The preservation paradox: Why minority languages must embrace change to survive

“ The English language is no mere historic monument, like Westminster Abbey, to be religiously preserved as a relic of the past, and reverenced as the burial-place of a bygone breed of giants. It is a living organism, ceaselessly busied, like any other organism, in the processes of assimilation and excretion. It has before it, we may fairly hope, a future still greater than its glorious past. And the greatness of that future will largely depend on the harmonious interplay of spiritual forces throughout the American Republic and the British Empire. ”

“ His pet theory was that if the language of a people could be preserved in pristine purity and elegance of speech, without the introduction of slang or flippant abbreviations, it would go a long way to check degeneration and decay. ”

“ But it must not be forgotten that language is a living, organic thing, and by the very law of its life must always be in a fluctuating state. To petrify it into immutable forms, to preserve it as one preserves fruits and flowers in spirits of wine and herbariums, is as hopeless as it would be undesirable, if we would have it a medium for the ever-changing thoughts of man. ”

“ Languages, like organic beings, can be classed in groups under groups; and they can be classed either naturally according to descent, or artificially by other characters. Dominant languages and dialects spread widely, and lead to the gradual extinction of other tongues. A language, like a species, when once extinct, never, as Sir C. Lyell remarks, reappears. The same language never has two birthplaces. Distinct languages may be crossed or blended together. We see variability in every tongue, and new words are continually cropping up ”

“ Yes—if we had it! But there are just a few little local patches, dying out here and there for lack of—well, hoeing and cross-fertilising: the last remnants of the old European tradition that your forebears brought with them. But you're in a pitiful little minority: you've got no centre, no competition, no audience. You're like the pictures on the walls of a deserted house: 'The Portrait of a Gentleman.' You'll never amount to anything, any of you, till you roll up your sleeves and get right down into the muck. That, or emigrate ... God! If I could emigrate ..." ”

“ Documenting linguistic diversity seeks to preserve languages for posterity in a context in which half of today’s 6,500 languages will be extinct in the next hundred years (Crystal 1996; Bradley and Bradley 2002) . The idea of preserving linguistic diversity as an expression of our species is certainly valuable, but it is less so when the great majority of documentation projects are focused on archiving only, i.e. without a view to mobilising outcomes for the survival of languages and cultures. ”

“ Language is not only “fossil poetry,” but it is also fossil philosophy, fossil ethics, and fossil history. As in the pre-Adamite rock are bound up and preserved the vegetable and animal forms of ages long gone by, so in words are locked up truths once known but now forgotten,—the thoughts and feelings, the habits, customs, opinions, virtues and vices of men long since in their graves. Language is, in short, “the depository of the accumulated body of experience, to which all former ages have contributed their part, and which is the inheritance of all yet to come.” ”

“ Language is the amber in which a thousand precious and subtle thoughts have been safely embedded and preserved. It has arrested ten thousand lightning flashes of genius, which, unless thus fixed and arrested, might have been as bright, but would have also been as quickly passing and perishing, as the lightning. 'Words convey the mental treasures of one period to the generations that follow ”

“ If the changes that we fear be thus irresistible, what remains but to acquiesce with silence, as in the other insurmountable distresses of humanity? It remains that we retard what we cannot repel, that we palliate what we cannot cure. Life may be lengthened by care, though death cannot be ultimately defeated: tongues, like governments, have a natural tendency to degeneration; we have long preserved our constitution, let us make some struggles for our language. ”

“ Their legitimate effect is to barbarize our language, and to destroy all the peculiar power, distinctiveness, and appropriateness of its terms. Words that are rarely used will at last inevitably disappear; and thus, if not speedily checked, this grandiloquence of expression will do an irreparable injury to our dear old English tongue. Poetry may for a while escape the effects of this vulgar coxcombry, because it is the farthest out of the reach of such contagion; but, as prose sinks, so must poetry, too, be ultimately dragged down into the general gulf of feebleness and inanition. ”

“ The second class of slang is not quite so coarse, and includes those ephemeral phrases and catchwords which have a fleeting popularity and which, because they meet no real need, are soon forgotten utterly. They live but a day and pass away, leaving behind no trace of their existence. ”

“ This superiority, we think, can be accounted for on the principle, first, that the evolution of languages on this continent has been more active and constant here than elsewhere, though unfortunately not always operating under favorable conditions; and second, that in the frequent catastrophes which have resulted from inter-tribal warfare, even in language, the law of the survival of the fittest is apparent, in the preservation of those etymological forms and principles of structure which are most useful. ”

“ The word or phrase that prospers—that commends itself, after adequate trial, for expressiveness, convenience, or euphony, or for any combination of useful qualities—will survive and become classic; the expression that has nothing special to commend it, beyond its novelty and slanginess, will probably pass, after a brief and partial currency, into the vast limbo of the unfit. All we can say of a word at a given moment is how far it has actually become current and what kind of society it keeps. ”

“ On the whole, therefore, we shall ascribe the major concordances and divergences in linguistic form—phonetic pattern and morphology—to the autonomous drift of language, not to the complicating effect of single, diffused features that cluster now this way, now that. Language is probably the most self-contained, the most massively resistant of all social phenomena. It is easier to kill it off than to disintegrate its individual form. ”

“ I envy you your peace of mind, your clean conscience, your unpolluted memory. Little girl, a memory without blot or contamination must be an exquisite treasure—an inexhaustible source of pure refreshment: is it not?” ”

“ There is contamination even in the thought. If you live with the lame, says the ancient proverb, you will learn to limp; if you keep in the kitchen, you will smell of smoke; if you touch pitch, you will be defiled. ”

“ We may also see reasons to make us judge, that a diversity of languages is suited to the other circumstances of mankind. For this must prevent the infection of vice from spreading with such rapidity, as it would otherwise have done, had mankind lived together in one large body, and had a free communication with each other by means of the same language. ”

“ New ideas, being young, are healthy, they impart their freshness to the tongue and far from spoiling it they preserve it. Sometimes they rescue it. Still, if a language is bound to disappear, thickening increases, obscurity overtakes certain areas of language, the logic of the language is altered, analogies vanish, etymologies underlying the words stop showing up, sloppy spelling is applied to long-standing roots of words, shabby usage distorts what’s left of the language’s fine original structure. ”

“ Irish men and women were taught to buy goods of Irish manufacture by the people who taught them to learn the language, on the ground that if the Irish nation continued to ebb away out of Ireland, nationality and language must perish together. ”

“ This: that ten years from now, with her own Government, with her own language back again—Gaelic—an' what language in the wurrld yields greater music than the old Gaelic?—with Ireland united and Ireland's land in the care of IRISHMEN: with Ireland's people self-respectin' an' sober an' healthy an' educated: with Irishmen employed on Irish industries, exportin' them all over the wurrld: with Ireland's heart beatin' with hope an' faith in the future—do ye know what will happen? ”

“ Still, the English spoken by three-fourths of the people of Ireland is largely influenced by Gaelic idioms, for most of those expressions which surprise Englishmen are really translations from that Irish which was the language of the speaker's father, grandfather, or great-grandfather—according to the part of the country you may be in—and there have perpetuated themselves, even in districts where you will scarce find a trace of an Irish word. There are, however, also hundreds of Gaelic idioms not reproduced in the English spoken by the people, and it is difficult to render these fitly. ”

“ That the Irish either were or are a people remarkable for making bulls or blunders, is an imputation utterly unfounded, and in every sense untrue. The source of this error on the part of our neighbors is, however, readily traced. The language of our people has been for centuries, and is up to the present day, in a transition state. The English tongue is gradually superseding the Irish. In my own native place, for instance, there is not by any means so much Irish spoken now, as there was about twenty or five-and-twenty years ago. ”

“ As a matter of fact, language, as perceived in the text cited and elsewhere in literature, becomes merely a storing device, not a formative instrument, a working tool of sorts, even a tool for making other tools and for evaluating them.
Languages have to be understood in a much broader perspective. Like humans, languages have an evolution in time. What came before language can be identified. What remains after a certain language disappears (and we know of some that have disappeared) are elements as important as the language itself for our better understanding of what makes language necessary. ”

“ I would emphasise the point that as regards the future of endangered languages, the Internet speeds everything up. If people don't care about preserving languages, the Internet and accompanying globalisation will greatly speed their demise. If people do care about preserving them, the Internet will be a tremendous help. ”

“ We do not even propose radical changes in spelling, and are accepting all its conventions, even when these are not entirely satisfactory. We revert to the true history of the language, lost at many points by ill-chosen innovations. Ours is really a work of preservation. I have shown that not a single objection advanced has any weight. One thing is in our way—habit; that we shall overcome.
In the more formal report to which his own incisive essay is prefixed M. Meyer is able to deal with other aspects of the case. ”

“ A strict observance of the written laws is doubtless one of the high duties of a good citizen, but it is not the highest. The laws of necessity, of self-preservation, of saving our country when in danger, are of higher obligation. To lose our country by a scrupulous adherence to written law, would be to lose the law itself, with life, liberty, property and all those who are enjoying them with us; thus absurdly sacrificing the end to the means. ”

“ In vain you guard against death; he must needs die; and even if you do not kill him with your precautions, they are mistaken. Teach him to live rather than to avoid death: life is not breath, but action, the use of our senses, our mind, our faculties, every part of ourselves which makes us conscious of our being. Life consists less in length of days than in the keen sense of living. A man maybe buried at a hundred and may never have lived at all. He would have fared better had he died young.
Our wisdom is slavish prejudice, our customs consist in control, constraint, compulsion. ”

“ We need to consider language, images, sounds, textures, odors, taste, motion, not to mention sub-verbal levels, where survival strategies are encoded, and beliefs and emotions are internalized, as they pertain to the pragmatic context of our existence. Literacy is not adequate for satisfactorily encoding the complexity and dynamics of practical experiences corresponding to the new scale that humankind has reached. ”

“ We experience a process of replacing the rigid logical framework of literate condition with many logical frameworks, adapted to diversity.
In conclusion, one more aspect should be approached. Is it enough to say that language expresses the biological and the social identity of the human being? To deal with language, and more specifically with the embodiment of language in literacy, means to deal with everything that makes the human being the bio-socio-politico- cultural entity that defines our species. ”

“ As long as it is alive and spoken, it is constantly changing and will not remain 'fixed' according to the whimsical desire of the purist. When it ceases to be used upon the lips of the people as a medium of communication of their thoughts and feelings, then it will cease to change and grow and will become 'fixed.' But when a language is no longer spoken, it is characterized as dead. It is in this sense that we call Latin and Greek dead languages, although they survive in modern Italian and modern Greek, respectively. ”

“ Psychologists should bethink themselves before putting down the instinct of self-preservation as the cardinal instinct of an organic being. A living thing seeks above all to DISCHARGE its strength—life itself is WILL TO POWER; self-preservation is only one of the indirect and most frequent RESULTS thereof. In short, here, as everywhere else, let us beware of SUPERFLUOUS teleological principles!—one of which is the instinct of self-preservation (we owe it to Spinoza's inconsistency) . ”

“ Human institutions depend for their existence and stability on the impulse of self-preservation and its close associate,—the fear instinct. ”

“ We must be careful, it is true, to keep the organism healthy, to guard against disintegration of tissue; but to that duty American writers are quite as keenly alive as we. It is not a source of weakness but of power and vitality to the English language that it should embrace a greater variety of dialects than any other civilised tongue. ”

“ There are men willing to die to destroy liberty, just as there are others willing to die in its defense. It is not that they do not understand liberty. They do, and that is why they wish to destroy it. It is the enemy of their ideal. Whether liberty will survive or not, depends upon whether there are more men inspired to die in defending liberty, than there are willing to die in opposing it. A thing lives while men love it sufficiently well to die for it. We get what we deserve; and readiness to die for it is the price God has put on liberty. ”