Lost languages discovered in the oldest continuously run libraries (2017)(smithsonianmag.com) |
Lost languages discovered in the oldest continuously run libraries (2017)(smithsonianmag.com) |
That sounds ... odd. If the monks were isolated then why should they copy books, especially when they had to delete older material to do so? At the very least this implies that the monks had a supply of books to copy and also had to return the originals to someone somehow.
I think the more logical explanation is that the deleted texts were considered worthless.
You combine the best halves of calculus and Harry Potter into one book.
It'll be more difficult to understand, but managing so grants one the best of both worlds.
It's your contention that the monks had unlimited access to parchment, but just chose to overwrite older work?
> If the monks were isolated then why should they copy books, especially when they had to delete older material to do so?
A religious order dedicated to copying books as a spiritual discipline isn't going to just sit around when parchment is hard to come by.
No-one in their right mind would create an ethical, functioning modern society with thousands of languages, some with 100% global power and some with 0%, and have children born into it at random.
Maybe it's because I'm not a historian, but statements like this:
> Michael Phelps, director of the Early Manuscripts Electronic Library, tells Gray of the Atlantic that the discovery of Caucasian Albanian writings at Saint Catherine’s library has helped scholars increase their knowledge of the language’s vocabulary, giving them words for things like “net” and “fish.”
... make me sad, not happy. This isn't exciting or fascinating, it's a testament to how pointless it is that we put so much value in languages, like we're still murmuring incantations around a fire and we just learned a new old one to murmur.
Let's pick a word for "net" and "fish" and finally, as a species, be done with it.
Make a program of keeping the new global language alive and equally accessible, just like we currently do with essential medicines.
Everybody has their own local medicines, even traditional witch-doctor medicines, but at the same time everybody gets the exact same doxycycline and training on when to use it. Likewise whatever word we end up choosing for "fish" and "net": use whatever word you want in your village, but when you want the one that works in the rest of the world, we made sure you're already armed with it.
Sure, languages evolve and you can't fight that, but with a global internet and a concerted effort to finally solve the Tower of Babel problem, languages can evolve everywhere at once into a single global language that every child gets brought up speaking.
This is the problem: every language is an exclusive cultural club. I want to have one that isn't an exclusive cultural club.
> I learned things that simply can't be translated into other languages without long paragraphs of explanation that would actually require the reader to accept some knowledge of the language to understand them
What would be an example of this? For example in Korean there's the concept of 정, which is a Korean-specific feeling of love/loyalty/bond with another person. You could write paragraphs about how it's subtly different from Japanese Jyo or English love/loyalty/bond, but at the end of the day either you need the concept and create a word for it in the global language, even "Jeong" or whatever, or you don't need the concept and don't create a word for it.
You don't build all of FORTRAN into CSS just because you want to borrow the concept of variables. You borrow what you need and make sure it fits nicely with what's already there.
> And people who grew up speaking this language have their entire life experience wrapped up in it, and their entire family history wrapped up in it for thousands of years.
You're saying that if over a generation they were to switch from one language to another their children and grandchildren would be without a history?
The children in our family don't speak the same language as their grandparents did. They don't know any of the culture-specific words. This doesn't seem to matter in any way that I've noticed, and certainly they themselves haven't.
Poetry, songs and literature just do not seamlessly translate between languages very well. Nor should we lose the calligraphy of Japanese/Chinese/Arabic/Persian.
Humanity would lose a lot if we all went to just one language and script.
Sure, when all the rich people flee to Elysium or Mars, they will be better off with generations growing up together with a common language and script. Because the population will be small in comparison and they will be creating their own civilization.
But until then, I'd like to keep the diversity right here on Earth.
We don't have to incinerate anything. There won't be a government commission you have to petition to be allowed to do Japanese calligraphy or read a poem in its original language.
As of now, English has become the de-facto universal language: in many countries it's the #1 most-studied foreign language in schools. I don't see a problem with having English (or another language) be everyone's 2nd language for better global communication.
(As an analogy, what if the world decides that only C++ should be used to write programs and libraries?!? Boooring!)
English seems to suck as a language but it has risen to be the lingua franca of our present world system - how much of that is because British and American superpowerdom vs being a good lingua franca is up for debate.
I think natural evolution will gradually move most people to adopt either a single global language, or there will only be a few global languages. As English speakers, you and I can travel to most parts of the world without knowing the local language, because English is so pervasive. Will the "global language" be English? Who knows!
> Sure, languages evolve and you can't fight that, but with a global internet and a concerted effort to finally solve the Tower of Babel problem, languages can evolve everywhere at once into a single global language that every child gets brought up speaking.
I always find it fascinating to see different dialects of English. The way that Americans will say "Please ..." and Indians say "Kindly ..." always makes me chuckle.
Right. Because societies are emergent things that arise from masses of people, not products of an individual’s design preferences.
That’s not to say that we might not eventually get to one language. But it won’t be because of illiterate* ideals expressed through technocratic meddling.
(* — “Illiterate” in its original sense: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2012/05/03/rediscovering-)literac...)
We build consensus, we devote dollars and person-hours, and we try to figure out how to get closer to a desired end state. We do it all the time. But when it's giving a generation of people plumbing that's monumental human progress and when it's giving a generation of people a lingua franca that's illiterate technocratic meddling.
That... is optimistic, to say the least. Languages evolve essentially by having successive generations pick up collectively on idiosyncratic features of the language. And of course, people who aren't talking with each other aren't going to pick up on others' idiosyncratic features, and after several generations, you end up with new, distinct languages. To keep a single language out of it, you have to work hard to promote only a single version of it, and rather literally beat the daylight of anyone who speaks the "wrong" version of the language (this is essentially how the modern "big" European languages came about.)
In other words, enforcing linguistic unity tends to require enforcing cultural unity as well.
Yes, you do have to work to make it happen. Up to now we've given languages a free cultural pass, whereas diseases and poverty we keep shoveling trillions into, and we're proud when we've made a 20% dent.
It takes work to pull the species out of what is natural, because what is natural is very often terrible. Diseases naturally evolve to terrorize us. We fight them and sometimes we win.
The first step is admitting that how languages have evolved naturally up to now sucks for an ethical, roughly egalitarian 21st century information-based society.
The sooner we can de-link language from local culture, the better.
And of course that begs the question: can language be delinked from culture?
Yes: my native language isn't the one I'm writing in to you now, and my native culture is whatever I'm making up for myself as I go along, to the chagrin of my parents and many in the culture I was born into.
I addressed this:
> Everybody has their own local medicines, even traditional witch-doctor medicines, but at the same time everybody gets the exact same doxycycline and training on when to use it. Likewise whatever word we end up choosing for "fish" and "net": use whatever word you want in your village, but when you want the one that works in the rest of the world, we made sure you're already armed with it.
Will this mean losing the diversity of cultures due to increased globalism? Yes.
Now here comes my most unpopular opinion on HN:
Good, let's lose some cultures.
My culture isn't special. Human cultures aren't a scare resource and we make up new ones all the time. If the next generation, which enjoys the gift of a single unified baseline language, isn't interested in my culture anymore, that's fine. It might even be good news.
When they need a culture like my culture again, they'll develop one, probably within years or months.
Complex cultures pop into and out of existence on the internet every day, and they're no less complex and no less varied than the ones that involved worshipping tree spirits and eating each other's hearts for strength. Let dying cultures die.
If we're going to agree that X is a problem and that we're happy the problem is naturally diminishing at some snail-like pace, then let's also agree to take direct action to solve X properly and now.
We're tackling the Malaria problem, with dollars and behavior changes. Let's tackle the Tower of Babel problem with dollars and behavior changes. English is an okay global language, for example, but its writing system is far from okay.
And you're talking about refactoring not merely an entire industry, but the very language of thought for our species!
How can we even begin to approach this consciously?
But there doesn't exist a human language that you can use to communicate with everyone on Earth. OP seems to propose a 0-1 language (to stay with the computer analogy) everyone could use to communicate with anybody else, while the local languages would be kept the same way as different programming languages are used now (basically to express certain patterns differently).
Human languages are much more generalized.
Sure, you can find domain-specific examples of one human language being preferable to another though, like when Korean Air forced all its pilots to communicate in English, even Korean->Korean pilots, because in English you can tell explicitly a person who is older/more senior than you that they're about to kill everybody on the plane, without defaulting to making that a polite "it seems as though perhaps what if" suggestion.
On a country-level, we've successfully normalized a given language across large populations and large geographies. Often without involving genocide or prison camps.
If we can roll out vaccines to the globe over a couple years and a few trillion dollars, then surely rolling out a global language over a generation or two would only be 1 or 2 orders of magnitude more challenging, but it would likely result in far more benefit to the human race in the medium/long term, and probably even in the short term too.
The Esperanto crowd is a cool community, but uptake has been much slower than would be necessary for it to have the desired effectiveness.
That's an interesting combination.
The main reason why English speakers often consider Malay to be easier than other South-East Asian languages is that it's usually written using the Latin script without diacritics. Writing it in Hangul instead would make it just another language with a writing system few people are familiar with.
Whereas Hangul as used for writing Korean has plenty of cases where the same symbol represents different sounds in different context and vice versa different symbols representing the same sound in the same context. There's an internal logic to it that makes sense for Korean, because it results in words deriving from the same root being spelled similarly, but if you apply it to Malay, it's just another random set of symbols that can be assigned sounds by convention.
Malay/Indonesian is ridiculously easy and fun to learn. The simple/logical grammar is a joy compared to English, French, Arabic, etc. And it doesn't really have tones like Chinese.
Anyway Malay + Hangul may not be your first choice, that's totally fine. Whatever is your first choice, let's go with it and establish it as the global baseline language that all children learn in school from kindergarten and in cartoons long before that.
> South Korean Hangul
The Roman alphabet is just as simple, and much wider spread. English is a perfectly simple, easy to learn language with great expressive power. So shall we settle on English as the New World Language? Thought so.
No, English isn't a perfectly simple, easy to learn writing system. It's among the hardest writing systems to learn.
Which is why we have a ridiculous game called "Spelling Bees", which can't exist in a language that's easy to write in. In Korea nobody's impressed when an 8-year-old can spell a complex-sounding word they've never heard before and don't know the meaning of: they should be able to spell it.
http://chateauview.com/pronunciation/
> Dearest creature in creation Studying English pronunciation, I will teach you in my verse Sounds like corpse, corps, horse and worse.
> I will keep you, Susy, busy, Make your head with heat grow dizzy; Tear in eye, your dress you’ll tear; Queer, fair seer, hear my prayer.
> Pray, console your loving poet, Make my coat look new, dear, sew it! Just compare heart, hear and heard, Dies and diet, lord and word.
What? English writing and pronunciation are atrocious. There are more exceptions than rules. I thought it was a pretty well known fact. There are languages where you can perfectly pronounce the words even if you don't have the slightest idea of what you are reading.
The problem is that it’s ultimately a purely academic debate, for somewhat similar reasons to why QWERTY vs DVORAK discussions never lead anywhere. I have spent my entire life practicing reading and writing in english. I have zero interest in all that away to switch to an entirely new language, much less one that none of the people around me speak. You’re just never going to develop a movement around this in a free society, so there’s no point.
English isn't substantially worse than any other natural language, except insofar that it is attached to a very inconsistent system of spelling. That's somewhat orthogonal to English as a language, though, and indeed it could be written with any imagined writing system (e.g. quickscript).
Consider the language Esperanto for universal candidate. /s
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulation_Interoperability_St...
- Harry Potter and the Two-Sided Limit.
- Harry Potter and the Area Beneath the Curve.
- Harry Potter and the Osculating Circle.There's no reason any reasonable person would suggest this
It's astonishing to what degree that comparison misses the mark. No, "complex" cultures don't pop into and out of existence on the internet every day -- "gaming" culture or "sports" culture or "woke twitter" culture are not cultures in the same sense that people living an an area and speaking a common language develop a culture over time. They're not the same thing, and though you might compare them via metaphor they're so different as to make that metaphor misleading.
Amusingly, I've seen this attitude in Esperanto circles. No, there's no "Esperanto" culture in the same sense that I'm culturally North American (for example).
> When they need a culture like my culture again, they'll develop one, probably within years or months.
Culture is not nearly as ephemeral as you're making it out. You can't just develop a culture out of nothing. My "culture" includes not just a common vocabulary but a shared history going back hundreds of years; it includes visual arts, literature, intertwined family histories, the dust bowl, jazz and rock and roll. You can't just find those popping into and out of existence on Discord or Facebook.
And since we're talking about ideals, I don't see any reason to limit ourselves to natural languages! I am quite certain you could design a language which is much easier to learn and no less expressive.
"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary." --James D. Nicoll
Or Inglish with a speling riform? Det shood bi sooparizi too lurn es wel. End yoo get ol da books end moovis for fri.
Anyway, you haven't replied why you think it's advantageous. All that trouble just to avoid translating here or there, or learning multiple languages? What makes you believe that speaking the same language makes a better place?
I can't accept this after decades of hearing 2nd language speakers attempt to trivialize my native language as "easy".
With half the world telling me "English is easy", then it's now on them to learn the easy language. No excuses. Get to learning.
Most of your examples don't really become big issues day to day either. They may never become lawyers using English, but they'll maintain just about any other career including a medical doctor.
I'm too, my native language isn't the one I am writing here. I have lived in quite a few different places. Culture is not something I could make up for myself as I go along, I don't think anyone could do so in isolation. I took in the different bits of cultures that i have experienced through, sometimes to the dismay of those around me. I appreciate the perspective that cultures create languages, and without the cultural reference the language would cease its importance and would die.
Indeed, languages are toneless and meaningless when divorced from their functional role in connecting people and enabling them to share thoughts.
For that reason languages aren't sacrosanct and are replaceable.
Whereas the baseline language I'm proposing we use would be very easy for humans, and in fact would be much easier than the local languages that would be kept the same to express whatever they're good at expressing.
I have been following some auxlangs for some time now, and if I had to vote, I'd go with an a priori language as a global second language, instead of choosing an existing one with specific culture attached to it.
I mean English has such a bizarro spelling system it may as well use pictograms. You might as well say "English will never be a lingua franca unless the English speakers overhaul their spelling". English is where it is because of the double historical whammy of the British Empire followed by American hegemony. Couple battles won or lost here and there and we'd still be using French.
Just as the saying is that a dialect is a "language with an army and a navy", a lingua franca is a language with the biggest army and navy (or trade/cultural influence). It has nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with the simplicity of the language, although simplified pidgins/creoles might develop as more non-natives have to learn it (hence how Latin evolved into French, Spanish etc). But pidgins/creoles tend to be localised adaptations and don't have the universal currency of a lingua franca - unless of course they develop into fully-fledged "imperial" languages themselves, as with English.
What does a learner of English need to be able to learn to write a word? 26 * 2 symbols, and a fair understanding of the most basic spelling rules to give any word a basic attempt at spelling. If you didn’t know the spelling of president, you could very reasonably guess your way through it (begins with a ‘p’, ‘z’s are pretty rare and I’d know if it had one, etc.) Contrast this with the modern state of China where actual teenagers have difficulties writing Chinese without the use of a computer because the written word is THAT vast.
I don’t see what your other examples have to do with anything…those are all languages that use an alphabet?
Speaking as a grandchild who didn't have the fortune of being exposed to my grandparents' language growing up, I felt that I missed out on a wealth of cultural knowledge and experience, which is what drove me to learn the language as an adult. I very much wish that I would have been taught by my family as a child.
> What would be an example of this?
Azt a fűzfán fütyülő réz angyalát!
This is the first example that came to my mind. It's not even the best example. The literal translation is "Unto that copper angel whistling on the willow tree", and it could be substituted with "Wow!" but good luck figuring out why it means that and why people use it instead of "Hűha".
Another more recent example, "Szeretném elkérni Mészáros Lőrinc anyukájának lencsefőzelék receptjét". You simply won't be able to understand what that means or why someone would say it as a literal translation.
This is a supporting argument for my point: it’s the equivalent of an in-joke that I simply wouldn’t be able to understand.
Lots of groups have in-jokes that I can’t understand. For example, 3/4ths of memes on gaming and sports subreddits. These are rich cultures I am not a part of and have no need to be a part of.
I want there to be a single, unifying baseline language that we can all understand. When a concept is relevant to us, we’ll create words for it. When it’s a historical or cultural curiosity and not relevant to us, we’ll leave it to be explored by hobbyists, academics and people who have some historical connection to it.
Not every in-joke in every culture needs to be preserved as a world heritage.
At some point we need to say: here are the words to know and here’s how we use them to do math, science, politics, and to debate social issues… everything that involves people who aren’t in one’s personal in-group, in one’s tribe or on one’s team.
Those words will evolve, but let them evolve globally, with off-shoots that are relevant to in-groups, but with a main branch that is relevant to everybody.
I'm not sure if you've ever had to learn English as a non-native English speaker, but it's one of the hardest, most painful, longest things to get truly proficient at, equal to other very hard aspects in one's very hard profession.
There are hundreds of millions of smart people who can't communicate their ideas to us in even simple English sentences. Whereas English grammar, as long as you avoid idioms, is pretty accessible as far as natural languages go.
So to sum up: as a global language English is maybe okay, but its writing system makes it not at all okay.
Which country is this? Genuinely curious. I’m a native English speaker and any time English was established as a country wide lingua franca it involved colonization and suppression of other people, even in England.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen,_speak_Turkish!
I'm not sure exactly how I feel about this. I hope we can get everyone to a global language without so much as a $1 fine, but if it did require a generation of fines and public shaming, it could fall into "the ends justify the means" territory.
In my modern/developed country we fine citizens heavily for entering without presenting a valid PCR test against covid. That's because we believe the public good of having everyone free of covid outweighs the public evil of fining people for simply existing as they are.
Would the public good of switching the globe to a unified language be worth fines and social pressure?
I don't know the answer to that, which maybe correlates with my score on the "Darkness Measure" we've recently seen posted here on HN:
Well, what do you call beating school children for not speaking the "proper" language? Because that's basically the minimum you need to do (see: US, Canada, France for specific examples).
People used to beat school children all the time. They used to beat minorities and torture people who have developmental problems.
We don't do that anymore, and we still find ways of achieving our aims.