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Comment by sametmax | Hacker News Reader

I think it will have the opposite effect.

Once we see the benefit of being able to communicate freely with anybody, and losing the protective aspect of being able to communicate in a language others can't understand, I think people will lose interest in local languages and dialect?

Why learn them when you can just translate them when you need them? What do they bring, except some aesthetical pleasure? Given the work it is to translate materials to a language, it will stop to be done: let the automatic system do that for you!

Then, people will be able to mix and travel more, exchange more, and so they will.

In this env, and using translation again and again, people will start to pick up whatever language is the most common.

Eventually, what is not useful will diseapear, only artefacts that we can translate automatically, will remain.

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Different languages and scripts don’t just convey information, they shape the speaker and reader.[1] Sure, there’s value in a shared communication language (and International English[2] is well on the way to being that), but that mostly communicative medium doesn’t capture everything that language is.

[1] https://www.ted.com/talks/lera_boroditsky_how_language_shape...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_English

I know. And I believe it's ok to lose that too.

We will develop different ways of thinking or improve the language we use.

I don't think there is anything in what we currently have that can compare to a united humanity. And this only can happen if we all can understand each others.

Why does everyone speaking one language somehow result in a united humanity? Plenty of countries speak English and yet there is zero desire or movement to unite them. Language is but one aspect of culture and unfortunately one result of widespread English usage is the destruction of local cultures by Western, specifically American consumeristic, culture.

I also don't particularly see the usefulness or relevance of everyone speaking one language for the overwhelming majority of people. Do a Chilean farmer, a Mongolian oil worker, and an American programmer need to communicate with each other on a regular basis? And if they did, would this be worth replacing thousands of years of local culture and language?

Waves of nationalism come and go. If you've got a big enough population, you can easily promote your native language as superior to others because it can express X, Y, and Z beautiful concepts easily while filthy foreign languages can't.

There were a few campaigns where various western countries tried promoting their alphabets over native writing systems. Some succeeded (e.g. Vietnamese) and many others failed. Trying to completely change the language is an even bigger stretch. Places like India have a long history of English, but few Indian people speak pure British English. Most will throw a mix of perfectly pronounced English words in the middle of a sea of their local language. English doesn't have a clear path to domination despite it being spoken by so many people.

Globalization will continue to unify language.

It'll be interesting to see the hybrid blend of English/Chinese/Spanish/Arabic that everyone learns in school.

> perfectly pronounced

Doesn’t India have its own English dialect - similar to the US, Australia, etc.?

Indian English is very similar to the British English of shortly before India gained independence from the British Empire (1947). That means it often sounds formal or old-fashioned. The reason for this is because linguistic change occurs almost entirely in places where that language is the first language, and English is only ever a second or subsequent language in India.

There has been some synchronisation with other English locales due to the effects of globalisation, but not a great deal. Beyond that, it does have some deviations from British English as it was in the days of the Empire, mostly due to grammatical misunderstandings becoming common and thus standard, or linguistic patterns from local languages making their way into English; the two examples that spring most immediately to my mind (as an Australian currently in Hyderabad): “very less” instead of “very little”, and a gratuitous “only” suffix where other dialects would either omit it or place it earlier in a sentence.

Concerning fiblye’s point: in cities, you’ll hear a fair smattering of English words when people are speaking their local languages. In rural areas this happens much less.

> English doesn't have a clear path to domination despite it being spoken by so many people.

With electing Trump or voting for Brexit native English speakers do not seem to care much.

Ireland now has the biggest natively English speaking population inside the EU. More than ever the EU is a German-French organization.

What do you think we speak when interracting with the germans ?

English.

I think the opposite will happen, personally. Imagine that you can speak and understand any language known to man. Furthermore, you can create any language fairly easily, and in order for others to understand this language, they simply need to download a file. It seems like the choice of language would then become an aesthetic, political or simply personal choice.

Certain human languages are definitely more suited for certain topics; talking about music in Italian is no doubt richer than in English (especially considering that many English music words are just Italian imports.)

We'd also see ad-hoc private languages develop on the fly in between people or machines. This already happens on a micro-level, but technology would make it far easier to implement.

Seems like a beautiful future to me.

Having amazing machine translation capability doesn't make it any easier for humans to learn a language.

And the "richness of expression" argument doesn't really hold water in such a reality – if there are things that "can't be easily expressed in English that can be expressed in Chinese", then your magical auto-translator presumably won't be able to actually convey what you're trying to convey if you say it in Chinese and want it translated to English. If the translator can accurately express your meaning, then the initial premise is invalid, no?

> if there are things that "can't be easily expressed in English that can be expressed in Chinese"

I didn't say that there are things that can't be easily expressed, but rather that certain languages are better suited for expressing certain things, or at the very least, opinionated in particular desirable ways. We're talking about the form, not the content.

In any case, yeah, I might be mixing the idea of a cyborg that speaks/understands all languages with a universal translator machine. It seems like these two things will eventually coalesce, though.

I hear what you're saying, but at the same time - coming from an area with its own relatively small language (<500K speakers) - there is a definite need or interest in websites and media in one's "own language", in our case it's things like local news websites (with comment sections of course), newspapers and a TV channel. Said TV channel, like all the other regional channels, get some shared time on the public networks as well, and a block in some of the national news bulletins.

Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu_ R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn.

Exactly.

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