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Comment by roca | Hacker News Reader

I don't know why Christian missionaries are slammed for creating "the first grammar resources for previously unwritten languages". Yes, missionaries have done a lot of the hard work of developing orthographies for minority languages. A language you can't read and write is much less useful than a language you can, so developing orthography is an essential step toward preserving these languages --- and the associated culture. And literacy is very valuable, so teaching people to read and write their native language benefits them immensely.

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I didn't read this as "slamming" missionaries so much as asking people to reconsider the framing of language-related actions under the frame of power. That is -- many people do see what Christian missionaries did as a uncomplicated social good, for reasons you laid out, but we should also consider outcomes like the decline of a language, and most importantly the role of power/consent. I thought the missionary example made for compelling comparison w/ modern day NLP work.

I don't understand why people get so sentimental when gravitating towards a regional mega-tongue is virtually always superior to small pockets of 'culture'. Culture is what the losers of history cling to because their way turned out to be a worse way. If the language had value it would survive plain and simple. Children rarely fail to learn their parent's native language if it offers actual utility to them.

And corporations rarely fail to invest in long-term value over short-term value extraction?

Do you feel rhetorical questions that ignore everything previously said while speaking to a straw argument contribute to discussions?

Children are more or less defined by the short duration of their lives to date. They are, in general, absolutely awful at judging "actual utility" on timescales literally longer than their whole lives, and most people don't usually expect them to be any good at it either. Basing your assessment of the value of a language on the implicit decisions of children at age of language acquisition doesn't seem very convincing.

Can't say I agree this is "plain and simple", as the way you're defining value here seems to be "might makes right".

I guess if that's what people believe, it may be tough to convince them otherwise... but IMO, it's really valuable to think about how the "winners" of history navigated tough moral challenges, and often did things that we can now identify as harmful.

In this case, it's not about making historical missionaries feel bad about themselves for "winning" -- this article (in my read, etc) is concretely about trying to avoid repeating these mistakes in modern tech, specifically NLP and translation. We can (hopefully) do better as a society than "might makes right"!

"Might makes right" is a weird takeaway from what I said. That you tried to refocus on corporations while ignoring my reference to the children was also strange. If anything, that you didn't address my point about the overwhelming utility of regionally homogenous languages is more telling of how much there is to fear. 'So what if some culture is lost when the utility gained was so beneficial' was my point. From everything you've said it seems like you don't actually disagree with me.

“get colonized by a superpower” = “inferior culture doomed to fail”

You’re not wrong in the one dimension that people preserving a culture are by definition “losers” (otherwise it would take no effort to preserve), why don’t we try not punishing kids for speaking their mother tongue and see how that goes for a while?

"Culture is what the losers of history cling to because their way turned out to be a worse way."

Or maybe its a sign that winners couldn't completely eradicate it because it occupies a niche in a more optimal way than the winner. Infact, we have seen winning cultures fail while the niched "loser" culture maintains, only to thrive after the downfall of the temporary winner.

It's even more amazing how she associates the evil of translating the Bible into native languages, with punishments for speaking native languages:

Some of the first grammar resources for previously unwritten languages were created by Christian missionaries in order to translate the Bible and proselytize to indigenous peoples worldwide. History is rife with examples of colonial subjects who were forced to learn the languages of their colonizers, often facing punishment for speaking in their native languages.

Surely any reasonable person would see that translating books into a language promotes, not suppresses, that language. Yet she links one to the other without missing a beat.

> Yet she links one to the other without missing a beat.

That's because the article's conclusion was written first, then filling had to be added to reach the pre-agreed conclusion.

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