Vanishing Voices
Why do the corpses of languages smell so sweet?
My wife is a linguist. Among the more popular projects in her academic circles is the effort to catalogue and preserve dead or dying languages. Of which, it would seem, there are thousands.
In books like Nettle and Romanaine's Vanishing Voices, linguists alternately bemoan the death of languages and call for (surprise) government efforts to keep them afloat.
If you know me at all, you can probably see by now where I'm going with this. Though I'll admit to feeling the same sort of nostalgia that many linguists do (especially with languages like Istro-Romanian, spoken by about 500 Croatians I've got to pay a visit one day), I see no case for using government resources to keep a language alive.
After all, most folks are in favor of standardization of things like credit cards, systems of weights and measures, computer software, interchangeable automobile parts and the like. There are even efforts underway by many of the same linguists to create a standard language that everyone can speak (as though English weren't the proper one all along.)
So why is spontaneous standardization of language something that governments need to fight? (See this Catallarchy post by Patri Friedman (yes - relation) loosley on point.)
And let's not get things confused: a language's death does not mean the death of its people. Or even their culture (witness Ireland.) Or that people's written history. Or even the liturgical tradition in that language (witness Latin, Sanskrit and - until recently - Old Church Slavonic).
The speakers of Romanian on the Istrian penninsula have every right to be sad that their dialect will someday die (as it almost certainly will.) But tax others so that it will not? I'd draw the line before that.
* * *
I'll add this post script: monolithic, standardized government education may be largely to blame for the disappearance of small language communities. I'm sure that Russia (a very ethnically diverse country) provides a great example of this.
If we (or - say - Russians) were to be taxed in order to support programs to keep dying languages afloat, what better an example could we ask for of government breaking our legs, then handing us a crutch and demanding "see, where would you be but for that great crutch I just gave you!?"
My wife is a linguist. Among the more popular projects in her academic circles is the effort to catalogue and preserve dead or dying languages. Of which, it would seem, there are thousands.
In books like Nettle and Romanaine's Vanishing Voices, linguists alternately bemoan the death of languages and call for (surprise) government efforts to keep them afloat.
If you know me at all, you can probably see by now where I'm going with this. Though I'll admit to feeling the same sort of nostalgia that many linguists do (especially with languages like Istro-Romanian, spoken by about 500 Croatians I've got to pay a visit one day), I see no case for using government resources to keep a language alive.
After all, most folks are in favor of standardization of things like credit cards, systems of weights and measures, computer software, interchangeable automobile parts and the like. There are even efforts underway by many of the same linguists to create a standard language that everyone can speak (as though English weren't the proper one all along.)
So why is spontaneous standardization of language something that governments need to fight? (See this Catallarchy post by Patri Friedman (yes - relation) loosley on point.)
And let's not get things confused: a language's death does not mean the death of its people. Or even their culture (witness Ireland.) Or that people's written history. Or even the liturgical tradition in that language (witness Latin, Sanskrit and - until recently - Old Church Slavonic).
The speakers of Romanian on the Istrian penninsula have every right to be sad that their dialect will someday die (as it almost certainly will.) But tax others so that it will not? I'd draw the line before that.
* * *
I'll add this post script: monolithic, standardized government education may be largely to blame for the disappearance of small language communities. I'm sure that Russia (a very ethnically diverse country) provides a great example of this.
If we (or - say - Russians) were to be taxed in order to support programs to keep dying languages afloat, what better an example could we ask for of government breaking our legs, then handing us a crutch and demanding "see, where would you be but for that great crutch I just gave you!?"
posted by Tanner | 1/08/2006 11:25:00 AM
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