ESR: Is Danish Dying?

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=965

by mdemare • 17 years ago

43 24 17 years ago

esr.ibiblio.org

Most linguists think it’s Just Not Done to say that a speaker population is evolving its own language out of existence

ESR == Steve Sailer

No matter what he's writing about there will always be a mention of how he can see situations more clearly than other people, but only because he's fearless in the face of the overbearing political correctness to which other people succumb.

He's just so unafraid of thinking "taboo" thoughts.

gustavo_duarte• 17 years ago

I think you underestimate his ego. What you describe is true, but it's not all. For example, he's also smarter than all physicists:

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=690

Oy! For relief, I suggest his epic spanking in the Linux Kernel Mailing List:

http://lkml.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0202.1/1909.h...

Which is actually a good thread to understand kernel development.

davidmathers2• 17 years ago

I think you underestimate his ego.

You're right. Painfully right.

"Eric realizes that if he’d had a bit more courage and self-discipline, and moved from mathematics into physics rather than programming, he would have been rather likely to have invented decoherence theory himself and become a physicist renowned for kicking the props out from under the Copenhagen Interpretation."

From the followup:

"I just turned 51. That means, in order to believe that I could do really strong and original physics work now, I’d have to start with a justified belief that I’m as talented as Hawking or Einstein. This is almost certainly not the case. I would say “certainly”, except that my general track record of creativity and insight is far enough off the mean to raise just the tiniest smidgen of realistic doubt about this. And I was, after all, ahead of the physics literature on something conceptually important at least once - even a lot of physicists never manage that."

One reads such words, and what can one say but... "esr."

abrahamsen3• 17 years ago

#1 (rapid evolution) is not a sign of language dying, it is a sign of language living. Only dead languages don't evolve.

#2 and #3 are true, not sure if they are a sign of death. As a (Danish) kid I found Norwegian (bokmål) far easier to read than Danish.

#4: I don't believe the ads are significant, and certainly not English street signs in areas a tourist may visit.

However, the last example is what Danish linguists consider the greatest threat to the language: Domain loss. Danish is really to small a language for specialized domains. When I write about my work, I use English, as the majority of people who might potentially be interested are from outside Denmark, and those Danes that might be interested can all read English. A generation ago similar texts would likely be in Danish, but a generation ago there was far less international collaboration.

[ Domain loss in Denmark is nothing new, Latin, French and German have all been dominating various domains earlier. The German dominance was far greater than English today, before the rise of nationalism Danish was merely a peasant language, and even for the peasants German words replaced Danish to a large degree. ]

dantheman2• 17 years ago

I'm intrigued by your comment that German dominance was far greater than English, for some reason I don't think that's true. Could you expand upon this?

albertcardona• 17 years ago

I have been told that German almost made it as the official language of the entire USA when the constitution was set up. The legend says it lost to English for a few votes, but that poll apparently didn't take place.

In any case: "On January 13, 1795, Congress considered a proposal, not to give German any official status, but merely to print the federal laws in German as well as English"

See this: http://www.english.illinois.edu/-people-/faculty/debaron/ess...

HSO• 17 years ago

I think he meant dominance w.r.t. Danish only, not all languages like English today.

abrahamsen3• 17 years ago

Not sure what I can say when you don't believe me. Here is an article from the Danish national encyclopedia (in Danish).

http://www.denstoredanske.dk/index.php?title=Samfund%2C_jura...

German was the official language of the Danish military until 1772, and equal to Danish in the city administration and guilds.

Another article:

http://www.denstoredanske.dk/Samfund%2c_jura_og_politik/Spro...)

No foreign language has had greater impact on Danish than Low German ... 16-17% of the Danish words are from Low German, 4-8% from Greek or Latin, 2-4% from French, and less than 1% from English. [ For comparison, around 2% of the English words are from Danish (from the viking era), according to Joseph M. Williams _Origins of the English Language_ ].

megaduck• 17 years ago

Interesting stuff. Thanks for sharing!

From my (limited) experience, it feels like small European languages are particularly susceptible to domain loss from English. Since they all share a common alphabet and the phonemes are "close enough", it's often trivial to grab a word or phrase from English when there isn't a proper native substitute. The technical fields are obviously going to go first, but other fields will follow as the world changes.

English is a highly predatory language. It absorbs foreign vocabulary extremely easily, and the grammar is remarkably flexible. If a language doesn't cover some conceptual territory, odds are that English will step in to fill the gap. I can easily envision a world where most people eventually speak some kind of English creole.

Oddly, the only major language (100 million+ speakers) I've seen that's resistant to English invasion is Chinese. The pictographic writing system, coupled with its monosyllabic tonal nature make it really hard for Chinese speakers to use unmodified foreign vocabulary. English has grabbed a number of Chinese words, but the transfer has been almost entirely one way.

I'm sure there's other languages that are incompatible with English, but they're in a distinct minority. I think the rest are going to experience at least some domain loss to English.

eru2• 17 years ago

What about the Japanese?

tokenadult2• 17 years ago

the only major language (100 million+ speakers) I've seen that's resistant to English invasion is Chinese.

This is not at all true of spoken Chinese. Having lived in east Asia for six years of my life, I can recall countless conversations I've overheard in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and China in which English words were intermixed into Chinese sentences by native speakers of Chinese speaking to other native speakers of Chinese. I've also heard a lot of use of straight-up English in "Chinese-language" broadcasting for local audiences.

After edit: I should point out too that most of the modern scientific vocabulary of Chinese is composed of compound words that are formed on the model of English or common European words for the same concepts. English ends up being a better launchpad for study of Chinese than I would have guessed when I began studying Chinese in 1975.

abrahamsen3• 17 years ago

Domain loss doesn't mean importing single words. Importing new words, especially for new concepts, and adjusting them to the native grammar is just natural evolution of the language.

Domain loss mean that we switch fully to another language, including grammar. This is very close to be the case at the Danish universities, where almost all research is published in English, and more recently, most courses are taught exclusively in English in order to attract foreign students.

arihelgason• 17 years ago

Another interesting development in the Danish language is the rise of 'multietnolekt' (multiethnolect) - a type of ethnolect that's emerged among multicultural communities.

It's gramatically different from Danish, and has words from Kurdish, Turkish and Arabic. As far as I know it's confined to immigrant communities, but that might change.

Not sure how this fits in with the idea that Danish is dying.

More info here http://dialekt.dk/multietnolekt/ (article in Danish)

pelle2• 17 years ago

I wrote this comment on ESR's site but it's in the moderation queue:

Interesting article. I myself am Danish but living in Miami. I left about 20 years ago but was back in Copenhagen for a couple of years recently. I did see a big change in Danish, in particularly with the use of English.

In the 80’s it was not all that cool to talk English all the time. It was only a few of us in the hip hop community and programmers who got a way with it. This has changed, but not in the way you might think. I think even on the street someone would be thought of as a poser if he used nothing but English.

What Danes do, do is import English words and make them their own. A lot of this I think comes from the hip hop community which has gone mainstream in Denmark in the period I was away. My 2 favorite examples of English words that have become Danish is Slice and Fck. Slice was new to me when I returned to Denmark. It means a slice of pizza. In Danish you can leave of Pizza and you can’t use “slice” for anything else unless you’re talking about servers.

Fck has become such a common use in Denmark, that I don’t think people even realize that it isn’t Danish. It is used by just about everyone younger than 40 all the time, to such extent that Danes travelling to the English speaking countries routinely and unwittingly cause offence.

So my point about these words is that while they both come from English, they have now become absorbed with changed meaning into Danish. So when I’m in a 7/11 in Copenhagen saying “give mig et slajs” I’m not actually talking English, just modern street Danish.

This absorption of new words reminds me of when I lived in Panama, where words have been imported whole sale from Jamaican and American English to the local Spanish language. The word “Man” for example means “Person” and not “Male”, which caused me never ending confusion when I heard people talking about “la man” and I thought they were talking about some guy.

My theory about what has happened in Denmark is that it is an extremely egalitarian society. Elitist language snobs are frowned upon. There was also a period (say the 80s) where very few decent TV or movies where made in Denmark. So my generation who grew up then absorbed everything we could from American and English culture. The growth of Hip Hop in Denmark has I’m certain also had a huge influence. In the 80s though there were lots of Danish groups singing in English, now I think the majority sing/rap in Danish.

I’m very interested in these kinds of changes to culture all over the world. I wrote this article about how globalization doesn’t homogenize music and food, but rather create lots of interesting new micro fusions. It’s kind of related to this debate and uses Denmark, the Philippines and others as examples.

http://stakeventures.com/articles/2007/09/18/why-globalizati...

silvestrov2• 17 years ago

Another example of word import in Danish: the word "shopping" (in Danish: "købe ind") is now used when shopping for fun stuff (girls/gays buying clothes) while the danish word is used when shopping for groceries.

So "jeg skal shoppe" (I have to shop) is shopping for fun, while "jeg skal købe ind" means "I have to buy groceries".

eru2• 17 years ago

Same in German.

jmillikin• 17 years ago

> [Fuck] has become such a common use in Denmark, that I don’t think people even realize that it isn’t Danish. It is used by just about everyone younger than 40 all the time, to such extent that Danes travelling to the English speaking countries routinely and unwittingly cause offence.

This surprised me -- is "fuck" not considered rude in Denmark? Or do Danes use it among "foreigners" without realizing it means the same thing in other languages?

silvestrov2• 17 years ago

both. Older people refrain from using it, but for young people it's just an innocent filler word. We don't beep such words out on TV/Radio, and they can be said in primetime by guests without problems.

And therefore it's easy for Danes when visiting USA/UK to say it without realizing that Americans/English people considers it rude.

barry-cotter• 17 years ago

No, but it is undergoing domain loss. Dialects with their very own army and navy don't disappear.

I spend a bit of time in Germany and while I can't speak to phoneme shifts in German because I can't speak the damned language yet, there's pseudo-English all over the place in advertising, street signs, tourist info. But for the advertising really is pseudo-English and sometimes translations are pretty desperate. At the very, very least 10% of Germans have English good enough to hold an intelligent conversation in.

ESR is putting too much weight on his personal experience. Most of the Germans I know are CS/Comp Ling or Psychology students and they use lots of English texts in their undergraduate courses and in the computery ones the Masters are all in English. But English is a domain specific language for them. But that's not a language shift. German's not going anywhere. Hell, German dialects aren't going anywhere, most of the Deutschsprecher countries are heavily diglossic, I'd be surprised if Denmark wasn't similar.

I think the post could have been written about any of the Germanic languages and it'd be just as wrong.

dot• 17 years ago

so it's come full circle. anglo saxons that 'invaded' england originated from denmark.

ESR: Is Danish Dying?

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