zompist bboard

M Mira wrote:

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:

Some dead/dying languages are dead/dying by "natural" means, it's true. But I would hesitate before concluding that most are that way. Certainly most languages in the Americas seem to have died out because of the deaths of speakers (whether unintentionally--through disease--or intentionally--through genocide) or because of enormous pressure to not speak them (e.g. Indian schools, where speaking your native language was punished severely).

Yes, language death is more complicated than "genocide". But it can't be denied that, as Tiamat said, economic pressures/oppression and sometimes literal genocide have contributed massively to language death. We cannot realistically talk about language death without factoring this in.

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.

Historically, picking up a new variety hasn't meant abandoning all previously-known varieties. Multilingualism has been the norm for our species for our entire history--even in urban areas. It's becoming increasingly less so in much of the world, and that's a significant change.

M Mira wrote: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.

Or their parents may make a conscious choice not to expose them to this language because it will "harm their development" (even though all the data we have shows that children who are brought up bilingual have better educational and cognitive outcomes than monolinguals). This is frequent even when the non-dominant language in question is common to more than parent/caregiver. (I hear this all the time from the children of immigrants to English-speaking countries.)

This is a form of coercion, and it's one which can be changed as a direct result of language policy. There are advantages to both the individuals in questions and to society as a whole from removing it and basically no downsides I can see. Why would you be in favour of keeping it?

xxx wrote:

gmalivuk wrote:xxx: Have you actually read all the 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...

Weak linguistic relativity is real. That was already explained to you but maybe you missed it.

And no one needs to learn Latin or Greek grammar and literature in order to understand modern technical jargon derived from those languages.

Even when the language death is not forced, I think that initiatives should be made for to incentivise preserving minority cultures and languages to members of their ethnicity.

gmalivuk wrote:Weak linguistic relativity is real. That was already explained to you but maybe you missed it.

weak sapir whorf thesis is so...weak that it brings nothing real special to any language...

gmalivuk wrote:And no one needs to learn Latin or Greek grammar and literature in order to understand modern technical jargon derived from those languages.

perhaps, that is why latin and greek teaching is... endangered
fortunatelly, my unknowledge of greek don't stop me to apreciate (translated) Plato...

xxx wrote:fortunatelly, my unknowledge of greek don't stop me to apreciate (translated) Plato...

That's arguable.

How accurate do you think translations of Plato would be if Greek had ceased to exist along with the Academy in Athens?

Written language never cease to exist...
Even if some need difficult work to be resurrected for the time to be translated...
This tranlation is the special point of view on the world that can be lost for ever, the language, the vector, can be changed to bring it along the time...
WIthout linguistic relativity, a good job of translation can give the change to survive a dissolved human community...

A lot of things don't translate between languages, though. Once you lose a language, you lose all that information that simply cannot be translated.

How many masterpieces we can really appreciate in their original language...
How many masterpieces we know by their translation only...
Translation is an art of choice, any human thinking can be translated in all languages...
If one says Traduttore, traditore, one can say the same for reading...

xxx wrote:Written language never cease to exist...

Many endangered languages aren't written.

xxx wrote:How many masterpieces we can really appreciate in their original language...
How many masterpieces we know by their translation only...

And as a result, we can't possibly appreciate those masterpieces on the same level as the speakers of that language did. And since there have always been languages dying, tons of which were never recorded in any way, we know that much less about how language works in general, making it all the more imperative that we try not to lose the languages that we do still have.

When a language dies, it is not just the language that is lost. What is also lost is a host of tales, poems and songs in that language. (Not only "literary" languages have stories and poetry, all languages do.) And while prose can always be translated into other languages, this is much more difficult with poetry and song, and virtually impossible with word play, and even prose translations are often woefully inaccurate. It has been said, I forgot by whom, that when a language dies, a whole library burns down.

Even a huge lexicon and a complete grammar of a language cannot replace the simple translation of the simpliest tale in it...
For ever every man will die... No matter the sound of his voice for who did not know him... but he'll carried away all his thought and experience into nothingness... May we could retranscribe it, even in the poor translation of a language ...

xxx wrote:Written language never cease to exist...

Can we really say a language is preserved just because it has glyphs extant? I mean, is Minoan/Linear A extant? Etiocypriot? The Indus language? Olmec? Scythian? In other words, if no one can read what was written, does writing in and of itself really preserve the language?

Also, in regards to translation...every translation warps the original, because words and phrases and ideas do not transfer perfectly from one language to another. Humor, in particular, is almost always lost in translation, unless the translator changes the meaning to preserve the humor. Likewise, one can preserve a poem's poetic nature or the poem's meaning, but rarely both. This is why your average lay reader will tend to regard foreign literature as inaccessible.

Perhaps philosophical and technical works do well enough in translation, but art will always suffer for the translation. Have you ever listened to Beowulf recited in the original language, for example by Richard Bagsby? I can't understand it, but I can tell you its beautiful to the ears. I can enjoy translations like Heaney's for the content, but they've lost something of the artistry of the original. This is true of any artistic writing.

xxx wrote:Even a huge lexicon and a complete grammar of a language can replace the simple translation of the simpliest tale in it...
For ever every man will die... No matter the sound of his voice for who did not know him... but he'll carried away all his thought and experience into nothingness... May we could retranscribe it, even in the poor translation of a language ...

What in the world are you talking about?

Going off topic for a single post here, don't respond:

Sometimes, I feel like the translations are much better than the original, especially in translations of poems or songs, such as Herman Miller's conlang translations of songs or the French version of Let it Go. Admittedly, It isn't common.

I agree with this feeling about some translations...
Translation is an art, some choices are so brilliant they increase the force of the original...
But for feeling it we have to know the two languages...
Translation can give to all with the knowledge of one... In an emergency situation the choice is simple...

Zaarin wrote: if no one can read what was written, does writing in and of itself really preserve the language?

I spoke about existing, but it can be revitalized if texts had been translated when the language was just endangered...
The bridge of translation is, with
the knowledge of language of the same family, the usual way to decode lost languages...

Humor, in particular, is almost always lost in translation

this week I saw many movies from many countries at Cannes international movie festival, and I do laugh many time just reading subtitles... (and cry and be happy or sad...)

gmalivuk wrote:

xxx wrote:Written language never cease to exist...

Many endangered languages aren't written.

that why they are in danger...
Writing a translation of their says is the only way to survive them...
Iliad was an oral tale nobody could ever know except by its written transcription... Arabian night also, and even in Arab it's known by its occidental translation...
If translations are so poor you said because of nobody know enough enough language we should be limited by our language, it is not true... international fame of written masterpieces is the result of their translation and nothing else...

All this talk about translation and writing down is parallel to my own concern, which is its impact on linguistics. We simply don't have enough, and may never have, enough documentation of a language to equal one speaker and the knowledge of their language that they can contain in their head, let alone enough to replicate a language community.

Natural language is of a different order and writing down things does nothing to change that.

Zaarin wrote: Perhaps philosophical and technical works do well enough in translation

Philosophy does badly in translation. Entire literatures exist devoted to the difficulties of translating particular documents. I once saw a discussion of the Tao Te Ching, with an entire page of footnotes purely on the translation of the first sentence (spoiler: the standard translations are misleading). What Plato or Aristotle meant by many of the things they said is lost to us. Texts translated from Latin or German often have to resort to introducing loanwords. Even historical philosophy in English is a viper's nest of potential misunderstandings, because so much of the terminology has been invented in the process of doing philosophy, and has often shifted in meaning over the years. To pick just one word: "sensation" was only introduced in the 17th century, and popularised by Locke, but Locke didn't mean it in its 20th century sense. In older texts, "sensation" means what we now mean by "(physical) perception". And that's an easy one - you don't want to go near words like 'substance'. Philosophical translation issues caused schisms and crusades!

Salmoneus wrote:

Zaarin wrote: Perhaps philosophical and technical works do well enough in translation

Philosophy does badly in translation. Entire literatures exist devoted to the difficulties of translating particular documents. I once saw a discussion of the Tao Te Ching, with an entire page of footnotes purely on the translation of the first sentence (spoiler: the standard translations are misleading). What Plato or Aristotle meant by many of the things they said is lost to us. Texts translated from Latin or German often have to resort to introducing loanwords. Even historical philosophy in English is a viper's nest of potential misunderstandings, because so much of the terminology has been invented in the process of doing philosophy, and has often shifted in meaning over the years. To pick just one word: "sensation" was only introduced in the 17th century, and popularised by Locke, but Locke didn't mean it in its 20th century sense. In older texts, "sensation" means what we now mean by "(physical) perception". And that's an easy one - you don't want to go near words like 'substance'. Philosophical translation issues caused schisms and crusades!

All fair points, and I should have known better since religious texts suffer the same problems in translation.

That reminds me that reading Ovid is just not as much fun in English as it is in the original Latin. Ovid loved wordplay and concrete imagery.

Salmoneus wrote:
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.

I was actually just thinking about this. I grew up speaking Limburgs, which is actually doing relatively well in the sense that it's still taught to children, and you can hear it on the streets and in bakeries and butcher shops. When I still lived and worked there, it was also spoken among coworkers in our office. Of course, it is eroding and rapidly becoming more and more similar to Dutch (I'd imagine that the same thing is happening to Welsh with respect to English).

Now that I live abroad though, I don't know if I would pass it on if we can get children. There would be no one for the child to speak it with, apart from the 5 people in my family I am in regular contact with. They also speak Dutch, of course, even though that comes less naturally to my grandma.

You see, it's an inherently local language, and it doesn't make any sense to learn or speak it unless you want to create some kind of 'in-group'. The vocabulary is far too limited for it to be able to function as a main form of communication in all contexts, so sometimes it's easier to simply switch to Dutch. For any child not living in Limburg, it is therefore much more useful to learn the national language.

Yet, I'd also feel bad about not passing it on. It's a pretty interesting language, and I feel quite passionate about it.

You should post in your mother tongue...
The only way to preserve minority languages is to use them in modern media... Instead of English...