Unpopular Opinion
Welcome to the Unpopular Opinion community!
How voting works:
Vote the opposite of the norm.
If you agree that the opinion is unpopular give it an arrow up. If it's something that's widely accepted, give it an arrow down.
Guidelines:
Tag your post, if possible (not required)
- If your post is a "General" unpopular opinion, start the subject with [GENERAL].
- If it is a Lemmy-specific unpopular opinion, start it with [LEMMY].
Rules:
1. NO POLITICS
Politics is everywhere. Let's make this about [general] and [lemmy] - specific topics, and keep politics out of it.
2. Be civil.
Disagreements happen, but that doesn’t provide the right to personally attack others. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Please also refrain from gatekeeping others' opinions.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Shitposts and memes are allowed but...
Only until they prove to be a problem. They can and will be removed at moderator discretion.
5. No trolling.
This shouldn't need an explanation. If your post or comment is made just to get a rise with no real value, it will be removed. You do this too often, you will get a vacation to touch grass, away from this community for 1 or more days. Repeat offenses will result in a perma-ban.
6. Defend your opinion
This is a bit of a mix of rules 4 and 5 to help foster higher quality posts. You are expected to defend your unpopular opinion in the post body. We don't expect a whole manifesto (please, no manifestos), but you should at least provide some details as to why you hold the position you do.
Instance-wide rules always apply. https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/
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Rants like these make me kind of glad that we're not too far away from universal translator tech.
I think UTs are bad for society because they make us less likely to question our linguistic biases.
Language is ontology. I've been learning the local Indigenous language, alongside Aboriginal metaphysics, history, culture, and law. Aboriginal language helps Me change My perception of the world around Me, by rephrasing daily life. With new words come new perceptions. I can't learn everything I've been learning at the same depth in English. A universal translator would stunt that development.
And I think that effect isn't just academic, it's societal. A whole world of monolingual people using UTs would be a world of people who don't know how to question the preconceptions that their language encourages. It would be a less intelligent, more culturally stagnant world.
Worse, under capitalism a UT would probably be controlled by corporations. Give corporations control of language itself, and society will decay. We're already seeing the start of this with words like "unalive" that develop from corporate censorship. UTs deployed en masse would provide new opportunities for propaganda and control. Imagine an immigrant in a new country who doesn't bother learning the local language, and just trusts Grok or ChatGPT to translate everything. It would be a good world for billionaires and a bad world for people.
I dread the day society integrates UTs into daily life.
It seems like your fears are based in capitalism and then smeared over universal translators. There are thousands of unique languages. And people will learn the languages that allow them to converse with the most people. The only recourse left to people then is to pick a one (or, if they are lucky, a handful of) language(s) to learn. Without some universal translation, those fringe languages will be crushed and homogenized into the nearest/largest lingua franca because it's economical. Or they will remain isolated and become more a scholastic toy than a living language.
This comment also assumes learning a language naturally will be...outlawed(?) once universal translators are on the scene. It's very pessimistic in a way that is almost misanthropic. It presumes humans will use it only and precisely in the worst ways possible: to specifically refuse engagement with other cultures, to stunt their intellectual growth. When people already don't engage with other cultures or seek true intellectual or even emotional growth, because of the strictures of daily life.