Hacker News Reader

Comment by jnky | Hacker News Reader

For what it's worth, I'm not a native English speaker and I don't live in an English-speaking country. However, I think I am "allowed" to voice this opinion without being labeled a racist, regardless of my native language.

I still think that there should be a standard language.

I really don't like that language is often conflated with having a distinct culture. I acknowledge that there is some connection between language and culture, but I don't think having a distinct culture necessitates a distinct language. There are many distinct cultures that share a language already. Even if that was the case, what would be wrong with cultivating a world wide culture? Also, some languages like Latin died out, while we still benefit from its speakers cultural achievements.

View on HN

>I really don't like that language is often conflated with having a distinct culture. I acknowledge that there is some connection between language and culture, but I don't think having a distinct culture necessitates a distinct language.

Having a distinct culture doesn't necessitate having a distinct language, but having an existing distinct culture in a specific language necessitates preserving the language for preserving it -- even just the tons of literature, poetry, song, etc, in that culture, not to mention worldviews and philosophical outlooks expressed in words, etymology, proverbs, shared expressions, etc.

(Also cultures with distinct languages are also more distinct than cultures with shared languages -- except of course if the languages are close cousins of the same family and the cultures have been co-existing for centuries already. An english speaking China will be a very different culture).

And we haven't even mentioned the Shapir/Worf hypothesis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity

>Even if that was the case, what would be wrong with cultivating a world wide culture?

You mean besides obliterating every existing culture and using it for parts?

Everything that's wrong with monocultures of all kinds and singular ways of thinking and doing things (less evolutionary adaptable, less competition among different viewpoints, poorer breadth of experiences and outlooks, etc)

> Having a distinct culture doesn't necessitate having a distinct language, but having an existing distinct culture in a specific language necessitates preserving the language for preserving it

I'm not saying other languages shouldn't be preserved. I'm saying there should be a standard language. I don't think that one precludes the other.

> An english speaking China will be a very different culture

Maybe, but why would that be worse (or better for that matter)?

> And we haven't even mentioned the Shapir/Worf hypothesis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity

That's an interesting point, but on the other hand I'm still not convinced that this means that having a lot of distinct languages is "better". While on the other hand, there would be clear benefits to everyone speaking the same language or having at least one common language.

> You mean besides obliterating every existing culture and using it for parts?

Isn't that what always happens with all culture as it evolves?

> Everything that's wrong with monocultures of all kinds and singular ways of thinking and doing things [...]

This is where I strongly disagree. I think that some things are tools for a specific purpose and should be standardized. Language is a tool to convey facts and ideas.

I recognize that culture should not be standardized, of course.

do not forget the fact that different languages have different cultural concepts embedded in them.

weltschmerz. schadenfreude. schmetterling.

you simply can not say this word in english without explaining it. if you do not understand german you will also have a very hard time getting the emotion that is embedded into all of us german speakers when we hear those words. there are tons of examples like this in every language.

i also personally think that learning german, english and russian was an enormous benefit to myself, some thoughts i think in english, some in german and very seldomly i even think in russian. the fact that i also think javascript, php, python and lots of other programming languages helps me even more to better be able to transpile my thoughts into words and actions.

you can not articulate thoughts that you do not have words for. if society has less words, society has less variety of thought. it follows that, if you have less words, you have less variety of thought.

in the end i think that instead of declaring a standard language or creating a new standard language (https://xkcd.com/927/ anyone?) what will happen is that our currently used languages will merge into one language that is influenced heavily by all currently spoken languages.

the situation will stay the same, most people will not be able to communicate efficiently, this is not the fault of language though.

As a casual student of German, is there any context in “der Schmetterling” which is not translated as “the butterfly”?

if you think about the butterfly effect, calling it schmetterlingseffekt just sounds way more badass :p

but you are right, schmetter does not originate from "smasher" (as i and probably most german speakers assumed), but instead from "Schmetten", which means butter or cream.

this also means that this word is translated perfectly, but the german word has a whole different meaning nowadays, i personally have never heard the word schmette.

thanks for the motivation to look at this, feeling a bit smarter now and finally know why the schmetterling is called butterfly. :)

>> the Shapir/Worf hypothesis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity >That's an interesting point, but on the other hand I'm still not convinced that this means that having a lot of distinct languages is "better". While on the other hand, there would be clear benefits to everyone speaking the same language or having at least one common language.

Would the computer world be "better" if anyone standardize on one single programming language (e.g. java) or is it "better" that different languages are there, ( dartmouth basic , javascript, python, lisp, haskell or perl) so you can code differently ?

As for the universal language, Esperanto tried: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto a nice documentary about it: http://esperantodocumentary.com/en/about-the-film

a nice project is the Positive Lexicography Project, an evolving index of 'untranslatable' words related to wellbeing from across the world's languages: http://www.drtimlomas.com/#!positive-lexicography/cm4mi

(previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11001695 )

You can have wildly differing viewpoints inside a culture. A democrat and republican can be further apart than an american and a frenchman. Culture and identity are complex phenomena. You cannot reduce a person's identity to a single label without removing almost every aspect about them. A global culture would be a baseline for mutual understanding, but it would not cause homogenous identity anymore than a person's citizenship does.

From a logical standpoint, standardising language certainly works as an idea, but humans are not so logical! The history of language is that of languages merging and diverging. It kinda depends a lot on who you want to talk to at any given time.

It's not clear that language is inseparable from culture; there are arguments to be made that language shapes thought (see "1984" for an extreme thought experiment!), and culture might well be shaped by the network effects of such frameworks.

As for cultivating a world wide culture, perhaps we can already see it happening! And perhaps global language would follow. A few years back there were great claims made that in a century we'd all be speaking so-called "Panglish", the sort of global pidgin that would emerge from mashing lots of languages into English. Maybe ... maybe not. If there were a "standard language", chances are it would be at least partially based on English, and supplement local languages. But it depends entirely on whether everyone really cares about understanding each other, to the extent of learning a common tongue.

I agree with most of what you have written except this part:

but humans are not so logical!

I don't believe there is anything illogical about the diversity of languages. No different from the existence of multiple,types of programming languages.

Perhaps instead of the literal "but humans are not logical" he meant "but languages are not precise". How ironic that would be.

Sometimes I wonder if this kind of notion of what's "logical" is a confusion of short-term instrumental thinking with what is actually successful in he long run. In many biological systems, for example, diverse evolutionary strategies play out in competition and exchange with one another with the end result that "life" more generally persists and grows in complexity on a grand scale. Humans seem to have an inverse tendency towards projecting uniformity wherever possible, with the end result being limited models that subsume as much as possible and then collapse under an unexpected pressure (the structuring of Western economies being the most obvious example of this). I wonder if we'll ever develop some kind of meta-logical approach whereby we intentionally foster diverse, but somewhat isolated, strategies and then experiment with varying levels of exchange to arrive at better outcomes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com