for me as a bilingual fluent person i think its a little weird to preserve languages. like it would be objectively better if all slavic languages were one language for instance because it enhances interconnectedness.
on the other hand, i can see the argument for cultural preservation. like china for instance has mandarin and theyre able to keep their system all nice and tidy because few anglos are interested in learning mandarin and causing problems in the mainland. and there is an argument that language and cultural history can make you think in different ways which helps you solve certain problems more efficiently in diverse teams. but idk. its hard for me to assign huge importance to my being able to speak czech. if anything i see it as more useful for understanding larger slavic languages like russian or polish.
Like obviously we should write everything down so we can translate old documents but beyond that? Idk
I think if everyone in the world started speaking only English (or any other single language) it would be a much less cool place. For the same reason, I don't think it makes any sense to say it would be "objectively" better if all the Slavic languages were condensed down into a single language that everybody spoke. Multilingualism is great and it's probably a good thing to have a lingua franca that helps everybody communicate, but that's a totally different concept than getting rid of differences between languages.
An example of the end result of a desire to rationalize culture is the McDonaldsization / Americanization that's happened all over the globe.
(That being said, the policies of the Académie francaise tend to be pretty ridiculous in the way they try to arrest any natural change in the language)
i mean i can see that argument, but there is still a trend for languages to merge into a larger one the more interconnected a society is. the only real way to preserve language and culture is full anprim seclusionism, but obviously that concept is antithetical to communism and socialism
maybe my pan-slavism is showing lmao
honestly, i just dont have a strong opinion either way. in the limited context of being a czech speaker i usually just see people who jerk off to preserving our language as ultranationalists. obviously, i dont wanna apply my experiences here to other small languages.
Esperanto is interesting but imo you'd have better luck taking a big language in the same group and making a simpler version of it for the rest of the group that almost everyone can understand. So for Slavic, take Russian and simplify it to the point that everyone can understand it and use it to learn other Slavic langauges and speak 'Simplified Russian' with little effort. The Soviets did do this a little but not entirely, though I think they were limited by how much of a statistical analysis of language they could do at the time. If they were still around... :thonk-cri:
Preserving languages of cultures who have been mauled by Imperialism is important, but this is just (Parisian) France being up it's own ass and refusing to understand or admit that languages are fluid and continually changing as people use them. It's the epitome of stupid, priggish arrogance, quite literally trying to hold back the progress of time to maintain a static and non-existent cultural ideal.
Theres something to be said about wanting to annihilate a culture in its entirety (re: fascism and imperialism) vs. a natural assimilation of cultures as societies become more interconnected. At least with assimilation, the culture does technically live on, just under a new language. However wanting people to assimilate and remove all previous cultural elements of their own is imperialism
Also, cultures and languages generally don't die that easily, well unless there's a targeted project of cultural genocide. The Balkan countries managed to preserve their Slavic character through various conquests from Byzantium, the Ottomans, and pressure from western European powers.
I mean yeah, Czech went through that period. We have a ton of loanwords from German. And I've been accused of having a German accent by Americans and some Slavs sometimes :guts-rage:
My ancestors were all highly bilingual. We have it on good authority that our family fluently spoke Slovak, Czech, Polish, German, sometimes Hungarian, and many even knew English from the 1800s onward. With Czechs, we were given somewhat preferential treatment under Austria-Hungary and that led to people being more bilingual than giving up Czech. Whereas many old people in the Czech community here in America were actually beaten for speaking a foreign language in school, and there was a lot of trickery on our part to avoid persecution (calling ourselves Germans pre-WW1, calling ourselves Czech midwar). And part of that was a lot of people forgot how to speak Czech well over time and 'assimilated' faster than in empires that we were part of for centuries. This is obviously bad. But assimilation is also happening faster in modern times, especially with the advent of new language learning tools and the internet, completely uncoerced.
as someone who lives in a settler colonial english shithole, I think the world would be much better if everyone else in the world actively stopped learning English
part of it is cultural preservation, the other part is to keep the cancer from spreading
i think its a little weird to preserve languages. like it would be objectively better if all slavic languages were one language for instance because it enhances interconnectedness.
In Canada, First Nations languages Chipewyan, Cree, Gwich’in, Inuinnaqtun, Inuktitut, Inuvialuktun, North Slavey, South Slavey and Tłįchǫ are taught in schools. Making all languages one is what the residential schools tried to do, and it is rightly regarded as an act of genocide.
Went over that in another post. Of course, I only really speak on the Czech situation. I think having a sort of pan-Slavic language would be better for Slavic countries as a whole in resisting imperialism from the EU and West. I'd be hesitant to apply that standard to indigenous people in America because I'm not indigenous. And of course a lot of Czechs would disagree with me, but I feel like its a pretty regular strain of thought in far left circles in Czechia.
One slavic language would be very cool, already probably around 40% of words are very similar across all slavic languages. Which alphabet do you think would be better latin or cyrylic? I had heard that cyrylic is better suited to slavic languages
for me as a bilingual fluent person i think its a little weird to preserve languages. like it would be objectively better if all slavic languages were one language for instance because it enhances interconnectedness.
on the other hand, i can see the argument for cultural preservation. like china for instance has mandarin and theyre able to keep their system all nice and tidy because few anglos are interested in learning mandarin and causing problems in the mainland. and there is an argument that language and cultural history can make you think in different ways which helps you solve certain problems more efficiently in diverse teams. but idk. its hard for me to assign huge importance to my being able to speak czech. if anything i see it as more useful for understanding larger slavic languages like russian or polish.
Like obviously we should write everything down so we can translate old documents but beyond that? Idk
I think if everyone in the world started speaking only English (or any other single language) it would be a much less cool place. For the same reason, I don't think it makes any sense to say it would be "objectively" better if all the Slavic languages were condensed down into a single language that everybody spoke. Multilingualism is great and it's probably a good thing to have a lingua franca that helps everybody communicate, but that's a totally different concept than getting rid of differences between languages.
An example of the end result of a desire to rationalize culture is the McDonaldsization / Americanization that's happened all over the globe.
(That being said, the policies of the Académie francaise tend to be pretty ridiculous in the way they try to arrest any natural change in the language)
i mean i can see that argument, but there is still a trend for languages to merge into a larger one the more interconnected a society is. the only real way to preserve language and culture is full anprim seclusionism, but obviously that concept is antithetical to communism and socialism
maybe my pan-slavism is showing lmao
honestly, i just dont have a strong opinion either way. in the limited context of being a czech speaker i usually just see people who jerk off to preserving our language as ultranationalists. obviously, i dont wanna apply my experiences here to other small languages.
what if, instead of English, Esperanto?
Esperanto is interesting but imo you'd have better luck taking a big language in the same group and making a simpler version of it for the rest of the group that almost everyone can understand. So for Slavic, take Russian and simplify it to the point that everyone can understand it and use it to learn other Slavic langauges and speak 'Simplified Russian' with little effort. The Soviets did do this a little but not entirely, though I think they were limited by how much of a statistical analysis of language they could do at the time. If they were still around... :thonk-cri:
Fun fact: George Soros is a native Esperanto speaker.
I feel like that sentence by itself should be classified as a chud cognitohazard.
Preserving languages of cultures who have been mauled by Imperialism is important, but this is just (Parisian) France being up it's own ass and refusing to understand or admit that languages are fluid and continually changing as people use them. It's the epitome of stupid, priggish arrogance, quite literally trying to hold back the progress of time to maintain a static and non-existent cultural ideal.
Theres something to be said about wanting to annihilate a culture in its entirety (re: fascism and imperialism) vs. a natural assimilation of cultures as societies become more interconnected. At least with assimilation, the culture does technically live on, just under a new language. However wanting people to assimilate and remove all previous cultural elements of their own is imperialism
Also, cultures and languages generally don't die that easily, well unless there's a targeted project of cultural genocide. The Balkan countries managed to preserve their Slavic character through various conquests from Byzantium, the Ottomans, and pressure from western European powers.
I mean yeah, Czech went through that period. We have a ton of loanwords from German. And I've been accused of having a German accent by Americans and some Slavs sometimes :guts-rage:
My ancestors were all highly bilingual. We have it on good authority that our family fluently spoke Slovak, Czech, Polish, German, sometimes Hungarian, and many even knew English from the 1800s onward. With Czechs, we were given somewhat preferential treatment under Austria-Hungary and that led to people being more bilingual than giving up Czech. Whereas many old people in the Czech community here in America were actually beaten for speaking a foreign language in school, and there was a lot of trickery on our part to avoid persecution (calling ourselves Germans pre-WW1, calling ourselves Czech midwar). And part of that was a lot of people forgot how to speak Czech well over time and 'assimilated' faster than in empires that we were part of for centuries. This is obviously bad. But assimilation is also happening faster in modern times, especially with the advent of new language learning tools and the internet, completely uncoerced.
as someone who lives in a settler colonial english shithole, I think the world would be much better if everyone else in the world actively stopped learning English
part of it is cultural preservation, the other part is to keep the cancer from spreading
yet you speak english :thonk-cri:
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In Canada, First Nations languages Chipewyan, Cree, Gwich’in, Inuinnaqtun, Inuktitut, Inuvialuktun, North Slavey, South Slavey and Tłįchǫ are taught in schools. Making all languages one is what the residential schools tried to do, and it is rightly regarded as an act of genocide.
Went over that in another post. Of course, I only really speak on the Czech situation. I think having a sort of pan-Slavic language would be better for Slavic countries as a whole in resisting imperialism from the EU and West. I'd be hesitant to apply that standard to indigenous people in America because I'm not indigenous. And of course a lot of Czechs would disagree with me, but I feel like its a pretty regular strain of thought in far left circles in Czechia.
One slavic language would be very cool, already probably around 40% of words are very similar across all slavic languages. Which alphabet do you think would be better latin or cyrylic? I had heard that cyrylic is better suited to slavic languages