Re: Uglossia and Utopia

On Fri, 24 Sep 1999, Thomas R. Wier wrote:

> Boudewijn Rempt wrote:
>
> By "death throes", I meant those which are soon to die -- as in,
> a few years or a decade or two.  Yes, thousands of languages are
> also in danger, but it's the difference between a nearly exstinct
> species (like the Coelocanth) and those that are merely endangered
> (like, say, the Bald Eagle).
>
There are tens of dying languages in Nepal alone. A couple of decades
is a long time, especially for languages where the younges people who
have learnt the language are in their forties, in places where people
seldom get older than fifty or sixty. And even if you do find the few
old folks who have some vague remembrance of the language they spoke
as a child, it's ten to one they haven't got any teeth left...

>
> Certainly, the two concepts are intimately related.  Language and culture
> perpetuate one another: it's a rare event when an English speaker can
> grow into adulthood without having been exposed to archaic ideas about
> monarchy and aristocracy, even when in most of the English speaking
> world democracy, whether it be political, economic, or social, is the
> general rule.  My point was simply that when the language dies, it makes
> it all the easier to uproot the culture that goes with it.
>
Well, that's correct - what I wanted to add was that merely preserving
a language does not perserve its unique features, if the culture isn't
preserved, too. And culture isn't very well preservable...

<...>

> (Please don't let my cynicism dampen y'all's spirits -- I'm cynical
> even about cynicism, which means idealism is a legitimate way
> to view the world too, if tempered by realism, IMO)
I'm tempted to say, so was I at your age ;-). (But then, I'm
thirty today, and feel old age creeping on...)

Boudewijn Rempt  | http://denden.conlang.org/~bsarempt