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."
as a petty google hater, let me just say.. (Score:3, Insightful)
.. kudos.
Re:as a petty google hater, let me just say.. (Score:5, Funny)
I'd rather see one universal language, or maybe a dozen (one from each family). Using Europe/the Mideast/North Africa as example:
They were much better off when they spoke 2 common tongues (Roman and Greek) and could communicate with one another easily, then one thousand years later when they split-up into a bunch of incomprehensible tongues.
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It's important to preserve all the languages we can outside of being able to use it as a form of communication...it enables us to study the evolution of language, which is obviously always changing. It enables us to still be able to fully examine the works of those languages in their native tongue, there are dozens of different translations of The Iliad, for instance, that we would not have if not for people studying Ancient Greek in depth. Those stories are immensely important scholastically, historicall
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I disagree.
I see a future of 'ow, my balls!'
Oh, Don't Give Them Too Much Credit... (Score:2)
I'm sure their research has shown that people respond better to advertising in their native tongues, or some equally self-serving privacy intrusion that's best wrapped in a facade of socio-linguistic altruism.
How do you say "Big Brother is Watching" in Assyrian?
At the risk of a flame war... (Score:5, Interesting)
Given the value of language in communication between people, and the rather dubious history of the various things that make messy tribalism even easier than it already is, is this 'Linguistic Diversity' stuff actually a good thing(beyond the relatively narrow; although certainly important, value as a research sample for linguists and as a useful rallying point for resistance to other flavors of attack on relatively powerless groups)?
Re:At the risk of a flame war... (Score:4, Insightful)
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If you don't have anyone who understands the language, you don't have anyon
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I believe this question is actually very interesting. And I do not have a full answer to it. My mother-tongue is french and I live in the US now; so I speak english fluently. I also know some spanish and some korean.
I believe that there is a very tight relation between how we speak and how think. There are concept that are more easily expressed in a language than in an other one. It helps bridging notion together that would not be otherwise. I believe languages greatly contribute to "mental imagery". I beli
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I am a linguist and sort of agree with you. From the point of view of my discipline, it hurts me to know how fast languages die (= last speaker dies) and that even with optimal funding the linguist community will not be able to keep up with cataloguing all nearly extinct languages. First of all, since most languages do not have a writing system, when a language dies often a whole collection of stories and tales dies with it, too. Second, from a more theoretical perspective, it is kind of sad that problemati
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Also, while there is some money for translators, linguists in general don't really derive substantial economic benefits from obscure languages(very few obscure languages, after all, have either wealthy speakers or wealthy would-be-listeners: the money in linguisti
Tax lawyers and perceived v. actual complexity (Score:3)
This is frequently stated, but not really all that true.
Actual complexity of tax codes increases the effort tax lawyers must expend to deliver the same value to clients, which is disadvantageous to them.
Perceived (by non-tax lawyers) complexity of the tax code increases the perceived value of the services of tax lawyers (and, therefore, the prices purchasers of those services are willing to pay), and i
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Part of language is examining and understanding it's evolution. How the hell are we going to do that if the only example we have of the dialect is whatever popular culture managed to survive in the cultural consciousness? There are important references for real historical research locked inside those stories, as well. For instance, The 1700 Cascadia Earthquake [wikipedia.org], which they're recently examining through study of oral histories passed down among the Quilleute and Hoh Indian tribes [oregongeology.com]. If no one bothered to sp
Save ALGOL68 before it's too late! (Score:4, Funny)
Save ALGOL68 before it's too late!
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Google announced their initiative to save Algol 68 a couple years ago: they revised it a little and called it Go [cowlark.com], in hopes that it would thereby become the Next Big Thing in software development.
Can I (Score:2)
Can I upload the language that I created to talk to my invisible best friend when I was 6 years old?
Hm... (Score:2)
Can someone give me a good reason for language diversity?
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Yes, there are the utopian esperantists and various outcroppings here and there of "Oh, we could have peace if only we could understand one another!" flavored optimi
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.
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language and war (Score:2)
Let's not forget sayings like "If you can read this, thank a teacher. If you can read it in English, thank a soldier". Even if the imperialist project wasn't successful, language imposition is taken as a symbol of it.
My language is in the list :( (Score:5, Interesting)
It'd be nice to preserve it, but even I don't see that much value in it.
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The total number of speakers is probably around 100-200 thousands, and all of them know Russian as well.
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Certainly not, I haven't spoken it for ages. I don't think there are many people out there who have Udmurt as a primary language.
So, you know Udmurt and Russian, and you're obviously fluent in English too - can you give us a sense of the relative utility of the languages?
Most of us have only learned 1+ languages that are already very successful (at least 10's of millions of speakers each), so the selection bias is towards all of them seeming 'good enough' for daily usage.
I find myself wondering why these p
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Udmurt language by itself is not very useful. However, it's a language from a family that is very different from English, German or Russian so it gives yet another 'view' of the world. And that's very useful by itself. Oh, and it also helps me to s
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I actually have a similar question to the person who you responded to, but on a different level.
As far as utility of expressing ideas of various types, which do you find best? Is it always one or another for certain types of mental activities? Does one or another have a richer set of aphorisms or ability to express types of concepts not available to the others?
I guess I am looking at what affordances one provides over the other.
Regards.
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And I really love Russian. It has a very rich system of prefixes and suffixes that allows to add a lot of hard-to-translate-into-English nuances. Grammar cases, inflecte
Tenses (Score:2)
The system of grammar tenses is also very interesting and powerful (Russian doesn't have an analog of present perfect, for example)
As another Russian speaker I disagree with you. Tenses are cumbersome and redundant.
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For others like me who wonder about these things, Udmurt [wikipedia.org] is one of the two official languages of the Russian republic (similar to a US state) of Udmurtia (the other being Russian). It uses an extended Cyrillic alphabet and has around half a million native speakers.
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Easy Come, Easy Go (Score:3)
... annnnd immediately upon launch, the project was added to the Endangered Projects Project [wikipedia.org].
Great idea, but how long will it be supported? Sadly, I think it will share a fate with Google Health [wikipedia.org].
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Not everything must be saved (Score:2)
There are some languages which are better off dead. VisualBasic for example.
Google! (Score:2)
Go raibh míle maith agaibh!
Pointless ... (Score:2)
If a language "dies" from lack of interest (nobody wants to learn it, use it and pass it down to their children), that is a natural thing that should be left to take its course.
I mean, what is the alternative? Surely, you can't force people to learn a language they are not interested in. How do you motivate people to revive a language that, say, only a few thousand people know?
This project, how does it actually protect "dying" languages? If some aspect of a language is kept in a museum, is that language rea
Na'vi (Score:2)
Wonder if Na'vi will end up there now that all the cool kids have moved on to learn the Dothraki language.
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Requisite (Score:2)
Netcraft now comfirms: Miami-Illinois is dying.
Re:why in the hell (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:why in the hell (Score:4)
Doubleplusungood.
"Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?... Has it ever occurred to your, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?... The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact, there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking-not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.
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To that I would say; incorporate those 'in-between' words and concepts into English
Good idea - it's been working great for the last thousand years or so, long may it continue :)
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I find thinking in German to be far more efficient. I mutter to myself in German although English is my first language. It confounds the illegal aliens at my workplace and I hear a lot less Espanol.
On the other hand I have the understanding of William Burroughs/ Laurie Anderson that:
Language is a virus from outer space and...
It's better to hear your name, than to see your face...
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Which German are you talking about? Probably the standard Haupt. Low German (Platt Deutsch) is facing extinction.
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The variant spoken the last couple of centuries by German settlers in Kansas?
No, interesting, just plain old "Rosetta Stone" German, off the computer.
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A study discussed on NPR recently found that when people think specifically in not-their-first language they are more rational and thoughtful. It was hypothesized that thinking in your primary language made it easier for your brain to take emotional shortcuts, making you less rational and coherent.
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A lot of our thought process is based on associations and if you know a couple of languages (for me Swedish, English, Dutch and German - in order of proficiency) you also know that nuances are very hard to translate - there is simply no 1:1 perfect relationship between certain concepts within different languages. Those ambigous meanings and cultural associations are a fundamental part of the thought process.
I agree with this, but only to the extent the "to be saved" language was a written language.
There are several languages and dialects that are vanishing which were never written, and the only sample of them is the few examples of recorded speech by people trying to save the language. Most, if not all of the native speakers of these languages have passed, except a very few individuals.
In this case you have nothing but a curiosity, a museum piece like an old rusty shovel. There is no body of literature upon
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Let's take the German "doch". It's the proper answer given to express that the assertion made by a negative question is wrong. For instance, for "Haven't you mown the lawn?" the answer "Doch." expresses that I have indeed mown the lawn. While English can approximate the answer with "Yes, I have.", the subtext is different. "Doch" is a negative answer; it implies wrongness on the part of the asker. "Yes, I have", on the other hand, answers in the affirmative.
Wouldn't a US teenage "duh?" or "hello?"work, with the right tone of voice? (implying "well I'm looking at a mown lane, and I've just been pushing a noisy lawn mower around for an hour, so what do you think, genius?")
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Wouldn't work, because "doch" (or "si" in French) isn't inherently snarky, not even necessarily adversarial. It can be merely informative.
I'm French, and I learned German before English (which was admittedly unusual even by then), and when I started the latter I've been kinda confused by the absence of an equivalent to French "si" or German "doch".
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English is completely inadequate for a country like Australia because it cannot describe the flora, fauna and weather - and that is one reason why Australians have a disconnect with the land.
When the original white settlers in Australia first saw a kangaroo, they asked some passing natives what they called that "fucking big rabbit thing". They replied "kangaroo" which is the native for "fucking big rabbit thing" and the name has been used ever since.
(With apologies to Douglas Adams.)
Re:why in the hell (Score:5, Insightful)
down with everything but English
I was with you until that point. A single world language would certainly do more good than harm, but English is a horrible choice. It's like deciding to standardize on a single OS circa 1999, and then picking Win95 because it's the most common one.
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I'm genuinely curious; why do you consider English to be the Windows 95 of languages? What language do you think the world should "standardize" on?
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.
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I'd much prefer, say, German over English (but then of course I'm also biased in favor of Indo-European group).
I wouldn't, and I bet a lot of people are with me on this one. Even some germans.
that's Pax Americana, so that language is English, unfortunately
American English. But yeah, you're right on the money.
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.
Can you explain why (traditional/simplified) chinese is that bad?
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I wouldn't, and I bet a lot of people are with me on this one. Even some germans.
Well, it's certainly more regular.
On a second thought, if I had to pick a European language that would be both easy to learn and reasonably popular, I'd say Spanish. At least you can read all the words without knowing them.
American English.
Not really. The strength of English today comes not from native speakers (Spanish and Chinese both have more), but from all the rest of us who learned it as a second language. And how close that is to American English varies from region to region - e.g. Indians contribute a lot there, and
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I love Spanish, but I wouldn't pick it as the lingua franca of the world - there's no neuter gender. I think any language without a proper neuter gender which works in a logical manner is just not the right language for a "world language". German noun genderrules also IMHO disqualifies German as a world language.
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German noun genderrules also IMHO disqualifies German as a world language.
Wait, there are rules?
- a native German speaker
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Back in the day, yes, they did. But the reason why English remains a global language today (and for the last 70 years or so) is solely due to US, not UK.
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Other languages either de-Germanized (like French) during the Roman empire to become fully "latinized"
I don't think there was much to de-Germanize in France during the Roman Empire. Wasn't France basically a Celtic language territory, with the Gaulish family and some Brythonic being spoken and basically wiped out and replaced by Latin under the Romans?
On the topic of phonetic spelling, I do somewhat like the idea, but still the IPA is not an exact rendering of pronunciation - in particular when it comes to vowels, which are notoriously hard to clearly define, being on non-discrete sliding scales like open-c
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I don't think there was much to de-Germanize in France during the Roman Empire. Wasn't France basically a Celtic language territory, with the Gaulish family and some Brythonic being spoken and basically wiped out and replaced by Latin under the Romans?
You're basically right, except the Brythonic arrived later from Great Britain in the fifth century or so, and settled in Brittany, giving modern Breton (which is also on the list of threatened languages).
French is basically derived from Latin, with traces of Gaulish in the lexicon, and a strong later Germanic influence.
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.
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Standard? Not quite. But there are three different methods, all based around replacing non-ASCII characters with a sequence of two ASCII characters. And each of them is common enough that you'll see them in use.
My own preference is for the use of the caret: ie. rego (with a circumflex over the G that I know /. won't parse) becomes reg^o.
Other systems use H (regho) or X (regxo) for the same purpose. H has the problem of being ambiguous as to whether it's an actual H, or if it's a diacritic replacement. X is
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English is needlessly complex and highly irregular.
Esperanto is the ideal language for standardization.
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English is what it is because of history.
It is the most eclectic language on earth.
Esperanto? Please. Most people don't know ONE person that speaks or understands it.
I know people that are fluent in languages from all over the world, (Yes, even Inupiat), I can throw a stone and
hit the windows of people who speak Russian, German, Italian, French, Spanish, Norwegian, Tlingit, Swedish, Dutch, and a few others.
Not one Esperanto.
The world will speak one language when Aliens arrive and teach it to us. Not a mom
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What do you suggest? Klingon?
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An artificially designed language that is actually easy to learn, convenient, expressive, logical and unambiguous.
But then I suspect it might present a bit of a problem when it comes to Bible translations. ~
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We have Esperanto. Not too many people speak it.
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The idea of one world language - no matter which one - is a cloud in the sky in the first place. For people who say English is "it", you forget about Chinese and Latin America. And so long as we're dreaming about things, might as well dream about those things done right.
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Bible translations....+1 interesting.
Youtube a Klingon giving the Sermon on the Mount...Priceless.
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A language that can't be used for bible translations is a win in my book (pun intended).
I guess that would be "winning" [ew.com], especially since so many prominent formally atheist [wikipedia.org] societies have been such successes [harvard.edu].
Alas, it is your destiny [wikipedia.org] to be frustrated [sacred-texts.com].
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...especially since so many prominent formally atheist [wikipedia.org] societies have been such successes [harvard.edu].
Communists have never been atheists. They've always had the deity in form of Marxism-Leninism. It's just like Abrahamic religions (authoritarian, dogmatic, expansionistic etc.), only the deity isn't antropomorphic. But that's about it.
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It can be used for Bible translations; the only "problem" is that you'd get a visibly different translation depending on which denomination/sect does it because they'd have to explicitly resolve all ambiguities, or at least deliberately mark them as such. Which, as far as I'm concerned, would be a good thing, but I suspect Christians might find it inconvenient.
choice of which particular language (Score:2)
If humanity were to standardize on one language:
It would make sense to consider what's already popular.
English can be hard to learn because of the irregular verbs; Mandarin can be hard because of the tones.
Not sure about other major languages such as Spanish, Hindi or Arabic.
And language is more than a practical means of communication; the cultural issues create a shitstorm.
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Spanish is not so bad, actually, and fairly widely known.
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English can be hard to learn
Every language can be hard to learn - it depends where you're coming from. I'm a portuguese native speaker (an irregular language with lots of subtle variations and even some adapted foreign terms), so learning spanish (a similar, but somewhat phonetically simpler language) is easy. So it is english or french. German not so much (phrase construction and algutination of terms seems somewhat "unnatural"). Russian seems phonetically similar, but with a different alphabet. And it is a lot easier for a russian o
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It makes sense to choose what's most common because there is a huge established base toward the purpose of choosing one, "intercommunicating with as many people as fast as possible." And your comments seem to assume some serious problems in the language: I'll be dealing with those in a reply to this comment, http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2931057&cid=40406061 [slashdot.org]
English also has an incomparably large amassed amount of literature for all sorts of purposes, which are not useful simply to get ideas,
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It makes sense to choose what's most common because there is a huge established base toward the purpose of choosing one
Well, if you really want it, you can start learning Chinese today. ~
On a more serious note, yes, English is the greatest by total number of speakers (if you count all people who speak it just barely), but Chinese is pretty damn close, and both Chinese and Spanish have more native speakers, and Spanish has a wider geographic spread of countries or regions where it's pervasive.
Anyway, as I said in another reply, realistically we're not going to have a single common primary language anytime soon. So if I'm dre
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Why? For every language you learn, your brain will gain about 5 years before showing the effects of aging.
Cultures that lose their language eventually die and, in cases such as the Bo, the population itself loses the will to live. We know that biodiversity is essential for a healthy ecosystem so why not assume linguistic/cultural diversity follows the same rule?
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Why? For every language you learn, your brain will gain about 5 years before showing the effects of aging.
And the reference for that would be?..
Cultures that lose their language eventually die
That's not strictly true, different cultures can exist very well under the umbrella of a single language; US itself is a prime example of that. Anyway, I don't care much about cultural diversity for the sake of it. I think that being able to communicate directly, without the need for intermediaries (who often have an agenda of their own - a recent example is the mistranslation of Ahmadinejad's quote that's known more widely in US than his actual words - something that w
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I was with you until that point. A single world language would certainly do more good than harm, but English is a horrible choice. It's like deciding to standardize on a single OS circa 1999, and then picking Win95 because it's the most common one.
Except for the small practical detail that English is already the de-facto lingua franca (God, that just pinned the needle on my irony meter!) in the EU and anywhere else that gets British/US music, TV and movies. The reason we Brits are so crap at languages is partly because its generally the most useful language to travel with. You can't "impose" a made-up language on the world - you have to build on what is already there.
One of the reasons that English is so illogical that it is the Borg of languages
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Bad analogy. Languages don't expire in the same sense as OS's do.
You misunderstood the analogy. The point wasn't that Win95 is an expired OS; the point was that, even at the time of its dominance shortly after release, it was still crappy from design point of view. Similarly, English, while dominant, is rather poorly designed, largely due to its unfortunate origin as a marriage of two languages from different language groups, and then an uneasy and rather turbulent evolution.
Also, are you implying that there exists a language that everyone should be switching to? Because there isn't really any 'good' universal language out there.
It depends on your definition of "good". From my subjective POV, no natural language is good for
Sapir-Whorf? (Score:2)
Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis about how language is related to the culture that uses it? That would make it more than a practical communication matter.
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what about a nice Gin and Tonic?
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Wrong.
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Yeah, not trying to insult linguistics, I actually quite like reading up on rarely used languages or dead languages
In that case, you actually are insulting linguistics. Linguistics is not about making people shake their heads while reading about "how weird those silly exotic languages are".