I'm not actually sure that's true - I suspect it's much more that 1) adults are usually much less comfortable just Trying Things Out and want an explanation rather than a demonstration they have to mimic, and 2) adults are very, very much less frequently in situations where they absolutely cannot communicate in a language they already know and tend to intentionally avoid such situations. If you're willing to put yourself in much the same situation as a kid learning their first language, you'll be able to learn pretty much as well.

It's an extremely common misconception, though, among parents from linguistic minorities that trying to teach both their own language and a more socially connected language will somehow disadvantage their child, and they should focus exclusively on the prestigious language and leave the other one behind entirely. This is of course entirely false, though, and is often rooted in their own internalised prejudice towards their language and culture. You can quite effectively teach kids two languages, especially when they have clearly segmented domains of use.

It's still very much endangered, though, and will be so until there's a sufficient population learning it as kids and going on to use it with their own kids.

(I think the title is about Hawai'i Sign Language, though, not Hawai'ian the spoken language.)

You don't have to speak only one language (^^)

I know what this means, but it sounds like they started with one diseased kidney and ended up with two diseased kidneys.

No, the inhabitants of the specific location in question. Not a bunch of people far away, even if they're within the same human-drawn box. You want to know what country a town should be in? Ask the people that live in that town.

Territorial integrity is overrated. Better to do what's best for the local inhabitants of any given place.

> The value of featues of language probably is quantifiable, though.

Not sure how you'd quantify that at all!

Off the top of my head, though, vocabulary can encode cultural knowledge about a people's relationship to their natural environment - showing both their own cultural practices, and medicinal and other kinds of knowledge that might be more widely applicable.

They contain another perspective for looking at the world, and often have a lot of valuable cultural knowledge stored in their vocabulary. If nothing else, they're a significant part of a person's cultural identity and should be respected as such.

In a purely unemotional sense, they're also additional data points that help answer the question 'what can and can't human language do?'.

(It's not like sharing a language brings people together, necessarily - see e.g. Serbian and Croatian, which are basically the same language but their speakers hate each other enough that they refuse to call it the same.)

For those of you wondering (like I did), the amount of power required to fire a laser large enough to redirect lighting is much higher than the amount of power you could generate by taking advantage of the energy in that lightning. It's useful for moving lightning away from problem targets, but not useful for power generation.

Not OP, but the general opinion in linguistics is I think fairly well reflected by this Language Log post from a good decade ago, in response to a paper about high altitudes correlating with ejectives:

> Still, the (presumably) spurious correlations of the two word-order variables with altitude remind us of the possibility for false findings here. (...)

> Whether or not the altitude/ejective correlation reveals a causal connection, we can expect the near future to bring us a large number of spurious correlational analyses, along with a few meaningful ones. There are three reasons for this:

> (1) The existence of digital datasets makes it increasingly easy to perform quantitative checks on hypotheses about possible relationships between linguistic and non-linguistic variables;

> (2) The astronomically large number of such possible relationships guarantees that many of them should exhibit a strong pair-wise connection by chance, even if all of the distributions were statistically independent;

> (3) The distributions are not statistically independent, due to factors such as cultural and geographical diffusion.

> Note that the "file drawer effect" strongly undermines the often-made argument "But I/we made the hypothesis before we checked, we didn't just dredge for correlations and then try to explain them". The data-dredging (and the associated multiple comparisons) can (and do) occur across many unconnected investigations, with only the "significant" ones getting published.

In short, such correspondences aren't impossible, but it's a lot of effort to show that they're not just random coincidences. Languages are incredibly complex systems, and aren't independent of each other - which makes them extremely difficult to do statistics on. Personally, I think for a lot of purposes (including these) the set of all human languages isn't a statistically significant sample size - the systems are too complex and too interrelated for only seven thousand data points to be anywhere near enough to show clear trends above the background of noise.

> For instance, the broad Australian accent (also called "Ocker"), which is more common in rural areas than metropolitan areas, has a prominent nasal twang and an emphasis on drawn-out long vowels. These characteristics are favourable for carrying over long, open distances with few obstructions. Rural accents in the U.S. exhibit similar adaptations.

My understanding agrees with other commenters in the thread - that there's no demonstrated connection between linguistic features and environment, and that connections like those are just intuited explanations rather than demonstrated scientific conclusions. Do you have a source you can cite for these?

As I understand it, the jury is still out. A lot of people have done a lot of math about it, but we still lack some empirical data to check that math against. There's a number of possible options that are consistent with current observations.

> The idea that space is infinite makes no sense to me as even the physical “space” between planets, stars etc is still “something” and according to the Law of Conservation of Mass, matter cannot be created or destroyed.

That space is, I suppose, "something" in a sense, but it certainly isn't matter. It's just location. (And matter can be created and destroyed; it's just converted to or from energy when that happens. This is what E=mc^2 is about. But the expansion of the universe is creating neither matter nor energy - just locations for it to be in.)

> BUT if space is finite, that suggests if you were able to travel for sufficient time, you would eventually reach the end/edge, which surely suggests it is contained within something. If this is true what/who is outside “the box”?

Not necessarily. The two-dimensional surface of a three-dimensional sphere has no edge. Our three-dimensional universe could be arranged in some four-dimensional way such that it has no edge.

In any case, since it's impossible to observe what's outside the universe (by definition of 'the universe'), science can simply say nothing at all about the outside of it.

I also think we're talking past each other a bit; you're mostly concerned with the ability to read something already written in whatever language and I'm mostly concerned with the ability to write something new fully in your own language. If you were to try and write a full novel in Fuzhounese with Chinese characters, how would that work? How often would you come across a situation where there's no obvious way to write what you want to say?

Basically the point I'm trying to make is that each Chinese language individually needs a conventional way to use Chinese characters; they don't just automatically work. I'll admit that maybe more of that would overlap with the conventions used to write other Chinese languages that I originally understood to be the case.

Take a look at the links at the bottom; they may talk more directly about the issue.

> What I'm trying to convey is that there's no such thing as "written Fuzhounese" unless you're trying to be super casual by trying to map what you speak to what you write word for word.

That opens the possibility, though, that your grandmother learned to read at least in part via Mandarin (since I imagine that's how reading is taught), and that's another factor in why she can read Mandarin.

> Out of curiosity, what's your experience with Chinese language?

Not as much direct experience as I'd like, but I'm used to Chinese characters via Japanese and have a master's in linguistics. Chinese languages and Chinese characters have come up a lot in the classes I've taken, and I've done some scholarly reading on them now and again (though it's been a while). I've also studied a bit of Classical Chinese, and briefly tried to learn Mandarin a couple of times.

I actually found I can read Classical Chinese rather more easily than modern Mandarin with just my background in Japanese - Mandarin has a bunch of grammatical function stuff I don't recognise and words that have shifted meaning since they were borrowed into Japanese, but I could read short and simple sentences in Classical Chinese fairly easily even before I started studying it.

> Sinitic is defined only by the many varieties of Chinese unified by a common writing system

In context it seems like that line specifically is saying 'the obviously Sinitic languages are the ones that have a shared heritage of Chinese characters', in contrast to Bai and a couple of other languages, which could or could not be Sinitic on phylogenetic grounds pending better data and further analysis.

> I'm getting the sense that you think what you're describing is a widespread problem, but from my experience, it probably only happens with very uncommon edge cases. It's more akin to, as an example, Australian's usage of "loo" to mean toilet in spoken language, while "toilet" is still understood and used in less casual contexts.

That may be, but I'm hesitant to accept the idea that a writing system that fundamentally encodes individual words in an individual spoken language can work without adaptation for a wide variety of different languages that do not all share exactly the same set of words.

Here's a brief blog post by a specialist linguist on just the difficulties of writing nonstandard Mandarin with Chinese characters, with some good links to check out at the bottom.

> I have a grandma who only speaks Fuzhounese (a subset of Min) yet has no trouble understanding "written Mandarin" (if there's even such a thing). Sure, she can't use the exact expression in written language and not have it be sort of weird. But again, people don't usually write that way, and understanding the characters allows the reader to extrapolate the general meaning of the sentence.

Did she learn to read Chinese characters via Fuzhounese text written with them? Does she use them to write Fuzhounese? If not, how did she learn them?

For 1, it is relevant, because the most straightforward way to decide on the character to use for a given word is to use the character used to write its Middle Chinese ancestor (unless this is a Min language, and then it gets complicated). When you can't do that for whatever reason, you're left with not a lot of options; in theory the best one is just to make a new character, but until the Unicode Consortium decides to include your new character in Unicode and you get good font support for it, you can only use that character in handwriting. So if you're trying to create a system for writing a Sinitic language that has even one novel grammatical function word that doesn't have a straightforward preexisting character that's appropriate, adapting the script for it is not going to be a simple process! I've actually seen examples even of Taiwanese Mandarin using pinyin or even kana to write words that exist in Taiwanese Mandarin but don't have an obvious Chinese character for them. Imagine if half your grammatical machinery has that problem!

For 2, that was just an example of one way in which being knowing what a character means in one language may not help you understand its use with another language. In that particular example the alternative meaning may still be well enough known, but that's not guaranteed to be the case in every such instance!

This is not true at all! Each Chinese character writes a word in a spoken language. Currently there are systems to use them for Mandarin and Cantonese, but mostly not for other Sinitic languages. The primary issue is that any given language may have words (including common grammatical function words) which have no clear appropriate character for them - either it's not clear which (if any) Middle Chinese word this word descends from, or it descends from the same word as another character, or there's some reason why speakers may find the character inappropriate for that word for other reasons (maybe it's developed a vulgar connotation in Mandarin, for example). Adapting Chinese characters to a new language, even if it's Sinitic, is not a straightforward process.

And of course, if you know how to write grammatical function words in Mandarin, that doesn't mean you'll recognise Cantonese's grammatical function words. Plus, many related words (which "should" be written with the same character) may have shifted their meaning - for example, 聞 meant 'hear' in Middle Chinese, and while both Mandarin and Cantonese have shifted it to 'smell', it remains 'hear' in its use in Japanese.

> Or maybe it’s because their are 8 different dialects in Chinese and you were using one they didn’t understand!

There are in fact probably several hundred Sinitic languages (which are often interchangeably referred to as 'Chinese').

Yeah, this seems to be using a very permissive definition of 'language'. Ethnologue - which at least tries to do things on a purely scientific basis - counts on the order of 600 or so languages in India.