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Study uncovers lost 'golden age' of languages

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Re: Study uncovers lost 'golden age' of languages

#41

Post by casey2 »

humanity's natural state is an impressive diversity of ideas and behavior and then inevitable the most violent of them marginalize the rest. Humanity has already found many social structure that prevent concentration of power but those have been lost not to time, but to intentional destruction.

Often natives look at our way of life and say hell no that's retarded. But they are more polite about it. Europeans on the other hand just defined their flawed structure as "progress" and went on killing anyone who disagreed. In a way the worst parts of AGI are already here, we already killed all the real humans and we are the soulless automatons bounded to our possessions.

Re: Study uncovers lost 'golden age' of languages

#42

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

mdp2021 wrote: post #31
messe wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> which was clearly not my intention. You did not express that clearly enough then.

My bad :) It's just that I cannot allocate the safest amount of effort in composing. I thought it was clear enough.

Except the rest of your arguments fall apart if your point is just "Sanskrit and English shared a common ancestor thousands of years ago and English (and some actual ancestor languages to English) pulled in some Sanskrit loan words". As other commenters mentioned, lots of languages (and languages with long and robust literary traditions) fit this bill, so from an English speaker's perspective there is nothing special about studying Sanskrit. If anything there are a host of more direct ancestors.

Re: Study uncovers lost 'golden age' of languages

#43

Post by rubberpoliceman »

wl wrote: post #35
mdp2021 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> learn a language with very few speakers Learn Sanskrit. You were writing in a descendant language just now. If you learnt the roots, you would understand the descendants better. And they are your tools, and knowing your tools is important. Other more obscure languages? Well, as implied, languages are related... So studying the network clarifies the whole.

Or learn Hittite. It's got the oldest corpus in the Indo-European language family. You've got your standard assortment of Indo-European cases. Grammatical gender is animate/inanimate and the animate gender has yet to split into masculine and feminine. The script is tons of fun, especially if you write it with a stylus on clay. And as a bonus, you get to learn a smattering of Sumerian and Akkadian vocabulary.

Animate gender didn’t split into masculine and feminine — inanimate collective plural was repurposed as feminine.

Re: Study uncovers lost 'golden age' of languages

#44

Post by forgotmyusernam »

gregdaniels421 wrote: post #2

> political currents don’t have to move in one direction. It’s not inevitable that endangered languages become extinct. There really isn't any good incentive to learn a language with very few speakers, since unless you already know a speaker, you really can't practice the real language. People were a few years ago at least hoping llms could help preserve the languages, but more most of them, there just aren't enough…

But what good can come from preserving languages that already do not have enough samples?

Do languages have value in themselves?

Re: Study uncovers lost 'golden age' of languages

#46

Post by layer8 »

boonzeet wrote: post #39

A minor point, but the colour scheme on that chart infuriates me. When the data can be seen a progression (not endangered -> threatened -> few known speakers -> no known speakers), why use red to green but in a random order?

The order is alphabetical, not random. ;)

Re: Study uncovers lost 'golden age' of languages

#47

Post by layer8 »

mdp2021 wrote: post #10
retrac wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know how people learn Ancient Greek to study Homer in the original language? Gilgamesh deserves that. I'm only a beginner but the refinement of the poetry is already obvious even as someone who doesn't know the language. Euphony was very important to the Mesopotamian poets. They liked rhythms and alliteration and assonance. And the late editions of Gilgamesh reflect about two thousand years of iterative improveme…

> Gilgamesh deserves that The very moral in Gilgamesh deserves that. "I went in a quest for immortality; I did not achieve it and came back, and while returning I saw in the distance the City I built, and I understood what my immortality was...". (A "must" of an insight for engineers, architects, builders...)

The longevity of a city is difficult to achieve as an engineer/architect/builder nowadays. One might have better chances as a scientist.

Re: Study uncovers lost 'golden age' of languages

#48

Post by layer8 »

aboardRat4 wrote: post #13

The golden age of languages is when there is only one language left, and everyone can understand everyone without cunning translators and hallucinating llms.

Knowing multiple languages, in particular less related or unrelated ones, is mentally enriching. If you only know a single language, you don’t know what you are missing in terms of diversity of thought and expression. Languages aren’t fungible. Translation is lossy, often considerably so.

Re: Study uncovers lost 'golden age' of languages

#49

Post by goodmythical »

layer8 wrote: post #45
thisisauserid wrote: post #36

Between one and three thousand years ago.

Less ambiguously: between 1000 and 3000 years ago. ;)

So definitely not either 1000 years ago or 3000 years ago, but in the range 975BC to 1025AD?

Cuz if it's got to be between 1/3000, it can't be 1000 or 3000, right?

Between can of course mean (1000,3000) or [1000,3000], right?

Just poking fun at the attempt to remove ambiguity including ambiguity.

Re: Study uncovers lost 'golden age' of languages

#50

Post by sieve »

mdp2021 wrote: post #11
gregdaniels421 wrote: post #2

> political currents don’t have to move in one direction. It’s not inevitable that endangered languages become extinct. There really isn't any good incentive to learn a language with very few speakers, since unless you already know a speaker, you really can't practice the real language. People were a few years ago at least hoping llms could help preserve the languages, but more most of them, there just aren't enough…

> learn a language with very few speakers Learn Sanskrit. You were writing in a descendant language just now. If you learnt the roots, you would understand the descendants better. And they are your tools, and knowing your tools is important. Other more obscure languages? Well, as implied, languages are related... So studying the network clarifies the whole.

Everyone should learn Sanskrit if only to read the great poets and dramatists in the original. The translations are often nice, but you do lose something in the process. Thanks to the incredible efforts of Pāṇini[1], the language was mostly frozen in time and is still just as understandable today as it was 2500 years ago.

I started learning it because it is India's civilizational language and I wanted to read the itihāsas in the original.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P%C4%81%E1%B9%87ini

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