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Posts Tagged ‘vanishing’

But What If AI Saves Dying Languages?

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on August 20, 2026| Leave a Comment »

Photo: Richard Ellis/Alamy.
Copies of the Gullah-language Bible, De Nyew Testament. I once had a Bible collection that included this one. Some experts say artificial intelligence will help save endangered languages like Gullah Geechee.

For many reasons, including the fact that artificial intelligence “godfather” Geoffrey Hinton has said AI could wipe out humanity in three decades, I am not a fan. I know it can be helpful in medicine and other things I care about, but three decades is scary.

But what if AI saves dying languages?

Jonathan Abrams wrote recently at the New York Times about people using AI as a tool to do just that.

“While relaxing a couple of years ago, Prof. Joshua Caffery found himself in the mood to unwind with some old-time Cajun music. He asked Amazon’s Alexa to play selections from Dewey Balfa, a celebrated fiddler and singer credited with popularizing the genre.

“Instead, Alexa frustratingly steered him to the catalog of the modern pop artist, Dua Lipa, Caffery said.

“ ‘I love Dua Lipa,’ said Caffery, the director of the Center for Louisiana Studies at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. ‘Don’t get me wrong. But it seems problematic if you’re interested in a different kind of culture and you want to surround yourself with the music of your region.’ …

“Louisiana French, the oral dialect of which Balfa was a cultural guardian, is part of the Bayou’s societal DNA, a link to its history, music and identity. Today, Caffery described the language as struggling and endangered. …

“In response, Caffery assembled a small team at the center to train its own language learning model in automatic speech recognition for Louisiana French, drawing from a trove of historical artifacts and interviews.

“Over the months, as the learning language model is trained on bits of the language — such as an old-age French nursery rhyme — it brings centuries-old dialect closer into the digital age.

“ ‘It’s scary how fast all this happened,’ Caffery said. ‘I don’t even think I knew a large-language model existed two years ago.’ …

“The efforts are part of inroads to preserve dialects at risk of being lost, and bridge a disconnect between large-language model machines, while maintaining a community’s ability to control and own its digital destiny.

“In the United States, questions exist over how to preserve languages like Louisiana French, the Gullah Geechee language (the English-based Creole language of some coastal regions in the Atlantic southeast) and Appalachian English in the modern, digital age.

“Globally, researchers at the University of Edinburgh are using artificial intelligence to strengthen and revive Scottish Gaelic and Manx. Google recently announced the availability of voice recordings of nearly 30 sub-Saharan African languages to help build tools like voice assistants and translation apps. …

“The importance of accurate speech recognition becomes greater as important tasks like job hiring and medical transcriptions become more automated and digitized, [Christine Mallinson, a professor of language, literacy, and culture at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County] said. …

” ‘There’s accents, patterns of grammar, word choice. Those differences are connected to our families, our neighborhoods, our age and gender and racial and ethnic and cultural backgrounds and where we grew up.’ …

“For centuries, Louisiana French was the predominant language spoken in South Louisiana. In 1921, a new state constitution declared English the primary language. Many parents stopped teaching their children the language out of fear of discrimination, as students who spoke Louisiana French in class were often punished with knuckle-rappings.

“A reversal came in 1968 when the Council for the Development of French in Louisiana was created to advance French, largely through education and community initiatives. In 2023, the Advocate of Baton Rouge estimated about 120,000 Louisianans still spoke French.

“Caffery grew up in Franklin, La., an antebellum town on Bayou Teche. As a child, he ate Cajun and Creole food. His grandparents sometimes sang Old French songs and passed along phrases in the language.

“ ‘Whether you spoke it or speak it, the language is floating in the air,’ he said. ‘There’s this feeling of there is this beautiful thing that we want to hang on to.’ …

“The Center of Louisiana Studies houses a vast trove of Cajun and Creole folklore recordings that include over 12,000 hours of oral histories, field recordings and music performances recorded on everything from wax cylinders to reel-to-reel tape. …

“The language is almost entirely preserved in vocal recordings. ‘A lot of it is sung in the language, and it’s something that’s vanishing,’ Caffery said. ‘Just in the same way you’d want food that’s local to your region, it’s important to have culture that is local to the region that makes you feel rooted and certain.’ ”

More at the Times, here,

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A Language Close to Aramaic

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on April 17, 2024| 7 Comments »

Photo: Jastrow at Wikimedia.
Slab with dedicatory Aramaic inscription to the god Salm. Sandstone, 5th century BC. Found in Tayma, Saudi Arabia, by Charles Huber in 1884. Now in the Louvre.

Among the world’s many endangered languages is one cherished today by a branch of Christianity in Iraq, a language close to the Aramaic Jesus spoke.

Sara Hassan reports at PRI’s The World, “In a small church in Baghdad, Iraq, a couple dozen people have gathered for prayers on a sunny Sunday morning. They stand in pews facing a crimson-colored curtain and a podium with a gold Syriac cross on it. The distinctive cross has a total of 12 circles at its points to represent the 12 disciples of Jesus.

“The congregants are reciting their prayers in an ancient language called Syriac. Today, it’s spoken mostly by Christians in Iraq and neighboring Syria. The language traces its roots to Aramaic, which was the script of the original Christian Bible and spoken by Jesus Christ. And it’s part of the family of Semitic languages in the Middle East region.

“The Syriac language is disappearing, with fewer and fewer people speaking it. The official languages of Iraq are Arabic and Kurdish.

“But now, after campaigning by some groups, a newly launched television channel, Al-Syriania, with funding from the Iraqi government, is hoping to change that. The community says it’s a good move toward preserving Syriac and in helping people stay connected with their language and culture.

“The channel has about 40 staff members and can be viewed in Iraq and around the world through satellite networks, such as NileSat and ArabSat. It’s a sister station of Al-Iraqiya, an Arabic television network that was set up in the country after the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003, which also broadcasts in Kurdish and Turkmen.

“The news bulletins for the new channel are read in classical Syriac, but many of the other programs — which include cinema, art, history, cultural events and music — are presented in a dialect of the language.

“ ‘We have daily segments, like news and morning shows, and also, documentary programs about the history of the church and historical sites,’ said Jack Anwia, the station director. ‘We also play classical Syriac songs and music, the top-100 movies, and we have correspondents reporting from the field.’ …

“In 2003, the country was home to about 1.5 million Christians. Since then, that number has dropped to about 400,000. The war caused many of them to flee to other safer countries. But much of the decline also followed the onslaught of ISIS in 2014, which targeted Christians and other minorities.

“Many of the families settled down in other countries around the world, and younger generations have tried to adopt the languages of their host countries to assimilate better, losing touch with Syriac unless it’s spoken at home. …

“[Father Qasha Shamoun, a priest at the Ancient Church of the East in Baghdad] said the security situation has improved in Iraq over the past several years, but the Christian community is so small that it’s hard to bring people together for programs. … He added that Al-Syriania has been good for providing Syriac programming and that people in his community have told him they like watching it.

“Hundreds of Syriac books and manuscripts have still survived decades of war and migration. In fact, right before ISIS fighters captured large parts of northern Iraq in 2014, the Chaldean Catholic archbishop of Mosul, Najeeb Michaeel, rescued a collection of centuries-old Syriac manuscripts as he fled.

“Now, many of them are preserved at the Digital Center for Eastern Manuscripts in Erbil, the capital of the Kurdish region, which is supported by UNESCO, USAID and the Catholic Dominican Order.

“Back at the news station, Anwia said that it’s important not to lose Syriac. ‘It is one of the oldest languages of Iraq,’ he said. ‘And it needs to be protected from extinction.’ ”

More at The World, here.

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Archeaology of Heritage Fruits

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on October 27, 2016| 4 Comments »

Art: Albrecht Dürer
“Virgin and Child With Pear,” at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.  Heritage fruit archaeologist Isabella Dalla Ragione says it’s not a pear.

I loved reading about this side effect of an Italian woman’s work to preserve heritage fruits: she discovered that a fruit in a famous painting was mislabeled.

Elisabetta Povoledo writes at the NY Times, “On her farm, Isabella Dalla Ragione pursues a personal mission — saving ancient fruit trees from extinction — with a strong sense of urgency. Rescuing vanishing varieties is a race, she says, ‘and lots of times we arrived late.’ …

“To find and collect their forgotten varieties, for decades she and her father chatted up farmers and motley locals in the Umbrian and Tuscan countryside. They gathered branches, and with them the traditions and chronicles tied to the fruits. …

“But because fruit was not always described in detail in written records, she also began to examine the works of Renaissance and Baroque painters working in Umbria and Tuscany at a time when ‘artists had close relations to agriculture’ and were sensitive to the seasons and local varieties, she said. …

“A closer look at Albrecht Dürer’s ‘Virgin and Child With Pear,’ at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, for example, reveals a clear misnomer, Ms. Dalla Ragione said.

“ ‘If it were a pear, it would show a stalk on top,’ she said. ‘Mary is clearly holding a muso di bue apple.’ …

“Ms. Dalla Ragione created a nonprofit foundation, the Arboreal Archaeology Foundation, in 2014 ‘because it made it easier to give a future to all this,’ she said.”

Read more about her quixotic but intriguing work here.

Photo: Francesco Lastrucci for The New York Times
Isabella Dalla Ragione picking apples on her farmstead in San Lorenzo di Lerchi, Italy.

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Languages

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on August 6, 2011| 8 Comments »

To paraphrase a character in the Brian Friel play “Translations,” if you impose a language on people, one day you may find that their speech “no longer fits the contours of the land.” Language is critical to identity. People can always learn the language of the power group later, once they have learned how to learn.

That is the rationale behind a new effort in Haiti.

“When Michel DeGraff was a young boy in Haiti, his older brother brought home a notice from school reminding students and parents of certain classroom rules. At the top of the list was ‘no weapons.’ And right below it, DeGraff still remembers: ‘No Creole.’ Students were supposed to use French, and French only. …

“DeGraff is now an associate professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and he is using his influence to try to destroy the barrier that essentially fences off most of Haiti’s children from a real education.” Read the Boston Globe report here.

The dominance of a few languages was one of the concerns behind creating Esperanto as a bridge. With a bridge language, Esperantists hoped, less common languages would not die. It hasn’t turned out that way.

“There are more than 7,000 languages in the world, and if statistics hold, two weeks from now, there will be one less. That’s the rate at which languages disappear. And each time a language disappears, a part of history — a subtle way of thinking — vanishes too.

“A new documentary called The Linguists, [which aired August 4] on PBS, follows ethnographers David Harrison and Greg Anderson as they race to document endangered languages in some of the most remote corners of the world.

“From the plains of Siberia to the mountains of Bolivia to the tribal lands of India, Harrison and Anderson have hopscotched the globe, but they sat down for a moment with NPR’s Scott Simon to discuss their race to capture the world’s endangered languages.

“Harrison, a linguistics professor at Swarthmore College, specializes in sounds and words; Anderson, who directs Oregon’s Living Tongues Institute, is the verb expert. Together, they speak 25 languages.” Read more here.

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