Obligatoric Babelfish reference:
Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.
this post was submitted on 11 May 2026
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Showerthoughts
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Let’s get ai into the right hands first and make it sustainable for this planet.
Helping people understand each other is in the opposite of the interests of those with power and wealth.
Here, just let me put this fish in your ear.
Oh dear. I hadn't thought of that. poof
The issue would be the languages having different syntaxes (syntaces?).
I dont know how well LLMs work translating chinese to english, but for the uses i give it: spanish, french, german and english, i dont see any issues. I did have some issues translating russian to english though... the stupid bot decided that i invented a modal verb
I still think we should agree on a universal sign language and then have every country teach it in school for all years of public school.
I agree but the esperantists will be annoyed by us choosing a different language
There's dozens of them!
Why do you think universal sign language would be better than universal spoken language?
we should agree on a universal sign language
Have I got an xkcd for you!
there are 6 competing standards!
Now 7
That would be not very accessible for people with sight or hand mobility issues. We'd need a spoken form of it, too.
We will never be able to have a perfect international language but considering all of the difficulties involved in creating an international that people around the world could speak, sign language that “only” alienates a small percentage of the population would be a huge improvement over the current system
It would, but we also can do better
We'd need a spoken form of it, too.
We have, like, 3 of those: logban, Esperanto, and ..lochebem?
yeah I just kinda figure we would never agree on a spoken one but I think sign language is doable. Then also would be a huge boon for those who have to use it.
Impossible, as the structure of language is not the same so you will always have lag or you need context to get the right meaning of a word. If someone is going to a ball, are they going to a dance, or getting a toy off the ground?
Anyone who knows at least two languages can tell you that you need to listen to the whole sentence before you can start translating. Usually there’s something in the end that changes everything. In many cases, the word order is more or less reversed, so you have to start translating from the end.
It's still not impossible, since professional humans can do it too. It'll never be 100% accurate though and that's just something we have to accept.
chat the entered japanese
Turkish the chat to also enter it did
Seems like a lot of asian languages follow this structure, a bunch of Indian languages are like this as well
Indeed Japanese the chat entered.
dattebayo!
...nai
yo!
chat the entered japanese
I felt it was imminent. My bro married a beautiful girl from japan, and she's so patient; but, even being marginally fluent in Thai and Mandarin as well as his French and English experience - thus, super plastic for languages - Japanese is still so hard. It seems to be THE poster-child for inscrutably challenging second-languages!
(Hmm. He needs to watch more anime maybe?)
Maybe just get AI to the point it knows that I’m taking my toy to the dance, and remembers that for the next piece of the convo?
Doesn't this already exist?
Yep I have some. We've been waiting for them to add Bulgarian so my husband can use them to learn.
It does.
ai investment sould go to public education so we can all learn whatever language we like
Right?
It drives me nuts that they want to spend trillions of dollars on technology to write for people instead of teaching people how to write.
As they say, "suck a man's penis, satisfy him for a day. Teach a man to suck a penis, and he'll insist instead you just do the sucking again this time."
https://support.apple.com/en-us/123185
Apple already has this, and I think google or Samsung also have something similar.