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The future of language

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Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture
The future of language
Some predictions about the future of language that seem to fit EP fairly well: http://lifeboat.com/blog/2012/06/a-future-of-fewer-words
Extropian
DivineWrath DivineWrath's picture
Re: The future of language
Thanks for the link. I plan to read it again later.
otohime1978 otohime1978's picture
Re: The future of language
Interesting. Although, it may have to do less with the introduction of images, and more with the greater proliferation of those previously unable to publish their thoughts publicly. Just because a creature thinks does not mean that its thoughts are of 'quality', as it were. The internet has given the everyman a soap box to stand and speak upon; and it could be possible that, rather than language receding, we're just seeing the true level of modern human intelligence... and it is not as high as we once thought. Just my two bits, I guess.
[size=6][i]...your vision / a homunculus on borrowed time Katya Bio: http://eclipsephase.com/comment/46253#comment-46253
The Green Slime The Green Slime's picture
Re: The future of language
There's always a lot of negative alarmism around language evolution. Personally I'm not convinced that transcribed mouth-sounds are an optimal format for conscious beings to communicate by, certainly not on profound levels, and the sooner we transcend the better. Think about what's happening now: I am referring to the dictionary in my mind, transcribing strings of characters to elicit your subjective memories of the corresponding mouth-sounds, which you then match to the dictionary in your mind, and hopefully, if both our dictionaries match, communication is achieved. It's not a terribly efficient process, certainly not compared to, say, encoding my idea in an image for instantaneous mental transmission (even if it is Courage Wolf or Skeptical Fry). I find this concern the most irksome...
Quote:
[i]While there are benefits to becoming more visually astute and more aurally discriminating, the areas of the brain associated with language are also associated with critical thinking and analysis. So, as the corpus of language shrinks, the human capacity for complex thinking may shrink with it.[/i]
Just because we're currently programmed to run our mental processes through words does not mean we have to cling to this operating system forever, or that we can only understand those aspects of reality which we can verbally signify. It is possible to [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_thinking]think without words[/url], which worked rather well for Einstein. Note also that many truly great authors, from Shakespeare to Joyce (both of whom hacked and "ruined" the English language moreso than an entire generation of lolspeak text-junkies) have intuitively understood that the ne plus ultra of language is the word not spoken or read, but beheld. How large does a vocabulary need to be to encapsulate reality? Joyce and his orgies of neologisms comes closest, and fails. But what he points toward is something like the persistent hallucination of the entoptic visual experience (or the psilocybin peak or DMT flash) in which language is not a representation of reality: it [i]is[/i] reality. The cumbersome mouth-sound dictionary-matching game is not really relevant when the mind can project a synaesthesic sculpture of pure felt experience.
GreyBrother GreyBrother's picture
Re: The future of language
Many people are traditionalists. Which is actually not that bad, as change can mean diverting fromt he safe path to an unknown one which may endager us. What many people regarding language don't grasp is, that there are no "pure" languages. Take german from example, listen a german-speaker from Berlin, one from Dresden, another one from Munich, compare it with somebody from Zürich, Vienna and Innsbruck. Language already diverts hard, but shorter subjective distance to other language groups means exchange of language attributes. I hail from northwestern austria, but i associate very close with people from northern germany and from the internet. So my whole language is already a clusterfuck between Lower Austrian German, some Prussian ways to speak and enough Netspeak that my grandma doesn't understand me. And people get pissed off when people make the same writing/speaking mistakes on a large scale? Doesn't make sense