Should we preserve languages?

[Zixinus]

This thread ties into a story on CBC some weeks ago about how the Native peoples were squealing about how the government isn't giving them enough money to force their kids to keep speaking the various dying native languages. They were all teary-eyed that one particular language has something like four living speakers left, and how good it was that some lady had been given millions of government dollars to start classes in said deceased language, and to translate thousands of government papers - for the four people who speak it only as a third language after English and French.

The situation is the same with old variants of the Hungarian language, except that its far less dramatic and thankfully, no money is spent on trying to keep dying and useless languages alive. That does not stop some nationalist-motivated assholes to think differently.

[Mayabird]

I agree that records should be kept of them, as much as possible, for whatever they might be studied for or used for later.

But I also want to note that if you're forcing people to learn a language to 'preserve' it, it's already sort of dead. Living languages are supposed to add words, change pronunciations, go through their own memetic evolution, and actually get used. If no one's making bad puns or silly new jokes with the language, it's already dead, just a fossilized curiosity maintained for no real reason.

I thought of this while I read an article about a Japanese man who had learned some now-rare traditional techniques for making fishing rods. He wasn't content with just making copies of the old styles, but spent his time trying to design new, better rods that utilized traditional techniques, because otherwise he was just making replica museum pieces instead of making fishing rods.

[Rye]

You only need one language, you only need one currency. I wouldn't care if we all started using American spellings or dollars, even. Makes no real difference.

Gee, it's not like people can be bi or trilingual, right?

Sure they can. Hell, I can usually work out what signs are saying in German, French and Spanish. Those signs don't have any more value than all of them in English so long as those who use them can understand them.

[Kanastrous]

Gee, it's not like people can be bi or trilingual, right?

What do you call a person who speaks three languages? Trilingual.

A person who speaks two languages? Bilingual.

A person who speaks one language? American.

[SCRawl]

I've been saying this for years: if a language is dying, then we should let it die. The French, for example, are paranoid about their language becoming extinct, and go to some effort to make sure it doesn't. In Quebec there are language police who go around measuring advertising signage to make sure that the French words are sufficiently larger than their English translations (as defined by law), among other things. I suppose that their fears are justified, though I can't stand government intervention in these areas; if the people want to save their language, then let them save it. If they don't, well, future generations will still have pretty good records. Until we all die from the effects of global warming.