[foxglacier]

If nobody's reading them and nobody's writing them, then perhaps it doesn't matter. We could let Wikipedia-Greenlandic persist as its own evolved language that forks from the original.

> potentially pushing the most vulnerable languages on Earth toward the precipice as future generations begin to turn away from them.

OK? We have lots of dead languages. It's fine. People use whatever languages are appropriate to them and we don't need to maintain them forever.

[phantomathkg]

I thought the argument point is letting it die is OK, but letting wrongfully translated text, becoming the source of AI to chuck out wrongfully translated text is not OK.

[foxglacier]

Yea, it's kind of pure and good to delete it all. But I'm imagining some self-sustaining evolution of the language through an LLM-Wikipedia feedback loop.

[arthurjj]

This was my take from the article also. These languages are clearly dying and not many people speak them as their primary language so the human suffering is minimal. Which means keeping them around is a past time that some people happen to enjoy (unless there is a Saphir-Whorf hypothesis I'm missing)

But the sentence `well-meaning Wikipedians who think that by creating articles in minority languages they are in some way “helping” those communities` clearly shows the author hasn't really considered the issue.

[aucisson_masque]

I see that this comment get downvoted but I think we can agree on the facts that languages, just like species, die while other flourish. And that's fine.

Survival of the fittest, right ? Not enough people speaking Greenlandic, too complicated even for it's own population who would rather speak danish ? The very reason I'm speaking English is because it was forced military during the 19th century by the UK and since the 20th by Hollywood.

Just like a virus, if a language doesn't spread, it die.

[jiggawatts]

As an immigrant to an anglophone country, I noticed a few things:

When people have varying levels of capability with languages, they’ll switch to whatever is the lowest common denominator — the language that the group can best communicate in. This tended to be English, even amongst a bunch of native speakers of a common foreign language.

Moreover, this is context dependent: when talking about technical matters (especially computing), the Lingua Franca (pun intended) is English. You’ll hear “locals” switch to either mixed or pure English, even if they’re not great at it. Science, aviation, etc… is the same.

Before English it was French that had this role, and before then it was Latin and Greek.

The thing is, when the whole world speaks one common language like Latin or English, this is a tiny bit sad for some Gaelic tribe that got wiped out culturally, but incredibly valuable for everybody everywhere. International commerce becomes practical. Students can study overseas, spreading ideas further and wider. Books have a bigger market, attracting smarter and better authors. There’s a bigger pool of talented authors to begin with, some of which write educational textbooks of exceptional sparkling quality. These all compound to create a more educated, vibrant, and varied culture… because of, not despite the single language.

[overfeed]

> The thing is, when the whole world speaks one common language like Latin or English, this is a tiny bit sad for some Gaelic tribe that got wiped out culturally, but incredibly valuable for everybody everywhere.

I find this cultural Darwinism argument incredibly ironic, given how vocal factions in 2 of largest (native) English-speaking countries have been whinging about "their culture" being sullied by immigrants.

[foxglacier]

It's not ironic that separate people (jiggawatts and US/UK nationalists) hold separate beliefs. But here's a thought. Are you ironic for being one person holding contradictory beliefs? I doubt you have the same contempt for all people who want to maintain their own culture. For example, I'm sure you don't think that New Zealand Maori who want to popularize the Maori language in New Zealand are whinging about it and you wouldn't describe Maori culture in quotes as "their culture", implying it's not really theirs or not really a culture.

[overfeed]

> It's not ironic that separate people (jiggawatts and US/UK nationalists) hold separate beliefs

You are correct, but I never claimed that as the source of irony. To set the stage, we have English-speaking nationalists (your term) who obliviously benefit from the rest of the world getting on board the English train at the detriment of their own languages[1] (never mind the circumstances). If we were to accept the language-Darwinism perspective at face value, watching the winning side being salty about (the effects of) winning is incredibly ironic to me.

> I doubt you have the same contempt for all people who want to maintain their own culture.

Merely observing an ironic situation doesn't mean I have contempt for any group of people. You feel very strongly about the subject and are reading into way more than what I actually wrote.

1. The French language board tries to fight a good fight against Angloisms, but it's a losing battle. Other languages have no structures holding them up, and lose dozens to hundred of words per year. English media is pervasive and incessant.

[foxglacier]

> watching the winning side being salty about (the effects of) winning is incredibly ironic to me.

You mean the irony is people whose language became popular are salty about having immigrants corrupting their culture? That's a stretch of the word irony - it's like saying it's ironic that a successful athlete is unhappy about losing a competition because his previous success came about from other people losing. People who are competing do like to win and don't like to lose. That's completely normal non-ironic thinking.

> doesn't mean I have contempt for any group of people.

Describing their behavior as whinging and putting "their culture" in quotes shows contempt. I'll show you with the NZ Maori example. See if it looks contemptuous:

I find it ironic that vocal factions of the New Zealand Maori population are whinging about "their culture" being sullied by immigrants.

[don-bright]

We already see the 'best' LLMs switch between different languages while they are 'thinking'. It seems to me that the more languages it can 'think' in, the better off it will be. Different human languages have different concepts of time, numbers, nature, place, intention, relationships, and so forth and so on.

[thaumasiotes]

> Survival of the fittest on a long time horizon means the more diversity the better the survival rate will be.

This is just a misapplication of the analogy. For a language, "fitness" refers to similarity to whatever language is spoken by people relevant to you. Diversity is the worst quality a language can exhibit, and is the quality that causes dying languages to die.

There is no such concept as an external force coming in that certain languages handle better, allowing them to temporarily outcompete other languages. Existing pools of diversity are not protective against this, because it can't happen.

Also unlike genetic diversity, linguistic diversity does not need to be maintained as a legacy of the past. It is constantly being generated in much larger quantities than are desired. If you managed to perform the opposite of the Tower of Babel miracle and replaced every currently-spoken language everywhere in the world with a perfect monoculture, within 1-2 generations you'd be back to having mutually unintelligible varieties in different regions.