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Comment by chaostheory | Hacker News Reader

I don’t feel that this is a bad thing. Not being able to speak and understand each other’s languages just helps increase conflict due to less empathy. While there are cons to less spoken languages, overall the world would be better off with less spoken languages.

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A language is a map to reality. More languages means more maps, more conceptual models, more strategies of existence.

Consider this: each additional language improves humanity's capacity to evolve and shift, a particularly valuable trait considering the pace of environmental and socioeconomic change. More languages increases the likelihood that humanity will continue to survive and maybe even thrive. (Reality one hundred, one thousand, and ten thousand years from now will each demand different models or languages.)

That only applies imo if the same individual learns multiple languages; not even half the world is bilingual. The cons that come with increased conflict outweigh the benefits imo. It is way too easy to “other” strangers if you don’t share the same language and general culture. It’s already bad enough when people do share the same language and main culture.

Zoom out a bit. How many iterations of civilization have we seen over the past 250k years? A lot. Language is the architecture of civilization, with each iteration of society dependent on the structures of vernacular to take its shape.

I am personally doubtful that humanity will be able to succeed for more than a few hundred years as a mono-culture. It needs variance (multiple languages) and experimentation (new languages) to evolve and respond to change.

My argument is not about individuals speaking multiple languages, it's about different groups of people adopting different models of reality and trying them out.

Language is pretty foundational to culture. When you lose a language you lose more than a way of speaking, but also the subtleties and emotions behind the "shape" of certain words, not to mention those words that reflect something so unique to that culture that you can't really translate them. The death of a language is the death of a world.

Saying there should be fewer spoken languages is frankly a very unempathetic thing to say.

Saying there should be more different languages shows an ignorance to both history and psychology.

Having less major cultures has the same effect on potential conflict

And there's the cost of keeping a dying language alive.

You're basically asking people to sacrifice their lives to a less useful language, a mere social utility, so you can maintain a sort of "cultural linguistic zoo" ... and yes you are by this analogy relegating them to the role of animals in a theme park.

Think of what that entails: "No, you can't be taught in the language that will get you into university and get you the best jobs. You must dedicate a significant portion portion of your life to something we already know is a dead end for you personally, because we have decided that it is more important that a legacy tool be kept alive than that you prosper as a person."

>not to mention those words that reflect something so unique to that culture that you can't really translate them

You've inverted the role of language. Language is what we use to communicate the things we feel, we gain essentially nothing from the words themselves. Even when you think you're communicating something very specific with the words you are using, there's little reason to believe that the person on the other end of the conversation really gets what you're trying to communicate. In a practical sense, you can easily communicate, but these deep, almost mystical, meanings you're implying... it's just not really something that can be known.

The is the point of the indeterminacy of translation illustrated by W.V. Quine.

How many dying languages/dialects have you personally learned and worked to keep alive?

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