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Though i agree with the main point, the blog post went off on a tangent about how some other languages are in danger because of English. IMO if the speakers of

Though i agree with the main point, the blog post went off on a tangent about how some other languages are in danger because of English. IMO if the speakers of the language do not: 1. Provide materials in their own language 2. Consume materials in their own language 3. Actively and exclusively contribute to the world in English it is already a statement about the necessity of their language: it isn't. Why should non speakers of a certain language invest money and/or time on a language its own people don't even invest in? If its own speakers kill the language (actively or passively) who are we to say they shouldn't?

slx26 6y ago
> Why should non speakers of a certain language invest money and/or time on a language its own people don't even invest in? Because rational choices at an individual level do not necessarily align with rational choices at a social collective level. "Meditations on Moloch" is a good read on this topic. You can easily see how collectively the language diversity is positive, but individually it kinda makes sense to bet for the biggest language instead. And to be fair, there's a lot of people investing in their own languages, just not enough, or not with enough power.
yorwba 6y ago
I assume you're referring to this paragraph: A continuing lack of technological inclusion will not only exacerbate the language divide but it may also drive speakers of unsupported languages and dialects to high-resource languages with better technological support, further endangering such language varieties. To ensure that non-English language speakers are not left behind and at the same time to offset the existing imbalance, to lower language and literacy barriers, we need to apply our models to non-English languages. Have you considered what this means, concretely, for a speaker of an endangered language? Suppose I want to "invest" into my language and 1. Provide materials: - Written? I need some kind of keyboard support. In the worst case, this might entail getting new characters added to Unicode. Or I could just use paper, but then I lose out on all the benefits of digital text editing. - Spoken/Signed? In some ways, that's easier, since I can just record myself. But if I want closed captions or some kind of transcript, I can't make use of automatic tools, I have to transcribe it completely manually. 2. Consume materials: - But how do I find them? What if searching for words in my language mostly turns up results in other languages because the search engine assumes I misspelled my query? - It might happen that the text I'm trying to read uses characters that were considered "too rare" to be included in the default font on my device. On most versions of Android, it's not possible to install a new font to fix that. I'm not sure about other mobile operating systems. Those are problems that don't require speakers of the language to do something differently (such as just using English instead...) but instead need technical solutions that can very well be implemented by someone who doesn't speak the language. I don't speak an endangered language myself, but I've written code to support dozens of languages I don't speak, because someone who did speak the language asked for a particular change that would make life easier for them.

slx26 6y ago

> Why should non speakers of a certain language invest money and/or time on a language its own people don't even invest in? Because rational choices at an individual level do not necessarily align with rational choices at a social collective level. "Meditations on Moloch" is a good read on this topic. You can easily see how collectively the language diversity is positive, but individually it kinda makes sense to bet for the biggest language instead. And to be fair, there's a lot of people investing in their own languages, just not enough, or not with enough power.

yorwba 6y ago

I assume you're referring to this paragraph: A continuing lack of technological inclusion will not only exacerbate the language divide but it may also drive speakers of unsupported languages and dialects to high-resource languages with better technological support, further endangering such language varieties. To ensure that non-English language speakers are not left behind and at the same time to offset the existing imbalance, to lower language and literacy barriers, we need to apply our models to non-English languages. Have you considered what this means, concretely, for a speaker of an endangered language? Suppose I want to "invest" into my language and 1. Provide materials: - Written? I need some kind of keyboard support. In the worst case, this might entail getting new characters added to Unicode. Or I could just use paper, but then I lose out on all the benefits of digital text editing. - Spoken/Signed? In some ways, that's easier, since I can just record myself. But if I want closed captions or some kind of transcript, I can't make use of automatic tools, I have to transcribe it completely manually. 2. Consume materials: - But how do I find them? What if searching for words in my language mostly turns up results in other languages because the search engine assumes I misspelled my query? - It might happen that the text I'm trying to read uses characters that were considered "too rare" to be included in the default font on my device. On most versions of Android, it's not possible to install a new font to fix that. I'm not sure about other mobile operating systems. Those are problems that don't require speakers of the language to do something differently (such as just using English instead...) but instead need technical solutions that can very well be implemented by someone who doesn't speak the language. I don't speak an endangered language myself, but I've written code to support dozens of languages I don't speak, because someone who did speak the language asked for a particular change that would make life easier for them.