How the Internet is Killing the World's Languages • Hacker News Board

Re: How the Internet is Killing the World's Languages

#21

Post by at-fates-hands » Wed, Dec 04, 2013, 6:48 PM UTC

sophacles wrote: post #2

Serious question: what are the arguments in favor of language preservation?

That's easy - your culture.

"As languages disappear, cultures die. The world becomes inherently a less interesting place, but we also sacrifice raw knowledge and the intellectual achievements of millennia."

Ken Hale, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, quoted in Davis, W. 1999.

Language and your cultural identity are very tightly coupled. Without language you essentially lose your identity, which is why its crucial to preserve your language. It's one of your primary identifiers of you and your culture. Wenying Jiang stated it quite well in her paper, "The Relationship Between Culture and Language" when she says your culture is like an iceberg. Your language is the tip which sits above the water. The rest which sits under the water is the rest of your culture. Your customs, your religions, your societal norms.

Link to her paper which is worth a read: http://203.72.145.166/ELT/files/54-4-3.pdf

Also consider the following:

"With the loss of the languages, all kinds of wonderful things that the speakers did with their languages have also vanished, for example, some of the greatest works of oral literature ever produced–the multilingual performances with different characters speaking different languages that was found in the Pacific Northwest.

The highly elaborate dances that accompanied the oral tradition are frequently also gone.

Large amounts of local knowledge about fauna and flora, ecosystem management, local place names, spiritual values, and so on are all submerged, altered or gone because the original languages that expressed these concepts are gone or no longer well understood."

source: http://newswatch.nationalgeographic.com/2009/11/15/0005_nati...

Re: How the Internet is Killing the World's Languages

#22

Post by normloman » Wed, Dec 04, 2013, 6:49 PM UTC

pouetpouet wrote: post #4

sophacles wrote: post #2

Serious question: what are the arguments in favor of language preservation?

Languages shape the mind. A language gives a special outlook on life and has its own reality. There are also specific linguistic features that are interesting to linguists and help to comprehend how languages work. One could also draw a parallel with genetic diversity.

It's my understanding that the language you speaks has only a small effect on your outlook. The gist behind the Sapir Whorf hypothesis was that the number of concepts you could grasp was limited by the language you spoke. But I don't think most linguists seriously believe this anymore. Research has shown language to influence our outlooks in limited ways, and even those findings are suspect, since some of the differences can be explained by cultural differences.

A good overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity

Re: How the Internet is Killing the World's Languages

#23

Post by PhasmaFelis » Wed, Dec 04, 2013, 6:51 PM UTC

mullingitover wrote: post #6

Another way of titling this would be, "How the internet is uniting humanity." Languages are tools for communication, and while it's sad from an anthropological/historical perspective to be losing languages, from a humanist perspective it's fantastic news. The more people can communicate without barriers, the better it makes the world for everyone.

On the one hand, I'm very much inclined to agree with you.

On the other hand, I'm a monolingual English-speaker. I personally gain much and lose nothing in this scenario, I have no real conception of what it feels like for the hundreds of millions of people who do speak minority languages; so I'm not sure I'm qualified to judge.

Re: How the Internet is Killing the World's Languages

#24

Post by normloman » Wed, Dec 04, 2013, 6:53 PM UTC

sophacles wrote: post #2

Serious question: what are the arguments in favor of language preservation?

We don't need to preserve languages per se. We need to record them before they disappear so that linguists, historians, and archaeologists will be able to decipher the written records of disappearing cultures.

Re: How the Internet is Killing the World's Languages

#25

Post by nostromo » Wed, Dec 04, 2013, 6:54 PM UTC

This happened before the internet with Arabic numerals.

There was a time when each culture had their own method for transcribing numbers. (My favorite is Egyptian Numerals that denoted 10,000 with a drawing of a bent finger.)

Today, I imagine (but I'm not sure) that I can travel almost anywhere in the world and the number 123 would mean the exact same thing. And that seems to be a good thing.

Re: How the Internet is Killing the World's Languages

#26

Post by sneak » Wed, Dec 04, 2013, 6:55 PM UTC

salient wrote: post #15

DanielStraight wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wikipedia[1] references a source[2] with a pretty good explanation: "As each language dies, many sciences - linguistics, anthropology, prehistory and psychology - lose one more precious source of data, one more of the diverse and unique ways that the human mind can express itself through a language's structure, vocabulary and idiom." Linguistics is obviously most affected. The variety of sounds and grammar used in la…

It's a good thing Google managed to scan all of the world's old books then, and also that they are working on perfecting translation between dozens of these languages. I doubt much will be lost. Plus, we can see it as a new beginning from now on, when everything will be in English, and all new science would be used by all.

Just because Google has the data doesn't mean all humans do.

Re: How the Internet is Killing the World's Languages

#27

Post by neakor » Wed, Dec 04, 2013, 6:56 PM UTC

On one hand, having a variety of languages makes the world diverse, more interesting and perhaps even encourages different ways of thinking. On the other hand, the high cost of communicating with multiple languages makes sharing thoughts and ideas harder, and perhaps even hinders our productivity and advancement as a whole. It's a tough call, but I vote for unification. In the name of advancement of humanity, we shall sacrifice diversity!

Re: How the Internet is Killing the World's Languages

#28

Post by emilga » Wed, Dec 04, 2013, 6:57 PM UTC

mullingitover wrote: post #6

Another way of titling this would be, "How the internet is uniting humanity." Languages are tools for communication, and while it's sad from an anthropological/historical perspective to be losing languages, from a humanist perspective it's fantastic news. The more people can communicate without barriers, the better it makes the world for everyone.

I agree. The authors of Genesis 11:1-9 even describe the world's languages as a _punishment_ by God(!):

"""5 But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower the people were building. 6 The Lord said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. 7 Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.”

8 So the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. 9 That is why it was called Babel[c]—because there the Lord confused the language of the whole world. From there the Lord scattered them over the face of the whole earth."""

Re: How the Internet is Killing the World's Languages

#29

Post by tokenizer » Wed, Dec 04, 2013, 6:57 PM UTC

tokenadult wrote: post #13

The interesting article kindly submitted here reports: "His finding: Less than five percent of languages in use now exist online. "Much of that gap can be attributed to the fact that the languages people use vary widely, in terms of scale and geography." Well, yes, little-used languages, and especially languages with small numbers of speakers that are also geographically limited to places with limited provision of th…

> If diversity in language diminishes a little bit, while humankind enjoys better health, longer lifespans,[1] and other benefits of increasing worldwide prosperity, I will feel wistful about that, because I am curious about all world languages, but people should be at liberty to decide what languages they use, and when.

And who's to say that having less languages in the world is a bad thing? I mean, from a cursory view it seems like people are equating the diminishing of multiple languages as a bad thing. Is it? Do we weep for Latin, or do we just celebrate the variety of cultures that had spawned from its ashes?

It's easy to be initially emotional about the potentiality of having some languages lost in time, but it's just a tool with history. It will eventually be completely wiped out by a new language, or evolve into one that barely resembles it. I personally don't think this is sad. I think it's just the reality of space and time.

Re: How the Internet is Killing the World's Languages

#30

Post by mullingitover » Wed, Dec 04, 2013, 7:03 PM UTC

emilga wrote: post #28

mullingitover wrote: post #6

Another way of titling this would be, "How the internet is uniting humanity." Languages are tools for communication, and while it's sad from an anthropological/historical perspective to be losing languages, from a humanist perspective it's fantastic news. The more people can communicate without barriers, the better it makes the world for everyone.

I agree. The authors of Genesis 11:1-9 even describe the world's languages as a _punishment_ by God(!): """5 But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower the people were building. 6 The Lord said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. 7 Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each o…

Buckminster Fuller's Critical Path puts forward the notion that this is really an allegory for the adoption of the phonetic alphabet. Prior to this, all the different language speakers could communicate with a symbolic system of writing, but once the phonetic alphabet was adopted they were no longer able to communicate in writing without knowing the reader's language.