain. The building of the city has, as I pointed out, nothing to do with self-protection from "loss of God's grace" (nowhere in the Bible does it say that Cain lost God's grace, and the mark itself as in act of grace to save Cain from being killed).
Let's look at standard Christian exegesis:
* Augustine provides the definitive patristic interpretation. According to Augustine, Cain building a city was an expression of his desire to remain tied to the land (a tiller of the soil) rather than a wanderer (cattle herding, as Abel). See The City of God (Book XV, Chapters 1 and 20). Augustine picks up on this as it is his own theme of the two cities: the earthly city (civitas terrena) and the heavenly city (civitas dei). Augustine says that Cain, as the first murderer, founded the earthly city, whereas Abel was a pilgrim and stranger who founded nothing on earth, but entered into the heavenly city.
* Later medieval commentators, such as Nicholas of Lyra and the Glossators, reinforced Augustine's interpretation, contrasting Cain's urbanization with the nomadic, tent-dwelling lifestyle of the patriarchs, accusing Cain of being worldly in his desires. E.g. it was an expression of Cain's desire, his teleos, and not a defense mechanism.
* Moving onto the reformation, in Lectures on Genesis, Luther views Cain as the archetype of the secular, worldly church opposed to the suffering church of Abel. Luther notes that while those who look for the heavenly city choose to dwell in tents as pilgrims, Cain builds a permanent habitation. Constructing a city represents an attempt to find rest, satisfaction, and permanence in the earthly sphere precisely because he is cut off from God.
* Looking at John Calvin, in Commentary on Genesis he also agrees with Augustine, arguing that Cain's establishment of a city marks the entrenchment of a society organized around immanent, earthly flourishing rather than faith.
Interestingly, some rabbinical commentators argue that in Lamech's grisly song "I have killed a man", that Lamech is talking about Cain -- e.g that Cain was murdered, accidentally, by Lamech, his descendant. The midrash in Genesis Rabbah is that the mark of Cain was a horn that grew out of Cain's head, and Lamech was a blind hunter who was guided by his son. The son saw a movement in the bushes and the horn, mistaking it for a wild animal, and Lamech fired his arrow, killing Cain. Thus God's grace extended only to seven generations. But Christian commentators do not argue for a seven generation time limit on God's protection, and assume Cain died of natural causes.
Exactly, and yet he still built a walled city. Why? For the same reason why Adam and Eve suddenly realized they were naked after falling from grace.
P.S. Neither Roman Catholics nor Protestants have anything approaching a standard Christian exegesis. Both traditions are way out there and are diverging significantly from Christianity.
That's not correct, in transcriptions of Akkadian š is pronounced sh (Heb. shin), ṣ (not ş) is pronounced ts (Heb. tsade), and there's also s, pronounced as regular s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laryngeal_theory#Pronunciation
I guess it's quite an imperfect analogy, because we have Akkadian writing (by people who actually spoke the language) and we have no equivalent at all for PIE.
People can decide to try to prevent dialects from forming and diverging
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_planning
but they have to actively work against it if they want to prevent it, and a lot of the common means of doing so historically have been pretty harsh (e.g. corporal punishment in schools for using disfavored varieties). I guess this is partly because the consensus that we should centralize and unify and standardize language, for all of its logistical and economic and cultural benefits, is mostly a central government/imperial metropole impulse rather than something that the general public is super-attracted to.
Standardizing language and letting it diverge both have cultural benefits! Just different ones. The standardization benefit is that more people can access a much larger body of culture without linguistic barriers and without needing translation or explanations, and cultural conversations can grow larger, with more direct participants in a given conversation or genre. The diversity benefit is that the language differences themselves can acquire, or mediate, cultural phenomena and cultural creativity.
English doesn't have a significant tradition of language planning the way that some of the continental European languages do, and this is posing a (minor) challenge to English's role as a global language, as there are sometimes genuine difficulties of intelligibility between English varieties, and again I think those differences are getting wider on average rather than narrower. Then again, if we did have such a tradition, it doesn't mean everyone would care to follow it... it's not as though everyone in Latin America cares about what the RAE says (or that they refrain from having meaningfully different vocabulary and grammar between Latin American regions!), or even that everyone in Austria or Switzerland necessary cares what Duden says.
Not to be "gotcha", but out of true curiosity: may I ask if you speak multiple languages fluently?
Different languages afford different ways of thinking and speaking? Just talk to a translator in works of literature or poetry. Some languages are more verb-y or noun-y, and so are more about getting between things than being something. Or have more or less ambiguity due to tonal systems.
And while ambiguity can create miscommunication when misused, it also allows for different minds to hear one thing, but interpret it in ways more personal to them. When used pro-socially (and not manipulatively), this can afford cooperation that might not otherwise be possible. Saying things while leaving some things unsaid, that has utility if our collective project is certain forms of synchrony -- we can sync on some things while the ambiguity allows asynchrony to remain unresolved in less important dimensions, etc
Imho monoculture is toward death, not toward something golden.
yeah, I speak 4 languages fluently, and can get through more with a dictionary
>Imho monoculture is toward death, not toward something golden
Same language does not mean same culture. Singapore and USA both speak English, yet the cultures are different.
The same culture can be represented in different languages, as translators prove by their existence.
Just as being able to play an instrument or dance or actually reading literature from other cultures, even in English.
It's interesting to think about the next generation being taught both their home language and the new language, they're the intermediate generation that can bridge the two worlds, and the generation after that being only taught the new language, and how that process might work.
Cuz if it's got to be between 1/3000, it can't be 1000 or 3000, right?
Between can of course mean (1000,3000) or [1000,3000], right?
Just poking fun at the attempt to remove ambiguity including ambiguity.
It has never been easier for a human being to take a corpus and refactor it in a fashion that they can understand it without making an energetic investment in constructing a new ontology; or that is to say, humans can use AI now to grasp text and words - language, specifically - in extraordinarily industrious, productive ways.
I know it is a crackpot event horizon, but I truly wonder if Szukalskis’ Protong isn’t just waiting there, tip of the iceberg, to be discovered. Seriously.
Um, when did anyone think it wasn't?
The entire history of linguistics shows this. Proto-Indo European had no common word (for that family) for sea/ocean [1] from which we can deduce something about the people who spoke it. That's not political obviously but environment and culture are inseparable from language is the ponit.
Languages really only grew for political reasons. Look at the spread of Latin throughout Roman territories.
Likewise, languages splinter and diverge in isolation. Populations that remain where they are and separate from others will drift linguistically. You can look at most of Europe for this. As just one example, the drift in Swiss Germany in Switzerland, which is a relatively small country.
But more than that, it takes some kind of centralization, which is to say, political force, to maintain a language. English had massive changes from Old English (which is essentially a separate language from Modern English) to Middle English (which is largely comprehensible by the modern speaker) when French was the court language of England in the centuries after 1066. And the Normans left their own imprints on English, which is where a ton of loan words came from [2]. But English grammar also greatly simplified without a central authority telling everyone what is proper, basically [3].
One of the fascinating things I remember learning was that there are between half a million and million cuneiform tablets int he world and fewwer than 10% of them have been translated. Now cuneiform is a writing style but one of the difficulties is that it encompasses multiple languages. And this was one of the earliest recorded examples of language displacement from Sumerian to Akkadian over thousands of years. But tablets could be written in part in both languages for a very long time. This is where we have the earliest documented human name, Kushim [4].
But the point is that the rise and fall of Sumer and its displacement by Akkad is recorded in the language.
And of course we had the spread of "colonial" languages in the colonial period (ie Spanish, French, Portugese, English).
Pragmatism also is a factor here. Different languages are inconvenient between populations that interact. The natural tendency is to homogenize on language given sufficient time, even without political pressure. it's a little sad when languages die but it's kind of inevitable.
[1]: https://talageri.blogspot.com/2020/05/the-proto-indo-europea...
[2]: https://www.krysstal.com/display_borrowlang.php?lang=Norman+...
[3]: https://www.sciscanpub.com/index/journals/ainfo/alr/7943.htm...
Often natives look at our way of life and say hell no that's retarded. But they are more polite about it. Europeans on the other hand just defined their flawed structure as "progress" and went on killing anyone who disagreed. In a way the worst parts of AGI are already here, we already killed all the real humans and we are the soulless automatons bounded to our possessions.