alt Hacker NewsStudy uncovers lost 'golden age' of languages
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I think that we are entering a new golden age of language, personally.
It has never been easier for a human being to take a corpus and refactor it in a fashion that they can understand it without making an energetic investment in constructing a new ontology; or that is to say, humans can use AI now to grasp text and words - language, specifically - in extraordinarily industrious, productive ways.
I know it is a crackpot event horizon, but I truly wonder if Szukalskis’ Protong isn’t just waiting there, tip of the iceberg, to be discovered. Seriously.
The golden age of languages is when there is only one language left, and everyone can understand everyone without cunning translators and hallucinating llms.
An interesting tangent to the language discussion is the Epic of Gilgamesh => https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-the-epic-o...
A minor point, but the colour scheme on that chart infuriates me. When the data can be seen a progression (not endangered -> threatened -> few known speakers -> no known speakers), why use red to green but in a random order?
> We show that language isn’t isolated from political currents and that this dynamic has been a facet of human history for much longer than previously thought.
Um, when did anyone think it wasn't?
The entire history of linguistics shows this. Proto-Indo European had no common word (for that family) for sea/ocean [1] from which we can deduce something about the people who spoke it. That's not political obviously but environment and culture are inseparable from language is the ponit.
Languages really only grew for political reasons. Look at the spread of Latin throughout Roman territories.
Likewise, languages splinter and diverge in isolation. Populations that remain where they are and separate from others will drift linguistically. You can look at most of Europe for this. As just one example, the drift in Swiss Germany in Switzerland, which is a relatively small country.
But more than that, it takes some kind of centralization, which is to say, political force, to maintain a language. English had massive changes from Old English (which is essentially a separate language from Modern English) to Middle English (which is largely comprehensible by the modern speaker) when French was the court language of England in the centuries after 1066. And the Normans left their own imprints on English, which is where a ton of loan words came from [2]. But English grammar also greatly simplified without a central authority telling everyone what is proper, basically [3].
One of the fascinating things I remember learning was that there are between half a million and million cuneiform tablets int he world and fewwer than 10% of them have been translated. Now cuneiform is a writing style but one of the difficulties is that it encompasses multiple languages. And this was one of the earliest recorded examples of language displacement from Sumerian to Akkadian over thousands of years. But tablets could be written in part in both languages for a very long time. This is where we have the earliest documented human name, Kushim [4].
But the point is that the rise and fall of Sumer and its displacement by Akkad is recorded in the language.
And of course we had the spread of "colonial" languages in the colonial period (ie Spanish, French, Portugese, English).
Pragmatism also is a factor here. Different languages are inconvenient between populations that interact. The natural tendency is to homogenize on language given sufficient time, even without political pressure. it's a little sad when languages die but it's kind of inevitable.
[1]: https://talageri.blogspot.com/2020/05/the-proto-indo-europea...
[2]: https://www.krysstal.com/display_borrowlang.php?lang=Norman+...
[3]: https://www.sciscanpub.com/index/journals/ainfo/alr/7943.htm...
humanity's natural state is an impressive diversity of ideas and behavior and then inevitable the most violent of them marginalize the rest. Humanity has already found many social structure that prevent concentration of power but those have been lost not to time, but to intentional destruction.
Often natives look at our way of life and say hell no that's retarded. But they are more polite about it. Europeans on the other hand just defined their flawed structure as "progress" and went on killing anyone who disagreed. In a way the worst parts of AGI are already here, we already killed all the real humans and we are the soulless automatons bounded to our possessions.
> political currents don’t have to move in one direction. It’s not inevitable that endangered languages become extinct.
There really isn't any good incentive to learn a language with very few speakers, since unless you already know a speaker, you really can't practice the real language. People were a few years ago at least hoping llms could help preserve the languages, but more most of them, there just aren't enough samples for any real preservation. I knew some dudes in college that were linguists that worked on recording native speakers of endangered languages, and while I hoped they would succeed, I never really had much hope of it working.