[Saccade]

Regardless of what study one takes into consideration, it is apparent that the world's languages are dying at an alarming rate. Average estimations of how many languages still exist: around 7,000. Some reports predict as many as 60% to 90% of the world's languages are at risk of extinction within the next 100 years. Language distribution today is very very skewed; the median amount of speakers for the languages of the world is only 5000-6000. What's more, nearly 85% of languages are below the 100,000 speaker count (Romaine).

My question is, does it really matter? I know there's some linguist enthusiasts here at RVF, what do you think?

Globalism, rather, this "global-village" we live in is to blame for this progressive death. Because we are more connected, because we may mix and move more freely across borders, our world's mother tongues suffer. Language dies along with man, as a culture dies, so too usually does its language. The farmer in the Caucuses would never hope to contact his cross-world neighbor in the Americas in the 1800s. Today, with the help of some wifi, he could send a picture of his dog through snapchat to the American in an instant. It is, for this reason, that the world's language equilibrium is so thrown out of wack today. The proverbial cat is out of the bag.

But what is lost with the death of language? If you speak another language you know the inherent benefits. It's almost like having another soul; along with language death is the loss of another part of the human experience, forever. As cultures die, so too does different perspective.

Take Europe for example; 3% of the world's languages are spoken in Europe. Just think: nearly 80% of the world's population speaks a total of only 75 languages. That's mindblowing. But what say he who can speak no longer? The Western world is taking over, as this global-village becomes more connected so too do our languages. It's only natural: segmentation created the diversity of the tongue, and reintegration will see it reduced.

The task of preservation is a monumental one. Who decides what stays? Who's gonna cough up the money for the documentation and the necessary social regulations that help propagate a language? It seems we can only apply band-aids for now, but I believe this phenomena should not go unnoticed.

[YoungBlade]

I make it a goal to learn as many languages as possible. I speak English, German, Japanese, Latin, and Spanish, and am learning Danish, French, and Russian. No need to let languages die.

On a similar note, here's a language which would be dead if it weren't useful in its locale.

[Leonard D Neubache]

Reminds me. I've been meaning to take a crack at learning sign language. I've always thought it would be a great universal language, although I'm told it has some fairly strong regional 'dialects'.

[YoungBlade]

(04-24-2018 09:22 AM)Leonard D Neubache Wrote:  

Reminds me. I've been meaning to take a crack at learning sign language. I've always thought it would be a great universal language, although I'm told it has some fairly strong regional 'dialects'.

There are actually two distinct languages IIRC. American and British. American sign language is descended from a Frenchman who recorded how a pair of twin deaf girls communicated and expanded it. British sign language has been around since the early renaissance. The issue with this is that depending on where you are in the world, you speak one or the other, and then with a dialect. China, for example, uses BSL, while most of the Western world uses ASL.

I'm sure CleanSlate can correct me, as I know comparatively little about sign languages

[Saccade]

Would love to hear CleanSlate's input for sure. Sign-language is so interesting because it is exactly analogous to spoken language. It has grammar, structure, vocab, the works. Humans can manifest the same expression from the tongue and translate it to simple hand motions. I wonder what the learning curve is like...

[Salvadore]

It does matter, but not in the way you think. It's actually prefered that most languages die off since the fittest survive even when it comes to languages. Most of the languages that are about to die off are very inconvenient anyway.

In the region where I live there are some people that try to keep an old language from the past alive but almost all words are too long which makes it harder to express oneself. Same thing with Welsh or Irish. They're also retarded in comparison to English.

Some tribe in the Amazonas speak Piraha, and since they lack number words, they got a hard time performing common quantitative tasks and they stay a bit more primitive than if they had those concepts. Some of these tribes doesn't even have a concept of the future or the past and can only express themselves in terms of shit going on right now. Why would you want to keep a language like that from dying off?

I've also always been annoyed that English only got the one word for "You" contrary to Italian, and doesn't differ whether it's meant to a singular person (tu) or multiple (voi). If everyone just spoke Italian it would make it a whole lot easier for everyone rather than having all these other ugly languages around.

[Leonard D Neubache]

(04-24-2018 10:09 AM)Salvadore Wrote:  

...
If everyone just spoke Italian it would make it a whole lot easier for everyone rather than having all these other ugly languages around.

I tried to learn it but my arms always got too sore.

[Bienvenuto]

I worked for a vehicle rental startup a while back.

The documentary title "Hypernormalisation" (shit documentary by the way) was actually a reference to Soviet culture. But it could apply to the modern world.

I was bussing trolleys of tea and sandwiches into meeting rooms and pulling out garbage bins and trash and looking in windows. There was a big industry drive to "standardise language". For example presentations about the need to get rid of alternatives to the word 'speed' - velocity, celerity, rapidity, rushing, - for the good of the industry they all had to go.

It just makes everything "easier" if we only speak one language and a reduced set of words within that language to boot.

Of course the more complex a language and -languages- there are, the more complex a picture of the world we can build up and the less lacunas we might have in our perspectives on the world.

I can't write shit on my Mac or smartphone without having my less typical words changed as I write them.

But on the other hand "hyper standardisation" just makes it easier to turn the world into one large retail unit. so...

I think its a crying shame that so much is being lost so quickly. The worst thing is that we are forgetting so quickly what it is that we have lost, even as we lose it.

Heidegger said -“The song still remains which names the land over which it sings.”

Not anymore it doesn't - it's being standardised out of existence.

[Fortis]

I'm fine with it. If you can't defend your language, culture and lifestyle then it doesn't deserve to remain. It's the law of the jungle. I don't cry for the lamb eaten by the wolf; I don't mourn fallen cultures and languages.

[ElFlaco]

1. No, it doesn't matter if languages die. Linguists like make comparisons with biology, arguing out that each language teaches us something about the human mind just as species tell us about what's possible for life. Maybe technically true, but the payoff gets smaller and smaller with each language (there are around 6000) and it's largely an academic matter with little real-world applicability.

2. Speakers of minority languages often want their children to master the local majority language (or globally, English). That's for them to decide. Or if they want to defend and preserve their language, more power to them.

3. Even languages with a relatively small number of speakers are not necessarily at risk of extinction. What matters is whether the children are learning the local language. If not, it will be dead soon.

[Mage]

I know I will get a lot of flack for saying this here, but I really dislike English spreading too much. I know native English speakers will get angry, but the fact is that English is a poor language with little variety to express oneself and the best things in English are those that are borrowed from French, Latin and elsewhere.

English is a simplistic and degenerate language in my opinion. Too many tenses are missing. Too many verb forms are missing. Too many nuances are missing. Nouns have no sex. No wonder feminism prospers mainly in anglosphere - English language already is lacking sex - an important nuance that makes people more easily manipulable to such subversion. Gender neutrality functions really bad in languages where not only the noun but also the associated verbs and adjectives change sex with it.

You can't pull gender neutral pronoun bullshit in any other language, but English and Swedish. In Baltic and Slavic languages - each and every word in sentence changes depending on the speakers sex and also depending on the sex of the thing that the speaker talks about. There is no way feminism can manipulate these languages.

The more complex the language, the richer it's speakers, the more truth in it, the less ability for deceit.

Languages are a miraculous thing that go against all concepts of evolution theory. If evolution is correct then more complex forms must evolve out of more simplistic. But in languages it is the opposite. Sanskrit is a very complex language with many forms and tenses.

Next come Baltic languages - Latvian and Lithuanian are both very beautiful languages with complex tenses and forms. They are the oldest living Indo-European languages. They are very descriptive and their created verbal picture will be much more intense and lifelike then anything you could write in English.

Slavic languages are the next oldest and they are complex too.
Russian language is infinity times more creative then English for instance. In English you can swear in only so few ways, mostly involving the word "fuck" in various forms. Then there are a few less impolite words like "damn" "shit" and the newcomer "cuck" and a few forms and a few derived words. You can make jokes in Russian so witty and complex that they are literally untranslatable in English. There is very little what can be said in English and that would not be translatable to a Baltic or Slavic language.

In Russian the ability to create swearwords is infinite! And you can create swearwords that are so painful and accurate to the situation and so multilayered and deep and witty that you can destroy a persons reputation with a single word.

After Slavic languages come Latin languages. French is the most complex of them all and can express poetic thought very well. The rest are a bit simpler.

Next come Germanic languages. German language is pretty great in expressing philosophical and accurate thought, like no other.

Last come English. English is probably the the least complicated language in the world. And the most mundane, most grounded one. It has little flight. It acts like sponge consuming many words from others and these consumed words give it some beauty but on itself the modern English has devolved into dullness. English is so short and meaningless that creating new words is a problem and English uses Latin for that. Not like Baltic and Slavic languages at all that can create beautiful meaningful new words for new things and whose old world are full of historic wisdom.

A world with all languages gone and only English left would be a nightmare. We would lose so much. It would be so easy to manipulate our culture and to deceive people by changing little bits of language. We would understand so little about our roots.

The more I study languages the more I disbelieve in evolution and start believing in devolution. That is despite me finding proofs of evolution in every other area like biology or technology. Perhaps Tower of Babel was real, perhaps we don't come from monkeys at all. Perhaps we come from angels and monkeys come from us and are devolved humans.

[TigerMandingo]

Interesting post Mage. I do agree that English is quite ugly in its coldness and lack of creativity, which is probably the reason it functions so well as the de facto language of international business. I don't agree that it's so simple to learn though, since we have millions of immigrants in America who have been here for decades and can't put together two sentences.

Not to shit on Americans or anything, but I feel like many of them don't have a strong command of the language, even the college-educated. I don't know why that is. Nobody reads books maybe?

[Super_Fire]

Yes it matters, because language is able to inform reality; different languages have different ways of expressing things or speaking to reality, and can form new modes of though. Look at the SJW thoughtcrime police now; they're seeking to take words and language away, because they know that if you don't have certain words at your disposal you're likely to be incapable of even forming the thought in your mind. You're placed in a cloud of unknowing because you can't properly express yourself.

So I think it's good to have other languages around, it lets us grasp more concepts, though it is handy to have an international language too.

(04-24-2018 06:39 PM)TigerMandingo Wrote:  

Not to shit on Americans or anything, but I feel like many of them don't have a strong command of the language, even the college-educated. I don't know why that is. Nobody reads books maybe?

IMO the Boomers threw out eloquence for the most part with everything else they were rebelling against.

Here's how Americans used to speak:

[Tiger Man]

Yes, it matters. It matters for a number of reasons.

First, this is the Roosh V Forum. I'd wager that most men find their way here looking for either game or travel advice. Combined the two, and you get a huge section of the posts on this forum. Now, when a guy used to post a question like, "I'm going to Belarus. How do I game the best women?", he would be hit with a number of responses asking him if he spoke Russian. Eastern Europe. South America. Parts of Asia. In every case, a lot of guys on here seem to stand by the idea that the "best" women in foreign countries are often the ones who don't speak English. Why? Because they have a much lower level of exposure to English language media. How many times, on this forum, have guys lamented that X City has been "Westernized" and it destroyed the women there? Part of that is, at first, an introduction to English.

Second, as has been mentioned, different languages are capable of expressing different thoughts. Why do we continue to reference Ancient/Koine Greek when expressing philosophical ideas? When we get to monolanguage, we lose a lot of the freedom of expression that comes with different languages and dialects.

Third, and related to the last point, the spread of English is more troubling than the spread of other languages. Maybe Mage was on to something. English does have a different gender setup than many other languages. And, interestingly enough, English, the language without an Academy, seems to be the language most amenable to gender theorists (perhaps with the exception of Swedish - "hen", just shoot me). Also, and back around to the start of my rant, things like feminism are rooted in English language sources (and some French, let's be honest). But beyond books, which can, of course, be translated, there is the media. The English language media, on a global scale, is the antithesis of everything we discuss on this forum as good.

For the polyglots on the forum, there is a way to test this. Limit your exposure to the X language media (X, in this case being Colombian Spanish or Hungarian or Russian, or really anything that isn't English). After a week or more, try watching CNN or reading the IHT. When I first went through this, it was a serious RP experience. I got turned off to the media - at large, not just news - long before Trump came along. And I argue a lot of this has to do with language.

[RawGod]

Modern English is indeed pretty poor aesthetically. But in fact, English is a rich and nuanced language - you have to go back to old texts to discover it. Reading Shakespeare and Milton is an amazing and enriching experience.
See my sig for fun with archaic English (a parody of Boswell's Life of Johnson - if anyone has read it since I've put it as my sig, no-one seems to have got it!)

[questor70]

I agree that English has devolved a lot. Look at an old Twilight Zone episode and hear some of Rod Serling's stentorian monologues delivered either by him or some of the characters in his scripts. Nobody speaks like that anymore. It was probably rare for anyone to speak that way even then. The average person's vocabulary is shrinking rapidly despite a constant injection of new slang terms from hip-hop and internet culture. Grammar is also horrible. Everyone says "different than" instead of "different from". Nobody knows the difference between "their", "they're", and "there". And don't even get me started on the normalization of swearing. For instance, the new Lost in Space has gotten a bit of criticism for trying to hard to be family-friendly but despite that the 2nd episode had a needless "bullshit" and "asshole" in it.

I know most here are Trump fans, but come on...Covfefe? Bigly?

How we speak reflects our culture and the devolution of the English language is a symptom of the culture-rot of the West.

[TigerMandingo]

Quintus recently tweeted that Theodore Roosevelt wrote 38 books. I doubt that we have many politicians nowadays who have even read that many in their lifetimes (including Trump).

Thomas Jefferson, Tom Paine, Lincoln. Those guys were eloquent and seriously erudite. There has been a huge dumbing-down of society, for sure.

[ElFlaco]

Russian, Spanish (and even Hungarian) aren't endangered languages. They're not going anywhere. The languages at risk are spoken by small groups surrounded by a more widely-spoken and economically valuable language in the culture/society (usually not English).

GRAMMAR
English has relatively simple grammar, probably due to changes it underwent when various groups invaded England and had to communicate. It has lost a complex set of case endings it used to have. This in itself makes it a good candidate for a global language (although the old saw about languages and armies is a bigger factor in its success). Nevertheless, English grammar still has a few weird features, such as "DO support", when you have to add DO to form certain questions.

VOCABULARY
English is particularly well-suited to incorporating new vocabulary. This is a plus. English may be thriving in part because of the lack of language academy rather than in spite of it.

PRONUNCIATION
English, unfortunately, is a mess when it comes to pronunciation. There are many varieties (with wide variation in how vowels are produced) and English has lots of rules (invisible to native speakers) about what happens to sounds when they combine with sounds around them. This makes is particularly hard to non-native speakers to develop a native-like accent, although we English speakers are pretty used to hearing heavily accented English and can usually figure out what is meant.

There's always speculation that Chinese / Mandarin will take over, due to the large number of native speakers. All you have to do is look at how little influence China has had culturally at the international level to know how unlikely that is. English is benefiting from a network effect at this point, where the fact that so many people around the world can communicate in English makes it the obvious second-language choice for most. The most likely development is that English continues to grow as a lingua franca (communication between non-native speakers) but that regional / world languages continue to be used for social communication, culture and daily life everywhere.

[Tiger Man]

I didn't mean to imply that Spanish or Russian were dying off. I just assumed that those would be languages that many on the forum would be familiar with. I am suggesting an English language media fast for a week (or more) as a test.

[GoingTheDistance]

I think it's complicated.

On the one hand, losing a language means cutting you off from your past in a sense.

You actually do have to change the way that your mind works when you speak a new language.

So it's sad when languages die off.

On the other hand, lets say a parent would rather teach their children a language that gives their child a pathway to a better life.

Who are rich people (everybody on this forum with access to the internet) to tell somebody in the middle of nowhere in Africa or India that they need to hold on to their little tribal village language with 5,000 speakers in the whole world instead of learning a global language that gets them out of poverty?

I do believe having a lingua-franca is absolutely essential to keeping the planet as peaceful as possible though. Without proper communication, things can get ugly real fast.

On an off related note, I will say that it always amazes me that North and South America have only four main languages: French, English, Spanish and Portuguese.

Then you look at Asia and Europe where they have probably close to 50 main languages. It wouldn't surprise me if Africa has about 200 main languages on the continent as big as Africa is. Of course that depends on how you define "main languages" but you get my point.

[Saccade]

I hear what y'all are saying about the 'simplicity' of English. This forum is not alone, there are scholars in the linguistics world with the same concerns: RVF always snuffing out the most pertinent stuff... We read something in class recently that talked about the 'mathematical' nature of english. Words like: good, bad, evil, right, and wrong depict this. These words are very simple, and are revealing of western thought and our constant desire to be 'correct' and to strive for some sort of higher active moral state.

The author we read said these words could almost be interpreted as mathematical because of their complete opposite nature. Think, the enlightenment: reason and critique above all else. Western thought holds reason as a high ideal; perhaps we can hypothesize that these thoughts came about due to the West's relative youth to the rest of the world. If we take into consideration eastern cultures and their pervading philosophies, they depart more readily from the idea of reason and are more receptive to the idea that we are not as in control as we think we are.

We are not rational beings, so why does English use these cut and dry words that neglect the other side of reason? Anyway, I take some issue with the notion that english can't be as beautiful as say a language like french. One look at a LOZ post and I think we get the idea of the power of the english language.

[getdownonit]

(04-24-2018 02:33 PM)Mage Wrote:  

I know I will get a lot of flack for saying this here, but I really dislike English spreading too much. I know native English speakers will get angry, but the fact is that English is a poor language with little variety to express oneself and the best things in English are those that are borrowed from French, Latin and elsewhere.

I agree with the bulk of your post, but this part is upside down. The English language's ability to evolve and adapt is one of it's strongest features. It may be a form of globalism via language - lacking linguistic purity - but it works. English seems much better suited for worldwide use than Dutch or Scots, for example.

Losing languages isn't a good thing but it is inevitable. More important long term would be to reverse the oversimplification of the languages that will remain. One of the fundamental premises of 1984 is that language had become too simple to adequately express ideas, with very foreseeable consequences. We would be better off focusing on improving our use of vocabulary and lexicon of languages we already speak than trying to halfway "save" a dying language.

Language simplification happens whenever a language spreads to new speakers, so as the top global language English is very much suffering from it.

[Hypno]

I understand that there are languages better than English, but the incremental value of those additional expressions is dwarfed by the network effect of everyone speaking the same language.

I have done business deals with Germans where both sides of the transaciton are native German speakers and they insist on conducting the meeting in English in order to demonstrate to the other German their mastery of English. Many Germans are proud and egotistical but even they see the benefit of the network effect of English as a common language.

[heavy]

I think Mage just delivered the

[Leonard D Neubache]

Odd to suggest that English is incomplete because it borrows heavily from French or Latin. Ask George bush. The French don't even have a word for espionage. Seriously though. How many languages are borderline forced to use English terms for nearly everything invented in the post-colonial era, albeit at times a slight variation.

English: Computer
Spanish: Computadora
German: Computer
Japanese: Konpyūtā
Hindi: kampyootar

Quote:

Latin definition for:
computatrum, computatri
noun

declension: 2nd declension
gender: neuter
Definitions:

calculator
Age: Coined recently, words for new things (19th-21st centuries)

Now, someone in an advanced nation could try to find an existing word that gave the right impression but that makes little sense because a new concept can't simply displace the old meaning in the process or you lose the old meaning. They could mash up words to the effect of "electric abacus" or some other nonsense but they'll just end up sounding like idiots. In the end they just use the English word or the butchered version of it.

In a primitive nation? They would end up with "small skyfire counting pouch" at best. I don't know Japanese but I'm guessing the Japanese were advanced enough when the washing machine was invented to already have terms amounting to "washing" and "machine" so they just used their own words to name the same device, but more primitive languages that have no effective word for 'machine' are once again stuck with using English words to describe a new device.

You only have to listen to a foreign language show set in modern times to constantly pick up on dozens of English words that seep into the dialogue. Corporate branding makes this phenomenon even more ubiquitous. Do non-english speakers call an iPhone an i(insert foreign word for phone) or do they just call it an iPhone?

The foreign words adopted by the English language pale in number by comparison to the opposite. I wouldn't be surprised if one of the fastest ways to grapple with a foreign language is simply to memorise a list of all the words that are drawn directly from english or exist as minor variations of the same word.