Why save a language?
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
And it's not simply like "a person can speak more than one language". It's actually more than half of the freaking world speaking more than one language. If you happen to live in a region (and I'm not saying "country") where people only speak one single language then it's quite possible you're the exception in fact.
"Indeed the people are one and they all have one language, and this is what they begin to do; now nothing that they propose to do will be withheld from them.
"Come, let Us go down and there confuse their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.
"So the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they ceased building the city.
"Therefore its name is called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth; and from there the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth."
Belarus - everyone speaks Russian, but Belorussian is mandatory in schools
Ukraine - a vast number of people (maybe not majority but too many to be called a minority) speaks Russian as their first language but Ukrainian is mandatory in schools and all attempts to give Russian some sort of official status were meet with fierce opposition for no other reason than to preserve national identity
Tatarstan (not so sure about this one, also not a country) - Tatar is mandatory in schools for all the same reasons
Yes, all of these majority languages where once forced on the peoples of colonies by the empires. But all the people who were forced to learn them are now dead. So the current generations are forced to learn those original languages in the name of historical justice and other bullshit.
And what studies do you need for negative effects? The time learning those languages involuntarily is obviously not spent doing anything else. Is that not negative enough for you?
No, it is not enough for me. The same could be said of any other school subject you don't have an interest in, a sort of grown up version of "When am I ever going to use trigonometry?" complaint you hear out of school kids. But since I'm a firm believer in "historical justice and other bullshit," I think we're at an impasse here.
However, I believe there are subtle implied philosophical differences. For example, I perceive German to be more principle-oriented and idealistic in comparison to English, which tends to favor more pragmatic thoughts. As an example, consider the word "Sachzwang", which has no direct English equivalent and roughly translates to "inherent necessity". It is a typical word for a language that thinks in absolute principles. Of course, it is also possible to express this in English, it is just a little less convenient and thus also less frequently done.
It's like different programming languages that are all turing-complete, but some allow to express certain things more effectively. From that point of view, having fewer languages would also come with a reduction in diversity of thoughts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_of_Babel
The lesson is that language diversity prevents coordinated work.
Well, in all seriousness, "saving a language" can mean many things, beyond "using humans as storage devices". On the one end of the scale, it can simply mean "not trying to eradicate a language". There are countless cases throughout history where speakers of central/majority languages have tried eradicating other cultures or languages, see e.g. "The termination phase" in http://galdu.org/govat/doc/mindeengelsk.pdf#19 about Saami.
Or, getting slightly more actively involved, it could mean trying to be supportive of the people who actually want to use their language – like creating software/web site localisations, book translations, spell checkers / other language tech. It doesn't have to mean forcing people to learn a language they don't want to learn, just so they can be studied by linguists :-)
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I was a bit disappointed by the "need to save cultures" paragraph as well; tighter-knit isn't necessarily better, especially not if it means active antagonism against other groups. But you'd think there would be less antagonism between groups if speakers of a non-central language have the feeling that the language they grew up learning, the language their parents spoke to them, the language that's nearest to their self-identity, is considered by the majority/central group to be somehow "worthy" (and not just something that should go away because it's an annoyance).
That is clearly not only not correct but is the opposite of the presentation in Genesis 11:4–9. This will be very clear if you could take just a few moments to go and read the story of Babel, which is a mythological account of the origin and benefits of language diversification. It is a very short story, only six verses long, that will take at most one minute to read.
The Babel story is getting misrepresented here from its clear Biblical representation. Some here are spinning as a triumph of progress and advancement through efficient communication.
In Genesis, it is given as a situation where common language allows people to display hubris while wasting effort on a completely useless project of attempting to build a tower to reach the sky. This project and its attitude is presented as clearly evil, and diversification of language, babelification, is given as a divine solution to the problem, which is presented as originating from cultural unity, common language, and concentration in a single area.
Efficiency and utility DO matter. We can learn from old or dying languages, sure. Then move on.
I'd extend the argument to species. Whatever curious creatures existed when ecologists came to exist is a coincidence. They are not intrinsically important. We can learn from them. Then move on.
Like data, it's better to store it and maybe use it once or twice, than to need data that doesn't exist at all.
I suppose what I want is to have a more interesting world. If we allow all this interesting data to die before we have the technology to truly capture and reproduce it, it is gone forever. Which in most cases would be ok, I guess, as new things could arise to replace them, right? Newer and better things?
Unfortunately, that can't happen if we never give it space to happen in. We monoculture our world in the name of utility, so the only species that can exist are the limited set we have chosen.
Your native languages have an impact on -- and enrichen -- your worldview. The classic examples of this are inuits and amazonian tribes, which use (indeed, need) a few scores of variations of white and green to depict the subtleties of their environments.
It also structures the way you think in some sense, and can yield interesting subtleties in the way you express things and in literature. See how German, for instance, requires the verb to be put to the end of a sentence. With a long enough sentence, you can tickle the imagination prior to reveal what action all the beautiful words were applying to.
Lastly, there's more to it that simply having everyone speak the same language. A language can be very rich in vocabulary, and offer wide variations of vocabulary depending on the individual, and turn into a tower of Babel in its own right. English, in fact, is the best example here. A typical English speaker might know -- or at least commonly use -- something like 20-40k words; someone who speaks international English at a conversational level might typically know and use half of that. Contrast the two figures with the total number of words, which is well north of 500k in total: each specialty field and subculture has its own set of words.
There is good and disturbing work on how language affects decision making (see, or example Lera Boroditsky). In some languages, like, English, you're more likely to say "he dropped the glass and broke it" while in others, like Spanish and Hindi, you're more likely to say "the glass fell and broke", or even "she had the glass and it fell and it broke". So what? Well if you use these formulations in a controlled trial in a single language (e.g. in English: split a group in two and describe a scene to one in an agentive and the other a non-agentive way they end up with completely different views of responsibility, guilt etc). Yes you could in theory do all this work in one language (like Lakoff) but you might not even know that it could be interesting. There are lots of interesting examples.
This kind of stuff can be useful in uncovering (or exploiting) propaganda / advertising, but also decision making in science, law etc. And language is one of our few tools for investigating operating brains since setting breakpoints in brains is frowned upon.
To what degree do these differences really affect culture? Who knows (yet?). I find a full Sapir-Whorf cultural-determinism-from-language very hard to take seriously, but in the small at least it seems pretty likely and who knows how fundamental it is? It needs research.
Plus it's fun. My wife, kid and I use three different languages together even in the house, depending on context or whom we're talking about, or what we want to say or just by whimsy. We listen to different kinds of music depending on mood too. People don't live in a world of fordist Gadgrinds!
And then there are the terms/concepts/ideas particular of a language or their lack thereof. I learnt from a Borges essay, Ancient Germanic Literatures, about the Ulfilas/Wulfila Bible. As I don't have the English translation of this book (and there's no excerpt in Google Books), I'll try to translate Borges (but not his semicolons) myself:
"The Gothic Bible is the oldest monument of the Germanic Languages. Wulfila had to overcome vast difficulties; the Bible more than a book, is a literature; to reproduce that literature, sometimes complex and abstruse, in a warriors and sheperds dialect is a job that would look impossible a priori. Wulfila achieved it with pluck and sometimes with sharp wit. As is natural, he lavished barbarisms and neologisms on it; he had to civilise the language. It holds surprises for the reader. It is written in The Mark Gospel (VIII, 36): "For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?" (translator's note: KJV). Wulfila translates world (cosmos, order, in the original) as beautiful house (t/n: fairhvu). Centuries later, Anglo-Saxons would translate world as woruld [wereald, age of Man], that sets human time against the infinite duration of divinity. The concepts of cosmos and world were quite abstract for the simple Germanic peoples."
I don't see that at all. He has two arguments. The first is that a common, and distinct, language helps a culture maintain its cohesion and continuity. It's worth noting that many writers from colonized areas have commented on the irony of writing about their experience using the colonizer's language. It's also worth noting the efforts in many areas to distinguish a group's own language from other nearby languages, even mutually intelligible ones. Why would these issues come up if language didn't matter on a cultural level? To many people, loss of language and loss of culture are related. Obviously this doesn't go for everyone, and some people willingly give up their native or cultural language, but no one should ever be forced to, no more than anyone should be forced to give up their religion, way of thinking, or way of life.
The second argument is basically that languages are data points. Studying languages, especially more isolated languages that tend to be in more danger of extinction, helps us better understand linguistics and human communication. If you only know one programming language, it's much harder to learn a new one than if you've already studied 50 programming languages. This increased linguistic understanding helps us study ancient cultures. It also helps us understand language acquisition, which in turn helps us encourage the language abilities of people with linguistic difficulties. It helps us build natural language processing tools. It even helps us develop patience when dealing with people who talk about things in a significantly different way. Something that may sound blunt or crude or inappropriate can be seen in a different light if you understand that different people communicate differently.
And... if you want to get a little "out there"... If humans ever encounter intelligent extraterrestrial life, we will be much more likely to be able to decipher their communication if we've studied 6000 languages already than if we've only studied 60. Even 60 is looking somewhat ambitious for the future of language. It's not hard to imagine a time when the only remaining languages are from a handful of language families: Indo-European, Afro-Asiatic, Niger-Congo, Sino-Tibetan, Japonic, Koreanic, and Turkic.
And if that does happen, the languages that remain will also likely be significantly simplified as languages tend to be when they become widespread. That may simplify communication, but it will make it harder to study communication and how it works.
The author of this piece (John McWhorter) has written a number of truly excellent books about languages. I would strongly encourage anyone with even a passing interest in linguistics to read any of his books that strike your fancy.
As for the second argument, I agree with it. I just think the burden of studying and preserving the languages should be on those who chose to dedicate their lives to studying them, i.e. scientists like the author or enthusiasts. Not some random dude who just happened to be born in the wrong place.
But I admit I might have given this a political angle it didn't originally have.
Just a note about the Austranesian language family: it contains a large number of speakers in Indonesia/Malaysia and the Phillipines, as well as lesser groups from Madagascar, Taiwan aboriginal people, NZ Maori, and Pacific Islanders as far east as Tahiti. It's likely to be in any handful of families left that people will speak.
The main reason Americans can't understand China or Russia, or Arab countries and vice versa is language.
People in the UK for example, do not listen to Putin 2 hours long Q&A and think for themselves. They listen to intermediaries, like Andrew Wood, because they don't understand Russian.
People would be shocked to know what Mr Putin is really saying, compared with what they are being told he is saying.
The same happens on the other side, too. The China and Russia media can portray a controlled picture of the rest of the world for most of their population.
The printing press changed the world because it made possible for people to read the Bible themselves instead of using the intermediaries interpretation(that sometimes were not in their best interest). Science advanced enormously when the status quo could be criticized(thanks access to books and the knowledge those carried).
In fact, Putin's Q&A doesn't contain much of anything.
It's not about the language, it's more about shared history or lack thereof.
Bob is at a disadvantage because he has to trust either (or both) of the translators.
I live in a 3r World country (Brazil). In a 3rd world perspective the Russian invasion of Ukraine is imperialism, plain and simple, just like what Russians accuse the western powers of doing. Russians have been dreaming of imperialism long before Lenin denounced it. And they never stopped dreaming about it.
The single biggest reason that the United States government can't control what I hear about world news from other sources in other countries is that it doesn't try to. News organizations in the United States are private enterprises, sometimes run on a nonprofit basis, and I can read and listen to news from all over the world while living in the United States. It's easy to get an unfiltered Internet connection here, and in the old days it was easy (and remarkably inexpensive) to get a shortwave radio here. (I have done both.) It's also possible to subscribe to periodicals published in other countries and receive those by mail here (I used to do that, but now read those on the Internet).
http://i.imgur.com/XnmMRQ6.png
Original:
Names of colors, at least in English, do not typically imply a complete range of color, but major points on the spectrum. We have hundreds of words for different shades of colors, and pseudo-words like, "Yellowish-green". Painters will know the different between Cerulean blue and Cobalt blue, and Wikipedia has a whole category of shades of blue, with varying English names.
If we need to limit ourselves to a 1st grade vocabulary to make a point about our language, it isn't a very strong point.
The second point is that the nuances that the author has observed don't have to be lost. If there was value in knowing that an object was "on" another object horizontally, or vertically, or slanted (using the example in the article), we could always incorporate those notions into any major language.
My parents have a medical clinic in one if these villages. When the government started making some of the classes be taught in the local language, the parents were upset, knowing that this would hurt their children. They viewed it as another way to keep the "indian" population back. And they're correct.
So while there may be good reasons to preserve languages (like preserving art, or historic towns), someone should be funding that directly, rather than externalizing the costs on to these indigenous groups.
I got a book last year about learning Old English. I haven't gotten very far into it yet, but just the fact that I can go back a thousand years in human history and see where the roots of my language came from is an incredibly cool thing. I am also inspired by the alliterative schemes of old Anglo-Saxon poetry, and have it on the back-burner to see how or how not that could work in modern language (e.g. in Rebsamen's "Beowulf" translation).
Similarly, whether or not I actually "speak" programming languages like Lisp, Forth, and APL in my daily work, they are a mine of cool ideas and experiments that I can still draw inspiration from, decades after the machines that they were originally built on crumble back into sand.
Which probably emphasizes the "cold storage" value of language, not necessarily the "active speaking" value of it. I think the cold storage value of retaining language is indisputably massive, and projects like the Rosetta Project are really interesting to me for that reason. What's the value of actively speaking it, even when the community of speakers dwindles? Perhaps it is in helping to cement our understanding of the language before it fades away.
I speak three languages, I think in two languages. I go on different paths when thinking in different languages when trying to solve a geometry problem.
I don't think we should care about keeping as many languages spoken as possible. Collective human culture is fluid, and subject to evolutionary pressures. If the human species converges to fewer languages because it allows us to do whatever we do more effectively, great. Going against that is just not practical and a waste of time.
In France, the modern French language has been pushed onto the population a few hundred years ago, at the detriment of local dialects ("patois"). In the recent years, there have been government initiatives to force schools in certain regions to teach their former dialects. What's the point? Those dialects are close to dead anyway, and take up valuable teaching times. Kids are already graduating high school barely able to write and read French properly- they have very little to benefit from by spending time learning such dialects. Sure, they are important to ~archive~ culturally and historically, and there's nothing wrong with funding a few scholars working on that, but that's it.
What is important to preserve is the knowledge that allows one to learn a language. In other words, if German were to disappear, that's fine, and we shouldn't make any efforts at attempting to preserve it. What we should do, however, is document German as much as possible (its vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation, idioms, native works, etc.) such that if one needs to learn German 100 years later, it's possible to do so.
The basis for that is two-fold: practicality (if an ancient German text is discovered but no one speaks German daily anymore, at least scholars can still decipher it), and preservation of human culture (but in a way that doesn't go against pragmatism, which the approach described by the author in the article is).
The same debate applies to other things, e.g. flora/fauna. Of course, when species are becoming close to extinct because of humans destroying environments, we should do something about it. But species go extinct all the time because that's just how nature works, and how it worked much before we got here. In this light, what's the sense of trying to preserve plants or animals artificially?
[1] googling turned up this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relative_direction#Cultures_not...
Should we teach children extinct professions just to keep some cultures alive?
Languages are just tools. If this tool is effective - people use it. Otherwise it "dies".
I don't think the aim here should be to culturally save just languages but the entire culture and lifestyle that spawns and nourishes them. At the very least, you'd have to put the brakes on the globalization movement, so as to preserve local cultural differentiation. It's very unlikely to happen.
A separate question is whether we have a duty to help _other_ cultures in their quest for self-preservation. I think there are altruistic reasons for doing so stemming from the fact that most people value their own culture so we can empathetically understand why others would want to preserve theirs.
There are also interesting biological and sociological arguments around diversity and resilience of the species that don't rely on altruism.
The question specifically about language is asking something different though. So this conversation should just be about languages where the group that spoke it no longer has enough interest to continue that tradition. So the question becomes should we save the language of other cultures for them? I don't think there is a strong case (other than academic preservation).
Arguments about the intrinsic relationship of language to culture are valid but fall apart when the members of the culture itself don't care enough to preserve the language.
I find we (humans) have some kind of emergent "gene pool variety preservation" behavior, even when talking about non-directly-genetic stuff: culture, language, knowledge, ways of thinking, animal species, etc.
It looks like we are wired to avoid natural selection over-fitting at a cultural level.
People are complex, and populations even more so. The fact that our actions can't be explained by a superficial set of coherent principles shouldn't even be surprizing.
The conservation ideal of preserving ecosystem diversity is a rather recent cultural invention. I don't think Alexander III of Macedon ordered the massacre of the men of Tyre, or the slaughter of the people of Massaga, in order to preserve cultural diversity.
I don't think the death and destruction under the Mongol Empire was because of their wired desire to avoid natural selection.
My comment is to ask why I should believe that the conjecture has any merit. I don't know what you mean by your response.
Maybe we only get this protective spirit when we have already "won" :)
I don't understand what you mean by "direct conflict between two cultures". The Indian Removal Act was a US act on the one side against the Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee-Creek, Seminole, and original Cherokee Nations. That's at least 6 cultures. And certainly the Indian schools affected a huge number of cultures.
Unless you mean that all of the tribal nations are a single culture?
And yes, evolution (particularly in the context of darwinism and derivatives) is what I am talking about, specifically, some kind of mechanism that seems to exist that prevents us getting stuck in a "local maximum".
A mechanism that I mentioned because I find it interesting that you can find signs of it at so many different levels, and in many different contexts.
If you can't count cultures (or other measures of diversity?) then how does any evolutionary behavior manage to do so?
I would like to know your historical examples of "signs of it at so many different levels". All I know of occur relatively recently in history, which is a strong indicator that it's a cultural change, and not a deep evolutionary imperative.
I don't need an historical example, since I am not arguing that this has always been the case, nor that it isn't a cultural change.
Going a bit further on my previous comment, and trying to clarify, I think this behavior emerges precisely because of a general stabilization/stagnation of a given population (of traits, languages, behaviors, animal species etc.) in order to avoid over-fitting (the "won" part, if I did not express myself clearly enough) and to preserve diversity.
The original comment is just that, a comment. A thought that I think holds some value and is related to the article. I am not trying to convince anyone that this is a defined mechanism by which nature rules and defines itself.
Without empirical grounding, it can also lead one drastically astray.
You have no examples that your thought is true, nor any mechanism by which it could work, while I have both counter-examples and the observation that any such mechanism is outside of known evolutionary theory.
"I am not arguing that this has always been the case" stands in stark contrast to your proposition that "we are wired" to this behavior.
So much falls (fails..) to judgement of point and term of saving, when maybe we need to focus on just saving better and judging why after.