Welcome home! Please contact lincoln@icrontic.com if you have any difficulty logging in or using the site. New registrations must be manually approved which may take several days. Can't log in? Try clearing your browser's cookies.
Endangered language discovered in India
zider_red
Explorer
Comments
If you really don't care, then why bother posting to the fact?
To me, that's just carelessness.
Understood, but my point is 'who cares?' Why is this of any importance? There are thousands of languages still spoken on the planet, most of them by a few hundred people or less. Of what importance is it if a language dies when the people speaking it die or adopt a different language?
The passing of any culture, however minor is, in my mis-guided opinion, a matter of some regret.
I can understand if this is not something to concern you personally.
What I don't entirely understand is why you should make the effort to inform us all of your lack of concern.
There are many things that I don't particularly care about, but I don't necessarily feel obliged to inform others of that indifference.
I'm far more interested in what people care about as opposed to what they don't care about.
Please understand that my original post was not meant as a personal slight against you.
But if a post does not interest me personally, I don't feel obliged to post my non-interest. I just don't post on that thread.
Wouldn't this be an attachment that just leads them to suffer? Bemoaning a lost culture that they don't actually care enough about to learn it's language?
Perhaps that is what leaves me with an odd feeling about this whole topic. Species die, cultures die, languages die, who cares? Perhaps it just strikes me as an unnecessary type of attachment. Trying to grasp at the wind.
In most of the Australian continent today, most of those languages (Along with their culture and knowledge of medicinal plants built up over 20 odd thousand years) are represented by fewer then 100 speakers.
In Central (where I live) and parts of Northern Australia, the speakers of various languages (and thus the accumulated wisdom of 20,000 years of culture, philosophy, cosmology and medicinal plants) is still mercifully represented by over 1000 speakers.
The rest are forgotten, all but lost, gone!
I love to sit near old Black Fellas in town and listen to their quitely whispered lingo as they talk amongst themselves.
(It sounds like they are saying "Ullamoolawoolagoolafoolajoola...etc. and sounds like the wind whispering through the leaves of gum trees. It's beautiful to hear.)
There will come a time when the opportunity to have such an experience will no longer exist.
I guess that in the Grand Scheme of things that that's of no overwhelming importance.
But by All The Gods That May Exist -
I'm bloody pleased and priveleged that I have had that experience and I feel for those who will lack it!
Important?
Make up your own mind!
No, but like me, it's seriously dated.
Today we have tv stations dedicated to the Maori language,Maraes(Maori meeting houses)every where,which both Maori and Pakeha(white fullahs)like me are free to go and stay at,to learn about the Maori ways.
Would the Maori have survived with out their language,sure,but now we don't just have them surviving,we have a whole culture indigenous to our land reviving.For me this is a great thing.
With metta
Well, the neighbours of the Koro people may have and have had a similar opinion.
Beautifully worded. sir.
And yeah English will always evolve but it will evolve very, very, very slowly now with the media age and mass literacy.
Isolated populations and lack of literacy is what does it. I mean, can't we all understand 100 year old recordings of English, albeit in a funny New York accent? But without mass literacy a simple 200 years before Shakespearean English and you've got yourself Chaucer, not an impossible read, but very, very different and difficult.
I guess I'm simply showing the other side of the coin to elucidate that, as the Buddha might say, "shit happens". Where are the Anglo-Saxons and Wodin?
I do think it's a bit depressing, but by observing our own history and considering hypotheticals it's a big lesson in annica/impermanence.
Other than that, I don't much disagree with you. The problem is that many of these endangered languages don't have a writing system so they are passed orally. When people lose interest in learning a strictly oral tradition in favor of the more popular written tradition that surrounds them, a language and it's culture dies.
Isolating them as a culture is much like isolating the ego as an entity when in reality both are very fluid things.
Take for instance, before Martin Luther standardised the the high German dialect in the 1522 publishing of the New Testament, the dialects of german to dutch were seamless; an absolute gradient. You'd walk from central Germany northwest to the Netherlands and see German slowly fade into a distinct west germanic Dutch, walk south of Germany and it slowly fades into Swiss German. The same idea applies with Italian with Dante Alighieri's writing of La Divina Commedia in the early 1300's to unify the large gradation of languages mainly by an amalgamation of the Sicilian and Florencian languages with mixes of others, as every town was considered a city-state, like the Grecian poleis of old, each equiped with it's own language to create the modern Tuscan Italian dialect.
There's a fine line between distinct cultures. Perhaps the culture could have followed the middle way intuitively and sought refuge in basic electricity and literacy and they wouldn't be facing extinction, at the same time, had they done so, they'd probably have been swallowed by the greater surrounding culture.
A lesson in annica.
Not depressing.
Just regretful.
We too shall pass and perhaps Future Ones will look on our passing with momentary regret?