Re: Uglossia and Utopia

On Thu, 23 Sep 1999, Thomas R. Wier wrote:

> It's a sad fact that hundreds of natural languages are in their death
> throes, and that that loss of diversity is truly a loss of immense
> proportions.
You've got the numbers wrong - it's thousands of languages, and maybe
hundreds that won't live until the next century. But, then, variety is
losing against conformity all over the world.

> Language encodes so many ways of viewing the world, and with a
> language's death so dies a culture, all too often.  It's usually difficult
> to graft those cultural artifacts onto another language; e.g., Quechua's
> evidentiality is only barely manifested in the Spanish of the region.
From reading Lakoff I get the impression that it would even be impossible
to keep the uniqueness of a language if the culture behind the language
gets lost. If Quechua would have been a prestige language, but the culture
would have become spanified (is that a word?), the evidentiality would
have disappeared from the language, too.

> If only conlangs could move in to fill up the vacuum! Alas, I fear this
> is impossible -- conlangs are, more often than not, I think, the product
> of rich Westerners with much idle time on their hands, and so are more
> often than not the product of Western minds, Western ways of thought,
> however much we, those Westerners, might want to be otherwise.
>
That's a bit sombre - since conlangs are the expression of an idioculture,
they are unique in themselves, and can add a lot of variety to the
world. Especially since conlangers can be quite unadjusted persons.

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