While involved in a rather OCD-driven google search this morning for the release year of a certain album by an obscure Peruvian chicha band from the 60s/70s, it occurred to me that it would be a lot easier to find (if it's even there somewhere) if our common languages had been built for the internet age in the first place.
I don't mean vocabulary, where certain words enter a language parallel to the widespread adoption of a new technology and become a normal part of that language ("online," "email," etc.). And I don't mean something along the lines of all of us speaking to each other in html code where little Billy's first word to his adoring parents might be "tag."
What would our shared language look like if it were constructed out of a world in which the internet is taken universally as a matter of course - like trees and the sky and animals or eating and sleeping? Something so ontologically present that spoken and written language would be incoherent without it built into the very structure and essence of the language?
Like, it would really help me right now if numerical years in Spanish were always preceded by the word "año" because I don't want to sift through links that have nothing to do with the year of the album. What if our language was built from the ground up like this, prepared inherently for google searches? Would this ultimately render google redundant or a technology that would never have been developed at all? If we started from today, never having spoken any other language except grunts and shouts, would language 10,000 years down the line be an inherently different thing than as we know it? Would communication?
10 comments:
I think we'd need something like diacriticals for speech, which could act as tags. Tonality as in Chinese spoken language might work, or hand signs as in ASL, or maybe we'd need both two together to be able to efficiently denote diverse parameters or coding unambiguously with one tag. But you couldn't talk and type at the same time and telephones would be a lot less useful.
I think this is not a first-language option, incidentally, unless we're talking about a descendant species of cyborgs. Language reflects our experience of the world and I think a child needs to experience that correspondence to learn it. Human infants can't experience or theorize the internet.
Sometimes I think I can play music out of my ass.
Realist. Okay, I guess I should make clear that this hypothetical would require that we are descended from cyborgs or something like that. I know Google couldn't be created otherwise. But the point here is what if we started to evolve natural languages from a world in which the internet was already put here by cyborgs, God, Vishnu, particularly smart and dexterous bonobos, etc?
Besides, as some linguists and cognitive scientists have it, the brain must be wired already to carry the basic structure of natural language upon which our actually existing languages are built. What if that wiring was not what it is but something else?
I find the question of brain wiring and language structure fascinating and unknown enough just as it is.
How is it, for example, that some languages are highly inflected and others not? And that if we learn one in infancy, we can still learn the other? Even more so for agglutinative versus other languages?
I guess I'm having a hard time imagining what you mean--still. Do these cyborgs interact with the Web like we do by typing at a computer interface? By thought? Do they "speak" in the real world or only online? Is the language Internet-ready or must it be transcribed like the language we speak?
Anyway, how much is Google about tags? Fundamentally it searches for text, not formatting.
"tags" had me thinking in terms XML and database querying.
You're right. "Tags" was misleading. I guess I'm specifically talking about google, but it could be put more broadly. But that would just make me more confused.
There's no big point here. Just Friday morning musing. Maybe it doesn't hold up as having any coherence at all. It certainly presumes that evolution is somehow suspended such that a very human technological product in the world is somehow not a human technology. That makes the idea nonsensical from the get-go.
But I'm not taking it all that seriously. Just wondering how ordinary language might develop if hominids began the long slog towards modern language with internet technology already in existence, like trees and birds. Maybe they/we would just bang on the machines with rocks for a hundred millenia or come to worship them as gods. As more complex language developed and as humans learned more and more about the technology would we see similar evolutionary paths as with our actual modern languages? Or would it be something radically different?
Honestly, it's a half-baked thought, and I'll cry uncle before I have to defend it any further.
Post a Comment