As noted in Part 1 of this post, the implicit timeline for big and small language projects, plus the global endangered language program adds up to a workload on multilinguality likely to last for decades before we achieve satisfying progress. …
“To imagine a language,” said Ludwig Wittgenstein, “is to imagine a form of life”.
We’ve entered the exponential age of constantly innovating, data-driven digital tech. And software is busy eating the word, not just the world. Vision, speech, and language research seem to be converging on a single processing model…
My feeling is that there is already widespread knowledge ABOUT endangered languages, as the new UNESCO Decade on the same topic shows. What's missing is not facts about different categories of endangerment, or numbers about X versus Y, but intelligent ideas about how to solve the problem (if it is really an existential problem) of how to maintain or sustain or revitalize endangered languages. The problem is huge and often poorly explained. We need good arguments about what it means to benefit from the content from these languages and embrace a green, inclusive, yet exponentially data-driven future.
At the heart of the upcoming UNESCO decade of endangered + revitalizing language projects, there’s one obvious yet curious fact: we can extract a “language” from its community setting of dialog and narrative flows, and manipulate it as an autonomous piece of knowledge. …
In the last 50 years or so, about 500 humans have been propelled from Earth into space in one way or another for brief periods. In future, far more astronauts will follow them, and human language will be spoken much more widely off-planet. What is at stake as we begin to language our way to the stars?
Beyond the current trend for unmanned rocket-launches aimed at the sub-orbital, orbital and lunar orbital market and more interestingly the remote target of Mars, the possibility of broader spacefaring as an integral part of our planetary destiny is now on the table for the post-2050 generation.
Some fear that space…
Poetry is language in free fall — no one is there to be held to account for its meaning. This is why machine verse can sound so convincing: it can be synthesized from anything in the canon, and challenges us to use our imaginations to make sense of it. …
Media technology used to be thought of as simply an extension of the human sensorium. Now it will become an extension of our entire existence.
Back in the 1960s, media theorist Marshall McLuhan expounded a simple story about the evolution of media technology: (alphabetic) writing, print, photography, film, radio and TV are all extensions of our natural sensorium. Alphabetic technology, for example, along with Chappe’s telegraph and similar devices, was a visual (hence inspectable) extension…
“Greater is he who prophesies than he who speaks in tongues” Paul of Tarsus, I Cor. 14.5
You can look back ten thousand years and try to understand how we got here and what kind of cycles and patterns underlie our historical development. Writers such as Arnold Toynbee or today’s…
