I rarely do this, but this is a cause dear to my heart. And Bren would approve.
This is for real—an attempt to save languages around this planet from extinction. In historical memory, for various cultures, the sun has gone down on various languages forever, starting with the last two Etruscan speakers, in about 80 BC; 1676, the last born Cornish speaker, in Britain; and in this last century, many, many of the world’s languages went extinct, with the history, the world view, the legends, the traditions and culture that are embedded in a language.
Sometimes the elders get the notion to withhold the language from the young, to make them live in the Outside World, that somehow they’re both protecting the old knowledge and trying to help the young survive. The ELF tries to get the cooperation of the elders to sanction the transmission and teaching, with an assurance of respect for the traditions. The site is: The Endangered Language Fund.
For me, it was somehow natural to start thinking in Spanish and French, when I’d learned to a certain level. I also had about 12 weeks of German, but nothing besides an occasional look at German since then.
I had up through Spanish II by high school, then switched to French, because I preferred the French teacher more than the regular Spanish teacher. Language-wise, that was a mixed blessing. Teaching- and inspiration-wise, it was the right thing for me.
In college, I had enough French that I would catch myself switching back and forth while taking notes in other classes…which didn’t fully dawn on me until I loaned my notes to a classmate, who returned them asking what those funny abbreviations meant. Were they terms used in class, and what did they mean? Well, no, they were qqc and qqn and others, abbreviated English or French or occasionally math symbols. Then I noticed I’d dream in French and mix in Franglais (mixed-up French and English) or Spanglish or…Frenchified Spanish or Spanish-ized French, but by then, my French was good enough I didn’t have to switch too much.
At that time, I was also around genuinely bilingual international students. Nothing like having friends around me go back and forth, mid-sentence, between Hindi and English, say, or Spanish and English.
French and English lit helped each other tremendously, and French has also helped me occasionally with legalese.
While I argued earlier in the thread about changes forward, the progress and future of language, that also *requires* the past of the language, and studying a language or literature, respecting it, also, I think, requires (or perhaps should require) appreciating, cherishing, that past history.
As a kid and young teen, I tended to be impatient with my dad’s English. His English was Appalachian Mountain dialect; very “country” and fractured by city-people’s standards; “substandard” by English teacher standards. My dad could not spell well or speak or write a grammatically standard (“correct”) sentence to save his life. Never mind that he was intelligent. It was how he was raised, what he’d learned, what he was comfortable with, and…he didn’t *want* to change that, I think. Never mind also he was well read, had a good memory, or that my mom was an English major with very good English. His own mom and dad taught their kids reading, writing, and arithmetic *before* they started school, and highly valued reading and learning, despite that they were poor farmers. Heck, my grampa was one of the oral history sources in the nearby counties, and people came to him for surveying and even legal advice, and Bible knowledge, because he *knew* such things. He was intelligent and read, despite little formal schooling. Their kids (my dad and his siblings) all completed high school and all but one went to college, though one of those didn’t complete college.
My point, after getting off-track, is that as I grew up, I learned more to appreciate, to value highly, my dad’s dialect, and I learned to discount his oddity in obstinately not improving his grammar or spelling. I learned that just because a dialect might not be “proper” speech, it might still be valuable, culturally rich, and preserve a way of life that mattered…and that is at risk of being lost now, as time and cultural tides and folkways are subsumed or forgotten.
His speech was very similar to that of Loretta Lynn or to the dialect used in the movie, Harlan County War, or the Foxfire books. (Harlan County isn’t far from where he grew up, and they got the dialect *right* in the movie.)
So, yes, I’m very much in favor of language preservation. It is strange to find the echoes of the first English colonists in America, let alone the Normans and Saxons and Danes/Vikings, or the academic Greco-Latin influence, or Spanish and Native American Indian influences in our English, but they are there. — And the Indians get a measure of “revenge” or, more accurately, persistence, as some of their worldview and words *are* carrying on in American thought and speech.
I suppose that gets back to my earlier premise. Language changes. It morphs, transmutes, into something else, not what it was before, but the sum of what it contacts, the ways that work, and some of the ways that didn’t work.
I think I have a counterpoint for Busifer’s concern about Swedish. While I agree with her concerns, the dangers that Swedish language and culture might be overwhelmed by English or others, I’d also make another point that I hope won’t be rude, insensitive, or wrong-headed. English and Swedish are close cousins. In some important ways, the English mindset and the Swedish mindset started out the same and still are the same. So in that sense, whatever does happen will likely keep something important about what it is to be Swedish. Yet, of course, what she’s concerned about are those unique differences that make one truly Swedish in thought and ways and culture. I wonder though. Suppose an entire language base, a nation, say, is subsumed or absorbed by another “conquering” language. (Take the Norman and Saxon example, though in that case, the conquerors ended up being reconquered by their subjects.) The people of that older or other language don’t disappear. They don’t stop thinking and speaking entirely in their old language. They carry on their ways and usually bring up their children and share with their friends and neighbors, their ways. So to some extend, their ways are carried into the future as a “substratum” of the overall culture. I hope I’m getting that across well. At the same time, though, yes, losing that other language would be losing something very important, that “massively multiplayer artwork / software” that is a language and a folkway. — I can’t be too blasé about it either. Some of my ancestors along a few branches of my family tree were people (American Indians) who willingly or unwillingly had descendants, with willing or unwilling white people. I am certain they would not be happy that I don’t know exactly who they were, what languages they spoke, and the ways they lived. I only know of one such case for sure, and very fortunately, that was quite consensual on both sides (at least for the married couple, and apparently for both families). But…well…there’s another branch on the other side of the family that, if the old tales are connected to “us,” was not a happy outcome on any side of the issue. (I keep getting reminded of it. I think I may have to research that more to find out what else I can, to write a story, whether it turns out that old tale is related to my family tree or not.) (I personally agree with my dad, who believed it was. It’s the right time and place for my family to have known what happened or to have been (sadly) involved.) (Look up Chief Benge or Bench, and Lt. Vincent Hobbs, in the Revolutionary War era. The main source I know of is a book called The Bear Grass, a small press publication.)
Wow, am I rambling today.
Well, if you are fluent in Latin you can ‘fake it’ in several other languages, at least enough to follow the topic. I have formally studied Latin, Greek, and French and to a very minor extent Russian and German; I’m able to get by in Italian fairly well—can converse, actually, if warmed up enough—you forget, but a day or two of exposure and words start snowballing back into memory, can get the gist in Spanish; can order food or give directions to a taxi in Turkish, with recourse to a tour phrase book. And now and again I brush up against something like Portuguese where I know a bit that’s going on, but I’m not sure which language it is. Modern Greek—I can read roadsigns fairly well, but the dialects are killer: I can get by in Athens and Sparta, but Thebes was in ancient times and still is an impenetrable accent. I know a little ‘movie’ Chinese and Japanese and have done some book study. I can watch anime and follow some exchanges without recourse to the subtitles, things like “wait!” and “what the heck?”
You can’t think a thought you don’t have a word for—or you can, but it’s a very frustrating process: and there’s an area of my brain where all these concepts meet. After your first ‘other’ language in which you achieve fluency, the next becomes easier, and so on, because you have developed this vague ‘float zone’ in your brain for wordless concepts, things that float in a microscopically small or infinitely large dark with lights shining on them here and there, turning up features you can compare to things you know, and rotating slowly, but weird beyond all description, with strange connectors floating into view as they turn, gone again into the dark… It’s sort of like the skill you practice in learning to read science fiction, where you meet things you have to puzzle out…but more extreme, and faster-moving.
Being able to think ‘between’ languages is something you acquire, and a creative ability that can be learned. But it cannot be readily explained to a 9th grader who’s just coming to face the fact that many languages don’t form sentences (or think thoughts) in anything like an English order.
For any who are interested, who’ve never found it, I have a conceptual intro to Latin as part of my website. http://www.cherryh.com/www/latin_language.htm
As before, blessings upon my HS Latin teacher, who gave me a better foundation for English grammar than the English teachers were doing at that time (in the height of so-called ‘transformational’ grammar, with such things as NounPhrase2, etc.)
My father is a first-generation immigrant from the Old Country, and listening to some of his sentence construction reflects that. Amusingly, one of my MLIS professors also came from that area, and while his accent was giving the rest of the class (born and raised in Hawaii) fits, I had no trouble following him 🙂 The course material might have also had something to do with it; Boolean algebra isn’t something many library students remember and feel comfortable using — it was a database construction and use class.
I am grateful for my travels while in the Navy. Seeing different cultures around the Mediterranean, as well as living in a small fishing village on the west coast of Italy for 2 years, and also the travels to South America. Would not trade them for all the tea in Ceylon, er Sri Lanka.
I think music (being a musician for the last 30 years) has been a main factor in the longevity of language throughout history. Stories were passed on throughout the ages through song (in the early times songs were more like poems spoken. Singing evolved as musical instruments made their appearence).
So, with the passing of those individuals that you speak of, if there is recorded music of their era past, then they will survive. Like a painting is a picture in time, so is music times voice.
I am always of two minds about things like this. I can see the value of preserving languages, and the link between languages and cultures. But it also does seem to me to be a bit of a “how quaint it is that you have these particular customs that we find charming and worth preserving” mindset… just a bit patronizing when done by people not of the culture, if that makes sense. Add in the fact that the basic purpose of a language is to communicate, and that languages are constantly evolving, and I think that you are fighting a losing battle. I don’t speak the same English that my great-grandparents did, and definitely don’t speak the same English that their great-grandparents did. (I was watching “Downton Abby” recently, and there is a scene where the heir to the estate, a distant cousin who worked in a profession, was talking to the old matriarch of the family about coming out on the weekend, and it was quite clear that the concept of a “weekend” as a distinct from a “work week” was something the matriarch had never encountered before.) I have, in just the last few years, accepted “google” as a verb, and that sort of evolution is going to continue to occur. At the same time, as fewer people speak a language, the chance to use it in everyday situations goes down, so it becomes much harder to stay fluent in the language. As I often say to Europeans who complain about American’s being mono-lingual: how many of you speak Swahili? I took 5 years of German, used to be pretty fluent in it, although my accent was horrible. But without any opportunity to actually use it, I would be hard pressed to actually converse in it now. So, as the pool of speakers decreases, the chance to use the language decreases, and thus fewer people speak it fluently and thus they use it less, which means the pool gets smaller, and a vicious cycle gets started.
Which is not to say that I think people should just give up and stop speaking whatever non-majority language they want. I guess I just feel that, if people think their culture is important enough to preserve, they will. If that means speaking a certain language, they will ensure that their kids speak that language. If the people in that culture do not think it’s worthwhile to preserve their language, who am I to force them to? Cultures are always in competition, and if a parent thinks that their child will have a better life learning “proper English” so that they can move off the farm and get a skilled job in town, that’s their decision, based upon actually living the life, and I figure they know more about the pros and cons of both than I do.
And finally, I think that the fears of a mono-language monoculture are not as bad as some people think. American English is not British English is not Australian English. Heck, the English spoken in New York is not that spoken in New Orleans. There is a very interesting book I read a while ago, the Power of Babel by John Mcwhorter, that delved into the politics behind how we define languages. For example, whether Dutch and German are separate languages or dialects of the same language has more to do with national boundaries than differences in the language. So, I do not think that the issue is that we will become a monoculture because we all speak the same language. I think the bigger issue is that we will wind up speaking the same language because we became a monoculture. And that’s going to be a lot harder to stop, because people will adopt cultures that they think provide them more opportunity.
Obligatory references: _Tigana_, which is a book I do not actually like all that much, but a lot of other people do. To exact revenge on a country, an evil wizard casts a spell which makes it so that only the natives of that country can pronounce and hear the country’s “real” name, and the affect that has on the country’s culture. Basically, only native New Yorkers could hear “New York”, to everyone else in the world the city would be “New Amsterdam”. I found the premise unworkable (how does the spell actually do that), the characters unlikeable (the hero performs an act which I find in many ways to be even more reprehensible than the supposed villain’s), and then see above for my comments about culture. Other people not being able to call your country by it’s “proper” name seems like a silly reason for a culture to die out, since most countries aren’t referred to properly now. We call it Germany, not Deutschland, and I don’t think that’s ever stopped Germans from being German. The assumption in the book seemed to be that once the spell was cast, the children of New Yorkers would actually be New Amsterdamians, even though nothing in the spell technically would preclude their parents from raising them as New Yorkers. At least how I see it.
And in filk, there’s Vixy and Tony’s “Strange Messenger”, all about Humboldt’s parrot, the last speaker of a lost language. http://www.last.fm/music/Vixy%2B%2526%2BTony/Thirteen/Strange+Messenger
Most interesting philosopher 77.
How would you measure the magnitude of the “keyboard” language evolution and the global connection of the fingers that now touch any section of the world each and every second of our lives? Would you consider this the main cause of the exponential “new Language” explosion and a future replacement for the face to face spoken word. Will “reading” replace speaking in futures beyond because of the waste of the spoken word? Will all present forms of communication be replaced?
The betterment of the individual can be done in an instant from one’s home. In many cases “moving off the farm” in the future may even become extinct. Or will the human’s need for close physical communication remain for eons to come simply because of our innate, primal nature (our reptilian brain center).
In my mind, language was a long time human development and will take as long to “deconstruct”….in my mind. But we may be outgrown by our own creations, and become obsolete in our own world, a future world where language (physically spoken) is no longer a necessity for communicating vital information. Therefore, language endangered.
I am not sure how all of this texting is going to affect future language. I think it will, but how much and how far is hard to say. I have seen several articles that suggest that kids today are much less comfortable with talking than with texting, and the issues that that has on relationships. It’s easier to be mean if you do not have to see the other person’s reaction, and kids can be cruel. And on the other end of the spectrum, apparently some kids will text the person sitting next to them at a party instead of just talking. So I do think that this is going to affect the language, but I’m not sure that it will ever entirely replace it.
I tend to think texting and typing/keyboarding will promote abbreviations, or at least spelling changes (and simplified spelling would be an improvement).
But we have to remember the pace of technological change. Look at how quickly iPads, iPhones, and other touchpads are being adopted. Look at the popularity of the laptop as opposed to the desktop. Look at the popularity of the Kindle and other e-readers. These do not do away with a keyboard, but they change how easy (or how hard) it is to enter things on the computer. (What would a neuro-/motor-impaired person or a totally blind person do about a touch tablet?) For most people, the touch screens are easier to use, though.
Then there is voice recognition. That is improving. Google and Dragon, among others, have good voice recognition apps, and apps that use speech to search. Likewise, the camera, for image-based searches. If you can command your computer by speech, or by touch and drawing and text, then you are much more flexible.
All that’s a step closer to the Star Trek data pads, the Star Trek ship’s computer voice interface, or the George Jetson gee-whiz method of computer control.
That means text won’t be the only way of doing things in the future. — But reading and writing, literacy, *will* be a necessity for computer use and for communicating with other people. (Hmm, what does that mean for people with aphasias? Probably, that “web accessibility” needs to be far more flexible, so people with disabilities (even ordinry things like eyeglasses or arthritis) can better use computers.
But the more basic issue is that, no matter how much people (kids too) may like IM chat or texting, they will still crave human contact, physical presence with other humans, sight, sound, touch, smell, (well, taste if you’re more intimate, lol) and a hug or other closeness (friends or family — or that special someone). We all want and need that, even if we’re loners. (Notice how recluses often have pets, to fill that need.)
But back to the question: Sure, why wouldn’t all this connectedness, web, blogs, forums, chat, IM, texting, videoconferencing, YouTube, and all those, why wouldn’t that change how we use language, esp. written language. It has to have an effect.
Why does texting use such freaky abbreviations? Three reasons, really, and two of those will likely disappear. One, it’s faster, and if both parties know the lingo, it works, it communicates well enough. Two, it saves bandwidth, storage, signal speed, but that is mostly a holdover from the days of much slower modem speeds, as opposed to 3G, 4G, or wifi options. Three, it’s hard to type on a smartphone keypad, instead of a real keyboard layout. When it’s easier to type normal-fashion, that roadblock will be eased.
But even so, some things will remain long after.
The problem of texting contributing to poor literacy probably is a matter of technology evolving to ease of use by people. Probably.
But I’m old-school. I learned to type on a real typewriter. I grew up before computers and cell phones and space shuttles. (Okay, I graduated high school in ’84, so primitive PC’s and Apples were around, along with the shuttle.) (I’m going to miss the shuttle, too.)
Also, I lean towards the proper grammar and spelling side of things, heavily. So I could be biased. ::whistles::