How to Save an Ancient Language Before It Disappears | Hacker News Reader

How to Save an Ancient Language Before It Disappears

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27 pointsquickfox12 comments

Whenever it comes to these kinds of issues I always have the same question: Why is it inherently valuable to save things that are no longer used? I rarely get an answer beyond a reference to the nebulous concept of "historical" that deems it worthy of preservation.

If it were important, people would be using it, or at least keeping it already. If it's not, let it die. Humans in groups have nasty tendencies toward hoarding.

Just my opinion, will probably get downvoted but I just don't get it.

Edit: Yes I realize this was kind of forcibly forgotten which changes the variables, I'm more referring to the constant stream of "we need to save the X" causes where X can be anything from a language to some subspecies of tropical frog or some weird tradition.

To me, it's important because it's harder to understand the past without it.

The same reason you get mad at ISIS tearing down ancient structures.

I don't honestly care that much. I'd prefer they tear down old buildings than kill people. Again though I know I'm in the minority here.

They do both.

You don't know where you're going until you know where you've been. What if you're going in circles?

There are historical events that that may be local and only recorded in an older language. That's what made the Rosetta Stone so important. It was monumental for our knowledge of the past.

>to some subspecies of tropical frog

Most of that has to do with biology rather than historical importance. There are many species with unique adaptations not seen in any other species on Earth. I'm not a biologist so I can't weigh in on how important studying such things are - but from what I gather from biologists they're super important. :)

Weird traditions are more about cultural heritage and keeping in touch with ones' culture. It's a feeling of belonging to a group that many people place importance on. Personally, I dislike my heritage and most aspects of my culture. I'd rather adopt one that I agree more with - but I'll be forever seen as an outsider and never as one who can appreciate the culture. It's unfortunate.

Historical events can be translated into a more relevant and useful language that's then more accessible to people who don't understand whatever language is dead/is dying though, doesn't that make more sense?

Frog: I don't know much either so I'll take your word for it. The way I see it is that nature is a massive constantly changing and constantly evolving system that, while we've done a lot of damage to I concede, we can't hope to take such a vast and complex machine and stick a wrench in it and stop it in a particular place that we like.

Traditions: The value of a given tradition is only expressed in the culture that holds it. If the tradition is dying, the culture obviously isn't holding it very much. Kind of like how not many people in the US avoid Black Friday because it's supposed to be part of the Thanksgiving holiday, and by contrast how the pilgrimage by Muslims to Ramadan (God I hope I got all that right) is a massive industry because it's still widely practiced.

>Historical events can be translated into a more relevant and useful language that's then more accessible to people who don't understand whatever language is dead/is dying though, doesn't that make more sense?

This requires we preserve the language long enough to study it. Preferably the more eyes studying the better, especially if the language is only spoken in a declining population.

Not to forget to mention that the meaning can be lost entirely between translations even if the words mean the same thing.

For example - translating Japanese honorics to more generic titles. You lose the subtle but important differences between calling someone 高村さん vs 高村ちゃん vs 高村 which could describe a friendship that grows closer and more casual over time. Dropping or changing an honorific has large implications that translations fail to capture. That's something extremely important and not all that nuanced. I can give more examples if you like.

>Traditions: The value of a given tradition is only expressed in the culture that holds it. If the tradition is dying, the culture obviously isn't holding it very much.

This isn't necessarily true - and in many cases its the older generations not teaching the younger generations, regardless of how much the younger generation is interested. Often times its hard to show or express interest or perhaps the parents don't feel qualified to teach the traditions but there aren't any more experienced elder around, etc. There's many many many reasons why traditions die out and sometimes they are discovered and "brought back to life".

Anthropologists have a hard time expressing this. One of the largest hurdles in anthropology trying to explain the importance of it. This goes double for linguistic and cultural anthropology because the benefits to people aren't as straightforward as advancements in other fields of study.

Disclosure: I may be biased here. I wanted to be a cultural and linguistic anthropologist but the desire to live a comfy life on a decent paycheck got the best of me. However my love of language and cultures and how humanity relates through them and the relations between languages and cultures themselves is still something of my interests.

For many things that are no longer used, there really isn't any value. But languages are special- languages are intimately connected with culture, and potentially vast bodies of other knowledge. As the article says, in this case "it is their language that binds them together as a people more than anything".

There is scientific value is preserving languages, just like there is scientific value in preserving endangered rainforest frogs and weird plants- they might have useful things to teach us, and we'll never know if we let them disappear.

When a weird tradition dies out, we lose some emotional connection to past people, but that's probably OK because it's still documented, and we can go read about it. When a tropical frog goes extinct, we lose access to any biochemical tricks it might have been hiding, and that's a little bit sadder. But when we lose a language, not only do we lose the emotional connection to other people (which is a pretty freaking big deal all by itself! But you could argue that losing a culture isn't inherently bad, if nobody cared about it anymore anyway), and not only do we lose the ability to study the workings of the language like we might study the workings of a frog, we also lose access to all of the knowledge of other things that was encoded in that language. It's not just losing a tradition, it's losing everything that people who spoke that language knew about all of their traditions. If it had extensive literature, and was well documented, we might be able to translate some of it into other languages for preservation, but that is incredibly difficult to do, and simply will not happen for most languages. And plenty of knowledge is not preserved in literature- it's purely oral. Cultures that die may have their knowledge preserved if their language is still carried on, but when a language dies, all of its knowledge dies with it.

For any particular language, there may not be much that it has to offer that is unique and can't be replaced. But, then again, there might. The potential is enormous, and thus the risks associated with losing a language are also enormous, and thus it makes a lot of sense to care about preserving languages, just in case.

I'm not sold on traditions, but your arguments on the other two are good.

>Why is it inherently valuable to save things that are no longer used?

Current utility is a poor predictor of future utility. For the same reason we have The National Archives, various libraries, and "Big Data" as an entire industry -- Humanity has learned time and time again that information storage is valuable to our collective knowledge. Our ability to decode various languages contributes to that.

>Humans in groups have nasty tendencies toward hoarding.

Could you provide some examples of what you mean? I can only think of the violent history of civilizations when I think of humans in groups. From the sacking of the Library at Alexandria to demolition of the Buddha of Bamyan, humans seem to have a propensity for destruction and genocide.

In the case of languages, it's political. China wants people to think of themselves as Chinese, not as Hakka or Taiwanese or whatever. Part of that is getting people to speak Mandarin as their first language.

Hakka could probably be documented and preserved pretty well for academics to study in the future. If people were only interested in technical questions like how languages developed over time or what languages had what features, that would work pretty well. But it's the politics that people are interested in here.

BTW, it's not immediately clear that having a lot of little groups with a strong identity separate from the national identity is good. If you look at places like Afghanistan or Iraq (or really most of the middle east), people only identify with "their" kind of people. When it comes to an election, they just vote for the candidate that has their race or particular brand of religion. Language, race, and religion tend to divide people as well as unite them. But I don't really know much about the Hakka or how they fit into China, so it's hard to have a reasonable opinion on how good or bad an idea "keeping Hakka alive" is.

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