Comment by eropple | Hacker News Reader

Comment by eropple | Hacker News Reader

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This post is a good one, and that utilitarian idea that unilingualism is good because you can hire people is a claim borne of the kind of short-sighted technocracy that bedevils tech and tech culture. In the appendices of 1984, Orwell was speaking of conscious linguistic malformation to make it difficult to communicate concepts that the manipulators of Newspeak (née English) wished to stamp out. It's not better when you do it because somebody sticks HBO on your television.

People here venerate Paul Graham's Blub Paradox article--I wonder how many stopped to think about the possibility that we're speaking Blub, and the attempt of a unilingual world is incomprehensibly more problematic than that of computer programming languages. From the root comment of this chain:

> Do you feel stunted or unsatisfied because your ancestors didn't pass their native tongues down to you? I don't.

How would you fucking know?

Technocracy in action: we can't think of a black swan, so black swans can't exist.

A single language would never work anyway. It would inevitably split into dialects and regional/generational/racial slang, which would soon become incomprehensible to outsiders.

English patois in some parts of the world makes no sense to British/American speakers, even though it reads and sounds more or less like standard English.

You don't even have to travel to find the split happening. Just try listening to teenagers.

Language isn't just a utility. One of its functions is to define social register and tribal identity, and humans are so attached to both they can't accept homogenisation.

Like Latin after the fall of the Roman Empire. Sumerian is such an interesting language too. I love how Neal Stephenson incorporated it into Snow Crash really got me thinking about languages.

This was readily apparent in The Wire. As a native English speaker from across the sea I could not understand the Baltimore street dialect.

I could, I just needed to turn on subtitles :)

Well another way to look at it. Japanese engineers get paid very poorly. If they spoke English they could easily leave the toxic Japanese work environment but they don't speak English or any other language so effectively they are prisoners of the only country that speaks their default language

I find it hard to believe Japanese engineers don't leave Japan because of the language. Perhaps most of them simply don't want to leave their country?

That is a big assumption. They would still need to get a work visa and have the desire to leave. There is a lot of culture at play as well, which would still be there if everyone in Japan was a native English speaker. English is certainly a valuable skill for traveling and moving abroad, but I hardly see Japanese people as trapped in their own country. According to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan there are 1.3 million Japanese citizens living abroad.

Unfortunately I could only find statistics information in Japanese.

http://www.mofa.go.jp/mofaj/toko/page22_000043.html

http://www.mofa.go.jp/mofaj/files/000162700.pdf (page 11)

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