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Comment by tho23i423434 | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how useful this really is.

No doubt, it's excellent for archiving, but that's not the same as "preserving" culture. If it's not alive and kicking it's not a culture IMO. You see this happen even with texts : once things start being written down, the actual knowledge tends to get lost (see India for example).

This "AI to help low-resource languages" thing is a big deal in India too, but it just feels like another "jumla" for academics/techbros to make money. I mean, India has brutal/vicious policies that are out to destroy any and every language that's not English (since it's automatically a threat to central rule from Delhi), but pretty much no intellectual, either in India or the US, actually cares about the mass-wiping out of Indian languages by English... Not even the ones who go "ree bad British man destroyed India" on twitter all day.

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It's really documenting the culture. A great thing in itself.

I think of cultures and languages as tools. When they don't serve a purpose anymore, they should be replaced by something more functional.

This demonstrates English utilitarianism basically won the philosophical war in Europe.

What is the purpose of culture? It's a way of life. Arguably no culture has purpose, so do we force people to live in a different way?

Cultures and languages die out because they're slowly (or revolutionarily quickly!) replaced by another. It's not like there are people out there speaking no language because their mother tongue has died out.

And who gets to decide that a language has no purpose?

I don't like the way this argument goes.

>who gets to decide that a language has no purpose?

The parents of the child doing the language learning or the adult doing it.

>When they don't serve a purpose anymore, they should be replaced by something more functional.

If and when that's a voluntary and organic process, sure. The problem is that replacement more often that not comes about through ethnic cleansing and violence. These indigenous languages were perfectly functional to the people who spoke them at the time but they were replaced because they didn't serve the purpose of colonizers.

And "lost" languages do get reclaimed from time to time. Hebrew and Irish being two examples.

Hebrew and Irish are illustrative examples.

Hebrew was brought back from the dead for the Jewish refugees populating Israel to have a common language. This solved a genuine practical problem.

Teaching Irish to kids who all speak English does not help anyone communicate better. It seems like a nationalist pride project, and those are not my favorite.

Israelis could just as well have chosen English for a common language, or Arabic, or any other living language. Reviving Hebrew was just as much about nationalist pride (or preserving culture if you like) as reviving Irish was for Ireland.

> When they don't serve a purpose anymore, they should be replaced by something more functional.

Okay colonizer.

> once things start being written down, the actual knowledge tends to get lost (see India for example)

Curious, what do you mean by this?

> pretty much no intellectual, either in India or the US, actually cares about the mass-wiping out of Indian languages by English

Well I've never heard of this so lack of awareness would be an obvious cause if it's an issue, are there any orgs raising awareness of it? Also seems surprising to me, Bollywood movies are immensely popular and are all in Hindi. Is there a danger of English overtaking Indian society to the extent where Bollywood movies would mostly be made in English?

Once an LLM knows an indigenous language, even if the last speaker dies out, future generations will be able to learn the language and use the LLM to converse with them in that language.

Learning a new language is a good use case for LLMs, not just indigenous languages, but any language.

As for your comment "ree bad British man destroyed India" this sound more like politics than anything of substance.

Yes, but the LLM is roughly equivalent to lossy compression of the corpus it is trained on so why wouldn't you preserve that actual corpus so that it can be used to train some better LLM, or something better than an LLM, in the future?

(There may be a good answer to that question: perhaps, for example, the corpus can't be preserved for data protection reasons but the LLM trained on it can be preserved? For various reasons that doesn't seem very plausible, however.)

You can do both. Preserving the corpus and building the LLM probably gives the best chance for future generations.

> but pretty much no intellectual, either in India or the US, actually cares about the mass-wiping out of Indian languages by English

That’s surprising and seems different than what I’ve seen for other languages in other parts of the world (even if it’s a relatively new phenomenon).

Right, you can't keep a culture in stasis. It always changes. There's something to be said for protectionism though (e.g. language laws), with varying degrees of success (Japan quashed Christianity quite well, brutally). There's a reason behind the choice in semantics particularly when it comes to traditional cultures. We don't call it "preserving culture" when historians and archivists document things.

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