The World's Languages Are Fast Becoming Extinct 939
Ant sends news of a report, released a couple of weeks back by the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages in Oregon, on the alarming rate of extinction of the world's languages. While half of all languages have gone extinct in the last 500 years, the half-life is dropping: half of the 7,000 languages spoken today won't exist by the year 2100. The NY Times adds this perspective: "83 languages with 'global' influence are spoken and written by 80 percent of the world population. Most of the others face extinction at a rate, the researchers said, that exceeds that of birds, mammals, fish and plants."
Good thing? (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe... (Score:5, Insightful)
Not everything that is old, traditional, or entrenched has the value nostalgia makes us want to apply to it.
This is a bad thing? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This is a bad thing? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Good thing? (Score:4, Insightful)
Let me put it this way: would it be a good things if most of the worlds religions are facing extinction, wouldn't that be a good thing? Less wars? If most of the world's cuisines were facing extinction, wouldn't that be a good thing? Music styles and dance?
Try chatting with a Native North American one day, and ask how they feel about the extinction of indigenous languages. Here in the United States, indigenous people suffered deliberate attempts at extermination, marginalization, and assimilation. At various times, it was illegal to speak Native languages, practice Native religions, or hold traditional dances or ceremonies, such as weddings. A lot of Native tradition have disappeared, and those that still exist are hanging on by the skin of their teeth. Not many Native Americans I've spoke to are happy about the state of affairs.
Some might answer, "Oh well, that's the way things go. Who cares if we lose a culture in the middle of the amazon? In history, there are winners and losers. It sucks, but it happens." Are those people willing to say the same thing about the annihilation that Jews were facing during WWII? If Hitler had conquered the world, he may have succeeded in exterminating the Jews. Would we be so quick to say "Oh well, the Jews lost out in the history of the world" as we are some tribe on an island? Why or why not?
14 Days (Score:5, Insightful)
I recently heard that a language goes extinct every 14 days, which for some reason pisses me off. No, I'm not pissed off that languages are going away (though I can see more value in them than some here), but rather that it would be expressed that way. Clearly it is meaningless to talk about this kind of change in a time frame of days, so the only reason to state "every 14 days", instead of a more meaningful figure like 250/decade would be to try to manipulate the listener into action.
But while linguists would like to make this out to be a calmity similar to wildlife extinction (hence the manipulation), there really is no practical solution to this situation; you can't force a language to live on - people either have a use for it, or they don't.
Re:This is a bad thing? (Score:1, Insightful)
Language and culture are closely linked, and the loss of languages means the loss of cultures, as they get swallowed up in the behemoth of global "culture", which is frequently neither all that global nor all that cultured.
Languages aren't just about the present or the future, they are about the past. They are the cultural DNA which can teach a great deal about the kinds of people are ancestors were, about the kinds of associations they may have had with other peoples and in many ways about the underlying nature of the society in which they evolve.
It's easy for a pack of computer geeks who largely speak English as a first language to sit here and talk about the extinction of some language you may or may not have even heard, but oddly enough a lot of people do care. In the Americas, a great deal of effort is being put into restoring dead or nearly dead American Indian languages in the hopes of rescuing dying civilizations. No one is under the illusion about the Haida, the Welsh or the Frisians that their languages are going to be dominant, or that they are going to be able to get away without being able to speak the major languages in their part of the world, but it is about preserving something of the past so that their descendants have some sort of ability to put themselves in a historical continuity.
Just as important, in my humble opinion, is preserving languages, because they have become the invaluable tools for tracing human movements and bring back the past. Imagine trying to decipher ancient Egyptian without the Coptic language. Imagine trying to investigate the origins of the Indo-Europeans or the Sino-Tibetans without a plethora of related languages, even with a relatively small number of speakers, to be able to formulate rules of sound change.
The really sad part is that it is, by and large, English speakers who have this ridiculous, insular and arrogant attitude. In Africa, for instance, it's not uncommon to see people who know three or four languages; usually their own tongue, plus some neighboring ones and French or English. In fact, I'd say that in North America, very little effort is put into teaching second and third languages, all because of the arrogance of "English is the only languages that matters a damn".
Re:This is a bad thing? (Score:3, Insightful)
Me, I don't think any of us have a perfect understanding of anything. Actually, one way to interpret Godel's theorem is to say that no language can do that. The various perspectives and representations all have some degree of validity and invalidity--but comparing them and thinking about the differences is especially interesting and sometimes even useful. As Dijkstra said (at least once), he found it very useful to try to translate any new idea into his other language. If he discovered that there were problems in the translation, it often signified that there was something wrong with his conception.
Perhaps a simple example will help clarify the point of how the data compression works for communication by language. If I say "cow" to you, I activate an entire group of mental models in your mind. They might include hamburgers or milkshakes or your childhood days on a farm. However, the main model should be a particular kind of largish animal. What happens if you say the word "cow" to someone from India? Well, even if he's fluent in English, he's likely to trigger quite a different set of mental models. Where you thought of "hamburgers" he may link to "sacred". If he isn't so fluent in English, the first step is likely to be a translation to some other language and the linked mental models are likely to be quite different from anything you were expecting.
Those other mental models are not wrong, but they are different. Some of them may work better for certain purposes than others, but that's the way of all problem solving. My theory is that asking the right question is about 90% of the work needed for finding the correct answer.
progress being made? (Score:3, Insightful)
a single language will go a long way towards resolving disputes and possibly even wars.
Different cultures must assimilate into the global culture or become obsolete.
On the other hand, these disappearing cultures have a lot to teach us.
Tribal wisdom must be translated and passed down to be preserved for the remainder of human history.
Vanilla Culture (Score:3, Insightful)
Ah, well. As the late great Kurt Vonnegut wrote, "So it goes."
Re:Maybe... (Score:4, Insightful)
That is one way to look at it. However, I'd argue there's a lot more than nostalgia at stake here. I'm no linguist, but it seems fairly self-evident (and something that is backed up by linguistics) that different languages give rise to different ways of thinking about things. Certain concepts just don't exist in language X, but do in Y and Z. This can have a profound effect on higher level thinking in the language, as well as providing for curiosities, like that language that only has words for one, two and many. [newscientist.com]
Also, there's a lot of linguistic and anthropological history at stake. When languages go extinct, you lose a great resource for understanding the evolution of that language, as well as all the others that are related to it.
Re:progress being made? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, after all, the Brits and Americans never fought, neither did all those German states or all those Latin-speaking folks. I mean, they all lived in harmony, and never took to arms.
Where the hell do you people learn your history? I'm thinking you probably don't.
Re:Good thing? (Score:5, Insightful)
Religions are not always benevolent in their own right.You seem to be putting more value on one group of people versus another. Why?
Re:Good thing? (Score:2, Insightful)
Do you cry for the candle makers who lost their craft due to electricity? Or the metal or wood craftsman who were replaced by machinery? Do you cry for farmers who became redundant due to modern machinery? Do you cry for the nobles of old who lost their way of life because of democracy? Do you cry for the serfs who can no longer toil on their farms? Do you cry for the peasants who no longer die of now preventable disease?
Re:Good thing? (Score:3, Insightful)
Esperanto! (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes! Now that everyone is finally picking up on THE language, Esperanto [wikipedia.org], soon everyone will understand everyone else!!
tm
Re:Is that bad? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:This is a bad thing? (Score:3, Insightful)
1) Speaking four languages will get you understood virtually everywhere in the hemisphere.
2) The vast majority of people will have to travel an extraordinary distance to find someone who speaks another language on a regular basis.
3) Because of 2), it's almost impossible to gain or maintain fluency in more than two languages.
The African languages are often fairly closely related to one another within a confined geographic area, making it relatively easy to gain proficiency in another. English and French serve as linguae francae to Africa, allowing more long-distance communication, so people have a strong incentive to learn them. I'm picking up Spanish because my area now has a large enough Hispanic population that it's worth my while to know it. Before, it wasn't. As for cultural continuity, who the hell cares? I don't think my life in 2007 USA is likely to be greatly improved if I learn to speak Gaelic, which my dirt-poor Irish great-great-ancestors did.
Re:Good thing? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Hey, English in the USA is doomed (Score:2, Insightful)
Actually, I was joking around, but, you could make a case for it:
a) There's no requirement to learn english in the USA - everything is in mixed english / spanish anymore.
b) spanish speaking immigrants have a much higher birthrate than do other minorities. In fact, other minorities are barely keeping on a sustainable level.
So, you take the trend that there will be little adoption of english by the immigrant minority, realize that they have the higher birthrate, and what do you get? If its reasonable to extrapolate out environmental fears by a couple decades, if not centuries, then why would it be hysterical to apply the same trends in languages out by a few generations.
Re:What will happen to English? (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't think American's use collective nouns? Bull. Don't think British English uses the subjective form? They must not be watching TV.
If you want rigid adherence to rules of grammar and spelling that don't keep up with the actual usage, go speak French. Or Latin. Or be the 27th idiot to learn Esperanto, which has no problem keeping up with actual usage (your contributions would be welcome, I'm sure).
Now, excuse me while I lie about getting laid.
Re:Good /bad thing? - Irrelevent. (Score:5, Insightful)
The difference now is that there are forces that speed up the extinction of non-self-sustaining types of cultures. Here in Canada there are more than a few First Nations languages which no more than a couple of people still speak. These are being recorded and documented as quickly as possible but it is understood that these will die out as soon as there is no one who needs to use them as part of their daily existence.
Is it sad that this is happening? Only if you don't realize the fact that the only reason there are so many different languages on earth is because of historic geographic isolation of all the different peoples. With instant worldwide communication and the ability to travel to just about any spot on the earth within a day or two, the conditions that allowed disparate languages and cultures to develop in the first place no longer exist.
That being said, languages are still developing and evolving, but now due more to artificial forces such as intentional introduction of slang as personal identification and new technologies and methods that need new terms to describe. e.g.: "Double-click the minimize control to select the desired HDMI input". Perfectly understandable to you and me, complete gibberish to most people over 50. And that's just in English.
We live in interesting times. The second case of technological development having a profound effect on all mankind, the first being the industrial revolution. I believe this second phase will have a much greater effect than the first.
Not all languages are equally expressive (Score:5, Insightful)
Various words just have no real translation. "Gesellig" (Dutch) just means so much more than the dictionary equivalents: genial, social. Similarly "mana" (Maori) means more than just pride or spirit.
Kill a language and you kill a culture. Kill a culture and you end up with disaffected people. You just need to look at Inuit, Uustalian Aboriginal and various other groups to see that this is a bad thing.
How many died because of religion? (Score:2, Insightful)
Just out of curiosity,
What religion was China with 129,000,000 dead in the 20th century?
What religion was the USSR with 72,000,000 dead in the 20th century?
What religion where the Nazi's with 21,000,000 dead?
What religion was Cambodia with 2,035,000 dead?
That brings us to ~200,000,000 for Communism, and atheist creed, and 21,000,000 for Nazism a pseudo-religious creed (IIRC, its official religious view was a state concocted Lutheranism with Paganism and a heavy dose of militarism, obviously designed to ween the population off Christianity and onto state controlled propoganda)
Yeah, obviously religion is the problem.
In fact, the only major religion that has Holy War as a major tenet of its religion is Islam. Islam actually divides the world into The House of Submission and the House of War.
Christianity doesn't have it. Not anywhere in the New Testament. The Crusades where a response to Islamic Holy War. Christianity didn't have the concept until then. And, the Crusades started because the Byzantines requested Frankish aid to defend against the Muslims (and got much more than they bargained for).
Judaism may have religious war in the Mosaic books, but they haven't practiced religious war since they Assyrians (IIRC).
In fact, most major religions have that "Do not murder" thing (The King James Bible mis-translated the Hebrew as "Do not kill"). So, wars occur despite the moral constraints put in place by religion.
Linguists, anthropologists hardest hit. (Score:5, Insightful)
So thats good, practically speaking.
Unfortunately, since language is so powerful in molding minds, we lose a lot when a language dies. We lose profound knowledge about a culture and the way it sees the world. To an anthropologist or linguist, this loss is irreplacable, which is why there are projects about whose goal is to record native languages before thier last speaker dies. Piecing together the natural history of humanity becomes that much harder when language dies.
Like everything else, you take the good with the bad.
Re:Good thing? (Score:5, Insightful)
While native Americans had something to complain about in the past there is a LOT of encouragement for them to maintain their culture now. Most of the younger generation simply isn't interested. They have a point -- a lot of the tradition is badly outdated.
Culture is valuable in that it provides variety, but at some point a lot of it is something that needs to go live in a museum because it simply isn't relevant to modern life. Every person alive has abandoned most of the culture of their ancestors. There's simply too much to actively maintain. I don't know how to speak Latin, build a square rigged sailing ship or shoe a horse (all things at least some of my ancestors would have been able to do). The white/Christian/English speaking group just likes to feel responsible for everything and therefore guilty.
Re:Good thing? (Score:5, Insightful)
etc etc etc. Japanese got so so so many foreign words for things they didn't had at that time, and plus use more and more English words (in katakana) because they are "cool" and therefore create new words.
I see no problem with that. Perhaps 100 Languages disappear, but seriously, if something doesn't get used, why force it to stay alive. If it is important it will get tought (like Latin), if not, its not a loss at all.
Of course the horrible grammar mangling is nothing beautiful. But English is just used by so many people who learn it as a second language that it just gets change and adapted a lot. Same with German. A lot of Aliens learned it as a second language and so there is a new sub dialect evolving
Language is just alive and although some people love to put it down in stone, it will never stay the same. The more people communicate online, the more one language will evolve
My god... (Score:3, Insightful)
My father spoke five languages - none of which I learned to speak more than a few mumbles here and there. But I could see how different languages were better at expressing different emotions, different ideas, different viewpoints in life. Some languages have such a strong system of honorifics and class in them - others are deviod of that, but have different terms spoken by the different sexes as a reflection of cultural differences. There are some with phonetic alphabets, others more pictoral, some with a blend of the two. The variety and beauty of human languages is every bit as beautiful as works of music, painting, sculpture.... Should we let the last man who knows how to build a piano die because there are enough other musical instruments out there?
Forget the structure of languages - what about all the ideas WRITTEN or SPOKEN in them that become forever inaccesable? How many of the Shakespeare's, Archemedes', Sun-Tzu's will be gone forever?
Should we apply the same concepts to computer languages? Data structures? 'Who cares, we have better stuff now, we'll never need to read that old stuff again.'
Language is a unique expression of humanity, and I think it is something worth preserving - even if it is not as practical as having Chinglish taking over the world.
Re:Reminds me ... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Good thing? (Score:1, Insightful)
You have a very poor grasp on world affairs, my friend. Whenever you see headlines about a pogrom/masssacre/riot directed an ethnic minority in some third world country, consider the fact that it's probably not about dark skin vs people with light skin--it's almost certainly about religion, LANGUAGE, and money, in that order. Those are the three biggest things you can point to when you want to rouse a rabble--the enemy don't pray like us (or "don't share our values"), they don't talk like us, and they have/want money that should rightfully be ours.
Re:Good thing? (Score:4, Insightful)
Spoken like a true monolinguist. The same could be said for many languages.
Why wouldn't it be Chinese? There are close to 3X as many native speakers of Chinese as there are of English. (There are more native Spanish speakers, too. Maybe even Hindi.) If you compare the number of people who know how to speak the language (not necessarily as their native language) Chinese still wins by 2.5:1.
I, too, speak only English. But I'm under no illusions about it being "better".
Re:Not all languages are equally expressive (Score:5, Insightful)
Just Stunned at the Ignorant and Selfish Attitudes (Score:3, Insightful)
I am just stunned. I realize the majority of people here are probably monolingual and probably living in North America, but the majority of posts here seem to be along the lines of "Well it doesn't affect me, so who gives a f**k?" or "If they are dying out, they are just cruft". At least some people see the value in everyone having a common language - but thats the best argument for everyone to learn a SECOND language, not for us to just abandon all of the smaller languages out there.
You see, a lot of those languages are dying out because the speakers of the more monolithic languages have forced them into extinction. We have made speaking many Native American languages illegal in the past, abused the cultures and people involved and slowly strangled their native language speaking populations to the point where they have all died off or are doing so daily. We have marginalized many small linguistic groups by the overwhelming power of Western culture and advertising, by refusing to learn their languages and insisting they learn ours or suffer the consequences. Thats a tragedy, nothing less.
Each language is more than just a medium of communications between people, its the encapsulation of an entire way of thinking, of a cultural world-view. When a language dies out, a small piece of humanity and human achievement goes with it. We are all lessened by the death of each language, and with it each culture that dies out.
I would think the programmers here would be the first to get it: You can program some things in certain programming languages, express some concepts, much more effectively and efficiently than in others. You can do anything in any language certainly, but some lean one way or another, some are more expressive and some more rigidly defined. Luckily we rarely lose a programming language, they just go out of style for the majority of users, but as long as someone is willing to write a compiler, we can keep using one. That is not true of human languages. Once they are gone, they are gone completely, and with them a unique way of thinking, and a unique way of viewing the world and expressing ideas about it. Languages quite honestly give you a completely different way of thinking and its a shame to lose that.
New languages effectively don't happen, or at best rarely and I imagine its almost impossible for a new language to evolve in the modern day. Human linguistic evolution is essentially a living version of the Highlander maxim "there can be only one", or at best maybe 2. It doesn't have to be inevitable though, we can preserve dying languages, and with them the cultures they belong to. It just takes more effort than most people are willing to engage in, and sadly - like the majority of posters here - it doesn't seem to worry those who speak the major languages, particularly the world's piranha of a language English.
If you want to have some good insight into this issue, I would suggest reading this book: Spoken Here [amazon.com] and perhaps: When Languages Die: The Extinction of the World's Languages and the Erosion of Human Knowledge [amazon.com] The steady extinction of our world's languages is a human crisis in my opinion, and we all lose when another language dies, even if we don't realize it.Re:What will happen to English? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Good thing? (Score:3, Insightful)
Apparently, those that care are too few in numbers to matter. Languages come and go. They mutate and get absorbed, obliterated, and new ones form. The concept of culture being innately valuable is pretty wrong. Tradition is simply ideas and habits parents pass to their children. Some may benefit a group of people, others not. For instance the "tradition" of eating part of a loved one that exists in portion of Africa encourages the spread of disease. It's a tradition, it's detrimental. Most are more neutral. The medicine bags of various north American tribes are a benign "habit". There really isn't that much list if no one wears one anymore. Putting such huge value into "habits" is silly. If it persists great. If not.. well apparently it didn't have too much fo a upside.
Re:Vanilla Culture (Score:2, Insightful)
*rolls eyes*
Rubbish. (Score:1, Insightful)
By the way, you modified a verb with an adjective.
Re:Good thing? (Score:2, Insightful)
Discouraging (Score:4, Insightful)
But as one who speaks 2 additional languages (Spanish and French) at an advanced conversational level and a third additional language (Arabic) at a very basic (and I mean very basic) level, I can't say I'm fond of this.
It's hard to understand if you haven't learned another language, but certain thoughts are more easily expressed in a foreign language once you've learned it. Certain phrases and words are simply idiomatic - they don't translate. "Che Pibe" is one that, for example, can kind of be explained in English, but loses its real meaning. I still want to say "trucho", a word without an adequate translation, when I see something that meets the characteristics. English contains a great deal of French words, true, but the real meaning, tied to cultural context, just can't be conveyed unless you are speaking in French. Arabic and, I imagine, Chinese are light years away from English.
I can accept a lingua franca, but language is an extremely important element of culture and expression. Most languages now dying were, arguably, dead long ago. But I shudder to think what would happen if the world adopted a "one language" stance rather than simply a lingua franca.
Re:Hey, English in the USA is doomed (Score:3, Insightful)
when people are saying otherwise, they are probably lying to you in order to make you afraid of "zomg we is being invadered by teh mexecans"
All languages are obsoletes (Score:3, Insightful)
But the priority for a universal understanding should be to teach new generations a logical language [lojban.org] instead of trying to keep these alive.
I know you're just joking, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
If someone in, say, America were to tell you that the Canadians as a whole are preaching holy Jihad upon the infidel Americans, everyone would just call him nuts. There are maybe millions of people who live close to the border or travel across the border, and can tell you relatively first hand what the Canadians actually say. Or if not, you can just order a newspaper and read for yourself what they do say. Even if they were to manage to find one nutcase preaching holy war, everyone would point out just that: it's just one idiot that noone else takes seriously.
Now try Americans vs Arabs, Arabs vs Jews, or whatever other manipulation across a language barrier. Now that works much better, doesn't it? You can cherry-pick which extremists (on both sides) to translate out of context, to make it sound like a whole language or ethnic group is hell-bent on wiping you off the face of the Earth. (Never mind that no group that size ever agreed on anything else, for as long as we have a recorded history.)
It goes sorta like this: Some fringe group on side A does a bit of fist shaking and maybe sabre rattling. Idiot politicians or journalists on side B take that out of context, maybe even mis-translate it a bit, present it as "Look what side A is saying about us!" Then some easily excitable nutcase on side B goes, basically, "yeah, well, I say nuke the idiots until they glow and let their god sort them!" Then idiot politicians or journalists on side A (or whoever has a vested interest in stirring up the pot) take _that_ out of context, maybe even take a pick of words when translating to sound even more ferocious, and present it as "Look what side B is saying about us!" Loop.
Sometimes even the subtle meaning of one word can be altered enough in translation to cause a big rift, although technically it is a honest-to-god translation.
E.g., a lot of the relatively early Christian problems leading schisms and heresies, a good thousand years before Hus and Luther, were... translation problems. Stuff that made sense about Christ in Greek, sounded like a major heresy when translated in Syriac, because the nuances of some words were different.
And that was guys who did a good faith effort to translate the scriptures and the dogmas decided in the church councils. Now imagine what you can do when you aren't that honest, and don't stop short of outright distorting the other side's words.
Or the even shorter version: if that quote was right, the USA, the UK, Canada and Australia should be the greatest enemies in history.
I call bull shit (Score:4, Insightful)
"Languages quite honestly give you a completely different way of thinking": Now there's a statement that requires a lot of backup. Language does not encapsulate ways of thinking; it's a means of conveying thoughts. Do you think that the Chinese cannot understand Plato? Their languages are about as far apart as possible.
"New languages effectively don't happen": well, there's a plainly wrong statement. New languages do arise. Not very frequently, but they do. Usually Creole, but there are more interesting cases. Check e.g. the sign language developed by deaf Nicaraguan children.
"the world's piranha of a language English": that's funny, but not really true either. Chinese is really gobbling up large portions of Asia and Spanish also seems to be spreading still.
I honestly think there is no way to stop the process of language extinction. It has always happened: my native tongue (Dutch) is quite different from what it used to be and that holds for many languages. They develop. Small groups tend to disappear. That also has always been the case. You can find remains of settlements everywhere with signs of a lost culture, and probably a lost language.
There is nothing inherently bad about that. It's not a question of ethics. Join Amnesty, support the Kurds and the Tibetans, but don't do it to save their language. Human life and thought is worth more than the precise way that they use to communicate.
Re:What will happen to English? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Good thing? (Score:4, Insightful)
The death of language is GOOD, not bad. (Score:5, Insightful)
Having said that. The corollary is that learning multiple languages is a good idea for an individual. If you live in the UK and speak only English then you are excluded from the largest economies on the continent; France Germany etc. The French and Germans all speak English. If their economies tank, they can always look for work in the UK.
Speaking of which, I have a German lesson this evening.
Re:Reminds me ... (Score:2, Insightful)
Good thing? Bad thing? I don't know. It's the way things are, at the moment, though it looks as though change is on the horizon. I surmise that within another 20 years or so, you may well find the rise of a new breed of American. One who speaks both English and Spanish. And to me, that is a good thing.
It will be easier. And much less cultural (Score:4, Insightful)
When you look at a language and its composition, you'll notice that every language reflects its users and their culture. No, I'm not going for the 20 words for snow in Inuit. I'm going for the very, very finely tune nuances of reverence in Japanese, something that cannot even remotely be reproduced in any other language I know. And of course, that way you simply cannot understand the culture that is behind it. You can promote and punish a coworker with the use of a syllable.
How to translate it? Not at all. There is no way to translate it. There is not even a way to express it. Because explaining it or using "stronger" words (that would have to be used in English or other languages) would, you guessed it, already break the unwritten laws of etiquette. You're not supposed to really 'hear' it, you're supposed to know it from listening closely.
And I can only assume it's similar with other cultures and languages. Maybe (or most likely) in other areas, areas in everyday life that are more important than social status, but nontheless parts of their culture. This will most likely suffer from a lack of an own language that lends itself to the needs of the culture.
Re:Discouraging (Score:2, Insightful)
But what happens when a person equipped with only, say, english comes into contact the concepts that those untranslatable words put a label on? If there's a void in the language, it gets filled by a new word or by the expansion or change of an old word. The words that are unique to one language represent concepts that just don't have a good label yet, not some utterly alien concept that people of other cultures are unable to ever understand. Go and live with Inuits and you too will learn those hundred words for snow they have (if you hurry before it all melts, that is).
Re:What will happen to English? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Loss of knowledge (Score:2, Insightful)
People nowadays may not be able to read Latin as the Romans did, but it is still readable.
Also, many of the languages which will be lost probably have no written form, so there will be no 'documents' which cannot be translated. There may be stories/myths/histories which are known in the spoken form, which may be lost - but that is a coincidental loss due to the loss of a language, not a direct result - the stories could easily be kept in a different language, and could also be lost despite the language surviving, and should really be written down to avoid losing them - which isn't possible without some form of translation if there isn't a written form to the language.
As another thought - English is still a living language - but Chaucer's English isn't.. As one document I've read put it, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Jefferson and Dubyu Bush all speak English; Shakespeare would probably have been able to converse with Chaucer and Jefferson (with some difficulty), but Jefferson (and certainly Bush) would need to have an interpreter to speak to Chaucer - even though it's the "same" language. So, does this mean that Chaucer's English is a dead language, or just a language that has evolved into something else?
If we say that it's a language which has evolved into something else, does this mean that other languages which 'die' by 'merging' have evolved or died out? If a language from the Andes becomes 'Spanish with some extra words' has it died out or evolved?
Re:What will happen to English? (Score:1, Insightful)
Strangely enough being able to reproduce (and actually doing it "in nature") is what defines a species, so the ability to interact is the scientific litmus test for relatedness in both of these cases.
That's a very simplistic species definition that falls down in a lot of cases. The best examples are organisms with asexual reproduction, which includes most of life on Earth. Also there are plenty of individual animals who for whatever reason can't reproduce at all. Anyway I'm not even sure what point I was trying to make there.
While you might be able to judge a person's abilities by how they talk or write it is just a measure of their usefulness to you. "More conformity == better" is just your personal bias for better or for worse.
It's not just about judging abilities. Its about judging attitude as well. When I see good English I think the author is probably smart, cares about the quality of what they do and is prepared to invest the time to get it right. When I see bad English I assume the author is either stupid, lazy, doesn't care, or is trying to make some kind of point. Bad English is also hard to read.
Re:Rubbish. (Score:4, Insightful)
Half of the comments on this fucking site are people bitching about someone using "There" instead of "Their" or some other ridiculously insignificant grammatical error. If you knew what the correct word to use was, you were obviously able to understand the meaning of the comment, so just keep your fucking mouth shut.
OMG, we can't let this happen! (Score:3, Insightful)
Why are so many people worried about languages dying off? In the long run this may solve some of the major problems we have in this world. If there were better communications between people we might not have so many misunderstandings that seem to be the cause of so many of the conflicts that are going on now. Just imagine the difference if most of the world spoke the same language? This is something that would bring everyone closer together on issues instead of dividing us.
We have to strive to reach common ground. But if this goes like most things there will be groups that will push to preserve all these languages. I can see it now, there will be walls erected around certain sections in each country where only the local dialect can be spoken under penalty of law. How else to preserve the spoken language but to isolate groups of people that speak that particular dialect?
Re:Language follows money when it can (Score:5, Insightful)
Only because of the vast population of China. It is incredibly difficult to learn a tonal language if you grow up speaking a non-tonal one. I don't see Chinese making any serious inroads in the West just for that reason alone. As someone who has studied several foreign languages, I can say I'd rather deal with grammar complexities than trying to figure out which tone is being used.
Meanwhile Europe and many parts of Asia are already speaking English. My guess is that English wins the race. It doesn't win because its best mind you.
No language is the best. English became a major world language in part because of the spread of the British Empire and in part because English grammar is pretty simple. Yes, much of the spelling makes no sense (well, there are reasons for it, but I'll skip the long explanation), but the grammar is basically easy. English is non-inflected, lacks grammatical genders, and the verbs have very simple conjugations. All of these make the language relatively easy to learn. Let's take Russian for an example now. It is inflected (6 cases), has 3 genders (masculine, feminine and neuter) and almost all verbs come in pairs (perfective and imperfective). English got a big boost from the rise of American culture, but the relative simplicity of the grammar is why it became a world language. Mark Twain wrote a famous piece on his attempts to learn German and the insane grammar of the language where the word for "wife" in German is a masculine (!!!) word. Twain said that any reasonably intelligent person could come to grips with English a lot quicker than they could German just because the grammar of English is so much easier.
Re:What will happen to English? (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, unless you're proposing that rules cannot possibly ever change, I don't understand your gripe.
When I started learning English some 20 years ago, I was taught the "shall-will-will" future tense. However, my teacher told me back then that by the time I grew up, it would probably be "will-will-will". And guess what, she was right - I haven't noticed the "old" future tense being used much lately.
Another English teacher recently told me that one British author of foreign language teaching books predicts that the -s in 3rd person singular is also bound to disappear, probably in the next 20-50 years.
Language evolves.
Better yet, languages evolve. And though as a linguist I'm a bit saddened by language extinction, it is a normal process - some languages will die out, but eventually many more will develop, though most probably as jargons. It is an inevitable consequence of globalization, and can no longer be stopped.
Re:Good /bad thing? - Irrelevent. (Score:3, Insightful)
When languages die out, it's because of an 'official language' that children must learn ( and learn in ) in school, and also use to interact with the government and other official entities. When children live in environments of multiple ethnicities with relatively similar levels of power, they learn many languages. When there is one dominant ethnicity and language, the members of which run the schools, government, businesses, and churches, children learn that dominant language ( and get ridiculed for speaking any of that silly country language ). The child quickly learns that speaking the dominant language means being successful, while speaking your mother tongue ( or grandmother's tongue ) means poverty and low social status ( i.e. being a 'dirty indian' or 'po white trash/black folk'). It's a matter of assimilation, not natural evolution.
Personally, I believe with projects like the OLPC, a global lingua franca will arise, or perhaps continentally regional lingua francas, for communications on the global communications network. However, people will continue to speak their native language at home. I have friends in Finland who are very conversant in 'digital english' -- written English over the internet. You would never guess they weren't English speaks from their online writings. More formal written English, not so good, and spoken English, sometimes pretty bad. However, they all continue to speak Finnish at home.
Re:Good thing? (Score:3, Insightful)
When there's talk about some tribe in the jungle losing their language or becoming extinct, I often hear people say "Oh, that sucks, but they're relatively unimportant. There isn't really anything we can do. They'll just have to adapt to the modern world." However, when they story is about Hitler trying to exterminate the Jews, I never hear "Well, the Jews are relatively unimportant. If their language, culture, and religion dies, it just means they couldn't adapt to the modern world." If anyone suggests that the holocaust was inevitable, they are branded as a racist or anti-semite, and rightly so. However, when we report on the extinction of languages, a poster on slashdot says "This is a good thing", and gets modded +5.
So, it seems that as a society, we are willing to accept the annihilation of some groups as natural or inevitable, while others are great tragedies and losses to humankind, nevermind the horror that those who are being annihilated experience. Why?
Re:What will happen to English? (Score:1, Insightful)
all other languages' spellings are being changed all the time, according to the changes that happen to the spoken language, so in most languages, you actually have a 1 to 1 mapping of letters to sounds, but with english you basically have to perform the whole 500 year evoltuion the language has gone through all the time, to transform the spelling that was close to phonetic 500 years ago, into the way we pronounce it today.
the biggest problem with english at the moment, is that there's nowhere to start. any change would be so dramatical that nobody would ever accept it for their normal writing, because it basically means that you have to learn to spell all over again. Anyone fancy writing in this way: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoundSpel [wikipedia.org]
Re:Maybe... (Score:3, Insightful)
Also, studying what is possible in real-world language syntax and grammar can teach us about the language faculties of our brain, and what its limits are.
So you are saying we should force people to learn these languages that are naturally dying out? How about we forbid the people speaking them to learn any other language and thus force them to live an isolated life that is unable to communicate with anyone else in the world? They are dying out because with new technology they can communicate with others, and choose to do so. They could have chosen differently but they didn't.
I think it's great that people are trying to record what they can of languages for academic reasons but the 'destruction' of a language is natural. Nature is cruel. Ask the salmon in the claws of the bear if you don't believe me. Wait - you probably don't speak salmon.
Re:What will happen to English? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Rubbish. (Score:3, Insightful)
I call bullshit on that one.
I have said it before, I will repeat it FSM knows how many times until I die, and I still won't get the message across to the uneducated masses: There. Is. No. Hardest. Language. To. Learn.
Not one. Not two. Not few. Not many. All natural languages are equally complex, as they are all designed to describe everything we come in contact with - therefore, they are all just as complex as the world that surrounds us.
Some people have trouble with certain subtleties of English; some have problems with some of the most fundamental concepts of my native Croatian; others find German impossible to learn, and don't get me started on Finnish, Hungarian, Chinese or !Xu (which you probably cannot even pronounce).
It's all about what you're used to; a language similar to your native one is easier to grasp than a completely unfamiliar one.