Dear Log,
Living here in New Mexico is linguistically interesting, but not really because of the local (moribund) form of Spanish; instead because of the good dozen or so Native languages around here. Most are endangered to varying degrees (meaning that very few people born after 1950 can speak them), but some are doing fine, like Navajo (safety in numbers, there).
It's very hard to talk (especially in English) about what's interesting about those languages, because in a way that's something that requires a sort of introspection into each language, such as I think can come only from the speakers of the languages having the sort of "cultural confidence" about the languages, so that speakers have an interest in asking simple things like "Why do we use the same word for X as for Y? There must be a story there" -- and also in passing on the ideas they come up with. That's the raw material for everything else.
But when the US government really started running New Mexico in the late 19th century, it started applying its general perspective on Native cultures and languages, which was that they're sort of a family-transmitted form of mental retardation. So it was made clear to young parents that they really should not use their "native dialect" around their kids, and definitely should not encourage the kids to actually "talk Indian". So that started at least fifty years of NM Natives being told at every turn "YOU ARE NOT INTERESTING", starting in childhood. Most people by their forties or fifties resume a real interest in Native cultures, but by then it's not exactly easy to learn the literature of a language you had nearly no exposure to, except from hearing your mom say "sit down!" and "eat your bread!" when you were a toddler.
And it really doesn't help that if you say "okay, I do now want to learn Tewa" (or whatever), there's very little in the way of books to pull off the shelf that will get you anywhere.
It's surprising to most people to think about it, but an inch-thick Harrap's French<->English dictionary and a three-year track of French textbooks represents an immense investment of time (not man-hours, but man-millennia) on the part of teachers and students figuring out the best way to learn a language as an adolescent or adult.
Starting from nothing and producing comparable materials for languages that are about as unlike English as you can get, is a daunting task. It requires endless data collection, thought, and research, coming up with ways of explaining things but then throwing them out. And most damnably, it requires time. But hhe most fluent speakers of most Native languages are now over seventy years old. Some people around here do live past 100 either out of sheer stubbornness, but I do feel a certain need to hurry.
Yes, the death of smaller languages is a sad thing. Languages are pretty much what makes us; and us is what makes cultures; and languages dying is cultures dying.
Being a native speaker of a small linguistic family has perhaps made me more sensitive to the issue: there's only five million of us Finns, and we are the second largest of Finno-Ugrian speakers after Hungarian. Five millions is enough for "safety in numbers", but in Finland one is daily bombarded by English: and I do mean bombarded: sometimes ads can be all in English.
But not all Finno-Ugrian languages are as lucky as Finnish, Hungarian, and Estonian of having their own countries. The area of the Sami (that's where the word "tundra" comes from) is spread over Russia, Finland, Sweden, and Norway, and they were for centuries oppressed by being driven to the Ultima Thule, and their language being oppressed in administration and in schools. Nowadays things are getting better, they are getting more autonomy, their lands are being returned, Sami is taught in schools and they have news broadcasts in their own language. About a dozen more Finno-Ugrian languages exist in the area of Russia, but they are not doing so well. Not so much because of active oppression, as was the case during the Soviet empire (the usual you-shall-not-speak-your-language-and-we-are-robbing-your-natural-resources routine), but because of more indirect (just the we-are-robbing-your-natural-resources part) ways. One has the choice of continuing one's traditional reindeer herder ways, or go work for the Russian oil company (which incidentally has spilled all the waterways with crude oil, so your reindeer wouldn't have anywhere to drink from, anyway). And those Finno-Ugrian groups are small: few thousands of people, they do not have the safety in numbers, and they are fighting a losing battle (there, against the Russian language: empires work that way, all over the world.)
I won't be so naive to suggest that English be the standard language - after all, Spanish is more widely spoken than English.
I can sympathize with the loss of a language, but I suggest that Darwin's Rule of "Survival of the Fittest" applies. The outgoing language should be introspected to gleam any nuggets and apply it to the whole (tundra's a cool word) and recorded for posterity, but the loss (when it dies) is merely sentimental, IMHO. I hope we are working back towards a unified world, a unified language and with it, world peace.
Jason
Re:Bah ... languages, smhlanguages
chaoticset on 2002-02-12T17:47:46
IMHO, it is precisely that way.Certain words in certain languages require whole paragraphs in other languages to accurately describe.
The old saw of "forty words for snow" holds true in certain places. Some cultures that don't require/have advanced color needs have, say, three words for the entire color spectrum. Definition of various concepts in languages varies.
Finally, certain aesthetics are nice to have. English has a certain sound, and it's radically different from, say, French or German. If you've ever heard a love poem recited in German, you know what I'm talking about.
:) Re:Bah ... languages, smhlanguages
TorgoX on 2002-02-12T18:31:01
Zeroth off, thanks for playing devil's advocate. It lets me talk more, which I always enjoy.First off, "survival of the fittest" is the fishiest of theories. Without getting into its "unfalsifiability" problems, it's just plain tautological: it defines fittest as just a property of whatever survives, which ends up saying nothing more than that the survivors survived. But moving on:
Second off, I see nothing wrong with a world where every person can speak English. But I see everything wrong with a world where every person can speak only English. We can all fit easily a half-dozen languages in our heads, to the betterment of all. Why waste the capacity? Speak English, but also speak Spanish, ASL, Cantonese, Cherokee, and Haitian, or whatever other languages are in your culture, family, region, religion, or whimsy.
Third off, people do have "mere sentimental" attachments to languages. But what does that mean? They care about it without having an exterior reason to do so? By that measure, most human relationships are "mere[ly] sentimental".
And fourth off, what gets lost when you lose a language, is understanding of the things composed in that language -- everything from puns to poems. You can translate, but I assure you that translation is never the same, not by a long shot, even for closely related languages. You can borrow words, but languages aren't just words, in the same way that computer programs aren't just variables.
To put it all in computer language terms: you can't turn ASM into Prolog, nor vice versa; and we shouldn't have to live in a world that lacks either. So yes, like you asked, human languages are surprisingly like computer languages in that some things are better in one that in another; and in that knowing several of them will "stritch your brines" as Damian once flatteringly said about Class::Classless.
Survival of the Fittest
Purdy on 2002-02-12T19:09:02
Just to provoke more thought: I (humbly) disagree with your assessment of "Survival of the Fittest." In your perception, SotF is an explanation of a result that has already taken effect. I see it more of a basic law of nature, which predicts trends as well, although I agree that we usually can't comprehend "fittest" until it has already survived. Fittest is not what merely survives (though that is true), but it also describes something that will survive the test of time.I'm short on brainpower right now, so I'll make up an example. Let's say within the possum species, there are two varieties: one that plays dead and another that fights back, both when threatened. Now let's say the predator of the possum (for some reason) only attacks/eats "live" possums. So over time, the variety that fights back diminishes, either by predatory practices or by converts (smart possums!).
So you would say playing dead is the fittest for the possum species (and I would agree), but I would further state that "fittest" was defined before it survived by the laws of nature that were in place.
Furthermore, I would assert that if we were in a world where every person could speak English (or Spanish or some one language), but also had the capability to speak other languages, we would find the secondary languages diminishing over time until they were gone altogether (keeping those "jewels" we already talked about).
I also don't comprehend the using different spoken languages for different tasks, but I blame that on inexperience. I was brought up on English and took the mandatory classes on French, Latin and Spanish, but the focus of all those classes were to convert my thoughts into voice using that particular language. But here's the kicker - I think in English. I don't have enough experience/depth in the different languages to think otherwise. So my perception of other languages is merely to take my raw English thoughts and run a conversion.
Maybe it's time for me to get back into the ring and tackle a language hard-core.
Jason
PS: I think what I'm trying to say about SotF is that it depends on the "world" (socioeconomic and nature factors/laws) that surrounds the target and can be pre-defined before it survives.
Re:Survival of the Fittest
quidity on 2002-02-13T20:46:53
`Fittest', or more correctly, `best fitted' is precisely just those things which have survived. Evolutionary theory also doesn't really apply here as a language is subject to so many directed processes. Groups of people try to keep their language alive, and languages don't change through random processes in the same way. While it's interesting to note the parallels between the processes through which languages change over time, and those which affect the biological sphere, it is a little broken.
Re:Bah ... languages, smhlanguages
jhi on 2002-02-12T20:37:36
The worst part about the "survival of the fittest" is that it's not called "death of the weakest". In other words, it's usually seen from the viewpoint of the "rightfully" fittest-- completely missing the constantly dynamic aspect, and the multidimensionality. Horseshoe business did really well up until the combustion engine.
Re:Bah ... languages, smhlanguages
jjohn on 2002-02-12T21:13:07
Recall that in Orwell's 1984, the main intellectual activity of Ingsoc was the perfection of the language NewSpeak, in which herectical ideas could neither be spoken nor thought. There is something very magical about language. It's not merely a pragmatic way to get information -- it's the cement of society itself. This extends into the animal kindom as well.Consider the bizarre symbotic relationship of a certain caterpillar and tree ants. The caterpiller has "dew patches" on which the ants feed. In return, the ants protect the caterpillar. What's missing from the article are two more interesting details. The first is that the caterpillar "sings" to the ants by rubbing its antennae along its ribbed head (the language connection). The second bit is that the caterpillar eats some of the ant larvae. All this for a song and a snack.
Sentimentality isn't all that bad, but it's always wiser to avoid destroying something which you cannot recreate (lives, languages, unarchived unix files
;-). Re:Bah ... languages, smhlanguages
Purdy on 2002-02-12T21:42:02
Interesting points and I don't know if I'm just too simple to come around to your points or if I can't convince you of mine - perhaps we're at a stalemate.I would argue, though, that if we've gleamed the nuggets out of a language that's doomed to die and recorded it for posterity, then what's wrong with destroying it for a common good (unifying humanity with language)? Look at Latin - it's a dead language, but we have recordings, we have books and we have classes on learning Latin. So we've destroyed Latin into non-usage (save for medical terminology [nuggets]). Language is probably an exception to your destruction-avoidance policy because we could recreate it if we wanted to.
Jason
Re:Bah ... languages, smhlanguages
jhi on 2002-02-12T22:30:25
No, we can't recreate languages. Languages are products of cultures, and recreating cultures would require being able to turn back time. We can create new variations from the remains of languages, that's all.
Think of all the bazillions of loanwords in the English language: tundra, sauna, payama, ketchup, katamaran-- would they have
become part of the English without history, mainly trade, and largely because of two English-speaking empires, first the British economical and political, and then the American economical and cultural. Do these loanwords have their original meaning? In most cases, no (for example: katamaran is Tamil for "bound-log). In other words, information has been lost, and if those languages would disappear, only the loanword semantics would remain. These are just examples at the technical level: in cases like sayings or poetry, even wider chasms exist. Translation simply doesn't work, most of the time. Rough made-up estimate: you can usually get 80% translated between languages of the same linguistic family, if translating basic prose. Change the register or the linguistic family, and it gets worse, possibly much worse. For example, Finno-Ugrian and Indo-European are not related families, so something is lost in the translation, either way, but they are reasonably close (Subject-Verb-Object, roughly the same concepts of time and place, etc), but if getting farther, to, say, Asian or Amer-Indian, it's getting really hard.
If you don't mind some linguistic roughing, take a look at the conlang community. A good tutorial on creating your own constructed language is
available, and it's a good shakeup on monolingual beliefs that everything could or should be expressed using a single language.
Re:Bah ... languages, smhlanguages
ziggy on 2002-02-13T18:26:37
I can't agree with that statement. Hebrew was a dead [spoken] language until the end of the 19th Century. Today it's a living [spoken] language again, the native tongue of a significant population. It's probably the only counterargument though, being the only language to be revived from the dead. Unfortunately, that also means that Yiddish is pretty much pushing up the daisies...No, we can't recreate languages.With that proviso, I do heartily agree with you. Hebrew was revivable because the culture wasn't lost while the language was sleeping for a few centuries.Languages are products of cultures, and recreating cultures would require being able to turn back time.That's what makes the loss of Navajo, Cherokee and multitudes of amerindian languages so sad -- not only is the language being lost, but pretty much the entire culture is slowly being lost too.
Re:Bah ... languages, smhlanguages
ziggy on 2002-02-13T18:53:51
What's wrong with that? A whole helluva lot!I would argue, though, that if we've gleamed the nuggets out of a language that's doomed to die and recorded it for posterity, then what's wrong with destroying it for a common good (unifying humanity with language)?If you're approaching this problem as a native English speaker that thought in English when learning other languages that are substantially similar to English, then I don't know if I'm personally skilled enough to convey the abysmal sense of loss here. Simply borrowing words from dead languages to create new medical terms doesn't cut it and is in fact quite nearsighted.
For example, I understand that in Japanese, there was no word for "green" until about a century ago -- it was just a shade of "blue". Doesn't that make it complicated to say something like "this mouldy cheese is rotten -- the blue mold specs are still there, but there are nasty green bits on top now"?
Japanese also has a strong emphasis on "that thing near me" vs. "that thing near you" vs. "that thing that's not near either one of us"; classifiers for degrees of honor (thinking -sensei == teacher and -san == mr. doesn't really explain it well); Japanese also doesn't a plethora of verb tenses like Latin, and it lacks a future tense of all things (try to translate "I'm gonna do it" without being specific when in the future you intend to do it).
But my favorite example of impedence mismatch between languages is with English and Hebrew. Think of all the different words we have for poultry in English (including "poultry"): chicken, cornish game hen, turkey, quail, cock, rooster, pea-hen, chick, phesant, duck,
... (obviously, whoever invented English had a lot of birds nearby.) In Hebrew, many of them are simply «oof» -- "bird" (or adjectives describing which bird, but the same word is used for chicken and "bird", and presumably various different forms of chicken as well). Given that state of affairs, how do you express yourself when you mean "any-random-avian-creature" vs. a chicken vs. someone you're associating with a small-thin-flying-creature vs. someone you're trying to associate with a chicken? At the same time, the book of Genesis starts out «b'resheet barah adonai...» -- "In the beginning, God created...". However "created" doesn't quite fit, because the verb here «barah» is quite special and conveys a sense of grandeur. In English, the sense of the creation of the universe is comparable to the sense of Larry Wall creating Perl. Not at all the same thing there.
Now, you could chalk that up to "well, poetry between languages doesn't translate", or "if you use a few paragraphs, you can still say the same thought". The truth is that actually, you can't. Perhaps it's easy to cut corners translating between English and French, but in general, once a language is lost, a whole perspective on the world is lost, and a whole set of ideas is lost along with it.
Reducing everything down to a single language is tantamount to Newspeak, and that association alone should really scare you.
Re:Bah ... languages, smhlanguages
jhi on 2002-02-14T19:43:39
Colours in various languages are a fascinating subject: anthropologists have done studies like showing patches of colours to people and asking what do they call them. Even within same cultures there are differences: we have a table cloth six people couldn't agree on whether it was blue or green, and I can guarantee it wasn't the question of the cloth not being washed:-) But, IIRC, spectra blue-green and red-orange-yellow-brown have been identified as rather fuzzy.
Finnish examples: there is (still) no native word for 'purple'. There's a compound word which translates to "blue-reddish", and a loanword 'violetti'. Then there are strange structures: red, blue, yellow, and white (as colours) are not really root words, they are "red-dish", "blue-ish", "yellow-ish", and "whit-ish" (the respective root words are semantically closer to "redness", "blueness", "yellowness", and "whiteness"). The word for "green" is probably just a cognate for "verdant" (as in
~ vegetation). The word for "brown" originally meant "red" (like rust, or autumn foliage). The word for "black" originally meant "dark" (and a cognate of "white" still means "light"). So there are historical shifts in meaning, traces of which you can see in other words (like the "green-verdant" pair), and if you were aware only of parts of the picture, you would be left with less.Re:Bah ... languages, smhlanguages
TorgoX on 2002-02-14T21:03:36
Colours in various languages are a fascinating subjectDefinitely! And one of my fondest memories from grad school was the book Basic Color Terms by Paul Kay and Brent Berlin -- one of the few bits of linguistics I found that was actually accessible to anyone who hadn't already spent years reading up on theoretical backstory.
The short story is this: collect all the color-terms in a language. For each one, ask "is [this term] a kind of [this other term]?" You get things like "pink ISA red", "beige ISA white", and so-on. So then you look for all the things that aren't ISA anything else. In English, this is grey, brown, white, black, blue, green, yellow, orange, red, purple; I think that's all of them. So you collect those, and throw out any words that are built up of other words, and you throw out words that can't apply to anything at all (so if you have a word for "grey" but it applies only to a horse being that color, toss it out). What's left are called "basic level color terms".
And there are two surprising things you find out when you do this across languages:
1) different languages have different sets of such basic level terms. So you can have a language where people have a word for the color orange, but say "but that's just a kind of red", and/or the term for the color orange is just "cloud red" (so it's a compound, so you throw it out).
2) there are patterns in what you get. I don't remember the exact details, but it's things like: you don't have "orange" (when not ISA "red"!) showing up before "green" (when not ISA "blue"!).
The weirdest languages I've ever found for this are the Northern Iroquois languages (and possibly Cherokee (which is Southern Iroquois), but I don't know). They have, by the above criteria, no basic-level color terms at all. They have a whole thing with some colors being ISA other colors, and some not being ISA anything, but all those get thrown out because they are all compounds: and almost all of them are compounds build of a common noun plus the verb that means "to be the same color as". So "the couch is blue" basically comes out "the couch is sky-color". "The cat is white" comes out "The cat is snow-color". But while some terms are clearly "conventionalized" (everyone uses snow as the default comparison noun in for the color white, blood for red, etc), you can use anything that makes any sort of conceptual sense: bone-color, ash-color, tongue-color, pinecone-color, etc. Tomato-color! Carrot-color!
Re:Bah ... languages, smhlanguages
hfb on 2002-02-14T00:17:54
The Catholic church would disagree with you that Latin is a dead language as there is modern and classical Latin. The pope issues nearly every written edict in Latin and up until Vatican II masses were conducted in Latin. No, Latin is quite alive and well, especially in the romance languages
:) And don't forget the legal profession. Umberto Eco had a wonderful book Experiences in Translation that would be of interest to anyone considering abolishing language for just one as it goes into the philosophy and art of translating works from one language to another.
