Discussion
I was on semi-holiday this week, which means I had more time to ruminate, which means that I have got unusually ped off about things that I am anyway ped off about.
Today's topic: we linguists have messed up. Big time.
And the result of our messing up is that Big Tech is currently redefining #language. /1
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
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
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
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
So now we are in the world of Large Language Models (note the 'Language' in there) and surprise, very few people are able to tell whether the machine is, in fact, generating language. Very few people even think to ask the question.
And it would be difficult to blame anybody because no one was ever told that language is a natural phenomenon with definitions, models and a whole scientific field behind it. /6
Our collective lack of knowledge about #language is allowing Big Tech to redefine it the way they want. /7
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