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How something starts and is intended to be used becomes corrupted for the purposes of power and control; its clockwork and it absolutely happened with Latin. We

How something starts and is intended to be used becomes corrupted for the purposes of power and control; its clockwork and it absolutely happened with Latin. We could say the same thing about Medicine and Law today. All those technical terms in Latin are just for cohesion, right? Just coincidence they happen to be for the two largest union based professions in the west? I don't think so. Perhaps, they started out oriented on codification and categorization, but ultimately it's used as barriers to entry for the purpose of containing who has what knowledge. AI is the digital wheel and the powers that be are intentionally altering it's ability to free us, to contain us for themselves. Labor is a powerful tool for vote motivation and instilling dependency. It is hard to watch them do to AI what they did to Bitcoin because they are afraid of what humanity will become without them.

joker_minmax 3y ago
I see what you're saying about Latin usage being a barrier to understanding "legalese". However, in medicine it's absolutely justified, because it allows us to be more specific than using English alone. A lot of the English words for body parts are loanwords from Latin that mean something else because English does not have its own word for it. Cervix, for example, means "neck". English took the Latin word to describe it, as the phrase "cervix uteri" in the 1700s. You could call it the "neck of the uterus" I guess, but uterus came from Latin too. Medical dictionaries can be bought by laypeople and are worth owning, but now people just use WebMD or one of the other SEO-optimized clones.
- RyanAdamas 3y ago
  That's fair, there are legitimate reasons for much of the complexities we deal with today. How far can that body of knowledge grow before a human can't actually understand it? Similar to maths, at what point do they advance so much that no one person, without bionic assistance, can learn it all? Consider the fact we call small pants "shorts" and current events "news"; the sophistication of our language is indeed lacking - jumping ship to a completely different language is inappropriate considering we have the ability to create whole new words and taxonomies to deal with that complexity. Oddly enough, AI is great solution to this problem, but it is currently being gutted in favor of established institutions of power. Highlighting the actual problem - control and elitism.
  - joker_minmax 3y ago
    I would like clarification: you are advocating that we use AI to come up with new words in English? Using what parameters, Anglo-Saxon root words? Are they still adding and creating new terms from Latin in the legal system? Either way people still have to learn new words, and AI generated new words would be hard to implement if they stray from the roots we have learned to recognize (especially Greek and Latin root words we are taught to recognize in school early on). In the current case "uterus" and "cervix" are now considered to be the English words for those body parts. Is using a loanword really "jumping ship" when much of English's influence history comes from Old French anyway? I think this would be better dealt with in the hands of a linguist. Elitism and access is an issue, but to me it strikes that the access issue is more about access to education, than access to the language itself.

joker_minmax 3y ago

I see what you're saying about Latin usage being a barrier to understanding "legalese". However, in medicine it's absolutely justified, because it allows us to be more specific than using English alone. A lot of the English words for body parts are loanwords from Latin that mean something else because English does not have its own word for it. Cervix, for example, means "neck". English took the Latin word to describe it, as the phrase "cervix uteri" in the 1700s. You could call it the "neck of the uterus" I guess, but uterus came from Latin too. Medical dictionaries can be bought by laypeople and are worth owning, but now people just use WebMD or one of the other SEO-optimized clones.

RyanAdamas 3y ago
That's fair, there are legitimate reasons for much of the complexities we deal with today. How far can that body of knowledge grow before a human can't actually understand it? Similar to maths, at what point do they advance so much that no one person, without bionic assistance, can learn it all? Consider the fact we call small pants "shorts" and current events "news"; the sophistication of our language is indeed lacking - jumping ship to a completely different language is inappropriate considering we have the ability to create whole new words and taxonomies to deal with that complexity. Oddly enough, AI is great solution to this problem, but it is currently being gutted in favor of established institutions of power. Highlighting the actual problem - control and elitism.
- joker_minmax 3y ago
  I would like clarification: you are advocating that we use AI to come up with new words in English? Using what parameters, Anglo-Saxon root words? Are they still adding and creating new terms from Latin in the legal system? Either way people still have to learn new words, and AI generated new words would be hard to implement if they stray from the roots we have learned to recognize (especially Greek and Latin root words we are taught to recognize in school early on). In the current case "uterus" and "cervix" are now considered to be the English words for those body parts. Is using a loanword really "jumping ship" when much of English's influence history comes from Old French anyway? I think this would be better dealt with in the hands of a linguist. Elitism and access is an issue, but to me it strikes that the access issue is more about access to education, than access to the language itself.