The golden age of languages is when there is only one language left, and everyone can understand everyone without cunning translators and hallucinating llms.

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patcon 18 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Isn't that a collapse in cognitive diversity?

Not to be "gotcha", but out of true curiosity: may I ask if you speak multiple languages fluently?

Different languages afford different ways of thinking and speaking? Just talk to a translator in works of literature or poetry. Some languages are more verb-y or noun-y, and so are more about getting between things than being something. Or have more or less ambiguity due to tonal systems.

And while ambiguity can create miscommunication when misused, it also allows for different minds to hear one thing, but interpret it in ways more personal to them. When used pro-socially (and not manipulatively), this can afford cooperation that might not otherwise be possible. Saying things while leaving some things unsaid, that has utility if our collective project is certain forms of synchrony -- we can sync on some things while the ambiguity allows asynchrony to remain unresolved in less important dimensions, etc

Imho monoculture is toward death, not toward something golden.

	▲	aboardRat4 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		>Not to be "gotcha", but out of true curiosity: may I ask if you speak multiple languages fluently? yeah, I speak 4 languages fluently, and can get through more with a dictionary >Imho monoculture is toward death, not toward something golden Same language does not mean same culture. Singapore and USA both speak English, yet the cultures are different. The same culture can be represented in different languages, as translators prove by their existence.

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derektank 18 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Unfortunately, even if we had a single language, I doubt we’d be free of misunderstandings. Jargon, double entendres, shibboleths and other barriers to understanding all still exist even when everyone is nominally speaking the same language

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schoen 15 hours ago | parent | next [-]

A big practical difficulty is the pressure for languages to continue to evolve in different directions when speaker communities are even slightly separated (hence the difference in present-day varieties of English, which is probably growing larger over time rather than smaller, based on (almost, approximately) a single common ancestor just a couple of centuries ago in the time of the British Empire and colonial expansion).

People can decide to try to prevent dialects from forming and diverging

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_planning

but they have to actively work against it if they want to prevent it, and a lot of the common means of doing so historically have been pretty harsh (e.g. corporal punishment in schools for using disfavored varieties). I guess this is partly because the consensus that we should centralize and unify and standardize language, for all of its logistical and economic and cultural benefits, is mostly a central government/imperial metropole impulse rather than something that the general public is super-attracted to.

Standardizing language and letting it diverge both have cultural benefits! Just different ones. The standardization benefit is that more people can access a much larger body of culture without linguistic barriers and without needing translation or explanations, and cultural conversations can grow larger, with more direct participants in a given conversation or genre. The diversity benefit is that the language differences themselves can acquire, or mediate, cultural phenomena and cultural creativity.

English doesn't have a significant tradition of language planning the way that some of the continental European languages do, and this is posing a (minor) challenge to English's role as a global language, as there are sometimes genuine difficulties of intelligibility between English varieties, and again I think those differences are getting wider on average rather than narrower. Then again, if we did have such a tradition, it doesn't mean everyone would care to follow it... it's not as though everyone in Latin America cares about what the RAE says (or that they refrain from having meaningfully different vocabulary and grammar between Latin American regions!), or even that everyone in Austria or Switzerland necessary cares what Duden says.

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stephenhuey 18 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

If we got down to only one language, that natural human tendency would be for new languages to grow out of that. They naturally change all the time, and suppressing that is a loss, not a gain.

	▲	derektank 18 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Hmmm maybe. There are obviously benefits to adapting languages to better describe the environment the speaker finds themselves in. But the utility of being able to communicate with others (especially if they are the overwhelming majority) is probably higher. In the absence of geographical separation, I don’t think new languages would have become mutually incomprehensible.

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thegrim33 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

A thought experiment I sometimes think about is if it'd ever be possible for the world to somehow, in some way, agree that every country would switch over to the same constructed language over the course of generation or two. A modern conlang without all the idiosyncrasies, irregular verbs, exceptions to rules, etc. that's endemic in current organic languages. Of course, how long a language like that could stay relatively clean is an open question.

It's interesting to think about the next generation being taught both their home language and the new language, they're the intermediate generation that can bridge the two worlds, and the generation after that being only taught the new language, and how that process might work.

	▲	aboardRat4 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		We are already switching to English slowly, but steadily.

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layer8 17 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Knowing multiple languages, in particular less related or unrelated ones, is mentally enriching. If you only know a single language, you don’t know what you are missing in terms of diversity of thought and expression. Languages aren’t fungible. Translation is lossy, often considerably so.

	▲	aboardRat4 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		>Knowing multiple languages, in particular less related or unrelated ones, is mentally enriching Just as being able to play an instrument or dance or actually reading literature from other cultures, even in English.

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7nolikov 19 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Live translators exist! It has become much better than even a couple years ago