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Landlubber77 t1_j573z2t wrote

If every time a bell rings an angel gets its wings and every two weeks an indigenous language dies, then how many bells must ring per week in order for Courtney Cox's hair in Scream 3 to make sense?

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Fjord-Prefect t1_j58nwzz wrote

I didn’t even know they were sick…

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Loki-L t1_j5asfeo wrote

There are about 6000 to 7000 living languages in the world today depending on how you count and maybe 900 of them are in Papua New Guinea spoken only by a small number of people each.

For comparison Europe has about 200 different Languages at most including immigrants from outside the continent.

Europe used to be a lot more diverse but empires building and ease of travel and communication led to a certain degree of standardization.

Around the time of the French revolution less than half of the population of the country spoke french and only a small minority spoke it well.

Loss of linguistic diversity is in many ways a natural result of living in a world where you can easily travel beyond you local village.

On the other hand colonialism and conquest that tries to destroy the native culture and langue of a place is also something that has been going on since the dawn of recorded history and likely beyond.

So both normal progress and "normal" evil crimes against humanity have worked hard at reducing the number of languages that are left on this planet.

It makes communication easier but also means we lose a lot of cultural diversity and ways to look at the world and many people lose their own cultural identity.

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mopsy-turtle t1_j588p0r wrote

Eventually everyone will be speaking the same language. And it'll be some form of txt language

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Berrysbottle t1_j58prjh wrote

Which language is that, and who keeps resurrecting it?

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AnchorKlanker t1_j59xs0g wrote

And how would anyone actually know this?

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Informal_Ad3771 t1_j5amy4x wrote

Every time a language dies, it's like a library is burnt to the ground.

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Killianti t1_j57xwsv wrote

That's probably for the best, right? What do different languages do besides seperate us?

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sjiveru t1_j5821rc wrote

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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_PM_ME_YOUR_FORESKIN t1_j5781gj wrote

Almost certainly by design. The effect of genocide, family separation, boarding schools, etc. is to thin numbers to such extremes that the language and culture cannot physically survive. What a shameful atrocity.

> While they differ in setting, culture, and phonetics, one aspect that most dead Indigenous languages share is that they perished as a result of colonization and the subsequent rise of international languages. As Indigenous languages go extinct, so too do the culture and history that they carry with them. In Canada, the government has been largely responsible for the decline of Canada’s Indigenous languages—yet, there may still be hope for them to be revitalized.

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axioner t1_j57antc wrote

Canada has spent millions upon millions to help indigenous recover and relearn their languages and cultures. The reality is that many young indigenous arent interested in learning a mostly dead language when the majority of the country speaks English. Is this a bad thing? Not really. Languages come and go... and at what point is it that culture job to keep their culture alive and not the governments? Every population on every continent has seen an ancient language die out and be replaced by a new language, perhaps even a modern hybridized version of theirs and another. Why is it that everyone loves to point the finger and blame Canada, but never acknowledge the decades of effort they have put in to right the wrongs of the past? Especially when it was primarily the church that ran the residential schools, with government funding. The government isn't free of blame, but they werent the main perpetrators. Just easier to go after a countries government than a religious faction I suppose.

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_PM_ME_YOUR_FORESKIN t1_j58toje wrote

They also allowed residential schools until 1996. So, let’s not pretend Canada isn’t just solving a problem that they created — and they achieved exactly what they wanted. To take the Indian out of the child. 100+ years of residential schools, abuse, sexual abuse, etc. weren’t accidental. Again, all by design. The oppression continues today even if efforts are being made to improve things now. It’s a drop in the bucket compared to hundreds of years of state-sponsored or supported genocide.

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axioner t1_j59kiyb wrote

Not plural. There was ONE residential school open past the 60s... and again, it was run by the church. Funded by the government, but operated by the church. All the abuse is on the part of the church. Yes, the government turned a blind eye to it and is culpable for that reason. But they werent sitting there telling the priests "Hey, your molestation numbers are a little lacking this quarter. Better pump up those numbers or you arent getting paid this month!"

Tell me exactly how indigenous are being oppressed by the government today? I assume you meant "cultural genocide" by your last sentence, since claiming that what happened with the indigenous was actual genocide would be a pretty dumb thing to assert. Those two things aren't interchangeable.

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axioner t1_j59l69e wrote

You know, I think its hilarious that the article talks about how the current generation of indigenous are being taught English as primary language instead of their ancestral language... as if thats a bad thing. Imagine if the indigenous kids only learnt their local language as primary? Then the article would be condemning Caanada for isolating these indigenous kids because they can't speak the national language and get work off the reserve. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

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