I fail to understand how AI is relevant here. Isn’t it just being used as a boogeyman to blame the problem on?
I mean, you’re not forced to use English with AI. They even know obscure languages like Swiss German (which doesn’t have any formal literature), surely they know Icelandic too. People talking to it in English is more of a people problem than an AI problem.
AI needs huge amounts of text to train on. Icelandic is a language with few speakers and and if there is not enough training material around, you can’t train a usable AI. If you suspect that people in the future will use more and more AI to create texts, that is a problem for those languages.
Is this officially the first bad thing to happen to Iceland that isn’t attributed to Denmark? I knew AI was coming to takes all of our jobs, but this is some black mirror level stuff.
And I always wanted to learn Icelandic but haven’t found an online source to do so.
Whatever you do, don’t get your pronunciation from the God of War games…
I am against killing languages but this just seems like the likely outcome of a global economy. Eventually the planet will be cohesive if we don’t kill ourselves first. English isn’t my first choice in what language should be dominant though, it’s too fucking confusing and breaks its own rules too often.
The alternative global language is Mandarin which is even more of a mess
Arabic would also be an option, or an entirely new language.
an entirely new language
Esperanto gang, rise up!
The simple claim of calling Arabic a single language is inherently a political one, in the same way calling Cantonese and Mandarin the same Chinese language is. Or would be like trying to reduce the Slavic languages into one or two.
Esperanto, sunken into it’s chair, slumbering, raises it’s head
I’m OK with the grammar, but the spelling is a total train wreck.
I wish we could just ignore that bit of history and start from scratch, because carrying a thousand years of historical baggage has gotten completely ridiculous at this point. There are also so many borrowed words from so many different languages that you can’t spell anything correctly without knowing the language of origin.
Just look at spelling bees, for example. English-speaking people seem to be okay with that, but people from other countries are like, “WTF are you doing? Just listen and write. What’s wrong with you?” Thanks to history, the sound has pretty much nothing to do with the letters. Forget about the rules. Just memorise each word individually.
That’s not OK. Someone needs to fix that mess, and many people have tried already. It looks unfixable to me. Maybe we should just abandon English and switch to any other language.
I wonder if Icelandic would be nicer.
but the spelling is a total train wreck.
With AI and videos, spelling will be irrelevant soon.
I really hope so.
I feel like English needs a spelling reform, but that’s never going to happen.
I like what Americans did with -ise/-ize, but they can take the ‘u’ from colour from my cold dead hands.
Þing iz, geting pēpel tú axept a speling rēform lyk ðis wöd bē véri difficult, & ēven if it woz, it haz a hy cans ov ōnli bēing parshali adópted
Why not just go full fonetic
The Problem with that is that English lacks uniformity. There is simply no possible spelling that works for Oxford, Houston, Vancouver, Perth, Lagos and Johannesburg at the same time. Heck, it doesn’t even work between London, Manchester and Edinburgh.
So which pronunciation do you match the spelling to? What is “High English”?
English could be mostly a written language for many people - they read it rather than hearing or speaking it. So changing the spelling, if that is true, would be just the wrong thing to do.
English is still evolving though. For example it’s not too uncommon to we “through” spelt as “thru”. How long these changes will take to become popular enough to make it into a dictionary is anyone’s guess, but i believe we are slowly making our way there.
Is mcdonalds the environmental stressor? 🤣
Countless reforms have already been attempted over the centuries, but here we are with this mess anyway. Yeah, that didn’t go as planned.
I think our best bet would be to switch to a more sensible language altogether. If USA loses its position in tech and entertainment, we’re probably going to switch to Chinese where writing is even more complicated.
Perhaps the Chinese will one day switch to an alphabet like Hangul or something similar. 🤣
Oh that one. The Korean alphabet is pretty neat and sensible.
To be honest, I don’t really know how it works, but I really like the aesthetic.
Don’t know much, but what I do know is that each symbol corresponds to a sound… for the most part.
If you hear a new word, you just listen to the sounds and convert them to a sequence of symbols. That way dictionaries are actually quite helpful and easy to use. Try that with English and you’ll see what I mean.
It works the other way too. If you read a new word somewhere, you can pronounce just like everyone else. Try that with English…
The west switching to chinese would be interesting to see, but I am doubtful.
By that argument, you should already be learning Mandarin, the world language spoken by the largest number of people, and in what in future will be very, very likely the biggest industrial economy.
Fun fact, I was last summer in Ljubljana / Slowenia, and some shops already have signs in Chinese writing.
we should standardize on Lojban.
that way, nobody’s happy.
Supongo que es verdad, pero para eso se inventaron las lenguas auxiliares, como el esperanto (muchos diacríticos) o la interlingua
Even with my own language, Dutch, spoken by millions of people, I feel as if we’re gradually losing ground and nuance in favour of bad English among the younger generations.
I found myself writing an email to a Norwegian recipient the other day. I wrote in English, despite Danish and Norwegian bokmål being >95% the same.
It waters out our native languages when we do this, and it is, as you say, in favour of bad English. I find even the most English proficient Danish teens lacking in their vocabulary. Pronunciation is good, but they can express themselves.
I’ve given it a fair bit of thought. I think that the kids choose English, because it’s emotionally distancing. Saying something in English doesn’t carry the same weight, as using their mother’s tongue. Simply because they don’t feel the words the same. Occasionally I will catch myself using English for my internal dialogue, especially when I’m thinking about something that causes me emotional distress.
emotionally distancing
when I’m thinking about something that causes me emotional distress.
Or is English better at expressing emotions?
Lol no, at least not compared to Scandinavian languages. OTOH plenty of us might only be experienced in emotions expressed in older poems and songs, not a natural style to copy for most (you know, this whole Scandinavians being introverted bit)
As a Portuguese, I see the same thing. It’s funny that older people were so concerned about the possible “negative” influence of Brazilian Portuguese on Portuguese spoken in Portugal among young people, while nowadays the younger generations can’t actually speak a sentence without introducing a few English words. If there was any Brazilian influence, it was minimal.
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Et avant ça, ça chiait sur les français qui ne veulent pas parler anglais. :)
même si on va pas se mentir, le français a déjà eu les mêmes ambitions impérialistes que l’anglais (et reste une langue coloniale dans bien des parties du monde, incluant là où je vis)
on a pas les mains propres non plus…
D’accord, mais au moins c’est une belle langue!
