Languages: Why we must save dying tongues (2014) • Hacker News Board

Re: Languages: Why we must save dying tongues (2014)

#151

Post by greggman » Mon, Jul 04, 2016, 7:10 AM UTC

eropple wrote: post #69

chousuke wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From an utilitarian viewpoint, sharing a single, global language is probably useful. but I feel that such a world would likely also suffer from less variety in culture and viewpoints. Languages tend to accommodate the way of thinking prevalent in the cultures that speak it, and vice versa the language also shapes the speakers. To learn another language as a non-native speaker, especially one that is sufficiently diff…

This post is a good one, and that utilitarian idea that unilingualism is good because you can hire people is a claim borne of the kind of short-sighted technocracy that bedevils tech and tech culture. In the appendices of 1984, Orwell was speaking of conscious linguistic malformation to make it difficult to communicate concepts that the manipulators of Newspeak (née English) wished to stamp out. It's not better when…

Well another way to look at it. Japanese engineers get paid very poorly. If they spoke English they could easily leave the toxic Japanese work environment but they don't speak English or any other language so effectively they are prisoners of the only country that speaks their default language

Re: Languages: Why we must save dying tongues (2014)

#152

Post by thaumasiotes » Mon, Jul 04, 2016, 7:21 AM UTC

khedoros wrote: post #147

thaumasiotes wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is dramatically overstated. It immediately predicts that British television would have no audience in the US and Australia.

Does it? I think it just means that there's a fair number of things to learn before the dialog makes complete sense. Context fills in many of the gaps, I know that I still miss some cultural references, rhyming slang, and such, even after watching a fair number of British shows.

According to your interpretation, it would be just as fair to say "it takes a few weeks of practice to be able to understand someone from the US, if you're from the US". I feel justified in not interpreting it that way.

Re: Languages: Why we must save dying tongues (2014)

#153

Post by hvidgaard » Mon, Jul 04, 2016, 7:22 AM UTC

ggreer wrote: post #5

It's not a well-liked view, but I'm very glad that humanity is on the path to speaking only a few languages (or perhaps just one). If you disagree, consider this thought experiment: Imagine if the entire world spoke a single language. Would we ever want to invent new languages, making mutual communication harder? It would be silly. I do feel for the speakers of these dying tongues, but in the long run, this is a good…

If the entire world spoke English, Spanish, or Chinese, we still wouldn't be able to understand each other. I live in Denmark, less than 6 million people, and I can pick two guys, put them in a room, and they would not be able to understand one another. They live less than 300 miles from eachother.

Re: Languages: Why we must save dying tongues (2014)

#154

Post by khedoros » Mon, Jul 04, 2016, 7:38 AM UTC

thaumasiotes wrote: post #152

khedoros wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it? I think it just means that there's a fair number of things to learn before the dialog makes complete sense. Context fills in many of the gaps, I know that I still miss some cultural references, rhyming slang, and such, even after watching a fair number of British shows.

According to your interpretation, it would be just as fair to say "it takes a few weeks of practice to be able to understand someone from the US, if you're from the US". I feel justified in not interpreting it that way.

If you're an American to whom general-audience American television doesn't make complete sense, and who misses many of the cultural references, then I'm quite relieved that I have a different interpretation.

I've seen a fair amount of British TV, and I'm fairly comfortable with the idioms and vocabulary differences. Less so than American TV, but I think that's fair, since I'm not immersed in the culture.

I've seen much less Australian TV, but a lot of the slang was utterly unfamiliar to me, in what I have seen. I'm sure that if I watched more, it would become more familiar.

I don't understand what is so controversial about the idea that other places use the language slightly differently, and it can take some time to become accustomed to the differences.

Re: Languages: Why we must save dying tongues (2014)

#155

Post by ktRolster » Mon, Jul 04, 2016, 7:41 AM UTC

contingencies wrote: post #105

douche wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They'll have to come up with a better writing system, either settling on pinyin on wade-giles, or something else. Really, ideographs are awful, an alphabet or even a syllabarry would be workable, but needing thousands of characters to read a newspaper is unforgivable.

That's OK, people don't read newspapers anymore and pinyin is a viable and highly consistent Romanization system already used by 1.4 billion. Wade Giles is a historical footnote. A little known fact is that the darling of the 20th century communist party's modern Chinese literary world, Lu Xun, advocated for the abolition of characters. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lu_Xun Perhaps long texts will be read in a Romaniz…

Perhaps long texts will be read in a Romanized form (Pinyin) and characters will be reserved for use in concise international symbologies, much like Japan's ongoing use of kanji?

In Japanese, the Kanji are used basically everywhere (and when you are writing, sometimes you wish there were a kanji for a word, so you wouldn't have to write out all the letters. Of course, it's not as bad when you can type it).

Re: Languages: Why we must save dying tongues (2014)

#156

Post by danieltillett » Mon, Jul 04, 2016, 7:50 AM UTC

mablap wrote: post #134

danieltillett wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

English is very interesting in that if a word makes sense to use (rather than a phrase) then English will borrow that word without hesitation. Actually because the language of science and technology is English there are lots of concepts that can’t be expressed in any other language. Sure any emotion a human can feel can be expressed in any language, but most higher level scientific concepts can’t be expressed in any…

most higher level scientific concepts can’t be expressed in any language other than English. Out of the total number of human concepts that have ever been communicated, the majority are only available to English speakers. Please provide examples to support your baseless claim.

Pick any scientific paper at random. No other language other than English has the terms and concepts required to write the paper - you can’t translate most scientific papers into another language since the complete set of terms and concepts don’t exist in any other languages.

It is not that you can’t write scientific papers in other languages (many are written in other languages), just that we have settled on English as the language of science. The vast majority of new scientific papers are written in English and hence every new concept within them can’t be expressed in any other language since there are no corresponding vocabulary to map the new concept onto. You can of course make up a new term in an another language if you want, but in this is not done for the many new concepts since it is more productive to just work within English.

Of course there are some papers that are written in a foreign language and which contain new concepts. These papers can’t be translated into English without inventing new terms in English. The whole untranslatability issue is purely a numbers game where the papers in English only vastly outnumber those in any other language and hence most of the novel concepts are in English alone.

Re: Languages: Why we must save dying tongues (2014)

#157

Post by danieltillett » Mon, Jul 04, 2016, 7:55 AM UTC

Razengan wrote: post #130

danieltillett wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That there is no knowledge that can't be communicated in English. Actually not all languages are equivalent because many concepts can only be expressed in English as all other languages lack the vocabulary to express many scientific and technical concepts. Right now English really is the only language that can be used to express a lot of concepts.

And most of those scientific and technical words in English are actually borrowed from other languages in the first place. Even the words "science" and "technique" and "compute." Latin and French. Basic stuff like "icon." Greek. "Algebra" and "alcohol" and some other words that start with "al-"; Arabic. I could go on to force the point but it already feels bizarre having to point out the obvious.. If English can want…

It is not that you can’t in principle express any concept in any other language, just that in most cases the vocabulary doesn’t exist in that language. In Newton’s time it was not possible to write most scientific papers in English as English lacked the required terms and concepts (everyone wrote in Latin).

For a whole series of historical reasons English has become the international language of science resulting in most new concepts only being expressible in English. We could of course change to a new language, but we would need to make up new terms to map all the existing concept onto in this new language. It might happen in the future, but right now there is no major effort to move science from English.

Re: Languages: Why we must save dying tongues (2014)

#158

Post by Mikhail_Edoshin » Mon, Jul 04, 2016, 8:01 AM UTC

ggreer wrote: post #5

It's not a well-liked view, but I'm very glad that humanity is on the path to speaking only a few languages (or perhaps just one). If you disagree, consider this thought experiment: Imagine if the entire world spoke a single language. Would we ever want to invent new languages, making mutual communication harder? It would be silly. I do feel for the speakers of these dying tongues, but in the long run, this is a good…

This line of reasoning implies there's a benefit in such economy and simplification. But is this really so? Take fonts, for example. One could argue that it would be better to have a single font and then maybe also simplify it to have fewer character shapes and width variations. But from what I see font development goes in an entirely different direction. There's more fonts developed every year, and they're getting more sophisticated, not less: they have much more ligatures, different variants of the same letter for different context, and so on.

Or take the ideographic writing systems. There were many attempts to simplify them, limit the number of ideographs, simplify their shapes, but as the result we now have two Chinese writing systems (simplified and not) and the simplification of Japanese seems to have stopped and even went backward.

Maybe it's not that simple to simplify things :)

Re: Languages: Why we must save dying tongues (2014)

#159

Post by danieltillett » Mon, Jul 04, 2016, 8:01 AM UTC

khedoros wrote: post #150

danieltillett wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That there is no knowledge that can't be communicated in English. Actually not all languages are equivalent because many concepts can only be expressed in English as all other languages lack the vocabulary to express many scientific and technical concepts. Right now English really is the only language that can be used to express a lot of concepts.

Where another language lacks the vocabulary, the concept could be expressed through explanation, or through assimilation of that word from English, construction of a new word that makes etymological sense, etc. There isn't anything extra that can be done in English that couldn't be done in another language to express new concepts.

This is true, but it is a massive job to do this translation so it does not get done. Many scientific concepts are only known by a handful of people in the world (i.e. those formed at the cutting edge) and are only able to be expressed in English.

There is nothing inherently superior about English as a language (other than it being my native language), just that it is the common language of science and so it is the language in which the majority of new concepts are communicated.

Re: Languages: Why we must save dying tongues (2014)

#160

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Jul 04, 2016, 8:09 AM UTC

eropple wrote: post #73

Symbiote wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

English had all of these, exactly. Every child knows poltergeist, from Harry Potter. Every teenager knows angst. The others are less universal, but I'd expect a university graduate to know them.

Where exactly do you think those words come from ?

[deleted]