Should we let old cultures and langauges die out?

steddyeddy

As the anthropologist Wade Davis says of culture:

“The world in which you were born is just one model of reality. Other cultures are not failed attempts at being you; they are unique manifestations of the human spirit.”

Is there any value in preserving languages and culture? Some people here have spoke in favor about language revival and speak about the importance of keeping languages like Hebrew, Irish and Sanskrit.

Some have the view that speaking a more common language like English or Spanish is the way to go. Personally I think it's important to retain culture where possible and one of the best ways we can do that is through language. Thoughts?

lanos

It's like bailing out rogue banks
They are probably doomed anyway and a bloody waste of resources

eternal

We are our past. Do not forget what moulded us.

kowloon

eternal wrote: »

We are our past. Do not forget what moulded us.

Culture changes, that's why we aren't running around the place naked smeared in our own $hite.

eternal

kowloon wrote: »

Culture changes, that's why we aren't running around the place naked smeared in our own $hite.

If that culture was forgotten, you wouldn't be aware of how far we have evolved.

steddyeddy

kowloon wrote: »

Culture changes, that's why we aren't running around the place naked smeared in our own $hite.

So should the whole world speak one language? If so which one?

eternal

History is fascinating. We couldn't know anything that we know without someone before us finding it out. We didn't just wake up with an ipad stuck in our hands.

lanos

Not Irish, or Scottish or Welsh anyway.
Or any African language.
French maybe.

steddyeddy

steddyeddy wrote: »

Is there any value in preserving languages and culture? Some people here have spoke in favor about language revival and speak about the importance of keeping languages like Hebrew, Irish and Sanskrit.

These three aren't comparable, to be pedantic. Hebrew is a living language, spoken every day by about ten million people. Irish is spoken as an everyday language by less than half a million, and Samskrit isn't a spoken language anymore, it's taught rather like Latin is taught as a written language.

There is value in preserving all knowlege, but not value in preserving all tradition, to evolve cultures also need to adapt and let go. Otherwise we'd still be sacrificing virgins to the new moons or something.

Art is the history of a people, told in architecture, decoration, color and clothing, food is the story of what was available to the area, what grew and what fuel was available for cooking etc, race and ethnicity the story of where they come from and who they married, religion the story of tradition and lifestyle, and language the story of how they communicated. All of it is a portrait of our fellow human beings, but not all of it equally worth of preservation by modern western standards.

Few of us would consider practices like genital mutilation worth preserving, regardless of how ingrained in a culture they may be.

lanos

lanos wrote: »

Not Irish, or Scottish or Welsh anyway.
Or any African language.
French maybe.

Why not?

TheLastMohican

What did the Romans ever do for us? Or Latin - for that matter?

steddyeddy

Candie wrote: »

These three aren't comparable, to be pedantic. Hebrew is a living language, spoken every day by about ten million people. Irish is spoken as an everyday language by less than half a million, and Samskrit isn't a spoken language anymore, it's taught rather like Latin is taught as a written language.

There is value in preserving all knowlege, but not value in preserving all tradition, to evolve cultures also need to adapt and let go. Otherwise we'd still be sacrificing virgins to the new moons or something.

Art is the history of a people, told in architecture, decoration, color and clothing, food is the story of what was available to the area, what grew and what fuel was available for cooking etc, race and ethnicity the story of where they come from and who they married, religion the story of tradition and lifestyle, and language the story of how they communicated. All of it is a portrait of our fellow human beings, but not all of it equally worth of preservation by modern western standards.

Few of us would consider practices like genital mutilation worth preserving, regardless of how ingrained in a culture they may be.

Ah but Candie they were comparable at various stages of revival. Hebrew was a moribund language which lacked words for much of everyday use but through enforced revival it was spoken by millions. That wasn't the case a few decades ago.

lanos

lanos wrote: »

Not Irish, or Scottish or Welsh anyway.
Or any African language.
French maybe.

Candie wrote: »

Why not?

It's only my opinion but the aforementioned languages lack elegance
Unlike french
French is very elegant.

TheLastMohican

TheLastMohican wrote: »

What did the Romans ever do for us? Or Latin - for that matter?

Gave us the root of about 70% of English words. For a start.

lanos

lanos wrote: »

It's only my opinion but the aforementioned languages lack elegance
Unlike french
French is very elegant.

So let them die because they don't suit your taste?

There are more than 390 African-Asiatic languages. Have you heard them all?

Eugene Norman

Candie wrote: »

These three aren't comparable, to be pedantic. Hebrew is a living language, spoken every day by about ten million people. Irish is spoken as an everyday language by less than half a million, and Samskrit isn't a spoken language anymore, it's taught rather like Latin is taught as a written language.

There is value in preserving all knowlege, but not value in preserving all tradition, to evolve cultures also need to adapt and let go. Otherwise we'd still be sacrificing virgins to the new moons or something.

Art is the history of a people, told in architecture, decoration, color and clothing, food is the story of what was available to the area, what grew and what fuel was available for cooking etc, race and ethnicity the story of where they come from and who they married, religion the story of tradition and lifestyle, and language the story of how they communicated. All of it is a portrait of our fellow human beings, but not all of it equally worth of preservation by modern western standards.

Few of us would consider practices like genital mutilation worth preserving, regardless of how ingrained in a culture they may be.

I don't think you can really compare genital mutilation with the speaking of a language.

steddyeddy

steddyeddy wrote: »

Ah but Candie they were comparable at various stages of revival. Hebrew was a moribund language which lacked words for much of everyday use but through enforced revival it was spoken by millions. That wasn't the case a few decades ago.

It is now though Eddie. It can't be compared with Samskrit, which hasn't been really spoken for centuries. Not that I think you were comparing it.

AlmightyCushion

kowloon wrote: »

Culture changes, that's why we aren't running around the place naked smeared in our own $hite.

Speak for yourself.

*continues smearing*

Billy86

They definitely should be all held on to, recorded, and made available to study (and teach) for those interested; willfully 'forgetting' any language or culture given the resources we have available to do otherwise would be incredibly stupid.

That said, if the world meshes into one sole 'primary' language over the coming decades or centuries that could also be a good thing. The two are not exactly mutually exclusive.

Eugene Norman

Eugene Norman wrote: »

I don't think you can really compare genital mutilation with the speaking of a language.

We're talking about culture, which encompasses traditional practises as well as language. And, fairly obviously, I'm not comparing language with circumcision.

I'm asking what do you preserve of a 'dying' culture? Not everything is equally worthy of preservation, but of course what we consider worthy or not worthy is heavily influenced by our own culture and traditions.

steddyeddy

steddyeddy wrote: »

As the anthropologist Wade Davis says of culture:



Is there any value in preserving languages and culture? Some people here have spoke in favor about language revival and speak about the importance of keeping languages like Hebrew, Irish and Sanskrit.

Some have the view that speaking a more common language like English or Spanish is the way to go. Personally I think it's important to retain culture where possible and one of the best ways we can do that is through language. Thoughts?

By "old" do you mean "small"? Or "minority"? Or "not English"?

The Irish language, for example, is both older and newer than English. The first literature written anywhere in Europe in the common language of people was in Irish, and modern Irish predates modern English by a couple of centuries. But on the other hand, written modern English was standardised much earlier than written modern Irish - which itself was only really standardised in the last 70 to 80 years.

Likewise, there are many languages across Europe that are under pressure from "bigger" languages. Some of those are older, while others are newer.

If we grow up with a language, we assume that it's always been there, because for us it has. But that's not how languages have worked throughout human history. Most modern languages are in fact relatively new, even though their origins might be very old. If you took a person from 21st century England and sent them back in time by 500 years they'd have trouble understanding a lot of spoken English and the huge majority of the written language. Send them back another 300 or 400 years and the language would simply be incomprehensible to them.

Whether that will stay the same or change in the future is difficult to predict, mainly because humans can now record both spoken and written languages with greater precision than was the case in the past.

Anyway, the above is an answer based on your question as it was phrased, and not on some narrow interpretation of it based on our own local cultural prejudices. I'm sure others will take the more parochial perspective on the discussion with a depressingly familiar absence of aplomb.

lanos

Candie wrote: »

So let them die because they don't suit your taste?

There are more than 390 African-Asiatic languages. Have you heard them all?

The question was what language we would adopt if we had to pick one.
I chose french
Now I'm not aware of all the African-Asiatic languages but thank you for that impressive statistic. You appear to really know your stuff.
BTW , I happen to be a cunning linguist.

FloatingVoter

Sure, keep them ticking over in dusty libraries for the benefit of mankind. Latin, Greek, Egyptian hieroglyphs etc. Nothing is truly dead providing it is remembered. And has a literature and history to match.
Ramming the languages down the throats of kids is counterproductive. A hatred such as I have for all things "Irish" could only have been instilled through the corporal punishment regime of Gaelification.
That said, it is nice to see tourists and grown-ups showing an interest in learning the quaint old tongue though. Made drearier by those made up little Irish names scribbling in various rags begging for grants from a taxpayer that is tired of leprechaun "culture". Their elitist rubbish is dead and needs stamping out where found. Anyone responding in their defence is most likely just in having driven home drunk and celebrating evasion of another arrest. Cop not got your tongue, eh?

lanos

lanos wrote: »

The question was what language we would adopt if we had to pick one.
I chose french
Now I'm not aware of all the African-Asiatic languages but thank you for that impressive statistic. You appear to really know your stuff.
BTW , I happen to be a cunning linguist.

I don't think that was the question!

I'd choose English, purely because I'm lazy.

Martial9

steddyeddy wrote: »

Is there any value in preserving languages and culture? Some people here have spoke in favor about language revival and speak about the importance of keeping languages like Hebrew, Irish and Sanskrit.

Hebrew has been revived, the Irish language is slowly growing - not due to the millions pumped into it but due to the love of the language and Sanskrit speakers were almost always multilingual.

I know plenty of Irish speakers and very few of them became fluent through the school system. Which is mad considering hundreds of thousands of us came through 13/14 years of obligatory Irish classes. They were either born fluent or became fluent out of the love of the language.

My sister became fluent after spending a month in the Gaeltacht after fifth year ended. She grew to love the language. She was sent just to keep her out of trouble during the three months of summer holidays! My ma became fluent when she attended night classes with some friends after her divorce. I know a Latvian girl that came here to work for the summer, fell in love with life here and started attending classes. Similar story with a Swedish chef I worked with.

Irish is a beautiful language and it will not die. But we should seriously look at how we teach it and we should make it an optional subject in secondary. For example, if you struggle at English higher level and Irish ordinary level and really want to hit 550 plus in the LC, you got to pick up another subject.

Let the students decide if the want to continue studying it after primary and let's change the way we teach it. I despised Irish, but loved German class.

I had braces on from 14-16 and had regular appointments I had to keep. 'We're penciling you in for Thursday the 17th next month for your return.' 'Eh, that's maths and history class. I have double Irish on Friday the same time, how are ye fixed?'

kowloon

eternal wrote: »

If that culture was forgotten, you wouldn't be aware of how far we have evolved.

Never said we should forget it, but rigid adherence to it causes cultures to stagnate. There's a balance.

Deleted User

Deleted User wrote: »

I'm sure others will take the more parochial perspective on the discussion with a depressingly familiar absence of aplomb.

FloatingVoter wrote: »

[deleted]

Et voilà! :D:D




(that's French for "and there it is!", in case our English speakers need a translation)

lanos

steddyeddy wrote: »

So should the whole world speak one language? If so which one?

lanos wrote: »

The question was what language we would adopt if we had to pick one.
I chose french
Now I'm not aware of all the African-Asiatic languages but thank you for that impressive statistic. You appear to really know your stuff.
BTW , I happen to be a cunning linguist.

Candie wrote: »

I don't think that was the question!

I'd choose English, purely because I'm lazy.

Yes it was the question.
And I do believe you are lazy for not checking back just 1 page

Eugene Norman

[Deleted User] wrote: »

By "old" do you mean "small"? Or "minority"? Or "not English"?

The Irish language, for example, is both older and newer than English. The first literature written anywhere in Europe in the common language of people was in Irish, and modern Irish predates modern English by a couple of centuries. But on the other hand, written modern English was standardised much earlier than written modern Irish - which itself was only really standardised in the last 70 to 80 years.

Likewise, there are many languages across Europe that are under pressure from "bigger" languages. Some of those are older, while others are newer.

If we grow up with a language, we assume that it's always been there, because for us it has. But that's not how languages have worked throughout human history. Most modern languages are in fact relatively new, even though their origins might be very old. If you took a person from 21st century England and sent them back in time by 500 years they'd have trouble understanding a lot of spoken English and the huge majority of the written language. Send them back another 300 or 400 years and the language would simply be incomprehensible to them.

Whether that will stay the same or change in the future is difficult to predict, mainly because humans can now record both spoken and written languages with greater precision than was the case in the past.

Anyway, the above is an answer based on your question as it was phrased, and not on some narrow interpretation of it based on our own local cultural prejudices. I'm sure others will take the more parochial perspective on the discussion with a depressingly familiar absence of aplomb.

A fair amount of well poisoning there. Impressive.

In the end however your argument seems to be languages (like the one you are writing in) change over time so why preserve indigenous or minority languages

Martial9

Candie wrote: »

it's taught rather like Latin is taught as a written language.

If any of your grandparents grew up in the 1950's, ask them how Latin was taught. It was also a compulsory language class up until the inter cert/leaving cert or whatever it was called then.

My grandfather told us that they spent 1/4 of teaching time on teaching them this language that the Catholic Church were slowly doing away with. But if you made a mistake with your recitals, a whack of the cane your pasty arse got.

We are making the same mistakes, via the modern age, with our teaching of Irish.

Eugene Norman

FloatingVoter wrote: »

Sure, keep them ticking over in dusty libraries for the benefit of mankind. Latin, Greek, Egyptian hieroglyphs etc. Nothing is truly dead providing it is remembered. And has a literature and history to match.
Ramming the languages down the throats of kids is counterproductive. A hatred such as I have for all things "Irish" could only have been instilled through the corporal punishment regime of Gaelification.
That said, it is nice to see tourists and grown-ups showing an interest in learning the quaint old tongue though. Made drearier by those made up little Irish names scribbling in various rags begging for grants from a taxpayer that is tired of leprechaun "culture". Their elitist rubbish is dead and needs stamping out where found. Anyone responding in their defence is most likely just in having driven home drunk and celebrating evasion of another arrest. Cop not got your tongue, eh?

Wtf?

Eugene Norman

Eugene Norman wrote: »

A fair amount of well poisoning there. Impressive.

It is a regrettable fact that some people have a very narrow and parochial view of the world. Thus, a debate about language becomes an excuse for people to make lazy generalisations about English and Irish, or a debate about dominant religious ethos gives people a chance to attack or defend Catholicism.

My point was that there's a whole big world out there - a point that will almost certainly be missed by most contributors to the thread.

Eugene Norman wrote: »

In the end however your argument seems to be languages (like the one you are writing in) change over time so why preserve indigenous or minority languages

It may seem that way to you, but that's not my argument.

Martial9

Martial9 wrote: »

But if you made a mistake with your recitals, a whack of the cane your pasty arse got.

We are making the same mistakes, via the modern age, with our teaching of Irish.

I'm pretty sure corporal punishment has been banned in schools here.

Just saying.

Mountainsandh

kowloon wrote: »

Never said we should forget it, but rigid adherence to it causes cultures to stagnate. There's a balance.

I agree. Language and cultures are not frozen entities you can preserve as they present at a particular moment in time, so it is utterly paradoxical to try and enforce one or the other. Some aspects are easier to preserve, in that they can be recorded and their memory upheld in a population's psyche.
The current Irish lobby (for want of a better word) imo are reaching a point where the campaign is antagonizing the very people they wish to convince to speak and use the language.
I agree we should try and preserve languages and cultures, but not forcibly.
We should also know when to let go, and let languages and cultures evolve, with the losses this might imply.

Martial9

Deleted User wrote: »

I'm pretty sure corporal punishment has been banned in schools here.

Just saying.

Hence why I said via the modern age. My point still stands.

Martial9

Billy86 wrote: »

That said, if the world meshes into one sole 'primary' language over the coming decades or centuries that could also be a good thing. The two are not exactly mutually exclusive.

Would it be a good thing, though? Our different lingos, mannerisms, cultures and what not makes global diversity beautiful.

It would be boring if we all spoke English and all followed similar culture.

Junkyard Tom

It would make a pleasant change from trying to destroy them.

FloatingVoter

The two dominant languages worldwide today are English and Chinese. Throw in Spanish for the bronze and you can pretty much travel the globe and find someone who'll know a little of one of the above.
But that isn't enough.
Portuguese isn't going anywhere soon. Neither is French or German. Farsi and all the other middle eastern languages and dialects will get you a shedload of literature and a lot of current affairs.
As for the one we're conversing in, English is constantly evolving. Evolving to the point where I have to look up the urban dictionary to discover wtf the youds of today are twittering on about.
And that is as it should be for a living language, the words of a younger generation as alien to the older fogie as the words of Shakespeare are to any of us born after about 1700. Just takes a little work in both cases to figure it out.
The ossified languages have no younger generations inventing words while collecting ASBOs- they have parliamentary committees discussing expense accounts and action plans.

Martial9

Martial9 wrote: »

Hence why I said via the modern age. My point still stands.

But it doesn't really.

Mountainsandh

[Deleted User] wrote: »

It is a regrettable fact that some people have a very narrow and parochial view of the world. Thus, a debate about language becomes an excuse for people to make lazy generalisations about English and Irish, or a debate about dominant religious ethos gives people a chance to attack or defend Catholicism.

My point was that there's a whole big world out there - a point that will almost certainly be missed by most contributors to the thread.

It may seem that way to you, but that's not my argument.

Your pompous post does not really address the question though.
Did you mean that people's perspectives should be broadened before language and culture issues can be addressed ?
If so, I agree it would be a better way to tackle the lack of enthusiasm than to force feed the above.
I'm just guessing since it wasn't quite clear.

Cultural studies are slowly being introduced in schools. Maybe as the world opens up at neck breaking speed, the best way to encourage people to embrace and preserve their "local" culture and language is to enable them to define it against the rest of the world.

Put simply I think the "you know you're Irish when..." approach works better than "you're Irish, do the Irish thing".

Shep_Dog

Deleted User wrote: »

I'm pretty sure corporal punishment has been banned in schools here.

While that's true, nobody has ever apologised for what happened in the past and the legacy of the brute-force teaching of Irish is the massive hidden resistance to the language concealed under a defensive veneer of expressing 'support' for Irish whenever the Irish lobby conducts a poll.

More to the point, is the role laws and coercion have in supporting minority languages and cultures. It's one thing protecting minority cultures from discrimination, quite another matter when the state tries to force the minority culture onto the majority population.

It is the main objective of the unregistered political lobby group, 'Conradh na Gaeilge' to reinstate Irish as 'the common tongue' of Ireland. This goal goes way beyond that of preserving a minority language or culture.

This agenda is not about preserving culture, it's about power.

Mother Brain

To my mind clinging on to the past is counter productive and only helps to foster cultural stagnation.

If anything at this stage we should be actively trying to evolve our society in new directions rather than trying to preserve the culture and traditions of a bygone era.

Eugene Norman

Shep_Dog wrote: »

While that's true, nobody has ever apologised for what happened in the past and the legacy of the brute-force teaching of Irish is the massive hidden resistance to the language concealed under a defensive veneer of expressing 'support' for Irish whenever the Irish lobby conducts a poll.

More to the point, is the role laws and coercion have in supporting minority languages and cultures. It's one thing protecting minority cultures from discrimination, quite another matter when the state tries to force the minority culture onto the majority population.

It is the main objective of the unregistered political lobby group, 'Conradh na Gaeilge' to reinstate Irish as 'the common tongue' of Ireland. This goal goes way beyond that of preserving a minority language or culture.

This agenda is not about preserving culture, it's about power.

The problem with this argument is that Irish is in fact an official language. Of equal status. That needs to change before either the language is non-obligatory in schools and before we can condemn conradh for wishing one official language rather than the other is the most widely spoken. There doesn't seem to be much desire for such a change. Not seeing a power play either.

With respect to other minority languages worldwide the arguments against Irish by "English language nationalists" (to coin a term) in Ireland is not too different to an English speaking chauvinist in the UK, Canada,Australia or New Zealand bemoaning any expenditure on minority languages, including signage, government document translations, whatever.

Eugene Norman

Mother Brain wrote: »

To my mind clinging on to the past is counter productive and only helps to foster cultural stagnation.

If anything at this stage we should be actively trying to evolve our society in new directions rather than trying to preserve the culture and traditions of a bygone era.

The future of course will be more of the language and culture you are familiar with and less of the "bygone" cultures and languages you are not comfortable with. How lucky you were born in a dominant culture ( in terms of language anyway).

That sentiment, btw, would be easily transportable to a 19th C imperialist. Let the lesser cultures die.

steddyeddy

Candie wrote: »

It is now though Eddie. It can't be compared with Samskrit, which hasn't been really spoken for centuries. Not that I think you were comparing it.

Good point Candie. Do you speak any other languages do you mind me asking?

Caoimhgh1n

I don't think we should let any language die out if we have the choice, which we do. Even if everybody learned 3 languages, think of how many we could keep living...

Mother Brain

Eugene Norman wrote: »

The future of course will be more of the language and culture you are familiar with and less of the "bygone" cultures and languages you are not comfortable with. How lucky you were born in a dominant culture ( in terms of language anyway).

That sentiment, btw, would be easily transportable to a 19th C imperialist. Let the lesser cultures die.

I must say, I find that a very strange way of framing my comments.

I'm not talking about cultural imperialism whereby one culture is 'superior' to another, what I mean is that change happens. There are new realities to be faced. Traditional attitudes rarely have a vested interest in adapting to shifting social changes and in my mind end up holding up social progress because of a misguided attempt to preserve that which cannot be preserved.

A few recent examples include traditional attitudes to abortion and education by church run institutions who require prospective students to be baptised etc. These are primarily religious hangovers, but are representative of ways in which social progress is stymied by attitudes and ideals that are increasingly anachronistic.

Surely we should be trying our best to create a culture that is the best it can be rather than clinging on to the past?

bnt

Dying doesn't mean being forgotten. These days we have the ability to keep comprehensive records on something before it disappears, which means we can safely retire it to the archives. Just as there are scholars with an interest in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, who can read and even speak the language and talk about the culture; by the year 2112 the Irish language may have disappeared from common usage, but still alive among scholars in universities, not forgotten.

Ave Sodalis

Irish sounds very much like Tolkien Elvish in my mind, and that for that reason (along with more sensible reasons) it should be kept and encouraged.

asherbassad

steddyeddy wrote: »

So should the whole world speak one language? If so which one?

The world soon will......it will be a combination of poorly formed phonetics bearing some resemblance to what used to be English coupled with infusions of emoticons. You will transmit this sh1t to the person sitting opposite you via your headmounted communicator. Sensors in your mouth will transcribe gibberish that you utter like "like, lulz, whatevz, ledge, totes-scrotes, etc, combined with emoticons that your eyes settle on from the display on your visor. This crap will be digitised and wifi-d to the cretin who you are talking to.

He will understand it perfectly.

Tarzana2

People are welcome to try and keep Irish going as a language. I won't be joining them though.