A Future of Fewer Words?: Five Trends Shaping the Future of Language
By Lawrence Baines
Natural selection is as much a phenomenon in human language as it is in natural ecosystems. An ongoing “survival of the fittest” may lead to continuing expansion of image-based communications and the extinction of more than half the world’s languages by this century’s end.
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Comments
A Future of Fewer Words
Recognition of the strengths and weaknesses of natural language is vital for effective use of natural language.
Natural language is hardwired in every human and its structure and constraints shape our perception of the world.
Thesis: A fundamental disconnect exists between structure of natural language and the structure of the real world.
Natural language is digital (based on phoneme or symbol combinations), sequential (one word follows the other in a serial fashion), very slow, and reductionist. By contrast the real world is analog, massively parallel and interrelated, very fast, and exponentially complex.
This structural disconnect causes natural language to be inefficient and insufficient for describing and managing dynamic complexity in the real world.
Many man made problems are made worse by the weaknesses of natural language.