[delichon]

With current tech we are close to having a babel fish to put in our ear as a near universal translator. I have a dream that this will enable huge linguistic diversity, even down to one language per person, as translation costs approach nil. I could privately alias "blue" as "orange" and cause no confusion ... except for the increasingly niche application of meat speaking directly to meat.

How fast might a specialty language evolve if changes are no longer a barrier to understanding and propagate to the whole network in real time? Changes that used to take generations could happen in days or hours, meme by meme.

[pegasus]

Human languages aren't just a set of more or less arbitrary conventions relating groups of sounds with meanings. Language is probably humanity's greatest and most advanced technology, making most of the other ones possible. And it's also art and play, a repository of original wisdom encoded in the various etymologies. It steers thinking down certain pathways in ways which are hard to even point to - because it would be a bit like the finger trying to point at itself. They are collectively created artifacts which encode the wisdom of generations. The deeper, wider and more diverse that pool, the more powerful the product. A human language invented by one person or by a group of people cannot ever compare in depth and richness to the languages most people use to communicate and think.

[delichon]

Mighty rivers start as a trickle. Enough trickles and fetch happens.

[onlypassingthru]

>How fast might a specialty language evolve

Pretty fast, actually. At least if you leave it up to kids.†

† https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaraguan_Sign_Language

[AngryData]

I would expect the opposite, languages converging if for nothing else to please the ear.

Just look at unit systems. People go crazy over metric versus imperial units or old outdated units being used. And yet converting between units has never been easier. Many industries invented their own units to fit their use case, but once their products spread to national or global distribution everything gets standardized to the most common unit.

[627467]

While preservation and enablement of niche languages is enriching imho, another incentive for individualism - one person = one language - is just the destruction of the core value of human achievements. Another step towards a solarian[0] society.

[0] https://asimov.fandom.com/wiki/Solaria

[nkrisc]

But why would anyone want that? Having interpersonal communication gated behind some translation technology is some dystopian nightmare.

[svl7]

Reminds me of this possible development: https://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=3576

[fittingopposite]

BS. We don't even have training data for the more than 6000 languages in the tail of the distribution.