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Languages: Why we must save dying tongues (2014)

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Re: Languages: Why we must save dying tongues (2014)

#161

Post by danieltillett »

gumby wrote: post #137
danieltillett wrote: post #100

Earlier 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. 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…

Do you know of one? I have been looking for one for years and nobody has been able to provide me one. Sure some terms can’t be easily translated into English (especially those that rely on assumed cultural knowledge), but none that I have found can’t be expressed in English.

Your Lisp - C analogy is not a bad one (I would have used assembler as the base rather than C). Sure there are some languages that are able to solve some problem more efficiently or elegantly than assembler, but there is no program that can’t (in principle) be written in assembler. There are however many programs that can be written in assembler that can’t be written in Lisp.

To continue my provocative thesis then you can think of English as the assembler of human thought :)

Re: Languages: Why we must save dying tongues (2014)

#162

Post by thret »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #110
eropple wrote: post #69

Earlier 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…

This was readily apparent in The Wire. As a native English speaker from across the sea I could not understand the Baltimore street dialect.

Re: Languages: Why we must save dying tongues (2014)

#163

Post by sametmax »

ggreer wrote: post #5

It'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…

+1. Yes, cultural diversity is good. But we have plenty of ways to have that without needing 1000 languages :

- art;

- food;

- social constructs;

- city organisations;

- and slang if you really want your tongue to be part of it.

We don't need to spend time and energy to save old ways of communication. Let's us it to make communication better now.

What's more, anything that live eventually dies, which is something we need to learn to accept. Now we are already spending a lot of energy to save our bodies, and a bit of it to save other living creatures, and I'm on board with that. But saving languages seems a waste to me. Either the system will procude or derive the next linguistic generation, or it will merge the old ones, but all in all, this is something I'd gladly let natural selection kick in.

At the very least, I wish we would all share a minimum of one language. I'm french, I consider my language much more efficient to describe things than english, but I'll be ok to just say "let's make sure everybody at least speak english" and be done with it.

I travel a lot, and the language barrier has never once been a good thing. Best case scenario you have goofy confusion and laughters, worst case scenario you have hate.

Now we don't need to eradicate the language diversity. But it's nor do we need to save it. It's ok to loose some of our knowledge. Yes, even books, stories, ways of thinking. Things die, that's how the system get balanced.

(Plus when we will create galatical aliances with aliens, we will need a earthling language, so let's start now people !)

Re: Languages: Why we must save dying tongues (2014)

#165

Post by swang »

danieltillett wrote: post #100
Razengan wrote: post #96

Earlier 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.

Well, no shit? The only language you speak is English. Any concepts that are foreign or difficult to explain in English would probably be out of your realm of understanding.

Re: Languages: Why we must save dying tongues (2014)

#166

Post by Razengan »

danieltillett wrote: post #157
Razengan wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 want…

It is not that you can’t in principle express any concept in any other language, just that in most cases the vocabulary doesn’t exist in that language. In Newton’s time it was not possible to write most scientific papers in English as English lacked the required terms and concepts (everyone wrote in Latin). For a whole series of historical reasons English has become the international language of science resulting in…

> just that in most cases the vocabulary doesn’t exist in that language.

Again you keep insisting that certain vocabulary doesn't exist in other languages, right after I provided some examples of vocabulary that do/did not exist in English!

If a language decides to incorporate, say, "science" into its vocabulary, does that make it any more limited than English when English itself took the word from French/Latin?

The argument in this thread was never about vocabulary, as all languages have been borrowing from each other since forever and are free to keep doing so. English does not have a trademark on words, especially ones that it itself took from other languages.

The initial point was that you lose nuance, intent, conciseness and artistic value. Take "throwing star" versus "shuriken", or "raw seafood" against "sushi." Does English have words for those objects or concepts? "Throwing star" is a clumsy phrase that has to be disambiguated from a solar star, or is it a celebrity known for his or her throwing skills?

Many poems, jokes or idioms fall apart right away when translated literally, or lose their punch or intended effect when "explained" in another language. The world would be an insanely dull and boring place with just one language.

Re: Languages: Why we must save dying tongues (2014)

#167

Post by realusername »

lugus35 wrote: post #2

French is one of those dying tongues. In France we don't speak french anymore, we speak franglais, a mix of french and english words.

French is absolutely not endangered at all, there is no risk for the language dying in the next 50 years with that much speakers. The number of speakers is actually growing (along with the other top 15 languages).

The languages we are speaking about might only have a handful of people from the older generation speaking it. The French legacy dialects actually are on the other hand endangered.

Re: Languages: Why we must save dying tongues (2014)

#168

Post by ketzu »

DonaldFisk wrote: post #62
ggreer wrote: post #5

It'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…

If we all started to speak the same language, it would make most of the world's novels, short stories, poetry, song lyrics, and movie dialogue inaccessible, and different ways of looking at the world would be lost. And which language should be chosen? English, Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, Esperanto, or something else? Ask bilingual speakers if they'd prefer just to speak one language and to forget the other one. Knowin…

For myself it's more like: I'd like to speak more languages, not have the world reduced to speak the two I already know!

But this is a purely opinion based discussion lacking any real data so far.

Re: Languages: Why we must save dying tongues (2014)

#169

Post by pvaldes »

chousuke wrote: post #16
ggreer wrote: post #5

It'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…

From an utilitarian viewpoint, sharing a single, global language is probably useful. but I feel that such a world would likely also suffer from less variety in culture and viewpoints. Languages tend to accommodate the way of thinking prevalent in the cultures that speak it, and vice versa the language also shapes the speakers. To learn another language as a non-native speaker, especially one that is sufficiently diff…

> had you ever considered that there might exist a word describing exactly why cat videos are popular?

"cute"?

Re: Languages: Why we must save dying tongues (2014)

#170

Post by majewsky »

Mikhail_Edoshin wrote: post #158
ggreer wrote: post #5

It'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…

This line of reasoning implies there's a benefit in such economy and simplification. But is this really so? Take fonts, for example. One could argue that it would be better to have a single font and then maybe also simplify it to have fewer character shapes and width variations. But from what I see font development goes in an entirely different direction. There's more fonts developed every year, and they're getting m…

https://xkcd.com/927/
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