> Utility had defeated tradition.
Is that supposed to be self-evidently bad?
Is that supposed to be self-evidently bad?
People don't mourn the loss of codepage 437. For many people that's a big part of their growing up. But now it's not in common use and the world is better for it. We don't see people trying to slow the adoption of UTF8 because it's making the world one big dull homogenous borg that's unable to express box drawings.
Nowadays, there's quiet revolution going on in the form of many small dialects disappearing. That's wonderful. It's giving millions the opportunities that come with being able to communicate with more other people by sharing common language. We should be celebrating the massive advantages that keep growing each time another obscure script or dialect becomes nobody's native language.
> Different people thinking differently is how problems can get solved, instead of monstrous uniformity you seem to be envisioning
People think plenty differently while speaking the same language. They don't think any more differently if they speak different languages.
Even if we only strictly consider languages themselves, what if some people find pleasure in them? You can't say that what they enjoy doing is wrong with some argument for its utility - because the use and consumption of that language is a utility in itself. Neither can you confine them to these "museums" since they might want to use it outside of the halls of dusty books. Then, so much for "one and only one language".
Now, considering not just the language but culture. Languages are so incredibly context dependent and vague that I think they are deeply intertwined with culture. Outside of whatever you can laboriously define and enshrine in some book to stuff in a museum, there are incredible nuances that can be hard to appreciate if one is not involved with it, through things like social interaction and the written word. If you lose or discard the language of some culture, then you might also lose an appreciation for a lot of subtleties and ways of thinking. Words and expressions that might seemingly translate easily may have nuances that only an active speaker of the language can appreciate.
Thirdly. Consider if we with one magical button could make everyone in the world speak one language, say English. Now we are all on the same page! Then fast forward a few units of time - are we still speaking the same language? Probably, but we might have developed distinct dialects in different corners of the world. Why? Because every society and culture practising the language "evolved", namely added new expressions, words, phrases. Even pronunciation (accents). Why didn't the language simply evolve in the same way, worldwide? Of course because of the fact that the world is made up of a lot of different places and cultures. All of these cultures affect each other, but it's like a web of intermingling sharing. There is, largely, not a single, dominating culture, and so there is no central "authority" on how the language is going to evolve naturally. But you need a single "reference" point for this language to evolve in a uniform way, and avoid a lot of dialects! So if the goal is to have a single language, and a single dialect, your only bet is cultural imperialism. But culture is just a silly thing that just gets in the way, right? Better just stuff them in a museum and adopt a single, standardized culture. It's so efficient!
Given enough time, these dialects might turn into their own languages (let's say that languages are now distinguished by not being mutually intelligible with each other). Then you're back to the same problem, basically. Well, it's a lot better since all of these languages are closely related. And maybe these languages would never really become their own languages, since there is sufficient inter-cultural, global communication to avoid any significant divergence. But to eventually have no dialecs, no linguistic misunderstandings? Something's gotta give, namely everyone has to adopt the same culture and pallet of beliefs and values. But I guess that kind of robotic efficiency would be a Utopia for you.
This is why I favor storing languages in museums, rather than burdening millions of innocent people with the job they didn't even sign up for.
Why have cultures? Because it increases the diversity of thought and ideas. This diversity in turn can inspire each other and create new impulses, ideas, ways of thinking. This diversity is severely limited - and in turn how much it can influence and inspire other cultures - if they simply disappear. It's like taking all the work and time it took, for perhaps thousands of years, to create that culture, and simply destroying it.
Another reason is that I think that it's a shame for majority, dominant cultures to simply swallow up minority cultures. If the people of that minority culture want to preserve it, I think they should stand a chance.
Lastly, I think it's a worthy end onto itself. This is the end-road of socratic reasoning. Would you say that it is frivolous to just say "because it is worthy in itself"? Well, this is how all arguments end up, anyway. Just like your argument might end up with the assumption that "convenience and less struggle to communicate is worthy in itself". But then I can say, "a little struggle and inconvenience in communication is part of the fun! We should preserve our differences for that reason".
> The other side of the coin is it's being done at the expense of forcing all minority language speakers to be economically disadvantaged. Great news if you're an American, not so great if you're a Nepalese. I have to disagree with you there. You haven't shown any reason why a member of a minority culture should be excluded from most of society and prevented from even learning modern knowledge, reading literature, or even understanding the ways of thinking of most of the world.
Nonsense. Do you know how many people speak two, three and so on languages? How many people who speak a minority language in some country, also speak some majority language? The same goes for speaking a native, minority, or whatever language, and speaking English (or perhaps French or Portuguese etc., depending on where they are in the world).
I have to emphasize that I would never condone forcing people to practice and learn a language. It should be by their own volition. If they don't want to practice it, then that is of course entirely up to them. Just as I wouldn't force them or encourage them to give up their language (and perhaps in turn also their culture) in favour of some international standard language.
> This is why I favor storing languages in museums, rather than burdening millions of innocent people with the job they didn't even sign up for.
Is that so.
And it's not that I think that English is somehow inherently a better language, it's more that there is a lot more people speaking it. It's kind of like if you are deciding what open source project to use. Having a big community around it is a major deciding factor, if not THE deciding factor.
The analogy to open source projects is spot on; while you might have some "emotional" attachment to a library/technology that you learned early on, you probably wouldn't make significant decisions based on that. I learned to program in VB5, yet I dropped it as soon as I learned Java because it was just an awful language (though I guess human languages don't really have notions of superiority or inferiority like some programming languages might).
Except that when an open source project dies, its code remains in full -- to study, take ideas from, or even potentially be revived at a later time.
When a language dies though, it's pretty much gone. Even if it's received a lot of attention from field linguists, it's near impossible to fully codify the grammar and document the nuances of any language.
Almost all the languages that we "lost" did not have a rich literature or sometimes even an alphabet.
The # of languages currently spoken is typically pegged somewhere between 3000-6000 and it's thought that we lose around one a week. Most have almost no documentation whatsoever, and even so a couple papers written in the 1970s aren't going to capture any potential unique aspects of a language let alone allow for reconstruction at a later point.
The analogy to code is way off.
In the several millions we are able to speak and write, there have been lots of languages taking that role.
And even English is not as common as many people think, just traveling around the world will teach people that there are many places where knowing English will be of no help.
Besides languages represent culture, not all concepts are expressible across all languages and they are also a door to our past as mankind, sure they are worth preserving.
I'm aware of that.
> And even English is not as common as many people think, just traveling around the world will teach people that there are many places where knowing English will be of no help.
I guess it's not just about sheer numbers but also about what sort of stuff is produced in the language. E.g. the expert books are mostly written in English. You don't even have to go that far, e.g. there aren't all that many say compiler books that were not translated from English, that are up to date and not terrible. This is for me more important than being able to have a discussion with Bhutani farmer.
> Besides languages represent culture, not all concepts are expressible across all languages and they are also a door to our past as mankind, sure they are worth preserving.
Well it's a tradeoff. And I think that at some point the cost of preserving them outweighs the benefits.
This depends very much on the domain.
Feierabend (German) - expresses the concept you are finished with the work duties for the day and can enjoy your private time with family and friends
Saudade (Portuguese) - a mixture of loneliness, melancholy, sense of loosing part of you feelings, even mixed with a kid of sad joy, while remembering something that is no longer there.
If they were popular enough, we'd say: English does have words for those ideas! They're "feierabend" and "saudade".
Exactly the same as "gesundheit".
Expressing means there is a similar word.
You should compare Orhan Pamuk's treatment with Fernando Pessoa.
Although you might spend far more words on it, and it might be hard to properly capture abstract concepts in another language, these are not examples of concepts that cannot be expressed in English.
From linguistic point of view, I explained them.
Expressing means there is an English word with the same meaning.
We were talking about concepts being "expressable" in any language. Of course many words are not directly translatable (half of Chinese isn't, that isn't news to anybody), so that's not particularly interesting. But you'd be hard pressed to find a concept that is not at least explainable in English.
My native language doesn't force feed gendered personal pronouns on me, so when other languages (English, Swedish, German etc.) do , I feel they are forcing me to be sexist.
(The Swedes are actually trying to take some steps fixing this aspect of their language, by introducing a gender-neutral pronoun.)
Even worse (i.d. feels even more unnatural) are the languages with gendered nouns (German, Spanish etc.).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_neutrality_in_genderless...
Scripts that were developed in the age of stone tablets will change when the tablet and chisel are replaced with paper and brush, and again when the brush is replaced with a fountain pen, and again when the whole setup is replaced with a computer. People will naturally adopt the style that allows them to convey meaning the most conveniently in a given medium.
Chinese, Japanese, and Korean were all written vertically from right to left (|||) until only a few decades ago. Now they are very often written horizontally from left to right (≡). A lot of factors have contributed to the change, such as the ease of embedding Western, mathematical and scientific symbols in a CJK sentence, the need to keep one's hands clean when writing with a modern pen, and of course the introduction of computerized typesetting.
Nobody forced anyone to write horizontally. People just gravitated towards what they found more convenient given the availability of new writing tools. And of course, many artists and calligraphers continue to write vertically when it suits their intentions better. Even better, new calligraphical techniques have been developed to take advantage of unique opportunities that horizontal writing offers. As long as everyone gets what they need (art for artists and utility for utilitarians), I don't see any problem with this arrangement.
As a writing style, cursive is basically dead. This would have made an awesome analogy for the original article essay. Very few Americans in gen X and younger actually write cursive and there are efforts to remove it from the curriculum.
I can sign my name in cursive when I write a legacy paper check (a couple times a year) or sign forms. Thats about it. I now write legacy paper checks in block capitals and only use cursive for my .sig. I would have to check wikipedia to see how to make a cursive capital "F" and some of the weirder letters (what is a cursive Q?)
It presents some problems to genealogy, I have trouble reading centuries old census forms because I haven't read cursive since grade school, some decades ago. In grade school we were told we will have to write all our papers in cursive in middle school and up; not so; all typed, mostly on computers.
Those scripts will not be forgotten soon because of the way information is preserved in our current age. Nothing of their historicity is lost to us at all. Yet this script (and many others) do not present compelling reasons to stay in use. The same goes for Chinese characters; the knowledge of this script among Chinese youth is waning simply because these characters are not as useful as pinyin romanization is. It's "natural selection".
From my limited knowledge, only some "effective" scripts in the world that translate efficiently to a digital age. From the top of my head, only Latin, Cyrillic, (other descendants of Greek) and Hangul script feature a small enough 'standardized' amount of characters to express a wide variety of information. That is what is needed to survive in a digital age methinks.
Most people I hear calling for the eradication of Chinese characters are just a few non-native speakers. Of course, that is just anecdotal, I am sure there are also a few native speakers that hold that view but it seems to be a very small minority.
Post-education most people hand write characters a lot less, but they are still reading characters and producing texts with pinyin/bopomofo/cangjie, etc. There are huge amounts of information being written Chinese with the increase of internet usage in China and increase in education. Unless there is another massive education reform in China, I don't see Chinese characters going anywhere.
I say as long as we ("we" being...fuck I don't know) make a concerted effort to translate any ancient texts not yet translated into English, then let it die gracefully. The people crying for these losses will eventually pass and...well, such is life.