Something poignant about the knowledge in this paper staying lost behind a paywall.
Supplementary materials
https://www.science.org/doi/suppl/10.1126/science.adx4343/su...
The rise and fall of language diversity through the Holocene
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Re: The rise and fall of language diversity through the Holocene
#22Caveat: if you read the full text/supplementary materials, it becomes clear it's actually about ethnolinguistic groups, not languages. I doubt that all the languages were unintelligible to each other given that intelligibility is a continuum and the large estimate they postulate (maximum of 40k languages 1000-3000 years ago)
Re: The rise and fall of language diversity through the Holocene
#23With current tech we are close to having a babel fish to put in our ear as a near universal translator. I have a dream that this will enable huge linguistic diversity, even down to one language per person, as translation costs approach nil. I could privately alias "blue" as "orange" and cause no confusion ... except for the increasingly niche application of meat speaking directly to meat. How fast might a specialty l…
I would expect the opposite, languages converging if for nothing else to please the ear.
Just look at unit systems. People go crazy over metric versus imperial units or old outdated units being used. And yet converting between units has never been easier. Many industries invented their own units to fit their use case, but once their products spread to national or global distribution everything gets standardized to the most common unit.
Re: The rise and fall of language diversity through the Holocene
#24This is interesting, but I have substantial doubt as to how accurately this models the actual number of languages that existed at times in the distant past.
Re: The rise and fall of language diversity through the Holocene
#25With current tech we are close to having a babel fish to put in our ear as a near universal translator. I have a dream that this will enable huge linguistic diversity, even down to one language per person, as translation costs approach nil. I could privately alias "blue" as "orange" and cause no confusion ... except for the increasingly niche application of meat speaking directly to meat. How fast might a specialty l…
While preservation and enablement of niche languages is enriching imho, another incentive for individualism - one person = one language - is just the destruction of the core value of human achievements. Another step towards a solarian[0] society.