[HN Gopher] Lost languages discovered in the oldest continuously...
___________________________________________________________________
Lost languages discovered in the oldest continuously run libraries
(2017)
Author : ALee
Score : 86 points
Date : 2022-01-03 20:20 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.smithsonianmag.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.smithsonianmag.com)
| billpg wrote:
| Glibc contains COBOL code?
| dhosek wrote:
| Pre-modern manuscript practices are remarkably alien to us today.
| A single codex might contain multiple works in it with no
| external indication of its contents. It's entirely possible that
| many lost works are sitting in manuscript libraries because
| nobody has been able to catalog everything in them. Add in the
| palimpsest practice (which would not only impact situations like
| Saint Catherine's but would also cause a manuscript containing
| some pagan text to be overwritten with a Christian text--or in
| later centuries for a Christian text to be overwritten with an
| Islamic text) and it's entirely possible that somewhere there's a
| copy of Aristotle's Second book of Poetics or more of Sappho than
| we currently have. It kind of excites me to consider the
| possibilities (and wonder if the alternate universe version of me
| who majored in classics might be combing through the Vatican
| archives right now).
| choeger wrote:
| > with the rise of Islam in the 7th century, Christian sites in
| the Sinai Desert began to disappear, and Saint Catherine's found
| itself in relative isolation. Monks turned to reusing older
| parchments when supplies at the monastery ran scarce.
|
| That sounds ... odd. If the monks were isolated then why should
| they copy books, especially when they had to delete older
| material to do so? At the very least this implies that the monks
| had a supply of books to copy and also had to return the
| originals to someone somehow.
|
| I think the more logical explanation is that the deleted texts
| were considered worthless.
| rendall wrote:
| > _' I think the more logical explanation is that the deleted
| texts were considered worthless.'_
|
| It's your contention that the monks had unlimited access to
| parchment, but just chose to overwrite older work?
|
| > _If the monks were isolated then why should they copy books,
| especially when they had to delete older material to do so?_
|
| A religious order dedicated to copying books as a spiritual
| discipline isn't going to just sit around when parchment is
| hard to come by.
| pure_simplicity wrote:
| Books were not only copied to have 2 functional copies, but
| also to have 1 fresh copy remaining once the older copy is no
| longer usable. Books are perishable and the more they are used,
| the quicker they disintegrate. That in itself is sufficient
| reason to sacrifice some works to preserve other works.
| bluGill wrote:
| Because some books are more valuable than others. You might
| enjoy Harry Potter, but if your only copy of a calculus 101 is
| deteriorating you will erase Harry Potter and copy the calculus
| text over the top to save the more important calculus book - or
| maybe you would erase the calculus textbook to copy Harry
| Potter over the top. This is a statement of relative value when
| paper is scarce, but it doesn't mean they didn't value the lost
| text, just that the replacement was even more valuable. If they
| had plenty of paper they wouldn't have erased the lost text in
| the first place and probably would have made a new copy.
| hypertele-Xii wrote:
| There's a third way.
|
| You combine the best halves of calculus and Harry Potter into
| one book.
|
| It'll be more difficult to understand, but managing so grants
| one the best of both worlds.
| kmstout wrote:
| - Harry Potter and the Two-Sided Limit. - Harry
| Potter and the Area Beneath the Curve. - Harry Potter
| and the Osculating Circle.
| williamdclt wrote:
| It's probably how "Harry Potter and the Methods of
| Rationality" (an actual real thing) came about.
| newsbinator wrote:
| As someone who makes a hobby of learning languages, I am of the
| highly unpopular opinion that the world would be a better place
| if we could pick one easy-to-learn language (e.g. Malay) and one
| super-simple writing system (e.g. South Korean Hangul) and get
| our species out of the dark ages of having thousands of mutually
| unintelligible languages.
|
| No-one in their right mind would create an ethical, functioning
| modern society with thousands of languages, some with 100% global
| power and some with 0%, and have children born into it at random.
|
| Maybe it's because I'm not a historian, but statements like this:
|
| > Michael Phelps, director of the Early Manuscripts Electronic
| Library, tells Gray of the Atlantic that the discovery of
| Caucasian Albanian writings at Saint Catherine's library has
| helped scholars increase their knowledge of the language's
| vocabulary, giving them words for things like "net" and "fish."
|
| ... make me sad, not happy. This isn't exciting or fascinating,
| it's a testament to how pointless it is that we put so much value
| in languages, like we're still murmuring incantations around a
| fire and we just learned a new old one to murmur.
|
| Let's pick a word for "net" and "fish" and finally, as a species,
| be done with it.
|
| Make a program of keeping the new global language alive and
| equally accessible, just like we currently do with essential
| medicines.
|
| Everybody has their own local medicines, even traditional witch-
| doctor medicines, but at the same time everybody gets the exact
| same doxycycline and training on when to use it. Likewise
| whatever word we end up choosing for "fish" and "net": use
| whatever word you want in your village, but when you want the one
| that works in the rest of the world, we made sure you're already
| armed with it.
|
| Sure, languages evolve and you can't fight that, but with a
| global internet and a concerted effort to finally solve the Tower
| of Babel problem, languages can evolve everywhere at once into a
| single global language that every child gets brought up speaking.
| yorwba wrote:
| > pick one easy-to-learn language (e.g. Malay) and one super-
| simple writing system (e.g. South Korean Hangul)
|
| That's an interesting combination.
|
| The main reason why English speakers often consider Malay to be
| easier than other South-East Asian languages is that it's
| usually written using the Latin script without diacritics.
| Writing it in Hangul instead would make it just another
| language with a writing system few people are familiar with.
|
| Whereas Hangul as used for writing Korean has plenty of cases
| where the same symbol represents different sounds in different
| context and vice versa different symbols representing the same
| sound in the same context. There's an internal logic to it that
| makes sense for Korean, because it results in words deriving
| from the same root being spelled similarly, but if you apply it
| to Malay, it's just another random set of symbols that can be
| assigned sounds by convention.
| newsbinator wrote:
| > The main reason why English speakers often consider Malay
| to be easier than other South-East Asian languages is that
| it's usually written using the Latin script without
| diacritics
|
| Malay/Indonesian is ridiculously easy and fun to learn. The
| simple/logical grammar is a joy compared to English, French,
| Arabic, etc. And it doesn't really have tones like Chinese.
|
| Anyway Malay + Hangul may not be your first choice, that's
| totally fine. Whatever is your first choice, let's go with it
| and establish it as the global baseline language that all
| children learn in school from kindergarten and in cartoons
| long before that.
| tbonesteaks wrote:
| You have a very fascinating point of view. I never thought of
| it that way before. But, from what I understand, the Tower of
| Babel isn't a problem to be solved. It was a solution to the
| problem you want to introduce. Not disagreeing with your points
| exactly, but it is very interesting dichotomy you've
| introduced.
| huachimingo wrote:
| Godwin's Law for language discussion:
|
| Consider the language _Esperanto_ for universal candidate. /s
| hypertele-Xii wrote:
| I read your comment and compare to programming languages. It
| _would_ be revolutionary to have all computers programmed in
| the same language, but as different languages are good at
| different things and evolve concurrently, it 's almost
| inconcievable to make it happen.
|
| And you're talking about refactoring not merely an entire
| industry, but the very language of thought for our species!
|
| How can we even begin to approach this consciously?
| newsbinator wrote:
| The analogy is reasonable, although it breaks down because
| human languages are not nearly as varied in usefulness for
| different things as programming languages are.
|
| Human languages are much more generalized.
|
| Sure, you can find domain-specific examples of one human
| language being preferable to another though, like when Korean
| Air forced all its pilots to communicate in English, even
| Korean->Korean pilots, because in English you can tell
| explicitly a person who is older/more senior than you that
| they're about to kill everybody on the plane, without
| defaulting to making that a polite "it seems as though
| perhaps what if" suggestion.
|
| On a country-level, we've successfully normalized a given
| language across large populations and large geographies.
| Often without involving genocide or prison camps.
|
| If we can roll out vaccines to the globe over a couple years
| and a few trillion dollars, then surely rolling out a global
| language over a generation or two would only be 1 or 2 orders
| of magnitude more challenging, but it would likely result in
| far more benefit to the human race in the medium/long term,
| and probably even in the short term too.
| hypertele-Xii wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity
| newsbinator wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak
| SamoyedFurFluff wrote:
| > On a country-level, we've successfully normalized a given
| language across large populations and large geographies.
| Often without involving genocide or prison camps.
|
| Which country is this? Genuinely curious. I'm a native
| English speaker and any time English was established as a
| country wide lingua franca it involved colonization and
| suppression of other people, even in England.
| newsbinator wrote:
| There are several examples. Here's one that involved
| fining people for not speaking the lingua franca _in
| public_ :
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen,_speak_Turkish!
|
| I'm not sure exactly how I feel about this. I hope we can
| get everyone to a global language without so much as a $1
| fine, but if it did require a generation of fines and
| public shaming, it could fall into "the ends justify the
| means" territory.
|
| In my modern/developed country we fine _citizens_ heavily
| for entering without presenting a valid PCR test against
| covid. That 's because we believe the public good of
| having everyone free of covid outweighs the public evil
| of fining people for simply existing as they are.
|
| Would the public good of switching the globe to a unified
| language be worth fines and social pressure?
|
| I don't know the answer to that, which maybe correlates
| with my score on the "Darkness Measure" we've recently
| seen posted here on HN:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29734100
| jcranmer wrote:
| > On a country-level, we've successfully normalized a given
| language across large populations and large geographies.
| Often without involving genocide or prison camps.
|
| Well, what do you call beating school children for not
| speaking the "proper" language? Because that's basically
| the minimum you need to do (see: US, Canada, France for
| specific examples).
| newsbinator wrote:
| We don't need to beat school children to get them to do
| all sorts of things they'd rather not do. Currently we
| get most school children trained to be effective factory
| workers and low-grade administrative assistants by age
| 14~16 without beating any of them.
|
| People used to beat school children all the time. They
| used to beat minorities and torture people who have
| developmental problems.
|
| We don't do that anymore, and we still find ways of
| achieving our aims.
| katsura wrote:
| Every computer is programmed with the same language, namely
| 1s and 0s. The other programming languages add certain
| abstractions to make different things "easier".
|
| But there doesn't exist a human language that you can use to
| communicate with everyone on Earth. OP seems to propose a 0-1
| language (to stay with the computer analogy) everyone could
| use to communicate with anybody else, while the local
| languages would be kept the same way as different programming
| languages are used now (basically to express certain patterns
| differently).
| newsbinator wrote:
| That's a good summary, thanks! With the only departure
| being that programming in 1s and 0s is very hard for humans
| and so we develop abstractions on top of it to make it
| easier.
|
| Whereas the baseline language I'm proposing we use would be
| very easy for humans, and in fact would be much easier than
| the local languages that would be kept the same to express
| whatever they're good at expressing.
| Izkata wrote:
| Isn't that what Esperanto was supposed to be?
| katsura wrote:
| Don't get me wrong, I have a huge appreciation for
| Esperanto, but using it as a global language would mean
| forcing western ideas, about how a language should work,
| on the eastern population. So as Zamenhof didn't consider
| Asian languages when he made Esperanto (not to mention
| the use of diacritics), I wouldn't use it as a global
| language.
|
| I have been following some auxlangs for some time now,
| and if I had to vote, I'd go with an a priori language as
| a global second language, instead of choosing an existing
| one with specific culture attached to it.
| yosito wrote:
| The thing is, languages are a whole lot more than systems for
| speaking and writing. They're cultural memes and make up a
| large portion of many people's identity. I speak two widely
| spoken languages and one that's a bit less common. Learning the
| less common language was like gaining membership in an
| exclusive cultural club, and was even a key to getting
| citizenship. But I had to learn more than just words for
| things. I had to learn about culture and history just to be
| able to socialize in the language. I learned things that simply
| can't be translated into other languages without long
| paragraphs of explanation that would actually require the
| reader to accept some knowledge of the language to understand
| them. And people who grew up speaking this language have their
| entire life experience wrapped up in it, and their entire
| family history wrapped up in it for thousands of years. It
| can't simply be replaced with a standardized system. Currently,
| the closest thing the world has to a global standardized
| language is English. English isn't the most logical or simple
| system, but it works because so many people already know it due
| to the global shared history it has. Languages can't be
| divorced from history and culture, even English.
| newsbinator wrote:
| > Learning the less common language was like gaining
| membership in an exclusive cultural club
|
| This is the problem: every language is an exclusive cultural
| club. I want to have one that isn't an exclusive cultural
| club.
|
| > I learned things that simply can't be translated into other
| languages without long paragraphs of explanation that would
| actually require the reader to accept some knowledge of the
| language to understand them
|
| What would be an example of this? For example in Korean
| there's the concept of jeong, which is a Korean-specific
| feeling of love/loyalty/bond with another person. You could
| write paragraphs about how it's subtly different from
| Japanese Jyo or English love/loyalty/bond, but at the end of
| the day either you need the concept and create a word for it
| in the global language, even "Jeong" or whatever, or you
| don't need the concept and don't create a word for it.
|
| You don't build all of FORTRAN into CSS just because you want
| to borrow the concept of variables. You borrow what you need
| and make sure it fits nicely with what's already there.
|
| > And people who grew up speaking this language have their
| entire life experience wrapped up in it, and their entire
| family history wrapped up in it for thousands of years.
|
| You're saying that if over a generation they were to switch
| from one language to another their children and grandchildren
| would be without a history?
|
| The children in our family don't speak the same language as
| their grandparents did. They don't know any of the culture-
| specific words. This doesn't seem to matter in any way that
| I've noticed, and certainly they themselves haven't.
| nitrogen wrote:
| Your ideas are interesting and I wish you luck on your
| quixotic quest to switch this part of our world from PvP
| mode to PvE mode.
| yosito wrote:
| > The children in our family don't speak the same language
| as their grandparents did ... This doesn't seem to matter
| in any way that I've noticed
|
| Speaking as a grandchild who didn't have the fortune of
| being exposed to my grandparents' language growing up, I
| felt that I missed out on a wealth of cultural knowledge
| and experience, which is what drove me to learn the
| language as an adult. I very much wish that I would have
| been taught by my family as a child.
|
| > What would be an example of this?
|
| Azt a fuzfan futyulo rez angyalat!
|
| This is the first example that came to my mind. It's not
| even the best example. The literal translation is "Unto
| that copper angel whistling on the willow tree", and it
| could be substituted with "Wow!" but good luck figuring out
| why it means that and why people use it instead of "Huha".
|
| Another more recent example, "Szeretnem elkerni Meszaros
| Lorinc anyukajanak lencsefozelek receptjet". You simply
| won't be able to understand what that means or why someone
| would say it as a literal translation.
| newsbinator wrote:
| > You simply won't be able to understand what that means
| or why someone would say it as a literal translation.
|
| This is a supporting argument for my point: it's the
| equivalent of an in-joke that I simply wouldn't be able
| to understand.
|
| Lots of groups have in-jokes that I can't understand. For
| example, 3/4ths of memes on gaming and sports subreddits.
| These are rich cultures I am not a part of and have no
| need to be a part of.
|
| I want there to be a single, unifying baseline language
| that we can all understand. When a concept is relevant to
| us, we'll create words for it. When it's a historical or
| cultural curiosity and not relevant to us, we'll leave it
| to be explored by hobbyists, academics and people who
| have some historical connection to it.
|
| Not every in-joke in every culture needs to be preserved
| as a world heritage.
|
| At some point we need to say: here are the words to know
| and here's how we use them to do math, science, politics,
| and to debate social issues... everything that involves
| people who aren't in one's personal in-group, in one's
| tribe or on one's team.
|
| Those words will evolve, but let them evolve globally,
| with off-shoots that are relevant to in-groups, but with
| a main branch that is relevant to everybody.
| kartikay26 wrote:
| I don't think we need to put in extra "effort" to make it
| happen, it's already happening - and English is becoming the
| default global language. Knowing English is an advantage in
| most jobs all over the world and it seems the percentage of
| English speakers in the world is increasing over time.
| newsbinator wrote:
| That's true, it's going in that direction. But that's like
| saying there's less Malaria year over year because we're
| naturally building cities and towns that displace mosquito
| habitats.
|
| If we're going to agree that X is a problem and that we're
| happy the problem is naturally diminishing at some snail-like
| pace, then let's also agree to take direct action to solve X
| properly and now.
|
| We're tackling the Malaria problem, with dollars and behavior
| changes. Let's tackle the Tower of Babel problem with dollars
| and behavior changes. English is an okay global language, for
| example, but its writing system is far from okay.
| thatjoeoverthr wrote:
| Empirically, most people deal with English'a dumb spelling.
| Over a billion people have gone and learned English, on top
| of native speakers. We're using it now. Your hypothetical
| new language would have to displace this incumbent which
| for all practical purposes already does what you want of
| it. Miraculously, people can do more than one language so
| all this happens without anyone abandoning their languages.
| English spelling is not okay but it's not -far- from okay.
| Most people (who, again, empirically deal with it fine) are
| typing with autocorrect.
| newsbinator wrote:
| Every person who learns English writing today spends
| literal _years_ learning it to the point of not being
| embarrassingly bad at writing it.
|
| I'm not sure if you've ever had to learn English as a
| non-native English speaker, but it's one of the hardest,
| most painful, longest things to get truly proficient at,
| equal to other very hard aspects in one's very hard
| profession.
|
| There are hundreds of millions of smart people who can't
| communicate their ideas to us in even simple English
| sentences. Whereas English grammar, as long as you avoid
| idioms, is pretty accessible as far as natural languages
| go.
|
| So to sum up: as a global language English is maybe okay,
| but its writing system makes it not at all okay.
| nitrogen wrote:
| Regarding writing systems for English, have you seen this
| one? We had to learn about it when growing up in Utah:
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deseret_alphabet
| kaesar14 wrote:
| I don't think anyone disagrees English writing sucks, but
| the inertia is massive, and the benefits not all that
| clear relative to the absolutely massive cost. Retraining
| every English speaker to write, changing all our
| keyboards, changing signage and physical written word...
| it's a near impossible task. And it's not clear to me
| what the benefit is when, yes, a billion people can more
| or less communicate in it just fine.
| jcranmer wrote:
| > Sure, languages evolve and you can't fight that, but with a
| global internet and a concerted effort to finally solve the
| Tower of Babel problem, languages can evolve everywhere at once
| into a single global language that every child gets brought up
| speaking.
|
| That... is optimistic, to say the least. Languages evolve
| essentially by having successive generations pick up
| collectively on idiosyncratic features of the language. And of
| course, people who aren't talking with each other aren't going
| to pick up on others' idiosyncratic features, and after several
| generations, you end up with new, distinct languages. To keep a
| single language out of it, you have to work hard to promote
| only a single version of it, and rather literally beat the
| daylight of anyone who speaks the "wrong" version of the
| language (this is essentially how the modern "big" European
| languages came about.)
|
| In other words, enforcing linguistic unity tends to require
| enforcing cultural unity as well.
| newsbinator wrote:
| > you have to work hard to promote only a single version of
| it
|
| Yes, you do have to work to make it happen. Up to now we've
| given languages a free cultural pass, whereas diseases and
| poverty we keep shoveling trillions into, and we're proud
| when we've made a 20% dent.
|
| It takes work to pull the species out of what is natural,
| because what is natural is very often terrible. Diseases
| naturally evolve to terrorize us. We fight them and sometimes
| we win.
|
| The first step is admitting that how languages have evolved
| naturally up to now sucks for an ethical, roughly egalitarian
| 21st century information-based society.
|
| The sooner we can de-link language from local culture, the
| better.
|
| And of course that begs the question: _can_ language be
| delinked from culture?
|
| Yes: my native language isn't the one I'm writing in to you
| now, and my native culture is whatever I'm making up for
| myself as I go along, to the chagrin of my parents and many
| in the culture I was born into.
| benjaminwai wrote:
| Can language be delinked from culture? Maybe. But can a
| language survive without a culture to encompass it? If you
| strip culture from a language, wouldn't the language would
| become toneless and meaningless? Yes, you can call
| something a 'net' or a 'fish' at a basic level. However in
| one culture one might say, "You must cast your net to catch
| the fish" it's plain what it means and it is meaningful,
| but for someone without the cultural context, it's a head
| scratcher and may wonder what fish are you talking about?
|
| I'm too, my native language isn't the one I am writing
| here. I have lived in quite a few different places. Culture
| is not something I could make up for myself as I go along,
| I don't think anyone could do so in isolation. I took in
| the different bits of cultures that i have experienced
| through, sometimes to the dismay of those around me. I
| appreciate the perspective that cultures create languages,
| and without the cultural reference the language would cease
| its importance and would die.
| newsbinator wrote:
| > If you strip culture from a language, wouldn't the
| language would become toneless and meaningless?
|
| Indeed, languages are toneless and meaningless when
| divorced from their functional role in connecting people
| and enabling them to share thoughts.
|
| For that reason languages aren't sacrosanct and are
| replaceable.
| 63 wrote:
| Language is an integral part of every culture. It's not just an
| arbitrary system that everyone chose differently, but a way of
| communicating and reinforcing ideas that's unique to different
| groups. Consider the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. There's a reason
| language was associated with nationalism in the 20th century.
| Keeping the diversity of breadth of the human experience alive
| (much of which we've already lost with increasing globalism)
| means keeping diverse languages and cultures, and I think
| that's important.
| newsbinator wrote:
| This is the standard refrain any time somebody calls for a
| unified language: "it's an integral part of our culture".
|
| I addressed this:
|
| > Everybody has their own local medicines, even traditional
| witch-doctor medicines, but at the same time everybody gets
| the exact same doxycycline and training on when to use it.
| Likewise whatever word we end up choosing for "fish" and
| "net": use whatever word you want in your village, but when
| you want the one that works in the rest of the world, we made
| sure you're already armed with it.
|
| Will this mean losing the diversity of cultures due to
| increased globalism? Yes.
|
| Now here comes my most unpopular opinion on HN:
|
| Good, let's lose some cultures.
|
| My culture isn't special. Human cultures aren't a scare
| resource and we make up new ones all the time. If the next
| generation, which enjoys the gift of a single unified
| baseline language, isn't interested in my culture anymore,
| that's fine. It might even be good news.
|
| When they need a culture like my culture again, they'll
| develop one, probably within years or months.
|
| Complex cultures pop into and out of existence on the
| internet every day, and they're no less complex and no less
| varied than the ones that involved worshipping tree spirits
| and eating each other's hearts for strength. Let dying
| cultures die.
| mrtranscendence wrote:
| > Complex cultures pop into and out of existence on the
| internet every day, and they're no less complex and no less
| varied
|
| It's astonishing to what degree that comparison misses the
| mark. No, "complex" cultures don't pop into and out of
| existence on the internet every day -- "gaming" culture or
| "sports" culture or "woke twitter" culture are not cultures
| in the same sense that people living an an area and
| speaking a common language develop a culture over time.
| They're not the same thing, and though you might compare
| them via metaphor they're so different as to make that
| metaphor misleading.
|
| Amusingly, I've seen this attitude in Esperanto circles.
| No, there's no "Esperanto" culture in the same sense that
| I'm culturally North American (for example).
|
| > When they need a culture like my culture again, they'll
| develop one, probably within years or months.
|
| Culture is not nearly as ephemeral as you're making it out.
| You can't just develop a culture out of nothing. My
| "culture" includes not just a common vocabulary but a
| shared history going back hundreds of years; it includes
| visual arts, literature, intertwined family histories, the
| dust bowl, jazz and rock and roll. You can't just find
| those popping into and out of existence on Discord or
| Facebook.
| yboris wrote:
| Language is a way of thought. Languages come with their own
| quirks, and just like [plant] monoculture is bad for an
| ecosystem, so would a single language. Since I was born in
| Russia and came to the US (thus becoming fluent in both
| languages), and especially after reading the book "Metaphors we
| live by" I see how language forces certain concepts on us.
| Having a variety of languages is a benefit, despite introducing
| problems.
|
| As of now, English has become the de-facto universal language:
| in many countries it's the #1 most-studied foreign language in
| schools. I don't see a problem with having English (or another
| language) be everyone's 2nd language for better global
| communication.
| ziotom78 wrote:
| I second this. Better having a 2nd language that is common
| for everybody than have just one language and only one way to
| express thoughts. I speak Italian (my mother tongue),
| English, Romanian and a bit of German, and I really enjoy
| when I discover subtle connections between words/sayings and
| the culture of the people using that language.
|
| (As an analogy, what if the world decides that only C++
| should be used to write programs and libraries?!? Boooring!)
| newsbinator wrote:
| > just one language and only one way to express thoughts.
|
| There's no reason any reasonable person would suggest this
| rileyphone wrote:
| The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis always catches me as something we
| should investigate more, but unfortunately it's mired in the
| broader conflict of cultural relativity, as I learned when my
| anthro professor tried to disprove it with a convoluted
| argument from an aboriginal tribes notion of direction. A
| diversity of languages means a diversity of thought, which
| maybe you could make the case for more multilingual teams
| from.
|
| English seems to suck as a language but it has risen to be
| the lingua franca of our present world system - how much of
| that is because British and American superpowerdom vs being a
| good lingua franca is up for debate.
| Sunspark wrote:
| It probably helps that it doesn't require one to memorize
| 10,000-20,000 individual characters and isn't a multi-tonal
| language so it also doesn't require excellent hearing
| discrimination.
| muststopmyths wrote:
| I'm sure you know that there is a reason your opinion is highly
| unpopular. Language doesn't just communicate fish and net.
|
| Poetry, songs and literature just do not seamlessly translate
| between languages very well. Nor should we lose the calligraphy
| of Japanese/Chinese/Arabic/Persian.
|
| Humanity would lose a lot if we all went to just one language
| and script.
|
| Sure, when all the rich people flee to Elysium or Mars, they
| will be better off with generations growing up together with a
| common language and script. Because the population will be
| small in comparison and they will be creating their own
| civilization.
|
| But until then, I'd like to keep the diversity right here on
| Earth.
| newsbinator wrote:
| > Poetry, songs and literature just do not seamlessly
| translate between languages very well. Nor should we lose the
| calligraphy of Japanese/Chinese/Arabic/Persian.
|
| We don't have to incinerate anything. There won't be a
| government commission you have to petition to be allowed to
| do Japanese calligraphy or read a poem in its original
| language.
| ksdale wrote:
| I mean, if you don't _force_ people to do it, then English
| is The One Language you 're talking about. People have
| basically collectively decided that if they're talking to
| someone halfway around the world, the words for net and
| fish are net and fish.
| paganel wrote:
| Of course not, but the language will get lost, with time.
| dorchadas wrote:
| This is already happening, at an ever increasing rate.
| It's likely that the majority of languages will be
| extinct by the end of the century.
| KineticLensman wrote:
| Implementing a new global language is akin to a standardization
| process. From my experience in standardization (several years
| supporting SISO [0]), standardization is a very expensive and
| time consuming activity, even when the participants can see
| obvious benefits. Creating a new global language - and then
| adopting it - would have a massive opportunity cost - that
| could be better spent in trying to deal with higher priority
| problems such as global heating.
|
| [0]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulation_Interoperability_St...
| gwbas1c wrote:
| That would be authoritarian.
|
| I think natural evolution will gradually move most people to
| adopt either a single global language, or there will only be a
| few global languages. As English speakers, you and I can travel
| to most parts of the world without knowing the local language,
| because English is so pervasive. Will the "global language" be
| English? Who knows!
|
| > Sure, languages evolve and you can't fight that, but with a
| global internet and a concerted effort to finally solve the
| Tower of Babel problem, languages can evolve everywhere at once
| into a single global language that every child gets brought up
| speaking.
|
| I always find it fascinating to see different dialects of
| English. The way that Americans will say "Please ..." and
| Indians say "Kindly ..." always makes me chuckle.
| kragen wrote:
| Schleyer's project of an international auxiliary language (and
| then later Zamenhof's, with Esperanto, and Hogben's with
| Interlingua) is indeed very worthwhile. It seems to have run
| into some political resistance, though.
| [deleted]
| BuckRogers wrote:
| The problem with the idea as I see it, is that it'll just
| tribalize again. You'd need to ensure that requirements are in
| place for learning and maintaining the chosen language, and
| prevent substantial evolution within it by any group of people.
| It's better for something like this to be a 2nd language, which
| is already in place for the world in English. The easy to learn
| and write part is mostly there, but getting someone out of the
| dark ages relies on them learning English. The real problem
| with maintaining language interop is that you have to practice
| it. It's infeasible to foist a new language onto the entire
| world, or choose one, rather than work with what we have. Money
| and knowledge are the only real motivators and English has it.
| Just as French did before, and Latin before that. Spanish,
| Chinese and Hindi probably also have a secure existence and
| always will. The rest are at risk of dwindling numbers and then
| extinction. So your wish has been coming true over time.
| SuoDuanDao wrote:
| That is very much the sentiment behind the Esperanto movement.
| Though that was proposed as a standardized second language, to
| be learned alongside whatever local languages were already
| being learned by the local population.
|
| The Esperanto crowd is a cool community, but uptake has been
| much slower than would be necessary for it to have the desired
| effectiveness.
| tgv wrote:
| What would that solve? Do large societies with a common
| language do so much better than those with multiple languages?
|
| > South Korean Hangul
|
| The Roman alphabet is just as simple, and much wider spread.
| English is a perfectly simple, easy to learn language with
| great expressive power. So shall we settle on English as the
| New World Language? Thought so.
| 725686 wrote:
| "English is a perfectly simple, easy to learn language"
|
| What? English writing and pronunciation are atrocious. There
| are more exceptions than rules. I thought it was a pretty
| well known fact. There are languages where you can perfectly
| pronounce the words even if you don't have the slightest idea
| of what you are reading.
| alvarlagerlof wrote:
| English isn't simple at all.
| newsbinator wrote:
| That's like comparing learning to drive a car with learning
| to drive a 747.
|
| No, English isn't a perfectly simple, easy to learn writing
| system. It's among the hardest writing systems to learn.
|
| Which is why we have a ridiculous game called "Spelling
| Bees", which can't exist in a language that's easy to write
| in. In Korea nobody's impressed when an 8-year-old can spell
| a complex-sounding word they've never heard before and don't
| know the meaning of: they _should_ be able to spell it.
|
| http://chateauview.com/pronunciation/
|
| > Dearest creature in creation Studying English
| pronunciation, I will teach you in my verse Sounds like
| corpse, corps, horse and worse.
|
| > I will keep you, Susy, busy, Make your head with heat grow
| dizzy; Tear in eye, your dress you'll tear; Queer, fair seer,
| hear my prayer.
|
| > Pray, console your loving poet, Make my coat look new,
| dear, sew it! Just compare heart, hear and heard, Dies and
| diet, lord and word.
| BuckRogers wrote:
| >No, English isn't a perfectly simple, easy to learn
| writing system. It's among the hardest writing systems to
| learn.
|
| I can't accept this after decades of hearing 2nd language
| speakers attempt to trivialize my native language as
| "easy".
|
| With half the world telling me "English is easy", then it's
| now on them to learn the easy language. No excuses. Get to
| learning.
|
| Most of your examples don't really become big issues day to
| day either. They may never become lawyers using English,
| but they'll maintain just about any other career including
| a medical doctor.
| tgv wrote:
| You said writing system, nothing about phonetic
| correspondence. But then I'll simply replace English by
| Spanish. There's of course the silent h which throws a
| spanner in the works sometimes, and there's the v/b
| overlap, but extremely easy to pronounce straight from the
| text, even without understanding. And with 27 letters that
| don't combine with others into groups, a lot easier to
| learn than Hangul.
|
| Or Inglish with a speling riform? Det shood bi sooparizi
| too lurn es wel. End yoo get ol da books end moovis for
| fri.
|
| Anyway, you haven't replied why you think it's
| advantageous. All that trouble just to avoid translating
| here or there, or learning multiple languages? What makes
| you believe that speaking the same language makes a better
| place?
| CapitalistCartr wrote:
| When my Romanian friend came to the United States he was
| shocked to discover we have have spelling bees. In Romanian
| it would make no sense; the spelling of a word is usually
| obvious from saying it. Then there's English. We prefer to
| merge multiple languages together in the most confusing
| way.
|
| "The problem with defending the purity of the English
| language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse
| whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has
| pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them
| unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary."
| --James D. Nicoll
| velcrovan wrote:
| > No-one in their right mind would create [...] society
|
| Right. Because societies are emergent things that arise from
| masses of people, not products of an individual's design
| preferences.
|
| That's not to say that we might not eventually get to one
| language. But it won't be because of illiterate* ideals
| expressed through technocratic meddling.
|
| (* -- "Illiterate" in its original sense: https://www.ribbonfar
| m.com/2012/05/03/rediscovering-)literac...)
| newsbinator wrote:
| What's the difference between the technocratic meddling of
| getting everybody to stop spreading AIDS and the technocratic
| meddling of getting everybody to start speaking the same
| language?
|
| We build consensus, we devote dollars and person-hours, and
| we try to figure out how to get closer to a desired end
| state. We do it all the time. But when it's giving a
| generation of people plumbing that's monumental human
| progress and when it's giving a generation of people a lingua
| franca that's illiterate technocratic meddling.
| rileyphone wrote:
| The consequences can be disastrous, like Mao's great leap
| forward. In any case, English is naturally taking the place
| of the world language.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| Is this an unpopular opinion? I think that languages are
| beautiful and culture should be studied and respected--but yes,
| of _course_ the world would be more efficient if we had a
| single universal language. (And preferably not English, since
| English is horrible.) There's a reason the Tower of Babel story
| depicts languages as a punishment from God.
|
| The problem is that it's ultimately a purely academic debate,
| for somewhat similar reasons to why QWERTY vs DVORAK
| discussions never lead anywhere. I have spent my entire life
| practicing reading and writing in english. I have zero interest
| in all that away to switch to an entirely new language, much
| less one that none of the people around me speak. You're just
| never going to develop a movement around this in a free
| society, so there's no point.
| mrtranscendence wrote:
| > English is horrible.
|
| English isn't substantially worse than any other natural
| language, except insofar that it is attached to a very
| inconsistent system of spelling. That's somewhat orthogonal
| to English as a language, though, and indeed it could be
| written with any imagined writing system (e.g. quickscript).
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| I'm not well-versed in any foreign languages, but the
| little I know of Spanish grammar seems to be a lot more
| consistent than english. (There are footguns, there just
| seem to be fewer.)
|
| And since we're talking about ideals, I don't see any
| reason to limit ourselves to natural languages! I am quite
| certain you could design a language which is much easier to
| learn and no less expressive.
| danjac wrote:
| The world decided on English. It wouldn't be my first choice -
| even as a native speaker - but history and inertia has decided
| on this obscure Norman French/Anglo-Saxon island pidgin and
| we're kind of stuck with it until the Chinese century runs its
| course and we're dealing with pictograms and tonal differences.
| kaesar14 wrote:
| Until Chinese romanizes it will never be a lingua franca.
| Simply far too hard to learn the written word, Simplified or
| not.
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