If those are all the reason to save dying tongues, then this article proved the opposite of what it meant to prove :)
Languages: Why we must save dying tongues (2014)
131–140 of 255 posts
Re: Languages: Why we must save dying tongues (2014)
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
The reason we have lots of programming languages is because: 1. They're not that different. Once you've learned a few, picking up new ones is pretty easy. 2. They're much easier to learn than human languages. To answer your first question: I probably wouldn't stop using english myself, but I don't think I'd teach it to my children.
3. You can teach millions of computers to obey a new language just by copying its implementation onto them. You can make something that reaches countless users even if you're the only person working in your language.
The process you describe is effectively translation. This works with natural languages as well.
Re: Languages: Why we must save dying tongues (2014)
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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. We do something similar to that already. Kids make up their own lingo when playing, subgroups invent new slangs within a single language, areas make their own dialect, we invent new cultural languages (e.g. music ge…
>you really don't know what actual cultural diversity is // So a young nomadic Mongolian girl and I (UK, middle-age, male, working in craft/retail) don't represent different cultures because we can both speak English? Go on, explain, clearly I don't understand. Didn't you already explain that there were vastly different subcultures within the population of English language speakers? Don't you think there's more to cu…
Again, the article has a specific definition of what it means to speak "one language" - it means to renounce all knowledge trapped inside the dead language, cultural and all. Therefore yes, if you both only spoke English (in the absolute case at issue) you woudn't have different cultures, by definition.
Language and culture are not linearly independent.
Re: Languages: Why we must save dying tongues (2014)
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, you can express pretty much any concept from a foreign language in English, and vice-versa if the language is thorough enough. What you lose is the power and conciseness that comes from having a single word expressing a concept that would take 10 or 18 words to be correctly expressd in English. I have memorized a few interesting ones in some languages: 'Litost' (czech), 'Prozvonit' (czech also),'Tartle'(scottis…
English is very interesting in that if a word makes sense to use (rather than a phrase) then English will borrow that word without hesitation. Actually because the language of science and technology is English there are lots of concepts that can’t be expressed in any other language. Sure any emotion a human can feel can be expressed in any language, but most higher level scientific concepts can’t be expressed in any…
most higher level scientific concepts can’t be expressed
in any language other than English. Out of the total
number of human concepts that have ever been communicated,
the majority are only available to English speakers.
Re: Languages: Why we must save dying tongues (2014)
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
3. You can teach millions of computers to obey a new language just by copying its implementation onto them. You can make something that reaches countless users even if you're the only person working in your language.
The process you describe is effectively translation. This works with natural languages as well.
The process I describe of installing a translation method in seconds, bringing about instant understanding, doesn't work with natural languages.
Re: Languages: Why we must save dying tongues (2014)
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 th…
Actually, the impact that standardized language education has had on dialect variation isn't quite clear. It appears to have had some impact, but not as much as laypeople usually think. In fact, standard written American-English has undergone quite a few changes over the last 100 years and things that were non-standard have become standard. Likewise with mass media. There is no evidence that mass media has had any effect on the rate of linguistic change and variation in America. The biggest impact has probably been the increase in ease and speed of modern transportation. Regardless, there is likely more dialect variation in America today than there was 1-200 years ago, though geographic variation may be slightly diminishing (at least intraregionally) and socioeconomic variation may be more important.
The biggest factor in dialect development is time, which is why you see a large variety of dialects in England as compared to the USA. England is much smaller, but has had much longer for dialects to develop.
Re: Languages: Why we must save dying tongues (2014)
#137Earlier 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.
That's an extraordinary statement; how many languages do you speak? In my home we speak a melange of three, different ratios depending on who is speaking to whom. And mixed in are other words that my wife or I acquired from other languages used when younger. Some concepts are just simpler or more intense in one language than another. Even though I have been speaking English from birth, use it every day, and live in an English speaking country, there are some things that are simply not natural in it. It would be like trying to write Lisp code using C -- possible (there are lisp compilers that emit C), but painful.
Re: Languages: Why we must save dying tongues (2014)
#138It'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…
It isn't necessary to have only one language for people to communicate. Humans are perfectly capable of learning multiple languages, and and it may even be good for a child's cognitive development to do so.
It's also unlikely that it is possible to have one global language. People acquire language from the people they grow up around. They get it from their parents, friends, neighbors, etc (note that I omitted teachers). Even if everyone had the possibility to communicate with any other person in the world, from birth, they wouldn't, and so dialects would form and eventually become languages.
Re: Languages: Why we must save dying tongues (2014)
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 (…
Why can't we ask people to give up their identity?
You're not willing to give up your identity. It's a lot of work, among other things.
Re: Languages: Why we must save dying tongues (2014)
#140Earlier 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.
English is not my native language, and I can barely tell the difference between Indian, Kenyan, British and American English. Cadence and idioms are all equally off. Certainly it's not "weeks of practice".