Re:How the Internet is Killing the World's Languages
by salient on Wednesday December 04, 2013 @01:36PM
(#6849018)
It's a good thing Google managed to scan all of the world's old books then, and also that they are working on perfecting translation between dozens of these languages. I doubt much will be lost. Plus, we can see it as a new beginning from now on, when everything will be in English, and all new science would be used by all.
Re:How the Internet is Killing the World's Languages
by DanielStraight on Wednesday December 04, 2013 @01:39PM
(#6849052)
The kind of languages we are talking about aren't recorded in books, many don't even have a written form. People have to go into the field and listen and record and write up grammars and such from scratch.
"As each language dies, many sciences - linguistics, anthropology, prehistory and psychology - lose one more precious source of data, one more of the diverse and unique ways that the human mind can express itself through a language's structure, vocabulary and idiom."
Linguistics is obviously most affected. The variety of sounds and grammar used in languages in huge, and we wouldn't know about it without being able to study a lot of languages. I don't know if that has any economic value[3], but then neither does paleontology, but we consider that pretty important, important enough to preserve the available data.
Really, as nice as it would be to keep these languages spoken, preserving a complete grammar and audio recording of individual sounds as well as longer spoken passages would be enough for most purposes. But the problem is that this is a lot of work, and languages are going extinct faster than we can document them.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_preservation
[2] http://www.ogmios.org/manifesto/index.htm
[3] Well OK, some people get paid to invent languages for sci-fi/fantasy and a lot of linguistic data helps with that, but... that's not much.