Study uncovers lost 'golden age' of languages(news.yale.edu) |
Study uncovers lost 'golden age' of languages(news.yale.edu) |
There really isn't any good incentive to learn a language with very few speakers, since unless you already know a speaker, you really can't practice the real language. People were a few years ago at least hoping llms could help preserve the languages, but more most of them, there just aren't enough samples for any real preservation. I knew some dudes in college that were linguists that worked on recording native speakers of endangered languages, and while I hoped they would succeed, I never really had much hope of it working.
You could probably convince me to join a hypothetical “Worshipful society of Gentlemen speaking Sumerian”.
Learn Sanskrit. You were writing in a descendant language just now. If you learnt the roots, you would understand the descendants better. And they are your tools, and knowing your tools is important.
Other more obscure languages? Well, as implied, languages are related... So studying the network clarifies the whole.
Gilgamesh deserves that. I'm only a beginner but the refinement of the poetry is already obvious even as someone who doesn't know the language.
Euphony was very important to the Mesopotamian poets. They liked rhythms and alliteration and assonance. And the late editions of Gilgamesh reflect about two thousand years of iterative improvement:
> ilū işinu iriša. ilū kima zūmbē eli bēl niqi iptaḫru. ("The gods could smell the fragrance. They gathered around the sacrificiant like flies.")
The ş is probably an affricate like ts, š is sh, q like in Arabic, ḫ like German ch. Vowels like in Spanish or the phonetic alphabet. Macron means a long vowel. Stress on the penultimate. (Edit: fixed ş / š)
It really rolls off the tongue, doesn't it?
> ibri kudanu ťardu akkannu ša šadi nimru ša şēri ("my friend the swift driven mule, wild ass of the mountains, panther of the wild")
> ibri ša arammušu danniš ittīa ittallaku kalu marşāti ("my friend, whom I loved greatly, who journeyed with me through every hardship")
> ikšudāššu šimat ("fate overtook [him...]" the tablet breaks off here)
That's not correct, in transcriptions of Akkadian š is pronounced sh (Heb. shin), ṣ (not ş) is pronounced ts (Heb. tsade), and there's also s, pronounced as regular s.
The very moral in Gilgamesh deserves that. "I went in a quest for immortality; I did not achieve it and came back, and while returning I saw in the distance the City I built, and I understood what my immortality was...".
(A "must" of an insight for engineers, architects, builders...)
Um, when did anyone think it wasn't?
The entire history of linguistics shows this. Proto-Indo European had no common word (for that family) for sea/ocean [1] from which we can deduce something about the people who spoke it. That's not political obviously but environment and culture are inseparable from language is the ponit.
Languages really only grew for political reasons. Look at the spread of Latin throughout Roman territories.
Likewise, languages splinter and diverge in isolation. Populations that remain where they are and separate from others will drift linguistically. You can look at most of Europe for this. As just one example, the drift in Swiss Germany in Switzerland, which is a relatively small country.
But more than that, it takes some kind of centralization, which is to say, political force, to maintain a language. English had massive changes from Old English (which is essentially a separate language from Modern English) to Middle English (which is largely comprehensible by the modern speaker) when French was the court language of England in the centuries after 1066. And the Normans left their own imprints on English, which is where a ton of loan words came from [2]. But English grammar also greatly simplified without a central authority telling everyone what is proper, basically [3].
One of the fascinating things I remember learning was that there are between half a million and million cuneiform tablets int he world and fewwer than 10% of them have been translated. Now cuneiform is a writing style but one of the difficulties is that it encompasses multiple languages. And this was one of the earliest recorded examples of language displacement from Sumerian to Akkadian over thousands of years. But tablets could be written in part in both languages for a very long time. This is where we have the earliest documented human name, Kushim [4].
But the point is that the rise and fall of Sumer and its displacement by Akkad is recorded in the language.
And of course we had the spread of "colonial" languages in the colonial period (ie Spanish, French, Portugese, English).
Pragmatism also is a factor here. Different languages are inconvenient between populations that interact. The natural tendency is to homogenize on language given sufficient time, even without political pressure. it's a little sad when languages die but it's kind of inevitable.
[1]: https://talageri.blogspot.com/2020/05/the-proto-indo-europea...
[2]: https://www.krysstal.com/display_borrowlang.php?lang=Norman+...
[3]: https://www.sciscanpub.com/index/journals/ainfo/alr/7943.htm...
Not to be "gotcha", but out of true curiosity: may I ask if you speak multiple languages fluently?
Different languages afford different ways of thinking and speaking? Just talk to a translator in works of literature or poetry. Some languages are more verb-y or noun-y, and so are more about getting between things than being something. Or have more or less ambiguity due to tonal systems.
And while ambiguity can create miscommunication when misused, it also allows for different minds to hear one thing, but interpret it in ways more personal to them. When used pro-socially (and not manipulatively), this can afford cooperation that might not otherwise be possible. Saying things while leaving some things unsaid, that has utility if our collective project is certain forms of synchrony -- we can sync on some things while the ambiguity allows asynchrony to remain unresolved in less important dimensions, etc
Imho monoculture is toward death, not toward something golden.
Sanskrit entered into Greek, Greek into Latin, Latin into English.
Edit: downvoter, express yourself clearly. I cannot see how the above sentence could be considered false, apart from gross interpretations of the chosen terms.
Again: you have a relation with "jñāna, gnō̃́sis, gnosco, knowledge"; then you have relations in other dimensions (jña, jñāti, gnṓmōn, gnṓmōn...): the awareness of those details enriches the awareness of the language. That is through the relation between Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, post-Latin - it is just there. What is contended is not clear.
Like Greek and Latin, Sanskrit is an anciently written language associated with major states and ‘civilizations’ - and, crucially, is like Greek and Latin: still remembered if only by some thin intellectual or priestly stratum of societies.
So by use of those three, Indo European unity could be especially well validated by pure textual scholarship (especially if the scholar was British or German and thus on another branch). It is surprising as the result is intuitively scientific — how could I arrive at it if all I do is read and write?! - and was indeed of massive importance to the framing of Darwin’s quite different scientific enterprise, which needed different evidence .
but "the thing with" Sanskrit is also about the prominence of its literature. The wealth of relations between the terms in those languages is enlightening, and there is an important literary corpus behind it.
(I am not quite prepared about Kurdish literature.)
--
Edit:
> still remembered if only by some thin intellectual or priestly stratum of societies
You are "setting the bar" so incredibly low...
English has borrowed words from many languages, as all but the most isolated languages have.
You are taking 'ancestor' in a strict technical sense, which was clearly not my intention.
> though both English and Sanskrit do share a common ancestry several thousand years ago
And those roots can be found and recognized in the subsequent languages, and there lies the value.
It is that consideration of the several implementations (so, include Sanskrit - it augments the material importantly) clarifies the cones of meanings in the roots.