Endangered Languages, Lost Knowledge and the Future | Daniel Everett

The Pirahã, a remote Amazonian tribe with little outside contact, have attracted the attention of mainstream media, scientists, zen buddhists, professors of religion, mathematicians, philosophers and others because of their unusual confluence of values, language, and culture.
Now, after 20 years of high intellectual and physical adventure living among them, Dan Everett proposes a revolution in anthropology and linguistics: culture profoundly shapes language, even at the most fundamental level. What happens when a language-culture pairing like the Pirahãs' is lost?
The Pirahãs are not alone in their lessons and knowledge for all of us -- there are hundreds of endangered languages in the world -- but their example provides a remarkably clear example of alternative knowledge and ways of talking of importance to all of us as we ponder how we should try to build future lives.
Everett is author of "Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazon Jungle" (02008): www.amazon.com/Dont-Sleep-Ther... and is Chair of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at Illinois State University.
"Endangered languages, lost knowledge and the future" was given on March 20, 02009 as part of Long Now's Seminar series. The series was started in 02003 to build a compelling body of ideas about long-term thinking from some of the world's leading thinkers. The Seminars take place in San Francisco and are curated and hosted by Stewart Brand. To follow the talks, you can:
Subscribe to our podcasts: longnow.org/seminars/podcast
Explore the full series: longnow.org/seminars
More ideas on long-term thinking: blog.longnow.org
The Long Now Foundation is a non-profit dedicated to fostering long-term thinking and responsibility. Our projects include a 10,000 Year Clock, endangered language preservation, thousand year+ data storage, and Long Bets, an arena for accountable predictions.
Become a Long Now member to support this series, join our community, and connect with our ongoing work to explore and deepen long-term thinking: longnow.org/membership
Like us on Facebook: / longnow
Follow us on Twitter: / longnow
Subscribe to our channel: / longnow

[@scraps992]

Another language can allow for a complete alteration of your perception on life. It's like living in a different reality in a way. If you let a language die, a world dies with it.

[@yaceya]

It's not a good idea to make a maximum level of sound the one you feel comfortable - it's better to set maximum to a level that is much higher than what you feel comfortable. Because not all speakers are of the same volume and not everyone's ears are the same. This video is an example of setting maximum level to be too low.

[@azmanabdula]

Sound mixers these days are idiots Movies these days have speaking really quiet and the actions scenes so loud you have to turn it down Then you have to turn it back up to hear people speaking So annoying

[@eldromedario3315]

​@@azmanabdula oh despise that too ! So often I need actual transcription to be able to properly follow bc it is barely intelligible..

[@bobaldo2339]

I like Everett much more than Chomsky or Pinker.

[@PetrosSyrak]

Why is that?

[@chaossynergy9768]

Yes, absolutely, better theories, more scientific mindset, more pleasant personality, better in every way.

[@purple-flowers]

100% me too I think that comes from the field work. He doesn't really feel ensconced in the ivory tower like Pinker and Chomsky do

[@ocasuista850]

Me too

[@rubensneto9049]

greetings from brasil,amazing lecture.

[@jennydeepable]

Fascinating talk!!

[@calvinrollins4957]

Fascinating

[@maryjanehalligan6210]

Chomsky proposed that humans are unique in that our minds have the ability to use language in a recursive manner, however, I could see that there may be populations of humans that speak a language that doesn't utilize recursion. In my mind those can be very two different things.

[@janinecarlock8023]

Thank you Dan for an interesting talk. What strikes me is the fact that live in the present, so they don't need a variety of tenses. I think we can all learn from that - I'm not sure how to apply it to general American society as it exists today though...

[@antoineprioleau2301]

This information is very fascinating, thank you Mr Everett. I'm currently reading you book "dont sleep there are snakes"

[@bennettbullock9690]

It just occurred to me that Chomsky, by shifting linguistics away from anthropology and philology, could be inadvertently contributing to the forgetting of smaller, endangered languages. He insists that all languages are the same, and that we must study the universals rather than the particulars. As such, someone with a doctorate in linguistics could be monolingual. One of the bitter ironies with modern linguistics is that Christian fundamentalists seem to be doing a lot more to record small languages than academics. Thanks, Noam.

[@keegster7167]

I agree. We have to focus on what makes them so different again.

[@Gdad-20]

Daniel The messanger! What a beautiful man ❤

[@louiscervantez1639]

WOW, SPEECHLESS, overwhelmed with such great info, I don’t know what to say … incursion?

[@jacquie3349]

I'm learning Scottish Gaidhlig! :)

[@alastairbrewster4274]

The Irish govt has been independent for a century , welsh still thrives , scots Gaelic is being revived and in some areas successfully , even Cornish is being revived. The many Irish governments have been useless in trying to preserve their culture , you can’t always blame the Brits , they need to step up to keep this language alive. Btw I’m Scots Irish living in Scotland . Not a plastic paddy living in USA

[@shandsantos2808]

Fascinating lecture

[@dbass4973]

the fact that all the dancing happens during the big moon means that all their females must have their cycles in tact, unlike us

[@MahatmaMichael]

How to contact Daniel Everett ?

[@The1Helleri]

8:02 Brazil has over 200m population. Why did he say less than 200k? Did he mean it was 200k in the 1500's? sounded like "and" not "at".

[@azmanabdula]

For someone who knows other languages he sure is quick Most people that learn heaps of languages start stuttering *um um um*

[@EmilNicolaiePerhinschi]

coffee comes from East Africa not the Americas

[@maximumslap2687]

Damn, way too few views and likes.

[@tomasfay8843]

That was great, thanks. Also, no chance Irish dies. People love their language and its growing now. She was close to defeat, but now rises to her feet.

[@cigh7445]

The communities where it is spoken as a first language are under severe pressure, where are the communities outside of the Gaeltachts and the small Bóthar Seoighe speech community in Belfast where Irish is the main language? 1.7% of the people of Ireland are daily speakers, and they have been shown by studies to be of mixed competency compared to the generations of native speakers born before the sixties. Studies have shown that minority languages do not survive surrounded by a majority language except in the most closed off of communities. Having a 'grá' for the language, as many claim, does not fortify the language. Irish people have to take their heads out of the sand and pressure their government to listen to the advice of sociolinguists and people like Brian Ó Curnáin, Ciarán Lenoach, Conchúr Ó Giollagáin, anybody involved with Tuismitheoirí na Gaeltachta.

[@ruthmacklin6927]

Makes me happy to hear ❤

[@jamesking1495]

So speakers of major Lang's contribute to language loss🤔, yet they don't care.

[@partialintegral]

Sumerian died, but the knowledge it conveyed survived.

[@eldromedario3315]

surely only a fraction

[@partialintegral]

@@eldromedario3315 We have much more Sumerian writings, than those from ancient Greece or Rome. It's not easy to destroy baked clay :)

[@eldromedario3315]

@@partialintegral well, you did not get at all the things Everett is trying to convey. You lose the spoken language - you lose an entire perspective of the world , their knowledge and even the way to look at it. Sure some things can stay but it will never have all of what having it from a living language. Scripture alone can only keep a fraction of it alive. You never get that feel and worldview and all and any info that wasn't written down.

[@partialintegral]

@@eldromedario3315 It's true about all the cultures that have have not survived but in writing.

[@eldromedario3315]

@@partialintegral glad you agree on that

[@mold_theband]

(The) Oysters, (that) oysters eat, eat oysters

[@jeff__w]

Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.

[@mold_theband]

@@jeff__w sir would you please shut up about your mother

[@jeff__w]

@@mold_theband 😜

[@nakinilerak]

About men whistling and women not, there is a proverb in English on the same subject: "Whistling girls and crowing hens always come to some bad end".

[@MeTheRob]

Wat's this E Unabus Pluram ? It's certainly not Latin.

[@aaronchambers9888]

Like the Jewish proverb says; he who murders one man destroys a universe.

[@davidpnewton]

He makes a critical error here: he confuses culture and knowledge with language. Culture and language are indeed closely linked, but they are NOT the same thing. It is perfectly possible to speak the same language as someone and yet have a very different culture from their culture. The bigger error is lumping knowledge in with language. The knowledge about those "jungle dogs" had nothing to do with them speaking that particular language. The knowledge of those creatures came from being physically in the same area as them. The knowledge would have been acquired whatever language was spoken. Ditto knowledge of local medicinal herbs etc. Now where language can give very useful insights is indeed grammatical structure and precise vocabulary. Why do some languages lump things into a single word and others split into multiple words? Colours is a classic case: English distinguishes between pink and red whereas in some languages both are encompaased by red. By contrast English has the verb to know and French has savoir and connaitre, or English has free but French has gratuit and libre. Grammar and structures associated with temporal and positional structures can also pose interesting questions. Why do some languages have grammatical structures directly distinguishing between how physically far away an object is from the speaker for example? The question also has to be considered as to why some languages have been successful and some haven't? Why does the language I am using to write this post have hundreds of millions of first language speakers and billions of second and third language speakers whereas the main subject language of this talk has a handful of speakers? It partially relates to geography but also to technology of course. To my mind one of the reasons English is so successful and widespread is its speakers' willingness to embrace loanwords and to coin neologisms. Zeitgeist; bungalow; robot; tsunami: all loanwords into English to express concepts without direct English equivalent. Himbo; cancel culture; fatberg; twerk: all neologisms within the last decade. Often they are portmanteaus (itself a loanword) which more elegantly express a concept than the previous phraseology. Now I don't know for certain that English is more open to loanwords and portmanteaus than average, but I know that it definitely is when compared to languages like French which have a central body defining grammar and spelling. Neologisms and loanwords also occur in languages like that, but there is often resistance to such structures accreting to the language with "native" alternatives being proposed (Fernspracher as against Telefon in German for example). This leads to linguistic sclerosis and stunting.

[@cigh7445]

In this age of technology and globalisation, language is the largest and most important part of the culture (even more so than before). There is very little difference in overall culture between the Anglosphere countries of the world. They might have different albeit slowly homogeneising accents and dialects, they might have a few cultural references of their own, some people in their society might maintain part of an older unique culture... But for English speaking countries at least there is no shield from the global hegemony of Anglosphere culture, countries who have a language other than English as their first language are more shielded from this process, compared to English speaking societies

[@drts6955]

English's success is clearly nothing to do with it as a language. It is due to the political and economic dominance of first UK then USA. English is not any more open to loan words. French, German and some other European languages are exceptional in that they are "maintained". I think looking at a language to see why it's successful makes zero sense. Which is an odd argument for you to make considering what you said about the confusion between culture and language earlier....

[@davidpnewton]

@@drts6955 I did not say that the language itself was more open to loanwords and neologisms. I said its SPEAKERS were more open to loanwords and neologisms than with languages like French with central academies. That's culture impacting language, not the other way round. English is inherently much more of a mix of influences than a lot of languages. It is a Germanic language and yet a great deal of its vocabulary is taken from Romance language sources. That will have consequences. One consequence is that native English speakers are inherently used to dealing with things from a lot of different sources and that they are comfortable with having multiple sets of rules governing things. That's flexibility built into the mindset thanks to the structure of the language. You do see fusses in English over changes of vocabulary use, as you do in other languages. The interesting thing is that if there is a fuss about the source of such changes of vocabulary use, it's about internal sources, rather than external sources. So in English you will see flaps about Americanisms, where in French you will see flaps about Anglicisation full-stop. I suspect that a lot of that is due to the overall dominance of English. For English speakers it's fuss about American English becoming dominant over all other forms of English. For other languages it's fuss about English becoming dominant over all other languages. English is dominant now because of the UK and US being the dominant world powers for two centuries. That doesn't answer why the UK first became the dominant world power? The answer to that is the industrial revolution of course. But then there's a further question: why did the industrial revolution first occur in England and nowhere else (and it was in England rather than any other part of the current UK)? That's where culture comes in and where language might have some impact. I don't know how much of an impact it might have had, but it would have been a factor.

[@drts6955]

@@davidpnewton I can't think of a mechanism that would explain how the English language influenced the Industrial Revolution. Can you suggest one? Also a lot of the loan words you previously mentioned were a result of Empire, which was simply a fruit of English success. I fail to see the causal link you are suggesting. To go to counterfactuals, what about Portuguese? Latin language with Arabic and (especially in Brazil) Tupi and African influences (way more in common use than English). Or Irish? Celtic Language with Latin, Viking, Old French and English influences. Unless you are more specific in your arguments about what is special about the English language, I really can't understand your point. What you say about the anxiety of influence of US English or English on French is no doubt true. But it's sort of besides the point. I am not trying to be too cynical. Certainly it's an interesting idea but I'm not convinced.

[@mechtheist]

@@drts6955 The huge number of English words that are of French origin isn't due to the success of English Empire but of the Norman Conquest, not much of a 'success.' That the language spoken in Britain is Germanic is also the result of an invasion. Without that, it's likely it would be 'Briton' and the language some form of Celtic. I don't understand using 'exceptional' for a maintained language, maybe it was meant along the lines of 'special' as in the Special Olympics? 'Maintaining' a language will always fail miserably and it's a fool's errand to attempt. I agree with your main point, I don't see how the the language played a major part in the Empire's success.

[@rubenjames7345]

Interesting, but if you have to invoke philosophy or religion to prove the gravity of language loss, you're reaching.

[@azmanabdula]

History is good enough