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.
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?
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.
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?
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 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?
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.
Why is culture so important, again?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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?