Why save a language?

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/07/opinion/sunday/why-save-a-language.html

by gpvos • 12 years ago

60 85 12 years ago

tzs• 12 years ago

I don't remember which language this is [1], but I read about some tribal language that did not have any words for relative direction. If you were facing North and I wanted to warn you to watch out for a snake approaching from your left, I'd have to tell you to look out for the snake coming from the West.

[1] googling turned up this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relative_direction#Cultures_not...

desas• 12 years ago

The Amazonian Piraha tribe have "to the river", "to the jungle", "up the river" and "down the river" rather than directions.

rimantas2• 12 years ago

How do they say "to the jungle on the left" while being in the river?

davidw• 12 years ago

For that matter, most people here in Italy look at you a bit funny if you talk about cardinal directions, and are more comfortable with "towards Venezia" or "in the direction of Verona" or that kind of thing. The latter is probably handier for navigating towns that are, outside of a very small Roman core (in some cases) not exactly linear in their layout.

herge• 12 years ago

There's a huge tribe in the Americas who use the terms "Lower", "Midtown", "Upper West Side" and "Upper East Side" for geographical locations. I hear they're at continual war with the "Bridge and Tunnel" people.

anonymfus• 12 years ago

"A rendering of the visible spectrum on a grey background" image from Wikipedia with added English and Russian colour range names:

http://i.imgur.com/XnmMRQ6.png

Original:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Rendered_Spectrum.png

codingdave• 12 years ago

This is interesting, but I don't feel it is significant.

Names of colors, at least in English, do not typically imply a complete range of color, but major points on the spectrum. We have hundreds of words for different shades of colors, and pseudo-words like, "Yellowish-green". Painters will know the different between Cerulean blue and Cobalt blue, and Wikipedia has a whole category of shades of blue, with varying English names.

If we need to limit ourselves to a 1st grade vocabulary to make a point about our language, it isn't a very strong point.

ehurrell• 12 years ago

I think it might be significant, or at least hint at a significance worth exploring. Taxi drivers' brains apparently adapt and grow a much better awareness of maps and routes than the regular person, and this might be the same thing happening with painters and their more precise sensitivity to colour. It's worth study anyway.

guard-of-terra4• 12 years ago

Why did they use such low-saturation colours? I would never call any those colors how they are marked - except maybe for green.

austerity8• 12 years ago

As the man in the back row, I am not convinced. He reduces the need to save languages to the need to save cultures and leaves it at that, implicitly assuming the latter to be an axiom. To me it's even more obviously false. Plus, he completely fails to consider the downsides of people speaking different languages which are enormous (as pointed out in the Old Testament). Yes, I realize a person can speak more than one language. And I am all for preserving for the sake of understanding. But using humans as storage devices sounds a little selfish coming from a linguist.

caio19824• 12 years ago

What exactly are the downsides of people speaking different languages according to a religious book? Please try not to use terms like efficiency in the answer.

And it's not simply like "a person can speak more than one language". It's actually more than half of the freaking world speaking more than one language. If you happen to live in a region (and I'm not saying "country") where people only speak one single language then it's quite possible you're the exception in fact.

treerock• 12 years ago

I presume he's referring to Babel.

"Indeed the people are one and they all have one language, and this is what they begin to do; now nothing that they propose to do will be withheld from them.

"Come, let Us go down and there confuse their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.

"So the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they ceased building the city.

"Therefore its name is called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth; and from there the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth."

austerity8• 12 years ago

Why shouldn't I use terms like efficiency? Because it's exactly about efficiency. Or ease of collaboration and communication if the e-word offends you for some reason. The languages are a barrier to distribution of knowledge. Yes you can learn a second language (I did that), but it takes lots of time and energy that could be spent elsewhere (and this doesn't really depend on where you live).

Hermel2• 12 years ago

As a Swiss speaking three languages, I can confirm that every additional language comes at a cost. Only having one language is more efficient.

However, I believe there are subtle implied philosophical differences. For example, I perceive German to be more principle-oriented and idealistic in comparison to English, which tends to favor more pragmatic thoughts. As an example, consider the word "Sachzwang", which has no direct English equivalent and roughly translates to "inherent necessity". It is a typical word for a language that thinks in absolute principles. Of course, it is also possible to express this in English, it is just a little less convenient and thus also less frequently done.

It's like different programming languages that are all turing-complete, but some allow to express certain things more effectively. From that point of view, having fewer languages would also come with a reduction in diversity of thoughts.

bane• 12 years ago

If you aren't familiar with the Biblical story (and there's no reason why you should be):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_of_Babel

The lesson is that language diversity prevents coordinated work.

unhammer2• 12 years ago

The authors of the Old Testament for some reason failed to appreciate the cognitive benefits to multilingualism. They also didn't realise (as I believe Douglas Adams pointed out) the peace-preserving benefit of not being able to understand what your neighbour is saying about you. Or the possibility of machine translation which some day will remove that benefit again :)

Well, in all seriousness, "saving a language" can mean many things, beyond "using humans as storage devices". On the one end of the scale, it can simply mean "not trying to eradicate a language". There are countless cases throughout history where speakers of central/majority languages have tried eradicating other cultures or languages, see e.g. "The termination phase" in http://galdu.org/govat/doc/mindeengelsk.pdf#19 about Saami.

Or, getting slightly more actively involved, it could mean trying to be supportive of the people who actually want to use their language – like creating software/web site localisations, book translations, spell checkers / other language tech. It doesn't have to mean forcing people to learn a language they don't want to learn, just so they can be studied by linguists :-)

-----

I was a bit disappointed by the "need to save cultures" paragraph as well; tighter-knit isn't necessarily better, especially not if it means active antagonism against other groups. But you'd think there would be less antagonism between groups if speakers of a non-central language have the feeling that the language they grew up learning, the language their parents spoke to them, the language that's nearest to their self-identity, is considered by the majority/central group to be somehow "worthy" (and not just something that should go away because it's an annoyance).

austerity8• 12 years ago

Yeah, maybe I assigned some of my own meanings to what he said. It just so happened that I only hear about "saving a language" in the context of shoving it down the kids' throats in schools and giving official status to dead or near-dead languages for the purpose of creating "strong national identity".

droithomme• 12 years ago

"The authors of the Old Testament for some reason failed to appreciate the cognitive benefits to multilingualism."

That is clearly not only not correct but is the opposite of the presentation in Genesis 11:4–9. This will be very clear if you could take just a few moments to go and read the story of Babel, which is a mythological account of the origin and benefits of language diversification. It is a very short story, only six verses long, that will take at most one minute to read.

The Babel story is getting misrepresented here from its clear Biblical representation. Some here are spinning as a triumph of progress and advancement through efficient communication.

In Genesis, it is given as a situation where common language allows people to display hubris while wasting effort on a completely useless project of attempting to build a tower to reach the sky. This project and its attitude is presented as clearly evil, and diversification of language, babelification, is given as a divine solution to the problem, which is presented as originating from cultural unity, common language, and concentration in a single area.

sd8f9iu• 12 years ago

I agree. Had he simply said we should record languages and try to understand them before they die out, I would have agreed with him too, but trying to get people to keep speaking them just for the sake of it seems like a waste (and an exercise in futility).

JoeAltmaier2• 12 years ago

Agreed. Whatever curious communications codes that existed when linguists happened to come to exist is a coincidence. It's like a child in the morning after a snow, looking at icicles - aren't they beautiful! If only they could last forever!

Efficiency and utility DO matter. We can learn from old or dying languages, sure. Then move on.

I'd extend the argument to species. Whatever curious creatures existed when ecologists came to exist is a coincidence. They are not intrinsically important. We can learn from them. Then move on.

mawburn• 12 years ago

But once gone, they are gone forever. Unlike icicles that will return next year.

Like data, it's better to store it and maybe use it once or twice, than to need data that doesn't exist at all.

tiglionabbit• 12 years ago

I want to agree with you, but I do believe in preserving species.

I suppose what I want is to have a more interesting world. If we allow all this interesting data to die before we have the technology to truly capture and reproduce it, it is gone forever. Which in most cases would be ok, I guess, as new things could arise to replace them, right? Newer and better things?

Unfortunately, that can't happen if we never give it space to happen in. We monoculture our world in the name of utility, so the only species that can exist are the limited set we have chosen.

ddebernardy• 12 years ago

It's not just about using humans as a storage device.

Your native languages have an impact on -- and enrichen -- your worldview. The classic examples of this are inuits and amazonian tribes, which use (indeed, need) a few scores of variations of white and green to depict the subtleties of their environments.

It also structures the way you think in some sense, and can yield interesting subtleties in the way you express things and in literature. See how German, for instance, requires the verb to be put to the end of a sentence. With a long enough sentence, you can tickle the imagination prior to reveal what action all the beautiful words were applying to.

Lastly, there's more to it that simply having everyone speak the same language. A language can be very rich in vocabulary, and offer wide variations of vocabulary depending on the individual, and turn into a tower of Babel in its own right. English, in fact, is the best example here. A typical English speaker might know -- or at least commonly use -- something like 20-40k words; someone who speaks international English at a conversational level might typically know and use half of that. Contrast the two figures with the total number of words, which is well north of 500k in total: each specialty field and subculture has its own set of words.

austerity8• 12 years ago

If I read the article correctly the author says he came to believe the idea of language defining/affecting worldview is false or at least unproven.

DanielStraight2• 12 years ago

He reduces the need to save languages to the need to save cultures

I don't see that at all. He has two arguments. The first is that a common, and distinct, language helps a culture maintain its cohesion and continuity. It's worth noting that many writers from colonized areas have commented on the irony of writing about their experience using the colonizer's language. It's also worth noting the efforts in many areas to distinguish a group's own language from other nearby languages, even mutually intelligible ones. Why would these issues come up if language didn't matter on a cultural level? To many people, loss of language and loss of culture are related. Obviously this doesn't go for everyone, and some people willingly give up their native or cultural language, but no one should ever be forced to, no more than anyone should be forced to give up their religion, way of thinking, or way of life.

The second argument is basically that languages are data points. Studying languages, especially more isolated languages that tend to be in more danger of extinction, helps us better understand linguistics and human communication. If you only know one programming language, it's much harder to learn a new one than if you've already studied 50 programming languages. This increased linguistic understanding helps us study ancient cultures. It also helps us understand language acquisition, which in turn helps us encourage the language abilities of people with linguistic difficulties. It helps us build natural language processing tools. It even helps us develop patience when dealing with people who talk about things in a significantly different way. Something that may sound blunt or crude or inappropriate can be seen in a different light if you understand that different people communicate differently.

And... if you want to get a little "out there"... If humans ever encounter intelligent extraterrestrial life, we will be much more likely to be able to decipher their communication if we've studied 6000 languages already than if we've only studied 60. Even 60 is looking somewhat ambitious for the future of language. It's not hard to imagine a time when the only remaining languages are from a handful of language families: Indo-European, Afro-Asiatic, Niger-Congo, Sino-Tibetan, Japonic, Koreanic, and Turkic.

And if that does happen, the languages that remain will also likely be significantly simplified as languages tend to be when they become widespread. That may simplify communication, but it will make it harder to study communication and how it works.

The author of this piece (John McWhorter) has written a number of truly excellent books about languages. I would strongly encourage anyone with even a passing interest in linguistics to read any of his books that strike your fancy.

austerity8• 12 years ago

With regard to the first argument, the author's virtual opponent explicitly states that it's about voluntarily abandoning one's "native" language. Of course no one should ever be forced to do that.

As for the second argument, I agree with it. I just think the burden of studying and preserving the languages should be on those who chose to dedicate their lives to studying them, i.e. scientists like the author or enthusiasts. Not some random dude who just happened to be born in the wrong place.

But I admit I might have given this a political angle it didn't originally have.

vorg2• 12 years ago

a handful of language families: Indo-European, Afro-Asiatic, Niger-Congo, Sino-Tibetan, Japonic, Koreanic, and Turkic.

Just a note about the Austranesian language family: it contains a large number of speakers in Indonesia/Malaysia and the Phillipines, as well as lesser groups from Madagascar, Taiwan aboriginal people, NZ Maori, and Pacific Islanders as far east as Tahiti. It's likely to be in any handful of families left that people will speak.

pain• 12 years ago

I can't help but think the social issue of saving is a memory processing issue. (Whether it is language extinction or link rot..)

So much falls (fails..) to judgement of point and term of saving, when maybe we need to focus on just saving better and judging why after.

kovrik• 12 years ago

I think that it's some kind of natural selection among languages/cultures.

Languages are just tools. If this tool is effective - people use it. Otherwise it "dies".

caio19824• 12 years ago

It's not just a tool, it's a mechanism to express thought. Different cultures, different people, different ways to put in other people's mind what's inside yours. Also, remember Chomsky, languages usually have an army and navy, so it's not as simple as "natural selection".

unhammer2• 12 years ago

Actually, the quote is from "an audience member at one of Max Weinreich's lectures" (well, logically that could be Chomsky, but most likely not ;)) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_a...

pandaman• 12 years ago

It's exactly as simple as natural selection. Because a language is not just expressing thought - it's driving it as well. Actually, it's exactly as the whole evolution in the animal world: languages are inheritable (parents teach their language to the children at the very least), mutable and there is a selection process among them, involving armies and navies among many other things.

atlantic3• 12 years ago

Tools - effectiveness. It sounds obvious - when you're speaking English, where "think" and "thing" are related, and language has a pragmatic orientation. You're coming from an Anglo-Saxon paradigm, and you're not even aware of it. Your response exemplifies just why it's so valuable to preserve a diversity of languages.

jayvanguard2• 12 years ago

It demonstrates the value in academically preserving languages, but not in culturally "saving" them from extinction.

phn4• 12 years ago

This is only tangentially related to the article.

I find we (humans) have some kind of emergent "gene pool variety preservation" behavior, even when talking about non-directly-genetic stuff: culture, language, knowledge, ways of thinking, animal species, etc.

It looks like we are wired to avoid natural selection over-fitting at a cultural level.

dalke5• 12 years ago

Indian schools in the US and the Stolen Generation in Australia, prohibitions on non-approved religions (the Edict of Expulsion, Edict of Fontainebleau, the Alhambra Decree, and many, many more), the forceful spread of Christianity in the Americas, the Indian Removal Act of 1830, the Armenian Genocide, the Final Solution, the anti-bourgeois re-education camps of Cultural Revolution, and even the former President's call to "bring democracy to the world" all strike me as good counter-examples to there being some "wired" behavior of the sort you mean.

marcosdumay• 12 years ago

Counter-examples do not make the examples inexistent.

People are complex, and populations even more so. The fact that our actions can't be explained by a superficial set of coherent principles shouldn't even be surprizing.

phn4• 12 years ago

Those are good counter examples, but they seem to happen in the context of a somewhat direct conflict between two cultures, thus entering a "survival of the fittest" kind of situation.

Maybe we only get this protective spirit when we have already "won" :)

hyperliner3• 12 years ago

The problem I have with this article is that it fails to recognize that language also is an anchor in a negative way. Yes, Hebrew can help form a stronger Jewish community, but a language spoken by 3000 people in the middle of the Amazon can only serve to keep those people hostage forever. What is wrong with teaching those people's kids to speak Hebrew or Spanish or English and let them join a broader, stronger community or nation? The alternative is that those people's children will not be able to prosper because, to highlight the obvious, many of these obscure languages are correlated with impoverished environments. Yes, it helps some academic in some fancy University in the northeast of the United States have "intellectual debates" about the issue while sipping on a starbucks latte, but it certainly does not help those people.

The second point is that the nuances that the author has observed don't have to be lost. If there was value in knowing that an object was "on" another object horizontally, or vertically, or slanted (using the example in the article), we could always incorporate those notions into any major language.

Htsthbjig• 12 years ago

Languages are tools but also barriers of thought.

The main reason Americans can't understand China or Russia, or Arab countries and vice versa is language.

People in the UK for example, do not listen to Putin 2 hours long Q&A and think for themselves. They listen to intermediaries, like Andrew Wood, because they don't understand Russian.

People would be shocked to know what Mr Putin is really saying, compared with what they are being told he is saying.

The same happens on the other side, too. The China and Russia media can portray a controlled picture of the rest of the world for most of their population.

The printing press changed the world because it made possible for people to read the Bible themselves instead of using the intermediaries interpretation(that sometimes were not in their best interest). Science advanced enormously when the status quo could be criticized(thanks access to books and the knowledge those carried).

guard-of-terra4• 12 years ago

I assure you that Putin's Q&A doesn't contain any language tricks not available for Americans or UK peope.

In fact, Putin's Q&A doesn't contain much of anything.

It's not about the language, it's more about shared history or lack thereof.

DanBC• 12 years ago

If Ann gives a 2 hour speech in Russian, and Bob does not speak Russian, then Bob needs to rely on Chris or Dave to translate.

Bob is at a disadvantage because he has to trust either (or both) of the translators.

diego_moita2• 12 years ago

Sorry, you used bad evidence. Truth is: politicians' words are irrelevant, in Russia, the West, the East and the 3rd World. What matters is what they do, not what they say.

I live in a 3r World country (Brazil). In a 3rd world perspective the Russian invasion of Ukraine is imperialism, plain and simple, just like what Russians accuse the western powers of doing. Russians have been dreaming of imperialism long before Lenin denounced it. And they never stopped dreaming about it.

guard-of-terra4• 12 years ago

Was the Vietnam invasion of Cambodia imperialism? One that disposed of Khmer Rouge.

tokenadult• 12 years ago

真的吗？There are plenty of Americans who understand Chinese. (I have also studied Russian, although my Russian is less proficient than my Chinese.) In fact, the United States offers exceptional opportunities to understand the rest of the world, because the United States is full of immigrants from other countries, including Russia and China (I know both), and receives more international tourist visitors each year than any other country besides France.

The single biggest reason that the United States government can't control what I hear about world news from other sources in other countries is that it doesn't try to. News organizations in the United States are private enterprises, sometimes run on a nonprofit basis, and I can read and listen to news from all over the world while living in the United States. It's easy to get an unfiltered Internet connection here, and in the old days it was easy (and remarkably inexpensive) to get a shortwave radio here. (I have done both.) It's also possible to subscribe to periodicals published in other countries and receive those by mail here (I used to do that, but now read those on the Internet).

hedgew• 12 years ago

Many of us "care" about languages – they have emotional significance – but what is the practical value of near-dead languages to society? How would you even measure the impact of lengthening the lifespan of a dying language? If we taught hundreds of children to speak an ancient language that no one else uses, would that make anyone happier?

Should we teach children extinct professions just to keep some cultures alive?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_cutting

kiliancs• 12 years ago

I speak three languages and appreciate the language diversity as each of them provides a unique window to perceive and express the universe. We need, however, a common (universal) language that allows mankind to create a global culture, a global identity (above and including all national identities) and to enable general understanding and practical communications in all matters. This language should be taught everywhere in addition to the local language. We cannot expect to for the different linguistic communities (or the world in general) to renounce to a language, but at the same time the general well-being calls for a common language.

GuiA• 12 years ago

Like other commenters in this thread, I find the author's arguments to be weak and tautological and/or based on invalid premises.

I don't think we should care about keeping as many languages spoken as possible. Collective human culture is fluid, and subject to evolutionary pressures. If the human species converges to fewer languages because it allows us to do whatever we do more effectively, great. Going against that is just not practical and a waste of time.

In France, the modern French language has been pushed onto the population a few hundred years ago, at the detriment of local dialects ("patois"). In the recent years, there have been government initiatives to force schools in certain regions to teach their former dialects. What's the point? Those dialects are close to dead anyway, and take up valuable teaching times. Kids are already graduating high school barely able to write and read French properly- they have very little to benefit from by spending time learning such dialects. Sure, they are important to ~archive~ culturally and historically, and there's nothing wrong with funding a few scholars working on that, but that's it.

What is important to preserve is the knowledge that allows one to learn a language. In other words, if German were to disappear, that's fine, and we shouldn't make any efforts at attempting to preserve it. What we should do, however, is document German as much as possible (its vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation, idioms, native works, etc.) such that if one needs to learn German 100 years later, it's possible to do so.

The basis for that is two-fold: practicality (if an ancient German text is discovered but no one speaks German daily anymore, at least scholars can still decipher it), and preservation of human culture (but in a way that doesn't go against pragmatism, which the approach described by the author in the article is).

The same debate applies to other things, e.g. flora/fauna. Of course, when species are becoming close to extinct because of humans destroying environments, we should do something about it. But species go extinct all the time because that's just how nature works, and how it worked much before we got here. In this light, what's the sense of trying to preserve plants or animals artificially?

sravfeyn• 12 years ago

Language is a reflection of speaker's model of the world, a different unique perspective on the same world we all live in and hence can provide diverse solutions to the same problems we face. Diversity in thought process makes it faster to decipher that beautiful Nature. So it will be sad if these languages die. Of course, this is not the only reason, but I think is one of the important reasons.

I speak three languages, I think in two languages. I go on different paths when thinking in different languages when trying to solve a geometry problem.

chalimacos• 12 years ago

What some people who don't see the need to preserve languages are missing is that each living language is in itself a Noah Ark that preserves lots of dead languages and world views. English preserves latin, greek, yiddish... Consider the word "consider". It comes from latin Considerare (cum + sidera) 'to consult the stars'. Each language that dies is a tragedy that kills many precedent languages. Moreover, current status is no guarantee for the future, even English could one day be at risk. I am a Catalan speaker, a language that once ruled the Mediterranean and now is struggling.

phlakaton• 12 years ago

The author claims that real, measurable differences in how people think based on how they speak is too insignificant, because it doesn't constitute a "worldview." I rather think he sells short the importance of seeing actual empirical ways in which language does indeed "speak us". Say there are thousands, maybe millions, of such minute alterations in metaphor or thought pattern – is it really so hard to imagine that the aggregate of these alterations form unique, interesting ways to interpret and respond to the world? Do we not see evidence of this when we read, say, the poetry of different cultures? (It's a rhetorical question – I certainly think we do!)

I got a book last year about learning Old English. I haven't gotten very far into it yet, but just the fact that I can go back a thousand years in human history and see where the roots of my language came from is an incredibly cool thing. I am also inspired by the alliterative schemes of old Anglo-Saxon poetry, and have it on the back-burner to see how or how not that could work in modern language (e.g. in Rebsamen's "Beowulf" translation).

Similarly, whether or not I actually "speak" programming languages like Lisp, Forth, and APL in my daily work, they are a mine of cool ideas and experiments that I can still draw inspiration from, decades after the machines that they were originally built on crumble back into sand.

Which probably emphasizes the "cold storage" value of language, not necessarily the "active speaking" value of it. I think the cold storage value of retaining language is indisputably massive, and projects like the Rosetta Project are really interesting to me for that reason. What's the value of actively speaking it, even when the community of speakers dwindles? Perhaps it is in helping to cement our understanding of the language before it fades away.

MichaelGG• 12 years ago

This ignores the negative impact of keeping smaller groups limited by preserving their language. In Guatemala, many of the "Indians" have their own languages it dialects, some of which are incompatible with each other. There's little opportunity for use of these languages apart from the town they live in. To be involved in commerce, read about current events, or even be treated well, you need to have great Spanish.

My parents have a medical clinic in one if these villages. When the government started making some of the classes be taught in the local language, the parents were upset, knowing that this would hurt their children. They viewed it as another way to keep the "indian" population back. And they're correct.

So while there may be good reasons to preserve languages (like preserving art, or historic towns), someone should be funding that directly, rather than externalizing the costs on to these indigenous groups.

LunaSea2• 12 years ago

http://youtu.be/OvlQXPNwrqo

Why save a language?

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