The Many Languages Missing From the Internet (bbc.com) 205
Imagine your favourite social media platform does not let you post in English. Now think of a keyboard that won't allow you to type in your own words. You would have two options: either switch to another language or remain digitally silent. This is the reality for most people that speak indigenous languages and dialects. From a report: There are nearly 7,000 languages and dialects in the world, yet only 7% are reflected in published online material, according to Whose knowledge?, a campaign that aims to make visible the knowledge of marginalized communities online. While Facebook supports up to 111 languages, making it the most multilingual online platform, a survey published by Unesco in 2008 found that 98% of the internet's web pages are published in just 12 languages, and more than half of them are in English. This reduces linguistic diversity online to a handful of tongues, making it harder for those that speak one of the excluded languages of the internet.
In reality... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Don't forget the US.
Compromise (Score:2, Insightful)
I have long supported the following changes to the world.
1. Adopt and enforce English as the Universal Language for all interactions world wide.
2. Teach English in all schools world wide as the primary language.
3. All other non-English languages can be taught but only as additional culture classes with no educational impact or requirements, place them in the same area as Band, Theater and other electives.
4. World wide adoption of the standard Metric system, yes America that means you will need to change out
Re:Compromise (Score:5, Insightful)
Which sounds great, until you change some of the values. "Adopt and enforce Esperanto as the Universal Language for all interactions world wide" would not go over so well. Same for Latin or French, both of which served that role in the past. Or written Chinese, which was used as a way to unify an empire full of disparate langauges. Possibly could get enough votes for Spanish to win the day though. English has severe drawbacks for being difficult to learn and with an enormous vocabulary. The problem is that much on your list sounds extremely convenient to you; would you feel the same way if the list was extremely inconvenient to you personally?
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How would you feel if we all went with Mandarin Chinese instead of English? There are a couple hundred million more Mandarin Chinese speakers than English ones.
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What's the point of visibility if no one outside the local area can read what you're posting? They might realize your culture exists, but that isn't as useful as communicating in a language that more people know. The purpose of the internet is to communicate with a global population. You're not going to do that in a dialect only known in your local region.
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What's the point of visibility if no one outside the local area can read what you're posting?
It makes it easier for outsiders to learn the language. For example, learning Spanish or Japanese is relatively easy, because there are so many resources (print, classes, online texts, whatever you want) for learning the language.
Learning Tamil or Igbo is a lot harder, although both are important languages with a lot of cultural history. There just aren't as many resources for learning the language.
For you, since you have no interest in learning languages, there might be no point.
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What's the point of visibility if no one outside the local area can read what you're posting?
It makes it easier for outsiders to learn the language.
Why would outsiders want to learn a marginal language with nothing of benefit in that language outside of that culture?
Learning Tamil or Igbo is a lot harder, although both are important languages with a lot of cultural history. There just aren't as many resources for learning the language.
Why are they important? I know Tamil, and outside of the culture it's useless.
For you, since you have no interest in learning languages, there might be no point.
The number of people who want to learn a marginal language is so tiny it's not even a rounding error. Saying "what's the point of learning $FOO" when there's no use for $FOO is a valid question.
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Why would outsiders want to learn a marginal language with nothing of benefit in that language outside of that culture?
I do, why don't you?
Why are they important? I know Tamil, and outside of the culture it's useless.
One of the oldest written languages in the world.
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I do, why don't you?
Because I have other interests and limited time.
Re:In reality... (Score:4, Informative)
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Why would outsiders want to learn a marginal language with nothing of benefit in that language outside of that culture?
I do, why don't you?
That doesn't answer the question.
Why are they important? I know Tamil, and outside of the culture it's useless.
One of the oldest written languages in the world.
Doesn't make it useful. Try talking to Tamil people sometime. About half the words used in any technical or scientific discussion are English. There's a reason for this.
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Why would outsiders want to learn a marginal language with nothing of benefit in that language outside of that culture?
I do, why don't you?
That doesn't answer the question.
The answer is self-evident. Like jazz, if you have to ask then you'll never know.
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Why would outsiders want to learn a marginal language with nothing of benefit in that language outside of that culture?
I do, why don't you?
That doesn't answer the question.
The answer is self-evident. Like jazz, if you have to ask then you'll never know.
You can say the same thing about Klingon; doesn't make it "not useless".
Re:In reality... (Score:5, Insightful)
Why would anyone want to learn English other than the globalism aspect of it? After all, there's nothing useful in the culture from such a tiny island, it only lives on because of the British countries and English colonies to give it clout. If English weren't the "lingua franca" where would it be? If America spoke German would we have people wondering why anyone would waste time learning English? Tamil is a big language spoken by lots of people, I wouldn't classify it as marginal or even minor.
I remember taking some classes in Finnish and the locals were often confused about why anyone would bother. But it's got an interesting history and culture, and it inspired Lord of the Rings to some degree. Meanwhile France is pissed that more people aren't learning the language and they fight against loan words showing up (never mind the horror some feel when they actually hear how French is actually spoken by native French speakers who are not French).
As far as the internet goes, maybe we don't need every trivial language. But... only 7% of languages are represented. It's not even half! You get some people and companies who make decisions about what languages "matter". A language doesn't show up on the internet because of the number of users it has, but from how rich the users are.
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Why would anyone want to learn English other than the globalism aspect of it?
There's absolutely no reason whatsoever. The largest reason for language is to communicate. If a language doesn't allow communication with anyone other than people you don't normally communicate with anyway then its pointless to learn.
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"If I go to France what language should I communicate in?"
English normally, because even the die hard old guard French who wanted absurd levels of legal protection for the language are fading away now leaving generations of French that are more than happy to speak English, precisely because they recognise a common language aids understanding.
Like it or not, the whole world has been converging from many to fewer languages for a few thousand years now. You can't halt progress with misguided romanticism.
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It's a shame all those Canadians can't just learn English. Or the others just learn French. Supporting two is stupid. Why should all have Esperanto all firmly at our command if we were even slightly logical!
The problem here is in discriminating against those who aren't speakers of the popular languages. It can range from just grumbling about immigrants should just learn English, to outright tribalism and conflicts. It becomes a major issue if you to worry about voting - to you exclude the older people,
Got the important ones (Score:5, Funny)
So what is your proposed solution? (Score:3)
Google Translate helps a ton of people understand foreign language websites, including English. There are very few companies that care enough or have the user base and extensive funds to translate things in various languages, most can't even be bothered to make things accessible to English speaking blind or deaf people.
The reality is that English is the business language of choice and the Internet is a business platform. For a while in the 2000's we thought it would be Chinese or Japanese, so you'll find a ton of technical information in Japanese, just like you found books in German back in the 1970's.
If you want to succeed on the International stage, you'll have to adopt some form of lingua franca. Is it nice you can read something in your own language: sure, but even plenty of those do have loan words from English when explaining technical details and there is simply insufficient resources to translate the entire Internet in every language and dialect.
Re:So what is your proposed solution? (Score:5, Funny)
The reality is that English is the business language of choice
And, a hundred years later, the French are still pissed about that.
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' The reality is that English is the business language of choice'
"And, a hundred years later, the French are still pissed about that."
Non!
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Chinese is likely next, if they can throw off the Communist dictators
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Based on demographic trends, it will actually be Amish Dutch.
Based on Firefly, it will be a mashup of English plus Chinese swear words.
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Perhaps then Shakespeare would roll over in his grave instead of on it.
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To an extent. What really gets them mad is the fact that it's largely replaced French as the diplomatic language of choice.
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Yeah, I remember that from watching PBS's "The Story of English" - which was a pretty fascinating series.
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Why are the French pissed about that? I thought French was the language of diplomacy. They should be happy with that.
Re: So what is your proposed solution? (Score:2)
Speaking of loanwords, I used to work with a lot of French guys and it's hilarious to hear them speak about anything technical because they're constantly switching to English for some terms. For instance "torque wrench" in French is "cle de serrage dynamometrique", which is clumsy as hell, so even when they're speaking to each other in French they'll use "torque wrench" instead. Other terms/phrases are even worse; that's just one of the few I remember offhand.
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Obviously France French people. Because Quebec F
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Only a handful of people have the Office québécois de la langue française up their arse.
Blue collar and white collar workers use english words all the time, either because the french version is a lot longer (torque wrench being a perfect example) or is used so little that some people only know the word in english.
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It's even more exaggerated when using words to describe the internet and various technologies associated with it. In many languages pretty much all of these words are English loanwords to the point where, when discussing these things, all of the nouns are English and they're just connected by a different language's function words and verbs.
The French are among the most stubborn about trying to maintain their own vocabulary for everything, but as you point out, it hasn't really worked out.
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The French government has a department dedicated to preserving the purity of the language. No-one actually listens to their pronouncements on the correct way to speak French.
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One advantage, that your post hints at, is that by having an established global lingua franca, it is easier for individuals to communicate with the larger community. There is a greater value in having a single lingua franca that provides individuals with access to pretty much all of the world' knowledge than to have the segmentation of having every language on the internet represented.
I understand that there is a sentimental attachment to these languages and that globalization has destroyed many cultures an
Oh, that's rich. (Score:5, Insightful)
Now think of a keyboard that won't allow you to type in your own words.
You mean like a website that doesn't support UTF-8 in comments?
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Now think of a keyboard that won't allow you to type in your own words.
You mean like a website that doesn't support UTF-8 in comments?
There's a donkey kick right in the bits and bytes. Practically deserved at this point.
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Now think of a keyboard that won't allow you to type in your own words.
You mean like a website that doesn't support UTF-8 in comments?
Nothing says "news for nerds" like being unable to adapt to modern standards.
Because lost tribes should publish academic papers (Score:2)
Just to make linguists happy.
What about Cultures with NO WRITTEN Language? (Score:2)
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Probably every language with over a million speakers has a writing system that is conventionally used with it. In fact many small languages have multiple writing systems -- the historical result of small ethnic groups being claimed by successive empires.
Uighur for example has many historical writing systems, and four modern ones: a Arabic derived one in use before the 1950s and still the dominant script; a Cyrillic one promoted by the Soviets in the 1950s; A Chinese pinyin romanization promoted by China
Foio fa raauu nrem aho AOAL pol ! (Score:2)
Language diversity on the Internet is a bad thing (Score:2)
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The goal should be to communicate with as many people as possible.
Why?
You sound like Mark Zucherberg.
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The goal should be to communicate with as many people as possible. The easiest way to achieve that is for everyone to use the Internet in English. If you don't speak English, learn it. If you are too old to learn it, make sure your kids learn it.
It's clear that the economic forces of gravity are already pulling us in that direction. The Chinese are learning English. While Spanish is crawling north into the US the countries in South America are learning English and it's not spreading in Europe/Asia/Africa. The next ones the list like Hindi, Arabic, Bengali, Portuguese and Russian have no chance to break out of their regional niche. I think this in some ways should make it easier, because today you need many languages to talk to everyone. When we con
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*Mandarin Chinese
*Hindi
*Spanish
And if all else fails.... English.
So what? (Score:2)
We now know what needs to be done. (Score:2)
This is a great article. It makes it very clear that we need to beat the missionaries to every last population on earth, not with bibles, but with keyboards and WIFI. This is a terrible shame and one that the likes of Google or Facebook are well suited for.
--
If you can't beat them. Join them - Jim Henson
Many languages have never been written (Score:5, Interesting)
Of the ~7000 known languages, about half are oral only: they've never been used in writing. Of these, more than a thousand are on the way to extinction because everyone that speaks one of these also speaks another language that is in broader use.
Christian missionaries [wikipedia.org] are often the first to develop a writing system for a language. This is then used to translate the Bible (still the book that has been translated into more languages than ay other) into that language. Wycliffe estimates that about 2000 languages still need to have a writing system developed - these languages are spoken by about 250 million people [wycliffe.net]. Compared to the 6.9 billion people who speak the 3500 languages that do have a writing system, that's pretty small.
Then there's language support on a computer. Part of my work involves translation support. Our most prolific clients translate to about 50 languages. Even in that small number, we've found language support is not a given. Burmese was not supported in Windows or Adobe InDesign until recently. Now this is more of an issue with languages that have a long written history: Burmese has a unique script, for instance. Languages for which a writing system was only developed recently, are likely to use the Latin alphabet which massively simplifies language support.
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I have to imagine the venn diagram of people who don't speak a written language AND have regular access to a computer is a pretty small one.
But really, the internet is just a symptom of the fact that globalization is causing wide scale language consolidation. While there ccan be important cultural history that gets lost when a language dies altogether, this in most cases a GOOD thing. It means fewer barriers to trade and better ability to communicate.
I think a good compromise is to do what many Europeans d
Why is this bad? (Score:2)
Unpopular opinion. The greater the number of different languages the more barriers between people and groups of people exist. Humans are naturally tribal. Exclusive languages serve to define tribal boundaries and create conflict, violence, prejudice and ultimately limit what humans can accomplish.
The writer(s) of Genesis understood this when they said - "the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do"
Odd (Score:2)
This I'll never understand. Americans are constantly berated by Europeans for not having switched completely to the metric system under the premise that barriers are reduced when we all use the same standards. Then they turn around and berate us because we all speak mostly the same language. . . because, standards don't matter?
If a particular language is just a widely agreed upon method of communication, shouldn't the ideal be that we all speak the same language? Wouldn't these "lost" languages be as use
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This. English is not my first language. Actually, more like my third. But it is necessary to communicate with most of the world (at least most of the world that I bother to communicate with), so I use it.
And yes, you should switch to metric. For the same reason.
Language is a means of communication (Score:2)
Not one of identity.
The goal of using a language is to be understood by someone. Because I don't need language to talk to myself, I can well understand myself non-verbally. Only when I need to convey an idea to a second person, language becomes a necessary tool. And then I have to use one that the other person can understand.
On the internet, this means that you have to find an encoding that both parties can understand. We call that English. Or Mandarin.
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one language not good (Score:2)
I grew up in a place that was a former British colony and were a large part of the population is considered (ethnically, culturally) English. Another large part of the population was speaking another Germanic language. For example, the schools I went to catered for both these languages, so I'd say one got exposed thoroughly to both cultures. Throw into the mix that my folks were German expats and we spoke German at home - another Germanic language.
Even given these three languages being in the same language
So? This is totally meaningless. (Score:2)
So? What if 99.99% of people are using those 7% of languages?
There are lots of varied different types of things, it doesn't mean that they're all worth using or having.
"I make the best cheese grater in the world, but no one wants to buy it because every time you use it, it kills a loved one at random. I demand representation!"
I'm sorry, the world doesn't and shouldn't work that way.
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The article is totally meaningless, because just because there are 7000 other languages, it doesn't mean anyone actually uses them.
It is not efficient, not logical, and not ethical to waste energy on something that almost if not literally no one will use.
The article is meaningless. The only people who read something like that and think "oh wow, that's bad and not very inclusive" are people who are either unintelligent or didn't spend time thinking about what they read.
Linguistic imperialists (Score:3, Informative)
Make English the universal language ... (Score:2)
... because the Bible is in English and Jesus spoke English.
The Ten Commandments were written in English, as recorded in the documentary starring Charlton Heston.
Limited languages by design. Ref: AMAZON, LULU,... (Score:2)
This is a serious issue for those who try and publish things that aren't "Western European" encoded. Like the Cherokee Syllabary.
Amazon pulled some of my ebooks because they aren't in English being primarily in Cherokee (for student use).
Lulu has pulled books because they say "COVER title in SYLLABARY" doesn't match metadata supplied, but they won't accept the metadata unless it is "Western European" encoded. An impossible set of conditions to meet.
Kobo also won't accept books except in a set of approved la
Re:Seems easy to solve (Score:4, Insightful)
Sure... Step 1:
Create a keyboard that uses your language's glyphs.
Step 2:
Get UNICODE space to support your new glyphs
Step 3:
Create fonts which represent your language
Step 4:
Build website
Easy! Anyone can do it!
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"Step 2:
Get UNICODE space to support your new glyphs"
You must be new here, even THIS page can't handle it.
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If the people who speak it can't be bothered, why would anyone else?
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Create a keyboard that uses your language's glyphs.
A billion people write Chinese, mostly with the same standard QWERTY keyboard that is used in America.
Pinyin input method [wikipedia.org]
Very few languages use keyboards customized for their language. Nearly all languages have some sort of Romanization [wikipedia.org] system.
Many, such as Vietnamese, have discarded their traditional writing systems and standardized on the Roman alphabet. This is a quick and easy shortcut if you want to get your language on the web.
Re: Seems easy to solve (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Seems easy to solve (Score:4, Insightful)
I disliked the term "excluded languages" from the article. Noone is excluding your language. If noone reads or understands or cares about things written in your obscure language, then that's a "you" problem, and not because of anyone else excluding you.
Exactly. This is like someone not finding their obscure porn fetish represented online. The internet may be able to provide significant archival benefits, but it certainly doesn't hold the responsibility of preventing extinction due to an utter lack of popularity.
Re: Seems easy to solve (Score:5, Funny)
This is like someone not finding their obscure porn fetish represented online
The one problem no one will ever have ...
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Noone is excluding your language.
All too often, yes they are. Slashdot not only has the convention that comments are written in English, the site software actively makes it impossible to write most of the world's languages here because it doesn't support Unicode. That's a conscious choice that excludes a lot of languages.
There's also a whole bunch of languages that need explicit support because unlike English, they use characters that interact with each other: in e.g. Arabic, Farsi, Hindi, Thai, the way a character is rendered depends on a
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The original article was written for lowest common denominator. What it meant to say is: imagine that your language's alphabet isn't included in Unicode. Neither of your solutions really works in that situation.
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Yes, they are stupid. After all, it's the BBC. Some of their copypasta generators are not much batter than msmash or BeauHD.
Also, there is no real barrier to getting any real written language "onto" the Internet. But it involves a little work.
Either someone familiar with the language needs to learn a bit about getting space in the Unicode via their Technical Committee or someone familiar with how the Unicode Technical committee needs to learn how to draw the characters of another language. Either way it
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It's important to distinguish technical difficulty from bureaucratic difficulty. It's not technically difficult to add new glyphs to Unicode, but there is a major bureaucratic difficulty in that the committee is spending lots of time on new emojis rather than new alphabets.
With respect to your last point, here's an example of the problems it causes for a partly "missing" language [modelviewculture.com].
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Nope, you might simply not consider killing someone as a bad or even important thing.
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> If you do not have the word for murder, then you are less likely to intentionally kill someone.
My Chinese made bullshit detector just blew up.
(Did anyone else notice that cases of the Wuhan Flu went up when they named it? This guy is onto something, lol.)
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Funny, you were ALMOST really ironic. The language I was thinking of was Japan where grammar does not apply to intent. They have words for killed but not murder.
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The more likely reason you don't have a word for swim is because you lived somewhere that didn't have a lot of large bodies of water where you could swim or would need to in order to survive. Our ape ancestors were likely killing each other long before we ever developed language. I'm fairly certain gender dysphoria existed long before we had words to describe it. Reality cares not for our inability to de
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Wow, you really can touch a rope and decide it must be an elephant.
All the bullshit you talked about was not mentioned in my post. I never said to get rid of bad words, YOU DID. I never said they had large bodies of water but did not swim. YOU DID.
Everyone likes to think they are smarter than other people. But I kindly request that you do not spend your time thinking up obvious BULLSHIT that is tangentially related to things I say then pretend I said it.
Reality is EXACTLY as I described it, but your desc
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Whether you had a word for it or not, if you ended up in a large body of water and managed to get out everyone would ask "How did you do that?", "I don't know, I just kept my head up out of the water" "Way cool, teach me, teach me" and so we have transfer of knowledge without a word for it. Happens all the time.
I mean, how the hell would you learn anything as a child when you haven't learnt any words yet, since you don't
Re:Languages affect how you think. (Score:4, Interesting)
If you do not have the word for murder, then you are less likely to intentionally kill someone.
Sorry, but we're gonna need a citation for this.
If you do not have the word for swim, then you will never try to learn how to swim.
This too.
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I said murder, not killing. Very different things. Your error demonstrates my point well.
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you can not say Peter Murdered John.
I lived in Japan. The Japanese word for murder is "satsujin". It is a different word from an accidental killing or the killing of an animal.
My Japanese is rusty, so I double-checked by typing "satsujin" into Google Translate. It "round trips" to "murder" and "murder" back to "satsujin".
you asked for an example, and I have one.
I did not ask for an example. I asked for a citation. In other words, a link to peer-reviewed linguistic research with evidence that a lack of a word for X causes X to be less prevalent. Since this is Slashdot, secondar
Re: Languages affect how you think. (Score:2)
Not have a word for murder? That's impossible, I think.
The act is the first, the word for it came after.
The act itself is omnipresent among humans of all times; during quite a bit of it we did not yet speak.
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By that logic we have to first make up a word for something before we can learn how to do it, which is blatantly bullshit.
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Tyranny of the majority is unamerican
Are you sure? I think I would call it an innate problem of democracy, perhaps even an innate problem of society. It's never easy to be an outsider.
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We need to have one common language which is artificially designed for maximum efficiency and ease of learning (perhaps Esperanto). But we also need people learning all the other languages to understand our pasts, our cultures, the nature of language itself, and to maintain sufficient diversity for life to be interesting and creativity encouraged.
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Papua New Guinea has 830 languages and 8 million people. That's about 10,000 people per language.