Posts Tagged ‘Languages’
“A different language is a different vision of life”*…
Damián Blasi delves into historic and current efforts to catalog the planet’s 7,000-plus languages…
As a scientist who has researched language diversity for a decade and a half, I recently joined a team to work on a task that even some linguists think is “ultimately unobtainable”: helping catalog and count the world’s complex and ever-changing languages. I am part of an international team of experts assembled by UNESCO to create a World Atlas of Languages. This catalog will hopefully generate updated estimates of the number of active languages and information on how these languages are being used.
Typically, when I present research, one of my gimmicks is to begin with a rough estimate of the number of natural languages in use today: between 7,000 and 8,000. My point is to communicate that there are many languages and, therefore, an incredible diversity of ways humans think, reason, and feel. But pinpointing a more precise number opens the door to all sorts of problems.
For example, the Central African Republic hosts about 70 languages. The speakers of many of these languages live deep within roadless rainforests in villages that are very difficult for government representatives and other researchers to access. It’s hard to fathom how resource-intensive it would be to form an accurate linguistic picture of this country alone.
Of course, our project is far from the first to attempt to categorize and quantify languages. Many groups and individuals have done this in the past and continue to do so.
My task set me on a path to understanding the history and craft of counting languages. While I expected to read a dull sequence of estimates, I instead found a riveting tale involving Christian missionaries, post-war idealists, a colonialist opium agent, and more. I also gained even more appreciation for the potentially impossible task of counting languages…
A fascinating read: “Tackling the Impossibility—and Necessity—of Counting the World’s Languages,” from @blasi_lang and @WennerGrenOrg.
Apposite: “Disappearing languages“
* Federico Fellini
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As we total up tongues, we might spare a thought for Søren Kierkegaard; he died on this date in 1855. a Danish theologian, philosopher, poet, social critic, and religious author widely considered to be the first Christian existentialist philosopher, he wrote critical texts on organized religion, Christianity, morality, ethics, psychology, and the philosophy of religion, all displaying a fondness for metaphor, irony, and parables. Among his major works: Either/Or, Fear and Trembling, and The Sickness unto Death. It may come as no surprise that he was a major influence on Dostoevsky.
Kierkegaard wrote in Danish and the reception of his work was initially limited to Scandinavia, but by the turn of the 20th century his writings were translated into French, German, and other major European languages. By the mid-20th century, his thought exerted a substantial influence on philosophy, theology, and Western culture in general.
“X marks the spot”*…
A reprise (because it’s just so much fun): the challenge facing pre-20th century alphabet book authors…
In 1895, the physicist Wilhelm Röntgen discovered X-rays, a groundbreaking moment in medical history which would lead to myriad improvements to people’s health. Perhaps one overlooked benefit though was in relation to mental health, specifically of those tasked with making alphabet books. How did they represent the letter X before X-rays? Xylophones, which have also been a popular choice through the twentieth century to today, are mysteriously absent in older works. Perhaps explained by the fact that, although around for millennia, the instrument didn’t gain popularity in the West (with the name of “xylophone”) until the early twentieth century. So to what solutions did our industrious publishers turn?
As we see… in addition to drawing on names — be it historical figures, plants, or animals, all mostly of a Greek bent (X being there much more common) — there’s also some more inventive approaches. And some wonderfully lazy ones too…
Many more amusing examples: “X is for...” from @PublicDomainRev.
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As we wrestle with representation, we might spare a thought for Thomas Young; he died on this date 1829. A polmath described as “the last man who knew everything,” he made notable contributions to the fields of vision, light, solid mechanics, energy, physiology, musical harmony, and Egyptology. His work influenced that of William Herschel, Hermann von Helmholtz, James Clerk Maxwell, and Albert Einstein. Young is credited with establishing Christiaan Huygens’ wave theory of light (in contrast to the corpuscular theory of Isaac Newton).
Further, Young was an astute student of languages. He noticed eerie similarities between Indic and European languages. He went further, analyzing 400 languages spread across continents and millennia and proved that the overlap between some of them was too extensive to be an accident. A single coincidence meant nothing, but each additional one increased the chance of an underlying connection. In 1813, Young declared that all those languages belong to one family. He named it “Indo-European.”
And Young was instrumental in the deciphering of Egyptian hieroglyphs, specifically the Rosetta Stone.
“The conquest of learning is achieved through the knowledge of languages”*…
“When humanity loses a language, we also lose the potential for greater diversity in art, music, literature, and oral traditions,” says Bogre Udell. “Would Cervantes have written the same stories had he been forced to write in a language other than Spanish? Would the music of Beyoncé be the same in a language other than English?”
Between 1950 and 2010, 230 languages went extinct, according to the UNESCO Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger. Today, a third of the world’s languages have fewer than 1,000 speakers left. Every two weeks a language dies with its last speaker, 50 to 90 percent of them are predicted to disappear by the next century…
Every two weeks a language dies: Wikitongues wants to save them: “The Race to Save the World’s Disappearing Languages.”
And for a more in depth– and fascinating– discussion of the subject, listen to Mary Kay Magistad‘s conversation with Laura Welcher, the director of the Rosetta Project at The Long Now Foundation: “Why half the world’s languages may disappear in this century.”
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As we contemplate conserving the capacity to converse, we might spare a thought for Archibald MacLeish; he died on this date in 1982. A poet, dramatist, writer, and lawyer, he is probably best remembered for his poem “Ars Poetica” and his play JB. But MacLeish also served, from 1939 to 1944 as Librarian of Congress, where he oversaw the modernization of the institution and helped promote The Library– and libraries, the arts, and culture more generally– in public opinion. Over his career, he won three Pulitzer Prizes, a Bollingen Prize, a National Book Award, a Tony Award (for JB), was named a Commandeur de la Legion d’honneur, and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
“Speech was given to man to disguise his thoughts”*…
Bare-handed speech synthesis: “Pink Trombone.”
[image above: source]
* Talleyrand
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As we hold our tongues, we might send exploratory birthday greetings to John Wesley “Wes” Powell; he was born on this date in 1834. A geologist and ethnologist, he published the first classification of American Indian languages and was the first director of the U.S. Bureau of Ethnology (1879-1902). In 1869, despite having lost his right arm in the Civil War, Powell outfitted a small party of men in wooden boats in Wyoming, and descended down into the then unknown Colorado River. Daring that mighty river for a thousand miles of huge, often horrifying rapids, unsuspected dangers, and endless hardship, he and his men were the first (white explorers) to challenge the Grand Canyon.
“‘Meow’ means ‘woof’ in cat”*…
In cliff-side houses like these, some Malian villagers speak an enigmatic anti-language originally designed to fool slave-traders
Criminals, conspirators, fugitives, outcasts– throughout history, they’ve all often spoken “The secret ‘anti-languages’ you’re not supposed to know.”
[Update: further to “I use a whole lot of half-assed semicolons; there was one of them just now; that was a semicolon after ‘semicolons,’ and another one after ‘now’*…,” this wonderful variation, via @PhelimKine]
* George Carlin
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As we watch our tongues, we might send breath-taking birthday greetings to the man who spoke the secret language of the environment, Ansel Easton Adams; he was born on this date in 1902. A co-founder of Group f/64 (with other masters like Edward Weston, Willard Van Dyke, and Imogen Cunningham), his black-and-white landscape photographs of the American West, especially Yosemite National Park, helped define landscape photography and establish photography as a fine art.
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