IMO proposing of speaking only one language because of usefulness on an English speaking site is a bit hypocritical, considering it is not even the most widespread. Surely keeping English around is just emotional appeal.
Languages: Why we must save dying tongues (2014)
201–210 of 255 posts
Re: Languages: Why we must save dying tongues (2014)
#202i thought it was going to come up with a rational argument. something like the real reason people are doing this and getting paid handsomely to do it. but its just all sentimental nonsense, isn't it?
Re: Languages: Why we must save dying tongues (2014)
#203Earlier 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…
Some people act so self-entitled, it hurts. Just because you seem to neither have appreciation for beauty nor humanities, doesn't free you from acknowledging it in others.
Your premise seems to be that all languages are 'Turing-equivalent': Given enough time+patience you can "explain" the meaning of every expression in every other language. To be honest, a book that wastes my time "explaining" concepts from the language it was originally written in is not a book I would consider fun.
I hope you can agree, that describing a feeling is not the same as actually feeling it. But you don't accept that there are words that evoke a feeling in a native speaker, that are not evoked by reading a translation in another language?
There are already several examples of phrases in this thread that can only clumsily be explained in English, and some of them are for exactly this reason already used by English speakers. The amount of scientific publications on indivual pieces of literature should also tell you that language as art is more than describing things.
Btw, your example of scientific papers is entirely besides the point because their purpose precisely is to just describe something, instead of evoking feelings or images in the readers mind, tapping into his stream of associations/values/lifelong cultural traditions etc. You also claim that _all_ human thoughts in history are "rather limited" when compared to modern "scientific papers". This is trolling, I hope.
Finally, the fact that you make out your own language as the lingua franka of all humanity does not do much good to your argument, which has a priori nothing to do with a specific language. Rather, it makes you look stereotypical Western-centric.
Re: Languages: Why we must save dying tongues (2014)
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
You don't know what languages I speak (other than English of course), but this is irrelevant. It is not if I can find a concept that can not be expressed in English, but if anyone I speak to can come up with one. Do you know of any?
To translate scientific literature is the easiest part of translation. In fact, a lot of papers don't even get translated because everyone can read them after learning 100-200 words from the respective language. I can tell you that most of my time goes by reading scientific papers in languages that are not my mother tongue.
The question discussed in this thread is _not_: Would it be beneficial to have all scientific papers in one language? It is: Would it be beneficial to have all literature, discussions, jokes, poems and songs in one language. A question, that Newton's work and the amount of NSF funded papers in 2015 has absolutely no relation to.
Re: Languages: Why we must save dying tongues (2014)
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 s…
I believe "expressed" is closer to "there's a concept everybody is familiar with and there's a specific feeling associated with that one word/expression that everyone understands without providing the definition of the word".
Kind of like schadenfreude is now known to English speakers as schadenfreude. You can explain what it means, but there's no direct equivalent that's as easy to bring up.
From my own experience, I found that there's no direct equivalent to "disturbing" in Polish. There are many similar words (equivalents of "shocking" and other), but they just don't have the same feeling associated with them.
Re: Languages: Why we must save dying tongues (2014)
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
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. Please provide examples to support your baseless claim.
Pick any scientific paper at random. No other language other than English has the terms and concepts required to write the paper - you can’t translate most scientific papers into another language since the complete set of terms and concepts don’t exist in any other languages. It is not that you can’t write scientific papers in other languages (many are written in other languages), just that we have settled on English…
You are aware of the fact, that Einstein's papers are in German, right?
> The vast majority of new scientific papers are written in English and hence every new concept within them can’t be expressed in any other language since there are no corresponding vocabulary to map the new concept onto.
Non sequitur. But how about _you_ provide an example of a non-translatable concept in an English paper. Should not be hard: 'Just pick any scientific paper at random.'
Re: Languages: Why we must save dying tongues (2014)
#207It'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 for no other reason, I would be psyched to see a single language win out, especially if it were an alphabetic language that could easily be encoded in 8 bits. Fuck Unicode.
It wouldn't solve a problem of transcribing the old texts, or when using mathematical notation or other symbols inline. They still need unicode.
Re: Languages: Why we must save dying tongues (2014)
#208As much as I feel sad about losing so many amazing languages, these arguments are weak emotional appeals at best. The only legitimate argument you can make for keeping minority languages around is to basically reframe the context and say your goal as a society is to promote cultural and linguistic diversity because society needs it more than it does a highly effecient raw information processing system. As a programme…
What is "efficiency" in the context of an entire society? What are we working toward? What will we do when we get there?
There are lots of great answers to this.
1. Working towards greater productivity. (In case this seems pointless or otherwise unworthy, remember that greater productivity leads to, e.g., people living longer lives).
2. Workings towards more great artistic achievements.
3. Working towards greater scientific achievements, which will bring the above, + more free time, + reaching other planters, + immortality.
You might not agree with all the above options, but if we, as a civilization, want to optimize towards something, there are plenty of great "somethings" to choose from. (and that are better than what most of humanity spends its time on, IMO).
Re: Languages: Why we must save dying tongues (2014)
#209It'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…
I think you're confusing monolingualism with everyone having a lingua franca. Your argument sounds like "We should all just have one common language; therefore, we don't need others."
Bilingualism has existed in countries for centuries without either language dying out. I'm all for everyone speaking English. I want people to know as many languages as possible. What I don't want is everyone speaking only English.
It's not ok to lose some of our knowledge. Uniformity is bland, dull, uninteresting, and sad. There's a reason why we think knowing a lot of languages is cool. There's beauty to be found in other cultures and their languages. I don't want to force everyone to learn languages, but it'd be tragic if we lost French and with it Hugo, Voltaire, Verne, Baudelaire, Dumas, Asterix and the rest. It just isn't the same in English.
Re: Languages: Why we must save dying tongues (2014)
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 s…
> Do you know of one?
Of course, I use them all the time. I'll give you a couple of silly, yet profound examples. In German and Marathi there are different words for the droppings (crap) of different animals. In fact in German there's a book that teaches the kids different words. Unlike the highly developed squeamishness of the English language around body functions, you might use one of these words to describe something non-scatalogical (say, some dropped bolts under a piece of machinery) Köttel which includes in one word that they are small, scattered, left by some small creature (i.e. by someone careless or simpleminded -- probably insulting yourself or someone else you're talking about) -- something that can be explained in English but by the time you've done so it's not worth it.
Or an example from English: because of the French invasion, English has different words for animals in the field (e.g. swine and pig) and on the table (pork). At home we'll use cow, Kuh, and vache (always humorously) as well as beef or "hamburger" in an English sentence just to emphasize different ways in which the animal is used in different cultures.
Agricultural roots are still current German and Marathi in a way not true in English, again due to the Norman invasion.
(oh yeah, another great German example is the different words for snot depending on its consistency).
German has a rich ontology of earth moving apparatus, and each kind of machine (e.g. Löffelbaggnr) has a descriptive term that even kids know and can understand. If that exists in English I have not seen it (and I've spent some time in construction) except presumably to particular specialists.
At the opposite end, in French you can't say shallow (only peu profond -- "a small depth") which has so much semantic richness it makes the term "shallow" shallow. In general, wordplay in English is pretty thin gruel compared to what you can get away with in French, or even German. Speaking of that the very structure of Arabic lets you say things with a richness (kitab vs katib) that is I find (and I have been speaking English in English speaking countries for more than 40 years) inexpressible in English.
> To continue my provocative thesis then you can think of English as the assembler of human thought
I enjoy speaking English but this statement is hardly true.