Comment by nkozyra 4 days ago
> That "casual English" is somewhat part of the language of the new generation.
It's a near global lingua franca and the Internet has only accelerated that.
I wonder how long it will be until English just sort of becomes first language in non-native English speaking countries with the current trajectory and momentum of English-first Llama.
Shame it couldn't be a more cohesive spoken language.
Well, speaking in different languages facilitates different modes of thinking which results in different thoughts. Some thoughts are easier to have in one language than another. It takes all sorts to make a world and multiple languages means a broader mental space to explore ideas.
People against that tend to lean totalitarian. People for a monoculture, that is. That is an inherently limiting philosophy which can only die out as it narrows the 'acceptable ideas' list over time.
> Well, speaking in different languages facilitates different modes of thinking
Sapir-Whorf? Can’t that just be put to bed by now?
> People against that tend to lean totalitarian. People for a monoculture, that is.
On the topic of languages at least.
Some technologists seem to want to get rid of all ostensibly useless things. More than one language being one of them.
I thought the weak form was pretty solid?
It's pretty obvious to anyone who learns math or programming, that once you find the right vocabulary or equation for something, that your brain chunks it, and it's easier to reason about that domain moving forward.
Of course it's not like if you don't have the word "blue" you are color blind, it's just that it's really hard to have a conversation about 10 different shades of blue if you don't even have a word for it.
The strong version of Sapir Whorf is obviously false because everyone has perceptions and feelings that they can't put words to.
Exactly. Culture obviously influences thinking, language less so. Sapir-Whorf has been refuted, except for some minor minor areas (names of colours - some people call these two colours two different names, some call them the same - big deal!; left-right vs north-east-south-west; etc.)
>Sapir-Whorf? Can’t that just be put to bed by now?
Said by someone who only speaks one language? Nice Idiom: shame if something were to happen to it.
It is SO EASY to prove this (literally just talk to any multilingual and watch their entire personality shift when they change languages {some languages have larger gaps}, they themselves don't often notice the effect)!
>On the topic of languages at least.
At least, you say... hmmm... why does that raise ALL THE RED FLAGS...
> Some technologists seem to want to get rid of all ostensibly useless things. More than one language being one of them.
which is why programmers keep inventing new languages (rust), which is the defacto standard everyone uses now. /s
Your arguments are as singularly cultured as what you argue for.... Which - as it so happens to be - (the quality of your arguments) is exactly my argument against such a future state.
And on one more note: Dave Ackley has some nifty ideas about the opposite of efficiency being robustness instead of waste. having a monoculture promises efficiency, but with that comes a brittleness that will cut us.
Eh it'll probably be the de-facto public/professional/transactional register and people will speak another language at home.
Based on what? Again we’re just throwing eventualities out there with no basis in current reality.
People are pretty good at understanding English in Norway. But the only factor that introduces English into the conversation is when someone does not speak Norwegian. In my experience.
People are extrapolating from the fact that people use English-borrowed slang to these far-fetched scenarios. Yeah? Slang and words have always been borrowed. Not even medical doctors speak Latin to each other.
> Based on what?
I never expected to be taken as declaring an objective fact; I just notice that this is already how workplaces are shaping up. I could easily be very wrong.
Anyway, with the internet the understanding of proximity changes. With an increasingly global economy everyone will be closer to people they only share english with. Or maybe mandarin, if you want me to emphasize skeptacism.
No offense, but sometimes an annoying aspects of monolingual people(those without substantial second language training, not just ** monolingualism totaritarianists) is that sometimes the only aspect of the concept of a language some of them understand is words.
About 30% each of English vocabulary is to have been borrowed from French. That means the phrase "it's all French to me" in free standing could logically imply that you do have good idea of what is being said. That's obviously never the case.
That's because dictionary vocabulary is just an asset file for a language. It's a major, but still a part of a language. Integrating bunch of words into a language only inflates that dataset.
Dinitrogen tetroxide(N2O4) is apparently called "tetraoksid diazota" in Russian. Do memorizing bunch of those compounds in Russian makes you fluent in that language? I'd very much doubt it.
> That means the phrase "it's all French to me" in free standing could logically imply that you do have good idea of what is being said.
It is not logical to infer that because a word is derived from another language that you'd have any chance of understanding it. The phrase just is a cute recognition of the same derivation.
But you seem to imply monolanguage speakers think the opposite! I strongly suspect this is true of multi-language speakers that learned language through formal techniques. Language is so universal you cannot expect people to be ignorant of its complexity despite their never descending to its depths.
But I'd also like to point out French is occasionally quite understandable. It's when french falls into simple phrases that it becomes unintelligible. As an analytic language it's nearly as easy to decipher as latin is, although orthography is very difficult to learn.
It's completely different thing: Ireland was a province loosing its language to metropoly. FWIW English wasn't even accepted as global lingua franca back then.
I have observed in dozens of countries that the youngest generation now speaks English quite fluently in most of the world. Boomers might know only a few phrases, many millennials can speak well enough, but quite a lot of teenagers now are speaking fluently, using slang and making jokes.
Dutch is so close to English that at times it is almost a dialect of English. "Ik zag de boot zinken." / "I saw the boat sink."
The rest of the world can't watch English TV with subtitles for a few months/years and come away with a passing understanding of English. It's a much steeper cliff.
The technical term is diglossia and it's much more common when the two languages are closely related. Latin being the written standard when the spoken language had evolved into Old French or Old Spanish is another classic example.
My mom was a German / English technical translator in the US. At one point she said those Germans need to decide, English or German. I guess the French from time to time make French words for those with English roots.
Though the German word for cell phone, “handy” is pretty great.
It won’t happen except in the imagination of mono-lingual-future dreamers on HN (popular idea here for some reason).