“My parents spoke Elfdalian with each other, and with my grandma and my aunts and uncles and everyone around,” Schütt said. “But when they turned to me, they spoke Swedish.”
Schütt said her parents spoke Swedish with her because that’s what was spoken in schools. Students were even discouraged to speak Elfdalian in the classroom. Now, there’s only about 2,500 speakers left.
This same story has played out in so many different places around the world.
Consolidating what we do (language, money, etc.) while honoring and keeping local culture alive is a huge issue everywhere, as the globe continues to shrink via technology and diplomacy. It's a root factor in practically every issue and will continue to be. Not sure what the answer is that results in more than crappy themed restaurants.
I still don't understand why losing another language is a bad thing. I realize that another language creates another way of thinking, culture, and way to express oneself which leads to a good variation instead of having a unified "one world view." I really am not coming off as someone ignorant thinking "the whole world should speak english!" What I'm getting at is, if it's a very insignificant language like that and nobody bothers learning it anymore, what is the point aside from looking for something to do? It's a dying language. Much like a dying culture of an extinct people. Reviving it and forcing people to retain it will not be doing anyone favors either.
I think having culturally distinct languages is fine on a macro level, but at the scale of this minor language, it's really as useful as arrowhead you find in the ground here in the States. At one time this was useful, but now is no longer that time.
I think the thing that doesn't make sense to me about all of these language preservation efforts is the idea that a language has to have people actively speaking it.
That's a gigantic lift, that takes a ton of effort. Even if you teach a new generation they likely won't keep using it in their day to day.
Why not just catalog it? Get the most experienced speakers to record hundreds of hours of audio of it, if it had a writing system catalog that too.
Problem solved. Language preserved. Otherwise you're fighting a losing battle trying to keep a language actively being used when only a few thousand people know it still.
Because you need to have native speakers in order to properly analyse the language. Let’s say you have a corpus and you’ve found two words that seem nearly synonymous: what’s the difference between them? A native speaker might be able to tell you about such subtle differences, but it can be impossible to know otherwise. Or, let’s say you’ve found an affix with an unusual distribution — if you want to test your theory of where it is allowed, you’ll need to have a native speaker to double-check if you’re using it correctly. Or even at a more fundamental level, one of the first things any book about field linguistics mentions is that it’s nearly impossible to transcribe audio without going through it with a native speaker, because you won’t necessarily be able to perceive all the sounds at first. (Disclaimer: I’m not a linguist myself, but I’ve seen this advice mentioned several times.) Problems like this are why language preservation generally ends up as a race against time until the last native speaker dies.
It sounds like the main argument you're making is that having a record wouldn't catch every single edge case. But maybe that's okay? If you get 90% of the value of preserving the language and you miss the 10%, it's probably still worth doing vs. trying to artificially keep a language alive.
If you read about this language, it emerged from Old Norse. Do you think there was some kind of "Preserve Old Norse" movement?
I just don't see how an effort like this could possibly succeed. If you make kids learn it, the chances of them retaining fluency in it are pretty low I'd think? They'd have to be using it a lot. And I think most people would probably rather their kids learn English as a second language.
I guess a solution would be to teach the kids English and Elfdalian instead of English and Swedish, and then when they need to talk to people from other regions they just use English as the lingua franca.
> It sounds like the main argument you're making is that having a record wouldn't catch every single edge case. But maybe that's okay? If you get 90% of the value of preserving the language and you miss the 10%, it's probably still worth doing vs. trying to artificially keep a language alive.
The problem is, it probably won’t be 90/10. I worry that it may be more like 50/50 or even 10/90, though to be sure I’d have to ask a linguist who’s actually worked in the field.
> If you read about this language, it emerged from Old Norse. Do you think there was some kind of "Preserve Old Norse" movement?
There’s a difference between evolution into a new language and language death. The former makes no difference to language diversity: the old language is just as interesting as the new one. (Or, in many cases, it increases diversity, because one language can split into multiple daughter languages.) The latter decreases language diversity, as a spoken language is irretrievably lost.
> I just don't see how an effort like this could possibly succeed. If you make kids learn it, the chances of them retaining fluency in it are pretty low I'd think? They'd have to be using it a lot. And I think most people would probably rather their kids learn English as a second language.
I don’t disagree. Language revival rarely if ever succeeds. This is why it’s important to do as much linguistic work on each language as possible while native speakers are still alive — simply making records of the language is not enough.
Maybe for some languages that are at the point of only having 2 speakers left. But at that point, you likely couldn't revive the language anyways. For this language, they absolutely should be able to record it in its current state in an extremely comprehensive way.
>There’s a difference between evolution into a new language and language death.
But Old Norse did die. It happened to sprout several new languages, most of which are not in danger of dying out like Danish and Swedish. The original Old Norse is gone though.
You seem to only be valuing a language based on if it's a net plus or minus to the "Language Diversity" which as you're using it seems to mean the number of distinct languages that are currently spoken natively by currently alive humans. Old Norse dying was -1 but sprouted many new languages so +n. Where Elfdalian dying would just be -1.
I would think a language would be of value based on the content of the language itself, for linguists to study.
>simply making records of the language is not enough.
I would consider doing linguistic work on the language with native speakers to be part of making records of the language. I don't think we're in disagreement here.
The original idea I was pushing against was trying to artificially keep a language alive by trying to keep large population groups speaking it natively. It goes against how language has always worked.
> Maybe for some languages that are at the point of only having 2 speakers left. But at that point, you likely couldn't revive the language anyways. For this language, they absolutely should be able to record it in its current state in an extremely comprehensive way.
Not at all. Even for languages with many more speakers you can get these sorts of problems.
For a very concrete example, consider this Japhug text [0]. I consider myself fairly knowledgable about phonetics, and I can read the transcribed text out loud. But listening to the accompanying recording, I can barely hear the distinctions between many of the sounds, or figure out where the word boundaries are. Such a recording can only be transcribed by carefully going through it with a native speaker.
Or, for a report by a more experienced linguist, here’s e.g. R.M.W. Dixon (2010) on the subject:
> All texts should be transcribed in the field. In the early stages the linguist should not attempt transcription without a native speaker by their side. As the linguist gets to know the language better they can attempt an initial transcription on their own, but should always then go over it in detail with a consultant. In the case of a language I had been working on for more than thirty years (Dyirbal) I could get a new text 95 per cent right, but there were always a few points that I missed the proper meaning or full significance of, and had to have them pointed out by an expert consultant. One thing one should never do is just record texts in the field and try to transcribe them later on, back at base (whether one is working on phonetics, phonology, grammar, discourse, or whatever); this is a sure recipe for an incompetent analysis.
> But Old Norse did die. It happened to sprout several new languages, most of which are not in danger of dying out like Danish and Swedish. The original Old Norse is gone though.
It did not die. There is a difference between language death and language evolution. In the latter process, there is no one point at which you can say, ‘Old Norse is dead and gone’; it is simply the case that speakers of the language found Old Norse texts less and less intelligible until they could no longer be understood. But the Old Norse language itself is hardly gone: many of its features are preserved in the derived languages, and Old Norse may still be reconstructed by comparison between its daughters.
Perhaps a more illustrative example would be Old English. Is Old English ‘dead’? Possibly, but it never ‘died’: it just gradually evolved into Middle English and then Modern English (and Scots).
> You seem to only be valuing a language based on if it's a net plus or minus to the "Language Diversity" which as you're using it seems to mean the number of distinct languages that are currently spoken natively by currently alive humans.
Not at all. I agree with you that languages are valuable because they give a unique perspective to both their native speakers and linguists at large. A natural consequence of this viewpoint is that one extra language is a net good, but I don’t think a language is valuable only because of this.
> I would consider doing linguistic work on the language with native speakers to be part of making records of the language. I don't think we're in disagreement here.
Ah, in that case we are indeed in agreement. I had assumed that by ‘making records’ you had meant only making audio recordings etc. I should have clarified what you meant exactly.
> The original idea I was pushing against was trying to artificially keep a language alive by trying to keep large population groups speaking it natively. It goes against how language has always worked.
I don’t think it’s a good idea to ‘artificially’ keep languages alive if there’s no reason to do so — but if a linguistic community wants to keep a language alive, then why not?
Probably the human tendency for loss aversion. No one today cares about the exact preparations and steps needed to prepare an offering of sheep intestines to Zeus other than a some PhDs in classical studies, but I could imagine ancient Greeks thinking that their youth deciding to worship Roman or Christian gods was a bad thing that took away from their cultural heritage. But after that event happened, no one today really cares or notices the loss of the precise minutia of ancient Greek cultural practices and values.
If another random species of lemur died off and we never sequenced its genome, you might not care. But many scientists would. That arrowhead you discount as useless is another data point to an anthropologist. One man’s trash is unfortunately another man’s dissertation and a window into the past.
Why not? As far as "looking for something to do", preserving a dying language seems a lot more interesting than a lot of other things people do with their spare time.
The incuriousness in this thread is atypical of the board in my opinion.
At one point I used to think that language diversity was actually a net bad thing for humanity, because it decreases our ability to communicate and so on. These days language technology and machine translation are solving that communication issue and we may choose to preserve dying languages for the sake of understanding how language itself works, how humans migrated in the past, and so on.
Preserving an old language is great. Preserving it by having young people who's first language is this obscure language probably is doing a disservice to those young people and the older people probably knew that.
Some kids can. Some kids definitely learn only one language really well and struggle with a second indefinitely.
I'm sure there's some cut-off and a way to do it right and so-forth. But are the surviving native speak of an obscure language in some rural village going to suss that out.
Plus a lot of kids who a language just when they're young go to forget. I remember, growing up, a friend who could understand but not speak Urdu. He wasn't going to perpetuate the language.
My grandmother speaks fluent English, but also fluent Italian. Problem is, it's what I'll call "pre-radio Italian" - where there was no single Italian language, but rather a great many dialects that sort-of sounded the same, until radio and (later) television came and unified them all into one language.
I bring this up because she often references words that only loosely resemble the modern forms. A good example is a number of her childhood figures who she affectionately calls "azi" - this is actually a version of the modern Italian "zio" (uncle). It gets much worse with foods, which really no amount of Googling can ever resolve a recipe, or even a description.
Some of the Low German dialects have been preserved by Anabaptist religious community speakers here in North America ("Plautdietsch" among Mennonites). And others (Amish, Hutterites) speak interesting High German dialects.
It's only not sad if you live with a completely utilitarian life where art and the beauty of human creation have no value.
Why don't we all just listen to one song, wear the same outfit and live in identical homes?
Regardless of whether they're useful, unique and irreplaceable information will be lost when minority languages are gone, as this information exists only in the minds of the remaining speakers. It isn't possible to back up this kind of information like we do with the Internet Archive or something.
Don't you think everyone speaking the same language would promote flourishing in human creativity? Wouldn't being able to have a meaningful conversation with someone completely and totally different than yourself inspire you? Isn't that what made the internet a thing? It's really just a set of communication protocols that everyone agreed to speak.
I think if you take a look at the internet, you’ll discover that there are large numbers of people who speak the same language who can’t have meaningful conversations or inspire one another.
>Don't you think everyone speaking the same language would promote flourishing in human creativity?
Not necessarily. Sometimes creativity may flourish better if developed independently without common influences.
>the internet
Websites could be analogous to language in this case. Why use hacker news when you could use twitter or reddit? Independent subgroups can produce more interesting or unique discussion.
> Independent subgroups can produce more interesting or unique discussion.
Right but the point is that all of these independent subgroups use the same protocols to communicate (i.e. web standards). Anyone who has a client that can understand these is able to interact with the entire internet. As we can see, standardizing protocols does not limit the ideas which can be expressed over those protocols.
I guess it depends where you consider the separation. Even among the web, people don't only post in one language. And among the English-speaking web, Reddit has absorbed forums almost entirely which I would consider to be a negative.
Just like in programming, different spoken languages have different capabilities-- certain ideas are easier to express in one language versus another. Some concepts don't even have words across languages. And there's beauty and rhythm, the way words rhyme, so even if you can express the same concepts, the network of how those concepts play off each other is different.
Having shared languages is awesome, allowing people to communicate together. But having only one language would be a great tragedy. It'd be like saying all paintings can only use one color.
I don't think the painting analogy applies. You can add words and meanings to languages. If we all spoke the same language, we'd iterate on it until it could express all the ideas that we have. We may lose some rhyming along the way, but it seems a small price to pay for universal, clear communication.
Yeah, it's sad that we're losing unique and interesting languages, but most people only learn 1-3 languages in their life. It's probably economically better for them to focus on ones that are spoken by larger groups of people.
It's weird that most of the discussion is focused on a false dichotomy between a single universal language for all humanity, and preserving every single language that exists today even if they only have a few dozen speakers. The reality is that most minority languages will die out, but we'll still have more languages with hundreds of thousands of speakers and backed by modern education systems than anyone could realistically learn in a lifetime.
Languages do not map to eachother one to one. The works of Shakespeare, for instance, are untranslatable to another language, without some loss of meaning.
Some are not phased by the loss of historic culture in that brave new world, but not everyone feels the same way.
> Languages do not map to eachother one to one. The works of Shakespeare, for instance, are untranslatable to another language, without some loss of meaning.
But isn't it exactly why in the ideal world everyone would speak the same language? Otherwise, due to the untranslatability, every Shakespeare is lost to the rest of the world that doesn't speak his language.
It's not lost to the world, you just need to learn the still-living language it's written in.
And on whatever lingua franca you choose to adopt, there will be an unbounded number of yet-to-be-written-works-of-shakespeare, that this language would lack the ability to express.
> It's not lost to the world, you just need to learn the still-living language it's written in.
Just?
Given how complex every language is, and the level of mastery that is required to read and appreciate the hypothetical Shakespeare of that language, and the time and effort that is required to achieve this level of mastery, this is highly impractical.
Language encodes within it's systems, a built-up treasure trove of human meaning. A universal language looses a humongous amount of meaning. Its usefulness is in merely communicating functionality. In short, such a "universal" will fragment for the need to enrich this substandard language. Remember, human language needs to be rich.
I'm not sure that any meaning is truly lost. Can you find a word in any language that isn't described by a short sentence in English? The differences seem mostly in the level of verbosity required to elucidate an idea.
The problem is that it’s not just words. For instance, if you speak Tariana, every grammatical sentence must have a marker expressing how you know the sentence is true (‘evidentiality’). In Kalam, you only have ~100 verbs, all of which have extremely broad meanings, and any more complex verbal meaning must be created by composing together the verbs you have available. In White Hmong, every noun can occur with a ‘classifier’; its presence or absence specifies whether the noun has been newly introduced or not. And sure, I suppose you could lump all these together as ‘differences in verbosity’, but those differences matter: they mean that the most natural way to express something in Tariana, say, is going to be very different to the most natural way to express something in English, and a translation would lose some of the meaning of the Tariana sentence. (And a complete translation, losing no meaning whatsoever, would end up so verbose as to be almost useless.)
Can you give a specific example of a word in Kalam or Tariana that cannot be expressed with a short sentence in English? It would follow that a short sentence in Kalam or Tariana may translate to a long sentence or short paragraph in English. I'm sure the same would be true the other way around. But doesn't this reinforce the idea that the difference is mainly in verbosity? And that the differences lie in which ideas can be expressed concisely and which must be expressed verbosely?
> Can you give a specific example of a word in Kalam or Tariana that cannot be expressed with a short sentence in English? It would follow that a short sentence in Kalam or Tariana may translate to a long sentence or short paragraph in English.
I’m not sure there are any examples which cannot be expressed with a short English sentence, but here’s one from Tariana:
Masitetakakakadekaɾupidanapitaniki.
‘We did not make each other smoke again at all, so I leant from someone else.’
The problem with this translation is that it doesn’t completely get across the ‘feel’ of the original — e.g. the fact that this information was learnt from someone else is an integral part of the original sentence, whereas specifying this in English feels somewhat unnatural.
> I'm sure the same would be true the other way around.
Exactly. A Kalam example:
Bin ak ñapanŋaŋ anup sop ak wki d ap tan d ap yap geb.
‘The woman is soaping her child.’
> And that the differences lie in which ideas can be expressed concisely and which must be expressed verbosely?
This is not something I entirely disagree with. Generally speaking, anything which can be expressed in one language can be expressed in another. The differences go beyond verbosity though: it is often the case that such a complete translation sounds really unnatural. For instance, Kalam sentences make it easy to express motion, so you get a lot of sentences like:
Bin pataj ogok am yg pak dad ap-elgp-al…
woman young the go dig hit carrying come-PST.HAB-3PL…
A literal translation would be ‘Young women used to go and dig and hit and carry and come back’, which doesn’t sound English-like at all. A more idiomatic translation might be something like, ‘Young women used to dig for rodents and kill them’, which focuses less on the sequence of events involved, but places more focus on the animals which were killed — something which is unusual in a Kalam sentence.
I used to think the same thing, but empirically it seems that diverse ecosystems are healthier and more resilient to unexpected pressures, and this seems to be universally true.
> diverse ecosystems are healthier and more resilient to unexpected pressures, and this seems to be universally true.
This is quite true in evolutionary biology (from which you are even borrowing the term ecosystem), where the ever-changing environment puts different evolutionary pressures on a population of organisms, and the more genetically diverse a population is, the higher its chance to adapt to the pressure.
I am not sure that this biological model holds true when applied to social systems. I find it hard to imagine that artificial barriers to information flow in human populations are particularly adaptive (unless, perhaps, an isolation from the frenzied social media due to a natural language barrier is considered adaptive).
Why do you assume that a single language would enable that?
It could just as easily have the opposite effect, of eliminating a wide range of expression and nuance, thus reducing the capacity for clear communication in absolute terms.
> It could just as easily have the opposite effect, of eliminating a wide range of expression and nuance
Why would that happen?
Expression and nuance is produced by the speakers of a language. Therefore, if different groups of speakers of a hypothetical common language had a need to express different nuances, they would evolve the language in such a way that it would become capable of expressing these nuances.
Consider how dominant modern languages can serve hugely different social groups: scholars, petty criminals, soldiers, scientists, sports fans, social justice warriors, and so on, with each group having different ranges of nuances of expression.
> Or would they need to fork the language away from the common base?
One does not simply fork a language :-) There must be a strong centrifugal (nationalist, separatist) political force for people to do so.
> Nuance and expression are produced by the speakers of the language having distinct experiences and finding distinct ways to express them.
Yes. Take a fisherman, a doctor, a frontend web developer, a fashion model, or a homeless beggar. They all have vastly different experiences. They all, however, can speak the same natural language to talk to each other. That language has the power to encompass the experiences and the nuances of all these different groups of people. I would not understand the professional jargon of a fisherman or a fashion model, while the homeless beggar may not understand the professional jargon of a frontend web developer; but we will all share the same grammar and the same core vocabulary, so that we can communicate what we want when we occasionally bump into each other.
> Understanding other people doesn’t magically come from having the same language. It requires learning to understand their experiences.
I am not sure what this means, and I am not after that kind of understanding anyway. I would be plenty happy if people shared the same native language when speaking at web conferences or writing documentation. Or if I could go to a shop anywhere and buy what I need, without resorting to a ridiculous pantomime; or listen to news, or to stop announcements in the public transport, or chat with a stranger, and lots of other small mundane things that we use our language for. I have no desire to understand the experiences of the most part of the humanity anyway; only some that I am interested in.
> I have no desire to understand the experiences of the most part of the humanity anyway
Nobody is arguing that a common language wouldn’t make mundane everyday transactions more convenient.
The argument is that a significant range of expression, nuance, culture and even experience would be lost in service of your goal of easier to use public transport, shopping etc.
It’s fine for you not to be interested in the experiences of the most part of humanity. Let’s just not pretend that there is a trade-off that many people do care about.
I did mention both a mundane case (shopping) and a specialised case (web conferences and technical documentation). Which is to say, I am interested in the experiences of web developers, but not, for example, of naval officers or fashion models. A common language would give me access to a larger pool of web developer experiences, just as is would give anyone who is into fashion access to a wider range of experiences of similarly-minded people. The absence of a common language prevents that.
> Let’s just not pretend that there is a trade-off
There are several assumptions behind this position.
One, that there are human experiences that require a very particular natural language to be expressed. That you need a whole unique system of phonology, morphology, syntax, etc. to be able to express your experience. I am not sure that this is the case.
The other is that the co-existence of a multitude of languages allows us to capture and communicate human experiences better.
Finally, as the life goes on, and the language — any language — evolves, we lose access to the previously expressed experiences anyway. So one language or many, we won't preserve human experiences.
> they would evolve the language in such a way that it would become capable of expressing these nuances
But everyone else that didn't evolve that couldn't understand it even though they speak the same language? Isn't how an evolution for a new language begins?
> Isn't how an evolution for a new language begins?
Consider evolution in biology. A species becomes distinct from another species when their individual members can no longer interbreed to produce fertile offspring. For an ancestor species to split into new ones, its populations have to be separated — either geographically (in the so-called allopatric speciation), or by the difference in reproductive timing (allochronic speciation). The point is, something needs to happen that breaks the free mixture of organisms between populations.
It should be similar with languages — the societies that speak them get separated, and the language they speak evolves separately in different directions to become mutually incomprehensible. Which, with the current state of communication, is only likely to happen if humans become an interplanetary or an intergalactic species. On the same planet, we have plenty of opportunities to mix together and talk to each other, which, were there a hypothetical common language, should prevent it from splitting into multiple languages.
Consider a major modern language. It will contain multiple jargons/slangs/argots that are barely comprehensible to each other (e.g. the medical jargon, or the physics jargon, or Cockney rhyming slang, and so on); and yet they contain a large mutually comprehensible common core that makes television, radio, shopping, conversations between strangers, and so on possible.
That is an assumption. In this day and age of globalism, multiculturalism and fast technology advancement the measurement of geographically distance for creating a split can paradoxically be an inverse.
Two groups of people can live next to each other geographically but have hard time understanding each other and not only that both can be uninterested in changing that.
What this means is that you can live geographically at one point and share nothing with those around you but communicate to galaxies far away far away with people you do.
> Two groups of people can live next to each other geographically but have hard time understanding each other and not only that both can be uninterested in changing that.
Isn't this description also an assumption? Do you have an example of this? Groups of people who have the same language, but have hard time understanding each other? The closest I can think of is dialects, e.g. regional dialects of British English or British English as opposed to Australian English or South African English, or Australian English; but again, they are mutually comprehensible, and the more cultural exchange happens between these communities the more comprehensible they should be.
> Isn't this description also an assumption? Do you have an example of this? Groups of people who have the same language, but have hard time understanding each other?
There are two obscure tribes found in a remote part of the North American continent in which this phenomenon can be observed. I believe one calls itself ‘the Democrats’ and the other ‘the Republicans’.
You can see the beginning of new languages evolving with the the mix of multiculturalism, taking words and expressions from their old languages and adding to the new language where they live. And because the majority does not have these words and expressions, and probably never will, eventually they will diverge. Yiddish is a example of this.
Languages are more than just encodings for meaning -- the language you think in gives you the basic units of meaning that you use to navigate the world. You can put 'untranslatable' into Google to look at lists of words to gain an intuitive understanding of what it is like to have access to another language. My quick search turned up this - https://www.boredpanda.com/untranslatable-words-found-in-tra... - which I think gives a good impression. Reading this list, you feel the impact of useful ideas, circles drawn around things you had never quite realized were things before, words you wish you had.
You might think it's a problem you can remedy by borrowing words from other languages until you have all the concepts. But it's not that simple. Languages are a whole ecosystem -- words, idioms, culture, ways of seeing and being, grammars -- they come together into an inimitable whole. The whole system is like those words; if you cannot have it, you lose ways of seeing the world.
Borrowing words still loses things -- it loses connections and connotations. Maybe I don't need the German "handschuh" (hand-shoe) because I have "glove", but I gain something by the perspective even if the literal meaning is the same. A favorite word of mine from ancient Greek is apo-kara-dokia -- it means eager, expectant watchfulness, that feeling the moment the lights go low and the movie is about to start, but sustained and persistent, like watching the tunnel at the airport waiting for someone you love to arrive, waiting and knowing they will. Like "handshoe", it has a literal breakdown -- "watching from the head" -- that captures those wide eyes and forward leaning alertness in the moment. English has "anticipation" or any number of shabby substitutes, but there's no competing with the Greek.
You can't just add onto vocabulary endlessly in one language. English doesn't have 'handshoes' precisely because it does have 'gloves', and it doesn't have 'watching-from-the-head' precisely because it does have anticipation. Words die out if you don't use them, and you lose whole ways of seeing the world.
Another thing you lose is when one word has two meanings, but they're really sort of related. For example, ancient Greek 'pharmacon' means "drugs" (like pharmacy), but it also means "sorcery", and I very much enjoy the connection that those are sort of subjectively similar things. The more expansive concept doesn't have an equivalent in English, and I'm the poorer for it -- but the richer for another language having taught me to see things that way.
It's easy to explain with words. It's harder to explain with grammar. But you encounter the same phenomenon. Some languages have tenses and cases with more precise or less precise or just different meanings that the ones you grew up with -- and like the different words drawing bigger or smaller or just different circles around concepts, they give you another window into thinking about the world.
But it all works together. The breaking-down-and-constructing aspect of German as a language is related to the way Germans are given to engineering, and the way German philosophers approach the world. If you encounter them in something other than their native language, you miss something of the whole. Translators will sometimes borrow words to try to fill the gap, but it's a poor substitute. Likewise, the logical precision and colorful concepts of ancient Greek inform the way its epic poets and ancient philosophers moved through the world -- and again, they are poorer in translation.
Even idioms enrichen. The Chinese "Heaven is high and the emperor is far away" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heaven_is_high_and_the_emperor... -- is so very Chinese in experience, and the fact that the Chinese saying itself is a pithy four words makes it work all the better in the context in which it is apropos. If we lost the Chinese language and its experience and culture, perhaps we could still say literally the same thing, but could not say quite exactly this, not with all its force of experience and history and character. And we would be poorer.
Languages and cultures and philosophies and histories and environments all feed back on each other, and they are this phenomenon of creating ways of seeing things, happening over and over in many contexts, building into a cohesive whole. This is why they are valuable to study and valuable to preserve.
Schütt said her parents spoke Swedish with her because that’s what was spoken in schools. Students were even discouraged to speak Elfdalian in the classroom. Now, there’s only about 2,500 speakers left.
This same story has played out in so many different places around the world.