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Learning rare or dying languages | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Cultural Experiences in Foreign Languages |  | |
| akprocks Senior Member United States Joined 5286 days ago 178 posts - 258 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: German | Message 9 of 24 15 September 2010 at 1:19am | IP Logged | |||||
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This is relevant to the discussion as Inupiaq is endangered. Their are enough resources to learn it fairly well at home, if you do some digging. University of Alaska holds Inupiat courses, their are online dictionaries, mp3s podcasts and videos for someone to learn at home. Also if an admin sees this, could you add Inupiaq eskimo to the list of languages?
info- http://www.uaf.edu/anlc/langs/i.html - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inupiaq_language sources- http://www.nsbsd.org/departm ents/inupiaq-education/podcasts/ - http://www.alaskool.org/language/dictiona ries/inupiaq/dictionary.htm - http://www.uaf.edu/catalog/catalog_10-11/ programs/native_lang_ed.html Edited by akprocks on 15 September 2010 at 1:24am 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 10 of 24 15 September 2010 at 9:46am | IP Logged | |||||
I would say that Latin probably has an even lower number of native speakers. But the total number of non-native speakers may in fact be higher. The big question is whether you can say that a language is living if it has lots of excellent second language learners, but no native speakers? Well, in a sense it is - and maybe more than a language with 2-3 old speakers and not one learner. And by the way: is a child who learns for instance Latin from mediocre second language speakers really qualified to represent the original language? My personal solution has been to declare that the international, but scattered community of excellent Latin speakers (and writers) now must carry on the torch, and if there still are true native speakers (children in monasteries? children of language professors?) then they may be quite unrepresentative of the classical or even medieval Latin. Besides there is another point: if you want to use Latin as a living language, then you have willy-nilly to adapt it to modern life. I have the following problem right now: I'm thinking about making a video in Latin, but the words for 'video' I find in even my most 'modern' dictionaries refer to video tapes, not to videos on the internet. For me the obvious solution is to (re)import the word "video" from 'Modern Internationalese', but the purists among Latinists would probably frown at this. But who should decide whether I have the right to import a word, - me (a mediocre, but active speaker/writer) or even most accomplished, but passive Classical Latinist? In the absence of a community of true native speakers I would say that those who intend to use a language also have the right and responsability of keeping it fit for fight.
You mean science? That's indeed a noble purpose, whether or not you actually learn those languages as active languages. But it takes some activity from members of the relevant cultures to keep them alive ... after all texts and speech and grammars and dictionaries and all that don't come out of the blue air, and you need a community of some kind to produce enough of the stuff. And by the way: I'm impressed by the number and quality of resources for learners of Irish. So we may end up with no native speakers at all, but a fair number of very accomplished second languages learners. Edited by Iversen on 15 September 2010 at 10:05am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| iguanamon Pentaglot Senior Member Virgin Islands Speaks: Ladino Joined 5262 days ago 2241 posts - 6731 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Creole (French) | Message 11 of 24 15 September 2010 at 1:44pm | IP Logged | |||||
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This article came out yesterday in BBC News Magazine: Are dying languages worth saving?
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| aricarrot Diglot Newbie United States Joined 5718 days ago 20 posts - 23 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish | Message 12 of 24 15 September 2010 at 3:21pm | IP Logged | |||||
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akprocks: Inupiaq is an excellent example-- thanks for pointing that out! For a lot of endangered languages, it seems there are adequate resources. I'll have to look up Inupiaq and see if I can put it in my paper :) I was thinking about learning Inuktitut which isn't exactly endangered, but still unusual and cool.
Latin I think counts as an extinct language (I was going to say it has less speakers than Irish/Low German), but obviously there are some excellent learners who use it frequently. I was exploring some websites about "Living Latin" and how to adapt it to everyday life to make it a means of communication instead of just study for the sake of study. I personally think that if you are making a video in Latin, you should use the word video even if classicists frown upon it. Modern languages are dynamic and constantly exchanging words with others no matter how much "purists" attempt to stop them. For example, in French, there are words for email, parking lot, and weekend, but speakers generally use the English terms. But that doesn't mean the language is in danger of becoming a dialect of English. The same goes for Hebrew-- it's been successfully revived from a Biblical language and Modern Hebrew borrows a ton of words from other languages. iguanamon: Thanks for the article! While the loss of a tiny language might not matter in the big picture, I still think it's a shame to lose a window into another culture. A lot of extinct and severely endangered languages have been recorded and grammars have been produced, but that doesn't accurately represent the nuances and quirks a living language has. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5381 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 13 of 24 15 September 2010 at 4:27pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I might go out of my way to help a community that is working really hard to keep their language alive. But it's their responsability, not mine.
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| galindo Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5207 days ago 142 posts - 248 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish*, Japanese Studies: Korean, Portuguese | Message 14 of 24 17 September 2010 at 1:01pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I don't think that a culture dies when its language gradually becomes less common and then disappears. Like language, culture is always changing, and there's nothing mystical or special about any particular one just because it's old or rare. The parts of a culture that the people of that culture find relevant and important will survive even if the whole population shifts to using a more dominant language.
It seems noble to try to "save a language," but ultimately it's not doing the world a favor the way saving a nearly-extinct species is. A group of people losing the language that made them unique is not a horrible tragedy; if that hadn't happened many times we would still all be divided into little tribes and not even having this discussion. The idea that you're doing a dying, 'disadvantaged' culture a favor by learning their language is self-serving; you're really only enriching yourself. If someone truly wants to learn a rare language, that is a life-long commitment and requires living where it is spoken. I don't really see the point of that, unless that particular language and culture are something you feel a deep connection to and have a lot of passion for. You can't just do something like that out of some kind of polyglot version of philanthropy. The best way to make a positive impact for a disappearing language/culture would be to extensively document interesting features in photos and videos, and produce translated versions of traditional stories, beliefs, etc. All cultures disappear into history eventually, and the big advantage we have now is being able to save tons of visual and audio evidence of them before that happens, so history books will be more accurate in the future. Creating a written form of a tiny language or trying to teach it to more people and make it "catch on again" is missing the point. EDIT: Yeah, sorry. I originally had one instance of 'it's' instead of 'its,' which probably happened because I had at one point constructed a sentence in that spot using 'it's' and did not properly edit it when I changed some things around... I'm not confused about the proper usage of those words. In general I am very careful with spelling and grammar, and I am constantly surprised by the many mistakes made by native English speakers on this forum full of language lovers. Blasius, you should feel free to correct any that you see. It's kind of rude for native speakers who use this site to set a bad example for non-native speakers by writing posts with usage errors and grammatical mistakes. Edited by galindo on 17 September 2010 at 2:46pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| blasius Newbie Italy Joined 5208 days ago 14 posts - 19 votes Studies: English | Message 15 of 24 17 September 2010 at 1:25pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Although I know it's pretty rude on my part to correct a native speaker, I'll do it anyway, because it's really, really annoying the confusion between the possessive "its" and the verbal "it's".
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| 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 16 of 24 17 September 2010 at 2:52pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Contrary to Galindo I do think that a culture dies when its language gradually becomes less common and then disappears - but the population may survive and be integrated into another culture. This can certainly be called a tragedy if it happens as the result of war or oppression or both, and history is full of examples where this has happened.
On the contrary: if it happens because of a lack of interest in preserving the language and the culture within the culture itself then you may want to learn the language, but it can only be for scientific purposes, for preservation purposes or because you think that is is interesting ... but you can't save such a culture, and you don't have any obligations to try doing it. And no, I wouldn't want to live in a tribal confusion like the one at New Guinea. I find it practical that there is some common means of communication, but on top of that I want both to have my own roots somewhere AND to be able to feast on a smorgasbord ("smørrebrødsbord") of languages which all have enough materials to make it feasible to learn them. Edited by Iversen on 17 September 2010 at 2:58pm 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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