Inuttitut, a language shaped by humility, poetry, and the land

Breaking news: language is optimized to communicate concepts its speakers find useful.

Meanwhile, how's the canary config for the Kubernetes L7 ingress coming along?

Isn't the language almost extinct and the community almost wiped out? I remember reading a while back that there are only a few hundred speakers and as more canadians move into the area, the inuit community and language were being endangered.

Is there a systematic campaign to preserve the language and/or community? At the very least to set down the vocabulary/grammer/pronounciation/etc?

The practice of drawing conclusions about people or their cultures based on properties of their language has been controversial since at least the original Sapir and Whorf stuff.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopi_time_controversy

If you admire or appreciate a culture, you might argue that the culture's values or history or distinctive outlook are directly reflected in grammatical features or vocabulary of an associated language. While this might be true in some ways and to some extent, it's something that's also very easy to deceive yourself about. You can easily make up a story about how distinctions that one language does (or doesn't) draw reflect the excellence or more appropriate priorities of its speakers' culture. Like "oh, this language makes distinctions that English doesn't -- because the people who speak it are so attuned to perceiving fine details!" or "oh, this language doesn't make distinctions that English does -- showing how its speakers are not distracted by the pointless minutia that occupy us in settled industrial civilization!".

A challenge to this kind of analysis is that studies of linguistic typology (deep structural features that languages do or don't have in common) show languages with, and without, particular characteristics all over the world, in languages spoken by people from all different kinds of cultures and societies. Most generalizations that might be given a higher significance just sort of fall flat when you look at typology data. Oh, that cool thing that we like in this language -- is also present in this other language from a different culture and part of the world! Oh, that thing we find annoying or irritating -- is present elsewhere too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_typology

A kind of counterexample that I learned from John McWhorter's books is that complicated irregularities in languages (e.g. a very large number of noun classes with distinctive classifiers and agreement rules, or a very large number of irregular verb forms) are likely a sign of smaller and more isolated speaker communities, whereas simplification that removes these irregularities is associated with circumstances in which more people have to use a language non-natively (and therefore have a harder time mastering these details), which could include migration, social disruptions, or the widespread use of a language as a lingua franca, trade language, language of imperial administration, etc. That does mean that indigenous languages (especially if they have almost exclusively been used by a native speaker community in a relatively small area) can often be harder to learn for non-native speakers.

But you still can't necessarily count on cultural generalizations based on those observations. One exercise you can try to do (maybe this is also an idea from McWhorter?) is pick a random set of characteristics that some language might have, and then try to come up with an essay explaining why those features show how awesome or admirable the speakers' culture must be. If it sounds deeply plausible, then maybe that's a sign that people aren't actually good at being objective about this. :-)

"Don't be snarky."

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inuttitut says about 550 mother tongue speakers of that dialect, while https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inuktitut as a whole has between 35.000 and 40.000 mother tongue speakers (and there are programs regarding Inuktitut at least https://nunatsiaq.com/stories/article/65674a_new_way_to_spre... )