I find this ironic that all the comments (both for and against) are in English.
People talk about this topic around the world. HN is just a small place.
Languages: Why we must save dying tongues (2014)
121–130 of 255 posts
Re: Languages: Why we must save dying tongues (2014)
#122It's not a well-liked view, but I'm very glad that humanity is on the path to speaking only a few languages (or perhaps just one). If you disagree, consider this thought experiment: Imagine if the entire world spoke a single language. Would we ever want to invent new languages, making mutual communication harder? It would be silly. I do feel for the speakers of these dying tongues, but in the long run, this is a good…
> Ideally, linguists and historians would document these languages and their cultures, then let them quietly fade. Teaching them to new generations is not only a futile effort, it's less beneficial on net. I agree to this, and only this, from your comment. There's a lot of romanticism in reviving dead or dying languages that recalls a likeness to the Human Zoo. But on the other hand, languages and dialects are very t…
Why can't we ask people to give up their identity? Let's consider the possibility that arbitrary linguistic (and other tribal) divisions are harmful. Consider the possibility that giving the political sphere more levers to pull to manipulate us is not a good thing.
In much the same way, consider the step backwards we've taken in messaging. We had a lingua franca - XMPP. We gave it up so that various powerful actors (google, facebook) could lock us into their unintelligible dialect.
Was this a good thing?
Re: Languages: Why we must save dying tongues (2014)
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
Turkey and Indonesia do not use Arabic for communication. There's an Arabic continuum, and Saudi Arabic is rather different from Moroccan Arabic. There are subtle cultural differences preserved in the diversity of language. England, Kenya, and India all speak English, but English is merely a common language, and a lot of cultural differences come from the linguistic diversity in each of those countries. Culture is a…
It takes a few weeks of practice to be able to intelligbly understand someone from India, Kenya, England, the US, or Australia, if you're from one of the others. Cadences and idioms are all off.
This is dramatically overstated. It immediately predicts that British television would have no audience in the US and Australia.
Re: Languages: Why we must save dying tongues (2014)
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
This sounds like the view of someone who has never been exposed to more than one language. If one were to try applying that idea to programming languages, they would get laughed off HackerNews. They'd be told to just "pick the right tool for the job." Perhaps you meant that we should only have a few or one dialects of each [major] language, which is more reasonable. No one language, or any system of communicating int…
I have yet to come across any concept in any human language that can’t be expressed in English. Sure in some languages some concept can be expressed more subtly or poetically, but the concept can be expressed provided the assumed knowledge is present. It is the lack of assumed cultural knowledge that prevents these Japanese expressions from making sense in English, not that they can’t be expressed in English in princ…
> I have yet to come across any concept in any human language that can’t be expressed in English.
And all turing-complete programming languages are technically equivalent; what's your point?
Re: Languages: Why we must save dying tongues (2014)
#125I'm not advocating one global language and I think everyone should learn at least one language other than English but let's let the dying languages die. Natural selection is doing a good job. The good ones will survive.
The problem with natural selection as pertaining to language is that the language may be great but die because the culture dies off or shrinks or gets assimilated. For example, I don't consider Spanish an efficient or well-designed language in the slightest, but it's very widely spoken because the Spanish are good at conquest. Ainu is very fascinating and possibly more efficient (in terms of syllables per second over…
Agree. Culture is what makes the language more beautiful. When a small town turns into a big city, the language will gradually lose its power if everyone goes for profit without the culture carried forward.
Also, like what @gkya said, if the government aggressively enforce an official language on the people, other languages will die more quickly.
Re: Languages: Why we must save dying tongues (2014)
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have yet to come across any concept in any human language that can’t be expressed in English. Sure in some languages some concept can be expressed more subtly or poetically, but the concept can be expressed provided the assumed knowledge is present. It is the lack of assumed cultural knowledge that prevents these Japanese expressions from making sense in English, not that they can’t be expressed in English in princ…
> I have yet to come across any concept in any human language that can’t be expressed in English. And all turing-complete programming languages are technically equivalent; what's your point?
That there is no knowledge that can't be communicated in English. Actually not all languages are equivalent because many concepts can only be expressed in English as all other languages lack the vocabulary to express many scientific and technical concepts. Right now English really is the only language that can be used to express a lot of concepts.
Re: Languages: Why we must save dying tongues (2014)
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
This post is a good one, and that utilitarian idea that unilingualism is good because you can hire people is a claim borne of the kind of short-sighted technocracy that bedevils tech and tech culture. In the appendices of 1984, Orwell was speaking of conscious linguistic malformation to make it difficult to communicate concepts that the manipulators of Newspeak (née English) wished to stamp out. It's not better when…
A single language would never work anyway. It would inevitably split into dialects and regional/generational/racial slang, which would soon become incomprehensible to outsiders. English patois in some parts of the world makes no sense to British/American speakers, even though it reads and sounds more or less like standard English. You don't even have to travel to find the split happening. Just try listening to teenag…
Like Latin after the fall of the Roman Empire. Sumerian is such an interesting language too. I love how Neal Stephenson incorporated it into Snow Crash really got me thinking about languages.
Re: Languages: Why we must save dying tongues (2014)
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is still somewhat historical. Latin becoming French, Spanish, Romanian, and all accents are all a product of geography. France, Spain, Romania, etc. It's not group entity, it's location identity. But the generations aren't separated by geography anymore. Well there may well be intellectual advantages for multilingualism, different unilingualism typically just leads to conflict.
> all accents are all a product of geography not necessarily, there is often a clear split between social classes of groups of people (i.e. consider the association of "cockney" with working class, or the discussion around "ebonics" for african-american-english) And there are cases where specific communities evolve their own sub-languages (e.g. cants and argots). There is surely less separation now then there once wa…
It was always about communication. The single deadliest blow that was ever stricken to the existing rich dialect continuums was mass media (newspapers, and later broadcasting). Where before you had populations relatively isolated across a wide geographic area, only conferring with their immediate neighbors, now you had something that would reach all the way to the political border (and beyond). The second blow was the public school system, that usually standardized on a single literary standard country-wide.
In the age where importance of geography is diminished, and with so many channels of communication for both text and voice, a trend towards a single language seems inevitable - there are just too many things that would benefit from it, from science to commerce, and to some extent even art (you trade diversity for audience).
Re: Languages: Why we must save dying tongues (2014)
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
I believe that this is one of the best things that TV has given us - the homogenization, and adoption of the English language. It eases communication and trade across cultures. It also makes it cheaper to recruit people from all around the world with a given skill. Right now, there's a shortage in skilled welders. There's a massive number of skilled welders in Asia that make bit less money than the welders here do. W…
I love English language, but I don't like it, and I find it unfortunate that it is the English language that has acquired the status of the most important international language today. Even the "standard" pronunciation turns out to be extremely hard to do correctly for non-native speakers, for many even after years of speaking it. The distinction between some phonemes is way too subtle for them to get right; some wor…
It will likely get simplified as it keeps evolving as the "common tongue". Both spelling, and shedding phonemes that are just too close to distinguish without a lot of practice, or that are inconvenient for non-native speakers (to remind, most English speakers today are non-native).
Re: Languages: Why we must save dying tongues (2014)
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I have yet to come across any concept in any human language that can’t be expressed in English. And all turing-complete programming languages are technically equivalent; what's your point?
That there is no knowledge that can't be communicated in English. Actually not all languages are equivalent because many concepts can only be expressed in English as all other languages lack the vocabulary to express many scientific and technical concepts. Right now English really is the only language that can be used to express a lot of concepts.
And most of those scientific and technical words in English are actually borrowed from other languages in the first place.
Even the words "science" and "technique" and "compute." Latin and French. Basic stuff like "icon." Greek. "Algebra" and "alcohol" and some other words that start with "al-"; Arabic.
I could go on to force the point but it already feels bizarre having to point out the obvious..
If English can wantonly borrow from other languages then pretend it's the only language that can express these things, why can't other languages borrow those words from English and pretend they're a part of them?