Discussion
The linguistics summer school in Leiden attracts the smartest, hardest working, most sincere and driven students imaginable. Every one of them wants to learn, wants to master their field and wants to make new meaningful advancements. I’m in awe of them.
And you know what I haven’t seen once all week? Haven’t heard anyone even mention using all week, among these people who love languages the most?
Large language models.
Had a very similar experience at a literary translation course. There was some discussion of them as an existential threat to the profession, and of general labor implications, but absolutely no interest in them as any kind of useful tool to produce good literary translations.
(What I have seen is a lot of people bent over rare books taking notes. And among those who do so digitally, a stylus is more common than typing)
Not sure if their preference for styli is an indictment of keyboards, of input methods, of Unicode itself, or a mix of the three.
@csolisr A lot of those people are studying antiquated or dead languages, so I'd guess that's the main thing. Personally, I wouldn't bother myself with learning to touch type Phoenician on a US English keyboard, for instance.
Install bonfire.cafe
Get the full app experience
