This is an old question for scholars in humanities. But what does concist of one’s ‘identity’? As most of the independent countries still have strong regulation on their ‘national language’, and as history education is language is two inalienable features in bringing up ‘national’ citizens, I’ve been wondering what would happen if different countries can make a common history books which can be read to all of the citizens around the world. However, for this to be possible,
For me, the failure of ‘Esperanto’ stemmed partly from its heavy dependence on Roman roots, and partly from its ignorance of the ‘power game’ which is deeply embedded in regional languages. According to linguists, many of the existing languages are under the threat of extinction, mostly because of English becoming a de facto lingua franca of the world. For the countries which still preserve their national languages, such as France, Spain, Russia, Japan, or China have the ability to keep their independence both in economic terms and political terms.
Although there has been a large number of [fictional languages],
Then the question is, why does brain so heavily depend on languages in creating concepts, remembering those and thus create some new world orders (of the speakers and thus the world as a whole)? So the essential difference between paintings (which can be read as ‘semantics’ of their own) and language is in the power of ‘granularity’ which can be achieved only through languages. Language can create new concepts, by dissecting and reassembling the phonemes of different languages. Linguistic system is a system of ‘meanings’, and this meaning can be woven with totally different structures and components. This is why scientists have used various means of meaning systems, including music and equations, to find ‘extraterristrial entities’. One cannot expect that differnt species living outside the earth or even outside thie galaxies to speak the same languages or even have the same meaning systems with the humans, as human language is different from Thus, for me, Artificial Intelligence is a way to find ‘new way of practicing languages or science or whatever meaning creation system’ with the utmost human imagination. Although AI is related to mathematics behind 4th automation revolution for the most of the people and media, for me, Artificial Intelligence is a way of scientists’ hope (be them vain or fruitful) to create a totally different system of languages.
This is partly the very point where scientists (or machine learning experts) are still struggling with, though this can be quite easily resolved, from my point of view. Language is not only about rules, as machien learning experts usually thin it is. However, language is a medium of creation, for novelists and poets, and even for most of the people, language is a repository of ceaseless creation. People in almost every linguistic society depends on abbreviation for the proficiency of language, and this has not yet been considered in machine learning cohorts. Maybe they can try to figure out the ‘universal rule’ of linguistic abbreviation across the different linguistic communities. Second, language use can be highly arbitrary, not orderly. Think about Ulysses. What kind of meaning can the readers draw from the book, unless they can’t understand the world the writer used to live in, the overall environment the writer used to inhabit? Without historic understanding of literature, thus the ‘congregation of the languages’, nlp is bound to be failed, and this is why nlp is not only about machine learning algorithms but also about teaching the machine the whole human history.