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Jonsj t1_ja2ca3v wrote

Reply to comment by Adghar in How far off are we from not needing to learn languages? by AmericanMonsterCock

Why? Language is just a friction that stop us from communicating, why did we learn how to stop washing clothes by hand? Or run instead of flying?

It's just a block, something that makes life harder, not easier. It's a tool, you would learn far more if you could talk to everyone, far more perspectives and ways of looking at thing's.

People would understand each other better, less misunderstandings. You don't sound like a Luddite, you sound like someone that thinks the status quo has a benefit, just because it had been this way, not because it has an actual benefit.

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Shot-Job-8841 t1_ja2qykp wrote

> Language is just a friction that stop us from communicating

There’s an entire school of psychology that considers language to be both the medium and the message. The idea is that your thoughts are shaped by language.

Calling it “just friction” is a gross oversimplification that treats vast amounts of salient nuance as so much obsolete baggage. Language is not a vestigial organ to be resigned to some psycho-cultural waste bin.

The wide variety of languages in the word provide more material for innovation: certain concepts are genuinely easier to express in specific languages because there is no truly appropriate equivalent.

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Jonsj t1_ja4617n wrote

Within one language there is plenty of jargon and it constantly developes to fit the needs of the user.

This always happens with cultural, people confuse the function of a language (to communicate) with something special in of itself.

A good example is theater, theater used to be the dominant form of long form narrative entertainment, it was one of the best ways to satisfy the need people felt for this kind of entertainment. Now it's movies, or even tv-series. Poetry used to be very popular, now we moved on. How do you know that innovation is driven by different languages? The lingua franca of science is English and the majority of innovations are published in English.

If 10 people in a room all speak the same language, 10 people in the other room speaks all different languages, which group has the best chance of trading ideas?

Innovation comes from the the mixing of ideas, this is best understood if people can understand each other. Science would not be were it is if there were not a common understanding, that's actually one of the first thing you learn. Jargon, you learn the language of your discipline, to better understand previous knowledge and to communicate your ideas to others.

If my teacher or professor speaks a different language than me, how does that foster innovation? It does not, cooperation comes from understanding each other, not not understanding each other.

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Shot-Job-8841 t1_ja46nft wrote

Poetry is still very popular where I live, which brings me to my point. I feel like you’re dismissing alternative perspectives without giving them adequate consideration because they don’t correspond with your personal experiences.

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Jonsj t1_ja4a8ns wrote

It's not an alternate perspective, poetry used to be very popular, movies, tv shows etc has surpassed poetry.

11.7% read poetry once a year in the US, the average US citizen watch 141 hours of tv a month!

The scale is not comparable. Poetry was just a small comparison to make a point. I am more curious to hear how people not understanding each other is good for innovation?

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