Endangered language...

Discussion of natural languages, or language in general.
User avatar
xxx
Lebom
Lebom
Posts: 94
Joined: Wed Dec 14, 2011 1:04 pm
Contact:

Endangered language...

Post by xxx »

Why fighting against the disappearance of languages...
If linguistic relativity is not a fact, it does not matter which language bears a particular culture in danger that must be saved ...

User avatar
gach
Avisaru
Avisaru
Posts: 472
Joined: Mon Feb 17, 2003 11:03 am
Location: displaced from Helsinki

Re: Endangered language...

Post by gach »

If languages aren't worth saving, why should cultures be?

or

If the study of languages is the study of the human mind, do you think you prefer 6000 datapoints over a single one?

User avatar
xxx
Lebom
Lebom
Posts: 94
Joined: Wed Dec 14, 2011 1:04 pm
Contact:

Re: Endangered language...

Post by xxx »

Culture can bring new knowledge on the world we live on...
Language if no linguistic relativity is real, nope...
And a special human mind for a peculiar language without language relativity proved...

User avatar
mèþru
Smeric
Smeric
Posts: 1984
Joined: Thu Oct 29, 2015 6:44 am
Location: suburbs of Mrin
Contact:

Re: Endangered language...

Post by mèþru »

Well, one, weak linguistic relativity is real. Two, I find linguistic diversity inherently "cool". Three, do we really need a reason?
ìtsanso, God In The Mountain, may our names inspire the deepest feelings of fear in urkos and all his ilk, for we have saved another man from his lies! I welcome back to the feast hall kal, who will never gamble again! May the eleven gods bless him!
kårroť

Vijay
Smeric
Smeric
Posts: 2244
Joined: Sat Feb 06, 2016 3:25 pm
Location: Austin, TX, USA

Re: Endangered language...

Post by Vijay »

xxx wrote:Culture can bring new knowledge on the world we live on
And language is a part of culture.

User avatar
xxx
Lebom
Lebom
Posts: 94
Joined: Wed Dec 14, 2011 1:04 pm
Contact:

Re: Endangered language...

Post by xxx »

I don't think linguistic diversity uncool (conlanging is a sort of GMO linguistic diversity making)...
But the parrallel between biodiversity urgency and linguistic diversity danger seems something a little biased...

gmalivuk
Lebom
Lebom
Posts: 114
Joined: Fri Aug 29, 2008 10:24 am

Re: Endangered language...

Post by gmalivuk »

People who speak those languages often want to preserve them, as do linguists.

What more reason is needed?

User avatar
Tiamat
Lebom
Lebom
Posts: 80
Joined: Sun Jul 08, 2007 5:47 pm
Location: Brooklyn, NY

Re: Endangered language...

Post by Tiamat »

Language death doesn't happen in a vacuum and while only weak linguistic relativity is real, the dynamics that cause language death are the same that causes cultures to die more or less. Languages don't usually die without some external pressure. They die due to political and economic pressures/oppression and very often as the result of genocide. Indigenous languages of North America wouldn't be near the state they are in today if it were for out right genocide and the children of their speakers being forcefully taken and place into boarding schools where they were banned from speaking their native language. The process of language preservation isn't just about giving us more data (linguistic relativism being wrong doesn't mean we know how language actually works tho) but is also about groups of people fighting for survival which includes maintaining their language and culture on top of other things.

M Mira
Lebom
Lebom
Posts: 92
Joined: Thu Mar 05, 2015 8:21 pm
Location: Taipeium, Respublica Sinarum

Re: Endangered language...

Post by M Mira »

Um, do you have to be so dramatic? Once most people stopped being eternal land-bound peasants and started moving around, they tend to pick up languages/(dialects/accents) that are more "prestigious", either due to political dominance, employment opportunities, and/or economic rationales, or even the good ol' "when in Rome, do as the Romans do" skewed towards popular destinations. Then the children of these bilingual individuals may prefer their parent's second, instead of their first language simply because it's more widely used, then the effect snowballs with no malice nor manipulation involved.

IMO unless the said language or its speakers were eradicated by force, then there's really no need for anyone but themselves to address the issue. Language death is a natural part of language evolution, and there's no intrinsic need to throw cash to put one on life support.

Vijay
Smeric
Smeric
Posts: 2244
Joined: Sat Feb 06, 2016 3:25 pm
Location: Austin, TX, USA

Re: Endangered language...

Post by Vijay »

M Mira wrote:Um, do you have to be so dramatic? Once most people stopped being eternal land-bound peasants and started moving around, they tend to pick up languages/(dialects/accents) that are more "prestigious", either due to political dominance, employment opportunities, and/or economic rationales, or even the good ol' "when in Rome, do as the Romans do" skewed towards popular destinations. Then the children of these bilingual individuals may prefer their parent's second, instead of their first language simply because it's more widely used, then the effect snowballs with no malice nor manipulation involved.
I really can't think of an example where this happened without some of the external pressure that Tiamat mentioned.

User avatar
Curlyjimsam
Lebom
Lebom
Posts: 205
Joined: Wed Dec 29, 2004 11:57 am
Location: Elsewhere
Contact:

Re: Endangered language...

Post by Curlyjimsam »

I don't think this has anything to do with linguistic relativity. If English were to die out, this would mean everything that had ever been written or recorded in English would become a lot more inaccessible. Even if translations were available, they wouldn't be able to capture every nuance (e.g. rhymes and many other poetic devices) without losing some other nuance.

For many cultures whose languages are endangered, the loss of that language might be even more catastrophic for the culture that speaks the language. The "literature" of these cultures is often oral, so there might not be any surviving record once people stopped speaking the language. Even if there was a record, it's doubtful many people would bother to look at it or to take the time to learn the language in order to understand it or make sure there were sufficient materials for future generations to do so. Whereas English at least has the cultural dominance, like Latin before it, that people would probably continue learning to read it as a second language for many centuries after it ceased to be spoken natively.

gmalivuk
Lebom
Lebom
Posts: 114
Joined: Fri Aug 29, 2008 10:24 am

Re: Endangered language...

Post by gmalivuk »

M Mira wrote:Um, do you have to be so dramatic? Once most people stopped being eternal land-bound peasants and started moving around, they tend to pick up languages/(dialects/accents) that are more "prestigious", either due to political dominance, employment opportunities, and/or economic rationales, or even the good ol' "when in Rome, do as the Romans do" skewed towards popular destinations. Then the children of these bilingual individuals may prefer their parent's second, instead of their first language simply because it's more widely used, then the effect snowballs with no malice nor manipulation involved.

IMO unless the said language or its speakers were eradicated by force, then there's really no need for anyone but themselves to address the issue. Language death is a natural part of language evolution, and there's no intrinsic need to throw cash to put one on life support.
Eradication by force applies to most endangered indigenous languages, which I believe account for pretty much all endangered languages overall.

But I guess if, like, Spanish or Chinese ever become endangered, we can console ourselves with cute stories about immigrant assimilation.

User avatar
clawgrip
Smeric
Smeric
Posts: 1723
Joined: Wed Feb 29, 2012 8:21 am
Location: Tokyo

Re: Endangered language...

Post by clawgrip »

It is a little dramatic. Many languages die out because of:
1. armed conflict: this could be conquest that actually kills most of the speakers and forces the rest to hide their knowledge (e.g. |Xam), conflict that causes speakers to flee their homeland and forces them to speak a different language for practical reasons (e.g. Ubykh), or because conflict changes the level of prestige of a language (e.g. Sumerian, Arapaho).
2. Better economic/social opportunities due to proximity to more influential (i.e. prestigious) cultures and languages (e.g. Manx). This can also be religiously motivated (e.g. Qimant, mostly discarded due to association with Qimant religion).
3. Combination of 1 and 2; discriminatory practices (rather than outright conflict) that result in #2, e.g. basically all Australian languages.

So I guess out of these, only #2 is totally not by force.

gmalivuk
Lebom
Lebom
Posts: 114
Joined: Fri Aug 29, 2008 10:24 am

Re: Endangered language...

Post by gmalivuk »

I don't know that I'd call converting to Christianity or being right next to England totally without force, either. It's not the more direct, "We'll beat you if you speak that language in school" cultural genocide approach, but it's not completely without coercion, either, given some of the common attitudes of Christians and Britons to people perceived as outside those groups.

Nooj
Sanci
Sanci
Posts: 54
Joined: Sat Jun 25, 2011 10:08 am
Location: Sydney, Australia

Re: Endangered language...

Post by Nooj »

It's not dramatic to say that colonialism went hand in hand with the oppression and disenfranchisement of colonised peoples AND their languages.

What happened and is happening in Australia, the United States and Canada is not dramatic, it's apocalyptic.

Hundreds of languages are dead or dying. And there is more linguistic diversity in California alone in terms of language families than all of Europe.

On a purely scientific level, you know, that's fucking awful. It's like if you were a marine biologist interested in cetaceans and half the species of whales and dolphins you were studying went extinct at the hands of humans. What the fuck do you study now?

On a human level, it's nothing less than genocide.

Vijay
Smeric
Smeric
Posts: 2244
Joined: Sat Feb 06, 2016 3:25 pm
Location: Austin, TX, USA

Re: Endangered language...

Post by Vijay »

Nooj wrote:What happened and is happening in Australia, the United States and Canada is not dramatic, it's apocalyptic.

Hundreds of languages are dead or dying. And there is more linguistic diversity in California alone in terms of language families than all of Europe.
This is true of most of the rest of the Americas, too. (And surely hundreds of languages have been dead or dying for hundreds of years by now anyway; the difference is that they're dying faster now than they ever have before).

Axiem
Avisaru
Avisaru
Posts: 260
Joined: Tue Oct 22, 2013 8:15 pm

Re: Endangered language...

Post by Axiem »

Nooj wrote:What happened and is happening in Australia, the United States and Canada is not dramatic, it's apocalyptic.
From a "what this word used to mean" perspective, it's quite the opposite—the languages are being concealed not revealed. :P

M Mira
Lebom
Lebom
Posts: 92
Joined: Thu Mar 05, 2015 8:21 pm
Location: Taipeium, Respublica Sinarum

Re: Endangered language...

Post by M Mira »

Aren't we talking about endangered languages -now- ? Militant removal of languages is incredibly rare nowadays compared to merely half a century ago, yet languages are still dying undramatic deaths, and a lot more are on life support through external intervention.

gmalivuk
Lebom
Lebom
Posts: 114
Joined: Fri Aug 29, 2008 10:24 am

Re: Endangered language...

Post by gmalivuk »

The languages that are dying today are in that state due to past actions.

Sure, the last speakers may die peaceful deaths surrounded by loved ones or whatever, but how do you think there came to be so few speakers in the first place?

M Mira
Lebom
Lebom
Posts: 92
Joined: Thu Mar 05, 2015 8:21 pm
Location: Taipeium, Respublica Sinarum

Re: Endangered language...

Post by M Mira »

gmalivuk wrote:The languages that are dying today are in that state due to past actions.

Sure, the last speakers may die peaceful deaths surrounded by loved ones or whatever, but how do you think there came to be so few speakers in the first place?
By being a historically small ethnic group, or being lukewarm about their "own" language? There are plenty of ethnic groups that have (or had) their own language, but the number of speakers is much, much less than the ethnic groups themselves. Just to draw some random examples:

Manchu: despite being a multi-million ethnic group , the language has a hundred or so speakers at best. Although there were subject to attempts of genocide by Chinese revolutionaries in 1911, the bulk of the population, residing in Beijing or Manchuria, was not affected. Instead, ethnic Manchu themselves dumped the language because the associated function (state administration) was lost, and now native Manchurian speakers only exist in a handful of remote villages.

She (in southern China): For unknown reasons, members of the said ethnic group had a preference to speak Hakka instead of the She language, which is rather odd as Hakka speaking regions is generally less wealthy than other neighboring regions speaking other Chinese variants such as Yue or Minnan. As such, while the ethnic group is quite alive, the language is near death.

Irish: while suffered from perhaps a Holodomor equivalent during the Potato Famine, Ireland managed to achieve independence and established the Irish language as an administrative language and had it taught in schools, yet the numbers of Irish L1 speakers and regions keep shrinking, and only a limited number of Irish L2 speakers continue using the language outside of school.

Hui (Muslim Chinese): we don't even know if these people once had a language of their own as they all speak Mandarin now.

User avatar
xxx
Lebom
Lebom
Posts: 94
Joined: Wed Dec 14, 2011 1:04 pm
Contact:

Re: Endangered language...

Post by xxx »

Whatever the cause of this extinction, if languages are only vectors of culture, would not it be more appropriate to concentrate on translations to preserve what will disappear...

Nooj
Sanci
Sanci
Posts: 54
Joined: Sat Jun 25, 2011 10:08 am
Location: Sydney, Australia

Re: Endangered language...

Post by Nooj »

M Mira wrote: By being a historically small ethnic group, or being lukewarm about their "own" language? There are plenty of ethnic groups that have (or had) their own language, but the number of speakers is much, much less than the ethnic groups themselves. Just to draw some random examples:

Manchu: despite being a multi-million ethnic group , the language has a hundred or so speakers at best. Although there were subject to attempts of genocide by Chinese revolutionaries in 1911, the bulk of the population, residing in Beijing or Manchuria, was not affected. Instead, ethnic Manchu themselves dumped the language because the associated function (state administration) was lost, and now native Manchurian speakers only exist in a handful of remote villages.

She (in southern China): For unknown reasons, members of the said ethnic group had a preference to speak Hakka instead of the She language, which is rather odd as Hakka speaking regions is generally less wealthy than other neighboring regions speaking other Chinese variants such as Yue or Minnan. As such, while the ethnic group is quite alive, the language is near death.

Irish: while suffered from perhaps a Holodomor equivalent during the Potato Famine, Ireland managed to achieve independence and established the Irish language as an administrative language and had it taught in schools, yet the numbers of Irish L1 speakers and regions keep shrinking, and only a limited number of Irish L2 speakers continue using the language outside of school.

Hui (Muslim Chinese): we don't even know if these people once had a language of their own as they all speak Mandarin now.
For a lot of language communities, yes, it is the language community themselves that kills themselves, and so I've heard of linguistic suicide in this respect. But this nicer and more gentle means of language extinction leaves language communities and languages just as 'dead' as at the hands of genocide.

Probably one of the biggest causes of language death is the mass transition from the rural way of living to urbanisation, mass conscription, railroads and universal education. Now I don't think anyone wants to go back to the good old days when people never travelled more than 100km outside of their town in their life, but I don't think the fact that people live in megacities and people have to learn a national language at school is natural either.

Death is natural. Murder isn't natural.

In Morocco, it's true that Berber suffered after the Arab invasion, but even after centuries, by the turn of the 20th century a huge proportion, perhaps the majority of the population still spoke a Berber language in the plains and in the mountains. It took less than a century to change what many centuries before couldn't. For some reason, we're losing languages at a far faster rate and at a far grander scale than normal.

Mass education and the growth of urban communities where the jobs were meant that Arabic dominate the urban space, which means that by 2017, the Moroccan Berber languages, despite the millions of people who speak them, might conceivably become endangered in the near future, like it already is in Tunisia. It's usually Berber speakers who switch to Moroccan Arabic, not vice versa...
Last edited by Nooj on Thu May 25, 2017 7:52 am, edited 2 times in total.

gmalivuk
Lebom
Lebom
Posts: 114
Joined: Fri Aug 29, 2008 10:24 am

Re: Endangered language...

Post by gmalivuk »

xxx: Have you actually read all the posts in your thread? Language is not only a vector for culture.

In addition, works in a language are not only interesting for their base propositional content. Etymology and wordplay and poetic structure are also there, and would be lost in just about any translation. Otherwise why does anybody bother to learn Greek or Latin?

User avatar
xxx
Lebom
Lebom
Posts: 94
Joined: Wed Dec 14, 2011 1:04 pm
Contact:

Re: Endangered language...

Post by xxx »

gmalivuk wrote:xxx: Have you actually read all the posts in your thread? Language is not only a vector for culture.
What I read is cultural loss principaly...
gmalivuk wrote:In addition, works in a language are not only interesting for their base propositional content. Etymology and wordplay and poetic structure are also there, and would be lost in just about any translation. Otherwise why does anybody bother to learn Greek or Latin?
Endangered language activism concerns non written languages with no parental with ours where poetry is even unknown...
Latin and Greek gave the basis of scientific and medical language, and learning them were a social behaviour in XX... although few of learners could understand their poetry subtilities...
Anything I read in linguist books seems more cultural loss or linguistic relativism point of view, they although reject...

User avatar
Salmoneus
Sanno
Sanno
Posts: 3197
Joined: Thu Jan 15, 2004 5:00 pm
Location: One of the dark places of the world

Re: Endangered language...

Post by Salmoneus »

M Mira wrote: Irish: while suffered from perhaps a Holodomor equivalent during the Potato Famine, Ireland managed to achieve independence and established the Irish language as an administrative language and had it taught in schools, yet the numbers of Irish L1 speakers and regions keep shrinking, and only a limited number of Irish L2 speakers continue using the language outside of school.
Thanks, I was about to cite the counterexample of Irish myself. It's certainly true that the apocalypse of the mid-19th century badly damaged the language (the strongest Irish-speaking regions were the worst affected). Much more damage was done, however, by the Irish themselves, for whom the abandonment of Irish became for a generation a key componant of nationalism (specifically, among the followers of The Liberator, Daniel O'Connell, who argued that for Irish to be independent it had to throw off backward practices and embrace the superior culture of Britain, at least in some respects - that Irish merchants would always lose out to English merchants, for instance, until the Irish merchants learned to speak English).

Despite all this, however, following a revival the language entered the 20th century and independence in relatively sound shape - the language had nationalist prestige, it was made compulsory to learn (for a while, all subjects were taught in Irish, even to English-speaking children), and there remained substantial areas in which it was the dominant community language. The government talked of the country returning to being majority-Irish-speaking within a generation. Instead, the language is now on the verge of extinction, at least among native speakers.

The truth is, languages come and go. It's hard to find historical examples of this happening without some degree of 'force', simply because it's hard to find any place or time in history where relations have not been marked by some degree of 'force'. That's like blaming language death on the presence of oxygen.

But look, for example, at the 20th century decline in minority languages and dialects throughout western europe. This has taken place almost everywhere - in places where the government tried to oppress minority language forms, but also in places where they supported the minority language forms, and in places where they had no particular linguistic policies. It's not that the people of north or west or south Germany, or eastern netherlands, or northern italy, for example, have been the victims of genocide. They've just been attracted to more prestigious (and economically useful) languages.

Nooj: of couse urbanism is natural. It's a trend that's been going on for thousands of years now and it wasn't imposed upon us by space-aliens. Nor are you helping your case with hysterical language. The fact that my mother chose not to learn Irish - despite years of government pressure on her to do so - is not equivalent to "murder".
Blog: [url]http://vacuouswastrel.wordpress.com/[/url]

But the river tripped on her by and by, lapping
as though her heart was brook: Why, why, why! Weh, O weh
I'se so silly to be flowing but I no canna stay!

Post Reply