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Are we selfish? | ||
Tags: Endangered Language | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7156 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes  20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 17 of 26 10 December 2012 at 5:58pm | IP Logged |
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It would indeed be nice if there were something close to Davvin or Cealkke dearvvuodaid that used English as the intermediary language. A top-notch English <> Northern Saami dictionary would be nice too. Sammallahti's Finnish <> Northern Saami one isn't that bad, but I wish that it were geared even more for learners and display the core inflectional forms beside every headword in addition to a few example sentences.
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| bela_lugosi Hexaglot Senior Member Finland Joined 6454 days ago 272 posts - 376 votes Speaks: English, Finnish*, Italian, Spanish, German, Swedish Studies: Russian, Estonian, Sámi, Latin | Message 18 of 26 10 December 2012 at 6:04pm | IP Logged |
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Exactly. There is an excellent yet short grammar book for Finns who study German called Nykysaksan preppauskirja. It is basically a preparation guide for the Finnish matriculation exam in high school and contains all the most important grammatical features of German neatly divided into different chapters by their function within a sentence. Below each preposition/conjunction/whatever there is an explanation and a few examples with word-to-word translations.
I would like to create a similar grammar book for Northern Saami with the addition of some cultural and historical background information. Maybe one day... 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7156 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 19 of 26 10 December 2012 at 6:24pm | IP Logged |
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Staff at the University of Tromsø has begun to translate from Norwegian into English a short descriptive grammar of Northern Saami (finally!).
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| MixedUpCody Senior Member United States Joined 5256 days ago 144 posts - 280 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Mandarin | Message 20 of 26 10 December 2012 at 6:41pm | IP Logged |
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I take issue with the statement in a few ways. Firstly: if you never do anything altruistic, then yes, you probably are selfish. However, everyone can't do everything just because it's a good cause. You can't give your money to every charity, you can't donate your time to every cause, and most people don't have the 2-10k hours necessary to learn a endangered foreign language well. So to say that you're selfish for not doing one specific altruistic thing is arbitrary.
Secondly: I think native speakers of languages are pretty clearly in the best position to save their own language. If their language is endangered, then they probably speak another language, and are in a unique position to do something meaningful to make a difference. So, by all means, they should grab a tape recorder and go to town. Lastly: we all know how hard/impossible it is to acquire native like accent. I've met ESL speakers who have lived in the US for 20 years, and still sound a little bit off. So even if someone did put in the work to sound pretty good with a language, they would still probably be speaking a slightly different version of it. Also, as others have noted, just learning the language doesn't really make a difference, you really need to write a comprehensive grammar and make recordings. That's my take on it. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| dekaglossai Newbie United States youtube.com/user/dek Joined 4399 days ago 19 posts - 59 votes | Message 21 of 26 11 December 2012 at 12:42am | IP Logged |
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Solfrid, please post a link to the page where Mike said this. Mike is always incredibly understanding and I've never seen him attack anyone. He is a huge supporter of the polyglot community online, even though he is the only one who studies marginal languages. I really doubt that he said anything with malicious intent.
That said, I think there is a misunderstanding here about what linguists do when they study endangered languages. The goal is not to save the language by creating more speakers (although this would be great), nor to learn the language to absolute fluency, but to document the language before it dies by creating materials that other linguists and language learners can use to access some of the cultural material contained in the language long after it has died, such as audio and video recordings, word lists, grammars, transcripts of folk tales and songs, etc. Whether one thinks that these languages need to recorded is another story, but many think that human languages ought to be preserved even when there no longer exist any speakers, just like ruins of building without any inhabitants, or photographs of one's dead relatives or of extinct species. No one has any obligation to do anything that they don't want to. But polyglots are in a unique position: they have, somehow or other, managed to learn many languages to a high level, and therefore, even if they never plan to learn an endangered language to fluency, are in a much better position to document and learn a bit about an endangered language than the average monolingual person (provided that the polyglot also knows a bit about field linguistics). Edited by dekaglossai on 11 December 2012 at 12:47am 4 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Marikki Tetraglot Senior Member Finland Joined 5495 days ago 130 posts - 210 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English, Spanish, Swedish Studies: German | Message 22 of 26 11 December 2012 at 12:54am | IP Logged |
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I think that Chung and Bela Lugosi have shown us one important aspect how occasional polyglots here and
there wanting to learn an endangered language do help: they create demand for learning materials, teachers and all kinds of native materials. Also the mere knowlegde that cool polyglots :) out there value the language and want to learn it could be uplifting to young native speakers. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Rykketid Diglot Groupie Italy Joined 4833 days ago 88 posts - 146 votes Speaks: Italian*, English Studies: French | Message 23 of 26 11 December 2012 at 3:24pm | IP Logged |
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I am merely a diglot person (learning two more languages) and I don't think I can fall
within the polygots' category, but I'll give my answer anyway. I think that Mike Campbell's reasoning may be valid only when one has a certain connection to the endangered language. For instance, a branch of my family is from a place in Italy where people speak Ladin as well as Italian. Ladin is not an Italian dialect, it is a language per se (not to be confused with Ladino, the Judeo-Spanish language), it is spoken in some valleys of the Dolomites, more or less 50,000 people are native Ladin speakers, and sometimes I wonder if it could be nice to learn it because in some way it is part of my cultural identity. But even in that case, talking about it only in terms of "duty" is wrong. I don't understand why I should feel the moral obligation to study a language; and what's even funnier is that I should help local people relearn their language... I mean, if they wanted to learn it, they would have much more resources and means to do that than I, and I don't think they would need the help of a person from abroad (or from another part of the country). One last thing: as a people who loves languages, one of the greatest satisfactions I get from learning a new language is when I put my knowledge in practice, by talking with native speakers, by watching movies in that language, reading books and newspapers in that language and so on and so forth. All of these things would be seriously compromised if I chose to learn endangered languages. Edited by Rykketid on 11 December 2012 at 3:32pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6703 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 24 of 26 11 December 2012 at 4:08pm | IP Logged |
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Being a native speaker of a certain language doesn't automatically qualify you to describe it in scientific or just useful terms. So typically you have a constellation of one or more ameteur or professional linguists PLUS one or (if possible) more informants - and the two groups rarely coincide when we are speaking about rare and endangered languages (with big languages it is much easier to find native speakers who also are linguists).
The informants have by definition a special relationship with the language, but even the linguist(s) must have a burning desire to spend months or years on documenting a certain language, and they also have to be in a situation where they have access to earlier works, written and spoken sources in general and - not least - willing native speakers. Those requirements are not something everybody can live up to, even though they may be interested in languages in general. What you can ask from native speakers is that they at least write someting or make recordings, and that's much easier. And from language learners with an interest in 'big' languages you could suggest that they at least take some time also to have a go at dialects or related languages, and then they may become sufficiently interested in those dialects or languages also to learn them properly. Asking for more than that just won't function. Edited by Iversen on 11 December 2012 at 4:13pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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