Re: Uglossia and Utopia

Boudewijn Rempt wrote:

> 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.
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).

> > 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.
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.

> > 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.
That's true.  They are variety -- but if the people making them are
Westerners and constantly exposed to and manipulating reality in
Western modes of thought, that's almost certainly not just going to
creep into their conlangs, but there's a good chance it will come
to dominate it.  (Not that I think anyone here has one dominated
by western thought; we here have pretty much all done a lot of research
to make our conlangs unique and different from the ones we speak,
but the people I know offlist who conlang, they don't necessarily do
all the necessary preparation.)

(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)

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Tom Wier <artabanos@...>
ICQ#: 4315704   AIM: Deuterotom
Website: <http://www.angelfire.com/tx/eclectorium/>
"Cogito ergo sum, sed credo ergo ero."

Denn wo Begriffe fehlen,
Da stellt ein Wort zur rechten Zeit sich ein.
   -- Mephistopheles, in Goethe's _Faust_
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