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English is King but Technology May Trump All

posted by martyb on Sunday January 27 2019, @08:50PM   Printer-friendly
from the You-will-be-assimilated dept.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

English is currently one of the dominant languages on the planet due to the spread of the US and UK empires in the last century. With the rise of technology English may be made redundant with the advent of automatic language translation.

Just waiting for made up languages to become the norm (e.g. Esperanto), or hyper language learning.

Now ponder, as Douglas Hofstadter did, translating Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky from English into French, German, and Russian (Cyrillic .GIF) or (ASCII transliteration).

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 28 2019, @01:13PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 28 2019, @01:13PM (#792971)

    > It sounds a lot like Spanish or Italian but in those languages you can still pack a lot of punch into a single word; ¡dámelo! for example, powerful word. "(You) give me that!" Takes at least three words in English (unless you resort to baby-speak and say "gimme") and I don't think Esperanto can do any better.

    Chinese can pack quite some things into a character. Do you want that? Probably not.

    Anyway, “Donu!” should likely suffice given context, I think. At least that's how we use similar things in Russian (“Дай!”, “Дай сюда!”, “Отдай!” depending on what you mean) and it works just fine.