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Comment by BurningFrog | Hacker News Reader

English is the universal aviation language.

In other contexts there is no such language, and I can see how the politics of which and how many languages we should include in our car messages may well result in a "let's just use beeps" decision.

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They have to supply written documentation in an appropriate language too, I don’t think it would be that difficult for it to have a voice language pack to match.

You're talking about an industry that gives you a generic "check engine" light and allows dealerships to charge you $100 just to read you the error message.

I don't have any faith that they have the wherewithal to make any common sense design choices about error states.

You cannot look up "beep" in the manual when you have 40 beeps.

You are not objectively worse off with a word than a beep, even if you do not understand the word.

Driving a car with beeps and chimes and dings means they all mush together and get ignored.

Feels like it'd be easier to differentiate jingles compared to different words of a language you don't know. You can vary intonations etc, but by that point you're back to jingles.

I've been in foreign countries with languages I don't have any knowledge of. Learning 3 words is not a problem, and is kind of fun. Usually, I learn yes, no, please and thank you. Those words will get you amazingly far!

Maybe some people think R2D2 beeps and chirps are better, but sorry, I have no interest in learning the binary language of vaporators.

Then I just have to learn to read sheet music to figure out what each specific tune means

How are you going to look up a jingle in the manual? Should they be sorted by pitch or by tempo?

Yeah I guess this is a legit problem, but also applies to foreign language warnings. Especially ones who have manual written in foreign glyphs.

for the already very niche case of ending up behind the wheel of a foreign car that you can't just set to your language, you can still at least ask any literate foreigner to help. (they don't have to be a mechanic to debug "put hands on wheel"). Presumably there will be some around if you somehow acquired a foreign car with no help.

Icons are worse than foreign glyphs because how are you going to look up an icon?

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