The Last Man on Earth To Speak His Language (axios.com) 177
From a report: An elderly man in Peru named Amadeo Garcia Garcia is the last person on earth to speak his native language, Taushiro, the NY Times' Nicholas Casey reports in a remarkable long-read. A combination of disease and exploitation have led the Taushiro, a tribe of hunter-gatherers in the Amazon, to the verge of extinction. In the last century, at least 37 languages have disappeared in Peru alone, lost in the steady clash and churn of national expansion, migration, urbanization and the pursuit of natural resources.
Sorry ... (Score:2, Redundant)
... what did you say?
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He said every dialect is its own language, and if everybody in your neighborhood moved to neighborhoods with a slightly different dialect, your "language" died.
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I remember when the music died.
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The janitors who run this site can't be bothered to fix some unicode text bug. It is literally the only website on the internet where I've seen this happen. Probably a five minute fix.
Bidirectional overrides (5:erocS) (Score:3)
The Slashdot team is disincentivized to fix character encoding issues because last time they improved character encoding support, the result was moderation score spoofing through bidirectional overrides [slashdot.org]. If you want Unicode, you could always give SoylentNews a try.
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So how does every other website handle this problem? I read Soylentnews all the time, they have better trolls than this place which is pretty sad.
Not really bad. (Score:3, Insightful)
Of the things that are going extinct, speakers of a particular language are not of great concern. Some people may see it as a tragedy but we aren't really losing much of anything. It's more romanticism over something interesting more than anything else.
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They always leave out, or carefully word, the fact that the main cause is that the living relatives of the past speakers don't find value in speaking it.
Compare it to Irish, which nobody was allowed to speak for generations, but when they got their freedom they wanted to learn it again!
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And it's only taken them a century to get up to 3%!
Re: Not really bad. (Score:2)
A: So the Irish would never rule the world.
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Irish people are proud of their right to speak bad Irish, they really don't care what anybody thinks of it.
Gaelic isn't really a language that lends itself to true forms anyways...
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Clearly not, or more of them would.
Not sure what that's even supposed to mean.
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Right, you didn't understand what I said. That's every time your purport to have read any of it.
The part that isn't clear is, why do you respond to your own ignorance with your nose in the air as if you're some sort of natural authority about something? You're consistently clueless about the literal meaning of clear statements.
And you obviously don't speak for the Irish, if you think I'm wrong go to Ireland and find out, or read a fucking book for once in your life and you might even, as I have, read books
Re:Not really bad. (Score:4, Insightful)
I'll admit I don't feel much twinge about losing a language. Now, cultures dying out, maybe, and associated stories and traditions, definitely, I can see how there's some value being lost. But at some level I feel like more languages just leads to more confusion, and the fewer of them we have, the more likely it is we'll understand each other.
Little value lost (Score:1)
I'll admit I don't feel much twinge about losing a language.
Agreed with the exception that sometimes we lose historical information when we lose a language. But in most cases little of value is lost. If it wasn't important enough for people to learn, odds are good it wasn't important in general.
at some level I feel like more languages just leads to more confusion, and the fewer of them we have, the more likely it is we'll understand each other.
Excellent point. Speaking a different language makes it just a bit easier to engage in pointless tribalism and we really don't need more of that. If the cost of people getting along better is to lose a bunch of minor languages then that is a cost I'm more than willing to
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That is the "best of all possible worlds" fallacy. In other words, for someone living in a cage or a basement, learning to swim or ride a bicycle is not "important" enough.
Tribalism has nothing to do with language or culture.
Rwa
Re:Not really bad. (Score:5)
Language is the same as culture. Or, perhaps better put, language is inextricably mixed with culture.
Yes, it is possible to experience a culture without speaking the language, but that experience is muted and without depth. Language and culture grow into and out of each other. One might argue nuances, such as various dialects of American English supporting the variety of cultures in the different corners of the US, but without a unifying language across a population, a deep, resilient culture does not develop.
My favorite example of this is the deaf versus blind populations. Blind people do not have a unifying culture that is starkly separate from the normal embedding culture, but deaf people do. Why? Because blind people communicate in their normal, native language whereas deaf people have a distinct language (i.e., sign language) that, with regional variations, defines subcultures that are separate and apart from the mainstream.
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Is culture defined by language, is language defined by culture or both?
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It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a sapphire Klingon.
Sapir-Worf hypothesis (Score:2)
Is culture defined by language, is language defined by culture or both?
The Sapir-Worf hypothesis [allthetropes.org] is that English and Klingon are not "sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality."
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But at some level I feel like more languages just leads to more confusion, and the fewer of them we have, the more likely it is we'll understand each other.
I don't think it's the long tail that is the source of confusion, it's agreeing on a common tongue. Like Europe has a ton of small national languages, but you get by on English pretty much everywhere. I mean if you speak a language only spoken by a few million or less you have a pretty high motivation to learn a world language. It's the medium size languages that are problematic, like if tens or hundreds of millions speak the same language it's not worth the effort. You'll do fine knowing "just" Portugese,
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I'll admit I don't feel much twinge about losing a language. Now, cultures dying out, maybe, and associated stories and traditions, definitely, I can see how there's some value being lost. But at some level I feel like more languages just leads to more confusion, and the fewer of them we have, the more likely it is we'll understand each other.
So why are Americans losing the speaking of English. Are you gonna tell me it ain't so?
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I'm sorry, but I don't really understand your question, or how it's tied to what you quoted.
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Just because you can't bring yourself to learn a language, it doesn't mean there isn't value in doing so.
Hey, now, I never said that at all. My point was more toward what the state of the world would be if we had only a few hundred or a few thousand major ones, as opposed to the roughly 7,000 languages that exist now.
To go with your analogy, I recognize the value of having several dozen or hundreds of different models of car and truck, but if we had 7,000 different models at a dealership, I'd readily argue that many of them could disappear without the world being worse off in a significant way. Languages obvio
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These obscure languages cause speakers to be economically and socially marginalized. They are better off learning a mainstream language, and devoting time to learning economically useful skills rather than learning a language that is only spoken by a handful of families.
When a language dwindles to a few dozen speakers, we should video record a few hours of conversation and put it up on Youtube for future linguists to study, and then move on.
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Learning an additional first language hasn't been shown to be taxing in any way to children, including time spent.
Then they should learn a second mainstream language that will actually be useful. Spanish+English will lead to far more life opportunities than Spanish+Taushiro.
It is easy to say that some impoverished child in a tribe half a world away should learn a useless language. But instead, how about you teach YOUR child an obscure language? Suddenly it doesn't seem like such a great idea.
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Then they should learn a second mainstream language that will actually be useful. Spanish+English will lead to far more life opportunities than Spanish+Taushiro.
They can always pick a second language, but in a Spanish+Taushiro speaking region, there aren't many primary English speakers to be found. It's perfectly possible for a Spanish+Taushiro primary bilingual to acquire English as a second language.
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in a Spanish+Taushiro speaking region ...
There is no "region". There is one guy.
Should other people learn the language to "keep it alive"? I don't think so.
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There is no "region".
Well, not anymore.
Should other people learn the language to "keep it alive"? I don't think so.
Obviously, it's too late for that now.
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and help prevent its extinction
Too late for that. And I prefer Scottish Gaelic anyway.
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Re:Not really bad. (Score:5, Interesting)
Language studies are valuable.
Languages evolve slowly, so they act as evidence for human migration patterns. The exact details of the migration into the Americas is still under debate, and languages form quite a bit of evidence. Consider the extent of the Dene-Yeniseian language family - members exist in parts of Siberia, Alaska, Canada and Southwest America (Navajo is the most well-known of these languages). This is good evidence that humans entered the continent from Siberia - but also good evidence that the migration occurred in at least two distinct, widely-separated waves, as no DY language is known in South America or eastern North America. Perhaps Taushiro, the Peruvian language the article focuses on, could have provided evidence for or against that theory.
Languages also tell us things about the human brain. There are languages with no words for relative position (eg. left or right), but speakers can simply use absolute position (eg. east or west), and more interestingly, do so correctly. Apparently keeping track of your heading is something you can just do, if your language and lifestyle require it. There was quite a bit of uproar when a study of a certain Amazon language completely upended a lot of theories about human syntax - specifically, the language seemed to not allow recursion. Every sentence is a simple declarative, not allowing things like this sub-clause you're reading right now. (I will note that the study was not very rigorous, and ongoing follow-up studies may prove it false - some of the other claims are already overturned.) But, either way, we learn something about the human mind and its capacity for language.
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Of the things that are going extinct, speakers of a particular language are not of great concern. Some people may see it as a tragedy but we aren't really losing much of anything. It's more romanticism over something interesting more than anything else.
There is also a linguistic and anthropological value being lost when a language is no longer spoken. In this specific case, the loss is more tragic considering that the language loss has been caused by disease and exploitation (rather than a pure language shift done for economic, social or utilitarian reasons.)
Such losses cannot be ascribed a monetary value, which is why a) the loss is invaluable and b) almost always inevitable.
Spoken vs Written (Score:2, Insightful)
If a spoken language "goes extinct", if there was no written language that accompanied it, the main "problem" would be, "how would I be fluent enough to communicate with these people when I use my time machine to visit them when they spoke language X?"
The written language, and the history written in it, that is a bit more of a problem for future of that culture. Assuming there are written histories, working with this "last native speaker" to build a base for translation would be a good idea.
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How do you know? (Score:2, Troll)
If he's the only one who speaks his native language, how can anyone know that he actually speaks it? He could just be babbling in complete gibberish, and everyone would be standing there going ... aww, how sad ... nobody else speaks his language any more ...
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Cause they started studying the language BEFORE the rest of the village died? The answers in your questions are... DUNH DUNH DUUUNNNNNHHHHHHHHHH in the article.
Captcha:Dumber
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They didn't die. They just didn't bother learning the gibberish that grandpa speaks as it has no value to them.
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Ask him to translate something in his native language, record it, and then a few weeks later, ask him to translate it back.
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I can accept that if everyone spoke one language that we might not advance as a species as quickly.
Why not?
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We're assuming it's languages affecting mindset. I'm not saying it isn't, but my truly non-professional gut feeling says language is affected by culture and environment, not the other way around.
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Everyone speaking the same language AND being on the same page is a HUUUGE assumption.
The Declaration of Independence alone proves your assumption wrong.
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Yeah, everybody knows why they speak Spanish in most of South America. It's because the Spanish brutalized most of the continent for the better part of three centuries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
http://www.mesacc.edu/~thoqh49... [mesacc.edu]
Happens twice a month (Score:5, Informative)
https://livinglanguages.wordpr... [wordpress.com]
This estimation can be wrong in many ways, but the point remains: languages do die all the time.
They should teach him to program in BLISS or COBOL (Score:2)
They should teach him to program in BLISS or COBOL, just to add some irony.
The Last Man on Earth to Speak His Language (Score:5, Funny)
And with his dying breath, he whispered one word..."covfefe".
boohoo (Score:1)
How stupid are idiots who are mourning disappearance of rare shit?
Good thing too. (Score:2)
Another six thousand or so and we can dump unicode.
language is divisive. (Score:2)
Some 75%% of all extant languages today, some 4000 of t
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Written language is not of that significance; it's the spoken that connects to the breathing. You know why a phone call is zillion times more effective than a written email.
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You can call it a tax cut till your blue in the face, it raises MY taxes, along with many others, so its a tax HIKE.
Note: I make roughly the median national salary and I don't live on a coast.
Re: Rushing to pre-pay 2018 taxes before Trump Tax (Score:2)
Except that for an average of $55k a year income which is the country single average you get a savings of $200 annually stretched out over 52 paycheckes means your paycheck goes up a whopping $3.85
You can't buy a Whopper for that much.
Those who beneifit are the wealthy who save Tens of thousands of dollars.
Look up and do the math. It isn't hard and the actual numbers will scare you.
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You do understand that what happened was a tax CUT, correct?
If you think this was a tax cut, then I guess if I put $10k on my credit cards next year you would consider that a $10k raise. At best you could call this a stimulus plan. It certainly isn't a tax cut because many people will be paying more. But the vast majority of people will see their taxes reduced slightly for the next decade, and then the vast majority will see their taxes increased slightly after that. That said, it doesn't take a hard look to see the distribution of this stimulus is heavily skewed to
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The specific provision in question is the elimination of the deduction for state and local taxes. People are paying their 2018 property tax now so they can deduct it, which they won't be able to do on next year's return. Given that change in the tax code, paying the bill now rather than next month is sensible.
For many people who are affected by that change and by the reduction of the deduction for mortgage interest, Trump's tax plan is a tax increase, not a cut. And that's before the tax cuts for the middle
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Just adding debt (Score:1, Offtopic)
im not rich by any means. and im going to save about 2 grand a year under the new plan. over 80% of americans are going to save money.
No they aren't. It just means we're going to have to borrow more which will need to be repaid later. They didn't cut medicare or defense or social security which account for around 3/4 of the federal budget so all they did was incur additional debt, most likely to burden future generations. Collectively we save nothing and any "savings" you realize will simply have to be picked up by someone else somewhere down the line.
Passing debt to your children (Score:2)
OH, now you want to balance the budget after 8 years if 1T deficit?
8 years? Try 30+ years. We've been running huge and increasing deficits since the Reagan administration. And no the annual increase for the last 8 years was about $500-600 billion - roughly the amount we spend on defense annually. They've recently become bigger because the Bush administration decided to start two wars in the Middle East and didn't raise taxes to pay for them. Then there was all the stimulus to keep the economy running after the crash in 2008 with again, no taxes to compensate because r
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Are the full changes out and in some place where I can look them up? I've heard about the details in little dribs and drabs. Where can I plug in my numbers and find out how the final bill will affect me?
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As an interested Brit, who has never spent any time in the USA, how do you categorise your status as lower-middle or upper-middle class?
I guess in the context of this conversation we are talking income levels (which in itself is different from how us class-loving Brits do it), but what sort of income levels are the categories based on, in your opinion? (I guess it might differ from state to state?)
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My opinion, colored by the fact that I live in a place with a very low cost of living compared to most of the U.S. (Cleveland, Ohio area):
Lower-class means you really have nowhere near enough resources to guarantee the survival of yourself and your children. Typically you live either in a very violent inner-city area with barely half of the average life expectancy because of crime and drug abuse, or in a very rural area without access to jobs or opportunities of any kind. It is not considered a pejorative
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I live in NY, most peoples taxes are not over 10 grand, most peoples taxes are under 8 grand. if you got a beef with the cost of your property taxes, its not the feds you need to be mad at its your local state official
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stop fear mongering
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as for the increases after the cuts expire... well, get congress to make the cuts permanent. the only reason they arent is because the democrats refused to allow it to happen. if 8 democrats voted yes, it could have been made permanent but they didn't. so blame them for that
stop trying to blame the republicans who actually got something accomplished here when its t
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as for the increases after the cuts expire... well, get congress to make the cuts permanent. the only reason they arent is because the democrats refused to allow it to happen. if 8 democrats voted yes, it could have been made permanent but they didn't. so blame them for that
No, the tax cuts are temporary because the Republicans wanted to pass the bill with no Democrat involvement. You cannot have a bill which is 100% partisan and then expect Democrats to vote for it just to make a few peanuts for the middle class permanent. The Republicans had the ability to make middle class tax cuts permanent and wealthy tax cuts temporary and they chose to do the opposite. Republicans are 100% responsible for every line of this tax bill.
Ultimately this approach of passing sweeping legislati
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So people are rushing to pre-pay 2018 taxes for fun?
Technically even people who see their taxes go down in 2018 can get a big tax break by paying their property taxes early this year. The higher standard deduction coupled with higher child tax credit will cause many people who currently itemize to save money by taking the standard deduction next year. But since they won't deduct any property taxes (not even the $10k maximum amount), then deducting them on their 2017 taxes would save them big.
I for instance will have my base taxes go up about $800 next year,
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You realize that prepaying income taxes does _nothing_ to the amount you owe? Unless your required to pay quarterly, then it saves you some interest and fees, still doesn't affect your return.
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Then there will be nothing to stop Menendez style Democrat corruption from sweeping the country and it joins its neighbors as a corrupt and impoverished shithole.
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No, we'll mutate into grumpy little elves who eat your pets at 3am.
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The blatant trolls don't work as well here.
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European languages and dialects die all the same.
A small language next to me (Livonian) went extinct in 2013.