[adamnemecek]

The question is whether languages are really worth preserving. I'm not a native English speaker yet I don't really have much emotional attachment to my first language. In fact, my life would have been easier if I grew up speaking English.

And it's not that I think that English is somehow inherently a better language, it's more that there is a lot more people speaking it. It's kind of like if you are deciding what open source project to use. Having a big community around it is a major deciding factor, if not THE deciding factor.

[pjmlp]

Although English is seen as the lingua franca of the 21st century, it wasn't always like that.

In the several millions we are able to speak and write, there have been lots of languages taking that role.

And even English is not as common as many people think, just traveling around the world will teach people that there are many places where knowing English will be of no help.

Besides languages represent culture, not all concepts are expressible across all languages and they are also a door to our past as mankind, sure they are worth preserving.

[adamnemecek]

> Although English is seen as the lingua franca of the 21st century, it wasn't always like that.

I'm aware of that.

> And even English is not as common as many people think, just traveling around the world will teach people that there are many places where knowing English will be of no help.

I guess it's not just about sheer numbers but also about what sort of stuff is produced in the language. E.g. the expert books are mostly written in English. You don't even have to go that far, e.g. there aren't all that many say compiler books that were not translated from English, that are up to date and not terrible. This is for me more important than being able to have a discussion with Bhutani farmer.

> Besides languages represent culture, not all concepts are expressible across all languages and they are also a door to our past as mankind, sure they are worth preserving.

Well it's a tradeoff. And I think that at some point the cost of preserving them outweighs the benefits.

[pjmlp]

> the expert books are mostly written in English.

This depends very much on the domain.

[Rapzid]

Just out of curiosity, what concept is not expressible in English?

[pjmlp]

There are lots of examples. Citing just two out of my mind.

Feierabend (German) - expresses the concept you are finished with the work duties for the day and can enjoy your private time with family and friends

Saudade (Portuguese) - a mixture of loneliness, melancholy, sense of loosing part of you feelings, even mixed with a kid of sad joy, while remembering something that is no longer there.

[viraptor]

You did a pretty good job expressing those concepts in English in your post. Sure, there's no single word for each of those expressions, but that only means they're not that popular in everyday usage.

If they were popular enough, we'd say: English does have words for those ideas! They're "feierabend" and "saudade".

Exactly the same as "gesundheit".

[pjmlp]

Thanks for the compliment, however I feel from the linguistic point of view, I explained them.

Expressing means there is a similar word.

[alieteraz]

The Turkish "huzun" is a lot like saudade.

You should compare Orhan Pamuk's treatment with Fernando Pessoa.

[pjmlp]

Thanks for the hint. Although I imagine reading a translated version won't be quite the same thing.

[DCKing]

You just expressed these in English.

Although you might spend far more words on it, and it might be hard to properly capture abstract concepts in another language, these are not examples of concepts that cannot be expressed in English.

[pjmlp]

> You just expressed these in English.

From linguistic point of view, I explained them.

Expressing means there is an English word with the same meaning.

[DCKing]

What definition of "to express" are you using? Because expressing does not come with a single word restriction that I know of. I think you mean whether or not there is a translation of a certain word?

We were talking about concepts being "expressable" in any language. Of course many words are not directly translatable (half of Chinese isn't, that isn't news to anybody), so that's not particularly interesting. But you'd be hard pressed to find a concept that is not at least explainable in English.

[pramalin]

Tamil and probably many other Indian languages have various examples: Love as in parental (anbu), as between couples (kaadhal). "How many -eth" (ethanaiyaavathu) child are you to your parents? Many forms of family relationships: younger brother (thambi), elder brother (annan), etc.

[jey]

Those concepts seem to be expressed just fine. The only difference is that you used multiple words instead of a single word. (I'm a native Tamil speaker.)

[sampo]

> Just out of curiosity, what concept is not expressible in English?

My native language doesn't force feed gendered personal pronouns on me, so when other languages (English, Swedish, German etc.) do , I feel they are forcing me to be sexist.

(The Swedes are actually trying to take some steps fixing this aspect of their language, by introducing a gender-neutral pronoun.)

Even worse (i.d. feels even more unnatural) are the languages with gendered nouns (German, Spanish etc.).

[hisham_hm]

Interesting — my native language is Portuguese and it suffers from having gendered nouns. Writing in English to me is an improvement in that sense. I didn't know there are other languages which are even better in that respect. What is your native language?

[sampo]

Finnish. But there are others, like Armenian, Basque, Bengali, Chinese, Estonian, Hungarian, Japanese, Korean, Persian.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_neutrality_in_genderless...

[ibrahima]

I feel much the same way (though, considering I learned English at the age of 4 and never really learned much more of my parents' language after that, calling English my second language is grossly misleading). I feel a vague attachment just because my grandfather was a professor of Bengali literature and I'd like to be able to read his work, but I don't sweat over the fact that my grasp of the language is very basic. I don't need to use it too often, and people back in the "motherland" can worry about preserving the language or not.

The analogy to open source projects is spot on; while you might have some "emotional" attachment to a library/technology that you learned early on, you probably wouldn't make significant decisions based on that. I learned to program in VB5, yet I dropped it as soon as I learned Java because it was just an awful language (though I guess human languages don't really have notions of superiority or inferiority like some programming languages might).

[llllllllllll]

The analogy to open source projects is spot on

Except that when an open source project dies, its code remains in full -- to study, take ideas from, or even potentially be revived at a later time.

When a language dies though, it's pretty much gone. Even if it's received a lot of attention from field linguists, it's near impossible to fully codify the grammar and document the nuances of any language.

[oblio]

I doubt that a language dieing in 2014 would be completely gone from all record.

Almost all the languages that we "lost" did not have a rich literature or sometimes even an alphabet.

[llllllllllll]

There are plenty of extant languages that don't have an alphabet either. They will be "lost" in every sense of the word.

The # of languages currently spoken is typically pegged somewhere between 3000-6000 and it's thought that we lose around one a week. Most have almost no documentation whatsoever, and even so a couple papers written in the 1970s aren't going to capture any potential unique aspects of a language let alone allow for reconstruction at a later point.

The analogy to code is way off.

[sampo]

Just a guess: (1) It's maybe difficult to separate one missing their country, and missing the language of their country. (2) Also it's maybe easier to miss the homeland, when the homeland is a rich western country, and moving back home would not mean any decrease in standard of living or safety (might even be an improvement over US or UK).