> For example, I can carry on a reasonably good conversation with ChatGPT in the ancient dead language of Pali and have it translated into cuneiform ChatGPT’s

> For example, I can carry on a reasonably good conversation with ChatGPT in the ancient dead language of Pali and have it translated into cuneiform ChatGPT’s ability to translate into Pali or cuneiform is limited by the size of the corpus. As I said, most languages of the world do not have a sizeable electronic corpus, and what has appeared in writing is only a limited portion of those languages. ChatGPT cannot magically guess words or idioms that it was never trained on. This is well known to anyone working in corpus linguistics. Do you have any formal background in the field? > As people are invested in their native language this doesn’t seem unreasonable. Outside a few relatively privileged languages, people are much less invested in their native language than you assume. Due to the pressures of poverty, political oppression, and social stigma, it can be difficult for linguists to even find speakers willing to answer some questions about their language, let alone train MT.