Comment by unsignedint
4 hours ago
But then, is that necessarily a bad thing?
In most cases where language is being used as a vehicle for exchanging ideas, isn't some degree of uniformity actually desirable for clarity? I personally wouldn't want instruction manuals to be full of colorful or highly individualized language, for instance.
That's not to say linguistic diversity is meaningless, but I would argue that this particular concern is fairly specialized and matters much more in literature and other creative forms of writing.
Linguistic diversity has been used as a casus belli, at least indirectly. It’s something that populations will take up arms for, so it’s probably worth tiptoeing around.
PG's 'learning a word' ~= 'learning an idea' comes to mind
"is that necessarily a bad thing?"
Yes.
The value of the diversity is not just aesthetic.
Human laguage is rich and expressive, matching human thought. The diversity is part of the expressiveness. Saying something in some poetic, or merely different way, is not just an inefficient or ambiguous/confusing way of saying the same thing, it's saying something else, and that something else cannot be expressed any other way.
A crayons-only, thumbs-only, Apple one-button-only, 1000 word vocabulary world is not efficient, it's poor.
This makes is sound like everything except a narrow slice of “creative forms” should be subject to a giant efficiency optimization. I’ve never noticed instruction manuals to be hard to understand because of colorful language, so I don’t believe we need to optimize further in that regard. Why stop with language? Shouldn’t every personality outside of “creative forms” be more standardized? Sure I want to laugh at comedians, but wouldn’t it be more efficient for us to work together if everyone had a totally fungible personality?
Engineers often reduce human interaction and creativity down to computer analogs like “exchanging data,” treat work and business as life’s raison d’etre and then we wonder why every car on the road is monochrome and we’re on the umpteenth Gardian of the Avangers film.
I completely agree with your critique here but I will say that I have had difficulty understanding pure math texts because of 'colorful' language -- e.g. "chattier" treatments of mathematical analysis. But I will also say that I'm glad such treatments of the material exist, partly because I know that what appeals to me doesn't appeal to others and these might be a valued resource for them, and because often pushing through and understanding texts that were difficult at first helps us to see the material from a different perspective. I think this optimization perspective squashes this possibility a bit when taken too far, as it usually is
Think of how much money we could make if we weren't wasting so much time being creative.
There’s no universal answer. Like most things it’s highly subjective and some people will want the standardization line to be in a particular place than someone else. I for instance, love the standardization of programming and science research for the most part into one language but at the same time, I also feel terrible about languages that are hundreds or thousands of years old disappearing forever.
Eh, not hard to notice some people indeed started to write like LLMs too. Not completely but hints are there.
I think it was the Uplift series by David Brin that has an idea where the old galactic races all speak a perfect language that has no ambiguity, and because of that they have no poetry or jokes. What a great world to strive for. No I'll take the mess please FFS.
People joke about engineer types treating humans the same as machines, but really I see no excuse for even engineer types to get this wrong. It's a failure to recognize what the function or goal actually is, and then optimizing for the wrong thing.
> a perfect language that has no ambiguity, and because of that they have no poetry or jokes.
Lojban, the constructed language, features:
a) logical grammar, inspired by predicate logic which means every sentence in Lojban has an unambiguous structure that a computer can parse
b) no ambiguity in the grammar (structural ambiguity) while you can be as vague or detailed as you like (or as funny!!)
c) emotional expressions via an "attitudinal" system of words that function like emoji
https://mw.lojban.org/index.php
and here are some Lojban literary forms writeup: https://mw.lojban.org/papri/lojban_literary_forms
> I think it was the Uplift series by David Brin that has an idea where the old galactic races all speak a perfect language that has no ambiguity, and because of that they have no poetry or jokes.
Where can I sign up?
Talking to developers about humanities often highlights how smart we're not.
Talking to people in the humanities about technology often highlights how smart they're not.