Ian O'Byrne
@Wiobyrne@mastodon.social  ·  activity timestamp 4 days ago

The twist? As AI gets more sophisticated, success depends MORE on human communication skills, not less. The professionals thriving in 2025 aren't the ones who know how transformers work; they're the ones who can bridge the gap between human intent and machine interpretation.
Ian O'Byrne
@Wiobyrne@mastodon.social  ·  activity timestamp 4 days ago

Bottom line: Treat prompt engineering like any other professional skill.

Who else has noticed this pattern? What's your experience?

💡 Just published a deep dive on this at https://wiobyrne.com/the-linguistics-advantage/.

#AI#Communication#Productivity#ProfessionalDevelopment#Linguistics #PromptEngineering

wakest ⁂
wakest ⁂ boosted
Stefan Bohacek
@stefan@stefanbohacek.online  ·  activity timestamp last month

"In Mandarin Chinese, World Wide Web is commonly translated via a phono-semantic matching to wàn wéi wǎng (万维网), which satisfies www and literally means "10,000-dimensional net", a translation that reflects the design concept and proliferation of the World Wide Web."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web

via https://mastodon.social/@mcc/114605076806447333

#internet#TheWeb#WorldWideWeb #chinese #language #linguistics
Stefan Bohacek
@stefan@stefanbohacek.online  ·  activity timestamp last month

"In Mandarin Chinese, World Wide Web is commonly translated via a phono-semantic matching to wàn wéi wǎng (万维网), which satisfies www and literally means "10,000-dimensional net", a translation that reflects the design concept and proliferation of the World Wide Web."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web

via https://mastodon.social/@mcc/114605076806447333

#internet#TheWeb#WorldWideWeb #chinese #language #linguistics
Stefan Bohacek
@stefan@stefanbohacek.online  ·  activity timestamp last month

Reminds me of the localization efforts on Mozilla's Firefox OS several years ago.

"Ibrahima Sarr, a Senegalese coder, led the translation of Firefox into Fulah, which is spoken by 20m people from Senegal to Nigeria. “Crash” became hookii (a cow falling over but not dying); “timeout” became a honaama (your fish has got away). “Aspect ratio” became jeendondiral, a rebuke from elders when a fishing net is wrongly woven."

https://archive.is/2025.01.09-014218/https://www.economist.com/international/2014/09/27/cookies-caches-and-cows

#technology #language #linguistics #translation #localization
Aurelie Herbelot (she/her)
@minimalparts@denotation.link  ·  activity timestamp last month

Now, linguists rarely make the news. They don't get interviewed by the TV. They don't feature in novels. Hollywood villains are usually chemists, biologists or physicists, but not linguists. Because language doesn't kill, does it?

(Well, okay, there is the story of Edward II being allegedly executed as the result of an ambiguous Latin message to his gaolers. But it must have been a glitch and the story is only alleged.) /4
Aurelie Herbelot (she/her)
@minimalparts@denotation.link  ·  activity timestamp last month

Schools do not teach #linguistics. I got out of school knowing about the theory of relativity, genetic recombination and chemical structure. All I was ever taught about language is that there are lots of irregular verbs in French and you have to learn the conjugations by heart because it is important to speak proper.

Which could be seen as anti-linguistics at its peak. /5
Aurelie Herbelot (she/her)
@minimalparts@denotation.link  ·  activity timestamp last month

There is that joke among linguists that no one knows what linguistics is. A lot of people think linguistics is about speaking different languages, which at some point prompted this excellent cartoon by Bethany Carlson, entitled 'The linguists strike back'. /2

From https://specgram.com/CLXXV.1/03.carlson.cartoon5.html:
Aurelie Herbelot (she/her)
@minimalparts@denotation.link  ·  activity timestamp last month

So just for clarification, #linguistics is the science of language. And like any other science, it builds models of its object of study by gathering observations, building theories and evaluating such theories. Depending on the strand of linguistics involved, models can be expressed in various ways, including formal logic and mathematical representations. /3
🇪🇺 Yet Another Owl 🕯️🕊️
@61ennepi@mastodon.social  ·  activity timestamp 3 months ago

Your personality changes when you speak another language, but that’s not always a bad thing / The Conversation

Un bell'aticolo sul Principio di Relatività Linguistica, formulato da Whorf negli anni '30.

Languages don’t just allow us to communicate – they also shape our perception of what surrounds us, and ourselves.

https://theconversation.com/your-personality-changes-when-you-speak-another-language-but-thats-not-always-a-bad-thing-245079

#Whorf#Sapir
#languages #linguistics #sociolinguistics #pragmatics#languageLearning