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

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/long-lost-languages-found-manuscripts-egyptian-monastery-180964698/

by ALee • 5 years ago

95 80 5 years ago

choeger• 5 years ago

with the rise of Islam in the 7th century, Christian sites in the Sinai Desert began to disappear, and Saint Catherine’s found itself in relative isolation. Monks turned to reusing older parchments when supplies at the monastery ran scarce.

That sounds ... odd. If the monks were isolated then why should they copy books, especially when they had to delete older material to do so? At the very least this implies that the monks had a supply of books to copy and also had to return the originals to someone somehow.

I think the more logical explanation is that the deleted texts were considered worthless.

rendall• 5 years ago

'I think the more logical explanation is that the deleted texts were considered worthless.'

It's your contention that the monks had unlimited access to parchment, but just chose to overwrite older work?

If the monks were isolated then why should they copy books, especially when they had to delete older material to do so?

A religious order dedicated to copying books as a spiritual discipline isn't going to just sit around when parchment is hard to come by.

pure_simplicity• 5 years ago

Books were not only copied to have 2 functional copies, but also to have 1 fresh copy remaining once the older copy is no longer usable. Books are perishable and the more they are used, the quicker they disintegrate. That in itself is sufficient reason to sacrifice some works to preserve other works.

bluGill• 5 years ago

Because some books are more valuable than others. You might enjoy Harry Potter, but if your only copy of a calculus 101 is deteriorating you will erase Harry Potter and copy the calculus text over the top to save the more important calculus book - or maybe you would erase the calculus textbook to copy Harry Potter over the top. This is a statement of relative value when paper is scarce, but it doesn't mean they didn't value the lost text, just that the replacement was even more valuable. If they had plenty of paper they wouldn't have erased the lost text in the first place and probably would have made a new copy.

hypertele-Xii3• 5 years ago

There's a third way.

You combine the best halves of calculus and Harry Potter into one book.

It'll be more difficult to understand, but managing so grants one the best of both worlds.

billpg• 5 years ago

Glibc contains COBOL code?

newsbinator18• 5 years ago

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 society with thousands of languages, some with 100% global power and some with 0%, and have children born into it at random.

Maybe it's because I'm not a historian, but statements like this:

Michael Phelps, director of the Early Manuscripts Electronic Library, tells Gray of the Atlantic that the discovery of Caucasian Albanian writings at Saint Catherine’s library has helped scholars increase their knowledge of the language’s vocabulary, giving them words for things like “net” and “fish.”

... make me sad, not happy. This isn't exciting or fascinating, it's a testament to how pointless it is that we put so much value in languages, like we're still murmuring incantations around a fire and we just learned a new old one to murmur.

Let's pick a word for "net" and "fish" and finally, as a species, be done with it.

Make a program of keeping the new global language alive and equally accessible, just like we currently do with essential medicines.

Everybody has their own local medicines, even traditional witch-doctor medicines, but at the same time everybody gets the exact same doxycycline and training on when to use it. Likewise whatever word we end up choosing for "fish" and "net": use whatever word you want in your village, but when you want the one that works in the rest of the world, we made sure you're already armed with it.

Sure, languages evolve and you can't fight that, but with a global internet and a concerted effort to finally solve the Tower of Babel problem, languages can evolve everywhere at once into a single global language that every child gets brought up speaking.

hypertele-Xii3• 5 years ago

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 this consciously?

newsbinator18• 5 years ago

The analogy is reasonable, although it breaks down because human languages are not nearly as varied in usefulness for different things as programming languages are.

Human languages are much more generalized.

Sure, you can find domain-specific examples of one human language being preferable to another though, like when Korean Air forced all its pilots to communicate in English, even Korean->Korean pilots, because in English you can tell explicitly a person who is older/more senior than you that they're about to kill everybody on the plane, without defaulting to making that a polite "it seems as though perhaps what if" suggestion.

On a country-level, we've successfully normalized a given language across large populations and large geographies. Often without involving genocide or prison camps.

If we can roll out vaccines to the globe over a couple years and a few trillion dollars, then surely rolling out a global language over a generation or two would only be 1 or 2 orders of magnitude more challenging, but it would likely result in far more benefit to the human race in the medium/long term, and probably even in the short term too.

katsura2• 5 years ago

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 kept the same way as different programming languages are used now (basically to express certain patterns differently).

muststopmyths• 5 years ago

I'm sure you know that there is a reason your opinion is highly unpopular. Language doesn't just communicate fish and net.

Poetry, songs and literature just do not seamlessly translate between languages very well. Nor should we lose the calligraphy of Japanese/Chinese/Arabic/Persian.

Humanity would lose a lot if we all went to just one language and script.

Sure, when all the rich people flee to Elysium or Mars, they will be better off with generations growing up together with a common language and script. Because the population will be small in comparison and they will be creating their own civilization.

But until then, I'd like to keep the diversity right here on Earth.

newsbinator18• 5 years ago

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.

jcranmer2• 5 years ago

Sure, languages evolve and you can't fight that, but with a global internet and a concerted effort to finally solve the Tower of Babel problem, languages can evolve everywhere at once into a single global language that every child gets brought up speaking.

That... is optimistic, to say the least. Languages evolve essentially by having successive generations pick up collectively on idiosyncratic features of the language. And of course, people who aren't talking with each other aren't going to pick up on others' idiosyncratic features, and after several generations, you end up with new, distinct languages. To keep a single language out of it, you have to work hard to promote only a single version of it, and rather literally beat the daylight of anyone who speaks the "wrong" version of the language (this is essentially how the modern "big" European languages came about.)

In other words, enforcing linguistic unity tends to require enforcing cultural unity as well.

newsbinator18• 5 years ago

you have to work hard to promote only a single version of it

Yes, you do have to work to make it happen. Up to now we've given languages a free cultural pass, whereas diseases and poverty we keep shoveling trillions into, and we're proud when we've made a 20% dent.

It takes work to pull the species out of what is natural, because what is natural is very often terrible. Diseases naturally evolve to terrorize us. We fight them and sometimes we win.

The first step is admitting that how languages have evolved naturally up to now sucks for an ethical, roughly egalitarian 21st century information-based society.

The sooner we can de-link language from local culture, the better.

And of course that begs the question: can language be delinked from culture?

Yes: my native language isn't the one I'm writing in to you now, and my native culture is whatever I'm making up for myself as I go along, to the chagrin of my parents and many in the culture I was born into.

gwbas1c• 5 years ago

That would be authoritarian.

I think natural evolution will gradually move most people to adopt either a single global language, or there will only be a few global languages. As English speakers, you and I can travel to most parts of the world without knowing the local language, because English is so pervasive. Will the "global language" be English? Who knows!

Sure, languages evolve and you can't fight that, but with a global internet and a concerted effort to finally solve the Tower of Babel problem, languages can evolve everywhere at once into a single global language that every child gets brought up speaking.

I always find it fascinating to see different dialects of English. The way that Americans will say "Please ..." and Indians say "Kindly ..." always makes me chuckle.

tbonesteaks• 5 years ago

You have a very fascinating point of view. I never thought of it that way before. But, from what I understand, the Tower of Babel isn’t a problem to be solved. It was a solution to the problem you want to introduce. Not disagreeing with your points exactly, but it is very interesting dichotomy you’ve introduced.

huachimingo• 5 years ago

Godwin's Law for language discussion:

Consider the language Esperanto for universal candidate. /s

kartikay26• 5 years ago

I don’t think we need to put in extra “effort” to make it happen, it’s already happening - and English is becoming the default global language. Knowing English is an advantage in most jobs all over the world and it seems the percentage of English speakers in the world is increasing over time.

newsbinator18• 5 years ago

That's true, it's going in that direction. But that's like saying there's less Malaria year over year because we're naturally building cities and towns that displace mosquito habitats.

If we're going to agree that X is a problem and that we're happy the problem is naturally diminishing at some snail-like pace, then let's also agree to take direct action to solve X properly and now.

We're tackling the Malaria problem, with dollars and behavior changes. Let's tackle the Tower of Babel problem with dollars and behavior changes. English is an okay global language, for example, but its writing system is far from okay.

yboris• 5 years ago

Language is a way of thought. Languages come with their own quirks, and just like [plant] monoculture is bad for an ecosystem, so would a single language. Since I was born in Russia and came to the US (thus becoming fluent in both languages), and especially after reading the book "Metaphors we live by" I see how language forces certain concepts on us. Having a variety of languages is a benefit, despite introducing problems.

As of now, English has become the de-facto universal language: in many countries it's the #1 most-studied foreign language in schools. I don't see a problem with having English (or another language) be everyone's 2nd language for better global communication.

ziotom78• 5 years ago

I second this. Better having a 2nd language that is common for everybody than have just one language and only one way to express thoughts. I speak Italian (my mother tongue), English, Romanian and a bit of German, and I really enjoy when I discover subtle connections between words/sayings and the culture of the people using that language.

(As an analogy, what if the world decides that only C++ should be used to write programs and libraries?!? Boooring!)

rileyphone2• 5 years ago

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis always catches me as something we should investigate more, but unfortunately it’s mired in the broader conflict of cultural relativity, as I learned when my anthro professor tried to disprove it with a convoluted argument from an aboriginal tribes notion of direction. A diversity of languages means a diversity of thought, which maybe you could make the case for more multilingual teams from.

English seems to suck as a language but it has risen to be the lingua franca of our present world system - how much of that is because British and American superpowerdom vs being a good lingua franca is up for debate.

KineticLensman• 5 years ago

Implementing a new global language is akin to a standardization process. From my experience in standardization (several years supporting SISO [0]), standardization is a very expensive and time consuming activity, even when the participants can see obvious benefits. Creating a new global language - and then adopting it - would have a massive opportunity cost - that could be better spent in trying to deal with higher priority problems such as global heating.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulation_Interoperability_St...

velcrovan• 5 years ago

No-one in their right mind would create […] society

Right. Because societies are emergent things that arise from masses of people, not products of an individual’s design preferences.

That’s not to say that we might not eventually get to one language. But it won’t be because of illiterate* ideals expressed through technocratic meddling.

(* — “Illiterate” in its original sense: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2012/05/03/rediscovering-)literac...)

newsbinator18• 5 years ago

What's the difference between the technocratic meddling of getting everybody to stop spreading AIDS and the technocratic meddling of getting everybody to start speaking the same language?

We build consensus, we devote dollars and person-hours, and we try to figure out how to get closer to a desired end state. We do it all the time. But when it's giving a generation of people plumbing that's monumental human progress and when it's giving a generation of people a lingua franca that's illiterate technocratic meddling.

63• 5 years ago

Language is an integral part of every culture. It's not just an arbitrary system that everyone chose differently, but a way of communicating and reinforcing ideas that's unique to different groups. Consider the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. There's a reason language was associated with nationalism in the 20th century. Keeping the diversity of breadth of the human experience alive (much of which we've already lost with increasing globalism) means keeping diverse languages and cultures, and I think that's important.

newsbinator18• 5 years ago

This is the standard refrain any time somebody calls for a unified language: "it's an integral part of our culture".

I addressed this:

Everybody has their own local medicines, even traditional witch-doctor medicines, but at the same time everybody gets the exact same doxycycline and training on when to use it. Likewise whatever word we end up choosing for "fish" and "net": use whatever word you want in your village, but when you want the one that works in the rest of the world, we made sure you're already armed with it.

Will this mean losing the diversity of cultures due to increased globalism? Yes.

Now here comes my most unpopular opinion on HN:

Good, let's lose some cultures.

My culture isn't special. Human cultures aren't a scare resource and we make up new ones all the time. If the next generation, which enjoys the gift of a single unified baseline language, isn't interested in my culture anymore, that's fine. It might even be good news.

When they need a culture like my culture again, they'll develop one, probably within years or months.

Complex cultures pop into and out of existence on the internet every day, and they're no less complex and no less varied than the ones that involved worshipping tree spirits and eating each other's hearts for strength. Let dying cultures die.

kragen• 5 years ago

Schleyer's project of an international auxiliary language (and then later Zamenhof's, with Esperanto, and Hogben's with Interlingua) is indeed very worthwhile. It seems to have run into some political resistance, though.

tgv2• 5 years ago

What would that solve? Do large societies with a common language do so much better than those with multiple languages?

South Korean Hangul

The Roman alphabet is just as simple, and much wider spread. English is a perfectly simple, easy to learn language with great expressive power. So shall we settle on English as the New World Language? Thought so.

newsbinator18• 5 years ago

That's like comparing learning to drive a car with learning to drive a 747.

No, English isn't a perfectly simple, easy to learn writing system. It's among the hardest writing systems to learn.

Which is why we have a ridiculous game called "Spelling Bees", which can't exist in a language that's easy to write in. In Korea nobody's impressed when an 8-year-old can spell a complex-sounding word they've never heard before and don't know the meaning of: they should be able to spell it.

http://chateauview.com/pronunciation/

Dearest creature in creation Studying English pronunciation, I will teach you in my verse Sounds like corpse, corps, horse and worse.
I will keep you, Susy, busy, Make your head with heat grow dizzy; Tear in eye, your dress you’ll tear; Queer, fair seer, hear my prayer.
Pray, console your loving poet, Make my coat look new, dear, sew it! Just compare heart, hear and heard, Dies and diet, lord and word.

725686• 5 years ago

"English is a perfectly simple, easy to learn language"

What? English writing and pronunciation are atrocious. There are more exceptions than rules. I thought it was a pretty well known fact. There are languages where you can perfectly pronounce the words even if you don't have the slightest idea of what you are reading.

alvarlagerlof• 5 years ago

English isn't simple at all.

Wowfunhappy2• 5 years ago

Is this an unpopular opinion? I think that languages are beautiful and culture should be studied and respected—but yes, of course the world would be more efficient if we had a single universal language. (And preferably not English, since English is horrible.) There’s a reason the Tower of Babel story depicts languages as a punishment from God.

The problem is that it’s ultimately a purely academic debate, for somewhat similar reasons to why QWERTY vs DVORAK discussions never lead anywhere. I have spent my entire life practicing reading and writing in english. I have zero interest in all that away to switch to an entirely new language, much less one that none of the people around me speak. You’re just never going to develop a movement around this in a free society, so there’s no point.

mrtranscendence2• 5 years ago

English is horrible.

English isn't substantially worse than any other natural language, except insofar that it is attached to a very inconsistent system of spelling. That's somewhat orthogonal to English as a language, though, and indeed it could be written with any imagined writing system (e.g. quickscript).

yosito3• 5 years ago

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.

newsbinator18• 5 years ago

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.

danjac2• 5 years ago

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.

kaesar143• 5 years ago

Until Chinese romanizes it will never be a lingua franca. Simply far too hard to learn the written word, Simplified or not.

yorwba• 5 years ago

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.

newsbinator18• 5 years ago

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.

SuoDuanDao• 5 years ago

That is very much the sentiment behind the Esperanto movement. Though that was proposed as a standardized second language, to be learned alongside whatever local languages were already being learned by the local population.

The Esperanto crowd is a cool community, but uptake has been much slower than would be necessary for it to have the desired effectiveness.

BuckRogers2• 5 years ago

The problem with the idea as I see it, is that it'll just tribalize again. You'd need to ensure that requirements are in place for learning and maintaining the chosen language, and prevent substantial evolution within it by any group of people. It's better for something like this to be a 2nd language, which is already in place for the world in English. The easy to learn and write part is mostly there, but getting someone out of the dark ages relies on them learning English. The real problem with maintaining language interop is that you have to practice it. It's infeasible to foist a new language onto the entire world, or choose one, rather than work with what we have. Money and knowledge are the only real motivators and English has it. Just as French did before, and Latin before that. Spanish, Chinese and Hindi probably also have a secure existence and always will. The rest are at risk of dwindling numbers and then extinction. So your wish has been coming true over time.

dhosek• 5 years ago

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).

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

Related Stories