Endangered languages

[Lagmonster]

Then maybe it would be better to look at why languages are unsustainable instead of just going "not worth preserving"?

Okay, sounds good. Why are languages unsustainable?

I really do not feel justified in making a general proclamation here. Maybe Duckie can do so, but I cannot speak for a general scale, only on some very specific languages.

That seems reasonable. In my own specific example regarding aboriginal languages, the language and culture was destroyed and the remnants simply allowed themselves to be assimilated over time. I can't imagine that it's the first time this has ever happened.

When they are, why are they worth preserving?

That one I will answer - because we will lose access otherwise.

This is where I start to get fuzzy on the border between 'something you personally would like' and 'social imperative'.

I understand that you're saying that archiving doesn't do enough to preserve everything - but I couldn't argue any further without knowing how much you'd lose. More to the point, I have no idea how you would successfully argue a case to a community to ask them to do what you want, or to ask a governing body to force people to do what you want.

Except that nobody is afraid we will be unable to re-create math if everybody stops giving a shit about it.

That would actually depend on the circumstances. After all, it is not as if the world never lost great advances in sciences and math, right?

This is true, but literature gone is gone forever. But even that doesn't matter when you consider that you responded to "why force kids to learn a language they have no wish to use?" with "why force kids to learn math they have to wish to use?", and I would not agree that the two subjects are parallels. We can defend the teaching of math as beneficial to a student's job prospects. How do you defend the teaching of a dying language to the people who will be expected to do the actual work?

What I am arguing about is that kids should get as much exposure as possible to languages. Sometimes you have to force them. Actually, having taken part in such programs I can attest from my own experience, that for several hundred disgruntled people you do get a dozen or so who will be very interested in that. If these dozens manage to speak that language, then the goal is achieved and the language is still viable.

Okay, so, here's the uncomfortable question: What do these dozens get out of it? So far the only beneficiary we've identified is you.

[Thanas]

As for arcchiving, you lose about everything. Interpretation is no longer really a possibility. You would pretty much rely on a translation (and remember, only a miniscule portion of every work gets translated, heck we have not even finished translating all the roman masters, so you can figure out how likely it is smaller languages get much translated) for everything from then on. This is of course not the way it is supposed to happen and a serious handicap for any historian. It makes working with the texts pretty much impossible. There is a reason why historians are supposed to learn languages. Three guesses as to why.

As for the beneficial impact, I suppose if you think that having a distinct culture is beneficial on its own or not. I think it is, but if you want to put everything under the dictatorship of "must be economical beneficial" then we are probably done talking right here. How do you measure the enjoyment of being able to read works that would otherwise be inaccessible to you?

And as for the benefits to those who would speak the language, in an ideal world they would be able to make a living of it. But (no small thanks to people with similar mindset to you) we no longer find it worthwhile to preserve knowledge. Instead you apparently find it commendable that we limit our overall knowledge and regress in that, instead of trying to expand into every possible venue.

I really do not get that viewpoint.

[Alyrium Denryle]

This is true, but literature gone is gone forever. But even that doesn't matter when you consider that you responded to "why force kids to learn a language they have no wish to use?" with "why force kids to learn math they have to wish to use?", and I would not agree that the two subjects are parallels. We can defend the teaching of math as beneficial to a student's job prospects. How do you defend the teaching of a dying language to the people who will be expected to do the actual work?

How many classical works were burned to a crisp when christians burned the great library of Alexandria? Dozens of plays by Sophocles and the other masters were lost forever, many of the works of the great Ionian philosophers etc.

You force kids to take languages because unless they are exposed to languages, they wont know if they like them. Plain and simple. Out of a hundred students, one or two people may go on to actually study latin as a language beyond the little bit of exposure they got in high school, and they did so because they were exposed to the language and enjoyed it, or are majoring in history and decide to specialize in the classical period, medieval church history or something similar. That is why you make them take something, and offer the esoteric languages.

[Simon_Jester]

All right. Does this generalize to, what about a language that is spoken across generations but by a small minority of the population, like Scots Gaelic? What about a language that is arguably a dialect of a larger language, or a very localized creole?

What about a Native American language that is now spoken by grandparents in a grand total of a few hundred homes? A few dozen? One?

In some cases, yes, spend money to preserve the language, for a number of good reasons already outlined. But what happens if you literally can not find people willing to study the language? If it was always obscure and has now become obscure to the point of near-nonexistence, how long do you keep trying to forcibly cultivate that interest in the population? Does it depend on the size of the body of literature and cultural lore that still exists in that language?* Does it depend on whether there is a recognizable group of people associated with the language?

How great a burden should language preservation be allowed to place on, say, the descendants of someone who speaks Language X when those descendants don't want to learn to speak X?

Thanas and Alyrium are making a case that there is a social imperative to preserve languages. Is this imperative entirely without limits? If there are limits, where do we find them?
___________

*There are works written in Latin that we can access better through knowing Latin, which provides a positive argument for retaining the language. Whereas there is very little left of many Native American cultures that we can access through their languages, simply because past events have caused so much damage to the cultural framework and the modern descendants of those people have decided they would prefer to assimilate rather than becoming the last guardians of a cultural heritage that got overwritten by foreigners.

[Duckie]

I'm really busy, but I'll note that a language is unsustainable when it presents more benefits to parents to not teach it to their children than to do so. A language is unsustainable as well when children find no use for learning it. Typically this is when there's nobody to speak to, but in the modern day reasons to learn a language can include media (though typically for adults it must be admitted, we have seen some amazing progress in Ireland with keeping the language learned by making childrens' TV and movies and whatnot in Gaelic)

It comes down to, 'is it actually worth the effort'? Yes, to a child such effort is miniscule compared to an adult's attempt to learn a language, yet nontheless they are lazy just like adults. If papa and mama speak yakuts and english, and everyone else you know speaks english, then english is the language that they'll speak. This is why the second generation of immigrants usually loses their language if the first learned english as a second language, and why the third almost always does. (Exceptions that can disrupt this are constant immigration so you have to talk to the first generation, national pride, or large enough communities as usual)

Non-immigrant communities it's the same, but it's reverse immigration- the bigger culture encroaches on that one. Usually parents get the impression (almost certainly true) that speaking your native language is a downside whereas teaching your children (french arabic english etc) produces economic success. Since a ton of people speak that language, usually it first becomes a bilingual society where everyone speaks english as a second language, then an english language community that has its native tongue as well, then an english community. At least in this sense, globalisation is exactly the same as neocolonialism is effects, but it targets everyone rather than the educated class of a society. This is slower and much less dangerous as you still have people to talk to at home almost always, unless it's a situation where a nation, shall we say, reverse immigrated wholesale into your land.

Stable native tongues tend to be the 'colonizing' type (which aren't all white*), as americans have no reason not to speak english and french no reason not to speak french especially when they can merely expect others to learn to speak with them because of the power dynamics of their relationship. One other type is people who are on a tongue that really shouldn't survive but keep speaking it any way. This one is usually caused by nationalism or cultural pride: the Welsh and the Piraha are a great example, and Irish and Hebrew are good examples of how if it actually matters to a society it can cause crazy effects (reviving languages from the dead or even switching everyone to a third party invented language that nobody spoke)

The final type of stable area is a place where bilingualism isn't coercive, or at least the coercive economic reasons are all balanced. In a standard 'tribe over here, tribe over there' type situation, unless one conquers the other, there's a reason to speak your neighbours languages but no reason to replace your own. In Malta (I'm no expert on it but I'll make some guesses based on the numbers) the advantages of speaking Italian and speaking English were, until recently, pretty balanced, so everyone quite obligingly spoke all 3. Now Italian is decending probably because that's a very unstable setup. I can't explain why the Maltese language itself wasn't annihilated by colonialism. Might be a national pride thing, or just luck. (It's got a lot of english loan words now, but that's not a huge deal despite how much it freaks out traditionalists with the "ARGH CONTACT IS NOT A NOUN, STUPID KIDS" reflex)

*Trade languages are like this, but since they're so much less powerful they tend not to destroy a language- after all, that's why they're called trade tongues and not 'language of our overlords' or whatnot. It's kind of self-fulfilling that way, we class any regional/world language not powerful enough to destroy other peoples' as a trade language cause that's then what you use it for. Due to historical reasons (colonialism and first world and whatnot) all the actual 'colonizing' type languages tend to be white, though a couple aren't. Mandarin immediately comes to mind.

[Broomstick]

*There are works written in Latin that we can access better through knowing Latin, which provides a positive argument for retaining the language. Whereas there is very little left of many Native American cultures that we can access through their languages, simply because past events have caused so much damage to the cultural framework and the modern descendants of those people have decided they would prefer to assimilate rather than becoming the last guardians of a cultural heritage that got overwritten by foreigners.

Simon, while I am sure there are people who have decided to assimilate and not pass on their language(s), such as my grandparents, that should not be stated as if that was the case with Natives. They didn't "decide" to assimilate, they were forced off their ancestral lands at gunpoint, their children taken away and held at boarding schools where they were punished, sometimes to the point of physical beatings if they spoke their native tongue.

There are Native groups where the language is still viable and still learned by young people. All the Native tongues still surviving now have a written form. While some are doomed, given how they got into that state it would seem just that the larger US society makes some effort to see that languages that go extinct do so only because there really aren't sufficient people interested rather than, say, a lack of funding for schools

[Simon_Jester]

*There are works written in Latin that we can access better through knowing Latin, which provides a positive argument for retaining the language. Whereas there is very little left of many Native American cultures that we can access through their languages, simply because past events have caused so much damage to the cultural framework and the modern descendants of those people have decided they would prefer to assimilate rather than becoming the last guardians of a cultural heritage that got overwritten by foreigners.

Simon, while I am sure there are people who have decided to assimilate and not pass on their language(s), such as my grandparents, that should not be stated as if that was the case with Natives. They didn't "decide" to assimilate, they were forced off their ancestral lands at gunpoint, their children taken away and held at boarding schools where they were punished, sometimes to the point of physical beatings if they spoke their native tongue.

Excuse me; I was thinking in terms of the people who were born relatively recently- say, the last three or four decades. In the early to mid-20th century yes these boarding schools played a huge role in the destruction and overwriting of Native American culture and I am certainly aware of this (if you go through some of my old posts this will be confirmed).

But today, right here and now, when the boarding schools are gone, there are still quite a few Native American cultures which could be, or could have been in the recent past, reconstructed. The language and some of the culture could be preserved by the surviving descendants with the aid of those old enough to remember.

For the larger tribes, this is often exactly what happened and continues to happen: the language and culture have a self-sustaining population to support them.

For many smaller tribes, the number of descendants is smaller, the population of descendants is more scattered, the amount of available resources that survived to make reconstruction possible was smaller... there is, at some point, a threshold of no return. When the language is spoken only by the grandparents of one or two extended families in a few households in Alberta, trying to reconstruct it in some recognizable form may simply not be a project anyone in the younger generations of those households has any desire to take on. They have other things they would rather do with their lives, and not because of a coerced decision. Do we then throw money at the problem on a scale large enough to ensure that a scholarly community of speakers of the language is created?

And no, that does not translate into me saying "abandon all state funding for the preservation of any and all Native American languages." That does not follow from what I am saying. What I'm getting at is that, as a matter of logic and basic common sense in policy, I would think there has to be a limit past which keeping a language on life support ceases to make sense.

If there is no such limit, I would like to see that stated openly by someone.

There are Native groups where the language is still viable and still learned by young people. All the Native tongues still surviving now have a written form. While some are doomed, given how they got into that state it would seem just that the larger US society makes some effort to see that languages that go extinct do so only because there really aren't sufficient people interested rather than, say, a lack of funding for schools

Yes. The question really does become where the limit is. If a language has been nearly wiped out (as is the case with some of the Native American languages, with some of the more extreme cases mentioned here being in Canada), how much effort would it take to create a stable or quasistable community of speakers? Will anyone want to enter that community, the way that some people would clearly want to learn Latin or Navajo, and so preserve the language of their own free will with some modicum of assistance from society at large?

The phrase "dead language" is a very loaded word, I know, but we can reasonably call a language "dead" when it has no speakers.* We obviously don't want languages to die, but is there such a thing as a terminally ill language on life support? One which is so utterly dependent on outside forces to keep pumping a semblance of life into it that it has no prospect of becoming a self-sustaining community of culture**, interests***, or scholarship?****

And, again, is there some point at which society should, or rather might as well, pull the plug?

If this question seems to have an obvious answer, I'd like to hear it. If not, fine.

*Latin is, by this standard, not "dead;" the languages used in Europe before the arrival of Indo-European languages mostly are with maybe a few exceptions like Basque.
**Like most languages we know of.
***Like Esperanto, which from what I can tell is kept alive by its speakers' interest in the idea of an international language
****Like Latin, obviously.

[Alyrium Denryle]

For many smaller tribes, the number of descendants is smaller, the population of descendants is more scattered, the amount of available resources that survived to make reconstruction possible was smaller... there is, at some point, a threshold of no return. When the language is spoken only by the grandparents of one or two extended families in a few households in Alberta, trying to reconstruct it in some recognizable form may simply not be a project anyone in the younger generations of those households has any desire to take on. They have other things they would rather do with their lives, and not because of a coerced decision. Do we then throw money at the problem on a scale large enough to ensure that a scholarly community of speakers of the language is created?

That is exactly what we should do, yes. Look, in the case you mentioned, while the individual kids involved are making a decision to not learn their cultural language because there is no point (no one to speak to...), the causal chain that lead up to that point is the same as for a population that was wiped out completely. Ethnic/Cultural cleansing and genocide. There ARE people who may like to speak the language outside that community though. Anthropologists, Historians and scholars of folklore may well take an interest, there are certainly enough of them to create such a tradition if the language was made available to them. This can even provide an opportunity to the few people who speak the language, namely, teaching the first generation of these scholars, and provides a financial incentive for the younger generations to learn the language. It is not, afterall, uncommon for such groups to be living in hideous poverty.

If there is no such limit, I would like to see that stated openly by someone.

I will do so then. Like a species, the intrinsic value of a language and cultural traditions outweighs the relatively miniscule costs of providing the infrastructure of its preservation. If the population of speakers is in any way large enough to sustain the language (Including a few dozen speakers in Alberta), then attempts should be made to keep it around.

Yes. The question really does become where the limit is. If a language has been nearly wiped out (as is the case with some of the Native American languages, with some of the more extreme cases mentioned here being in Canada), how much effort would it take to create a stable or quasistable community of speakers? Will anyone want to enter that community, the way that some people would clearly want to learn Latin or Navajo, and so preserve the language of their own free will with some modicum of assistance from society at large?

Sure, really, it is just a matter of finding the right set of incentives and infrastructure.

[Simon_Jester]

Very well.

Moving on from that, at what point should we make additional effort to keep the language alive as more than a field of scholarly interest? Latin is alive- but is kept alive by scholars, not by native speakers. Many of these Native American languages would likewise have to be kept alive by scholars, not by a continuous community of ethnic speakers of the language, and yes we can do that without spending much money.

Maintaining communities that speak the language on a native or quasi-native basis (as some Scots speak Scots Gaelic) is considerably more challenging- I'm not even sure it can be done unless you can already find a community of hundreds or thousands of people who are already willing to do it and just need a little support.

Stipulate that we should always keep languages alive as fields of scholarly interest. Should we also always try to maintain a community of native-speakers? Is there a limiting case past which this becomes impractical, even if keeping the language alive on a scholarly basis is practical?

[hongi]

Maintaining communities that speak the language on a native or quasi-native basis (as some Scots speak Scots Gaelic) is considerably more challenging- I'm not even sure it can be done unless you can already find a community of hundreds or thousands of people who are already willing to do it and just need a little support.

Language revitilisation is a new and interesting field.

Hawaiian got down to a couple of thousand speakers (around two thousand IIRC) by the '70s, but a couple of motivated and dedicated people, many of whom didn't even know the language, established language nests following the Maori model, where pre-school kids were totally immersed into Hawaiian. Then they established primary schools. Then high schools. They had to fight the government and all sorts of issues, but just by sheer determination, they saved the language. Community, community, community. That is where the language will be saved.

It's ironic, because when writing was first introduced into Hawai'i, literacy rates exploded. 90% of the populace was literate in their language at one point. Newspapers, books what have you, they had it. Then English took over thanks to the government. It wasn't even until the last couple of decades that Hawaiian actually because an official language of Hawai'i alongside English.

[Lagmonster]

As for archiving, you lose about everything. Interpretation is no longer really a possibility. You would pretty much rely on a translation (and remember, only a miniscule portion of every work gets translated, heck we have not even finished translating all the roman masters, so you can figure out how likely it is smaller languages get much translated) for everything from then on.

"It doesn't work" is a good response, but I'd still love to understand your point of view on what constitutes 'everything'. I mean, my layman-idiot's assumption would be that storage (actual preservation), of both the artifacts and the mechanism for translation, is the highest priority, followed by translation when you can afford to. Can you describe how the other qualities of nuance and interpretation are important?

As for the beneficial impact, I suppose if you think that having a distinct culture is beneficial on its own or not. I think it is, but if you want to put everything under the dictatorship of "must be economical beneficial" then we are probably done talking right here. How do you measure the enjoyment of being able to read works that would otherwise be inaccessible to you?

I don't have a problem with people choosing to enjoy things. I also don't have a problem with being incapable of experiencing art because it is either gone forever or purposely out of reach. Imagine if, instead of classical German poetry, you were 3000 years in the future trying to save Elvis concerts. Will we have an imperative to fund Elvis Impersonator schools from now until doomsday because that will be the only way to get the complete experience?

I should say that I basically agree with you on many of your points about multilingualism and culture, even about kids being exposed to multiple languages while they're young and can easily learn them. I live in a multicultural society; I could easily have to speak English, French, Lebanese, Swedish, Chinese, and Italian just to get through my day on the terms of all the people I interact with in my neighbourhood. I'm with you right up to the point where we start talking about including languages that are considered either dying/dead, or which belong to an ancestry that no person identifies with.

And as for the benefits to those who would speak the language, in an ideal world they would be able to make a living of it. But (no small thanks to people with similar mindset to you) we no longer find it worthwhile to preserve knowledge. Instead you apparently find it commendable that we limit our overall knowledge and regress in that, instead of trying to expand into every possible venue. I really do not get that viewpoint.

It's the viewpoint where the value of art and culture is highly subjective, and the qualification for a 'correct' experience of that art or culture based on the context of the viewer, not the author. That's why I'm okay with archiving - it is good for the library of human knowledge to record the work of our ancestors. But I disagree that there is an imperative for keeping abandoned or lost languages alive just to learn everything about that work, for pretty much the same reason that I don't think we need to clone dinosaurs for the sake of the gaps in our palaeontology textbooks.

[Lagmonster]

I will do so then. Like a species, the intrinsic value of a language and cultural traditions outweighs the relatively miniscule costs of providing the infrastructure of its preservation. If the population of speakers is in any way large enough to sustain the language (Including a few dozen speakers in Alberta), then attempts should be made to keep it around.

To what end? How many lost languages and cultures should be preserved by actual people? All of them that ever formed, no matter how small the original population? And how do we decide who is responsible for each language? Our more thoroughly inter-bred people could have dozens of ancestral roots sporting a plethora of cultures.

[Thanas]

As for archiving, you lose about everything. Interpretation is no longer really a possibility. You would pretty much rely on a translation (and remember, only a miniscule portion of every work gets translated, heck we have not even finished translating all the roman masters, so you can figure out how likely it is smaller languages get much translated) for everything from then on.

"It doesn't work" is a good response, but I'd still love to understand your point of view on what constitutes 'everything'. I mean, my layman-idiot's assumption would be that storage (actual preservation), of both the artifacts and the mechanism for translation, is the highest priority, followed by translation when you can afford to. Can you describe how the other qualities of nuance and interpretation are important?

Sure. Let us, for example, look at a legal or religious text. I'll use latin for this one. The Romans used various terms which actually meant - in translation - pretty much the same, the "vanquished enemies begging for peace". And in translation you nearly always find the same words for it "conquered, subjugated" and their various synonyms. However, over time it was actually found out that when the Romans use different terms, they mean different things. Some were true conquered people, some were subjugated according to a hashed-out agreement, and others were just people who made a peace treaty. Now, in early translations, this error was not fixed because nobody had by then realized the legal connotations to the word usage, because our understanding of the Roman ius gentium was not that great then, or the translators (who were often not historians) did not notice it/care about the implications. It was only after a lot of translations and decades of scholarship that this error was fixed.

Needless to say, our complete understanding of Roman rule, international politics etc. had to be changed, which had a major impact upon how we view, for example, the 3rd century AD etc.

And this is just a single example how the incorrect translation of a single word can have wide-reaching consequences. This is why you need people who study the language involved and this capacity to challenge once-widely accepted translations is what would be lost if nobody could read/speak the language involved anymore. Because you essentially throw your entire research on the mercy of a single translator.

Likewise, you can read a lot into the words used, for example adjectives in Latin are highly connotational. But you need to be able to read them first.

I don't have a problem with people choosing to enjoy things. I also don't have a problem with being incapable of experiencing art because it is either gone forever or purposely out of reach. Imagine if, instead of classical German poetry, you were 3000 years in the future trying to save Elvis concerts. Will we have an imperative to fund Elvis Impersonator schools from now until doomsday because that will be the only way to get the complete experience?

The latter is a strawman. Just because I happen to speak Latin does not mean I have to thrown on a toga, get a gladius and start raping German slave girls.

I'm with you right up to the point where we start talking about including languages that are considered either dying/dead, or which belong to an ancestry that no person identifies with.

The point is though, what gives you the competence to rule that a language is no longer in use, will not have any future use and is not of any value? How about Ancient Egyptian, for example.. If they had not built the Pyramids and accomplished other things as well, nobody would care about them today. But don't tell me that works like this are not beautiful or worth preserving on their own:

Death is before me today:
like the recovery of a sick man,
like going forth into a garden after sickness.
Death is before me today:
like the odor of myrrh,
like sitting under a sail in a good wind.
Death is before me today:
like the course of a stream;
like the return of a man from the war-galley to his house.
Death is before me today:
like the home that a man longs to see,
after years spent as a captive.

Incidentally, this work also gave Neil Gaiman the idea of creating one of the most impactful characters of modern pop culture, so you can think once more about the potential value of dead languages. Who knows what other (once thought forgotten) texts may inspire other artists to create more work of Art?

This is the point. Neither you nor I know the value a language will bring. It may come down to nothing. It also may inspire artists to reach new heights, create new work of art. It may enhance our knowledge of the past and give us an identity. The potential to have that there is valuable enough to keep it alive instead of outright saying "let's lock it away". Archiving makes it inaccessible to the public (before you go all "but museums", let me remind you that only a few choice pieces are displayed and how many times have you read/translated ancient egyptian/latin when walking through a museum?) and to scholars. It further puts all eggs into one basket (museums do occassionally burn down/are looted/bombed) and restricts access to all but a very small number of people, who, when they die, seldom leave successors to carry on with the work.

[hongi]

When they are, why are they worth preserving?

There's very many (scholarly) works written on this.

An interesting angle is the scientific one. Prostratin is a drug derived from Homalanthus nutans, a tree that grows natively in Samoa. Scientists now think that the drug may have efficacy against type 1 HIV. Do you know how scientists found out about it? A Samoan healer was using extracts to treat hepatitis.

It can be argued that traditional knowledge like this and language goes hand in hand. Languages don't only provide names for things, they are classificatory systems. David K. Harrison argues in one of his books that they do it efficiently, and 'converting' them to another language like English loses some of that information packaging that's so effectively done in the original language.

Not to mention that the vast majority of languages have never had a writing system. All they've had were oral traditions passed down over the ages. When we lose the languages and the people speaking them, we're going to miss out on a lot. A language isn't just how it works, it's what's been said in that language. And that's precious. It's gold, it's our combined human heritage that we're just pissing on.

Do you know that the Homeric works, the Iliad and the Odyssey were for centuries purely oral compositions because in the Greek Dark Ages, writing had been lost?

[Lagmonster]

When they are, why are they worth preserving?

An interesting angle is the scientific one. Prostratin is a drug derived from Homalanthus nutans, a tree that grows natively in Samoa. Scientists now think that the drug may have efficacy against type 1 HIV. Do you know how scientists found out about it? A Samoan healer was using extracts to treat hepatitis.

Nuh-unh, honey, no. Research into medical uses for this plant is dependant on the survival of the plant and the people that know about it, not the culture of whichever people first figured it out or the language they spoke. The shaman could have been a deaf mute and still communicated the message that "X plant = medicine" if that was the idea that had been passed on. Most ideas can translate and technologies can get re-discovered; it's more culturally relevant art, philosophy and politics that can stay gone once you lose them.

It can be argued that traditional knowledge like this and language goes hand in hand. Languages don't only provide names for things, they are classificatory systems. David K. Harrison argues in one of his books that they do it efficiently, and 'converting' them to another language like English loses some of that information packaging that's so effectively done in the original language.

So your argument is that English is less efficient at categorization of things than a dead language? I really hope Duckie gets back to the thread, because I'd want to hear about two tiny doubts: 1) that English would seem to assimilate concepts shamefully from other languages for nomenclature and categorization already, and; 2) that I'd assume people who care that much about efficiency would end up preferring numeric systems for separating big volumes of data.

Not to mention that the vast majority of languages have never had a writing system. All they've had were oral traditions passed down over the ages. When we lose the languages and the people speaking them, we're going to miss out on a lot. A language isn't just how it works, it's what's been said in that language. And that's precious. It's gold, it's our combined human heritage that we're just pissing on.

Which brings us back to the realization that sooner or later this thread is going to culminate in a clash over the societal value of cultural history and art.

[Thanas]

Did you miss my post?

Ugh, looks like I did. Sorry, Thanas. Backtracking. - Lagmonster

[Akhlut]

When they are, why are they worth preserving?

An interesting angle is the scientific one. Prostratin is a drug derived from Homalanthus nutans, a tree that grows natively in Samoa. Scientists now think that the drug may have efficacy against type 1 HIV. Do you know how scientists found out about it? A Samoan healer was using extracts to treat hepatitis.

Nuh-unh, honey, no. Research into medical uses for this plant is dependant on the survival of the plant and the people that know about it, not the culture of whichever people first figured it out or the language they spoke. The shaman could have been a deaf mute and still communicated the message that "X plant = medicine" if that was the idea that had been passed on. Most ideas can translate and technologies can get re-discovered; it's more culturally relevant art, philosophy and politics that can stay gone once you lose them.

Except that generally cultures and their knowledge are lost wholesale because a lot of indigenous knowledge is usually disregarded as inferior to the colonists' knowledge.

Also, consider this: there are over 300,000 species of plants in the world and it takes time to assay the individual products of each one to determine medicinal value. This is not even considering insects (probably over a millions species), fungi (maybe 1.5 million species), and other species with potential medicinal value. As the loss of traditional, cultural knowledge is accompanied by the loss of language ("why should I listen to my great uncle about what plant I should take for my stomach ache when I have a big bottle of Pepto Bismal here?"), we can expect the loss of knowledge about these sorts of medicinal substances. And, because there are some many fucking things out there which we simply don't have the ability to assay all at once, maybe we should keep those languages alive because it keeps a culture alive and that keeps traditional knowledge going which we can then use for E.D. drugs to keep the economy afloat.

It can be argued that traditional knowledge like this and language goes hand in hand. Languages don't only provide names for things, they are classificatory systems. David K. Harrison argues in one of his books that they do it efficiently, and 'converting' them to another language like English loses some of that information packaging that's so effectively done in the original language.

So your argument is that English is less efficient at categorization of things than a dead language? I really hope Duckie gets back to the thread, because I'd want to hear about two tiny doubts: 1) that English would seem to assimilate concepts shamefully from other languages for nomenclature and categorization already, and; 2) that I'd assume people who care that much about efficiency would end up preferring numeric systems for separating big volumes of data.

English doesn't really have grammatical categories for nouns beyond "proper nouns" and "common nouns." Certain languages might classify nouns according to their medicinal use (which is probably going to make it a lot easier for us to make educated guesses on what's useful to send through the battery of tests to see if it is pharmacalogically active or not).

Not to mention that the vast majority of languages have never had a writing system. All they've had were oral traditions passed down over the ages. When we lose the languages and the people speaking them, we're going to miss out on a lot. A language isn't just how it works, it's what's been said in that language. And that's precious. It's gold, it's our combined human heritage that we're just pissing on.

Which brings us back to the realization that sooner or later this thread is going to culminate in a clash over the societal value of cultural history and art.

So, maintaining the histories and cultures of people who are, more often than not, having their histories and cultures eliminating by outside forces is not important?

Further, how is the maintenance of a language going to hurt anyone? Generally, the languages that are most endangered are the ones spoken by people who are usually in pretty shitty situations. By encouraging conditions that aid in the survival of a language, one also raises the standard of living for a group of people. It's not like money is just being thrown away at some abstract concept, it's being used to help real, flesh and blood human beings.

[Lagmonster]

Needless to say, our complete understanding of Roman rule, international politics etc. had to be changed, which had a major impact upon how we view, for example, the 3rd century AD etc.

So your argument is that if we value history, we cannot afford to lose nuance and meaning in literature. Given this explanation, your position makes sense, although you are saddled with the burden of convincing other people to agree with it. More on that in a moment.

Imagine if, instead of classical German poetry, you were 3000 years in the future trying to save Elvis concerts. Will we have an imperative to fund Elvis Impersonator schools from now until doomsday because that will be the only way to get the complete experience?

The latter is a strawman. Just because I happen to speak Latin does not mean I have to thrown on a toga, get a gladius and start raping German slave girls.

I admit that it was a trite analogy, but it was meant to bring up the issue of the cost of action (not inaction), and a bit of the measure of the value of culture and art. That cost should be defined, since as you've already pointed out, the average guy doesn't care whether or not we know everything about the political affairs of people who died two thousand years ago.

Maybe we could end this quicker if you were to establish what the limits should be to a population to keep a language alive; mainly who is responsible, and what reasonable limits they should be expected to go to. And yes, I know Alyrium has already trotted out his patented "no cost too great to avert loss" balls-out position; I'm interested in a more seasoned opinion.

Archiving makes it inaccessible to the public (before you go all "but museums", let me remind you that only a few choice pieces are displayed and how many times have you read/translated ancient egyptian/latin when walking through a museum?) and to scholars. It further puts all eggs into one basket (museums do occassionally burn down/are looted/bombed) and restricts access to all but a very small number of people, who, when they die, seldom leave successors to carry on with the work.

In other words, you are saying that archiving runs an increased risk of extinction. Thinking back to the example of the native tribe...I'm not certain how much more sensible it is to leave a dying language with a handful of people, all but one or two of whom require a constant investment as encouragement to continue and who are prone to leave bits and pieces out here and there since they're only practicing it for aesthetic reasons.

[Thanas]

So your argument is that if we value history, we cannot afford to lose nuance and meaning in literature. Given this explanation, your position makes sense, although you are saddled with the burden of convincing other people to agree with it. More on that in a moment.

Well, I freely admit that it is useless to convince people who view everything from a "has it material value and can we make profit from it?" Those people of course are also hypocrite and barbarians, since they themselves regularly engage in behavior which destroys material value (drinking, clubbing, going to movies) and waste time that would net them better value if it would be spent working. It is really hard to quantify the material value of anything humans do for fun or to educate themselves or for cultural reasons.

And it is not only history - I specifically named Gaiman for a reason. "Dead" languages provide inspiration, meaning and goals for contemporary artists. That alone has value.

I must also confess that I am a bit annoyed with your argument - it seemed as if you are trying to get me to quantify the value of something that has no objective material value, but immense subjective value and (as in the case of Gaiman) great objective value as well. It is all about potential, not about value.

BTW, you might make the same argument you are apparently making for the cutting of funding of anything that is not directly related to manufacture, industry and things that make money.

I admit that it was a trite analogy, but it was meant to bring up the issue of the cost of action (not inaction), and a bit of the measure of the value of culture and art. That cost should be defined, since as you've already pointed out, the average guy doesn't care whether or not we know everything about the political affairs of people who died two thousand years ago.

See above. Of course, there is the added argument that he who does not know (or care) about history is more prone to make mistakes - see the whole troglodytes who voted for Bush because they knew nothing about the middle east or the history of US power. An educated electorate should be the end goal of any democracy, and knowing the history of the world (and languages) is a part of it.

Maybe we could end this quicker if you were to establish what the limits should be to a population to keep a language alive; mainly who is responsible, and what reasonable limits they should be expected to go to. And yes, I know Alyrium has already trotted out his patented "no cost too great to avert loss" balls-out position; I'm interested in a more seasoned opinion.

As for responsibility: Society, and the state as agent/representative of society.

As to limits, I cannot say without a concrete situation. I just cannot, nor am I qualified to, make a general judgement/baseline for what are very individual situations. Obviously, there are hard limits - like if there is widespread starvation in the streets, society is collapsing etc. But none of these conditions are met in western nations today.

In other words, you are saying that archiving runs an increased risk of extinction.

No, I am saying that archiving ensures that the language will not exist anymore outside a few academic circles. This is an immense capitulation first of all, because it moves a living language firmly into the dead column. That is the first huge difference.
The second difference is that the increased risk of extincting is not merely a calculated risk. It essentially is throwing the entire language at the mercy of the politicians. When budget cuts come around, guess what positions are more vulnerable than essential services? And once it is abolished, it rarely will be (if it even can, for reasons I already outlined above in my posts) re-established.

Thinking back to the example of the native tribe...I'm not certain how much more sensible it is to leave a dying language with a handful of people, all but one or two of whom require a constant investment as encouragement to continue and who are prone to leave bits and pieces out here and there since they're only practicing it for aesthetic reasons.

As long as there are still native speakers, they should be encouraged to speak it. We have similar programs for languages other than High German in Germany and these programs are great successes. We even have low german newspaper articles, for example. (Funny thing: The eminent authority on Low german today is a black immigrant from Africa, who now is the professor for low German. Showing once more why even "dieing" or "dead" languages can still inspire people and bring them together, no matter their roots).

[Alyrium Denryle]

To what end? How many lost languages and cultures should be preserved by actual people? All of them that ever formed, no matter how small the original population? And how do we decide who is responsible for each language? Our more thoroughly inter-bred people could have dozens of ancestral roots sporting a plethora of cultures.

Well, in some cases, it is just impossible. Some languages are simply lost, no written records etc. But yes, it is not at all unreasonable to create incentives to keep the language alive, and preserve its literature etc. You dont have to keep the ceremonies alive in any practical sense, but many small Amerind tribes do keep their ceremonies etc in practice for cultural and economic reasons, even if none of them believe in the religion.

You dont have to mandate responsibility either. Again, create incentives and interest, and people will do it on their own.