Comments on: A Future of Fewer Words

By: Dylan

Dylan — Mon, 16 Jul 2012 06:34:05 +0000

Circumpolar lagguanes,(including se1mi), Amerindian lagguanes, Zuni, apache, Navajo, Tlingit, Cree, and a what ever else tickles my fancy, and also the lagguanes of the amazon, add to that Chinese lagguanes Finnougric amongst indo European celtic/Germanic lagguanes, (due to political belief in what one may call pangermanic panceltic ideology of sorts I guess but a non encompassing one just feel obliged to give some patriotism to the cultures, also Hindi, Sanskrit, Latin, Pali, I heard their v

By: Rickey Dale Hicks

Rickey Dale Hicks — Sun, 01 Jul 2012 02:52:46 +0000

I may have taken something for granted when once I had spent three years alone in the woods. This in not a recommendation for anyone to try this. Anyone seeking to not exist within the world of human involvement or seeking solitude is in fact insane. The only way to live with oneself is to be very happy with oneself; if not you would have to live with someone that you do not like. Yourself! That would be Hell. If in fact you could be outside in nature for a year before even noticing that you were alone; then you have got it made. The results of this (stepping out) brought some very important things to the surface. Language is important- only if communication is necessary to convey a need or wont to transact business maters of commerce. After putting away the desire to fool needlessly around with dialog; the importance grows more toward the environment of surroundings. If a day goes by without dialog that could be for most people a relief within a family that communicates all the time; the vacation of the mind would become most confused to not have foolishness and ignorance as part of the complex family center of struggle. The more limited the vocabulary the less regard to have understanding or reliance on conformation of said discussion; thus the political becomes apparent as a need to be more persuasive than understood in a logical manner. On the other hand there are the intellectuals that convey and understand fully what the propositions are and relate accordingly. With the prier capacity taken away the mind seeks to entertain itself in the more fruitful surroundings of nature; a more natural order of mind comes into play to organize the future; one on one!. Thinking within the box of distances that derives from the total vistas of mountain top to mountain top; the mind has plenty to exchange with in terms of importance to survival. The loss of language will never be overcome in the plain face of it; but the need to confer within itself is localized within the structure that deems what is relevant (with no time restriction) to foreword transcending motivations that occur without strong self debate of undertaking. The destruction of the self does not happen with the lack of the use of language; but in fact the mind is enchanted to a more pure— a strategic use of logic. The— (all bullshit aside syndrome) clears the way for some very important things to start happening.
When supplies were to be gotten; the fact that you can go and get supplies and never say a word to anyone is very possible. At first the monthly chore was adopted to retrieve some things for the store of goods; in the end (after three years) the need to shop had ceased to be. The mind had overcame any lack of human entertainment in the regards of having to have any contact with anyone.
At the time of my first verbal investment with another human being I found myself unable to speak. I thought it was because I had not used my voice in so long it simply failed me. After reading this article I have to rethink that hypothesis. Although I did overcome the problem in not being able to ask or answer the clerk by reading aloud to myself the night before I went and was able to communicate with a rather raspy voice. It seemed I had my answer. Now I think different; the mind had in fact not lost its local language skills but had linked up with an inner voice that failed for another reason. The vocal cords were not the problem but the victim of human non-attachment to needlessly embed the link to something that had been overcame in vocabulary terms and enchanted to terms ultra beyond to anything known or reported in language or sign. Although I knew exactly what I wonted; could see it on the shelf; I had no real name for it. The sign was unprepared to relate to human equivalence the thing in itself. The formula and the taste was within my comprehension and not the name of said product. Although I knew what I had in mind; the mind had nothing for it. Can we in fact get along without language? Not as a spices! As social animals it becomes the animalistic side that we really fall to– so that the language concept comes into play; a real letdown after having knowledge of a superior nature without it. Does the mind simply overcome the play of emotions when language is finally deemed unnecessary? When talking about language; don’t forget the animal- human side of conveyance. The link is not so hard wired as we think. Mr.R.D.Hicks

By: rus

rus — Thu, 28 Jun 2012 16:57:01 +0000

i guess alphabets and pictograms and hieroglyphs and ideograms aren’t visual?
come on…

By: Simon Newman

Simon Newman — Mon, 25 Jun 2012 10:45:40 +0000

“Today, many of the most widely read texts emanate from blogs and social networking sites, such as Facebook. Authors of these sites may be non-readers who have little knowledge of effective writing and may have never developed an ear for language. Over the next century, a rise in “tone deaf” writing seems certain.”

I see almost the opposite effect: good writing attracts readers, so there is a major incentive to be clear, comprehensible and entertaining. Likewise, effective Internet communication requires the ability to write; there is a bigger premium on writing ability now than ever before. If you are semi-illiterate, everyone can see it now, it’s the modern equivalent of being semi-dumb.

By: David Brin

David Brin — Sat, 23 Jun 2012 19:28:05 +0000

A thought provoking rumination about how many of the world’s extant 6500 spoken languages are dying, while English and Chinese and Spanish rise.… And English speakers use less complex or precise speaking patterns. Worth some contemplation!

By: mikelorrey

mikelorrey — Fri, 22 Jun 2012 22:51:24 +0000

More efficient communication is always helpful, although one thing to be concerned about is something I illustrated in an article on The Libertarian Enterprise in 2001 "It's About the Trust", where progressive and totalitarianesque elements seek to move the political middle and change the interpretation of the foundations of our political union by redefining the words that place restraint upon government in their Constitution. As an example, the attempts by fascist types through the 20th century to redefine rights pertaining to "the people" as collective and not individual rights (2nd Amendment, 1st amendment, etc).

By: Leonid Korogodski

Leonid Korogodski — Fri, 22 Jun 2012 19:02:28 +0000

The fact that natural selection works on languages doesn’t mean that the total number of languages would go down in the future. Species go extinct in the world all the time, yet more appear. The general trend has been toward diversification, not simplification. The natural world now is much more diverse than billions of years ago. The same applies to languages. The British and American dialects were much closer to each other during the American Revolution than they are now, and no amount of increased communication will stop them from diverging into separate languages in near future.

By: Richard Riley Bushnell

Richard Riley Bushnell — Fri, 22 Jun 2012 17:50:57 +0000

Where do we stand on civility, morals and general good manners. Seems they have been replaced with quick communications, abbreviations, and in some cases they are nonexistent. We have lost a tremendous amount of our heritage and social good behavior.

By: Lori Rhodes

Lori Rhodes — Fri, 22 Jun 2012 14:39:48 +0000

The information within this article is most intriguing as it deals not only with ancient languages dying out, but also the shifts in language trends through human evolution. In viewing the chart (above) regarding the languages represented on the Internet, it appears English maintains its status as the most widely used or favored language for international business.

As per a shift to a more visual and image-based communication, people have always used hand gestures and visual cues to bridge language/cultural barriers. I would not be surprised to see Sign language become the international language. Studies, like England’s ‘Sign in Education’ (Robinson, 1997 http://www.signsforsuccess.co.uk/sfsimages/research/Tucker.pdf) have shown that children who learn to speak and Sign at the same time experience improved communication, literacy and math skills.

As per a Universal language, Wikipedia has an entry at (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_language), that suggests it is, “a hypothetical or historical language spoken and understood by all or most of the world’s population. In some contexts, it refers to a means of communication said to be understood by all living things, beings, and objects alike.”

I may be ‘old school’, or at least in the manner(s) by which I grasp the burgeoning technologies (taking a ‘bottoms-up’ approach) however; when researching anything, be it simple or complex, you must reduce all to a common denominator, breaking things down to their basic components.

In reducing languages to their common denominators, I’m inclined to follow the logic of using binary code, first espoused by Gottfried Leibniz in 1666 within his “On the Art of Combination” and (refined much later) by Claude Shannon in 1948 in “A Mathematical Theory of Communication”, used in the current worldwide telecommunications.

In this Technological Revolution, information is reduced to a series of ones and zeros. Given the complexities of telecommunication and its use of binary code, I am confident that “the 6,900 or so languages spoken on the planet” today, as well as the languages threatened to become extinct can be reduced to and preserved using binary code and that binary code could be deemed a/the Universal Language where information about ourselves for future generations of our civilization and civilizations whose existence we have yet to become aware is stored and commonly understood.

By: Robin Helweg-Larsen

Robin Helweg-Larsen — Fri, 22 Jun 2012 07:09:47 +0000

A very interesting post, which I am going to quote and paraphrase in my own business blog. I feel myself both encouraging and resisting the trends you outline.

On the one hand I write deliberately language-rich poetry, so packed with rhyme and complex phrasing that it is virtually unpublishable in the US and mostly appears in Ambit in the UK. On the other hand I am co-founder of a business that teaches business finance through board games, with an emphasis on social interaction and the physical movement of colored objects as a way of understanding foundational concepts — very limited lectures, explanations and readings, much more direct experience.

The future will see your identified trends operating more strongly by orders of magnitude. We are just at the beginning of brain-to-brain communication without the intermediaries of speech or gesture. What will happen to language then? Will we be able to avoid thinking in words? Obviously it’s possible — babies, animals and drunks do it all the time. How will we communicate? What parts of the brain will we develop, what will we neglect? What happens to language if we can communicate pseudo-psychically?

The least we can say is that existing trends will accelerate for the foreseeable future.