If all the languages of the earth were to dissappear and you had the chance to save a select few languages, and you were only allowed to pick five languages, what would your choices be?
My five picks would be the following:
1. English
2. Spanish
3. Italian
4. French
5. German
Benjamin [inactive]
I have to say that loic was right when he said that you have a very Eurocentric view of the world.
I would have to choose languages of diverse origins. This would perhaps involve, say, one Indo-European language, one Afro-Asiatic language, one Sino-Tibetan language, one Austronesian language and one Native American language. This would still exclude a large part of the world, however.
Tiorthan
What are different languages, in your view?
For example: The different dialects of German are only dialects for me, for I can understand them all (some idioms aside). But my parents don't undersand Schwäbisch or Bayrisch and some others as well.
Benjamin [inactive]
Tiorthan wrote:
What are different languages, in your view?
For example: The different dialects of German are only dialects for me, for I can understand them all (some idioms aside). But my parents don't undersand Schwäbisch or Bayrisch and some others as well.
That's interesting. That's made me wonder which particular 'English' (and others) Porthos had in mind. Working class people from Northumbria and Durham in Northeast England, and the Black Country in Central England, usually consider their native language to be 'English', even though their dialects would probably be rather unintelligible to most Americans. I even find them rather difficult to understand.
Irrintzi
Re: Preserving only 5 languages for humanity
Porthos wrote:
If all the languages of the earth were to dissappear and you had the chance to save a select few languages, and you were only allowed to pick five languages, what would your choices be?
My five picks would be the following:
1. English
2. Spanish
3. Italian
4. French
5. German
You are very narrow minded! You quote only European languages, and the others then? Is not the Chinese spoken by more than a billion persons? and arabic, japanese, hindi, and other 6000 languages?
and why this selection?
It's important to save our cultures, our patrimony, our languages!
Every years 60 languages disappear in the world, with them, are the history and the culture of people who disappears...
Shouga
English, Mandarin Chinese, Hindi, Spanish and Arabic/Russian.
patriccke
Benjamin wrote:
I have to say that loic was right when he said that you have a very Eurocentric view of the world.
I would have to choose languages of diverse origins. This would perhaps involve, say, one Indo-European language, one Afro-Asiatic language, one Sino-Tibetan language, one Austronesian language and one Native American language. This would still exclude a large part of the world, however.
I quite agree with you. Yet I would try to include an agglutinant language such as Basque, Turkish, Finnish, Ungarian...
Porthos
Quote:
You are very narrow minded! You quote only European languages, and the others then?
Quote:
I have to say that loic was right when he said that you have a very Eurocentric view of the world.
Why? The only purpose of my selection was to preserve my favorite languages. It had nothing to do with respecting the cultures of the world, since this is a purely hypothetical disscussion. If a Chinese person answered the same question and chose only 5 Asian languages, I would not have a problem with that. It merely means that he likes those languages.
I like the five languages I listed, and I like them a lot more than non-Indo European languages. That was the only reason I started this thread, was so that you could pick your top five favorite languages, or at least discuss which languages you would miss the most. So, naturally, I picked my favorite languages. So sorry if I was being "politically incorrect".[/quote]
Deborah
The way the original question is phrased makes it sound like something more than just naming your five favorite languages -- it sounds more like having to make a decision as to which five languages would best represent the diversity of human language (event though you didn't say that).
Oh, and the title of your thread supports that idead: "Preserving only 5 languages for humanity"
Shouga
It's not that you were being politically incorrect. It's that, like Deborah stated, your original post certainly doesn't hint at 'favourite languages' - only at preservation. If I were to list my favourite languages, they would be very different from those that I chose for preservation.
Porthos
Shouga wrote:
It's not that you were being politically incorrect. It's that, like Deborah stated, your original post certainly doesn't hint at 'favourite languages' - only at preservation. If I were to list my favourite languages, they would be very different from those that I chose for preservation.
See, we look at things differently. I would choose to preserve my favorite languages, with no consideration for diversity or foreign cultures. That's why I listed my favorite languages, all of which would be Romance or Germanic languages, as they are my favorite.
greg in noord-frankrijk
Re: Preserving only 5 languages for humanity
Porthos wrote:
If all the languages of the earth were to dissappear and you had the chance to save a select few languages, and you were only allowed to pick five languages, what would your choices be?
Kr vtpod sir wpa vjpoc vpadodyrtzoy z vtrrt ia apibrzi mzahzhr !
Solution : à partir d'un clavier azerty, tapez la lettre située immédiatement à gauche de celle que vous lisez sur l'écran...
Shouga
Re: Preserving only 5 languages for humanity
greg in noord-frankrijk wrote:
Porthos wrote:
If all the languages of the earth were to dissappear and you had the chance to save a select few languages, and you were only allowed to pick five languages, what would your choices be?
Kr vtpod sir wpa vjpoc vpadodyrtzoy z vtrrt ia apibrzi mzahzhr !
Solution : à partir d'un clavier azerty, tapez la lettre située immédiatement à gauche de celle que vous lisez sur l'écran...
Lol, there are azerty keyboards?
Porthos wrote:
See, we look at things differently. I would choose to preserve my favorite languages, with no consideration for diversity or foreign cultures. That's why I listed my favorite languages, all of which would be Romance or Germanic languages, as they are my favorite.
(Weird, I thought I replied last night...)
Anyway. That's fair enough, but the initial post suggested preservation, not your favourite language. If you meant 'favourite language', and had no consideration for preservation of world cultures, then you should have named this post 'What are your top five favourite languages'
SOUTH AND CENTRAL AMERICA
1. Hixkaryana
2. Quechua
3. Guarani
4. Mayan
5. Nahuatl
NORTH AMERICA
1. Inuktitut
2. Lakota
3. Navajo
4. Yu'pik
5. Cherokee
ASIA
1. Arabic
2. Hindi
3. Farsi
4. Gujarati
5. Tibetan
Those are my choices for every part of the world.
Shouga
Daniel wrote:
...
Those are my choices for every part of the world.
I love your choices Daniel. I'm glad Icelandic is in your list.
Deborah
I like your choices too, Daniel. But you chose Hindi and Gujarati for Asia. Aren't you being a bit South-Asia-centric?
greg in noord-frankrijk
Re: Preserving only 5 languages for humanity
Shouga wrote:
Lol, there are azerty keyboards?
Oui ! Je crois que ça remonte à l'époque de la machine à écrire : le but était de minimiser les risques de dysfonctionnement mécanique (éviter que les tiges de touches rapprochées ne se bloquent). La disposition des lettres dépendait de leur fréquence d'utilisation dans une langue donnée. Au final ça donnait azerty pour le français, qwerty pour l'anglais et, je crois, qwertz pour l'allemand...
Loic
I suppose the British definition of Asian is really narrowed down to the Indian subcontinent.
In the event that all other languages in the world were destroyed save for five, I suppose we must preserve the five languages which are indispensable for knowledge transmission. English is a natural candidate as many scientific output are written in the language and the bulk of scientific literature written in English is not necessarily translated into other languages.
Germany also has a prodigious output with a fair bit of it unknown to non speakers of German.
In the interests of civilisation, the preservation of knowledge is essential and in my opinion, these are the top five languages which form the medium by which most of our knowledge is preserved.
1. English
2. German
3. Japanese
4. Russian
5. French
I was deliberating between French and Chinese for the last choice but the fact that France have won Nobel Prizes in an scientific endeavour before makes her language a better candidate.
If I were to take Porthos's interpretation and include only languages which please me the most, my list'd be quite different:
1. English
2. Chinese (Mandarin)
3. Chinese (Teochew)
4. French
5. Dutch
I feel a little guilty that I have not included a Biblical language like Hebrew or Aramaic. These are after all languages which Jesus would have been familiar with.
SOUTH AND CENTRAL AMERICA
1. Hixkaryana
2. Quechua
3. Guarani
4. Mayan
5. Nahuatl
NORTH AMERICA
1. Inuktitut
2. Lakota
3. Navajo
4. Yu'pik
5. Cherokee
ASIA
1. Arabic
2. Hindi
3. Farsi
4. Gujarati
5. Tibetan
Those are my choices for every part of the world.
Wow! Basque in first choice! Its funny!
David
loic wrote:
I feel a little guilty that I have not included a Biblical language like Hebrew or Aramaic. These are after all languages which Jesus would have been familiar with.
I think Aramaic is extinct.
Daniel
David wrote:
loic wrote:
I feel a little guilty that I have not included a Biblical language like Hebrew or Aramaic. These are after all languages which Jesus would have been familiar with.
I think Aramaic is extinct.
Yes, but Syriac, the closest relative of Aramaic, is still spoken in Syria, I think.
Irrintzi wrote:
Wow! Basque in first choice! Its funny!
Well, of course, I have Basque ancestry. And so it is my ancestral language. I've learned a little, just a very little - ni Daniel naiz. Apparently, my ancestors were from the Spanish Basque Country but then they went to Mexico before ending up in the Philippines. Nice.
And I chose Basque because it's a unique language that should definitely be preserved!
Deborah wrote:
I like your choices too, Daniel. But you chose Hindi and Gujarati for Asia. Aren't you being a bit South-Asia-centric?
Ooh, true! I guess it's because the British definition of "Asian" is actually South Asian. To say Chinese, etc. you'd have to say Far East or Chinese (China is a huge country, y'know).
I'd have to choose some languages from North Asia: maybe Turkmen, Uzbek or Georgian.
Irrintzi
Kaixo gizon!
Your basque family history is interesting, your ancestors were big travelers!
I suppose they went to America at the end of the XIX century, as numerous other families, lot members of my family went to Argentina, to tempt their luck...
I hope your cousins earned their keep.
Loic
David: No, Aramaic isn't extinct although it is as endangered as the snow leopard. There are still small pockets of Aramaic speakers scattered around the Middle East although their speech is splintered into different dialects based on religious lines.
Daniel: I am curious that you did not include Tamil in your list of South Asian languages. After Hindu, it is arguably the most populous tongue in India. Apart from having official status in India, it also enjoys government patronage in Sri Lanka and Singapore.
David
Thanks for the info.
My list:
English
Basque
Spanish
xhosa
Narauharuatl
Or I might want to preserve a constructed lanugage like Ido, or Esperanto, because those languages are good generalizations of European languages.
Loic
Actually, I think our choices are mostly unconscious manifestations of our preferred languages. I doubt if a panel of disinterested judges would agree with some of the more esoteric and little known choices.
Maybe the UN has got it right in one of its rare lucid moments by choosing English, Russian, Chinese, Arabic and Spanish.
I might be biased, but I really cannot understand why Chinese has been deliberately omitted from the list of quite a few outstanding individuals here. It is the oldest surviving language in the world that continues to survive and thrive. When Neanderthals were still storming over parts of Europe and Cato the Elder has yet to make any sort of positive contribution in Rome, the Chinese script as we know it today already enjoyed widespread currency among the educated classes in China.
I don't think we have the luxury of preserving endangered languages that are already tottering on the brink of extinction if Mankind could only save five languages for future generations. We must consider and evaluate criteria that include the amount of literary output produced in that particular language as well as their scientific endeavours that are transcribed in these tongues.
Lastly, we need to consider the strength of emotional attachment which native speakers of the world's myriad languages have towards their mother tongues. Would a Dutch speaker be loath to give up his language if it comes to a crunch?
Of course. But I dare say it'd grieve an English speaker more if he were told to make a similar sacrifice.
Daniel
loic wrote:
Daniel: I am curious that you did not include Tamil in your list of South Asian languages. After Hindu, it is arguably the most populous tongue in India. Apart from having official status in India, it also enjoys government patronage in Sri Lanka and Singapore.
I didn't know that. I was aware of Tamil, as well as Telugu, etc. when choosing.
Speaking of which, there are many Tamil speakers here in London.
Isn't Tamil one of the official languages of Singapore?
Loic
Quote:
Isn't Tamil one of the official languages of Singapore?
Yep. Spot on.
Shouga
loic wrote:
Actually, I think our choices are mostly unconscious manifestations of our preferred languages. I doubt if a panel of disinterested judges would agree with some of the more esoteric and little known choices.
Maybe the UN has got it right in one of its rare lucid moments by choosing English, Russian, Chinese, Arabic and Spanish.
Which is basically what I chose XD (English, Mandarin Chinese, Hindi, Spanish and Arabic/Russian). I have obscure preferred languages, such as Icelandic, but it's unreasonable to expect that to be one of the 'top five' languages; I don't think that the range of languages that I chose was any sort of manifestation of my preferred languages, but merely those that I think our world culture and society would be sorry to lose.
If you meant 'favourite language', and had no consideration for preservation of world cultures, then you should have named this post 'What are your top five favourite languages' 
