?? Babel, or the Necessity of Chinese

The setting depicted in "Babel, or the Necessity of Violence" introduces a fascinating concept where a magic that silver bars have the ability to solidify the linguistic disparities. The quote "We capture what is lost in translation – for there is always something lost in translation – and the bar manifests it into being" illustrates its function.

The protagonist, Robin, adopted by Prof. Lovell from China, is seen as a vital for the manifestation of magic since he can think both in English and Chinese. Moreover, he is viewed as the hope for future silver bar extraction. Here, the author prophecies the exploitable resource between Chinese, a logographic language, and English, a phonetic language, in their distinct “untranslatability”.

Coincidentally, Wendler et al. (2024) investigate the role of English as a pivotal language in LLMs, proposing that the model's internal lingua franca is inclined towards English concepts rather than the language itself, "in a semantic, rather than a purely lexical, sense". This echoes Steven Pinker's idea that language not only serves as a means of communication but also influences our way of thinking and cognitive structure. Technically, Wendler et al. (2024) hypothesise the impact of tokenisation on language-specific tokens, suggesting that the detour through English is less pronounced when such tokens are available (In experiments, they consciously selecting Chinese with 100% single-token words contrasts with 13% for Russian, 43% for German, and 55% for French respectively). It naturally leads one to contemplate the resulting conceptual space if Chinese were selected as the pivotal language.

Wendler, C., Veselovsky, V., Monea, G., & West, R. (2024). Do Llamas Work in English? On the Latent Language of Multilingual Transformers (arXiv:2402.10588). arXiv. [https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.10588](https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.10588)