Posted by Anon84 7 days ago
The BBC admitted more and more announcers with regional accents; and in 2017, it launched an online news service in West African Pidgin English.
You can see this by how those companies operate with their divisions in the Middle East. You won’t see a pride flag. If you were really taking a stand, you’d fight the hard fights, lose money. Not just do things where you think you can get away with it.
In fact, if I’m not mistaken, most of those companies changed their policies on DEI hiring as soon as Trump said anyone with contracts with US government could not participate in DEI or they lose those contracts. But there is no uproar all.
But small confused individuals belive this.
So I'm wondering why they won't learn a new language to bring more diversity.
Q. What do you call someone who speaks 3 languages? A. Trilingual Q. What do you call someone who speaks 2 languages? A. Bilingual Q. What do you call someone who speaks 1 language? A. American Q. What do you call an American who speaks multiple languages? A. CIA
I would rather do the opposite and try to learn as many languages as possible. I can’t imagine the fun of reading “Cien Años de Soledad” in Spanish or Dostoevski in Russian.
I side with the utilitarian here. You're in a very small class of people if the inherent joy of language learning is so strong for you that that sounds like a good idea.
Like, think of all the other things you could do with that time. Why not go to the gym instead or something? Why not read 20 classics instead of 2?
Because as Nabokov said, what a scholar one could be if one could only read five or six books. Real knowledge lies in depth, full exploration, individuation. Knowing five books totally, having one unique experience, is worth infinitely more than checking books of your Goodreads list.
Oppenheimer learned Sanskrit just to read the Gita. Was that "utilitarian"? No, but he didn't care, because utilitarianism is a suckers philosophy anyway. Don't try to be good by some stupid quantitative metric, try to do something interesting.
Let's take him at face value, though. Why not read 2 classics 10 times instead of just once, then? Most every language with a writing system has at least 2 classics these days. Finnish, for example: Sinuhe egyptiläinen and Seitsemän veljestä. English: The Bible and Bart Simpson's Guide to Life. Etc.
Re/ Oppenheimer, I wouldn't necessarily point at the guy who rained atomic hellfire upon Japan as someone with an especially sound moral compass, or even an interesting view on anything except how to dispense violence at scale. It is true there's a lot of violence in the Gita, so, I dunno, maybe he was just trying to read it as a self-insert fic or something. I don't think you have to be a utilitarian to say he probably did a lot of really bad things, in fact I think it helps not to be. A deontologist can at least say "I don't care if you think someone else will do it anyway, it's still bad and you shouldn't pull that lever."
I think our time scales are on different scales. I treat this as a lifelong pursuit and savour it slowly in a leisurely manner. I don’t need to sacrifice anything that way.
This is an interesting point where our experiences totally differ. I have myself read a few classics in both original and translation, between the English-Latin-Spanish triumvirate, such as Cien Años de Soledad as you mentioned. I percieved little if any drop in quality between Marquez and the translation - indeed I often thought the translated work was superior to the original. It's not a classic in the same vein, but I similarly found the modern Latin translations of Harry Potter were much more fun than the original English prose, which even as a kid felt very workaday and even uninspired at times to me.
So I see this more as evidence that you put a very high aesthetic value on linguistic purism than anything else. You don't just want the thing, you like working really hard to get the original thing. You like pushing the boulder up that hill. To be clear, I consider that an extremely commendable character trait, I just also think it means you're living on another planet compared to most of the population. Which isn't a bad thing, it's nice here.
>I don’t need to sacrifice anything that way.
It may be a sacrifice you're happy to make, but you are absolutely making some kind of large tradeoff every time you invest 500-1500 hours into learning a new language to C1 level, man. Like come on. That's like the economic definition of an opportunity cost.
The Indian subcontinent is ancient, and so is its literary tradition. It's possible that truly ancient works like the various parts of the Mahabharata genuinely can't be translated at a high enough level of quality - because they actually happened. They are not entirely fictional accounts of a time and place so fundamentally different to our own, that no attempt at a translation within a secular context could work well, because the whole semantic space of modern language is just too divergent from it. It would be like handing a caveman a copy of Accelerando or something. I did know one guy in college who learned Aramaic for a few years years, and eventually recoiled in horror and stopped because this was the conclusion he came to.
I just want to be as close as the original experience as possible, and it maybe my naive thinking that original languages capture that nuance better?
However your point about English-Latin-Spanish triumvirate is interesting and may explain your reasoning. Indian works like Mrityunjaya or Godān can easily be read in many Indic languages without any drop of quality.
You might be surprised but I’ve actually found German translations of Mahabharata or Tripitaka to be much better then English ones.
I wouldn't call reading Dostoevski fun in any language (and I did read it in Russian) :-)
I agree with your point regarding English however, I think everyone should learn it regardless and I can't help but feel like it's a lighthearted language.
I wonder if others are the same, but I feel like a different person based on the language I speak.. somehow I'm "kinder" (is that the right word?) when I speak English for example..
It seems that Americans can never win. Either the most racist xenophobic people in the world that deserve to have foreigners take their country over. Or, they’re fake cosmopolitans larping. Of course the real answer is that people are just envious of Americans. But we won’t go into that.
It’s true that AI is making nearly any intellectual endeavor pointless from a necessity standpoint. But that’s OK, we’re going to be able to intellectually dive into things that we actually want to do for enjoyment in the future. People will still learn languages and study whatever they want.
I find foreign language is interesting and fun. I don’t know if it’s the brain stimulation or just the sheer joy of having a secret language that many people around me don’t understand.