Google Launches Endangered Languages Project 194
redletterdave writes "About half of all of the languages in the world — more than 3,000 of them — are currently on the verge of extinction. Google hopes to stem the tide with its latest effort that launched Thursday, called The Endangered Languages Project. Google teamed up with the Alliance for Linguistic Diversity, a newly formed coalition of global language groups and associations, to give endangered-language speakers and their supporters a place to upload and share their research and collaborations. The site currently features posts submitted by the Endangered Languages community, including linguistic fieldwork, projects, audio interviews, and transcriptions."
Re:why in the hell (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Hm... (Score:5, Informative)
As a linguist myself (working with a few different revitalization projects), you can think about linguistic diversity as being like biodiversity: Examining the differences across many different, unrelated (or nearly so) languages gives better insight into Language (with a capital L) on the whole. Sure, losing an individual language doesn't destroy everything, but each language that's lost is one less (incredibly rich) datapoint which can be used to better understand how people do language, and what other ways things can be done.
For instance, in Wichita, a language which may or may not be dead based on the health of its last few speakers, one could express "the buffalo ran up and down the village several times while scaring people" using a single, very long, very complex word. There are other languages which act like this ("polysynthetic languages"), but Wichita is really, frighteningly good at it. Don't you think that it'd be fascinating to do some MRI studies to see how Wichita people are parsing words, compared to speakers of, say, Mandarin Chinese, which isolate nearly every concept, grammatical or otherwise, into single words?
In addition, as other people have pointed out, when you lose the language, you lose the culture very easily (and vice versa). Even if you're not interested in the specifics of how language works in the mind (or just in general), understanding different cultural approaches to the world provides more information on the human condition. If your culture doesn't permit or believe in the idea of "selling land", that's interesting data, and food for thought for most other cultures.
In short, practically, in terms of trade or war or politics, there's little reason to have a group of 50,000 people speaking three languages rather than one. But if you're interested in how human language, culture, and cognition works, that diversity and those comparisons offer data that a homogenous group would not.
Re:why in the hell (Score:4, Informative)
I'm genuinely curious; why do you consider English to be the Windows 95 of languages?
Its spelling is horribly mismatched with pronunciation, and its morphology has a lot of irregularities (e.g. irregular verbs).
I don't think the world should standardize on any existing natural language; a constructed one would be a better fit. But so long as we stick to natural languages, I'd much prefer, say, German over English (but then of course I'm also biased in favor of Indo-European group).
Of course, in practice, the only way the world might standardize on a single language is by a process similar to Pax Romana. Today, that's Pax Americana, so that language is English, unfortunately. I sure hope Chinese are not going to be the next to run the world, because their writing system is so crappy English looks like Esperanto in comparison.
Re:why in the hell (Score:5, Informative)
English is the exact opposite of "orthogonal". Nothing makes sense.
Let's just look at the rules for taking a singular noun, and making it plural (paraphrased from Wikipedia's article):
1. If the noun ends in a sibilant consonant sound, suffix -es
1a. unless it ended with a silent E, in which case merely suffix an -s and pronounce the E
2. If it ends with a non-sibilant unvoiced consonant, suffix -s
3. For all others, suffix -s, but pronounce it as -z
3a. Unless it ended with -o, in which case suffix -es and pronounce as an S (provided it is not a loanword from Italian)
3b. Unless it ended with -y, in which case replace with -ies (but ONLY if there is not a vowel before the Y)
3c. Unless the last consonant was an unvoiced fricative, in which case replace with a voiced fricative. Whether or not you should change the spelling varies by word
3d. Unless it is one of the special words that do not change at all between singular and plural
3e. Unless it is one of several Old English words that are suffixed with -en, often changing other parts (ie. brother -> brethren)
3f. Unless it is one of several other Old English words that change certain vowels (ie. foot -> feet)
3g. Unless it is derived from Latin and ends in -a, in which case follow the Latin rules and replace with -ae
3h. Unless it is derived from Latin and ends in -us, in which case follow the Latin rules and replace with -i
3i. Unless it is derived from Latin and ends in -um, in which case follow the Latin rules and replace with -a
3j. Unless it is derived from Latin and ends in -[i|e]x, in which case follow the Latin rules and replace with -ices
3k: Unless it is derived from Greek and ends in -on, in which case follow the Greek rules and replace with -a
3l: Unless it is one of certain words from Hebrew, in which case suffix -im or -ot as appropriate
3m: Unless it is one of other certain exceptions that occur for only one or two words.
Got it?
Now try to list every possible way to pronounce "gh" in a word. You *will* miss some.
Now realize that you have to learn the entire nominative/accusative system common to European languages *just* for a handful of pronouns (see: I vs. Me, We vs. Us). At least in most languages that do that, it applies everywhere.
Yeah, English follows the philosophy of "rules are meant to be broken". *Every* rule has at least one exception. Like how adjectives normally come before the noun, except in weird structures like "notary public".
There's even more things. You know that "th" sound (or rather, sounds, because there's actually two distinct ways to pronounce it)? Yeah, that's pretty much one of the rarest phonemes on the planet. It's in English, Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, Spanish, Swahili, and *nothing* else of note (no, Arapaho is not notable). That's why so many foreigners can't pronounce "th" properly - it doesn't exist in their language.
My vote for lingua franca? Esperanto. That's literally what it was designed for.
It's very orthogonal - that massive list at the start of "how to convert a noun from singular to plural" is just one rule: add a -j. That's it. Auto becomes autoj. Kapo becomes kapoj. Letters are pronounced only one way.
It's not perfectly culture-neutral, but it at least makes a significant effort. It's already widely-spoken enough to have an "installed base", unlike most other invented languages (I'm looking at you, Lojban!)
And it's Indo-european enough that anyone who knows English, German, French, Russian, or any of those other related languages, will be able to sort-of understand you. Not perfectly, not even half the full meaning will get through, but if I say "mia komputilo estas rompita", you should be able to guess at least "my computer is ____", and hopefully the blue smoke leaking out will tell you the rest.