The future of language isn't set in stone

In November, 1922, Howard Carter, the British archaeologist, made what was to be one of the greatest archaeological discoveries of the 20th century – the tomb of a pharaoh, still full of treasures, in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings. This tomb, which had lain undisturbed for 3,250 years, was that of a boy king, Tutankhamun, and the treasures he was buried with have since told us an enormous amount about royal life and death in Ancient Egypt.

 

But how did Carter know whose tomb it was?  

 

The answer is obvious – he read the hieroglyphics. But only a hundred years earlier this wouldn’t have been possible...

 

As Napoleon and his army explored Egypt in the 1790s, scholars were confounded by the unintelligible language they found inscribed in stone all over the country – Egyptian hieroglyphics. We can only imagine their sheer frustration at knowing that the walls of these spectacular temples, monuments and palaces really could talk, really did have ancient stories to tell – if only the hieroglyphics could be deciphered.

 

This year marks the bicentenary of French scholar, Jean-François Champollion, finally cracking the code and lifting the veil on this ancient language that had been lost to time.

 

Key to unlocking this understanding was the Rosetta Stone – a stele inscribed with a decree by King Ptolemy V in 196 BC in three languages – demotic (the ancient Egyptian language), hieroglyphics and Greek.

 

The whole story, from the discovery of the Rosetta Stone in Egypt in 1799 by Frenchmen, to its landing in London in 1802 against the backdrop of the Napoleonic war, could certainly be made into a blockbuster heist movie or an Emmy-award winning TV show.

 

Copies of the Rosetta Stone were cast directly on the slab, stored in large chests, and then loaded onto boats for several weeks on a perilous sea voyage. Scholars then worked tirelessly on understanding it  ̶  sharing their work and cross-checking their discoveries. Eventually they produced a research paper that detailed what the hieroglyphic symbols meant. It had taken Champollion and the other scholars 22 years to crack.

 

With the technology at our disposal today, it is likely that Egyptian hieroglyphics would have been cracked much sooner.

 

A technician could for example take a picture of the stone on their smartphone and send it instantly over the internet to colleagues all across the world. Machine Learning programmes and AI-driven algorithms would then discover, classify and clean the data from the stone  ̶  helping translators swiftly unlock the secrets of one of the most mysterious languages in the world.

 

Technology has advanced so much that you can now decipher hieroglyphics with your computer without any prior knowledge – and this works with other languages too.

 

The internet, now used by billions of people in the world, has led to a change in human habits that is having a dramatic impact on language. With so much content available, people have shorter attention spans, so organizations and individuals have learnt that in order to communicate effectively, they need to ‘cut through the noise’ – using shorter sentences, a simpler vocabulary, and even using emojis instead of words – especially in social media. This is also a direct consequence of the early limitations of technology. With SMS and Twitter having restricted character counts, people found other ways to deliver their message  ̶  but with fewer letters.

 

These needs and limitations have become a trend. The number of pages written in Simple English on Wikipedia keeps rising and has now surpassed Greek. Companies’ tone of voice guidelines are following the same path  ̶  writers and translators must use simple sentences, layman’s terms, and be ’direct and engaging‘. And one way to be engaging is to use words that everyone understands. This is also the result of the huge growth in online content  ̶  there simply isn’t the time to read everything we want to, so we spend very little time actually reading the content and instead train our brain to ingest words and language patterns.

 

In fact, this rise in simplification has a parallel trend that we see in all the main Western languages  ̶  the use of tech-driven English words to cover concepts and terms that are not readily available in the local language. The unstoppable and fast evolution of new technologies has accelerated the need for new words to describe innovations. Neologisms and loanwords are constantly used and added to our everyday language. Plus, English has become so influential that speakers almost always use the English word instead of its translated counterpart  ̶  even when it exists. New term usage, especially in the high-tech field, spreads at lightning speed, leaving nearly no time for another language to adapt. In French for example, people will use terms like ’email‘ or ’cloud‘, but they are just the tip of the linguistic iceberg.

 

While this language blend, driven largely by new technology, may lead to the unification of languages, or at least alter significantly the way languages evolve, technology can also help remove the language barrier when people fail to understand one another. In Decision to Leave, a South Korean movie directed by Park Chan-Wook, a Korean police detective and a Chinese nurse use a text-to-speech translation app to communicate with each other when they need to fill a linguistic gap in their respective languages.

 

This communication technique, used in a non-science-fiction movie, shows just how important language technology is becoming in our lives. We are entering a new era where global understanding is paramount to individuals and companies alike.

 

It’s no surprise that language and technology exert considerable influence on one another. After all, they share the same ultimate purpose: to connect everyone. But who knows how they will impact each other in the future? As the saying goes, ‘The future is not set in stone…’