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I am not a native English-speaker, but my dream is that the world gradually converges on a single standard for international communication, and that this standa

I am not a native English-speaker, but my dream is that the world gradually converges on a single standard for international communication, and that this standard is English, so that an ever-growing proportion of the population will become fluent in it. I understand various reasons for why this is unlikely to happen; and I realise that there've been lots of centrifugal forces lately that make this vision ever less likely; but I can't help but smile inwardly when I hear that NLP is so much focused on English, and can't help rooting for it to remain so.

bitL 6y ago
I think this is a horrible idea; unifying the mindsets of all people via the same language would mean that we might get forever stuck in some local optimum and there won't be any other culture that could push humanity forward. People tend to become complacent if they aren't feeling competition, leading to a downfall, and that is true for all aspects of life. It's like we are all in some sort of Reinforcement Learning algorithm and unifying the language portion would significantly restrict the exploration phase, the one that moves world forward. There are many concepts unique to each language, different emphasis on different things, different emotional response to different sentences, leading to unique ways of exploring the universe, and that all would be lost.
- azangru 6y ago
  > unifying the mindsets of all people via the same language There is a Sapir-Whorfian assumption here that it is the language that enslaves the mind, rather than the collective minds that are constantly shaping, morphing and bending the language. To me, the prospect of cultures having to communicate with each other via such a broken mechanism as translation is far more repugnant than a linguistically unified superculture within which ideas flow unimpeded. The more language users there are, the more capable of expression the language will become; so no, I am not particularly worried about getting stuck in a local maximum.
  - djedr 6y ago
    I think it goes both ways: language shapes mind and mind shapes language. It's a feedback loop.
  - viscanti 6y ago
    The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis has been widely debunked. It feels right, so it keeps getting spread around as a fact. The world is ultra connected now. It's fine for people to be bilingual and continue to communicate and respect their local history and culture. There's also a premium on being able to communicate wherever you go and with anyone you might meet. That's where English is already filling a dominant niche. The concern that some countries have with children learning English (when it's not their native language), is that their children might also grow up being heavily influenced by American/British culture (as they'll grow up watching English TV shows, reading English books, etc). That's a legitimate concern, where it's difficult to decouple the language from the associated culture. That said, I think there's a value in being able to communicate with everyone else and those countries could do other things to either limit screen time or increase the amount of historical and cultural content they give to their kids (this seems mostly like a problem for people who just want to sit their kids in front of a laptop and hope for the best - active parenting and teaching of local culture seems effective).
    - Tainnor 6y ago
      > The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis has been widely debunked. It feels right, so it keeps getting spread around as a fact. You say this as if there were consensus around that, but that's not true. The very strong, original formulation of Sapir-Whorf probably doesn't hold much water, but you'll still find enough linguists claiming that language influences thought nontrivially. But of course, you'll also find linguists arguing the opposite.
    - ludamad 6y ago
      I think it is true in an obvious but meaningful sense, though - word choices available impact meaning. If it's idiomatic to use a colourful dramatic phrase, a normally benign saying has subtlety pushed towards different connotations in people's minds etc. Now, I think this is true in pockets. In the larger sense, our available linguistic tools continues to grow, and speakers have no taboos even playing with basic grammar for effect
627467 6y ago
I used to placed more emphasis unification of standards (as in the case, unification of a natural language) but the truth is: humans will always diverge for various (conscious and less conscious) reasons. Imagine a world of 7billion English speakers: there would obviously be a huge range of accents and standards. In fact, compared to other languages, English is much less standardized and I'd argue that the premise that there's a single "English" for NLP to focus on. So, I'd rather NLP scientists find fulfilling work in exploring existing languages diversity.
ssivark 6y ago
For some reason the thought of English become a standard made me feel sad. While standardization certainly lends convenience and efficiency, diversity leads to more robustness and effective exploration — instead of everything being caught up in the same bubble. The web as a platform might become unmanageably “hot” (in a McLuhan-esque sense) if that were to happen; we’d just have to find other arbitrary ways of differentiating ourselves to form more convivial communities. I don’t mind if English becomes the common interchange format (lingua franca, ha) but I hope people continue to be multilingual and conserving and growing the cultures of other tongues.
djedr 6y ago
My amateur observations, I wonder what others think: English is already something of a standard for international communication I think, at least in some domains. It looks like a successor to Latin in many regards. Nonetheless I don't think English can function as an universal language because it is specialized in some regards. It is better for thinking about and capturing some things and ideas, but not for everything. Other languages, it seems to me, are optimized better for certain use cases. Everything of course cross-pollinates and, thanks to that, flexibility of different languages increases. But some fundamental rules must remain in place to maintain coherence of a language. If you change the basic grammar rules, you get a different one. In this way achieving universality within a single lanugage is either impossible or very difficult. Hard to tell if lanugages are evolving towards convergence into a single universal superlanguage or if the optimum is specialization. Programming languages seem to follow similar patterns.
- cs02rm0 6y ago
  Nonetheless I don't think English can function as an universal language because it is specialized in some regards. It is better for thinking about and capturing some things and ideas, but not for everything. Other languages, it seems to me, are optimized better for certain use cases. Curious as to what you had in mind (assuming it was broader than Eskimos and snow!)?
  - djedr 6y ago
    See my reply to benrbray above.
- benrbray 6y ago
  > Nonetheless I don't think English can function as an universal language because it is specialized in some regards. It is better for thinking about and capturing some things and ideas, but not for everything. Other languages, it seems to me, are optimized better for certain use cases. Care to back up this claim with examples? To me, it sounds like you're advocating for linguistic relativism [1], which doesn't really hold up to our modern understanding of language and thought. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity
inetsee 6y ago
I am a native English speaker. The problem I have with English as the Universal International Language is that it gives enormous economic and political power to the United States. I am not convinced that the United States can be relied upon to use this power responsibly.
- azangru 6y ago
  > is that it gives enormous economic and political power to the United States All the best to them :-) I think having models in nations that actually use a language as their native tongue is far better than choosing a language for which there is no living model (such as Latin or Esperanto). But then, why don't you also add Britain, Australia, Canada or South Africa to your list?
  - inetsee 6y ago
    I am aware that there are other countries that have English as their primary language. According to Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi... the US GDP is approximately 3.45 times the combined GDP of the other countries you named. I stand by my statement that the US has "enormous economic and political power". edit: I personally think Esperanto would be a good choice as an International Language. I believe it's much easier to learn than English.
    - azangru 6y ago
      I am not disputing this statement. Moreover, it is well known to sociolinguists that political and economic power is something that makes a language spoken by that nation more prestigious and more desirable to attain, and, therefore, contributes to the spread of that language. So, for the purposes of my dream, I can only wish that the US remains as influential as it is (and doesn't switch to Spanish in the process) :-) I guess my point is that I am not sure that, say, having other countries where English is the primary language (as listed in the previous comment) contributes to the power of the US. Likewise, I am not sure that the further spread of English as an international language will by itself contribute significantly to the power of the US. > I personally think Esperanto would be a good choice as an International Language Ugh, not a fan. English is a vibrant, living language that already is being used by huge swathes of people for various purposes; Esperanto is not.
YeGoblynQueenne 6y ago
This has nothing to do with communication. The article makes the case that overemphasising English for NLP has produced approaches that are limited in what they can do and can only solve some of the problems of English language modelling. In short, they're "one trick ponies" that only work well in one kind of problem. Further progress requires the ability to tackle more diverse problems and that's what the article advocates for. So I'm sorry to say but your "vision" of a united world under English is a vision of a world united under technological stagnation, a world where our NLP (and possibly AI, in general) approaches can only handle a limited set of "low hanging fruit" problems associated with English. The opinion expressed in your comment, that we should adjust ourselves to our technology, rather than improving our technology to suit our needs, is not entirely new. For example, Andrew Ng has said that rather than trying to make self-driving cars capable of dealing with an unexpected situation such as a pedestrian on a pogo stick, we should make sure that people don't engage in such unexpected behaviour that self-driving cars can't handle [1]. Obviously, this is a recipe not just for suppressing much of the diversity of human behaviour with unpredictable results for our own cognitive capacity, it's also backwards and antithetical to the motive of improving technology to make it capable of new applications. ___________________ [1] Rodney Brooks, Bothersome Bystanders and Self Driving Cars: https://rodneybrooks.com/bothersome-bystanders-and-self-driving-cars/ https://rodneybrooks.com/bothersome-bystanders-and-self-driv...

bitL 6y ago

I think this is a horrible idea; unifying the mindsets of all people via the same language would mean that we might get forever stuck in some local optimum and there won't be any other culture that could push humanity forward. People tend to become complacent if they aren't feeling competition, leading to a downfall, and that is true for all aspects of life. It's like we are all in some sort of Reinforcement Learning algorithm and unifying the language portion would significantly restrict the exploration phase, the one that moves world forward. There are many concepts unique to each language, different emphasis on different things, different emotional response to different sentences, leading to unique ways of exploring the universe, and that all would be lost.

azangru 6y ago
> unifying the mindsets of all people via the same language There is a Sapir-Whorfian assumption here that it is the language that enslaves the mind, rather than the collective minds that are constantly shaping, morphing and bending the language. To me, the prospect of cultures having to communicate with each other via such a broken mechanism as translation is far more repugnant than a linguistically unified superculture within which ideas flow unimpeded. The more language users there are, the more capable of expression the language will become; so no, I am not particularly worried about getting stuck in a local maximum.
- djedr 6y ago
  I think it goes both ways: language shapes mind and mind shapes language. It's a feedback loop.
- viscanti 6y ago
  The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis has been widely debunked. It feels right, so it keeps getting spread around as a fact. The world is ultra connected now. It's fine for people to be bilingual and continue to communicate and respect their local history and culture. There's also a premium on being able to communicate wherever you go and with anyone you might meet. That's where English is already filling a dominant niche. The concern that some countries have with children learning English (when it's not their native language), is that their children might also grow up being heavily influenced by American/British culture (as they'll grow up watching English TV shows, reading English books, etc). That's a legitimate concern, where it's difficult to decouple the language from the associated culture. That said, I think there's a value in being able to communicate with everyone else and those countries could do other things to either limit screen time or increase the amount of historical and cultural content they give to their kids (this seems mostly like a problem for people who just want to sit their kids in front of a laptop and hope for the best - active parenting and teaching of local culture seems effective).
  - Tainnor 6y ago
    > The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis has been widely debunked. It feels right, so it keeps getting spread around as a fact. You say this as if there were consensus around that, but that's not true. The very strong, original formulation of Sapir-Whorf probably doesn't hold much water, but you'll still find enough linguists claiming that language influences thought nontrivially. But of course, you'll also find linguists arguing the opposite.
  - ludamad 6y ago
    I think it is true in an obvious but meaningful sense, though - word choices available impact meaning. If it's idiomatic to use a colourful dramatic phrase, a normally benign saying has subtlety pushed towards different connotations in people's minds etc. Now, I think this is true in pockets. In the larger sense, our available linguistic tools continues to grow, and speakers have no taboos even playing with basic grammar for effect

627467 6y ago

I used to placed more emphasis unification of standards (as in the case, unification of a natural language) but the truth is: humans will always diverge for various (conscious and less conscious) reasons. Imagine a world of 7billion English speakers: there would obviously be a huge range of accents and standards. In fact, compared to other languages, English is much less standardized and I'd argue that the premise that there's a single "English" for NLP to focus on. So, I'd rather NLP scientists find fulfilling work in exploring existing languages diversity.

ssivark 6y ago

For some reason the thought of English become a standard made me feel sad. While standardization certainly lends convenience and efficiency, diversity leads to more robustness and effective exploration — instead of everything being caught up in the same bubble. The web as a platform might become unmanageably “hot” (in a McLuhan-esque sense) if that were to happen; we’d just have to find other arbitrary ways of differentiating ourselves to form more convivial communities. I don’t mind if English becomes the common interchange format (lingua franca, ha) but I hope people continue to be multilingual and conserving and growing the cultures of other tongues.

djedr 6y ago

My amateur observations, I wonder what others think: English is already something of a standard for international communication I think, at least in some domains. It looks like a successor to Latin in many regards. Nonetheless I don't think English can function as an universal language because it is specialized in some regards. It is better for thinking about and capturing some things and ideas, but not for everything. Other languages, it seems to me, are optimized better for certain use cases. Everything of course cross-pollinates and, thanks to that, flexibility of different languages increases. But some fundamental rules must remain in place to maintain coherence of a language. If you change the basic grammar rules, you get a different one. In this way achieving universality within a single lanugage is either impossible or very difficult. Hard to tell if lanugages are evolving towards convergence into a single universal superlanguage or if the optimum is specialization. Programming languages seem to follow similar patterns.

cs02rm0 6y ago
Nonetheless I don't think English can function as an universal language because it is specialized in some regards. It is better for thinking about and capturing some things and ideas, but not for everything. Other languages, it seems to me, are optimized better for certain use cases. Curious as to what you had in mind (assuming it was broader than Eskimos and snow!)?
- djedr 6y ago
  See my reply to benrbray above.
benrbray 6y ago
> Nonetheless I don't think English can function as an universal language because it is specialized in some regards. It is better for thinking about and capturing some things and ideas, but not for everything. Other languages, it seems to me, are optimized better for certain use cases. Care to back up this claim with examples? To me, it sounds like you're advocating for linguistic relativism [1], which doesn't really hold up to our modern understanding of language and thought. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity

inetsee 6y ago

I am a native English speaker. The problem I have with English as the Universal International Language is that it gives enormous economic and political power to the United States. I am not convinced that the United States can be relied upon to use this power responsibly.

azangru 6y ago
> is that it gives enormous economic and political power to the United States All the best to them :-) I think having models in nations that actually use a language as their native tongue is far better than choosing a language for which there is no living model (such as Latin or Esperanto). But then, why don't you also add Britain, Australia, Canada or South Africa to your list?
- inetsee 6y ago
  I am aware that there are other countries that have English as their primary language. According to Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi... the US GDP is approximately 3.45 times the combined GDP of the other countries you named. I stand by my statement that the US has "enormous economic and political power". edit: I personally think Esperanto would be a good choice as an International Language. I believe it's much easier to learn than English.
  - azangru 6y ago
    I am not disputing this statement. Moreover, it is well known to sociolinguists that political and economic power is something that makes a language spoken by that nation more prestigious and more desirable to attain, and, therefore, contributes to the spread of that language. So, for the purposes of my dream, I can only wish that the US remains as influential as it is (and doesn't switch to Spanish in the process) :-) I guess my point is that I am not sure that, say, having other countries where English is the primary language (as listed in the previous comment) contributes to the power of the US. Likewise, I am not sure that the further spread of English as an international language will by itself contribute significantly to the power of the US. > I personally think Esperanto would be a good choice as an International Language Ugh, not a fan. English is a vibrant, living language that already is being used by huge swathes of people for various purposes; Esperanto is not.

YeGoblynQueenne 6y ago

This has nothing to do with communication. The article makes the case that overemphasising English for NLP has produced approaches that are limited in what they can do and can only solve some of the problems of English language modelling. In short, they're "one trick ponies" that only work well in one kind of problem. Further progress requires the ability to tackle more diverse problems and that's what the article advocates for. So I'm sorry to say but your "vision" of a united world under English is a vision of a world united under technological stagnation, a world where our NLP (and possibly AI, in general) approaches can only handle a limited set of "low hanging fruit" problems associated with English. The opinion expressed in your comment, that we should adjust ourselves to our technology, rather than improving our technology to suit our needs, is not entirely new. For example, Andrew Ng has said that rather than trying to make self-driving cars capable of dealing with an unexpected situation such as a pedestrian on a pogo stick, we should make sure that people don't engage in such unexpected behaviour that self-driving cars can't handle [1]. Obviously, this is a recipe not just for suppressing much of the diversity of human behaviour with unpredictable results for our own cognitive capacity, it's also backwards and antithetical to the motive of improving technology to make it capable of new applications. ___________________ [1] Rodney Brooks, Bothersome Bystanders and Self Driving Cars: https://rodneybrooks.com/bothersome-bystanders-and-self-driving-cars/ https://rodneybrooks.com/bothersome-bystanders-and-self-driv...