So long as there's still one speaker of a language alive, it can still be saved for very little cost: you don't need to worry about teaching it to a new generation. Concentrate on collecting as much of it as possible and get it in audio form with translations.
Artificial intelligence will in the future be able to learn the language from these recordings (so long as you have managed to gather enough material) and it will be able to bring up future generations to speak it as native speakers if the attitude of a community changes and they decide they want their language back. In the future we're going to have talking teddies that hold fully logical conversations, and it'll be possible for all children to grow up speaking many languages automatically and without effort, all taught to them by their furry friends.
Every language is a cultural treasure and we must never just give up and let any of them die out without trying to collect them to preserve them for the future. With each language that disappears, we may be losing vital evidence as to how languages evolved from each other and of the ancient languages from which they originated.
If you're in a position to help save a language, please help to gather the data.
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Can we save rare languages?
So long as there's still one speaker of a language alive, it can still be saved for very little cost: you don't need to worry about teaching it to a new generation. Concentrate on collecting as much of it as possible and get it in audio form with translations.
Artificial intelligence will in the future be able to learn the language from these recordings (so long as you have managed to gather enough material) and it will be able to bring up future generations to speak it as native speakers if the attitude of a community changes and they decide they want their language back. In the future we're going to have talking teddies that hold fully logical conversations, and it'll be possible for all children to grow up speaking many languages automatically and without effort, all taught to them by their furry friends.
Every language is a cultural treasure and we must never just give up and let any of them die out without trying to collect them to preserve them for the future. With each language that disappears, we may be losing vital evidence as to how languages evolved from each other and of the ancient languages from which they originated.
If you're in a position to help save a language, please help to gather the data.
Re: Can we save rare languages?
hi, my message is. I speak pushto and live in England. Despite, my children understanding the lingo they do not speak it nor are they able to form a complete sentence. Sadly, there are not many people they can engage in a conversation with and I blame this as the main factor preventing them from excelling in their mother tongue.I strongly dout that any mechanical toy can replace the human touch nor can it bring the complete set of values and accent that are unique with individual languages. However, it can aid and compliment childrens learning in an engaging way and that can't be a bad thing. But ultimatly my message wants to stress the importance of the ireplacable human touch.
Re: Can we save rare languages?
The technology certainly doesn't exist yet and won't be around for quite a few years, but there is every reason to think that it will be possible within the next ten to twenty years. Once artificial intelligence is capable of holding rational conversations and can learn more languages all by itself, it will then be able to talk to a child via a toy in any language simply by putting a microphone, speaker and transmitter inside the toy.
Speech synthesis will also get to the point where it sounds completely natural and it will be able to replicate the accents of the original speakers (in recordings of extinct languages) perfectly. This is why it is important to collect rare languages in audio form along with translations: languages are currently being allowed to die out without being collected in this way, so they are being lost needlessly and can never be recovered.
When machines have visual processing systems programmed into them, their interactions with people will improve. It will then be possible to put a camera inside the toy so that it can see what the child is doing, and again the picture can be transmitted to a computer elsewhere for processing. At some stage it will be possible to put the computer and AI software inside the toy itself, thus freeing it up to be taken anywhere without losing functionality. All of this will happen some day: be in no doubt about that. Also, because this idea has now been discussed openly, no one should ever be able to get a patent for the idea.
Re: Can we save rare languages?
Further to my previous post, I should point out that these toys will teach all manner of other things too in adition to languages. They will also monitor the way children behave and spot problems early on so that they can be put right before they become too hard to fix. I don't want to see anyone patent that idea either: far too many patents are given to ideas that are too obvious to deserve them.
Re: Can we save rare languages?
Why would you want to save a dead language? Any history or culture can be translated and then forgotten.
Re: Can we save rare languages?
Every language I've studied (and I've worked on over fifty) has given me insights into the grammar of thought that underlies all languages: they are extremely valuable to anyone who is working in artificial intelligence involving linguistics. They are also beautiful in their own right, each language having evolved to be perfect tools for analysing the world of the people who speek them. If you know only English and a few bits and pieces of one or two other languages closely related to it, you simply won't have any idea of how fascinating the extreme differences between languages can be: Japanese, for example, is rather like speeking Gaelic backwards.
Poetry doesn't translate usefully at all, and translations are invariably highly problematic due to ambiguities. Indeed, some languages are so ambiguous that a sentence can have many different possible meanings, and sometimes more than one of them are intended at the same time: this is a game that is often played in Sanskrit.
Languages are a treasure that should be preserved, and my point in posting this thread was to tell people that if a language is doomed to die out, it can still be preserved in another way such that it can be revived at a later stage if the desire to speak it returns. Trying to save languages by trying to get more people to speak them now is in many cases doomed to failure, but if they are recorded properly they can be brought back at a later stage without effort. Learning languages will be easy once artificial intelligence gets to the stage where you can carry your language teacher about with you all the time and talk to it constantly.
Re: Can we save rare languages?
its a shame in some respects that we do have different languages, after all wouldnt it be an easier world to be able to understand everyone and everyone understand us.
im no precher of religion but was it not the devil who cast out 11 different languages in the world to make communication difficult ?
Re: Can we save rare languages?
language is unlikely to be the barrier to understanding.
for example do you understand either of your parents?
do either of your parents understand you ?
do you understand any of your children.... ...your partner... ...anyone?
rare languages are good for old stories