I can't decide whether this is a good thing or a bad thing.
Why does it have to be either? At best it's convenient, at worst it doesn't effect you. No need to make a value judgment. :)
Only 4% of languages are used online
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Re: Only 4% of languages are used online
#12I can't decide whether this is a good thing or a bad thing.
That depends on whether you are globalist or nationalist. Globalist - good, less languages - less barriers. Good for international commerce and knowledge sharing. Nationalist - bad, loss of language means some part of cultural heritage lost. Truth is always somewhere in between.
>Truth is always somewhere in between.
Either that's totally wrong (implies equal weighting), or it's a near-tautology (only false if one position is less than 100% accurate).
Re: Only 4% of languages are used online
#13I can't decide whether this is a good thing or a bad thing.
That depends on whether you are globalist or nationalist. Globalist - good, less languages - less barriers. Good for international commerce and knowledge sharing. Nationalist - bad, loss of language means some part of cultural heritage lost. Truth is always somewhere in between.
> Truth is always somewhere in between.
Good thing we agree about globalization otherwise I'd grab one of your goalposts and run with it ;)
Re: Only 4% of languages are used online
#14I guess the title "Only 240 languages are used online" doesn't sound like a problem? That probably represents 5 or 6 of 7 billion people?
I think the world should move towards even fewer languages than 240. However, it would be very sad if we didn't capture the complete grammar, vocabulary, etc. of those other languages before they die, along with lots of audio, to preserve them.
Re: Only 4% of languages are used online
#15And what percentage of people in the world uses one of the languages in that 4% as their primary language? I'm guessing it's a really large percentage, probably a majority of the world's population. It's not really useful to look at the percent of languages when they vary in the number of speakers by so much (and there's a long tail of languages with a vanishingly small number of speakers).
Indeed. To get a rough idea I added up the first table in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of... , it seems that about 85% of the world population are native speakers of one of the top-100 (top 1.6%) languages.
Re: Only 4% of languages are used online
#16I can't decide whether this is a good thing or a bad thing.
That depends on whether you are globalist or nationalist. Globalist - good, less languages - less barriers. Good for international commerce and knowledge sharing. Nationalist - bad, loss of language means some part of cultural heritage lost. Truth is always somewhere in between.
196 countries and 240 languages are represented online. The other 5000+ languages being used aren't national languages.
Re: Only 4% of languages are used online
#17I can't decide whether this is a good thing or a bad thing.
That depends on whether you are globalist or nationalist. Globalist - good, less languages - less barriers. Good for international commerce and knowledge sharing. Nationalist - bad, loss of language means some part of cultural heritage lost. Truth is always somewhere in between.
Loss of a language also often means a slightly unique way of seeing the world and thinking/talking about it is lost. Many languages have cool or weird features [1], and I care about that even though I can't communicate with speakers of those languages and therefore will never know the difference. I don't care about the national heritage of others, it's theirs - I care about diversity for the sake of it existing, not for the sake of me experiencing it. If we all thought the same stuff in the same ways, without any barriers, that would be much worse than having disconnected pockets of diversity, IMHO.
Re: Only 4% of languages are used online
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
That depends on whether you are globalist or nationalist. Globalist - good, less languages - less barriers. Good for international commerce and knowledge sharing. Nationalist - bad, loss of language means some part of cultural heritage lost. Truth is always somewhere in between.
Loss of a language also often means a slightly unique way of seeing the world and thinking/talking about it is lost. Many languages have cool or weird features [1], and I care about that even though I can't communicate with speakers of those languages and therefore will never know the difference. I don't care about the national heritage of others, it's theirs - I care about diversity for the sake of it existing, not…
That way lies the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and madness. The value isn't about (slightly) unique ways of thinking/talking about things, but (slightly) unique ways of expressing those thoughts. That is, without at least a good description of as many of the various grammars that exist, we lose a lot of data that can help us to understand language as a whole. F'rinstance, if languages like Hixkaryana had died out before being described, then the prevailing belief that OVS was an "impossible" regular order (as opposed to a special construction) would likely have become "truth", and the possibilities only explored in artificial languages like Klingon. Losing that data means that we are losing the ability to make inferences as to how language works at the most fundamental level in the human brain.
On the other hand, it is rather inconvenient (from the perspective of a great global society) to have as many "pure" languages on the ground as we have (and have had). But while linguae francae bridge gaps across culture, full-time bilingualism and multilingualism tend to cross-fertilize grammars (and, of course, vocabularies), which has the effect of eroding the more interesting (and the most difficult) aspects of grammars in the smaller languages.
Re: Only 4% of languages are used online
#19We parsed a lot of the data from App reviews (about 100 million) in different countries. Languages used are predominantly skewered toward english or other european languages. For example, in Israel, 51% of all reviews are in english while only 46% are in Hebrew. Writeup on major countries: http://blog.sensortower.com/blog/2013/11/27/what-apple-app-s...
That's pretty cool analysis. Do you think the high proportion of English relative to other non-native languages could be related to the general affluence of Apple users? It would be interesting to see how these ratios stack up relative to the languages used in reviews on some of the Android app stores in their respective countries. Thanks for sharing.
Re: Only 4% of languages are used online
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
That depends on whether you are globalist or nationalist. Globalist - good, less languages - less barriers. Good for international commerce and knowledge sharing. Nationalist - bad, loss of language means some part of cultural heritage lost. Truth is always somewhere in between.
>Truth is always somewhere in between. Either that's totally wrong (implies equal weighting), or it's a near-tautology (only false if one position is less than 100% accurate).
>Either that's totally wrong (implies equal weighting)
Equal weighting would be "Truth is always in the middle".
>it's a near-tautology
Another way to say near-tautology is "something that is true".