How the Internet is Killing the World's Languages • Hacker News Board

Re: How the Internet is Killing the World's Languages

#51

Post by infruset » Wed, Dec 04, 2013, 9:22 PM UTC

neakor wrote: post #27

On one hand, having a variety of languages makes the world diverse, more interesting and perhaps even encourages different ways of thinking. On the other hand, the high cost of communicating with multiple languages makes sharing thoughts and ideas harder, and perhaps even hinders our productivity and advancement as a whole. It's a tough call, but I vote for unification. In the name of advancement of humanity, we shal…

And choose what as the universal language? I assume, lest it might seem like there is a conflict of interest, that you are thinking of some language you don't speak? Thank you for showing the way in this sacrifice everyone must make.

Re: How the Internet is Killing the World's Languages

#52

Post by PhasmaFelis » Wed, Dec 04, 2013, 9:35 PM UTC

infruset wrote: post #50

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the one hand, I'm very much inclined to agree with you. On the other hand, I'm a monolingual English-speaker. I personally gain much and lose nothing in this scenario, I have no real conception of what it feels like for the hundreds of millions of people who do speak minority languages; so I'm not sure I'm qualified to judge.

Thank you for this comment. It would be interesting to know, among all those embracing everyone speaking english, how many are native english speakers and how many are monolingual; that might put things in perspective. In other words, it's easy to claim that everyone doing things your way with no effort on your part is the right way to go.

There's an interesting point. It's taken for granted that the ruling language of the internet is and will be English; no surprise that native English-speakers approve. I wonder how many people in this thread would change their tune if the emerging lingua franca was Spanish or Mandarin.

Re: How the Internet is Killing the World's Languages

#53

Post by PhasmaFelis » Wed, Dec 04, 2013, 10:12 PM UTC

mullingitover wrote: post #34

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the one hand, I'm very much inclined to agree with you. On the other hand, I'm a monolingual English-speaker. I personally gain much and lose nothing in this scenario, I have no real conception of what it feels like for the hundreds of millions of people who do speak minority languages; so I'm not sure I'm qualified to judge.

> I personally gain much and lose nothing in this scenario You gain a great deal if you have the ability to communicate with millions (billions?) of people that you otherwise couldn't.

...Yes, that's what I said. I gain much and lose nothing, because other people are forced to conform to my standards. In the same scenario, someone who speaks only (say) Swahili gains nothing except another hurdle to access, and loses a potential shot at a local online community.

Re: How the Internet is Killing the World's Languages

#54

Post by DanielStraight » Wed, Dec 04, 2013, 11:02 PM UTC

spodek wrote: post #36

The internet doesn't "kill" languages. People choose what language to speak. If they -- rather, we -- have a choice of languages, why do we choose common ones instead of uncommon ones? We are actively choosing to speak common languages, not some abstract network of computers is killing something. If linguists or anyone else says we're doing something wrong and losing something valuable, why do we keep doing it? Is it…

In what? In being able to study the thousands of dramatically different ways humans can communicate.

Preserving languages is about preserving data for linguistics (and other fields). We preserve a lot of things with no "real value". We preserve fossils, species (any species with fewer than 100 remaining specimens isn't contributing to any ecosystem), books (even ones that are outdated and no one is ever likely to read), websites... I could go on all day. We preserve this stuff because we can learn by studying it.

Languages don't just have different nuances, they have completely different ways of putting human thought into words. They have grammars so different that a word for word translation would be no more readable than an untranslated text. They have such a huge variety of sounds that encoding them into IPA stretches the limits of Unicode's variants of the Latin alphabet, relying on many diacritic marks on top of regular characters.

It's not about preserving something that gives some greater ability to communicate. It's about preserving a database of linguistic evolution and the bounds of how human thought can be encoded orally.

Re: How the Internet is Killing the World's Languages

#55

Post by gazrogers » Thu, Dec 05, 2013, 11:57 AM UTC

DanBC wrote: post #46

Nux wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't upvote this enough. A united world needs to speak the same language. Down with the borders, of any kind.

I welcome your attempts to learn and speak Mandarin as that single global language.

I wish I could upvote this more than once. A lot of comments here are positive about the idea of a single global language when it's their language that wins out. I strongly suspect that if it were Mandarin, Arabic or Russian instead of English that was being suggested, their enthusiasm for the idea might be more muted.