Do We Need a Dying Language?
On a website entitled “2Blowhards“, “in which a group of graying eternal amateurs discuss their passions, interests and obsessions,” one of the blowhards, Donald Pittenger, has a rant about Dying languages:
What exactly might a language spoken by 250 people living near the Amazon River possess that, if lost, could never ever be reinvented in the future? If they have 12 names for beetles, that is nothing compared to taxonomies already performed by biologists. And if they have eight names for various types of tropical rainfall, so what? That information would be irrelevant to an Arabian nomad and the same information could be largely conveyed in other languages by use of adjectives.
BAcked His argument seems to be firstly, that nobody has recently made a convincing case for why a dying language should be preserved. He cites two admittedly weak arguments:
One argument for language preservation is that isolated languages embody folk-wisdom offering insights into herbs or leaves or bark or other substances that can cure one disease or another. … Another argument that catches my attention is based on the assumption that languages are like genes or DNA and that the loss of a language is equivalent to the extinction of a biological species.
I find the first argument a pathetic stretch and the second one absurd.
What exactly might a language spoken by 250 people living near the Amazon River possess that, if lost, could never ever be reinvented in the future?
In general, this blowhard is not so opposed to the preservation of dying languages as his tone would suggest, but he has something that resembles a “not with my tax money” attitude about it. My counterargument, then, is to address this question “What exactly might a language spoken by 250 people living near the Amazon River possess that, if lost, could never ever be reinvented in the future?” and to address this concern of his as well:
My take is that, in our modern high-tech world, cultures can and do visibly change: consider the fate of Western culture over the past hundred years. So just what is to be preserved if cultures wax and wane, changing all the while?
There may be no scientific, economic, or academic merit in these dying languages, just as there may be none of that merit in the following little bit of language:
Music to hear, why hear’st thou music sadly?
Sweets with sweets war not, joy delights in joy.
Why lovest thou that which thou receivest not gladly,
Or else receivest with pleasure thine annoy?
If the true concord of well-tuned sounds,
By unions married, do offend thine ear,
They do but sweetly chide thee, who confounds
In singleness the parts that thou shouldst bear.
Mark how one string, sweet husband to another,
Strikes each in each by mutual ordering,
Resembling sire and child and happy mother
Who all in one, one pleasing note do sing:
Whose speechless song, being many, seeming one,
Sings this to thee: ‘thou single wilt prove none.’
Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that Shakespeare’s Sonnet # 8 is language beautifully used. If you don’t agree, substitute it with whatever you feel happens to be language beautifully used. (Surely you can think of an instance of beautiful language, if you’re not that much of a blowhard). Now, imagine the language were to die; this sonnet would become illegible, its beauty lost. I happen to think that would be unfortunate.
It is interesting that this example happens to be written in something of a dead tongue preserved, isn’t it? Nobody speaks Elizabethan English anymore, but it lives on somehow, thanks to a certain kind of work, work which will undoubtedly continue, the deader the tongue becomes in time. I am in favor of that work — with my tax money, even.