The HOA of my neighborhood allows 4 species of trees. They are very good trees, native to the area, and grow up to be very beautiful. At first glance while driving down the street, the neighborhood looks nice and practical.
I was looking at aerial shots of my home the other day for solar installation options, and when I looked at the broader picture, it was a bit soulless. Everything was optimized to be inoffensive and suit the lowest common denominator of taste. The yards and trees and landscaping of each house all are from the same list of plants everyone is familiar with, which are optimized for practicality (hard to kill, and look somewhat okay.)
My anecdote doesn’t fit this situation as an analogy but it shares a common thread in that limiting diversity reduces the humanity of the system, and makes the world more boring as a result. Not everything has to be min maxed and optimized. Some things that humanity has invented are worth dragging with us just so that the world does not slide further into hyper-optimization.
I agree, but I don't think it's exclusively about optimization. I look at language more or less as a communication protocol. The data flowing over the protocol takes the shape of thoughts and ideas. The diversity of these is not being limited. In fact, the diversity of your possible experiences is expanded as you can communicate meaningfully with people totally unlike you. In English I can communicate with native speakers who are subsistence farmers in Africa, programmers in Europe or rocket scientists in America. This is great!
If we all agree about the way we move our mouth parts it'll only serve to increase the diversity of ideas and people we can be exposed to. It's akin to various languages all adopting QWERTY, or the Latin alphabet before it. Nothing is lost due to lack of diversity in protocol.
Certain concepts are more difficult or less difficult to express depending on the language. I think somewhat differently in Korean than English. Translating existing text can be very difficult and nuanced because of how concepts can be expressed differently.
This also ignores the issue that the majority of the world would have to abandon their language, no matter what language is picked. And how do you pick a language? It’s entirely arbitrary. You can argue for Chinese just as well as you can for English.
There seems to be some confusion here. I don't think anyone is proposing that we shouldn't be able to communicate meaningfully with people totally unlike us. Knowing an additional language doesn't have that effect, believe it or not.
The view of language as "the way we move our mouthparts", a protocol for transparently transfering ideas is simplistic. Even if you ignore or discount linguistic relativity, languages have political and aesthetic functions.
Take a rhyme, for example. It can't easily be translated accurately because the language used is itself part of what it expresses. There's no simple onion model with distinct, unleaky layers for natural languages where words are a protocol and thoughts are the content; that's a reductionist misconception on your part.
> Knowing an additional language doesn't have that effect, believe it or not.
This seems absurd. Being able to have a conversation is orders of magnitude more effective than the mimicry and hand signals that must be resorted to when you truly don't speak the same language.
> languages have political and aesthetic functions.
Right, but politics and aesthetics are also ideas that are transferred via language. It's really just a protocol. What was lost when most European languages adopted the Latin alphabet? Or when the Chinese empire standardized the writing system?
> Take a rhyme, for example
What additional information is transferred in a rhyme? What meaning?
> a reductionist misconception on your part.
What can you do with language that does not constitute the expression of a thought or an idea?
> This seems absurd. Being able to have a conversation is orders of magnitude more effective than the mimicry and hand signals that must be resorted to when you truly don't speak the same language.
How does my point contradict that? I am saying that knowing an additional language takes nothing away. I speak English to you because I understand that we both understand it. That hasn't made me forget my mother tongue. That is to say, knowing (and using) an additional language didn't have the effect on me that I couldn't communicate with people that don't understand my mother tongue.
> Right, but politics and aesthetics are also ideas that are transferred via language.
Point is that language itself can constitute a political message or an aesthetic expression.
> What was lost when most European languages adopted the Latin alphabet? Or when the Chinese empire standardized the writing system?
Writing is an expression in itself, hence things like calligraphy and type setting. We perceive it and meaning is derived from our impressions of it. What was lost, insofar that writing systems were actually lost, was probably many lifetimes' worth of calligraphic tradition, especially in China where calligraphy is considered a very important art form, though I'm sure many of these traditions are still maintained by enthusiasts.
> What additional information is transferred in a rhyme? What meaning?
I don't see how this question can come from anything but a position of total philistinism, so I probably misunderstand it. Rhyme and rhythm in general is rhetorically and aesthetically useful so as to make an expression impactful, evocative and memorable, or simply funny and delightful. You may have heard of music and poetry. What happens when you take away the meter and rhythm from song or poetry? Information is definitely lost. If I hear a limerick, and you here an prosaic retelling of the exact same circumstances, I know something which you don't. Whether this information is useful or actionable to you is another question.
Have you heard of puns? They get lost in translation. Perhaps to Siri and Alexa it didn't matter in the first place, but it did to me and (hopefully) you.
> What can you do with language that does not constitute the expression of a thought or an idea?
You misread me. My objection isn't with the notion that language is a tool to express thoughts and ideas, but with the notion that it's a transparent protocol for doing so rather than something that is inherently part of the expression. The thoughts and ideas can be—and frequently are—colored by the language itself. Because there is music and poetry in the English language that is basically inexpressible in other languages without great artistic license, if we forget English, that work is lost.
If you want to live in a newish build with decent schools, you have slim pickings in my area. Planning on flipping my house and moving to a rural area once the kids don’t need public schooling anymore. Probably once this solar loan is paid off.
I was looking at aerial shots of my home the other day for solar installation options, and when I looked at the broader picture, it was a bit soulless. Everything was optimized to be inoffensive and suit the lowest common denominator of taste. The yards and trees and landscaping of each house all are from the same list of plants everyone is familiar with, which are optimized for practicality (hard to kill, and look somewhat okay.)
My anecdote doesn’t fit this situation as an analogy but it shares a common thread in that limiting diversity reduces the humanity of the system, and makes the world more boring as a result. Not everything has to be min maxed and optimized. Some things that humanity has invented are worth dragging with us just so that the world does not slide further into hyper-optimization.