A few times I’ve come upon the power of a common language in the last few days.

I’ve seen a video about a meeting of Amazonian pajés (shamans) and herbalists sharing and maintaining traditional plant use, facilitated through the common language Portuguese, I’ve read about the success of the Zapatistas where native people are helped in their efforts by the common language Spanish. And just now a post in Anarchism & Social Ecology mixing Spanish and English just as comfortably as my family juggles three languages at home.

Do you know of other examples?

I thought one of the non-evil possible uses of a LLM could be to create a new language like Esperanto, and ideally it would simply be a mix of English and Spanish, to connect a maximum number of people? Or are artificial languages always doomed to fail?

Edit: title, because there is not one language of solarpunk

  • keepthepace@slrpnk.net
    3·
    11 months ago

    What I find interesting in the evolution of LLMs nowadays is that they end up being multilingual by default. Still biased towards some languages but this is fixed by adding a more diverse dataset. They do not “think” in a language and are becoming very skilled translators.

    • schmorp@slrpnk.netOPEnglish
      1·
      11 months ago

      I am currently trying to translate documentation where UI entries are supposed to be “Target language” (Source language). AI just can’t handle the apostrophes and brackets, plus it keeps confusing the order of the languages. And that’s what I end up fixing, feeling a lot like a robot at the end of the day.