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A comment on Languages: Why we must save dying tongues (2014). Parent comment

Re:Languages: Why we must save dying tongues (2014) by gkya on Sunday July 03, 2016 @07:22PM (#12028084)
> Ideally, linguists and historians would document these languages and their cultures, then let them quietly fade. Teaching them to new generations is not only a futile effort, it's less beneficial on net.

I agree to this, and only this, from your comment. There's a lot of romanticism in reviving dead or dying languages that recalls a likeness to the Human Zoo.

But on the other hand, languages and dialects are very tied to the political spheres, which are always on the change, and the languages change with them. Dialects form themselves everywhere: even each household has it's own tiny dialect where some phrases make sense only therewithin. And for language in the modern sense is basically a partially constructed dialect based on a dialect spoken by the ruling class of a dialect continuum, and as dialects and politics are ever-changing animals, languages will always change. While some dialects become closer to a given language, others diverge, or even emerge.

And for lingua francas, they change too. It is possible that English will let it's status go to some other language in the coming centuries, just like Latin, French, Aramhaic, etc. did in the past.

> And most people don't realize how great a cost we pay for having so many languages.

Well, we can't ask people to let go of their identities because we'd rather not do internationalisation.

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Re:Languages: Why we must save dying tongues (2014) by yummyfajitas on Sunday July 03, 2016 @11:18PM (#12028737)
Why can't we ask people to give up their identity? Let's consider the possibility that arbitrary linguistic (and other tribal) divisions are harmful. Consider the possibility that giving the political sphere more levers to pull to manipulate us is not a good thing.

In much the same way, consider the step backwards we've taken in messaging. We had a lingua franca - XMPP. We gave it up so that various powerful actors (google, facebook) could lock us into their unintelligible dialect.

Was this a good thing?

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Re:Languages: Why we must save dying tongues (2014) by gkya on Tuesday July 05, 2016 @05:40PM (#12039736)
> Why can't we ask people to give up their identity?

Because that's how they _be_. Even if we created a monotonous people without any identities, different persons with different abilities and interests will diverge from others and cluster with similar individuals, forming various intersecting groups, and lead to a complex system of group and personal identities. (edit, forgot: Such groups bring together diverging dialects, first diverging metaphors, then words, phrases, etc., so on maybe until mutual intelligibility is lost.)

Your XMPP analogy does not hold because XMPP was popular among some tech geeks whereas even my granny who does not understand the concept of video and blushes and hides when changing her clothes when the TV is on gets to use WhatsApp, with help from my mom who thinks her WhatsApp is locked because of the recent encryption thing they introduced and the yellow little message the app displays related thereto.

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Re:Languages: Why we must save dying tongues (2014) by ktRolster on Monday July 04, 2016 @01:30AM (#12029016)
Why can't we ask people to give up their identity?

You're not willing to give up your identity. It's a lot of work, among other things.

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