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I don't think the loss of a language without a literature is much of a loss, really. Also Navajo, though grammatically odd to speakers of Indo-European languages, contrary to the article does not seem to only have irregular verbs.
I think that quite contrary - when language without literature is lost then everything about this language - traditions, knowledge, history, is lost forever (unless anthropologists manage to save some bits of it).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The thing is, that would require that your smartphone be sufficiently aware of the context of your words that it could correctly map one ambiguous statement in one language to another in another language with a different set of ambiguities. For example, the German 'ich mag sie' could mean 'I like her' or 'I like them' or 'I like you' in formal settings, while the English 'at least' could be translated to German as 'z…
Not to detract from your point (which is very true; for machine translation to match human translations they need equal access to and understanding of context), but as a native German speaker, your example seems wrong to me :). "It is pleasing to her" = "es gefällt ihr","It is pleasing to them" = "es gefällt ihnen". No doubt it's possible to construct examples that support your agument in just about any language, tho…
I really don't like how tones are presented as a confounding item like irregular verbs. Tonal languages essentially just take advantage of extra bandwidth that was ignored by most european languages. They are hard for western learners but only because we are unused to treating tonal information as important. In fact because of tones and limited pronunciations available I have found that I feel Chinese is more toleran…
"Going to the store" (rising = question)
"Going to the store" (flat or descending = statement)
I don't think the loss of a language without a literature is much of a loss, really. Also Navajo, though grammatically odd to speakers of Indo-European languages, contrary to the article does not seem to only have irregular verbs.
I think that quite contrary - when language without literature is lost then everything about this language - traditions, knowledge, history, is lost forever (unless anthropologists manage to save some bits of it).
So, yes, what will the world speak only a century from now, as the article asks? Plenty of other languages, for sure, and I for one am glad I devoted years to learning Chinese and German and other languages, but there will be more and more people speaking English in more and more places as the years go by.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not to detract from your point (which is very true; for machine translation to match human translations they need equal access to and understanding of context), but as a native German speaker, your example seems wrong to me :). "It is pleasing to her" = "es gefällt ihr","It is pleasing to them" = "es gefällt ihnen". No doubt it's possible to construct examples that support your agument in just about any language, tho…
true, damn, let me fix that... I was thinking of using sie in the accusative rather than the dative ... hopefully 'ich mag sie' works better, right?
Machine translation is of course aware of this problem, and doing the (rough) equivalent of "whole program analysis" is an active concern. I.e. you can try to source info elsewhere in a longer input to decide between multiple possible translations for another bit. The problem is really these short inputs where no context is easily available to the program - it's an input problem in some sense; it's just much easier for a human translator to guess from cues the program simply has no input channels for. One of those cues is who exactly they've been hired by, though, and that can be replicated with user profiles, too.
I don't think the loss of a language without a literature is much of a loss, really. Also Navajo, though grammatically odd to speakers of Indo-European languages, contrary to the article does not seem to only have irregular verbs.
I really don't like how tones are presented as a confounding item like irregular verbs. Tonal languages essentially just take advantage of extra bandwidth that was ignored by most european languages. They are hard for western learners but only because we are unused to treating tonal information as important. In fact because of tones and limited pronunciations available I have found that I feel Chinese is more toleran…
English does use tones: "Going to the store" (rising = question) "Going to the store" (flat or descending = statement)
For tonal languages, the use of tone as a distinguishing characteristic is similar to any other phonemic characteristic you would typically have to distinguish words in any other non-tonal language. For instance, in English, voicing is a distinguishing characteristic that differentiates the words "pat" and "bat". Similarly in Mandarin Chinese, tone is a distinguishing characteristic that differentiates the words "mā" (mother) and "mǎ" (horse).