While I sometimes see Dutch as an endangered language, reality is that with nearly 30 million speakers worldwide, we’re actually doing pretty well. Sadly, this can’t be said for the 3000 truly endangered languages of the world – nearly half of the world’s total number of languages is on the verge of extinction, and with it, large amounts of human culture are in danger of disappearing forever. In collaboration with several universities and language institutions, Google has launched the Endangered Languages Project to document these languages – textually, visually, and
auditorially.
I have a specific interest in languages and linguistic subject matter; both my BA and MA are language-related, and I earn my money by being a translator. I always like to think I’m pretty good at what I do, and especially after a few weeks of lots of intensive work and ‘solving’ difficult texts, I kind of feel like a bad-ass. At those points in time, I often load up my favourite Wikipedia page, just to bring me back to earth. A dose of Icelandic grammar is incredibly humbling.
Imagine just how humbling it is to realise that half of the world’s languages – around 3000 of them – are in danger of disappearing forever. Often, we know relatively little of these languages as the elders that still speak them pass away and leave no records behind, making it hard to pass on the knowledge and culture encoded in them onto younger generations.
This is something we should not allow to happen, and of course, technology can play an important role here. In that light, Google has partnered with several universities and language institutions to launch the Endangered Languages Project. The goal of this project is to allow people the world over to document these languages – textually, visually, and auditorially. For instance, researchers and individuals can upload videos of their grandparents speaking these endangered languages, or manuscripts of languages we barely know how to decode. Research can also be uploaded, of course. All this material will be accessible to everyone.
As cynical as the industry’s current state of mind has made me – and many of you – it’s still amazing to see how technology can play a role in matters like this. Language is so much more than a mere means of communication; it’s a database for cultural information, norms, values, ideas, and wisdom, things even we in the modern world could learn from. You can’t translate the Dutch word ‘gezellig‘ into German or English, and you can’t translate ‘to cringe’ into Dutch – and those are closely-related languages. You can imagine just how many nuances are stored away in these small, nearly-dead languages.
This is a great initiative, and with the extensive support from the academic community, it can grow into something quite extraordinary.
Really nice to see that Google does stuff that’s beyond money-making.
…Can only agree..!
and I know other large companies, both tech, and otherwise, DO engage in philanthropic donations and projects, but it would always be nice to see more.
Especially from the Apples, the Microsofts, and dare I say it, the Oracles etc of the world that have similar enormous resources to Google to be able to undertake similarly large-in-scope projects with less skin off their noses than is the case for others.
Edited 2012-06-21 13:27 UTC
In elkaar krimpen?
That’s the closest translation, yes, but it misses the more… Social or shame aspect of ‘to cringe’.
It’s a nuance I miss – so I often use ‘cringe’ in Dutch as-is.
it missed a lot of the meaning
Voilà une nouvelle très intéressante, surtout après l’article de la semaine dernière :
http://www.osnews.com/story/26075/OSX_s_Dwindling_Support_for_Third…
Malheureusement, Google ayant toujours eu de sérieuses difficultés à faire travailler ses différents sous-groupes en synergie (Chrome et le navigateur d’Android en est un bon exemple), je ne m’attends pas à ce que cela se traduise par un support accru des langues étrangères (en dehors de Google Search).
Edited 2012-06-21 12:57 UTC
Maybe I’m quite pedantic here, but please, write in English in this forum. Most people here (including me obviously) are not native English speakers and we do our best to express ourselves using English. That’s the way we all get communicated each other right here
Edited 2012-06-21 18:55 UTC
ebasconp,
“Maybe I’m quite pedantic here, but please, write in English in this forum.”
Hehe, I’d say one deserves a bit of leniency on this considering how article was about keeping alternative languages around. Not that french is endangered, but still it would be extremely ironic to bash non-english posts.
🙂 ok, ok.
estoy de acuerdo
Oh, come on, man; at least I checked it would be understandable once put through Google translate! (almost perfect)
Und wem das zu blöd ist, der kann es ja einfach ignorieren.
PijtmÃ¥le jär alenaste sprÃ¥ke i broj mä om. Sijda hav ett ensh vä hä opa lista. Raskt förklaare, google nögest lägg dell’e.
=D
“opa” is a Spanish slang for “idiot” actually
And German for “grandpa” …I wonder if both, together, have something to do with the German Balearic Islands.
Nu ved ente jau om vi sa ti o borja vrövla på dijalekt haar ellår ente, men e de så, vill jau osse va me litta.
Do you by chance know if Norwegian “koselig” is generally close in meaning to “gezellig”?
Since the meaning of ‘koselig’ is quite close to Danish ‘hyggelig’ and the Danish word is quite close to ‘gezelligheid’ it seems rather likely. But as far as I can understand it is not a 1:1:1 relationship. They kinda fit, but not quite. Almost translatable, but not quite.
I also don’t know how to translate “cringe” from English to Danish, “krympe” perhaps, but it is not quite 1:1.
I was hoping to read another COBOL article…
I am wondering if I should learn COBOL… but when I look at some code examples… I get discouraged again.
If you are working with other people who work with COBOL, it helps to have a working knowledge. I feel like every language has its own good features and bad that give me a broader idea of what’s possible in a language. My university mostly taught Ada, and as a result many CS students were completely ignorant of very common features in other more common languages and their use of those languages suffered as a result.
One of my teachers mentioned many COBOL programmers are retiring, and there are many systems in banks and insurance companies etc. still running software written in COBOL. Therefore learning COBOL might be interesting. But on the other hand, that’s not the industry I wish to find a job in.
I have never looking into Ada, I have no idea what that language is like.
Ada is one of those design by committee languages like COBOL, only worse because it was the US Government that did it. Its designed to be a highly reliable systems language. For decades, the Airplane control systems in the US were written in Ada. If you are familiar with Pascal, its very close.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_%28programming_language%29
The version we used at school didn’t have dynamic input support. So command line programs written by students were often worded strangely like:
Please enter your name, padding it with spaces to 20 characters.
It’s like a really more powerful/sensible version of Pascal, a hyper-strongly typed version of Python, and has a better template system than C++ and arguably a bit better with the low level stuff. It’s a shame C++11 doesn’t have concepts – because Ada’s generics is miles ahead of C++.
* As people know, I prefer C++. Doesn’t stop me from liking good features of other languages, unlike critics of C++.
If you have ever used Oracle’s PL/SQL, it’s what Ada is, with SQL added.
I remember when I first saw PL/SQL…. I was like “YES!! MY FIRST YEAR AT UNI WASN’T WASTED LEARNING ADA!!” Having said that, I do know one guy from my degree group that actually got a job off the back of knowing ADA. writing the System software for submarines for Marconi.
Imagine Pascal, but reworked and designed by a committee. That’s pretty much it.
I know some Pascal…. but the work of a committee, I don’t know it that would be better or worse.
Ditto. We did ADA at my Uni. But then I did C/C++, Prolog, COBOL, assembler, VB and Pascal after that. Depended on the modules you chose. I liked programming, so I took mostly programming ones.
Only if you’re suicidal.
COBOL is a zombie language. It will never be completely killed. It will always rise up out of the mainframe to eat the brains of recent CS grads.
Even as someone who writes a good number of web plumbing, I run into it every now and then. Some people I talk to just *assume* I’m also writing my system in COBOL.
A truly endangered language would be something like SNOBOL or PL/1.
Yes! I took PL/1 in school in the 70’s (Yes I AM old). It was supposed to be the one language to rule them all. COBOL was better at character data, Fortan for numeric. PL/1 was good at both – WOOT! PL/1 was strange in that there were no reserved words. You could have a variable name that matches a control word, and the compiler would “know” the difference by context(although doing so was discouraged)!
The hell????
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_PL/1
and some more:
http://www.iron-spring.com/
http://pl1gcc.sourceforge.net/
http://pliedit.com/
I stand slightly corrected. Its clear that some people are still using it. I haven’t run into it since the late 90’s, when I was trying to pick it up for fun.
So… where is its head?
This sounds like a very worthwhile project for linguists, which is very important.
Of course, the real trick is to keep the ordinary people using the languages, so they don’t fall out of active use (i.e. die).
Its a long shot but these things can come back from the grave. Look at Cornish or Hebrew.
Or Manx (though Manx could use a proper Gaelic orthography).
Hebrew yes. Cornish is more problematic. There are a number of competing versions. The only one I ever liked is the least popular, the “Modern” version by Richard Gendall. It’s most like modern Welsh and Breton to me. The others are nice, but retain archaic and quirky features and spellings.
I dislike the “modern” (RLC) version. The orthography is not particularly Celtic, it is basically Anglo-Cornish with English spelling, and differs greatly from Welsh and Breton. I prefer a certain level of linguistic purity for the sake of diversity (and to undo the effect of English imperialism), so Modern Cornish is a no-go.
The same is true for the Peurunvan and Skolveurieg orthographies (the latter being too french) for Breton. The right one to use is obviously Etrerannyezhel, with its dependency on proper Brythonic etymology. I also prefer formal Welsh over informal Welsh, the former being closer to Cornish and Breton.
But, there’s no such thing at Brythonic orthography, nor Celtic. None othe the natural (as opposed to revived) Celtic languages have commonality in their orthography. Gaelic and Irish seriously disagree, and really, they are closely related offshoots of the same language. Welsh is competely different (save the C over K preference and the agreement on CH being a friative). Indeed, Irish and Aelic don’t even agree on how to aspirate/leinate (mutate in welsh)…. The most Welsh looking Breton orthography is still miles away.
If you look at common phrases (the Pan Celtic phrase book by Y Lolfa,ISBN 0862434416, is a pretty good source) the commonality can be seen, but Welsh and Breton have diverged a lot. Oddly, sometimes Breton is the least Celtic word order, sometimes Welsh. The Gaelic/GÃ idhlig/Gaeilge look similar, but with enough subtle grammatical differences so as to not be identical.
Cornish doesn’t really exist anymore. All you have is 3 different opinions of what it might look like now. Modern is the closest to reality.
Manx, well, the orthography is exactly what it is.
I think you need to realise, one persons idea rules most written languages. From Ataturk to Kanji. Sometimes it’s the orthography that really creates identity. E.g. Thai and Lao, Finnish and Estonian, Gaelic and Irish, Swedish, Danish and Norwegian.
Nonsense. Utter nonsense.
Why? Welsh spelling is absolutely different to Scottish Gaelic. Scottish Gaelic is different (but similar to Irish) and Breton is different again. Let’s throw out some examples then:
Gwerthir gwin a chwrw yma.
Gwin ha bier a gwerzh amañ.
Tá fÃon agus leann ar dÃol anseo.
Tha fìon agus leann ‘gan reic an seo.
Prydau o fwyd ar gael drwy’r dydd.
Boued servijet an devezh pad.
Bia ar fáil fad an lae
Biadh ri fhaighinn fad an là .
Mae tua saith deg mil o bobl yr Alban yn siarad Gaeleg.
War-dro dek ha tri-urgent mil den e Bro-Skos a oar gouezeleg.
Tá Gaeilge an h-Alban ag timpeall trà scór is deich mÃle duine in Albain.
Tha a’ Ghà idhlig aig timcheall tri fichead ‘s a deich mìle duine ann an Albainn.
So, the gaelics have a lot of commonality, but welsh orthography is vastly different. Like I said. I’m not even going to go there with Breton.
For the gaelics, there are lots of differences, e.g. the eclipsis: (e.g. ocht mbliana vs ochd bliadhna.) but look here for a big long list
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Scottish_Gaelic_and_Iris…
For Gaelic and Welsh –
Th – in welsh this is equiv to TH in eng. “thing”, in Gaelic this is H (or nothing) as it represents an aspirated T.
Dh – does not occur in Welsh. Closest is Dd, which is the TH in “this” (I.e voiced), but it was used in Cornish for same sound. In Gaelic, this is a fricative, similar to CH and depending on dialect sometimes a Y.
CH – similar in all, though Breton uses a weird ch and c’h here, and some Cornish uses gh over ch.
Gh – doesn’t appear in Welsh, similar to DH in Gaelic. Did appear in some Cornish ortographies instead of CH, as the CH phonem was used as in English (e.g. Ty, house, was Chy)
Mh – only in Gaelic. V or W. welsh uses F for this phonem
F – always V in Welsh, and F in gaelics
FF – always F in Welsh, not in gaelics in same way.
Fh – like h in Gaelic. Not in welsh.
W – a vowel in Welsh (like oo in book) but not in gaelic.
Y – a vowel in welsh, (shwa in final position, like welsh i elsewhere), not in Gaelic.
Bh – like V or W in Gaelic. Not in welsh.
Need we go on? The Gaelics share as much comonality in orthography as Swedish does with Danish. Similar roots, spelling diverges. When compared to Welsh, the relationship is more like Polish and Latvian or Lithuanian. Common ancestor way back, very, very different now, orthography only very slightly similar due to common influences.
The spelling differences between Swedish and Danish are minute and nearly non-existant. Same language with written standards based on different dialects
I explicitly wrote ‘brythonic’ and not ‘celtic’ orthography. If you compare Cymric, Cornish (Standard Written Form) and Breton, one can easily establish a brythonic orthography. The differences are larger than between the big north-germanic ‘languages’, but the similarities are larger than the differences. I prefer a Cornish orthography based on traditional brythonic spelling rather than Late Cornish which is an evil, disgraceful bastard child of Cornish and English.
In regard to Manx I’d prefer a Gaelic orthography (which can easily be established through comparison of Scottish Gaelic and Irish Gaelic and traditional Gaelic spelling) rather than the existing orthography which is a mixture of English and Cymric orthographies.
I’m sure we look quite differently at things. I tend to stick hard to linguistic purism (as does the ‘languages’ in the North Germanic branch). Purity above all.
There really is only Breton and Welsh though, and whilst they are similar, they are also completely different. The mutation system doesn’t agree at all, nor does the Cornish one for that matter. Any Cornish that exists is synthetic. The modern dialect with a more Welsh orthography would be nice. let’s be honest, Breton is closer to what Cornish should be like (as a spoken language) than Welsh, due to the Breton’s being people’s of a closer original geographical location (the Breton language originated from people’s fleeing the UK, mostly southern people’s). The Welsh were isolates.
Manx is another kettle of fish. It had an established written form, so the form you have is what it should use really.
Edited 2012-06-23 10:19 UTC
They cannot be completely different and similar at the same time. They are mostly similar with a few differences here and there, but they are almost non-existant if you compare Formal Welsh with the interdialectale orthography (Etrerannyezhel). Cornish is very much a living language though with very few speakers. Calling it synthetic (e.g. artificial) is pretty much offensive, considering the circumstances. It is very much alive and SWF is based primarily on Late Middle Cornish making it no more artificial than modern Danish or Icelandic.
Manx Gaelic should really be written with a proper Gaelic orthography, getting rid of the nasty English-inspired orthography. Just because a silly englishman happened to write Manx with english orthography, doesn’t mean that should be the future written form
Compare this written in anglo-Manx Gaelic:
Ta’n Gaelg feer ghoan çheumooie jeh Ellan Vannin, agh fod pobble ennagh screeu ee ayns çheeryn elley.
with the same using a proper Manx Gaelic orthography:
Tà ‘n Ghaelg fìor-ghónn teabh a-muigh de Eilean Mhannain, ach faod pobal eanach scrìobh ì ans tìoran eile.
and compare with Irish Gaelic:
Tá an Ghaeilge an-ghann (fÃor-ghann) taobh amuigh de Oileán Mhannanáin, ach féadann daoine [pobal] éigin(each) à a scrÃobh i dtÃortha eile.
and Scottish Gaelic:
Tha a’ Ghà idhlig glé ghann (fìor-ghann) taobh a-muigh de Eilean Mhannain, ach faodaidh daoine [pobal] igint(each) ì a sgrìobhadh ann an tìrean eile.
It is obvious why Manx Gaelic should be written with a proper Gaelic orthography. Again: It is all about purity
Formal Welsh is not a living spoken language any more. Not really. The colloquial Welsh is.
Cornish doesn’t exist. All you have is a reconstruction based on the best guess of a bunch of non native speakers. Calling it anything else is fantasy. Also, you’d be lucky to find anyone in Cornwall with any knowledge. Believe me, I’ve worked in Wales and worked with real native speakers. I’ve been to Scotland and met a couple of native Gaelic speakers. I’ve had enough Irish friends to know that most 30 something’s (and younger) have basic Irish drummed in to them at school. I’ve been to Cornwall numerous times, including spending time on the Lizard and round Helston, heart of the last refuge of Cornish. Never met one person that could say anything more that a few sentences. There are probably more fluent Klingon speakers than Cornish speakers.
As for Manx – who says the others have it right? Neither of the current spellings systems (agreed spelling conventions) are more than 100 years old now. Both have had major reforms in the 1950’s and later. If you want to be authentic, use the traditional Irish script. Any where a Ch, Gh, Dh, etc is used are neologisms. If anything, Manx orthography captures the actual spelling of a word more exactly.
Whatever… utter nonsense again.
Why? Because I’ve lived in Wales, have Welsh relatives and my Fatheri-in-law lives near Inverness and my own father owns a home in Cornwall? Which of us has first hand experience?
They can. All three have comonality, but all three diverge. None agree on specific grammar, not in spoken form.
No, that’s just a fantasy. There were no native speakers left. The last native speakers died in the 19th Century (earlier if you believe the Dolly Pentreath story) and anything spoken today is entirely synthetic and constructed from the scant documents they had to hand in the 1920s (for the Jenner branch), then Kemmyn is a refinement of that premise (slightly more authentic, still synthetic) and Late/Modern is a construction of Gendall in the late 70’s and early 80’s. Gosh, I even remember them announcing hs work on TV news back in the 80’s. Comparing this to Icelandic (which has been spoken continuously) and Danish/Swedish (also continuous) is an utter joke. You may like the romantic fantasy that Cornish is a real revival of the language, but it’s a conlang based on the remnants of real Cornish. No one knows if the people who spoke Cornish in the medieval times even still used the written grammar. Look at Welsh. Formal welsh hasn’t been a living spoken language for hundreds of years.
Forget Cornish then.
Aaah… England First, eh?
Oh god. Now who is clueless. Seriously, I have cousins fluent in Welsh, do you? If you want to be a racist, fine. Dont believe you have any credibility though.
Nothing I’m saying about Cornish is inaccurate. It was re-invented by enthusiasts, the real living language is dead.
Edited 2012-06-23 19:46 UTC
Whose purity? (as in, who is pure and who in turn determines that?)
And when? (doesn’t that purity thing fly in the face of languages constantly evolving?)
BTW, what’s the deal with two Norwegian variants?
You mean 4 variants
Riksmål, Bokmål, Nynorsk and Høgnorsk. Not to mention that Bokmål can be done in several ways, Traditional Bokmål (closer to Riksmål) and Radical Bokmål (closer to Nynorsk).
I think it is wonderful. Linguistic anarchy
Perhaps even sort of more than 4, now that I checked Wiki…
Still, seems quite far from purity.
I mean, in my part of the woods there are regional dialects, sure – with some unique vocabulary, and with pronunciation / accent / and so on sometimes so peculiar that, occasionally, it’s hard to discern some supposedly common words in a speech (luckily I’m using almost exclusively the literary “melting pot” variant – a gift from Stalin on some areas, from his idea of resettlements ;p …well, plus later media influence – that is purity, the essence :p ). But they’re still really written in the same way, that seems to be the general idea behind writing systems.
Edited 2012-06-29 00:11 UTC
Ah, there-in lies the reason for the languages being endangered. As we move to a more global community, it’s no longer practical be monolingual in a smaller language. If you’re bilingual, you’ll default to language spoken by more of your contacts, which will typically be the larger one. Thus the smaller one fades into obscurity and eventually dies.
I do not think we should allow any language to die without being thoroughly studied. But, the benefit of everyone speaking a common language is tremendous. IMHO, it’s good to have people thinking in languages of different families since a Chinese-speaker and English-speaker may have unique perspectives, but cultural identity shouldn’t trump progress. We shouldn’t keep people speaking different languages just so those languages don’t die.
Progress shouldn’t trump cultural identity, dude!
What is progress? Progress is the advancement of humans. When humans loose culture, they regress. More culture = Progress. Less culture = regression.
I beg to differ. The Sentinelese people highly value cultural identity, while Americans do not (“melting pot”, a nation of immigrants, etc.). I suspect there’s a linear correlation along that line if you throw in other cultures. That’s not to say Sentinelese are less happy than Americans, just less developed.
Americans value their cultural identity much more than you think. You don’t see it because it’s not endangered but they do. To say americans do not have any cultral identity is ignorant. Baseball, western, hollywood, patrotism, freedom, the founding fathers, risk taking, poker, individualism, national pride, thanksgiving, independance day, quarter pounder with cheese are a few things that are part of american culture.
Edited 2012-06-22 13:47 UTC
…but is there something positive in their culture?
PS. Ah, I see you’re trying hard to find it, adding stuff to the original list ;p
Edited 2012-06-22 13:55 UTC
I don’t mean Americans don’t have any, I mean that it’s a culture of assimilation as opposed to conforming to tradition. English is a mesh of numerous languages. States have more cultural identity than the nation, but that generally has minimal influence on decisions (e.g. most people would take a higher paying job in another state if they can uproot easily). This may, in part, be due to having 400 years of tradition rather than 1,000+, so it’s less ingrained.
Amaricans have 10000+ years of cultural history. Pretty much all cultures evolved from trading and mixing. That someone does not care much about his land and cares a lot about money is because of his culture. American have a tradition of money loving. Some other culture consider that a bad thing. But in the american culture, being rich and proud of it is good.
Lol, only if you are one of the rich and powerful. If not, culturally, you are supposed to hate them. I don’t, but you’d be amazed how many people will revile someone they have never even met just because he or she has a lot of money. Truth be told, most Americans these days have entitlement complexes the size of the atlantic ocean, and would rather bring others down than actually work to improve their own lives in an honest way. It’s easier to bitch than to work, I guess.
I agree with this. (Although whether English is a good choice is another question.)
I disagree with this. There are hundreds or thousands of years of history embodied in the language, idioms, stories, etc., which are lost if the language goes out of usage.
There are many groups of people in the world that are bilingual (a “native” language and a national/international one), and this seems to work very well. I think this is a model that should be encouraged.
[quote]As cynical as the industry’s current state of mind has made me – and many of you – it’s still amazing to see how technology can play a role in matters like this.[/quote]
Indeed. Puts petty arguments about the success’ and failures of our various pet OS’ into perspective.
What’s so humbling about Icelandic gramma? *scratches my leftover hair*
EDIT: Great initiative btw. Too many languages out there with <1000 speakers. If they cannot be kept alive, they should at the least be documented.
Edited 2012-06-22 03:17 UTC
It’s quite arcane.
Probably. I find it rather straight forward. There’s a couple of odd vowel shifts, but quite logical gramma. The similarities in inflection between male gender and female gender, combined with the lack of syllable-final double consonants in Danish explains why we have conflated the two genders in Standard Danish (dialects are a different matter; my childhood dialect is somewhere being Swedish and Icelandic).
You should try with one of the Celtic languages
So… From Bornholm?
Nope, the Zealandic province. Old Rural Zealandic is in terms of pronounciation and gramma quite similar to Swedish and Icelandic, but more archaic than Swedish, but not as much as Swedish. Compare Zealandic ‘vaðn’ with Icelandic ‘vatn’ or Swedish ‘vatten’ – and compare with standard Danish ‘vand’ (silent d, since ‘nn’ cannot happen word final), or Norwegian ‘vann’.
Bornholmsk isn’t that different from other Danish dialects (incl. Scanian) – OTOH, I don´t consider Danish and Icelandic to be particularly different. I also consider Old Low Franconian to be easy to read, so my opinion doesn’t count
Etymology isn’t agreeing here. The old Germanic version of Water had a T, so the Swedish/Danish look closer.
The German (country) dialect developed S (Wasser), most of the rest have T or D depending on whether the sound became voiced again or not.
Hmm… Old Norse (Danish by its speakers then) had ‘vatn’, Modern Icelandic has ‘vatn’, Zealandic has ‘vaðn’ (t -> soft d) and Swedish has ‘vatten’ (remember: hidden vowel between t/ð and n).
Swedish however has a very different phonology where Danish (and particularly the Belt-dialects in Denmark) has a phonology near-identical to Icelandic, but more conservative than the Icelandic phonology.
Finnish and Hungarian are reaaaaally tough.
Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian are only tough because they are not in the same language family as most other European languages. Finnish and Estonian are fairly closely related, Hungarian more distantly. But it’s only like learning any other non indo-European language. The killer with Finnish is the inflexion system. But like Icelandic, get your head around that, it’s not so hard.
If I’m not mistaken Finnish has 16 cases. That’s enough to blow my head off
But the grammar is incredibly regular. You learn a rule, it’s always true.
I am very into languages. Learned a whole bunch of them encluding e.g. ancient Greek and Esperanto.
But still: Do we really need 3000+ languages?
It is nice that they can them by way of documentation, but keep them alive?
You say that because it isn’t yours which is going to disappear.
We don’t need houses. Fancy living in a shed?
It’s a great project, and it’s nice to see about other culture, other people, it’s a little like discovering a new world, if you usef for example to live just in europe. I like the idea, to discover new areas, new people….. but…
but my deepenst believes are, that we need a main common language. One that is the “mother langugae” for all (even not the “second language”). I think it would help to make the world more peaceful. And it would make the communication easier. I wish europe would be more unified like USA. I really think at least europe should have a common language… may it be Esperanto , or english or spanish, but we need one. Esperanto has a great structure and could be learnt quite easy by a lot of people in europe.
It’s already great to be able to travel in europe around without needing a passport, without needing to change your money into other currencies…but i wish this would be extended. Imagine you can go all around the world without password, and being able to communicate with everyone.
I agree with this on one level, but on another, I think it’s a pipe dream. First of all, the various languages of the world are far too different. The Asian languages bare little resemblance to those of indo-european or baltic descent, and there are several languages that don’t even have a linguistic family to classify them. Consequently, you can’t really invent a “mother language” and in fact that term is about as inaccurate as one can get. Even if you did create this theoretical language, how would you force it on others? Because, you know, that’s exactly what you would have to do.
I think a better solution would be a constructed language that is extremely regular in both grammar and phonology, and which does not break its own rules even once. You could then have this language be learned as a second language by all. That way, no one need give up their native tongue and yet we might be able to communicate more easily. Creating something that would be relatively easy for all to learn, however, would be difficult in the extreme given the sheer variety of languages out there, many of which have uncommon phonemes not found in the more common languages of today (have a look at some of the languages spoken in Africa).
I wonder if you have been to the USA? If there is one thing we are not, it is unified on languages. There are pockets of speakers of whichever language you can name all over. There are huge pockets of Spanish, particularly on the west coast where I live. Pennsylvania has a considerable German and Dutch population, while Maryland has a sizeable Korean demographic. California has just about everything, and Oregon has a lot of Spanish and Russian speakers along with a sizeable middle eastern demographic. The list can go on indefinitely. In fact, I’m lucky these days if a fast food drive-through worker or a cab driver can even understand me (American English being my first language, German being my second). I can usually understand them, but they seem to be better at speaking our version of English (even if all they can manage is a pidgin varient) than they are at comprehending it. We don’t even have an official language for this country, did you know that? It’s perfectly legal to demand a translated version of any government document into any language you choose, at no cost to you, and it is illegal not to hire someone based on a language barrier. It’s even theorized by some that English will become a minority language here within the next century, although whether this country will even hold together that long is doubtful if you ask me. That you say we are unified about our language here suggests to me that you’ve never actually been to this country or, at the very least, have not seen much of it.
It doesn’t work that way. Exactly how do you plan to force a common language on the whole of Europe? Remember, the EU only encompasses some of the European countries, not all of them, and you’d be surprised just how hard people will fight to maintain their native tongue in their native land.
I wonder if there is any room for common ground with Wycliffe Bible Translators. Since their goal is to translate the Bible into every language on earth, they have actually created written languages for a few people groups which previously had only a verbal language.
http://www.wycliffe.org/about/statistics.aspx