indessed roscivs

Last week, I saw an article on Slashdot about languages going extinct. Somewhat surprisingly, the majority opinion seemed to be that this was a good thing. A rather representative comment stated:

A language is just a communication protocol. Would you say that having 7000 incompatible networking protocols is a good thing? No, it patently isn’t. Thousands of incompatible languages simply help create pockets of ignorance and deprivation.

Another poster points out that people can take advantage of the ignorance that comes from “incompatible languages”:

If someone in, say, America were to tell you that the Canadians as a whole are preaching holy Jihad upon the infidel Americans, everyone would just call him nuts. There are maybe millions of people who live close to the border or travel across the border, and can tell you relatively first hand what the Canadians actually say. Or if not, you can just order a newspaper and read for yourself what they do say. Even if they were to manage to find one nutcase preaching holy war, everyone would point out just that: it’s just one idiot that no one else takes seriously.

Now try Americans vs Arabs, Arabs vs Jews, or whatever other manipulation across a language barrier. Now that works much better, doesn’t it? You can cherry-pick which extremists (on both sides) to translate out of context, to make it sound like a whole language or ethnic group is hell-bent on wiping you off the face of the Earth. (Never mind that no group that size ever agreed on anything else, for as long as we have a recorded history.)

Perhaps this is one of the reasons for the Italian expression, “traduttore, traditore”—translator, traitor.

But this perspective was by no means the only one. There were also quite a few posters shocked at the prevalent opinion that the fewer languages the better. “Not all languages are equally expressive,” asserted one poster. “There are some things you just cannot say in certain languages because they lack the constructs and idioms. … Various words just have no real translation.”

Anyone who has spoken multiple languages won’t find this idea difficult to swallow. It is quite common to find words or phrases that are difficult to translate from one language to another; speakers of multiple languages will often switch back and forth between languages to more richly express the concepts they want to talk about. I frequently use the Afrikaans word snaaks, which means “funny”—but not “ha ha” funny. The English word is ambiguous, but the Afrikaans word is not.

Does this mean Afrikaans is more expressive? What if I want to be more ambiguous? A different Slashdot thread on machine translation describes a Japanese poem that is “written to be gender-ambiguous and person-ambiguous,” something that happens by default in Japanese, but is difficult or impossible to write in English.

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But this discussion of languages seems bizarre in the light of one of linguistics’ foundational claims, that “all languages are equal in their communicative and expressive abilities”^[1]. Or, in the words of Edward Sapir, “The outstanding fact about any language is its formal completeness … To put this … in somewhat different words, we may say that a language is so constructed that no matter what any speaker of it may desire to communicate … the language is prepared to do his work.”^[2]

How do we reconcile these two different perspectives? I think the mistake in thinking that “not all languages are equally expressive” is one of confusing cause and effect. The lack of a word (e.g. snaaks) doesn’t prevent you from expressing the concept (”funny, but not ‘ha ha’ funny”) at all. And if the concept is important enough in the culture where that language is used, the longer phrase will, over time, become shortened into a single word.

Utahraptor in Dinosaur Comics gives a good example: “As things become more prominent, they move to become words. Like ‘electronic mail’ becoming ‘e-mail’ and finally ‘email’—that was due to email becoming more popular, not because people were creating the word in order to MAKE it more popular. You know?”

Douglas Hofstadter gives a cogent example in a single language, highlighting the distinction: “people who grow up in a rural area are more aware of, say, the difference between a pickup and a truck, than a city dweller is. A city dweller may call them both ‘trucks.’ It is not the difference in the native language, but the difference in culture (or subculture), that gives rise to this perceptual difference.” The country mouse and the city mouse are speaking the same language—languages equal in their communicative and expressive abilities—and yet if you hear the city mouse say “truck,” it’s more ambiguous what he’s referring to.

I believe you can think of all the world’s languages being equivalent in a similar way. English has the ability to express gender-ambiguity and person-ambiguity just as it has the ability to express truck/pickup ambiguity, but we don’t use words that way because it’s not important to us culturally. English speakers are the country bumpkin to Japan’s city slicker in that respect.

If there is an apparent “hole” in the language—things you seemingly cannot say because it’s missing certain constructs or idioms—it is for the same reason that English as spoken in different regions or different countries has words or phrases that the same language spoken elsewhere lacks. And if a language disappears but the culture of its speakers remains unchanged, then the language those people adopt will change and grow to accommodate the exact same concepts and idioms that the newly-extinct language could convey.

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