Now I’ve landed somewhere in the middle. Elements of high-culture work, like the OP link to a life work in dictionary building are high value for languages *if* there is also a viable low-culture living language for it to ride on. Otherwise it is dead language scholarship.
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High culture as a sort of authoritarian cultural policing force on a dying language only hastens its death, as younger speakers chafe and defect to more laissez-faire languages. But high culture as a sort of high technology for doing more complex cultural things, that’s necessary
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A language without an esoteric tier will soon degenerate and die in a different way: by becoming a language mostly for stupid people thinking stupid thoughts. A preliminary stage is a divide of growing mutual unintelligibility emerging between high/low versions of a language.
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This divide is starkly visible in all Indian languages (a bad thing) but barely visible in English (a sign of health). A scholarly speaker speaking “shudh” (pure) Hindi sounds almost like Sanskrit and incomprehensible the way Latin does to average English speakers.
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Conversely, a full-blown use of a deep-slang street version of Hindi, like Bambaiyya (think strong Geordie or AAVE in relation to English), can be almost as unintelligible to people schooled exclusively in official-sanskritized “high-culture” version, like many South Indians are.
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Prediction: tailwinds of digitization, auto-translation, robust street use, and demographics notwithstanding, most 2nd tier languages are going to die of stupidification because they are below critical mass of creatives working in high culture and keeping it close to low culture
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Coda: I found a translator partner for German version of Breaking Smart easily. In French, I was approached by a French digital agency. In Spanish, I had a couple of individuals interested and an incomplete translation exists it the project didn’t get done.
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This tells you the limits of informal, extra-institutional translation possibilities. Traditionally published books that are reasonably successful will easily appear in 6-7 languages. Self-published ones like my book Tempo (~5k copies, so low end of “successful”) are unlikely to.
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A lot of the value of existence of institutionalized high culture layers in languages is: cultural globalization. When high culture dies, books stop being translated into other languages as the translation gap between self-published and traditionally published demonstrates.
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Replying to @vgr
Can easily happen the other way round. 2nd or 3rd tier languages can survive and thrive because of cultural regionalization. When region becomes more important, there will be a growing demand for something that can positively define identity.
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My point is that’s necessary but not sufficient if critical mass to sustain the high culture in that language is missing. Even you guys gave up on GDI Impuls in German, which is one of the best resources non-English cultures.
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Replying to @vgr
Yes, we could have been prouder on Swissness. But that development was due to hope on globalization gains. (OTOH we translated Breaking Smart and a book of
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And as globalization suffers setbacks (and will continue to do so), you gain less from going out to the world and more bringing world closer to home.
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