Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: Andre@shappski.demon.co.uk (Andre Shapps)
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!das-news2.harvard.edu!news2.near.net!news.mathworks.com!usenet.eel.ufl.edu!news-feed-1.peachnet.edu!gatech!howland.reston.ans.net!pipex!peernews.demon.co.uk!shappski.demon.co.uk!Andre
Subject: Re: Language Extinction
References: <3ih1ho$rne@fang.dsto.gov.au> <540276879wnr@shappski.demon.co.uk> <D4yFw8.7F9@midway.uchicago.edu>
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Date: Sun, 5 Mar 1995 23:06:01 +0000
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In article: <D4yFw8.7F9@midway.uchicago.edu>  deb5@ellis.uchicago.edu (Daniel 
von Brighoff) writes:
> >You are quite right I think, but I don't know that life has much value 
> >when divorced from culture.
> [rest deleted]
> 
> I strongly disagree with this. [etc. etc.]

And you're quite right to do so, I phrased that rather clumsily, but since no 
one seems to have challenged me about it till now I didn't get round to 
qualifiying it (life is only so long - there are many things I'd like to do 
but don't have time to).

I was trying to transpose, not wholly successfully, an argument that was put 
to me when I expressed some guilt about choosing to be a musician for a living 
as opposed to doing something useful with my life. I was programming computers 
at the time. It was pointed out to me that I would probably be giving more 
pleasure to mankind by making music than by programming their computers. This 
of course is open to question because there's a possibility that more people 
might hate my stuff than like it, but probably on balance it was true.

The point he was making, and I believe I made too - I've lost the bit of the 
thread, was that there is more to life than living and that I believe it is 
worth using resources to ends not directly connected with survival.

There is such a thing as the will to live and that is connected to the quality 
of life, so endeavours not directly connected with saving life, but with 
improving its quality, can have that effect.

I certainly didn't mean to imply that people should be left to die while money 
that could be spent on food is spent keeping their language alive.

For the record, by the way, I think that the idea of keeping languages on an 
artificial lung has some merit, but to be honest I don't think the benifits 
warrant the resources involved (not that I'd wish to put anyone off trying). 
For a start the shear wealth of data would be incredible. How would this work? 
Would a snapshot of each language be taken every 25 or 50 years? This would 
generate vast quantities of information that would be comprehensible only to 
an enourmously powerful computer. This is a philosophical point - if only a 
computer understands something does it have any meaning?
-- 
Andre Shapps

