Comment by jcranmer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jcranmer | Hacker News Reader

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> Sure, languages evolve and you can't fight that, but with a global internet and a concerted effort to finally solve the Tower of Babel problem, languages can evolve everywhere at once into a single global language that every child gets brought up speaking.

That... is optimistic, to say the least. Languages evolve essentially by having successive generations pick up collectively on idiosyncratic features of the language. And of course, people who aren't talking with each other aren't going to pick up on others' idiosyncratic features, and after several generations, you end up with new, distinct languages. To keep a single language out of it, you have to work hard to promote only a single version of it, and rather literally beat the daylight of anyone who speaks the "wrong" version of the language (this is essentially how the modern "big" European languages came about.)

In other words, enforcing linguistic unity tends to require enforcing cultural unity as well.

> you have to work hard to promote only a single version of it

Yes, you do have to work to make it happen. Up to now we've given languages a free cultural pass, whereas diseases and poverty we keep shoveling trillions into, and we're proud when we've made a 20% dent.

It takes work to pull the species out of what is natural, because what is natural is very often terrible. Diseases naturally evolve to terrorize us. We fight them and sometimes we win.

The first step is admitting that how languages have evolved naturally up to now sucks for an ethical, roughly egalitarian 21st century information-based society.

The sooner we can de-link language from local culture, the better.

And of course that begs the question: can language be delinked from culture?

Yes: my native language isn't the one I'm writing in to you now, and my native culture is whatever I'm making up for myself as I go along, to the chagrin of my parents and many in the culture I was born into.

Can language be delinked from culture? Maybe. But can a language survive without a culture to encompass it? If you strip culture from a language, wouldn't the language would become toneless and meaningless? Yes, you can call something a 'net' or a 'fish' at a basic level. However in one culture one might say, "You must cast your net to catch the fish" it's plain what it means and it is meaningful, but for someone without the cultural context, it's a head scratcher and may wonder what fish are you talking about?

I'm too, my native language isn't the one I am writing here. I have lived in quite a few different places. Culture is not something I could make up for myself as I go along, I don't think anyone could do so in isolation. I took in the different bits of cultures that i have experienced through, sometimes to the dismay of those around me. I appreciate the perspective that cultures create languages, and without the cultural reference the language would cease its importance and would die.

> If you strip culture from a language, wouldn't the language would become toneless and meaningless?

Indeed, languages are toneless and meaningless when divorced from their functional role in connecting people and enabling them to share thoughts.

For that reason languages aren't sacrosanct and are replaceable.

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