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sjiveru t1_j5821rc wrote

Reply to comment by Killianti in TIL Every two weeks, an Indigenous language dies. by ImAllAboutYou

They contain another perspective for looking at the world, and often have a lot of valuable cultural knowledge stored in their vocabulary. If nothing else, they're a significant part of a person's cultural identity and should be respected as such.

In a purely unemotional sense, they're also additional data points that help answer the question 'what can and can't human language do?'.

(It's not like sharing a language brings people together, necessarily - see e.g. Serbian and Croatian, which are basically the same language but their speakers hate each other enough that they refuse to call it the same.)

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Killianti t1_j5ckeme wrote

Is the cultural information stored in the vocabulary more valuable than the communication that's lost by excluding the rest of the world when you use that vocabulary? I know that's an impossible question to answer precisely because the value of that cultural knowledge is unquantifiable, and the value of the lost communication is barely quantifiable.

The value of featues of language probably is quantifiable, though. My intuition says that it's not very valuable. Can you explain why it's important or give me some search terms to get me started?

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sjiveru t1_j5d8kgj wrote

> The value of featues of language probably is quantifiable, though.

Not sure how you'd quantify that at all!

Off the top of my head, though, vocabulary can encode cultural knowledge about a people's relationship to their natural environment - showing both their own cultural practices, and medicinal and other kinds of knowledge that might be more widely applicable.

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