museum exhibit: endangered languages

Wed Sep 4 12:45:31 UTC 2013

Another idea that came to my mind:

You could describe an example with Cornish. The language flourished before  
the English conquest, then diminished slowly, until, in the late 18th c.,  
it had literally withdrawn into a Mousehole, the place where the last  
speaker died  
(http://www.cornwalls.co.uk/history/people/dolly_pentreath.htm). Few  
litrary traces of Late Cornish, the language of that time, are preserved  
(more of Middle Cornish), but recently, it has been revived (mostly on the  
basis of related languages such as Breton and Welsh, so, its authenticity  
is somewhat debateable, and a long debate on how to reconstruct Cornish  
has been raging for half a century, see  
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornish_revival).

So, this language went through the full cycle. For many languages,  
revitalization will be difficult as they are not even substantially  
documented which is why political awareness and support are so important.

Best,
Christian

On Wed, 04 Sep 2013 14:20:37 +0200, Christian Chiarcos  
<christian.chiarcos at web.de> wrote:

> Dear Lena, dear all,
>
> I am glad that many of you liked the tree metaphor, and I'm happy that  
> it helped to give the entire discussion a somewhat more constructive  
> tone. Personally, I find other metaphors equally valid (even the coffin,  
> and the phoenix -- although the latter may be somewhat too complex for  
> children at small age). For me, the coffin with "linguistic diversity"  
> on it would be somewhat less offensive, and you could combine it with a  
> globe where the nations of the world are color-coded for, say, their  
> endangered languages per square kilometer to make clear that it is a  
> problem on a global scale. Alternatively, you can generate a map of  
> endangered languages from http://www.unesco.org/culture/languages-atlas/
>
> But regardless of the metaphor you eventually adopt, some ideas on a few  
> specific points you raised:
>
> - If you have difficulties to classify languages as being endangered,  
> just take a pragmatic approach and follow a standard reference such as  
> http://www.unesco.org/culture/languages-atlas/. Their classification may  
> not necessarily be correct, but you don't have to decide by yourself and  
> can redirect all criticism directly to the authors.
>
> - Coming back to "Collecting words of different languages for the same  
> concept/object also came to my mind in the first place", you might  
> consider using existing Swadesh lists such as  
> http://starling.rinet.ru/cgi-bin/main.cgi?root=new100. Again, their data  
> is far from being perfect (and it's not authoritative, in this case),  
> but you're on safe ground by using data produced by the scientific  
> community. However, AFAIK, there are no audio Swadesh lists available.
>
>> Imagine a language is learnt by children, yet there is only a small  
>> number of speakers, no educational material and pressure from a  
>> "bigger" language, where should I put the language?
>
> - You don't have to provide a classification of all languages and in  
> your context, no one really expects you to, but you can concentrate on  
> representative examples. No need for exhaustivity. If you look for  
> prototypically "healthy" languages, you might adopt, for example, the  
> criterion whether your audience has first-hand experience on them  
> (that's why I was suggesting German and Turkish). The point is that you  
> employ a verifiable, objective criterion (the number of speakers would  
> be another one) from an authoritative source or common knowledge. In  
> this way, any argument about your classification decision should vanish  
> immediately. Maybe, people won't agree, but then, they obviously don't  
> share your definition, and it's a comparison of applies and pies. To be  
> on the safe side, you can add a pointer to a website on language  
> documentation where the problem and its complexity are described in  
> detail. I'm sure people on the list have suggestions for such a link.
>
> - I also don't think that it is a good idea to provide a gradual scale  
> (at least not one based on intuition, if you just take the number of  
> speakers, then it should be fine), and in particular, it won't help to  
> distinguish languages that are highly endangered and some that are more  
> in between. There will certainly be a lot of disagreement even on the  
> state and the future of large national languages. Recently, the future  
> of German is controversially discussed again, for example: you might  
> take a look on  
> http://www.heute.de/Sprachpanscher-des-Jahres-Der-Duden-29564858.html  
> for some more or less unjustified controversies. Hence, distinguishing  
> perishing languages and endangered languages would probably not be a  
> good idea. What I was suggesting with the perishing tree (or, more  
> precisely, the treestump) was to enumerate some languages that are lost  
> beyond reconstructability and for which no substantial record, or no  
> record at all is preserved.
>
>> The pictures of hope that some of you want to paint are certainly very  
>> beautiful and they are appropriate if people already know about  
>> language endangerment. But this is not the case for the general public  
>> in Germany. Hope? Yes. But what for?
>
> - Actually, people might know about the disappearence of dialects in  
> Germany. Maybe not so much in Saxony, but  
> http://www.unesco.org/culture/languages-atlas/ lists 13 languages  
> vulnerable or endangered in (or originating from) Germany alone.
>
> - Whatever you do, part of the message should probably be that the loss  
> of linguistic diversity is inseparable from the loss of cultural  
> diversity (or, a symptom at least). Something that I found truly  
> impressing (being a linguist myself) is how different the world is  
> categorized in different languages. With every language we loose, a  
> system of metaphors vanishes that might have held the key for better  
> understanding the world (or, at least, understanding it in a different  
> way). Lera Boroditsky, psychologist at Stanford University, has given a  
> great keynote on this at ACL-2010 (also cf.  
> http://www-psych.stanford.edu/~lera/press/SuddeutscheZeitung.pdf). A  
> nice discussion on a few such aspects, and a source of inspiration may  
> be http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYlVJlmjLEc.
>
> All the best, good luck with the exhibition, and thank you for the  
> initiative,
> Christian

-- 
Christian Chiarcos
Applied Computational Linguistics
Johann Wolfgang Goethe Universität Frankfurt a. M.
60054 Frankfurt am Main, Germany

office: Robert-Mayer-Str. 10, #401b
mail: chiarcos at informatik.uni-frankfurt.de
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