|
Swift action to safeguard the Scots tongue is
being taken. It follows a warning by UNESCO that in less than three
decades as many as half of the world's 6,000-plus languages, already
under threat, face dying out and that's not including dialects and
creoles.
The United Nations agency, founded in the UK in 1945 with the aim of
fostering mutual understanding and respect in education, science,
culture and information, gives a stark but somehow arbitrary cut-off
date as 2050.
Furthermore, and this is hard to credit, English is included. It shows
even such a dominant language is not immune from such a mass linguistic
culling. Whatever the eventual total lost, it appears no language is
safe.
In Scotland preservation moves are well underway, in no small measure
thanks to the Internet. It includes employee-owned translation and
localisation outfit Rubric, enabling online searches with a browser
written in Scots. Refreshingly, its "maximise" option is listed as mak
muckle and minimise mak tottie.
The project is attracting growing recognition in schools, parliament and
on social media aimed at preserving our native tongue. Gaelic is also in
good hands.
The Gaelic Books Council (Comhairle nan Leabhraihean) is the lead
organisation with responsibility for supporting Scottish Gaelic authors
and publishers at home and internationally.
Back to English. Still considered the planet's lingua franca, although
this is disputed. Cambridge University describes it as the language of
globalization that became an "enemy" to other languages with its current
dominance nearing its end.
The University of Edinburgh stresses the need for inclusivity in all
languages to enable smaller ones to survive. One would think English
will stick around, such is its imperialistic-grounded historical claim.
Also, and highly significant, is the largest segment of English-speaking
population are the Chinese, albeit more often than not in an
Americanised form and mostly gained through online learning.
We're fast heading towards an increasingly diverse, multilingual future
where technology enables people to communicate efficiently and
effectively without having to resort to resort to learning a completely
new language.
Such is the universality of English usage by the information technology
(IT) leviathans this is likely to keep the language alive and continuing
to evolve longer than otherwise anticipated.
Mind you, it doesn't have total exclusivity: Amazon Echo is available in
eight languages, Google translates in a mighty 109, and Wikipedia is
available in languages other than English.
In the singular world of high-tech, amidst all the endless acronyms
employed by the sector are examples of age-old words where their
original meanings have taken on a more updated yet often complementary
role.
Old, Medieval and Shakespearian iterations may have been all but
replaced by a more contemporary version but nothing should be taken for
granted.
Classical Arabic, Greek, Latin, Sanskrit have practically disappeared
except in certain circles. Around 90 per cent of scientific terms
emanate from Latin and Greek and many English legal terms come from
French, teaching website Denwa Sensei reminds us.
Technopedia is run by our Canadian cousins (from where Electric Scotland
is also published) and the website comes up with a word or term every
weekday.
A recent offering is parcer, a linguistic-based phrase involving syntax
analysis in a natural language checking the underlying structure, the
separate components of a sentence for example, conforms to rules of
formal grammar. It comes from the Latin pars meaning part of speech.
It is certainly not an everyday term and could have likely fallen by the
wayside but has been taken up by computer scientists to represent a
string of commands, usually a program, separated into more easily
processed components.
A computer can then process each program chunk and transform it into
machine language, referred to as machine or object code. It is the only
language a computer is capable of understanding.
The Internet is double-edged given early warnings about Artificial
Intelligence as regards language manipulation, through the likes of
heavily marketed ChatGPT and similar AI driven so-called online content
assistants.
This is not lost back in Scotland where Rubric, fast reaching its 30th
work anniversary, reports one of the team's ongoing tasks is to develop
content strategies for global businesses to meet the challenge to find a
medium, a balance, between an interesting, lively and accessible Scots
but making sure it isn't too antiquated or whimsical.
The outfit have worked with the BBC, Oxford University Press and
Firefox. It launched the service after discovering there was less drive
to incorporate Scots into technological products compared with other
minority languages, such as Scots Gaelic. It is also proving
instrumental in preserving Scots as a fully-fledged, fully functioning,
fully legitimate modern language.
Definitely more muckle than tottie.. |
