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Lost languages discovered in the oldest continuously run libraries (2017)

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Re: Lost languages discovered in the oldest continuously run libraries (2017)

#51

Post by yosito »

newsbinator wrote: post #7

As someone who makes a hobby of learning languages, I am of the highly unpopular opinion that the world would be a better place if we could pick one easy-to-learn language (e.g. Malay) and one super-simple writing system (e.g. South Korean Hangul) and get our species out of the dark ages of having thousands of mutually unintelligible languages. No-one in their right mind would create an ethical, functioning modern so…

The thing is, languages are a whole lot more than systems for speaking and writing. They're cultural memes and make up a large portion of many people's identity. I speak two widely spoken languages and one that's a bit less common. Learning the less common language was like gaining membership in an exclusive cultural club, and was even a key to getting citizenship. But I had to learn more than just words for things. I had to learn about culture and history just to be able to socialize in the language. I learned things that simply can't be translated into other languages without long paragraphs of explanation that would actually require the reader to accept some knowledge of the language to understand them. And people who grew up speaking this language have their entire life experience wrapped up in it, and their entire family history wrapped up in it for thousands of years. It can't simply be replaced with a standardized system. Currently, the closest thing the world has to a global standardized language is English. English isn't the most logical or simple system, but it works because so many people already know it due to the global shared history it has. Languages can't be divorced from history and culture, even English.

Re: Lost languages discovered in the oldest continuously run libraries (2017)

#52

Post by [deleted] »

newsbinator wrote: post #7

As someone who makes a hobby of learning languages, I am of the highly unpopular opinion that the world would be a better place if we could pick one easy-to-learn language (e.g. Malay) and one super-simple writing system (e.g. South Korean Hangul) and get our species out of the dark ages of having thousands of mutually unintelligible languages. No-one in their right mind would create an ethical, functioning modern so…

[deleted]

Re: Lost languages discovered in the oldest continuously run libraries (2017)

#53

Post by Izkata »

katsura wrote: post #42
hypertele-Xii wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read your comment and compare to programming languages. It would be revolutionary to have all computers programmed in the same language, but as different languages are good at different things and evolve concurrently, it's almost inconcievable to make it happen. And you're talking about refactoring not merely an entire industry, but the very language of thought for our species! How can we even begin to approach thi…

Every computer is programmed with the same language, namely 1s and 0s. The other programming languages add certain abstractions to make different things "easier". But there doesn't exist a human language that you can use to communicate with everyone on Earth. OP seems to propose a 0-1 language (to stay with the computer analogy) everyone could use to communicate with anybody else, while the local languages would be k…

Isn't that what Esperanto was supposed to be?

Re: Lost languages discovered in the oldest continuously run libraries (2017)

#54

Post by danjac »

newsbinator wrote: post #7

As someone who makes a hobby of learning languages, I am of the highly unpopular opinion that the world would be a better place if we could pick one easy-to-learn language (e.g. Malay) and one super-simple writing system (e.g. South Korean Hangul) and get our species out of the dark ages of having thousands of mutually unintelligible languages. No-one in their right mind would create an ethical, functioning modern so…

The world decided on English. It wouldn't be my first choice - even as a native speaker - but history and inertia has decided on this obscure Norman French/Anglo-Saxon island pidgin and we're kind of stuck with it until the Chinese century runs its course and we're dealing with pictograms and tonal differences.

Re: Lost languages discovered in the oldest continuously run libraries (2017)

#55

Post by yorwba »

newsbinator wrote: post #7

As someone who makes a hobby of learning languages, I am of the highly unpopular opinion that the world would be a better place if we could pick one easy-to-learn language (e.g. Malay) and one super-simple writing system (e.g. South Korean Hangul) and get our species out of the dark ages of having thousands of mutually unintelligible languages. No-one in their right mind would create an ethical, functioning modern so…

> pick one easy-to-learn language (e.g. Malay) and one super-simple writing system (e.g. South Korean Hangul)

That's an interesting combination.

The main reason why English speakers often consider Malay to be easier than other South-East Asian languages is that it's usually written using the Latin script without diacritics. Writing it in Hangul instead would make it just another language with a writing system few people are familiar with.

Whereas Hangul as used for writing Korean has plenty of cases where the same symbol represents different sounds in different context and vice versa different symbols representing the same sound in the same context. There's an internal logic to it that makes sense for Korean, because it results in words deriving from the same root being spelled similarly, but if you apply it to Malay, it's just another random set of symbols that can be assigned sounds by convention.

Re: Lost languages discovered in the oldest continuously run libraries (2017)

#56

Post by newsbinator »

yosito wrote: post #51
newsbinator wrote: post #7

As someone who makes a hobby of learning languages, I am of the highly unpopular opinion that the world would be a better place if we could pick one easy-to-learn language (e.g. Malay) and one super-simple writing system (e.g. South Korean Hangul) and get our species out of the dark ages of having thousands of mutually unintelligible languages. No-one in their right mind would create an ethical, functioning modern so…

The thing is, languages are a whole lot more than systems for speaking and writing. They're cultural memes and make up a large portion of many people's identity. I speak two widely spoken languages and one that's a bit less common. Learning the less common language was like gaining membership in an exclusive cultural club, and was even a key to getting citizenship. But I had to learn more than just words for things.…

> Learning the less common language was like gaining membership in an exclusive cultural club

This is the problem: every language is an exclusive cultural club. I want to have one that isn't an exclusive cultural club.

> I learned things that simply can't be translated into other languages without long paragraphs of explanation that would actually require the reader to accept some knowledge of the language to understand them

What would be an example of this? For example in Korean there's the concept of 정, which is a Korean-specific feeling of love/loyalty/bond with another person. You could write paragraphs about how it's subtly different from Japanese Jyo or English love/loyalty/bond, but at the end of the day either you need the concept and create a word for it in the global language, even "Jeong" or whatever, or you don't need the concept and don't create a word for it.

You don't build all of FORTRAN into CSS just because you want to borrow the concept of variables. You borrow what you need and make sure it fits nicely with what's already there.

> And people who grew up speaking this language have their entire life experience wrapped up in it, and their entire family history wrapped up in it for thousands of years.

You're saying that if over a generation they were to switch from one language to another their children and grandchildren would be without a history?

The children in our family don't speak the same language as their grandparents did. They don't know any of the culture-specific words. This doesn't seem to matter in any way that I've noticed, and certainly they themselves haven't.

Re: Lost languages discovered in the oldest continuously run libraries (2017)

#57

Post by dorchadas »

paganel wrote: post #50
newsbinator wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Poetry, songs and literature just do not seamlessly translate between languages very well. Nor should we lose the calligraphy of Japanese/Chinese/Arabic/Persian. We don't have to incinerate anything. There won't be a government commission you have to petition to be allowed to do Japanese calligraphy or read a poem in its original language.

Of course not, but the language will get lost, with time.

This is already happening, at an ever increasing rate. It's likely that the majority of languages will be extinct by the end of the century.

Re: Lost languages discovered in the oldest continuously run libraries (2017)

#58

Post by newsbinator »

yorwba wrote: post #55
newsbinator wrote: post #7

As someone who makes a hobby of learning languages, I am of the highly unpopular opinion that the world would be a better place if we could pick one easy-to-learn language (e.g. Malay) and one super-simple writing system (e.g. South Korean Hangul) and get our species out of the dark ages of having thousands of mutually unintelligible languages. No-one in their right mind would create an ethical, functioning modern so…

> pick one easy-to-learn language (e.g. Malay) and one super-simple writing system (e.g. South Korean Hangul) That's an interesting combination. The main reason why English speakers often consider Malay to be easier than other South-East Asian languages is that it's usually written using the Latin script without diacritics. Writing it in Hangul instead would make it just another language with a writing system few peo…

> The main reason why English speakers often consider Malay to be easier than other South-East Asian languages is that it's usually written using the Latin script without diacritics

Malay/Indonesian is ridiculously easy and fun to learn. The simple/logical grammar is a joy compared to English, French, Arabic, etc. And it doesn't really have tones like Chinese.

Anyway Malay + Hangul may not be your first choice, that's totally fine. Whatever is your first choice, let's go with it and establish it as the global baseline language that all children learn in school from kindergarten and in cartoons long before that.

Re: Lost languages discovered in the oldest continuously run libraries (2017)

#59

Post by dhosek »

Pre-modern manuscript practices are remarkably alien to us today. A single codex might contain multiple works in it with no external indication of its contents. It's entirely possible that many lost works are sitting in manuscript libraries because nobody has been able to catalog everything in them. Add in the palimpsest practice (which would not only impact situations like Saint Catherine's but would also cause a manuscript containing some pagan text to be overwritten with a Christian text—or in later centuries for a Christian text to be overwritten with an Islamic text) and it's entirely possible that somewhere there's a copy of Aristotle's Second book of Poetics or more of Sappho than we currently have. It kind of excites me to consider the possibilities (and wonder if the alternate universe version of me who majored in classics might be combing through the Vatican archives right now).

Re: Lost languages discovered in the oldest continuously run libraries (2017)

#60

Post by katsura »

Izkata wrote: post #53
katsura wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every computer is programmed with the same language, namely 1s and 0s. The other programming languages add certain abstractions to make different things "easier". But there doesn't exist a human language that you can use to communicate with everyone on Earth. OP seems to propose a 0-1 language (to stay with the computer analogy) everyone could use to communicate with anybody else, while the local languages would be k…

Isn't that what Esperanto was supposed to be?

Don't get me wrong, I have a huge appreciation for Esperanto, but using it as a global language would mean forcing western ideas, about how a language should work, on the eastern population. So as Zamenhof didn't consider Asian languages when he made Esperanto (not to mention the use of diacritics), I wouldn't use it as a global language.

I have been following some auxlangs for some time now, and if I had to vote, I'd go with an a priori language as a global second language, instead of choosing an existing one with specific culture attached to it.

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