How great is the utility of "saving" endangered languages?
9David Gross
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2Shankar Sivarajan
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2AnthonyC
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2Viliam
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2Richard_Kennaway
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3Richard_Kennaway
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93
Some considerations you might be missing:
A language, among other things, is an ongoing, long-term, collective effort by a culture to categorize understanding: to divide up what is known, knowable, (or mistaken) into chunky abstractions that can then be played with lego-style to assemble new insights, hypotheses, or what-have-you.
Each language carves up reality a little differently.
When there are more languages in use, there are more versions of this carving at play. Some languages can easily express things that other languages cannot. Some languages make distinctions that others do not. And so forth.
When a language dies and merely exists as documentation in another language, something is lost. The very things in the dead language that are most exceptional are the ones that defy translation; they have their edges rubbed off during the documentation process and become e.g. "the closest English equivalent of" rather than their rich original meaning.
When we lose living languages, we lose more than alternative ways of expressing certain concepts, but alternative ways of conceptualizing.
1I agree that the utility of preserving endangered languages is greater than zero. But how much greater.
These alternative ways of conceptualizing... how useful are they? What can we achieve with them? As far as I can tell, they are fun and interesting, but insignificant compared to other problems we can help solve.
I'm reminded of the recent review of How Language Began on ACX: the missionary linguist becomes an atheist because in the local very weird language they have declinations to indicate the source of what you are saying, and saying things about Jesus just doesn't click.
82
I agree; keeping endangered languages alive is nowhere near the top 1000 possible Effective Altruist causes.
*
It definitely sucks to be one of the remaining monolingual speakers of a dying language. It is tempting to say that they made a very stupid choice, but maybe it wasn't really their choice. Perhaps they grew up in a small village isolated from the rest of the world. Maybe everyone around was hostile to them for ethnic or religious reasons, so there wasn't much opportunity and incentive to communicate. Or maybe they are just not smart enough to learn a second language. Life is not fair.
But these people are relatively few, otherwise the language wouldn't be getting extinct.
For the remaining bilingual speakers of a dying language, I think the loss is mostly cultural. Their situation could be compared to those expats whose children decide that learning the native language of their parents is too much work. The parents may feel very sad about not being able to share their culture with their children.
This kind of suffering is not comparable to a typical Effective Altruist cause.
For everyone else, there is a cultural loss of all the knowledge that existed in given language and hasn't been translated. When the language is gone, that knowledge is probably irreversibly gone, too. I think the lost knowledge will mostly be of historical and cultural nature; but sometimes there could be e.g. useful medical advice.
Again, there is real value lost, but not comparable to a typical EA cause. (Even the useful medical advice is probably about some rare local illness. Otherwise, I suppose, the useful information probably would have already spread beyond the small community.)
*
Some people will feel about this topic strongly, even if it is not an EA-level cause.
The ones who care about the cultural loss for humanity, they should document as much as possible. Take a camera, interview all the remaining speakers about all possible topics; upload to YouTube. Record people when they sing, and when they work. Record as much as possible, even if it is low quality; more data is better (you can still throw it away later, but you won't be able to record it later). Let the bilingual speakers tell the entire story in their native language first, and only afterwards ask them to translate.
I suggest recording over writing, because it is easier for the interviewed person (unless they have some tribal taboo against recording), so you can get much more data that way; and as a side effect you also document the accent, gesticulation, etc. Recording people while they work, as they comment what they are doing, helps to establish the meaning of their words.
If you record enough data, the future generations can sort it out, probably with the help of an AI.
Other people will be more concerned about the personal fate of the remaining speakers of the language.
I think the best thing you could do for the speakers personally would be to provide good language education for the young, and translation services for the old. (Yes, this does not oppose the extinction of the language; maybe even encourages it.) Be very sensitive about it! The goal should be to make the speakers fluently bilingual rather than to reeducate them. Let the language die (or maybe survive) naturally when its time comes.
And for some people (they will probably be over-represented online) this entire situation will be just a convenient metaphor for their favorite political topic. They will propose solutions that seem like a metaphorical way of hurting their political enemies, and oppose the solutions that seem like a metaphorical victory for the enemies. This is sad but probably inevitable; don't get involved in that, don't let your friends get involved in that.
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Language is a border on culture, like a big wall.
Within a big language like English, people naturally invent new words when trying to reach for concepts they can not yet say, and this creates a tiny fence around a subculture. you can step over it, but the taller the fence the more the subculture diffs the broader culture.
I say this to say there is any value at all in having different communication protocols in the world at all. From an optimalist perspective you'd want everyone to have the same, because communication leads to truth right? but humans aren't immune to propaganda; listening is not a free action. If the world spoke the same words tomorrow, people would immediately fight and get polarized, and diverge as they all tried to carve away a tiny little society that's safe and better by their values.
But I think such a society is much better than the one we currently have. Large borders seem worse than a polycentric world where people can move between subcultures and pick up the best parts. Freedom of movement allows people to leave cultures worse for them and enter cultures that are better.
Anyways, besides that small caveat, at this point in society we should if anything be actively trying to replace and assimilate the small languages rather than preserve them.
Anyways, besides that small caveat, at this point in society we should if anything be actively trying to replace and assimilate the small languages rather than preserve them.
What would that look like? Beating children for speaking in class the language they speak at home? Removing them from their parents? Teaching them that their parents' language is bad and wrong and pig-language fit only for ignorant yokels? All of these were common practices in the past. But what else could "actively trying to replace" them be?
What does "assimilating" a language mean? Keeping a few picturesque words from it as local cultural decor?
5
After the Norman conquest of England, "beef", derived from the French word for cow, started to refer to the meat of the cow in the context of a meal. This is because the nobles spoke French. You see the same etymological distinction in pork/pig, venison/deer, and mutton/sheep.
The addition of new words from foreign languages into English continues to happen all the time still. This happens by default. (I should note that sometimes when populations which speak different languages live side by side they form a more simplified combination language called a pidgin/creole rather than any one of them winning out.)
I think violence is bad. If you just teach kids in a language gives them job access to the world economy, their more obscure language will get replaced in a few generations.
My advice to multinational corporations is to run their offices in English or Chinese (pick one). My advice to developing nations is to pick as their official language (like in legal texts and taught in schools) one of the six UN languages. My advice to new parents anywhere is to expose your toddlers to a ton of media in either English or Chinese and to get them into a peer group that speaks that language (like by picking their school). maybe even Spanish if you want to make a high variance bet on Mexico/South-America--Except-Brazil.
I'm sorry but Hindi, Bengali, Urdu speakers should learn English. Portuguese speakers should learn Spanish. Japanese punches above its weight in fraction of global GDP and number of webpages, but I nonetheless think its speakers should continue the slow Englishification of Japanese that is already happening. Much of Africa already can speak French or English but especially for the people who don't it's probably worth making the leap to Chinese.
Also, it would be nice if the non-east-asian languages could coalesce on the latin alphabet as much as possible. Also also it would be nice if when the CCP gets around to Simplified Chinese 2.0 they reform the pronunc
2
If you haven't seen it yet, you might enjoy this "French is a waste of time" video.
3
I am convinced if only the Cult of Reason had not chopped off the head of Lavoisier, France woulda industrialized first. They got to clockwork and machining first! (Unless you count the antikythera mechanism of the Ancient Greeks.) Also it's really sad how France has treated - and continues to treat - its colonies. Compared to the British they were much worse at building infrastructure and and setting up institutions. This is why no one takes French seriously. Except Japan.
lol at the guy in the video being nostalgic for the Islamic Golden Age while saying French speakers have no science. they did and they squandard it, just like Arabic speakers.
Also, it is harmful to the child to teach him an endangered language because it restricts his learning opportunities and (when he approaches adulthood) his social and career opportunities. For example, moving to a megacity is a potent social intervention for many young adults, and none of the megacities of the world are navigable by an endangered language.
Not everyone can acquire a second language at a reasonable expenditure of time and effort, and many that can will lose their first language when they acquire the second one (which happened to me).
Generally speaking, people who speak endangered languages also speak the majority language - otherwise it wouldn't be endangered. Preservation of endangered languages involves raising children bilingually in the majority and endangered language. Being bilingual has been linked with a lot of benefits, and the only downside is that it slightly slows initial language acquisition (but children quickly catch up).
Generally speaking, endangered languages are from a cultural minority and members of that minority culture enjoy being able to speak that language. I went on a date with an Australian man who was half belgian half japanese and he said that he wishes his parents had taught him either language, instead he just speaks english.
Our local (australian) Indigenous language is called Noongar and is undergoing revitalisation. By all accounts, the Noongar people benefit from this socially, and the language itself has information and culture.
Imagine if english went extinct. In a sense, we'd lose Chaucer, Shakespeare, Austen, Steinbeck. They can be translated into other languages (and, well, Chaucer has to be translated to be understood). But, to my mind, something valuable is lost if culture is lost. These "endangered" languages had culture too - songs and stories, maybe books and plays. That's important.
I get the feeling that a lot of people in the rationalsphere think that if something won't help us invent friendly AI or space travel it's pointless. Culture's important. Lesswrong has culture (HPMOR, the sequences, etc).
Being bilingual has been linked with a lot of benefits
Being bilingual is AFAIK a strong signal of cognitive competence: given a choice between 2 applicants for a cognitively-demanding job, one bilingual and one not bilingual, I would heavy favor the bilingual one. But that does not mean that investing effort in making a person bilingual increases the person's cognitive competence to any significant degree.
One thing we don't need studies or complex arguments for is the fact that it takes a lot of study and practice to learn a second language -- time and mental energy that can be used to learn other things. Our society has accumulated an impressive store of potent knowledge, knowledge that takes a long time for people to acquire, but which clearly improves their lives and their ability to contribute to society. I'm very skeptical that the benefits of spending an hour learning a second language outweigh the benefits of spending an hour learning, e.g., history, geography, chemistry, physics, statistics, computer programming, practical human physiology, cooking, sewing, woodworking, accounting or the basics of public speaking or performing in front of an audience.
I'm anticipating that you will reply here that there is more to culture than knowledge that has obvious practical benefits. And my reply to that is that I don't see why an hour spent on second-language learning would outweigh the benefits of an hour spent watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Desperate Housewives or browsing https://tvtropes.org/. Those 3 things are products of the dominant culture, and I suspect that most of the effort to save endangered languages stems from a perceived need to fight the dominant culture in any way possible (but I don't perceive any need to fight against the dominant culture).
I was talking specifically about childhood language acquisition, where learning a new language doesn't require you to forgo reading tvtropes or watching buffy the vampire slayer, it's just part of your background acquisition the same way that children learn how gravity works and how to manipulate small objects as they grow up.
There's plenty of research showing that bilingual children have some small advantages, e.g.: https://www.canr.msu.edu/news/advantages_of_a_bilingual_brain
Then there's the cultural value of language that I raised in my previous post, especially for minority cultures (and you state that things from your culture like Buffy and TVTropes are valuable to you). I'm assuming you're from an English-dominant culture. Can you imagine if you moved to, say, Portugal, and you learned Portugese and all your friends and family spoke Portugese all the time, you might feel as though something was lacking if they watched Buffy episodes that had been dubbed into Portugese?
I was talking specifically about childhood language acquisition, where learning a new language doesn't require you to forgo reading tvtropes or watching buffy the vampire slayer, it's just part of your background acquisition the same way that children learn how gravity works and how to manipulate small objects as they grow up.
It maybe easy for the child, but it can take a lot of effort and energy from the parents.
I am the father of a sort-of bilingual child. I am Danish and we live in Denmark, but my wife is Chinese. Our 4-year-old son speaks good Danish, but his Chinese is very weak. My wife tries on-and-off to insist on speaking Chinese to him, but it is a struggle because he does not like it. So it is hard work for her, and she often does not have the energy and falls back to speaking Danish to him.
I speak nary a word Chinese. I could of course study Chinese so I could contribute, but that would be a huge effort.
Culture is important, I absolutely agree. This is not the same as claiming that there is a way to save the culture by way of saving a language, in a way that preserves the important bits long term. I think that most of the value is reflected in the language but mostly contained in the living traditions and experiences and practices of the people who generated the language. Preserving the culture is a whole lot more complicated than preserving the language, and we don't really know how to do it effectively.
So what's the long term goal? Do you raise native speakers living mostly in the culture from which the language originated, partly isolated from the outside world so they think in the smaller culture's language and memeplexes? Raise bilingual speakers who mostly think and speak in the dominant culture's language and memeplexes but abstractly know bits of their ancestors' cultures? Train non-native speakers in an attempt to document stories and practices that are no longer a living tradition? How much value do the different options preserve, and for whom? Who should be responsible for making and paying for the decision to try one method or another?
Consider ancient Greece. It's a pretty good example, since without the language and a comprehensive knowledge of the culture there's a huge range of meaning you lose out on when reading (or hearing) the surviving works of literature/philosophy/history. Millions of person-years have been spent trying to improve and advance our understanding in this field. In the Middle Ages, this was really important: reintroducing Aristotle to Europe (via the Middle East) was a huge gain in value. In the modern day, it's really cool and helps us understand history but is otherwise mostly a curiosity; the kind of thing you put a little effort into for the really impactful dying or dead languages. We don't even attempt that for most of the other languages that existed in Britain in Chaucer's time, because the value just isn't high enough to justify the level of effort required.
Now, if there's a way to sustain a language and culture long enough that it would be here until we got a future technology to preserve it better long-term (either AI or biological immortality of brain-machine interfaces for rapid learning and teaching) then that would be different. If you only need to attempt preservation for another generation or two, after which you get more preservation very cheaply, then that's a great deal.
Culture is, among other things, a set of time-tested heuristics that are easier to pass along (for humans) than explicit knowledge, and easier to act on in real time than explicit reasoning.
It provides a set of default assumptions for how to navigate the world as it has existed in the past. This, among other things, enables more efficient interactions between people who don't know each other well otherwise.
It can be too slow to catch up to rapid change, but then in that case one of the things you want is a diversity of cultures for selection to act on.
It can be too slow to catch up to rapid change, but then in that case one of the things you want is a diversity of cultures for selection to act on.
Is this the problem that you are trying to solve by preserving cultures? Make the human race as a whole more resilient in the face of rapid change?
Is this really the reason why you think culture is important? Or is it a rationalization?
I am skeptical for two reasons:
- Your argument about rapid change seems extremely different from your argument in the grandparent post where you talked about literature and philosophy, Aristotle and Chaucer.
- Do you think that preserving a bunch of tiny cultures of a few hundred people (many of whom probably live in poverty) is really going to help make the human race more resilient in the face of rapid change?
Good questions!
- The grandparent comment was talking about how actually preserving culture is much harder than preserving language, that we're not very good at it, and that when we've tried we've had mixed results and diminishing returns beyond in the long run. However, the long run followed a period where the preservation was really really impactful. The Middle East preserving Aristotle and other Greek and Roman works, and reintroducing them to Europe, basically kickstarted the Renaissance and the scientific revolution. That's a very big deal, and an example of what can happen when cultures coexist, last, and cross-pollinate. Chaucer I care much less about, but I mentioned it because it had been referenced even earlier in the same thread.
- No, I don't. However, I also think that in any kind of complex system, monocultures are fragile. That's true whether it's farming, medicine, philosophy, operating systems, electricity generation, or a bunch of other things. I think those smaller cultures have a lot of accumulated-but-illegible value that is very easy to lose and very difficult to share with the larger world. In a lot of cases even the people living in a culture won't really know, in the historical or scientific senses, which parts of their culture are load-bearing and contributing to survival, or why, let alone which will be beneficial to outsiders now or in the future. And critically, most attempts to engage with them in a deep enough way will tend to destroy the culture before we can even begin to really understand it, let alone gain value from it. To that end, it would be great to be able to preserve the value long enough to actually develop understanding, without condemning anyone to isolation and poverty if they don't want that.
But in the long run, yes, I do think resilience is my core reason for wanting to preserve other cultures long enough to really understand them. I think we generally do a really bad job of trying to understand when culture is valuable vs a hindrance and why, and most attempts are either racist, misguided, or clumsy at best. Right now (for good historical reasons) everyone rounds such attempts to assumed-to-be-racist. I also just find the diversity of ways humans try to understand and explain their world to be fascinating and illuminating. Not by being right or wrong or useful or useless, but for pointing out that there are many possible natural ways of carving up an ambiguous landscape of things and concepts. It helps me find common ground when engaging with people whose minds work very differently from my own, and have productive and/or enjoyable conversations with them.
I also think that in any kind of complex system, monocultures are fragile.
This is a valid point. But the world is far from a monoculture. Even if all currently endangered languages die out, we will have plenty of cultures left.
If the world ends up with less than, say, 100 languages, then I agree it starts to make sense to preserve them. As it stands now, I think we have more than enough cultural diversity, and keeping tiny minority languages and cultures alive is not worth the opportunity cost.
There's truth to that for sure. The smaller and more isolated cultures have more variability, but cost more to try to preserve, and I don't have a good model to evaluate that balance.
Being bilingual has been linked with a lot of benefits
It is plausible that bilingualism somehow exercises the brain, but it seems to me that a much stronger case can be made in the opposite direction -- smart people are more likely to successfully learn multiple languages.
I agree that it is good for children to grow up in a bilingual environment, because they get the other language for very little opportunity cost, if the other language is naturally around them.
Preservation of endangered languages involves raising children bilingually in the majority and endangered language...
Generally speaking, endangered languages are from a cultural minority and members of that minority culture enjoy being able to speak that language.
If the minority cultures can fix the problem themselves by teaching their children, great! Far be it from me to stop them from that. And of course the dominant cultures should not actively oppress minority languages.
But when outsiders are expected to put in extra effort to preserve minority languages - that is when I balk.
Imagine if english went extinct. In a sense, we'd lose Chaucer, Shakespeare, Austen, Steinbeck. ... These "endangered" languages had culture too - songs and stories, maybe books and plays. That's important.
Important, sure. But other things are much more important, such as eradicating diseases and getting people basic education and preserving the environment.
If I had the choice between saving just one (decent quality) human life and keeping an endangered language alive for another generation, I would sacrifice the language to save the human.
If I had the choice between saving just one (decent quality) human life and keeping an endangered language alive for another generation, I would sacrifice the language to save the human.
Everyone who is keeping an endangered language alive is, during the time they spend doing that, not saving human lives. Would you say that they are sacrificing humans to save the language? In those words it sounds like a bad thing, but look past the words and is it, really?
Some make direct efforts to save lives. Others try to make a world fit for those lives to be lived in.
In those words it sounds like a bad thing, but look past the words and is it, really?
In my opinion, yes. That is why I posted the question.
How far do you take this? What else would you have everyone sacrifice to saving lives?
I am currently attending the Early Music Festival in Utrecht, 10 days of concerts of music at least 400 years old. Is everyone involved in this event — the performers whose whole career is in music, the audiences who are devoting their time to doing this and not something else, and all the people organizing it — engaging in dereliction of duty?
Measuring utility is an unsolved, and probably unsolvable, problem. It's hard to say that someone who values the cultural continuity and linguistic diversity of keeping multiple languages alive is wrong about that value, only that I don't share it.
How you aggregate stated or inferred values across different beings is the next level of unsolved (and IMO unsolvable) problem for Utilitiarianism. Maybe they DO value that highly, but you should devalue their utility compared to some other person's desires.
To me this sound suspiciously like the "Fallacy of Grey".
The Sophisticate: “The world isn’t black and white. No one does pure good or pure bad. It’s all gray. Therefore, no one is better than anyone else.”
The Zetet: “Knowing only gray, you conclude that all grays are the same shade. You mock the simplicity of the two-color view, yet you replace it with a one-color view . . .”
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dLJv2CoRCgeC2mPgj/the-fallacy-of-gray
Close, but not quite. There well may be colors and gradients, but we're all very nearsighted and can't tell what anyone else is seeing, and there's no photography or ability to share the experiences and intuitions. There is no authority to tell us, no way to be sure that what we think is important is what matters to somebody else.
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