British languages ‘in danger of dying out within a generation’
9th December 2010
More hand-wringing about the disappearance of things of no possible interest to anyone whose academic career didn’t depend on it.
Also included is Polari, a language which grew from ingredients of Italian, Romany and Hebrew origin and was used by homosexual men in the mid-19th century as a secret code at a time when it was still illegal to be gay.
I mean, really, who gives a shit? This is the intellectual equivalent of saving up giant balls of tinfoil. It’s stupid, and it wastes time and resouces that could be devoted to more useful things.
December 9th, 2010 at 08:49
Klingon is another dying language… Maybe we should get some taxpayer money and promote it so it doesn’t die out?
December 9th, 2010 at 14:10
I understand why various languages are dying out. In large part, it comes down to market forces, and I have no problem with that. My lament is that I doubt we’re documenting the dying languages well enough to preserve/document the associated worldview.
I’ve been reading news articles in the past few years that indicate that more support is being found for the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, even in its strong form, so the loss of a language may mean the loss of a unique way of viewing the world. The odds are that most languages have very similar worldviews, but there are some, such as Hopi, that have worldviews that diverge significantly from what’s common in the more widespread languages.
December 9th, 2010 at 14:30
That would be a good test – only a language that has more people who know it than know Klingon gets any special preservation effort.
December 9th, 2010 at 14:32
I see no reason to encourage divergent worldviews. If there were any intrinsic virtue in diversity, natural selection wouldn’t be successful. All divergent worldviews do is generate hate and discontent. A pox on them.
December 13th, 2010 at 11:23
You have a point. I’ve long been interested in languages, and one thing I remember from a course I took was that the major forces acting on language development are the cradle and the marketplace. I also remember that Russian was described as a language very adept in expressing paranoia, a worldview promoted by the multiple invasions/conquering sweeps to which it had been subjected.
That said, I disagree on the innate virtue of diversity – natural selection works toward local optima; diversity allows for multiple local optima, which increases the probability of a global optimum and promotes a better response to changing conditions.