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by DiscourseFan 412 days ago
This means of communication is already outdated. If you live in an urban metropolis in the US and Europe especially, but increasingly everywhere, you cannot avoid using translation apps on an almost daily basis. I’ve had close intimacy with a partner whose language I barely spoke. The intricacies of language are suitable for technical tasks but language is something which is wielded at the bottom by force, the force of expression, of a gesture. The culture of the internet is building a language of its own with a non-linguistic grammar, as exemplified by memes which increasingly lack any immediately percievable linguistic content. And LLMs are the key to all this, they are the great mediator of the world, transforming any expression into any other. But the strength of the expression still lies in its use, far more than its content. Still, as I said, there is room for deep knowledge of the cultural intricacies intertwined into any particular language: but this is a regressive element in our expression, one which is being eliminated by industrial necessity.