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Minority Languages
Starcross
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The language I'll be using in all my examples in this post is scottish gaelic, purely because it's the minority language i'm most familiar with.
Scottish Gaelic is clearly in a decline. Reasons for this are numerous, in the past anti-Gaelic policies were to blame, nowadays a lack of Gaelic media and the fact that most Gaelic speakers are forced to speak English most of the time because of the lack of speakers are contributing to its decline. An act was passed in 2005 making Gaelic an official language of the Scottish parliament and preparing guidance on Gaelic language education, but I see this as at best slowing rather than stopping the death of the language.
Languages in a position like Gaelic are becoming endangered around the world. Do you think that these languages should be saved and if so how? Does anyone in D&D speak a minority language (and want to show off by writing in it)?
I'm in two minds about this, while i accept that these languages are important parts of their nations culture I can't help but feel a lot of them are doomed to sort of fade away and I'm unsure whether a program of Gaelic education is a good idea (I think that language education in Britain is appalling and can't help but feel that if we're going to start teaching kids a language from a young age it should be something useful like French or German).
Scottish Gaelic is clearly in a decline. Reasons for this are numerous, in the past anti-Gaelic policies were to blame, nowadays a lack of Gaelic media and the fact that most Gaelic speakers are forced to speak English most of the time because of the lack of speakers are contributing to its decline. An act was passed in 2005 making Gaelic an official language of the Scottish parliament and preparing guidance on Gaelic language education, but I see this as at best slowing rather than stopping the death of the language.
Languages in a position like Gaelic are becoming endangered around the world. Do you think that these languages should be saved and if so how? Does anyone in D&D speak a minority language (and want to show off by writing in it)?
I'm in two minds about this, while i accept that these languages are important parts of their nations culture I can't help but feel a lot of them are doomed to sort of fade away and I'm unsure whether a program of Gaelic education is a good idea (I think that language education in Britain is appalling and can't help but feel that if we're going to start teaching kids a language from a young age it should be something useful like French or German).
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But then again, tradition in general has never made any goddamn sense to me. So I can't speak for those who actually care about it.
So as to why preserve such a language - well there could be all sorts of justifications - like national pride, or placing value on something that is not "useful" etc. But one I kind of like is that in many cases the local languages were actively repressed or at least seriously discouraged by government/ the establishment in previous eras, so for a government now to invest serious money in such a project is kind of neat - paying for one's past sins almost
I'm of two minds as well about the subject. On one hand I feel that being able to universally communicate is important and might help people understand each other better. Although using an existing popular language such as Chinese, Spanish, Arabic, or English might be easier, it probably would be best to develop a completely new "Universal," so that way no one society or culture is favored over others. It would take a massive effort for not only a new language to be developed, but agreed upon and then taught across the globe. It's hard enough getting allied countries to agree on certain things, how could we expect to get the world to learn a new language?
On the other side I think it's important for people to maintain culture and history that they or their ancestors have experienced. Losing a native language can be one of the biggest nails in the coffin for a culture.
In an ideal world we would have a universal language, and then everyone have their native tongue as well. That way we could continue to cultivate interesting diversities, and at the same time communicate effectively. The likelyhood of this scenario, or even developing a universal language is probably effectively nil, though.
That said, as the OP noted, saving a language that one cannot commonly use is all but hopeless. When it comes to language, if you don't use it, you lose it. A few years of schooling in that language and an annual award for the best author won't change a damn thing. The only real way of saving a language is to go all in - I'm talking media, schools, even local government entirely in that language.
Case in point: from what I read, the only language to ever be successfully taken back from the brink of extinction is Hebrew. How? Israel. In 1948, they created a new nation whose official language was Hebrew. Schools, government, media, newspaper, everything. And it was populated by Jewish immigrants from all over the world, all speaking different languages, which thus created a strong social pressure for everyone to adopt a common language (Hebrew, obviously) rather than keep speaking the language of their previous home countries.
It's happening right now. There will always be variations, but as the world gets more and more interconnected, speaking the same language becomes more valuable.
I guess I mean a new language, but I could very well be wrong on the whole thing. The pool of languages is getting smaller, certainly though.
While teaching methods in schools are sub-par, I don't think a language has to be compulsory to be offered at a school. At least around here we get offered the choice of a few (major) languages and get to pick one to fill our 2 year requirement for high school. Done in such a way, I think the problem isn't really in teaching a minority language but the way we view language in school generally.
Translation isn't anywhere near that simple. There's a whole layer of expression that's basically irretrievably lost (it isn't necessarily, but it requires a huge body of work and a lot of careful study to reconstruct) when you're working with a dead language. Translation doesn't work if you just go word by word and substitute.
Hell, babelfish is the perfect example of this. It does literal substitution based on a dictionary, and when was the last time it produced anything comprehensible.
That's... actually a whole lot better than it used to be. Technology is neat! And so are obscure languages. I've always wanted to learn Gaelic - I'm half Scot on my father's side, and it just sounds lovely. But seven years of grade school and high school French was barely enough to teach me how to say "Look, there is a kitty!", so I think mastering the old mother tongue will be a bit beyond my means.
This also runs into the problem of languages which have no written system, in that simply recording them may run the risk of capturing the language correctly.
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It'd be a damn shame if we let any language completely die just because English is so popular.
But as for their teaching to new people, I don't know about that. If the culture wants it, it will happen. But if they die a natural death, all you can reasonably do is catalogue them.
There is no language with pre-existing terms for quantum physics concepts that were discovered last week. You can either create a new word for them or assign a new meaning to an existing words (see: strings). Both these solutions have problems: new scientific words are typically made from foreign (most often Greek) roots and further bastardize the tongue, while adding more and more definitions to words adds to confusion.
On top of that, as cultures become more and more interconnected, foreign concepts or objects are introduced into English (and every other tongue) for which there is no valid word. Hence, foreign words are necessarily introduced alongside. Think of "sushi", "gelato", "poutine", all words that were introduced into languages worldwide because there were no equivalents. Necessary bastardization.
I was talking about psychology, but I see your point with physics.
Seriously, the scientific study of human mental behavior should not use english. It's just, terrible. Terrible language to be using. You have to define so many terms, so many normal everyday words are just unusable, at all.
And then you go to describe it to people outside of psychology and they don't get it, because English is terrible.
And I, in turn, am acknowledging this example as a true and valid concept and pointing out that psychology in particular is suffering because of English, in particular. In ways that the other sciences are not.
How would other languages spoke by populations be diffrent in this regard?
considering the psychology is frequently clinical, how could this ever be avoided?
I dunno, actually.
That's a very good question I think you've made me run headlong into a bias I have which I can't answer.
Let me go away and think about it. I retract my statements for now.
edit: Btw thanks for pointing that out I would never have realised!
You also Richy.
The Japanese colonized Korea and basically tried to wipe out Korean culture entirely. They banned Korean being taught in schools and corrupted Korean media and culture to venerate the Japanese instead. Everything was to be in Japanese.
The grandparents of children today know Japanese from their childhood because it was what they were taught in school. People had to teach their children Korean in underground schools under fear of DEATH to keep their culture alive. After the Japanese were kicked out of Korea (Post-WWII), Korean culture worked hard to restore itself and Korean literacy rates are at 98%.
...
This is the downside of not trying to save a language. Destruction of culture.
I live in a culture where I speak the minority language (English), but teach it to people who speak the majority language (Korean), because their language is a minority in the world. Most Koreans view this practically, by saying that while their language is Korean, the world's language of travel and business is English, so to do better in the world they need to learn English as well as Korean.
By learning English to make their country strong economically can they save Korean, and thus their culture from outside forces. If you don't learn a language voluntarily, you can be made to learn one by force, which is far more destructive.
Personally, learning a native language in parallel to the dominate one you might interact with is better in almost every circumstance I can think of. It allows you to hold onto the bonds of a culture, preserve diversity of thought, and allows you to better describe the world. The lost of language is the loss of a way to express someone's ideas of the world accurately to others, and should always be treated with regret and loss.
Most people don't have the experience of living in a culture where their language isn't dominant. I can get by with English in Korea, even if it isn't dominant, because it's taught in school and is EVERYWHERE in the world. English words bastardized into Korean are all over the place. People from small tribal regions, or immigrants don't always have that luxury.
I couldn't imagine watching the language I speak disappear around me and see it as "an evolution of culture". It's the death of culture. People need to save languages and pass on their beliefs to future generations and language is critical to that. You can't understand the past without culture and language playing a part of that understanding. Knowing history helps us in the future.
There are downsides to the world speaking the same language that people don't seem to grasp. Being able to order a hamburger at McDonalds in any country of the world isn't good. I'm not saying that people shouldn't be taught what they need to know to survive in the world. That's how I make my living, but the death of regionalism means a lack of variety. Variety is a good thing, IMO.
Preserving it for its own sake is dumb. I don't ever mourn the dearth of koine Greek speakers (or the dearth of devotees of Athena).
Just make sure to preserve knowledge of the language so we can recunstruct and translate texts.
Actually, Hebrew was running pretty strong at that time, to the point that some Sephardim are STILL bitching about how Israeli Hebrew is too close to the Ashkenazi/Yiddish model, rather than the Sephardic or originalist models.
Same. I'm one of the least sentimental people around, things have to be justified to me on their own merits, not just because it's traditional. If it seems to me that keeping some of these brain-dead languages on life support is holding back future progress, I'll be the first to pull the plug. Having ties to the past is fine, but when the past becomes an anchor sometimes you gotta move on.
How many hundreds of languages are there out there with only 5,000 or less primary speakers? What good does it do the world to have them creating their arts and works in a form that 99.999999% of the world can't understand?
I kind of see that as a window into a different way of thinking. Languages reflect differences in culture and the way in which those cultures see and interact with their world.
Because that's up to the people making the arts and works in dying languages to decide?
Personally I don't think there should be a herculean effort especially by non-related cultures, but there's nothing wrong with cataloging smaller cultures if for no reasons other than it's interesting and apart of the human story.
Kay. We should help them learn one of the major languages so they can get around outside their small tribal areas. If they don't want to, then hey, that's their option. Maybe someone will decide they're worth talking to and learn their language and help them out.
You can understand the past without speaking the language. I can open up Wikipedia and learn about Greece right now. This isn't to say it doesn't help. It definitely does help. For people that want to bother to learn a whole other language in order to study historical texts in that language. But stop going on about people abandoning language they don't use anymore as if it's the worst thing in the world. It happens all the time. It's language. It's supposed to do that. It's why we don't sound anything like we did a thousand, five hundred, a hundred years ago. Yes, it sucks that history of Gaelic texts won't be quite as good, but that's no reason to force others to learn it.
No, it really doesn't. Having a single language everyone can understand would do pretty much fuck all to variety. It might, might lessen it. But it's not the end of the world. In fact, it's the start of a better one since a spectacular number of conflicts could be avoided if people actually understood each other.
And stop acting as if every aspect of globalization is bad. There are good things to it too. A McDonald's in every place? Not so much. Increased ease of distribution of medicine because people can read the directions? Pretty fucking good.
They problem is that the best time to learn a second language is far ahead of when stuff like that should be left to a person's own devices.
Of course, I also think that Gargantua was on to something., so maybe it's just me.
I'm not saying it's impossible to learn another language after say, 25.
But it's both hard, and I will, happily and without fear of being wrong, state that it's impossible to learn it perfectly (ie no accent, as a native) unless you are an exceptional human being.
So sorry mate but it's not as easy as that.
And I'm all for people learning another language, particularly major ones. But I'm not going to lament the loss of Gaelic speakers because no one uses it ever.
Because it is quite literally impossible to master a language if you start after puberty, and how many prepubescent kids do you know who would attend an optional class?
As for why they should learn a language, there have been all sorts of documented benefits.
Cool. Teach them Spanish. Don't teach them a dying, near useless language only good for reading historical texts.
No, I'm not picking a side.
Although I will, from a neutral position, comment that Latin is also a language that isn't possible to master anymore.
It's almost incalcuable how much meaning is lost from any given document, or to really tell if we've translated it correctly, because of that.
Even the tiniest dialect inflection could skew a given sentence.
But I'm not saying Skalfin's way is the only way. I'm just not in agreement of dismissing a piece of information, not for sentimental reasons, but because it's a human frailty to want to make sure and clear decisions about things that don't have a sure and clear solution.
Oh and Scalfin's statement about puberty is wrong, it's more like after 25-30. And every person differs.
Actually, dead Gaelic has an added value of being an ancestor of English, which makes it very useful for using both languages.
You might have serviceable use, but you haven't mastered it until you've internalized it, which quite a bit of study has shown you won't be able to do. Hell, you can't even hear the difference between unfamiliar morphemes after around age seven, if memory serves.