

Google: Introducing The Endangered Languages Project - PaulMcCartney
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/06/endangered-languages-project-supporting.html

======
mercuryrising
Here's a better link to the actual project.
<http://www.endangeredlanguages.com/>

This is really awesome. One of my good friends is a linguist, and when I first
started learning about languages, I couldn't figure out what all the hype was
about. Yeah languages are dying... So what? A single language where I could
communicate with anyone in the world would be the best, wouldn't it?

A language is like a toolbox for idea transmission, we want to share what we
see on the inside, and language is one of our best ways to do it. It's the
most universal, it's one of the first things we learn, and it has the ability
to incite the most powerful imagery (books vs. a movie).

Say a language is the average mean of a group of people's ability to speak to
one another. These people were likely geographically isolated and their
language developed on it's own, they saw things in the world and described
them with their language. Their culture, their ideas, their perceptions of the
world are all encoded into their language. When all the native speakers of a
language die, we lose more than just the language, we lose the insights that
the language carried, a language that was likely crafted over many thousands
of years.

Take for instance color blindness. Attempt to explain to someone with color
blindness what colors look like. It will never work, they will never
experience what you experience, but they can share your experience through
your description of colors, they can imagine what the world could be like if
you give a good enough description. We lose analogies for human thoughts when
languages die, and if we ever want to begin to understand what a consciousness
is, preserving these analogies is an absolute necessity. We could wonder for
millions of years whether or not a language could ever come to be that didn't
have counting words, but luckily we found the Piranha[1] that do just that
[2]. It's like all the species we're losing in the rain forests, what if the
cure for cancer was present in one of the now-extinct mushrooms? What if we
never could find the cure for cancer because we just didn't have that
mushroom? It likely won't happen for cancer, but for consciousness we need
every piece of information that we can get.

[1]
[http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/04/16/070416fa_fact_...](http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/04/16/070416fa_fact_colapinto)

[2] <http://phys.org/news/2012-02-math-words.html>

~~~
_delirium
There are definitely many important things about languages, but I think
attempts to preserve traditional language communities have significant risks
and downsides as well, if we're talking about maintaining communities of
people speaking them living in the present day, as opposed to scholarly
study/preservation (the latter of course has little downside besides
time/effort). I'm one generation removed from a dying/nearly-dead language
myself, and am vaguely regretful not to be speaking it, but also feel a bit
lucky to have "escaped" from it into a larger, less-dying language community,
and in particular to have (mostly) escaped the cultural aspects of being an
aggrieved minority fighting to preserve some ancient spark of glory.

My grandfather's first language was Pontic, a sibling of modern Greek (both
descended from ancient Greek, but not mutually intelligible), and it could be
fairly called the language of his community even once almost all of them were,
erm, "displaced" to Greece (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_genocide>).
But he was actually pretty against transmitting it to future generations,
because of the strong cultural conservatism that he found among a large
proportion of those trying to keep it alive. As you say, it's not just a
language, but everything it's tied up in isn't good, either: it was often tied
up in things like a strong purist/anti-outsiders/anti-ethnic-mixing mindset, a
general anti-West, anti-modern-world outlook, and irredentist nationalism
(recapture the old homeland from the colonialist Turks, etc.). He'd just as
rather his kids grew up as modern Greeks and lose some of that baggage, in
part because he was politically left-ish, and in part because spending your
whole life looking for ways to preserve/avenge the 1910s, instead of moving on
to a focus on being a Greek citizen in the late 20th century, seemed
unproductive. That definitely loses something, I'll admit, but I'm not sure
the alternative is better; to some extent you run the risk of having people
live their lives as some kind of frozen-in-time living museum, a box I'm glad
not to be living in.

~~~
rmc
Some of these attitudes are familiar with the Irish language aswell.

------
cmelbye
Semi-unrelated, am I the only one astounded at how effective Google was in
making the Blogger reading experience as terrible as it could be?
<http://cl.ly/HaPS>

Weird layouts, loading screens, horrible gesture-based interface for touch
devices, etc.

I miss the static blogs.

~~~
fdej
Blogger doesn't load at all with JS disabled (noscript). Insane.

------
klez
They missed Venetan[1].

It's considered vulnerable by UNESCO[2], but it's not even recognized as a
language by the Italian governement (just by the Venetan region).

As almost all pre-unitarian Italic languages, it's not being thought, degraded
as 'dialect' and is being discouraged as an idiom for ignorants.

There's a very ample discussion to make about these issues here in Italy. If
anyone wants to know more, I'll try to answer. Here or in a more appropriate
venue.

[1] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venetan_language>

[2][http://www.unesco.org/culture/languages-
atlas/en/atlasmap/la...](http://www.unesco.org/culture/languages-
atlas/en/atlasmap/language-id-1021.html)

~~~
falling
That is not entirely true. However, I think the issue with defending the
language is that its more fervent supporters are using it as a confrontational
political leverage instead of just plain culture.

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munchor
For a minute there, I thought it was about endangered programming languages.
Well, this is far better, looks like a very interesting project that I would
like to follow close.

------
splicer
There's a language around my hometown that only about 250 people speak:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kwakwala>

The community is doing a great job at keeping their language alive. A few of
my friends took Kwak'wala classes in middle/high school.

Here's what the language sounds like:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNECt4ViNjY>

------
Irishsteve
Let's not forget Microsoft and supporting all their products in languages such
as Irish and Welsh. P.s Welsh isn't on the map of endangered languages (oops).

~~~
cycojesus
And yet there is no Vietnamese version of Windows (or any other Microsoft
major product as far as I can tell.)

~~~
zokier
[http://www.microsoft.com/vi-
vn/download/details.aspx?id=1703...](http://www.microsoft.com/vi-
vn/download/details.aspx?id=17036)

Maybe not complete retail version, but still something.

------
jskopek
Every endangered language we can categorize is an insight into our more
primitive selves. Languages reflects so much of a society's culture, and so
many of these languages come from isolated areas that have had little contact
with the developed world.

------
chrischen
It seems like they're missing some Chinese dialects which are mutually
unintelligible from mandarin. Maybe they aren't endangered, but China only
teaches mandarin in schools.

------
wulczer
That sweet map in the background was made by Vizzuality, keep on rocking! (no
affiliation on my side apart from knowing them and being a fan).

~~~
javisantana
thanks man, actually the complete site was made by vizzuality

------
xavijam
Great initiative

