
Languages: Why we must save dying tongues (2014) - sndean
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20140606-why-we-must-save-dying-languages
======
ggreer
It's not a well-liked view, but I'm very glad that humanity is on the path to
speaking only a few languages (or perhaps just one).

If you disagree, consider this thought experiment: Imagine if the entire world
spoke a single language. Would we ever want to invent new languages, making
mutual communication harder? It would be silly.

I do feel for the speakers of these dying tongues, but in the long run, this
is a good thing. Do you feel stunted or unsatisfied because your ancestors
didn't pass their native tongues down to you? I don't. And most people don't
realize how great a cost we pay for having so many languages. Ideally,
linguists and historians would document these languages and their cultures,
then let them quietly fade. Teaching them to new generations is not only a
futile effort, it's less beneficial on net.

~~~
mablap
Are you willing to stop speaking, reading, thinking, writing in English and
use Mandarin?

And what about the fact that some concepts and words are enunciated more
succintly or clearly in different languages?

I mean, you have the perfect example in front of you: why are there so many
programming languages? Could it be that some language constructs are more
difficult in one language vs the other? Why invent new programming languages
when you've got C?

~~~
Kenji
I am willing to give up my language in favour of a world language - in fact, I
have already done that. I think in English. I write all my poetry, stories and
dreams in English, I only communicate in that language unless it's with family
or coworkers. I pretty much gave up on my native language. I feel like English
is superior in many ways because it has words that my language does not, which
forces me to describe awkwardly what I mean instead of using a single word. In
German, happiness and luck are merged into one single word (da fuq?). German
has no succinct word for contrarian (noun). Or another point for English:

Our language has wisely sensed the two sides of being alone. It has created
the word loneliness to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the
word solitude to express the glory of being alone. - Paul Tillich

~~~
smsm42
German, however, has schadenfreude, gestalt, eigenvalue, angst, weltschmerz
and poltergeist ;)

~~~
Symbiote
English had all of these, exactly.

Every child knows poltergeist, from Harry Potter. Every teenager knows angst.

The others are less universal, but I'd expect a university graduate to know
them.

~~~
eropple
Where exactly do you think those words _come from_?

------
jfaucett
As much as I feel sad about losing so many amazing languages, these arguments
are weak emotional appeals at best.

The only legitimate argument you can make for keeping minority languages
around is to basically reframe the context and say your goal as a society is
to promote cultural and linguistic diversity because society needs it more
than it does a highly effecient raw information processing system.

As a programmer, when you think how much easier everything would be if there
were only 1 OS, 1 Web Browser, 1 programming language, 1 data exchange format,
1 byte order, etc, etc. and then you think about languages its clear how much
easier everything would be.

Of course, we have different OSes, Browsers, Image Editors, because they are
all better at different things and we aren't one organism - we as humans have
different needs & preferences - which we bring to the table everytime we
choose from one of the zillions of different options available to us.

Its the same with languages, when you want to be amazed by poetic eloquence
and the rhythm and rhyme of words you read Pablo Neruda in Spanish, when you
want to delve into highly analytical thought processes you read anything by
the German Think Tanks such as Freud, Marx, Nietsche, Gauss, in German. When
you want to talk to a superior in a formal setting, you adapt a different
tone, appearance and language, as opposed to when you are splurting out your
particular workplace jargon with collegues. The list goes on and on virtually
forever, its even the case that the language we speak i.e. English, Spanish or
whatever it may be - is completely unique to ourselves like a fingerprint
which can identify us from all the other people on the planet.

Social Scientists study these aspects of our humanity, believing they give us
insight not only into how people function but also into the optimization of
more subjective qualities of that functioning such as happiness, group
behaviors, moral motivations, etc.

But why does society need diversity more than efficiency? Someone else can
give that one a try :)

~~~
panic
What is "efficiency" in the context of an entire society? What are we working
toward? What will we do when we get there?

~~~
edanm
There are lots of great answers to this.

1\. Working towards greater productivity. (In case this seems pointless or
otherwise unworthy, remember that greater productivity leads to, e.g., people
living longer lives).

2\. Workings towards more great artistic achievements.

3\. Working towards greater scientific achievements, which will bring the
above, + more free time, + reaching other planters, + immortality.

You might not agree with all the above options, but if we, as a civilization,
want to optimize towards something, there are plenty of great "somethings" to
choose from. (and that are better than what most of humanity spends its time
on, IMO).

------
contingencies
I've personally volunteered for the anthropologist and linguist interviewed in
the article sporadically since the 1990s, doing things like OCR'ing early
Himalayan journals, setting up and maintaining websites (Digital Himalaya
Project, World Oral Literature Project). Eventually I met him for a beer in
Cambridge in 2009, shortly before he moved to Yale... great character! I
believe he has since moved on to Canada.

That said, as a westerner who has picked up fluent Mandarin (and dabbled in
dozes of languages) and who lives nearly full time in China, now raising my
own child, I can see the efficacy and likelihood of evolving toward a reduced
set of tongues or even a single-tongue. My grandparents spoke English,
Croatian, German, and to a lesser extent probably some Russian, Yiddish and
Scot. Other than English, only one surviving grandparent (90+) still speaks
one of those languages. Similarly on my wife's side, her family have learned
and forgotten Arabic and Vietnamese.

If indeed over hundreds of years the world does converge toward a single
tongue, I would be surprised if Mandarin Chinese is not a serious candidate:
offering simple grammar, huge and well dispersed population, with a
pluralistic and pragmatic approach to culinary and other cultural acquisitions
from integrated populations. The biggest issue is the number of characters,
however a common international subset is perhaps emerging, largely through
shared manufacturing supply chains, software interfaces, public signage and
media.

~~~
douche
They'll have to come up with a better writing system, either settling on
pinyin on wade-giles, or something else. Really, ideographs are awful, an
alphabet or even a syllabarry would be workable, but needing thousands of
characters to read a newspaper is unforgivable.

~~~
contingencies
That's OK, people don't read newspapers anymore and pinyin is a viable and
highly consistent Romanization system already used by 1.4 billion. Wade Giles
is a historical footnote. A little known fact is that the darling of the 20th
century communist party's modern Chinese literary world, Lu Xun, advocated for
the abolition of characters.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lu_Xun](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lu_Xun)
Perhaps long texts will be read in a Romanized form (Pinyin) and characters
will be reserved for use in concise international symbologies, much like
Japan's ongoing use of _kanji_?

~~~
ktRolster
_Perhaps long texts will be read in a Romanized form (Pinyin) and characters
will be reserved for use in concise international symbologies, much like Japan
's ongoing use of kanji?_

In Japanese, the Kanji are used basically everywhere (and when you are
writing, sometimes you wish there were a kanji for a word, so you wouldn't
have to write out all the letters. Of course, it's not as bad when you can
type it).

------
Paul_S
I'm not advocating one global language and I think everyone should learn at
least one language other than English but let's let the dying languages die.
Natural selection is doing a good job. The good ones will survive.

~~~
PeCaN
The problem with natural selection as pertaining to language is that the
language may be great but die because the culture dies off or shrinks or gets
assimilated. For example, I don't consider Spanish an efficient or well-
designed language in the slightest, but it's very widely spoken because the
Spanish are good at conquest. Ainu is very fascinating and possibly more
efficient (in terms of syllables per second over syllables per bit of
information). The Ainu didn't have much interest in expansion and got more or
less assimilated by Japan. Doesn't mean the language got selected against, the
_culture_ got selected against.

While language may have an effect on a culture's success, I suspect a culture
has much more impact on a language's success. Natural selection is a terrible
metric of “good ones” in that case.

~~~
voaie
Agree. Culture is what makes the language more beautiful. When a small town
turns into a big city, the language will gradually lose its power if everyone
goes for profit without the culture carried forward.

Also, like what @gkya said, if the government aggressively enforce an official
language on the people, other languages will die more quickly.

------
stretchwithme
Our awareness of language diversity is artificial. It only exists because of
the same forces that are reducing it: modern communications and
transportation.

Most languages will be fully understood by artificial intelligence soon
enough. Anybody that wants to learn them 1000 years from now will be able to.

And once we enhance our own brains with technology, people will be inventing
new languages with ease. And integrating the unique features of old ones.

There are probably millions of languages throughout the universe. We may not
be the only species that uses language on Earth either.

We are really just at the beginning of discovering language diversity.

------
sethbannon
Anyone interested in the effort to catalogue all the world's languages should
check out the nonprofit Wikitongues:
[http://www.wikitongues.org](http://www.wikitongues.org)

They have a fascinating collection of videos of people speaking in their
native languages.

------
Kenji
If computer scientists made similar emotional arguments: Save EBCDIC because
diversity.

No. Full stop. It's the adherents' of these cultures (speakers' of these
languages) duty to compile and/or translate their cultural insights and
knowledge. If they fail to do that - good bye, it probably wasn't that
important, otherwise the culture or language would have been dominant.

~~~
Chris2048
No, it's not the same. The natural languages that "won" did so because of
colonisation, not meritocracy - or should computer scientists compete by
oppressing their competitors?

~~~
zephyrfalcon
You have a point, although technologies don't necessarily win because of merit
either. In fact, they often don't...

~~~
Chris2048
That's the MS way! ;-D

------
auganov
Would any of you make your children monolingual [0] speakers of your national
language? Wouldn't you feel like you're doing them a disservice?

[0] monolingual in the sense that the national language would strictly be
their native language spoken at school/education, with friends and family even
if they'd still be learning English

------
clamstew
Rosetta Stone works to preserve languages with its products
[http://m.news9.com/story.aspx?story=30485894&catId=112032](http://m.news9.com/story.aspx?story=30485894&catId=112032)

------
takshak
A language carries its philosophy inside the words. Not all philosophical
concept can be easily translated in other language. Take a Hindi/Sanskrit word
"Aatma/Ātman" for example, it is translated into english as "soul". But it is
wrong translation as plant, animal don't have "soul", while even bacteria have
"Aatma/Ātman". If Sankrit is lost then the concept of "Ātman" will also be
lost.

------
anabis
If an adult wants to learn it, fine. But I will not teach my children a minor
language as the first one. Otherwise, record few TB worth of speech and be
done with it.

------
bmrishabh
My immediate thought after reading this article was like there is nothing
wrong or disadvantageous in having a single language all over the world. It
would make communication easy and universal. But the point here, which the
author stresses, is that every language has its own perspective of looking at
an object, emotion, action etc. If we let a languages die then we are
essentially losing this perspective. May be there is some language in this
world which can express a particular emotion which other languages, for
example English, cannot express no matter what. Won't humanity lose a lot in
this scenario? And besides this I think that English is the so called
universal language just because English speaking population conquered most of
the world. It is not so that English is the easiest or most simple and
complete in all aspects.

As a student of science I tend to believe in universality of language. It
makes exchange of knowledge easy. But the points that I mentioned above are
also important. According to me, letting a set of people try and revive the
dying languages is worthy and helpful to human civilization.

------
seanvk
I find this ironic that all the comments (both for and against) are in
English.

~~~
voaie
People talk about this topic around the world. HN is just a small place.

------
xchip
If those are all the reason to save dying tongues, then this article proved
the opposite of what it meant to prove :)

------
vonnik
Many will die, but some are being digitized.

[http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/28/science/28prof.html](http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/28/science/28prof.html)

------
benkarst
[https://www.ted.com/talks/wade_davis_on_endangered_cultures](https://www.ted.com/talks/wade_davis_on_endangered_cultures)

------
MrPatan
Or: Why Other People must keep having difficulty accessing information and
opportunities, for my own aesthetic pleasure, but I bring up my kids only with
useful languages.

------
a_imho
IMO proposing of speaking only one language because of usefulness on an
English speaking site is a bit hypocritical, considering it is not even the
most widespread. Surely keeping English around is just emotional appeal.

------
lugus35
French is one of those dying tongues. In France we don't speak french anymore,
we speak franglais, a mix of french and english words.

~~~
miguelrochefort
Quebec is trying to save French through some crazy laws:

\- You can't have a company whose name isn't French.

\- The company I work for had to replace all keyboards by French keyboards,
had to switch to an HR software available in French, had to switch all OSes to
French, had to put French stickers on the microwave oven, etc.

\- I can't send my kid to an English school if I haven't been to one myself.

~~~
jeromegv
\- You can't have a company whose name isn't French. That's much more nuanced
than that. See article: [http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/quebec-
cracks-down-...](http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/quebec-cracks-down-
on-english-brand-names-forces-prominent-french-signage-to-be-included)

\- The company I work for had to replace all keyboards by French keyboards,
had to switch to an HR software available in French, had to switch all OSes to
French, had to put French stickers on the microwave oven, etc.

It's about having the language of the work environment in French. If the
company decided to switch the keyboard to French and change your microwave in
French, that is just a company policy, not a government regulation. The point
of having the HR software in French is to allow someone that only speak French
to work in HR in the company. Surely you can still use the software in English
if you want to, but at least it's available in French.

~~~
miguelrochefort
No, the French police forced us to made these changes.

------
beloch

      "What’s more, languages are conduits of human heritage. Writing is a relatively recent development in our history (written systems currently exist for only about one-third of the world’s languages), so language itself is often the only way to convey a community’s songs, stories and poems. The Iliad was an oral story before it was written, as was The Odyssey. “How many other traditions are out there in the world that we’ll never know about because no-one recorded them before the language disappeared?” Austin says. ""
    

The Illiad is doing just fine in the many different languages it has been
translated into. Preserving languages as living, spoken tongues is not
necessary for the mere preservation of stories and history.

    
    
      "Without the language, the culture itself might teeter, or even disappear. “If we are to survive, to continue on and to exist as a people with a distinct and unique culture,” he continues, “then we have to have a language.” “It’s very hard as an English speaker to understand that,” "
    

This is true. English is now so widely used that it isn't really associated
with one particular culture. You can travel to a completely alien country that
speaks English, just differently than you.

    
    
      “Different languages provide distinct pathways of thought and frameworks for thinking and solving problems,” Harrison says. Returning to Cherokee, unlike English it is verb rather than noun-based, and those verbs can be conjugated in a multitude of ways based on who they are acting upon."
    

Many languages have unique attributes that let them excel at certain things.
German, for example, is fantastic for creating compound words (e.g.
Gedankenexperiment). English, however, gleefully swallows up such words and
incorporates them.

    
    
      "There are also a few examples of languages being revived even after actually going extinct. By the 1960s, the last fluent Miami language speakers living in the American Midwest passed away. Thanks largely to the efforts of one interested member of the Miami Nation tribe, however, the language is now taught at Miami University in Ohio. "
    

Another example of this is written Mayan. The first archbishop of Yucatan,
Diego de Landa, deliberately wiped out every trace of written Mayan he could.
Paper codices were burned. Stone monuments were defaced. Literate Mayans were
executed. He was so successful that, by the 20th century, written Mayan was a
complete mystery. It has since been deciphered, but outside of a very small
number of paper codices, all that remains are stone monuments. This is
unfortunate. Consider the writing on monuments in Washington as compared to
what's in the Library of Congress.

As useful as different languages may be for different things, they're also
distressingly good at preventing us from communicating with and understanding
each other. Perhaps the rise of more global languages is worth paying the
price of losing some of our lingual diversity.

~~~
gkya
Off-topic: Why are code blocks are used for quotes by many people here? They
just scroll horizontally forever and are a burden to read.

~~~
beloch
When you're quoting a fair bit of stuff, it gets hard to tell what is quote
and what is not. I'd love it if there was a <blockquote> equivalent.

------
xchip
Yet another super long article that could be summarized in a couple of lines.

------
timwaagh
i thought it was going to come up with a rational argument. something like the
real reason people are doing this and getting paid handsomely to do it. but
its just all sentimental nonsense, isn't it?

