Death of a Language: Why Care?

When your dog dies, you know it's bad without having to be told why. When a language dies (and they die every week) it dies quietly and without a fuss. Why care? It's hard to really know. I think senescent languages should be allowed to die peacefully- just as long as they are not murdered along with their speakers.

Is the 'death' of a language really a 'death' if the dictionary is still there? Perhaps a language is like a crystallised virus- hibernating for thousands of years until the next appropriate 'host' (anthropologist) is found.

Even if the language itself can never be resuscitated- it can be translated. This is where the comparison with 'biodiversity' fails (despite many comparing language extinction with species extinction). When the information contained in the species known as "leopard" dies out in the next few decades, it cannot simply be re-booted on another animal (yet).

Other arguments seem to stem from a more utilitarian perpective: "If we only knew what (extinct plant) the speakers (of this extinct language) used to treat headaches!"- but is ethnopharmacology really the way "Big Pharma" discovers new drugs? I doubt it.

We can certainly learn more about history /culture if we can understand how languages evolved with their speakers. Dead languages need to be translatable for research purposes- but who cares if there aren't any people speaking "linear B" anymore?

History is written by it's victors- and in their language. In a globalised world- one in which typing on a computer keyboard empowers an alphabetic language- i think English is the best bet. If voice recognition improves, alphabets won't be as important- and Chinese may dominate. Either way, probably about 97% of all languages will die. Overall, i think this will be a good thing.

A common language doesn't mean an end to war- but i think mutual understanding is a necessary precondition for peace. Once linguistic unification is achieved, we'll be able to build " Tower of Babel II".

Romulus

I wonder if the myth could possibly be true- most children reared by animals have great difficulty learning language, walking upright and integrating in any way back into society- much less founding one of the world's greatest civilizations.

Oliver Sacks has written about such children. Most seem to have been reared by dogs, although monkeys come a close second. Sacks talks about a particular "wolf-boy" who was able to learn a language fluently and then describe what it was like to be "pre-linguistic"... there was no such thing as "A Tree", only "The Tree". It is interesting that the capacity for logical thought appears to require the presence of language- of some sort (he includes sign language and algebra).

There is a story attributed to an ancient Egyptian pharoah who decided to find out what the original human language was by raising a few children in complete isolation from birth. It turns out they don't say very much. Unfortunately, these results were not published in the Journal of Negative Results- and the experiment had to be repeated in 1211 AD by a German Emperor. This is analogous to my idea of rearing 2 children in (separated) isolation for 38 years. Following this, they are shown both a Porsche and a Hyundai and asked to say which they feel is the sexier car.

The Extinction of the Expletive

Swearing : A Study of Swearing in Modern English
With the passing of generations, 'swear words' become only mildly offensive... the last remaining swear word is C_nt. Almost certainly our children will be using this term as often as we say "fuck". After that- there will be no more swearing... what will happen when our grand-children get angry? Will they explode through lack of expletive?