20 years ago, I would read EGM because I liked talking about video games. When I talked with people, if they said something in the same order EGM had written it out, and that was more awkward than natural flow of conversation, I knew they weren't really thinking about things but repeating them. Where someone's words come from is very important for how I relate to someone.
Nowadays I that tool doesn't work, as there's a million sauces of content for every subject.
I still have the habit of searching for clues though. You can guess at a person's home by an unspoken assumption of what's outside, gleaned from context: neighbors, exploration (of nature or abandoned buildings?), danger, or outside doesn't exist we play minecraft. Closeted people often say 'partner' instead of a gendered term. Bosses who've read "How to win friends and influence people" tend to sound fangless and ask you to judge yourself for them. People on the spectrum are rarely a middle amount of precise: I'm either told things very explicitly or just get pointed at the direction of a thought and I can do the work to put it in context myself. (I love conversations with less verbal people, they are better worth understanding than Finnigan Wake.)
There is also sometimes, the view from nowhere is the authority, or the post-modern view that everything is subjective (that is in your Antilibrary). That a voice is from a place, a context, is more useful than those extremes.
Very interesting topic, Karl. It reminds me of a few things, like Esperanto (ever see the William Shatner horror movie where all dialog is in that language?), standpoint theory, and some US language politics over several dialects (African-American English) and Spanish. Also how most large AI projects tend to try for the view from nowhere.
PS: I taught "Antilibrary" to my technology seminar again and it made the students think very hard. Interesting how few of them were into blockchain this time.
I'm glad that story still has legs! I'm using some of its core ideas in the new novel. Yeah, blockchain failed to have its iPhone moment, whereas ChatGPT provided universal access early on. Doesn't really matter if it's more useful in the long run.
Blockchain has *developed* a skeezy reputation. It's a technology with great potential that has been ruined by a bunch of bad actors. I was actually given an award (in the UNESCO building in Paris) in 2018 for my work on its positive potential. But I wrote my book on it and now I'm on to other things.
Standardized language also makes it easier to communicate. A 40 character Shavian just makes keyboards more complicated to make and use.
I would have thought that text to speech technology solves much of the problem between accents, but not dialects, but AI potentially solves translations and dialects too.
There are plusses and minuses for localization. While I don't like McDonalds at all, let alone outside teh US, some people want the same wherever they go. This was the basis of making Holiday Inns teh same wherever you were in the US, and perhaps outside the US. OTOH, while SI units have become the standard in most Western countries, the US stubbornly uses its version of Imperial units.
Localization should be about making the local place fairly unique, from its architecture to the food. The downside is that this can impact tourism for people who cannot enjoy "foreign food" and insist on having the foods they know. The "International" style of architecture and interiors does make everywhere look the same, but is that so bad for international corporations? Perhaps zoning is a solution. Paris has maintained its 18th/19th century look by only allowing outward commercial architectural modernity outside the periphery of the center (apart from the Pompidou Centre).
But should European cities flattened during WWII be forced to rebuild in some local vernacular style. I don't think that makes sense, although the Corbusier and Bauhaus inspired architecture proved very problematic.
I prefer that there be variety. If you want Disneyfied local styles, then that is OK if they are sited next to contemporary office buildings. Just as restaurants can offer many different cuisines, let that be a choice for locals to make, based on demand. Everything else might benefit from a global standard - fixtures, fittings, power, internet, telephone service (including local emergency numbers), weights and measures. Just leave currencies optional. I can see technology could make non-physical services portable, from text and speech translators, to having local services be requested when calling for police or ambulances, using voice translation and smart calling.
There has always been a tension between maintaining an "unspoiled" local color and ease of access. We can romanticize the days of travel when places remained fairly untouched by international travelers because only the wealthy could afford to travel. Today we can decry the cruise ship loads of tourists "ruining" destinations, although they have helped locals increase their standard of living, but I think there is a net positive value in that increased travel, as long as tourists behave.
Bottom line, I disagree with your post and the suggested remedies. I think technology solves the language issue, and while I deplore the samness of low cost office buildings, I really like some of the outstanding and different architecture that has been built. [I even liked the Pompidou Centre back in the 1970s on a visit to Paris, although it is now a very dated design. Can you tell I am not a fan of "timeless architecture styles"?]
If I were to defend Shavian (I think the letter shapes are problematic) I would point out that it actually enables simpler typewriters, because our Roman alphabet actually has 52 characters (26 letters but in two cases). Shavian, for all its other faults, only has one case.
I once read a book on language by Deutsch [?] who made teh claim that teh shapes of our letters reflected the sort of lines and shapes we could see in objects in nature. IDK if this was pure speculation or not, but the Shavian letter/sound examples you gave seemed very unnatural in comparison. It would be interesting to see where object recognition was easier or harder vs our romance language alphabet.
I can see that the Shavian letter reversal could be invoked with a "shift key" as we use it for capitals.
As for the trickiness of pronunciation, English is almost made to be difficult. German is very simple and regular by comparison. As for the time to learn a language, Italian is the easiest, then English, and last Chinese. While Esperanto wasn't widely used, it was designed to be a universal language. The characters can be seen at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto
I've heard that about the shapes of letters too, so it must be true. :-) I'll check out the Esperanto characters, though the language itself doesn't interest me much. ...I like the idea of future space colonies all speaking Italian for maximum inclusivity, though.
Oh, I'm not suggesting we adopt Shavian here. I'm not proposing any particular "remedy" as I'm not even sure there's a problem. What I sense is a blind spot--even if only in myself--and am framing the surrounding ideas in different ways to see where this analogical thinking leads.
I had heard of the “view from nowhere” before but never connected the dots. It seems related to my own idea of Placeness. https://publish.obsidian.md/a14f/Blog/Internet+Technology/Placeness
"You can't take an accurate or meaningful photo of the deep Forest."
And why I don't carry a camera.
One can reproduce a tiny bit of it, for 1/60 of a second. But that's not the Forest.
The only media that comes close, is poetry, and that is often also only a small bit.
When I travel to new places, I also don't photograph them. I stop, slow down, experience, and whatever memories are made, that's it.
It's not a surprise to me that Shaw would want to invent his own way of writing English- he did that every time he wrote something!
Don't be afraid to post incomplete thoughts huh?
20 years ago, I would read EGM because I liked talking about video games. When I talked with people, if they said something in the same order EGM had written it out, and that was more awkward than natural flow of conversation, I knew they weren't really thinking about things but repeating them. Where someone's words come from is very important for how I relate to someone.
Nowadays I that tool doesn't work, as there's a million sauces of content for every subject.
I still have the habit of searching for clues though. You can guess at a person's home by an unspoken assumption of what's outside, gleaned from context: neighbors, exploration (of nature or abandoned buildings?), danger, or outside doesn't exist we play minecraft. Closeted people often say 'partner' instead of a gendered term. Bosses who've read "How to win friends and influence people" tend to sound fangless and ask you to judge yourself for them. People on the spectrum are rarely a middle amount of precise: I'm either told things very explicitly or just get pointed at the direction of a thought and I can do the work to put it in context myself. (I love conversations with less verbal people, they are better worth understanding than Finnigan Wake.)
There is also sometimes, the view from nowhere is the authority, or the post-modern view that everything is subjective (that is in your Antilibrary). That a voice is from a place, a context, is more useful than those extremes.
Very interesting topic, Karl. It reminds me of a few things, like Esperanto (ever see the William Shatner horror movie where all dialog is in that language?), standpoint theory, and some US language politics over several dialects (African-American English) and Spanish. Also how most large AI projects tend to try for the view from nowhere.
PS: I taught "Antilibrary" to my technology seminar again and it made the students think very hard. Interesting how few of them were into blockchain this time.
I'm glad that story still has legs! I'm using some of its core ideas in the new novel. Yeah, blockchain failed to have its iPhone moment, whereas ChatGPT provided universal access early on. Doesn't really matter if it's more useful in the long run.
Blockchain also has a skeezy reputation.
I paired it with "As We May Think" as imaginations of new tech.
Blockchain has *developed* a skeezy reputation. It's a technology with great potential that has been ruined by a bunch of bad actors. I was actually given an award (in the UNESCO building in Paris) in 2018 for my work on its positive potential. But I wrote my book on it and now I'm on to other things.
Bitcoin's story should be an instructive one.
Americans do pronounce "roof" sometimes. And Americans certainly do not promote the metric system, outside of the military and some scientists. :)
Standardized language also makes it easier to communicate. A 40 character Shavian just makes keyboards more complicated to make and use.
I would have thought that text to speech technology solves much of the problem between accents, but not dialects, but AI potentially solves translations and dialects too.
There are plusses and minuses for localization. While I don't like McDonalds at all, let alone outside teh US, some people want the same wherever they go. This was the basis of making Holiday Inns teh same wherever you were in the US, and perhaps outside the US. OTOH, while SI units have become the standard in most Western countries, the US stubbornly uses its version of Imperial units.
Localization should be about making the local place fairly unique, from its architecture to the food. The downside is that this can impact tourism for people who cannot enjoy "foreign food" and insist on having the foods they know. The "International" style of architecture and interiors does make everywhere look the same, but is that so bad for international corporations? Perhaps zoning is a solution. Paris has maintained its 18th/19th century look by only allowing outward commercial architectural modernity outside the periphery of the center (apart from the Pompidou Centre).
But should European cities flattened during WWII be forced to rebuild in some local vernacular style. I don't think that makes sense, although the Corbusier and Bauhaus inspired architecture proved very problematic.
I prefer that there be variety. If you want Disneyfied local styles, then that is OK if they are sited next to contemporary office buildings. Just as restaurants can offer many different cuisines, let that be a choice for locals to make, based on demand. Everything else might benefit from a global standard - fixtures, fittings, power, internet, telephone service (including local emergency numbers), weights and measures. Just leave currencies optional. I can see technology could make non-physical services portable, from text and speech translators, to having local services be requested when calling for police or ambulances, using voice translation and smart calling.
There has always been a tension between maintaining an "unspoiled" local color and ease of access. We can romanticize the days of travel when places remained fairly untouched by international travelers because only the wealthy could afford to travel. Today we can decry the cruise ship loads of tourists "ruining" destinations, although they have helped locals increase their standard of living, but I think there is a net positive value in that increased travel, as long as tourists behave.
Bottom line, I disagree with your post and the suggested remedies. I think technology solves the language issue, and while I deplore the samness of low cost office buildings, I really like some of the outstanding and different architecture that has been built. [I even liked the Pompidou Centre back in the 1970s on a visit to Paris, although it is now a very dated design. Can you tell I am not a fan of "timeless architecture styles"?]
If I were to defend Shavian (I think the letter shapes are problematic) I would point out that it actually enables simpler typewriters, because our Roman alphabet actually has 52 characters (26 letters but in two cases). Shavian, for all its other faults, only has one case.
I once read a book on language by Deutsch [?] who made teh claim that teh shapes of our letters reflected the sort of lines and shapes we could see in objects in nature. IDK if this was pure speculation or not, but the Shavian letter/sound examples you gave seemed very unnatural in comparison. It would be interesting to see where object recognition was easier or harder vs our romance language alphabet.
I can see that the Shavian letter reversal could be invoked with a "shift key" as we use it for capitals.
As for the trickiness of pronunciation, English is almost made to be difficult. German is very simple and regular by comparison. As for the time to learn a language, Italian is the easiest, then English, and last Chinese. While Esperanto wasn't widely used, it was designed to be a universal language. The characters can be seen at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto
I've heard that about the shapes of letters too, so it must be true. :-) I'll check out the Esperanto characters, though the language itself doesn't interest me much. ...I like the idea of future space colonies all speaking Italian for maximum inclusivity, though.
Oh, I'm not suggesting we adopt Shavian here. I'm not proposing any particular "remedy" as I'm not even sure there's a problem. What I sense is a blind spot--even if only in myself--and am framing the surrounding ideas in different ways to see where this analogical thinking leads.