Old 06-26-2012, 03:51 AM   #1
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Default Endangered Languages Project

So on google today they have a link to this http://www.endangeredlanguages.com/
Basically, they're trying to record, preserve, and teach various endangered languages.

Now, I understand the historical, cultural, anthropological value in making records and general data-gathering and storage. But I disagree with some of their goals -- namely, I don't see the extinction of languages as a bad thing, and I don't think people should spend time trying to learn languages that, IMO, have very little value.

Many of their claims seem truth-stretching to me. For example, they claim the loss of such languages causes great loss of scientific knowledge. But if such cultures were such powerhouses of scientific knowledge, surely they would have already contributed this to the greater scientific world at large, and at the very least would have vast archives of scientific literature in said languages; but if that were the case, I hardly think they would be endangered as there would be a great interest in those languages in at least the scientific communities.

They also compare the loss of languages to the loss of entire species. Come on. Really? Really!?

Also, there are already far too many languages as there are. If the languages we are losing are ones which don't have a written system (or, if they do, very few written works), were never widely used to begin with, did not contribute much to the greater world at large in any meaningful way, then I think it's good if they go. It is unfortunate for the remaining speakers, but a language which has outlived its usefulness does not need to be propagated "just because" IMO.

I'd love to hear reasoning which differs from mine. Give me good reasons why dying languages with little value outside of their tiny places in space/time should be actively, livingly preserved rather than merely recorded for posterity. I say let them die out, but do collect historical and cultural data before they do.
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Old 06-26-2012, 03:59 AM   #2
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Default Re: Endangered Languages Project

In the Age of Information, the preservation of knowledge is incredibly rife; wayback machine, anyone? That being said, it does seem a little overzealous and has that "white man's burden" vibe to it. I agree about the "historical, cultural, anthropological value" these languages would provide, but otherwise they're just falling into another trendy intellectual vibe that'll pass like how doomsday prophecies became popular after the release of the movie 2012.

In short, good for historical purposes, but nothing else other than something to take a fancy too, which sounds as offensive as Black History Month.
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Old 06-26-2012, 04:24 AM   #3
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Default Re: Endangered Languages Project

Perhaps it is difficult to envision or recall a rarely spoken language without at least someone speaking it. I would imagine it to be difficult to record-keep a dying language without knowing how to actively speak it.
It's more than just writing "how to say this and that" in a book. Can you imagine trying to record how to pronounce every sort of intonation in, say, Chinese if it died out? What about exceptions and similar-sounding words with completely different meanings? Even if actively speaking a language for preservation purposes isn't necessary, I'm sure preservation would be a lot more manageable that way.

Maybe you disagree with some of this project's goals because your views are strictly utilitarian. I would not disagree with the fact that losing a language is like losing a biological species. Beyond sentimentalism, I'm sure there are other uses, such as tracking and tracing the evolution of past languages to modern ones, as well as the sociological implications from those patterns. Perhaps a past language may have implied certain behaviors in society that have slowly changed to the present. There's a lot to be discovered about our mannerisms in slang and colloquialism for instance.

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Old 06-26-2012, 04:54 AM   #4
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Default Re: Endangered Languages Project

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Perhaps it is difficult to envision or recall a rarely spoken language without at least someone speaking it. I would imagine it to be difficult to record-keep a dying language without knowing how to actively speak it.
It's more than just writing "how to say this and that" in a book. Can you imagine trying to record how to pronounce every sort of intonation in, say, Chinese if it died out? What about exceptions and similar-sounding words with completely different meanings? Even if actively speaking a language for preservation purposes isn't necessary, I'm sure preservation would be a lot more manageable that way.

Maybe you disagree with some of this project's goals because your views are strictly utilitarian. I would not disagree with the fact that losing a language is like losing a biological species. Beyond sentimentalism, I'm sure there are other uses, such as tracking and tracing the evolution of past languages to modern ones, as well as the sociological implications from those patterns. Perhaps a past language may have implied certain behaviors in society that have slowly changed to the present. There's a lot to be discovered about our mannerisms in slang and colloquialism for instance.
I agree. You never know when we're going to discover some sort of archive of writings or something like that which could benefit science or history or something. And if you don't have active speakers of the language, then you can't really understand the language. Anyone can run Google Translate, but that doesn't mean you can read a historical document in said language. You can get the gist of something, but if people don't actively speak the language, you are losing a lot.

That said, I also think the effort expended vs. rewards might not be worth it. Then again, if a project is meaningful for people, that might be enough of a reward itself. Personally, I would never get into this sort of thing, but more power to the people who do.
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Old 06-26-2012, 05:03 AM   #5
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Default Re: Endangered Languages Project

ehhh either way it's no big deal. They surely have a way to keep all the languages recorded and spoken, if the information is there and we need it one day then that's fine, we will have it. Learning a language just because the human side of it is losing it's touch doesn't make sense to me. I strongly agree with OP on many things and couldn't have said things better. I am also terrible at this subject as I only know one language myself, but I do feel like there isn't a way to really get people to learn languages that really aren't that interesting or especially useful. Just keep everything recorded and let the world keep on spinning. I'm sure it's more complicated as you are all showing very interesting points in your discussion. Overall though we are already advancing at phenomenal rates. With the computer revolution, being just ONE of the revolutions that is blasting our synergy through the roof, I'm sure it will be easier then ever to desipher and figure out the meaning of these endangered languages. Just because something has been around for so long doesn't mean it should be treated special either. We have many failed laws and the us government is a piece of work if you ask me, but many people go with the old "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" kind of attitude and justify it with BS, well I say lets make some progress!
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Old 06-26-2012, 05:10 AM   #6
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Default Re: Endangered Languages Project

Sounds like the argument here is solely "is it useful or not?". You can treat any object in a museum with the same sort of indifference, so I find this debate rather pointless. We've come to accept presevations of the past in museums, so why can't you just leave this group be. People have their reasons, and whether they're utilitarian enough for you to care, whatever. Good for them.
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Old 06-26-2012, 05:33 AM   #7
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Default Re: Endangered Languages Project

It's probably just the format of said object d'art that's getting people in a tizzy. Or the first post swaying the discussion into a discussion.

Before I get too meta, I'll just agree to preserving the languages as a form of preservation.
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Old 06-26-2012, 06:37 AM   #8
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Default Re: Endangered Languages Project

Well there are many languages which have produced much of value. None of those languages are in any sort of danger because there will always be people who learn or study them either to interact with native speakers (of which there are usually many), or to read important historical texts from the language (for example, Latin) and are well-documented.

If a language has not produced much in the way of writing or contributed much to the outside world, I don't see much use in actively preserving it beyond the last few speakers.

So, yes, my view is highly utilitarian.

Data preservation, however, is important from a cultural, historical, and archaeological standpoint. So, yes, it is important that they record native speakers, get videos, audio, and any writing archived that they can. What I don't think is important is to actively recruit new speakers into dying languages. Archive, and move on.

--Edit--
Also, in my view, I treat language as useful only in terms of expressiveness and data, or quality and quantity. More expressive languages which have large amounts of recorded texts tend to fare much better than the rest. An expressive language which didn't have a writing system would be an unfortunate occurrence, but if there are no preserved writings and few remaining speakers, what good is it?

I treat it as a kind of natural evolution of language. And as with biological evolution, less "fit" languages will die off. And this being the natural order of things and not a bad thing.
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Old 06-26-2012, 07:08 AM   #9
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Default Re: Endangered Languages Project

The thing is, you don't know whether we have found all of the existing texts of a given language. Just because we have translated every extant text doesn't mean we can't find more later, and who knows what possible value those texts could have for social sciences? While they may not be useful for active communication, languages can be useful for other reasons.

Like I said before, I wouldn't contribute to a project like this, but it's certainly not useless. Is it worth preserving every language? Maybe not. But could it possibly be worth preserving [insert language here]? Maybe. Some people would rather err on the side of preserving something rather than let it die out.
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Old 06-26-2012, 02:49 PM   #10
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Default Re: Endangered Languages Project

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Sounds like the argument here is solely "is it useful or not?". You can treat any object in a museum with the same sort of indifference, so I find this debate rather pointless. We've come to accept presevations of the past in museums, so why can't you just leave this group be. People have their reasons, and whether they're utilitarian enough for you to care, whatever. Good for them.
Wow this is really eloquently said.
I don't find it worthwhile, but more power to the people who do- I'm not going to judge their idea of an interesting project so long as they aren't getting in my way (which they clearly aren't)
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Old 06-29-2012, 12:46 AM   #11
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Default Re: Endangered Languages Project

I'm not saying anything against the people who are putting effort into this. I just think it is a bit futile is all.

Languages will come and go. More power to anyone who wishes to learn some of these endangered languages, but I just don't see how that's going to do a lot of good. Even a few more people learning and actively using some particular language(s) -- will just result in delaying the inevitable a bit.

Surely there won't be just flocks of people to any one of these endangered languages, so you effectively increase the number of speakers a small amount, just delaying their eventual demise a bit is all. You can't stop it.

I think unless someone has a very specific interest, they'd do better to learn some of the other, more globally-useful, languages first. Once you're fluent in about 40 of those, then perhaps give this a shot, but don't think one more speaker of a dying language will do a lot to stop its demise.
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Old 06-29-2012, 01:29 AM   #12
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Default Re: Endangered Languages Project

I think you're missing the point of the project. The usefulness from this sort of project doesn't regard so much the need for people to constantly keep rarely-spoken languages alive for future generations to speak. The project has more scientific value in tracking down past human migration, social activity, psychology and behavior. Having a number of people actively speak these endangered languages is part of the necessity of preservation in order to make possible these migrational or social studies.

So in essence, forget about the argument regarding which languages are useful in today's global economy. The purpose of keeping endangered languages alive is for facilitating scientific studies in various aspects of human nature.

If I may go back to your first post, maybe you can now see how a loss of an endangered language is indeed a great loss to scientific knowledge - no less of a loss than a biological species. It goes beyond the usefulness of the present. You can say they're markers of the past. Scientists always value that.

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Old 07-1-2012, 01:02 AM   #13
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Default Re: Endangered Languages Project

"If a language has not produced much in the way of writing or contributed much to the outside world, I don't see much use in actively preserving it beyond the last few speakers."

So...the only things worthwhile are popular?

This thing is called the language project, but their little blurb really says that they're trying to keep a culture alive, not just a language. There's a lot of things that individual cultures may know that are worthwhile that our western society doesn't know. Heck there's probably cancer curing plants or something that some culture knows about somewhere that, if their society becomes westernized, will result in no one knowing about them anymore.

All those people saying that the internet is alive and well as if to say that it has everything on it already. I'm sure the most endangered languages are ones in third world areas where computers and the internet are far from. The way back machine isn't much of a comparison...that preserves only a couple of decades of information! To compare that to a culture that stems from thousands of years ago is very small minded. Besides which, saying that the internet has all the information is dumb for another reason...how do you think the internet gets all its information? What about people who go around making wikipedia entries for random crap you don't care about? Is that fine because it's using wikipedia, or is it bad because you don't care?

All that said, the site doesn't seem to have a whole lot of information on it...
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Old 07-1-2012, 02:19 PM   #14
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Default Re: Endangered Languages Project

I'm not saying something is worthwhile only if it is popular. Where did you get that idea from?

And, yes, it is possible to lose valuable information by the loss of languages. What I am saying is I don't think the effort-to-reward ratio is high enough to make this worthwhile.

Many of these languages would be from various undeveloped (in the sense of a developed nation, technologically & scientifically advanced, etc...) people in small tribal groups. While they may have some valuable knowledge we don't have (for example, medical plants, etc...), I don't think they would have volumes and volumes of such knowledge (elsewise they'd have a sizeable literary archive and would be unlikely to be endangered -- most of these have few or no writings)

What I am saying is I don't think the effort expended is worth the gains. Spend a reasonable amount of resources cataloging and recording what you can, and then move on. There is no possible way to save these cultures from extinction. It wasn't possible in the past and it isn't possible now.

So by all means, if someone wants to work on this, more power to them. In fact, part of the reason I made this thread was in case someone did want to contribute or find more information, BAM, there you have it. And I don't expect everyone to have my views.
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Old 07-4-2012, 02:09 PM   #15
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Default Re: Endangered Languages Project

I got the idea from what I quoted immediately prior. Replace 'contributed to the outside world' with 'popular', and then take that same argument to anything else.
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