Stay Human

@nabelew

Linguist (revitalization, documentation, sociolinguistics) but also not a professional account so I’m gonna say cuss words 🤷‍♀️ she/her

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Stay Human@nabelew· 21d

The conclusion is, of course, "let them die". It would simply be too expensive to allocate the necessary resources - resources which are scarce in most communities facing language loss for the exact same historical reasons they are facing language loss. And WE certainly shouldn't subsidize it.

Freud once helpfully distinguished that healthy thing, mourning, from melancholia—the mourning that never ends, grief that is unable to let the lost object go. The literature of linguistic preservation is a literature of mourning when it calls for languages to be documented, honored, and, in the rare instance where a revival might be a real option, revived. At its most culpably self-deceiving, it comes closer to melancholia: a refusal to recognize when the time for salvation is past and the most we can hope for is salvage. In acknowledging that not all languages can or should be rescued, we do not love the dying languages less. In a world where resources are scarce and values conflict, it may be the only way to love them wisely. ♦

Stay Human@nabelew· 21d

But eventually we get down to the core thesis, and it's exactly what you knew it would be. The destiny manifested, some unfortunate things took place, but aren't they grateful to be using a smartphone and eating pizza right now? It was all for the best, even the somewhat distasteful brutality.

But Weber’s account is also a reminder that the project of linguistic homogenization had a republican, and not merely an administrative, justification. During the Revolutionary period, Abbé Grégoire held that a true republic could not flourish if its citizens could not understand one another; in the Third Republic, the push for universal primary education in French explicitly framed it as the condition for civic participation. Kings may have wanted a single language for the convenience of their scribes and tax collectors, but republicans wanted it for the sake of the citizens.

The French republican project did, in fact, succeed in creating a public sphere where a farmer from Brittany and a lawyer from Provence might read the same newspaper, serve on the same jury, and vote in the same election, without some Parisian smart-ass claiming not to understand what they were saying. What was erected on the site of that linguicide could be something of real value. A similar story might be told of Italy after unification, or of the ambitious effort to find a lingua franca to connect the vast and diverse islands of Indonesia without giving the country’s dominant Javanese even more power than they already had.

Stay Human@nabelew· 21d

Ah yes things done to French children are violent, humiliating, and degrading, while the exact same things done to Kenyan children may be cause for "indignation" European language? Linguicide. Those other ones? Natural deaths.

Berlin’s thesis lands with special poignancy when we consider the question of language loss. When French people today complain about the diminished international prestige of their nation and language, and wince when their teens talk about “e-mail” rather than the approved “courriel,” they might remember that their ideal de-Englished French was itself a construction built on the graves of the dozens of languages and regional forms of speech which dominated much of rural France well into the nineteenth century. The historian Eugen Weber wrote influentially of how peasants who spoke languages like Occitan, Breton, or Basque became—or, more honestly, were made—Frenchmen. Weber’s account does not play down the violence and humiliation of the process. Smith Galer herself notes that, as late as 1949, one could find children wearing slates around their necks with the degrading confession: “Je parle Breton” (“I speak Breton”). These were not cases of languages being allowed to die a natural death.

Stay Human@nabelew· 21d

While trying to position language revitalization as trying to force a choice between nostalgia and nihilism, the author forces the reader into a choice between

Isaiah Berlin famously observed that there is no social world without loss. We want and value many things that cannot be had at the same time. Say we want people to be free and also to be equal and to live in happy, unalienated communities. What if some people’s exercise of freedom renders things less equal, or less happy and more alienated? Berlin thought it a contemptible sleight of hand to insist that such freedom was not “true freedom.” To hope to honor all our values, he believed, is not simply overoptimistic but incoherent. What makes some political choices tragic is not that we have failed to think hard enough about how to have it all but that there is, in fact, no way to have it all. Politics, then, is the always unsatisfying project of managing loss; at its best, it consists of doing this without self-deception.

Stay Human@nabelew· 21d

But this article NEEDS to return to shoring up its core dichotomies: Preservation vs. community agency Sentimentality vs. rationality Primitivism vs. modernity Frivolity (language) vs. pragmatism (money) The messy fluidity and nuance of power, knowledge, sovereignty, and history can't fit there.

Every dollar dedicated to a language-revitalization program could, in any realistic budget, go toward something else: a school, or a hospital, or even another language program. The language program may well be of real value. But the value of the hospital or the school we might instead build is also real. To pretend otherwise, and to accuse everyone who points to these difficult trade-offs of bad faith, is to duck a confrontation with the deepest problems of politics and policy.

Stay Human@nabelew· 21d

There's just nothing like a dude with no knowledge of a field smugly instructing the field on how to address its central issue. Language survival through community-led regeneration of land, culture, health, economies, rights, and education is...The Thing Everyone Knows Works. Thanks for the protip?

David Crystal refers to a 1992 controversy about whether it was appropriate for the Academy of Mayan Languages, in Guatemala, to devote resources to a reforestation project. Shouldn’t we take more seriously the claim, made by defenders of the decision, that improving the community’s economic security was the most effective route to saving the language? Crystal mentions this episode as an aside in “Language Death,” but anyone who hopes to move from plaintive elegy to policy proposal must make such questions central. If saving a language takes money, how should that money be spent? Perhaps the Karuk people would prefer to use their own judgment to decide whether they want to spend it on language-learning programs or on direct support. That argument is sometimes made cynically, by people who’d rather no money were given to anyone for any reason at all. But these are real questions that organizations working in the field have to face.

Stay Human@nabelew· 21d

What do I even do with this strawman-ass bullshit, it's so stupid it's making it hard to maintain a palatable public-facing sci-comm tone "Even if something IS bad, why should we drop every other human endeavor to focus exclusively on it? Which is what's absolutely being proposed here?"

Even if we grant Smith Galer the premise that language death is always a terrible thing, it doesn’t follow that we ought to do everything in our power to stop it. That’s an extremely demanding standard that we adopt in no other policy domain. The death of human beings is also a very bad thing, but all health systems have to make hard choices about how they use their finite resources. There is no reason for language death to be an exception to the general principle. Even where the death of a language would be acknowledged as a tragedy, what we should do—what costs we should be willing to bear—in trying to stop it must remain an open question.

Stay Human@nabelew· 21d

Just an incredible parenthetical to slip in, to subtly discredit the idea that bilingualism is not harmful to speech development. As if one groundbreaking new study may, at any moment, once and for all shatter the myth that humans can know more than one language.

Individuals, too, may find that they have more power than they realized. Immigrants might continue to speak their native languages to their children without worrying that it might affect their acquisition of their new country’s dominant tongue. (The current research suggests that bilingualism poses no threat to speech development.) Where a school offers the heritage language of your family, consider allowing your children to study it. Maybe, other things being equal, choose a school for your child that offers a program in your native language.

Stay Human@nabelew· 21d

Here, the author is positing that languages can encode "traditional error" (i.e. epistemologies that differ from western ones), social hierarchies, or other things he presumes would be offensive to "liberal-minded activists". Very "you're gay & anti-genocide? They'd kill you in Palestine, GOTCHA"

In general, Smith Galer’s empirical examples tend toward the optimistic. The clinical value of prostratin, for one, has yet to be established. And if languages can encode traditional knowledge they can also encode and perpetuate traditional error. We need no exotic examples to see that the folk category of “fish” (in English as in many other languages)—as something that, understandably enough, included whales, dolphins, and porpoises—was genuinely improved upon by the scientific term “mammal” and its associated taxonomies. Nor is factual error the only thing a language can preserve. Languages also encode values—gender hierarchies baked into pronouns, honorifics that perpetuate caste distinctions—that liberal-minded activists may not be eager to preserve as valuable pieces of linguistic heritage.

Stay Human@nabelew· 21d

“She tells us,” rather than “cites peer-reviewed studies." “One may wonder” rather than just reading the studies, I guess, if one wishes. Or one could read them and look at which confounding factors were actually accounted for. But that’s less fun than bloviating. doi.org/10.1186/s129...

Languages aren’t dictionaries, but encyclopedias, containing entire worlds of often irreplaceable information.” A compound called prostratin, she recounts, was discovered to be a potential treatment for H.I.V. by a scientist who knew Samoan well enough to have spoken to tribal healers in Samoa about the healing properties of a certain tree. Speakers of the Iwaidja language in northern Australia have long had different words for two distinct dolphin species; modern zoology wouldn’t have taken so long to recognize their distinctness if scientists had, Smith Galer writes, “bothered to speak to the Iwaidja people, or learn their language.” There are also documented links, she tells us, between a language’s health and the mental health of the communities that speak it. Communities in Canada that could “hold a conversation in their Aboriginal language experienced low to zero youth suicide rates. In communities where fewer than half could speak their language, suicide rates were six times higher.”

One may wonder, too, about those vaunted correlations between language health and a community’s psychological well-being. Isn’t it at least as plausible that some more basic social or economic fact explains the health both of the language and of the community? If that’s true, we shouldn’t be so confident that communities will be happier if only we enrolled their members in language lessons.

Stay Human@nabelew· 21d

Color me surprised that a very dated overview by David Crystal is praised as “indispensable” and “scholarly”, while the book written by a woman is “melancholic”. Similarly unsurprised that the author seems to discount the possibility the Kichwa woman had the same experience as the Kikuyu kid.

The linguist David Crystal, in his indispensable scholarly survey “Language Death,” has a term for the sort of thing that happened to Smith Galer and her dialët: cultural assimilation. The pressure to assimilate linguistically can be, he points out, either “top down” (laws, incentives) or “bottom up” (fashion, peer pressure). But it is hard even for dispassionate surveys to avoid lapsing into an elegiac mode in which these important distinctions are flattened into a single tragedy. It is one thing to be indignant about a Kenyan schoolchild asked to wear a sign reading “I AM A DONKEY” for speaking Kikuyu. But how should we feel about a Kichwa speaker who moves to Lima and starts living her life in Spanish in response to the demands of the labor market, especially when the Kichwa speaker doesn’t see the switch as involving any great loss?

Stay Human@nabelew· 21d

(He does get around to the "they were no angels" line later, of course. Can't leave that bingo square empty!)

Kichwa trails a similar history. Spoken today by hundreds of thousands, it descends from the Quechuan language carried north by Inca imperial expansion. In southern Ecuador, the Cañari were conquered by Quechuan speakers, and their own language went extinct. We can condemn the perpetrators of linguicide without assuming that their victims must themselves be blameless innocents. It’s graveyards all the way down.

Stay Human@nabelew· Jul 4

(it was from a northern flicker btw)

a feather with a bright neon orange quill and orange-brown and white pattern

Stay Human@nabelew· Jun 8

oh cool we’re already at “fully AI-generated videos about how AI steals Indigenous languages” now with bonus slop images of generically “Indigenous” women, and a “nobody’s talking about it” while referring to but not actually naming the specific Māori people who are VERY MUCH talking about it

screenshot of a youtube video with AI slop image of three generic “Indigenous” women wearing a mishmash of clothes from a bunch of cultures and holding what appear to be Kindles. Video title is “AI is stealing Indigenous languages (and nobody’s talking about it)”, and video label says “made with AI”

Stay Human@nabelew· Dec 22

the archaic broken image placeholders and six empty attachments with no filetype are a pretty solid visual representation of what it’s like to interact with any US government body these days

Stay Human@nabelew· Dec 22

one of my favorite high school holiday memories was the annual reading of The Shortest Day, it still gives me warmth in its simplicity anyways happy solstice as we dearly love our friends and hope for peace

THE SHORTEST DAY
By Susan Cooper
So the shortest day came, and the year died,
And everywhere down the centuries of the snow-white world
Came people singing, dancing,
To drive the dark away.
They lighted candles in the winter trees;
They hung their homes with evergreen, They burned beseeching fires all night long
To keep the year alive.
And when the new year's sunshine blazed awake
They shouted, revelling.
Through all the frosty ages you can hear them
Echoing, behind us — listen!
All the long echoes sing the same delight
This shortest day
As promise wakens in the sleeping land.
They carol, feast, give thanks,
And dearly love their friends, and hope for peace.
And so do we, here, now,
This year, and every year.
Welcome Yule!

Stay Human@nabelew· Dec 1

kudos to my brother for replying to this article with the absolute perfect gif

Stay Human@nabelew· Nov 25

anyway have y’all seen Orca (1977) I have literally no idea how it has a 10% on rotten tomatoes, everyone in the 70s was too dumb to recognize that a lone orca experiencing a tragedy protagonist’s suffering-vengeance-regret-defeat plot arc is a very good kind of movie

an orca breaches, jumping triumphantly in front of a burning boat and an exploding building at night

Stay Human@nabelew· May 18

every spring I feel so grateful to live in Portland. “City of Roses” is true, they love it here, they bloom untended on highway medians, they flourish in yards where they were planted thirty years ago and forgotten about, they flood the city with the smell of new life and make the days lighter 🥖🌹

two dusty lavender rose blossoms against a background of red roses and some other bright purple flowers

a mottled blood red and cream colored rose blossom

a group of rose blossoms that are pink in the middle and yellow on the outside

Stay Human@nabelew· May 15

lmao

post by this guy reading “what’s wrong with being like Darth Vader! He was an equal opportunities employer bringing hope equity to the Galactic Empire!”

Stay Human@nabelew· May 10

Without downloading any pics where are you mentally

Dale Gribble saying “Figure it out, Hank, the state calls its own violence law, but that of the individual, crime”

Stay Human@nabelew· Feb 4

any program officer who doesn’t submit an empty or deliberately garbled spreadsheet needs to grow the fuck up

Around 10,000 research grants have been flagged for review and distributed to various programme directors. Grants in one area of science are being distributed to directors in a separate area of science. For instance, the geosciences division is examining grants from the division of social, behavioural and economic sciences. The grants are being reviewed independently by two staff members instructed to indicate any potential violations of Trump’s orders. They will submit their reviews in a spreadsheet by 5 p.m. today.

Stay Human@nabelew· Jan 26

there is a hotline:

ICE hotline number, eyewitness reports only: 1-888-622-1510

Stay Human@nabelew· Jan 13

what a cursed headline on so many levels

“Technology meets mission: Starlink’s role in Bible translation - Mission Network News”

Stay Human@nabelew· Dec 28

Without downloading any new pics what's your energy going into 2025

bathroom graffiti reading “succeed - live - survive - out of spite”

Stay Human@nabelew· Dec 24

turns out all you have to do to militarize a population en masse is switch around your theta-roles and add “effort-producing gutturals and hard vowels” to your phonemic inventory

was: "Farmer in state of exertion; axe agency; tree in state of subjection to attack.") "In the new language the sentence becomes: The farmer overcomes the inertia of the axe; the axe breaks asunder the resistance of tree.' Or perhaps: "The farmer vanquishes the tree, using the weapon-instrument of the axe'."
"Ah," said Bustamonte appreciatively.
"The syllabary will be rich in effort-producing gutturals and hard vowels. A number of key ideas will be synony-mous; such as pleasure and overcoming a resistance-relax-tion and shame-out-worlder and rival. Even the clans of Bat-marsh will seem mild compared to the future Paonese military.

Stay Human@nabelew· Dec 24

finally getting around to reading this, and while it’s 75% boring pulp, I admit a liking for “watershed” as a linguistic relativity metaphor (also, linguistic anarchism as hyper-individualism is so dumb, and just a decade later was so beautifully rebutted by Le Guin’s Pravic)

Fanchiel found his answer in Beran's expression.
"Think of a language as the contour of a watershed, stopping flow in certain directions, channeling it into others. Language controls the mechanism of your mind. When people speak different languages, their minds work differently and they act differently. For instance: you know of the planet
Vale?"
"Yes. The world where all the people are insane."
"Better to say, their actions give the impression of insanity. Actually they are complete anarchists. Now if we examine the speech of Vale we find, if not a reason for the behavior, at least a parallelism. Language on Vale is personal improvisation, with the fewest possible conventions. Each individual selects a speech as you or I might choose the color of our garments.

Stay Human@nabelew· Dec 16

A grim but significant question: Lyle Campbell is wondering if anyone has documented examples of sudden language dormancy (death of all speakers/signers at once). Sharing here in case anyone knows of such cases - let him know, or I’ll share any replies I get here: #linguistics 🐦🐦

[1] Does anyone have any information about what impact the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa had on languages? (It is reported that 165 villages and towns were destroyed near Krakatoa, and another 132 were seriously damaged, mostly in the tsunami following the explosion, and that there were 36,417 deaths (some sources say 120,000+).

[2] Are there documented cases of languages becoming suddenly dormant (“extinct”) because all the speakers were killed by humans (in massacres, ethnic cleansing, genocide, etc.)? [I’m thinking of purposeful killing, but if there are any cases where all remaining speakers of a language were killed accidentally due to human error, I’d be interested to know of them too.]

[3] Are there documented cases of languages suddenly being lost (becoming dormant [“extinct”]) due to diseases, epidemics?

[4] Are there other instances of sudden loss (“extinction”) of languages due to catastrophic events of any other sorts? (I’m not sure what they might be, maybe the likes of mudslides, rock slides, sudden severe famine, drought, blizzards, tornadoes, ships/boats sinking, whatever?)

Stay Human@nabelew· Dec 16

This is the energy I want to see at every city council meeting when some chud from Florida calls ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi or any Indigenous language "dead" 🔥 www.msn.com/en-us/news/u...

“It is not a dead language. It’s very much alive,” said Esther Kiaʻāina, Honolulu City Council vice chair.

“If it wasn’t for the fact that those who helped to overthrow the Kingdom of Hawai’i and banned our language, we would only speak Hawaiian now, so please learn your history when you come to testify at the city council,” she added.

Stay Human@nabelew· Dec 9

uhhh a linguistic relativity sci-fi novel from 1958 i’ve never heard of? SOLD they were having some THOUGHTS about psychological sapir-worfare back then (🥴)