

When there's no one left to talk to: a guide to endangered languages - Mclhuman
http://www.hopesandfears.com/hopes/city/life/213363-endangered-languages

======
Htsthbjig
Good riddance.

When I have traveled the world I got to the conclusion that the main problem
of the world is people speaking different languages.

Americans, or Japanese or Chinese believing whatever their media trows at them
only happens because those people do not understand the rest of the languages
of the world.

Those countries are so big, the people living there believe they don't need
other languages in order to live, so they live in their own bubble.

For Americans it gets compounded because they also believe the world should
learn their language and not the other way around.

Languages are the main cause of conflict in the world today as without
understanding them you are at the mercy of other people's interest.

The person that yesterday was a friend, today could become an enemy just
because media tells you so(because it is in their own interest). It is very
hard for media to do that when people could actually travel their selves and
understand reality talking to the people that supposedly hates them without
intermediaries.

People have the natural tendency to fear what they don't know about, and this
could be used against them in order to justify mass surveillance, emergency
measures, also called "total control of the ruling's elite".

This was said by Goering in Nuremberg: "the people can always be brought to
the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they
are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and
exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country."

Not different today. War is created by media. Living in a language bubble is
dangerous.

Most of the languages that are going to disappear are not that different from
others that will survive. People that live near other people copy the best
thing their neighbor has.

~~~
Dewie3
Damn - if only programmers ruled the world, there could be world peace.
Imagine a world of total conformance and homogeneity, identity stripped away
in the name of standardization and streamlining. Finally, we would all
understand each other... surely...

Viva la programmacion!..

~~~
analyst74
What carries culture is people, not the language they speak. Do all English
speaking people think the same and have no identity?

We humans are very good at both forming groups as well as self-segregation.
There will never be total conformance and homogeneity. If you think certain
group of people fall into that category, that's because your own lack of
understanding of them rather than them being the same.

In fact, if we all spoke the same language, there will actually be more
understanding and less perceived sameness or difference.

~~~
meric
If we all do the same things during the day, there will actually be even more
understanding and less perceived sameness or difference.

People don't live to achieve total understanding and zero perceived difference
with everyone else, rather, understanding and sameness exists to facilitate
living.

Slowly getting to know people who spoke no common language with you and
finally both of you managing to build rapport and communicate clearly with
each other is a fulfilling experience. Advocating monoculture of language
isn't too different to advocating a monoculture of crops, destroying diversity
of life in the name of efficiency.

Efficiency facilitates living. Sacrificing experience of life in the name of
efficiency kind of defeats the point.

You want _more_ , _more_ of what, exactly?

------
realusername
I've witnessed the death of a language with my own eyes. My father still
speaks the local dialect but I don't and nobody of my age does. I just know a
few words of it. It's really sad to see the death of a language, when a
language dies, everything dies with it, the spirit of a culture dies. And most
of these languages are not even recorded anywhere, there is just no trace of
it. (that's also the case of the dialect I'm talking about).

However, a language rarely dies completely. Even if the next generations are
not speaking it anymore, some words remains when the concept the word is
describing does not exist in the new language, some traces are still there.

~~~
iagooar
I don't want you to see this as a personal attack, but isn't it your father's
fault not having taught you to speak this "dialect" (which, I guess, is a
language called despectively a dialect)?

~~~
d4mi3n
Blaming people contributes to this discussion how?

~~~
XaspR8d
Well I'm not sure of iagooar's intent, but there is an important distinction
here that only community members have the actually power to save a language.
It isn't their 'fault' by any means because they have to balance the
conformative expectations of the larger (usually oppressive) society with the
desire to keep their culture alive, and none of us can really say which is the
'right' choice.

The important battleground here is misinformation. A lot of people think
teaching their children a native language will impede them from learning the
matrix language, but tons of evidence shows that this is not the case.
Bilinguals might think slightly _differently_ than monolinguals, but on most
tests they actually perform above average. If we could make sure they know
that, and provide resources to record media and train educators directly in
the communities, a lot more languages would survive.

------
analyst74
Languages were invented as means of communication, so if all languages
disappear except one it'll be tremendous boost to humanity.

But once you link disappearance of language with words like endangered, dying,
extinct, all of sudden it sounds terrible.

Power of the words.

~~~
Afton
> Languages were invented as means of communication, so if all languages
> disappear except one it'll be tremendous boost to humanity.

It isn't at all obvious that it would be a straight-up boon. It would help
some things, hurt others. And in a few generations, we would have dialects and
languages again. It's just how brains and (by extension) communities work.

~~~
walterbell
_> It's just how brains and (by extension) communities work_

Any recommended references on this process of language forking and dialect
creation, especially in the context of neuroscience?

~~~
mc32
I would think this kind of drift that used to happen when population were
separated and didn't intercommunicate would happen much less nowadays.

Print, physical and electronic, kind of ossify a language. How much have
English, Chinese, German evolved since widespread print and education? I think
much less than they did a few hundred years ago.

Interconnectedness kind of promotes the preservation of the current state of a
language, I think. Yes argots and memes and cants proliferate more quickly but
dont seem to make so many permanent changes and when they do instigate a
change that change gets diffused more widely so the language, while changing,
remains monolithic rather than create a new dialect.

------
iagooar
I am a person who, as a polyglot, feels a lot of passion for languages, and
can get really upset when I hear about languages that are dying. Guess you
could compare the feeling with those of animal species getting extinct.

I often ask myself if I, as a programmer, could contribute to helping preserve
at least some information about that of dying languages, or even prevent them
getting extinct at all? Any ideas?

~~~
walterbell
How about organizing an effort to collect entries like the ones in
_Untranslatables_ , for endangered languages? This could be done as a CC-
licensed dictionary with source on github. A markdown template would be
useful, and a way to collect all submissions into a nicely typeset PDF.

[http://www.amazon.com/Dictionary-Untranslatables-
Philosophic...](http://www.amazon.com/Dictionary-Untranslatables-
Philosophical-Translation-Transnation/dp/0691138702)

~~~
XaspR8d
Google partnered with several research foundations to back
[http://www.endangeredlanguages.com/](http://www.endangeredlanguages.com/)
It's not as specific as a dictionary, but it does provide a simple way to find
particular languages and upload source material for them.

------
walterbell
There a PBS documentary on deciphering the glyphs of the lost Mayan language,
which has been so valuable to the history of the Mayan people that they began
teaching the lost language in schools:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5ppfC6y-5s](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5ppfC6y-5s)

There's also a corresponding book, _Breaking the Maya Code_ ,
[http://www.amazon.com/Breaking-Maya-Code-Third-
Michael/dp/05...](http://www.amazon.com/Breaking-Maya-Code-Third-
Michael/dp/0500289557/)

------
droidist2
I wonder if when one's language dies out enough then it becomes incredibly
hard to learn a new language since there are no resources to learn the new
language using your original language.

