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English is the new lingua francua. AI does a piss poor job translating nuance and context. If you cannot understand the language you are publishing an article

English is the new lingua francua. AI does a piss poor job translating nuance and context. If you cannot understand the language you are publishing an article in, you should not publish. Currently the language of the world is English. Maybe that won’t always be true. Maybe English will gain so many loanwords that it will look completely foreign 1000 years from now. But learning a language isn’t particularly hard, and the only real difficulty seems to be Korean/chinese/japanese <-> English.

xandrius 2y ago
That's because you're only aware of the "popular" ones. Lots of less known not PIE-languages (Proto Indo-European) out there that will make you reconsider your opinion.
- rvense 2y ago
  There are roughly 6,000 languages in the world. My own first language, Danish, has about 6 million native speakers, and it is something like the 50th most spoken language in the world. The world is a big place. Did you know that there are languages where you can't form a sentence without describing what direction something happens in? Like you can't just "see the house", you're either doing it up or down the mountain. And you know how in English you can't really say anything without saying if it's going on now or happened in the past. Other languages don't really care about that at all, you can speak all day with specifying if it "is" or "was".
  - TeaBrain 2y ago
    I'm not familiar with Danish, so this background of yours may be influencing your comment, but I'm not sure what you think you are referring to with your last two sentences on the temporal aspect of English. With the romance languages the tense is often explicitly built into the conjugation of verbs. Korean and Hindi also have conjugation systems to specify the tense. English does not have a similar system, so auxiliary verbs are relied on. Romance languages and others that have explicit tense conjugation systems are still specifying whether something "is" or "was", but through conjugation, rather than purely auxiliary verbs. Of note though, is that in Japanese, base words do not change conjugation between tenses, but are modified with a auxiliary verb system, where the tense is specified with auxiliary verbs, as with English.
    - rvense 2y ago
      If we described tense as something like the grammaticalization of the temporal relationship between the state of affairs described in the utterance and the time of the utterance itself, then it is my understanding that this isn't really a meaningful category in e.g. Sino-Tibetan or Austronesian languages. You can specify "today" or "tomorrow", but most sentences will be ambigous as far as time goes. (I'm also slightly confused by your suggestion that English does not have tense outside of auxilliary verbs? "He goes" vs. "He went"?)
pvaldes 2y ago
Imagine a world where every piece of poetry, novel or literature would be forced to be written in English. Our literature would be much poor and many new points of view would be dismissed just because "not enough Anglo Saxon". This does not happen because editors take care of the translation, hire professional translators for that, and let the creator alone to keep creating while happily selling the novel in 40 different languages. That is the right way to do it. Science still lives in a previous, less sophisticated, age. We should be grateful for them not expecting us to knit our own tunics also. The idea that somebody somewhere could have a possible solution to our urgent problems but we'll need to wait until this people learns English and "earns the right to be heard", is a disaster.
- indymike 2y ago
  > Imagine a world where every piece of poetry, novel or literature would be forced to be written in English. Nobody is wanting that world. > because "not enough Anglo Saxon" What is this, the year 1055? "Anglo Saxon" ceased to be a cultural group later that century. Now "Anglo-Saxon" is just a phony geopolitical spectre, mostly invoked by despotic governments as a scapegoat. > hire professional translators for that, and let the creator alone...that is the right thing to do. It would be if scientific publications had audiences where it made economic sense to do such a translation. Additionally, the cost of such translation for scientific literature is much more expensive owing to the need for great accuracy.
  - pvaldes 2y ago
    Most scientists work for free for the journals as reviewers, the same Journals earn also money obviously selling the product and they aren't cheap. They didn't spend a cent into the research done. Somebody else paid for it. How the cost of a translator could be too expensive when everybody is working for free for you? > What is this, the year 1055? If your surname is Brown your work will be treated clearly different by journals than if it is Gutierres or Coulibaly. The editors probably don't even perceive that there is a bias here. Including at least a member with an English name in your team is a known trick that eases to be accepted by publishers.
rvense 2y ago
> But learning a language isn’t particularly hard Actually, it is probably one of the hardest things you can attempt. You can speak a language every day for 30 years, but if you start after you're maybe 14, native speakers will be able to spot you in (literally) less than a second.
- giraffe_lady 2y ago
  So? They can't hear your accent in a journal article. Unless you're an actor the goal of an adult learner probably shouldn't be a native accent. You can speak competently but with a non-native accent, it's fine.
- jajko 2y ago
  Speaking (and thus cca thinking in) foreign languages massively stimulates your brain. You can't do much more for your (or child') mental development than make it learn and keep using multiple languages. Age doesn't matter, you arrive at the destination just a bit slower - Ie I am in my forties and learning french, slowly but surely. If they spot you, 2 things may happen - they will be nice like all normal people anywhere do and maybe even appreciate that other people are learning their non-trivial and probably a bit obscure language. Or you hit the rest, and they will either laugh at you, ignore you or just switch to english if they want/can. This is very common in France in my decade and a half experience of going there almost every weekend, also very frequent among young. Their own shame and mistake, instead of embracing the future and improving themselves, they choose the other direction and watch world slowly pass by. I think it comes from their deeply flawed education in this regard, not on languages per se but whole view on exceptionalism and what current world actually revolves around.
- gumby 2y ago
  I know people say that, but I also know quite a few people who learned English after that age who sound "native". All of them now live in English-speaking countries.
salviati 2y ago
> But learning a language isn’t particularly hard I'm very curious about what makes you think that. I belive it's true only if you already speak one or two other similarly rooted languages, or if you learn the language before you're 10. Did you learn your first foreign language as an adult and found it "not particularly hard"?
- bryanrasmussen 2y ago
  people often move to places with a language that is needed to exist in that place and then manage to learn that language. I would say becoming proficient in a language with small effort and no especial facility in languages should take no more than 2 years. With a good deal of intensive effort, focus and natural 3-6 months. this also depends a lot on the language, many of the Romance languages are relatively easy to learn, many of the Nordic ones seem quite difficult. Difficulty of course may depend on what you are moving from to what you will be using.
  - neffy 2y ago
    Abilities to do this range widely with individuals. Leaving that aside, there is a concept of linguistic distance from people´s first language, which makes it easier or harder to learn another language. French and English are very close to each other, as are Arabic and Hebrew, the Scandinavian languages are also all very close to each other (a little further from English), except for Finnish of course, which is kind of out there on its own. There is a nice recent paper looking at this in the academic context: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048733324000209 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004873332... Essentially how far your native tongue is from the language you are attempting to learn will drastically affect how long it takes to learn it for most people.
    - 082349872349872 2y ago
      For the other direction, based on a couple of centuries of data: https://www.state.gov/foreign-language-training/ https://www.state.gov/foreign-language-training/ Some languages take english L1 speakers 3x as long to learn as others. I agree with GP's 2 years for Cat I-II languages (assuming you're mostly living there and learning the language in your spare time, not intensively).

xandrius 2y ago

That's because you're only aware of the "popular" ones. Lots of less known not PIE-languages (Proto Indo-European) out there that will make you reconsider your opinion.

rvense 2y ago
There are roughly 6,000 languages in the world. My own first language, Danish, has about 6 million native speakers, and it is something like the 50th most spoken language in the world. The world is a big place. Did you know that there are languages where you can't form a sentence without describing what direction something happens in? Like you can't just "see the house", you're either doing it up or down the mountain. And you know how in English you can't really say anything without saying if it's going on now or happened in the past. Other languages don't really care about that at all, you can speak all day with specifying if it "is" or "was".
- TeaBrain 2y ago
  I'm not familiar with Danish, so this background of yours may be influencing your comment, but I'm not sure what you think you are referring to with your last two sentences on the temporal aspect of English. With the romance languages the tense is often explicitly built into the conjugation of verbs. Korean and Hindi also have conjugation systems to specify the tense. English does not have a similar system, so auxiliary verbs are relied on. Romance languages and others that have explicit tense conjugation systems are still specifying whether something "is" or "was", but through conjugation, rather than purely auxiliary verbs. Of note though, is that in Japanese, base words do not change conjugation between tenses, but are modified with a auxiliary verb system, where the tense is specified with auxiliary verbs, as with English.
  - rvense 2y ago
    If we described tense as something like the grammaticalization of the temporal relationship between the state of affairs described in the utterance and the time of the utterance itself, then it is my understanding that this isn't really a meaningful category in e.g. Sino-Tibetan or Austronesian languages. You can specify "today" or "tomorrow", but most sentences will be ambigous as far as time goes. (I'm also slightly confused by your suggestion that English does not have tense outside of auxilliary verbs? "He goes" vs. "He went"?)

pvaldes 2y ago

Imagine a world where every piece of poetry, novel or literature would be forced to be written in English. Our literature would be much poor and many new points of view would be dismissed just because "not enough Anglo Saxon". This does not happen because editors take care of the translation, hire professional translators for that, and let the creator alone to keep creating while happily selling the novel in 40 different languages. That is the right way to do it. Science still lives in a previous, less sophisticated, age. We should be grateful for them not expecting us to knit our own tunics also. The idea that somebody somewhere could have a possible solution to our urgent problems but we'll need to wait until this people learns English and "earns the right to be heard", is a disaster.

indymike 2y ago
> Imagine a world where every piece of poetry, novel or literature would be forced to be written in English. Nobody is wanting that world. > because "not enough Anglo Saxon" What is this, the year 1055? "Anglo Saxon" ceased to be a cultural group later that century. Now "Anglo-Saxon" is just a phony geopolitical spectre, mostly invoked by despotic governments as a scapegoat. > hire professional translators for that, and let the creator alone...that is the right thing to do. It would be if scientific publications had audiences where it made economic sense to do such a translation. Additionally, the cost of such translation for scientific literature is much more expensive owing to the need for great accuracy.
- pvaldes 2y ago
  Most scientists work for free for the journals as reviewers, the same Journals earn also money obviously selling the product and they aren't cheap. They didn't spend a cent into the research done. Somebody else paid for it. How the cost of a translator could be too expensive when everybody is working for free for you? > What is this, the year 1055? If your surname is Brown your work will be treated clearly different by journals than if it is Gutierres or Coulibaly. The editors probably don't even perceive that there is a bias here. Including at least a member with an English name in your team is a known trick that eases to be accepted by publishers.

rvense 2y ago

> But learning a language isn’t particularly hard Actually, it is probably one of the hardest things you can attempt. You can speak a language every day for 30 years, but if you start after you're maybe 14, native speakers will be able to spot you in (literally) less than a second.

giraffe_lady 2y ago
So? They can't hear your accent in a journal article. Unless you're an actor the goal of an adult learner probably shouldn't be a native accent. You can speak competently but with a non-native accent, it's fine.
jajko 2y ago
Speaking (and thus cca thinking in) foreign languages massively stimulates your brain. You can't do much more for your (or child') mental development than make it learn and keep using multiple languages. Age doesn't matter, you arrive at the destination just a bit slower - Ie I am in my forties and learning french, slowly but surely. If they spot you, 2 things may happen - they will be nice like all normal people anywhere do and maybe even appreciate that other people are learning their non-trivial and probably a bit obscure language. Or you hit the rest, and they will either laugh at you, ignore you or just switch to english if they want/can. This is very common in France in my decade and a half experience of going there almost every weekend, also very frequent among young. Their own shame and mistake, instead of embracing the future and improving themselves, they choose the other direction and watch world slowly pass by. I think it comes from their deeply flawed education in this regard, not on languages per se but whole view on exceptionalism and what current world actually revolves around.
gumby 2y ago
I know people say that, but I also know quite a few people who learned English after that age who sound "native". All of them now live in English-speaking countries.

salviati 2y ago

> But learning a language isn’t particularly hard I'm very curious about what makes you think that. I belive it's true only if you already speak one or two other similarly rooted languages, or if you learn the language before you're 10. Did you learn your first foreign language as an adult and found it "not particularly hard"?

bryanrasmussen 2y ago
people often move to places with a language that is needed to exist in that place and then manage to learn that language. I would say becoming proficient in a language with small effort and no especial facility in languages should take no more than 2 years. With a good deal of intensive effort, focus and natural 3-6 months. this also depends a lot on the language, many of the Romance languages are relatively easy to learn, many of the Nordic ones seem quite difficult. Difficulty of course may depend on what you are moving from to what you will be using.
- neffy 2y ago
  Abilities to do this range widely with individuals. Leaving that aside, there is a concept of linguistic distance from people´s first language, which makes it easier or harder to learn another language. French and English are very close to each other, as are Arabic and Hebrew, the Scandinavian languages are also all very close to each other (a little further from English), except for Finnish of course, which is kind of out there on its own. There is a nice recent paper looking at this in the academic context: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048733324000209 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004873332... Essentially how far your native tongue is from the language you are attempting to learn will drastically affect how long it takes to learn it for most people.
  - 082349872349872 2y ago
    For the other direction, based on a couple of centuries of data: https://www.state.gov/foreign-language-training/ https://www.state.gov/foreign-language-training/ Some languages take english L1 speakers 3x as long to learn as others. I agree with GP's 2 years for Cat I-II languages (assuming you're mostly living there and learning the language in your spare time, not intensively).