To be honest, I was more interested in the languages themselves than in the highly speculative consequences of this unrealistic thought experiment.
The point was to try to determine which criteria to use to decide which languages should be preserved when you cannot save them all.
If we discard French, for example, what happens to al the French terms, phrases and grammar that English has…appropriated over the years? Will the line cook at Denny’s no longer have their mise en place? Will Texans have to stop BBQing bœuf? Seeing as how English is largely a melding of French and Anglo-Saxon languages, where do the aliens draw the line?
I don’t see how it’s possible to determine which criteria to use without considering the likely consequences of choosing one set of criteria over another.
If you don’t think the survival of outlying cultures, whether in the sense of the physical survival of their members or in the sense of the preservation of their knowledge or in the sense of the preservation of information their existence can provide about the nature of human language and human knowledge, should be one of those criteria; then you don’t think that. But it certainly seems relevant to the conversation. And I do think that all of those are important criteria.
I don’t think we’d have English at all without the elements of other languages that English has incorporated over the years. Those are so much of what modern English is made up of that all that would be left would be something no modern speaker would recognize, or be able to use to navigate in the current civilization. So if the magic aliens won’t allow incorporated language, they’d be saying that we can’t keep English.
And probably all languages, at some point in their histories, incorporated chunks of other languages (most likely including Sentinelese, if we go back far enough into prehistory.) I very much doubt that anybody today is speaking First Human Language, modified only by internal changes within their group and never modified by contact with any other group. So they’d have to be saying that we can’t keep any human language; which would rather render the entire proposition moot. – having said that, this would still have to be an OP decision. @Moonrise: is modern English on the possibles list?
I do think that’s one of the best arguments for keeping English – a great deal of the information that exists in other languages has been incorporated into English, and therefore wouldn’t be lost. French has tried very hard to keep other languages out, and much of French has been incorporated into English (while, obviously, none of Sentinelese has; or any of the possible fully isolated Amazonian languages.) Therefore I think English has a much better claim to be on the list than French does.
Of course, English is also the language I know the most about; so I may be prejudiced.
That is the rub. People can get upset to the point of violence if you try to force them to speak a certain language or a certain way, like declaring the official normative national language to be X or the official language of your institute will be Y. For a real-life example, even the UN has never had a single working language. Or the current thread about how apparently people do not like “standard” Indonesian; I could go on.
Meanwhile, linguists are of course trying to “preserve” everything; on the other hand it is a different issue when it comes to getting funding and government support for primary and secondary schools in a certain critically endangered language, and if I were from a certain ethnic group I may or may not take pride in speaking, e.g., Ayapa Zoque, but how many of them have the time or energy for the type of cultural and political activism it takes to get it to stick?
It seems to me that the possible impacts on people and cultures, both current and if the unforseeable future, should be the criteria to use.
Why does any other criteria matter if not due to its relevance to those impacts?
I completely endorse the criteria being suggest by @thorny_locust: not just the uniqueness of the language (as much as I see that as important to the future) but the uniqueness of the information contained in it alone; what gets lost in addition to the language if the language disappears. (In the context of the other languages that are preserved.)
The 50 saved languages will be preserved in the exact state in which they are at the moment the decision is made, loan words fully included. But if a loan word comes from a language that ends up erased, the knowledge of its origins will be lost. It will just be seen as an ordinary word in the saved language.
It’s highly unlikely, indeed.
English is on the list, of course and it will in all likelihood be the very first language selected. No other modern language has a better claim at the moment, I think.
OK, it’s something I hadn’t considered but you (+ @DPRK) have convinced me. How do we go about it ?
So, far we have :
Pick any arbitrary number, four? five? of the largest demographic, and simultaneously most translated into, languages. Mandarin, Hindi, Spanish, Arabic, and English? A large fraction of the world is at least fairly fluent in at least one of those. And a large portion of science, history, and literature has at least been translated into one or more of those.
For the remaining 45 spots make sure that we have diversity of major language families represented and unique knowledge bases only available in a specific language covered to the greatest degree reasonably possible. You cannot simply use one from this group and then one from this other one as different languages will meet more than one criteria to different degrees and how much one is needed, its value, depends on what else is already on board the language life raft.
The goal should be to have a best possible team of languages. A broad linguistic toolkit to deal with unknown future needs and as much of the world’s past and present cultural diversity and knowledge accessible as possible. It would be a complicated max-min equation once relative values are able to assigned (and dynamically adjusted).
My take anyway.
I’d consider the alphabets/characters. Georgian (Mkhedruli), Arabic, and Chinese written languages are all so beautiful and distinct from the Latin alphabet.
And should we consider Braille?
We’d better keep a sign language.
Uniqueness of the alphabet could be another criteria, indeed.
Arabic and Chinese were already in, in my opinion, due to their huge importance in all the categories suggested above, but Georgian could make it thanks to its unique writing system. It was already a scientifically interesting language in its own right, but this new criteria could give it the final nudge it needed to get across the line.
Actually, I’ve been thinking a bit about which “academically relevant” languages to include since the demographics criteria leaves out languages from the New World completely. Like @MrDibble , I think it’d be a shame.
Since we have 10 slots for languages that are worth saving for purely scientific reasons, I think it is reasonable to allocate half of them to Native American languages. My choice would go like this :
The other 5 academically important languages I would include are :
These two barely missed the main cut (see post 33) but should be saved as sole representatives of their respective families. Plus, they have over 65 millions of speakers each, which is significant.
I’d have to include at least one Uralic language. Hungarian is the most spoken, but since demographics isn’t the main criteria for these 10 languages and we have some leeway for subjectivity, I’ll add :
Then, for the remaining 2 spots :