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This is amazing work from Meta and Peng-Jen Chen. As a person who grew up having Hokkien as my first language, I've feared that Hokkien might go extinct over t

This is amazing work from Meta and Peng-Jen Chen. As a person who grew up having Hokkien as my first language, I've feared that Hokkien might go extinct over time. Having a formal English and Mandarin Chinese education had pretty much started to erase my Hokkien knowledge. I'm glad that AI technologies can be used to preserve this language.

tokinonagare 4y ago
They won't. It will only help accelerate the move towards concentration to national languages (Standard Chinese in Taiwan and China, French in France, etc.) Why would anyone put the effort to learn a "small" language when it can be translated automatically for understanding? The way to preserve a language is putting humans in the loop. Creating content in that language; interestingly more and more shows are produced in Taiwan in or using non-Mandarin languages as a political way to mark a difference with the big neighbour. And having government support, notably at school (at young age) by allowing partial or total teaching in the language to be preserved.
- lettergram 4y ago
  The better translation technology is the less likely it is I’ll ever learn a language. To put it another way, in 10 years when I visit China I could probably have an in-depth conversation without ever knowing Chinese. I’d the Chinese can come to a university and never need to learn English, they won’t. Your parents and community will teach out to speak and that’ll be the end of it. It’ll be closer to the Tower of Babel scenario. Every community will have their own language and dialect and the AI will just adapt. If a solar flare takes out electronics we won’t be able to understand each other. Alternatively, the AI will teach us to speak or an implant will teach us similar to the matrix. Those are the scenarios in the next 25-30 years I see.
  - version_five 4y ago
    > 10 years when I visit China I could probably have an in-depth conversation without ever knowing Chinese Doubt it. When you learn a language you learn a lot more than the translation, you learn thinking and connotations that require a broader understanding that never get captured regardless of the translation quality, because they require knowing history and seeing previous uses in context that can't be captured in the translation. "Good" translation will do for language what wikipedia has done for knowledge. Everyone will get a superficial understanding, some will pretend that reading off a definitions is the same as actually knowing something, and the world will get a lot more shallow, empty conversations.
    - realusername 4y ago
      All of that does not matter for just communicating, even for the languages where google translate is terrible, it's already equivalent to a B2 level which is enough for communicating about everything. In some languages, DeepL has near perfect translation to the point you cannot really tell if it was translated.
  - MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
    The Tower of Babel scenario isn't so bad is it? Instead of minority language speakers being under immense pressure to adapt to and be replaced by dominant languages, communities can continue to exist as they are in their own language.
  - leg0m4n 4y ago
    [dead]
  - ekianjo 4y ago
    > To put it another way, in 10 years when I visit China I could probably have an in-depth conversation without ever knowing Chinese. preposterous. having an indepth discussion with a foreigner requires not only the language but also the understanding of the cultural context.
    - lettergram 4y ago
      I don’t need cultural context to order a cheese burger. Presumably, future AI systems would be able to translate this context as well. They do to some extent [poorly] today.
      - nfoz 4y ago
        You moved the goalpost from "in-depth conversation" to "order a cheese burger".
- larryliu 4y ago
  It's anthropocentric to say a language can only be preserved by live humans rather than AI natural language models and digital corpora. No one use Latin any more but we can still figure out what Roman text meant. It's also counterproductive to let humans learn a language of limited content resources and use cases. Taiwan people are highly educated and urbanized. It's much harder to use Taiwanese in Taiwan compared to High German in a Pennsylvanian Amish village. I don't know how to express clearly in Taiwanese "GPS in my neighborhood has a 100x lower accuracy because of radio interference" or "move this MOSFET up by 15mm to balance the PCB thermal stress". If you still have to switch to Chinese or English from time to time, why not just use the popular languages? Even Japanese, a language used by 125 million, has similar issues, my Japanese coworkers frequently switch to English during technical discussions.
  - tkgally 4y ago
    Your Japanese coworkers are the exception, not the rule. The vast majority of Japanese speakers in Japan, including those in technical fields, do all of their work communication in Japanese. They may use technical vocabulary borrowed from English and other languages, but those words are used with Japanese pronunciation in Japanese sentences.
    - larryliu 4y ago
      I asked them why. They said it's possible to say anything in Japanese, but English has the brevity for some topics.
    - kmeisthax 4y ago
      In Masahiro Sakurai[0]'s series of YouTube talks[1] on game development, he specifically mentions how he has to tell Japanese developers to always name files and source code functions in English, just in case they need to work with an overseas team. Yes, it is possible to do everything 100% in Japanese, with the only English being the keywords of whatever programming system you are working with. However, that is more the exception than the rule, especially in larger teams that need to work overseas. [0] Creator of Super Smash Bros. and Kirby [1] "Masahiro Sakurai on Creating Games"
spoonjim 4y ago
The language will be “preserved” in that 300 years from now, a tape drive in Harvard’s Widener Library will have a Hokkien model on file for historians writing a tenure book designed to go right back into those dusty shelves.
- Apocryphon 4y ago
  In the same way all verbal and symbolic language will no longer exist following the invention of the neuraljack, yes.
  - nullc 4y ago
    Most people use their spoken[1] language as a major part of their conscious minds. Do you expect that to change? [1] (ASL speakers claim to 'think' in sign)
    - Apocryphon 4y ago
      Regarding the exact nature of the gestalt transhuman super-intelligences that will arise post-Singularity, who can say?
    - jxf 4y ago
      Some researchers think that this is a sort of limitation of our current language structures, and that there exist more general encodings of our ideas ("engrams") that we could express if we had perfect telepathy and perfect comprehension. In this sense, we would exchange information that was of a higher order than language. For example, a complex idea like "the location where I will meet you for lunch this afternoon" would be independent of the verbal language we use it to express it. We can see a similar (albeit more limited) exchange of language-independent structural ideas in mathematics. We distinguish between "numbers" (the idea of a quantity) and "numerals" (the symbols we use to describe that quantity). For example, `III`, `three`, `3`, `5 - 2`, and `the number of complete revolutions made by rotating 6*pi radians` are all ways of defining and representing the same common idea — "the number three". Going back to the previous example, imagine if an idea "where I'll meet you for lunch today" could be universally and unambiguously shared in a similar way, and you'll get a rough approximation of what perfect telepathy and perfect comprehension would be like.
e63f67dd-065b 4y ago
Yeah language attrition is very real. I used to be a near native speaker of Hokkien and Cantonese, now I can barely understand a word after more than a decade of not speaking them. Going extinct would be sad, sure, but I'm not sure that the effort required to not make it so would be worth it. Putting children through thousands of hours of education in another language, for what exactly? If I have kids, I'm not sure I'd be willing to put them through all that work for a nearly dead language. They're not gonna use it to speak with their peers, or to open up communication with another group of people, it's just preservation for the sake of preservation.
- Apocryphon 4y ago
  Perhaps the old reasons will do just as well. Hokkien is an interesting case of being involved in a potentially fractious political situation- one can imagine to further distinguish themselves from the Chinese mainland, the people of Taiwan promote the use of Hokkien. Not dissimilar to say bilingual laws in Canada. After all, the nineteenth century saw the consolidation of national languages and elimination of regional dialects in the name of fostering nationalism, which continued in the twentieth but also saw the revival of languages like Irish or Hebrew for new nationalisms.
  - yorwba 4y ago
    I doubt that desire for cultural differentiation is going to change much about the diglossic situation in Taiwan, since the continued use of Traditional Chinese characters is already a pretty big differentiator. The government is making some effort to promote the Tai-lô writing system (e.g. https://tailo.moe.edu.tw/index.php https://tailo.moe.edu.tw/index.php ), but overall there's very little incentive for Hokkien speakers to become literate in it. If you look at Wikipedia visits from Taiwan, 92% go to the Mandarin version, 6% to English, 1% to Japanese, and Hokkien is in the tail of small languages behind even Cantonese and Classical Chinese. Of these, I think English is most likely to grow in the future. Also, the differentiation potential is somewhat limited due to the fact that the majority of Hokkien speakers lives in Fujian province on the mainland (Hokkien = Fujian) and there's some preservation work going on there as well. E.g. Xiamen University's Speech Lab had a working demo of spoken-Hokkien-to-written-Mandarin translation in 2018, although the link shortener they used has since suffered from link rot. https://speech.xmu.edu.cn/2018/1215/c18169a359542/page.htm https://speech.xmu.edu.cn/2018/1215/c18169a359542/page.htm
danieltanfh95 4y ago
Its spoken by many people all around me. There's more to preserving a language than translating it to a foreign language.
- Daub 4y ago
  Also spoken heavily where I used to live. However, a lot of the time it was used by non-Hokien speakers for its rich collection of curse and swear words.

tokinonagare 4y ago

They won't. It will only help accelerate the move towards concentration to national languages (Standard Chinese in Taiwan and China, French in France, etc.) Why would anyone put the effort to learn a "small" language when it can be translated automatically for understanding? The way to preserve a language is putting humans in the loop. Creating content in that language; interestingly more and more shows are produced in Taiwan in or using non-Mandarin languages as a political way to mark a difference with the big neighbour. And having government support, notably at school (at young age) by allowing partial or total teaching in the language to be preserved.

lettergram 4y ago
The better translation technology is the less likely it is I’ll ever learn a language. To put it another way, in 10 years when I visit China I could probably have an in-depth conversation without ever knowing Chinese. I’d the Chinese can come to a university and never need to learn English, they won’t. Your parents and community will teach out to speak and that’ll be the end of it. It’ll be closer to the Tower of Babel scenario. Every community will have their own language and dialect and the AI will just adapt. If a solar flare takes out electronics we won’t be able to understand each other. Alternatively, the AI will teach us to speak or an implant will teach us similar to the matrix. Those are the scenarios in the next 25-30 years I see.
- version_five 4y ago
  > 10 years when I visit China I could probably have an in-depth conversation without ever knowing Chinese Doubt it. When you learn a language you learn a lot more than the translation, you learn thinking and connotations that require a broader understanding that never get captured regardless of the translation quality, because they require knowing history and seeing previous uses in context that can't be captured in the translation. "Good" translation will do for language what wikipedia has done for knowledge. Everyone will get a superficial understanding, some will pretend that reading off a definitions is the same as actually knowing something, and the world will get a lot more shallow, empty conversations.
  - realusername 4y ago
    All of that does not matter for just communicating, even for the languages where google translate is terrible, it's already equivalent to a B2 level which is enough for communicating about everything. In some languages, DeepL has near perfect translation to the point you cannot really tell if it was translated.
- MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
  The Tower of Babel scenario isn't so bad is it? Instead of minority language speakers being under immense pressure to adapt to and be replaced by dominant languages, communities can continue to exist as they are in their own language.
- leg0m4n 4y ago
  [dead]
- ekianjo 4y ago
  > To put it another way, in 10 years when I visit China I could probably have an in-depth conversation without ever knowing Chinese. preposterous. having an indepth discussion with a foreigner requires not only the language but also the understanding of the cultural context.
  - lettergram 4y ago
    I don’t need cultural context to order a cheese burger. Presumably, future AI systems would be able to translate this context as well. They do to some extent [poorly] today.
    - nfoz 4y ago
      You moved the goalpost from "in-depth conversation" to "order a cheese burger".
larryliu 4y ago
It's anthropocentric to say a language can only be preserved by live humans rather than AI natural language models and digital corpora. No one use Latin any more but we can still figure out what Roman text meant. It's also counterproductive to let humans learn a language of limited content resources and use cases. Taiwan people are highly educated and urbanized. It's much harder to use Taiwanese in Taiwan compared to High German in a Pennsylvanian Amish village. I don't know how to express clearly in Taiwanese "GPS in my neighborhood has a 100x lower accuracy because of radio interference" or "move this MOSFET up by 15mm to balance the PCB thermal stress". If you still have to switch to Chinese or English from time to time, why not just use the popular languages? Even Japanese, a language used by 125 million, has similar issues, my Japanese coworkers frequently switch to English during technical discussions.
- tkgally 4y ago
  Your Japanese coworkers are the exception, not the rule. The vast majority of Japanese speakers in Japan, including those in technical fields, do all of their work communication in Japanese. They may use technical vocabulary borrowed from English and other languages, but those words are used with Japanese pronunciation in Japanese sentences.
  - larryliu 4y ago
    I asked them why. They said it's possible to say anything in Japanese, but English has the brevity for some topics.
  - kmeisthax 4y ago
    In Masahiro Sakurai[0]'s series of YouTube talks[1] on game development, he specifically mentions how he has to tell Japanese developers to always name files and source code functions in English, just in case they need to work with an overseas team. Yes, it is possible to do everything 100% in Japanese, with the only English being the keywords of whatever programming system you are working with. However, that is more the exception than the rule, especially in larger teams that need to work overseas. [0] Creator of Super Smash Bros. and Kirby [1] "Masahiro Sakurai on Creating Games"

spoonjim 4y ago

The language will be “preserved” in that 300 years from now, a tape drive in Harvard’s Widener Library will have a Hokkien model on file for historians writing a tenure book designed to go right back into those dusty shelves.

Apocryphon 4y ago
In the same way all verbal and symbolic language will no longer exist following the invention of the neuraljack, yes.
- nullc 4y ago
  Most people use their spoken[1] language as a major part of their conscious minds. Do you expect that to change? [1] (ASL speakers claim to 'think' in sign)
  - Apocryphon 4y ago
    Regarding the exact nature of the gestalt transhuman super-intelligences that will arise post-Singularity, who can say?
  - jxf 4y ago
    Some researchers think that this is a sort of limitation of our current language structures, and that there exist more general encodings of our ideas ("engrams") that we could express if we had perfect telepathy and perfect comprehension. In this sense, we would exchange information that was of a higher order than language. For example, a complex idea like "the location where I will meet you for lunch this afternoon" would be independent of the verbal language we use it to express it. We can see a similar (albeit more limited) exchange of language-independent structural ideas in mathematics. We distinguish between "numbers" (the idea of a quantity) and "numerals" (the symbols we use to describe that quantity). For example, `III`, `three`, `3`, `5 - 2`, and `the number of complete revolutions made by rotating 6*pi radians` are all ways of defining and representing the same common idea — "the number three". Going back to the previous example, imagine if an idea "where I'll meet you for lunch today" could be universally and unambiguously shared in a similar way, and you'll get a rough approximation of what perfect telepathy and perfect comprehension would be like.

e63f67dd-065b 4y ago

Yeah language attrition is very real. I used to be a near native speaker of Hokkien and Cantonese, now I can barely understand a word after more than a decade of not speaking them. Going extinct would be sad, sure, but I'm not sure that the effort required to not make it so would be worth it. Putting children through thousands of hours of education in another language, for what exactly? If I have kids, I'm not sure I'd be willing to put them through all that work for a nearly dead language. They're not gonna use it to speak with their peers, or to open up communication with another group of people, it's just preservation for the sake of preservation.

Apocryphon 4y ago
Perhaps the old reasons will do just as well. Hokkien is an interesting case of being involved in a potentially fractious political situation- one can imagine to further distinguish themselves from the Chinese mainland, the people of Taiwan promote the use of Hokkien. Not dissimilar to say bilingual laws in Canada. After all, the nineteenth century saw the consolidation of national languages and elimination of regional dialects in the name of fostering nationalism, which continued in the twentieth but also saw the revival of languages like Irish or Hebrew for new nationalisms.
- yorwba 4y ago
  I doubt that desire for cultural differentiation is going to change much about the diglossic situation in Taiwan, since the continued use of Traditional Chinese characters is already a pretty big differentiator. The government is making some effort to promote the Tai-lô writing system (e.g. https://tailo.moe.edu.tw/index.php https://tailo.moe.edu.tw/index.php ), but overall there's very little incentive for Hokkien speakers to become literate in it. If you look at Wikipedia visits from Taiwan, 92% go to the Mandarin version, 6% to English, 1% to Japanese, and Hokkien is in the tail of small languages behind even Cantonese and Classical Chinese. Of these, I think English is most likely to grow in the future. Also, the differentiation potential is somewhat limited due to the fact that the majority of Hokkien speakers lives in Fujian province on the mainland (Hokkien = Fujian) and there's some preservation work going on there as well. E.g. Xiamen University's Speech Lab had a working demo of spoken-Hokkien-to-written-Mandarin translation in 2018, although the link shortener they used has since suffered from link rot. https://speech.xmu.edu.cn/2018/1215/c18169a359542/page.htm https://speech.xmu.edu.cn/2018/1215/c18169a359542/page.htm

danieltanfh95 4y ago

Its spoken by many people all around me. There's more to preserving a language than translating it to a foreign language.

Daub 4y ago
Also spoken heavily where I used to live. However, a lot of the time it was used by non-Hokien speakers for its rich collection of curse and swear words.