Verbal e-volution: Language technologies are still shaping global culture

livemint.com:

In February 2024, stock prices in three continents hit new highs in a rally that should be of interest to linguists, philologists and others who study languages. Just about 15-18 months ago, Web3, comprising blockchain and crypto technology, was touted as the future and had the attention of venture capitalists—until Generative AI crashed the party. This wave saw Nvidia’s shares soar, as it is a key supplier of chips needed for advanced AI processing.

But what does linguistics have to do with all this? From the dawn of civilization, every major leap in language processing—whether it’s printing, transmitting, recording or retrieving information—has significantly altered our world. In modern history, it starts with Gutenberg’s printing press, which accelerated information dissemination. In the 19th century, we deciphered the Rosetta Stone written in Egyptian hieroglyphics to understand an entire civilization.

By century end, we got functional radio and telephone technology, which laid the foundation of the communications we take for granted today. From pigeon mail, this was quite a leap. Think also of Edison’s phonograph, which recorded and replayed Mary Had a Little Lamb, marking another advancement.

Similarly, Alan Turing’s decryption of Germany’s Enigma code during World War II was a linguistic feat as much as a mathematical one. The birth of modern computer science was greatly influenced by linguistics and philology. In the 1950s, Noam Chomsky coined the phrase “Colourless green ideas sleep furiously" to illustrate the difference between syntax and semantics, challenging the then-dominant statistical approaches to grammar.