Sorry, I should have made it more explicit that I wasn’t making any sort of objection to your general point, just wondering about the specific examples you used.
I completely agree that, whether or not there are Slovak terms that are good translations of “economies of scale” and “single point of failure”, there are definitely some languages, or dialects, or systems of technical terminology, in which there are some things that can’t be said so easily in some others, and that limits on what can easily be talked about are important, and that what communities’ ideas end up with a barrier to entry into public discourse will depend on the size of the community and the size and quirks of whatever larger community they’re embedded in.
I’m not wholly convinced, though, that the size of the larger community is really the point. (To be clear, this is no part of what I was saying before, it’s just something I notice while affirming that I agree with all those things I agree with.) If I try to get my head around the mechanisms whereby there aren’t (assuming that indeed there aren’t) Slovak terms for various standard economics concepts, the size of the Slovak-speaking world seems to enter in only quite indirectly: it’s something like “Slovakia isn’t a large market, so there aren’t a lot of translations of English-language economics texts into Slovak, so the main channel by which those terms would have got into the Slovak language is rather narrow, so those terms haven’t had much chance to take hold”. All of which might be true, and does have to do with the size of the community—but (1) only quite indirectly, and (2) it seems like there are other equally plausible mechanisms that have nothing to do with the size of the community. Maybe there are more economists in richer countries, and Slovakia is relatively poor, and so doesn’t have a lot of people who have been exposed to technical terms of economics. Maybe it’s relevant that Slovakia used to be part of the Soviet bloc where the prevailing approach to economics was very different from what we have in the West, and that has meant that there are fewer economists now, or that the ideas taught in economics courses are different, or something. Etc.
(Maybe you are actually proposing a direct effect of absolute community size: you need at least N people to make your community and its terminology visible enough for others to take notice. But it seems much more likely to me that the requirement there is for a certain fraction of the community, maybe a fraction “weighted by prestige” in some sense. I would expect the ideas and terminology of a 1000-person community in a country of 10M to have about the same amount of influence as those of a 100,000-person community in a country of 1B. I think.)
Sorry, I should have made it more explicit that I wasn’t making any sort of objection to your general point, just wondering about the specific examples you used.
I completely agree that, whether or not there are Slovak terms that are good translations of “economies of scale” and “single point of failure”, there are definitely some languages, or dialects, or systems of technical terminology, in which there are some things that can’t be said so easily in some others, and that limits on what can easily be talked about are important, and that what communities’ ideas end up with a barrier to entry into public discourse will depend on the size of the community and the size and quirks of whatever larger community they’re embedded in.
I’m not wholly convinced, though, that the size of the larger community is really the point. (To be clear, this is no part of what I was saying before, it’s just something I notice while affirming that I agree with all those things I agree with.) If I try to get my head around the mechanisms whereby there aren’t (assuming that indeed there aren’t) Slovak terms for various standard economics concepts, the size of the Slovak-speaking world seems to enter in only quite indirectly: it’s something like “Slovakia isn’t a large market, so there aren’t a lot of translations of English-language economics texts into Slovak, so the main channel by which those terms would have got into the Slovak language is rather narrow, so those terms haven’t had much chance to take hold”. All of which might be true, and does have to do with the size of the community—but (1) only quite indirectly, and (2) it seems like there are other equally plausible mechanisms that have nothing to do with the size of the community. Maybe there are more economists in richer countries, and Slovakia is relatively poor, and so doesn’t have a lot of people who have been exposed to technical terms of economics. Maybe it’s relevant that Slovakia used to be part of the Soviet bloc where the prevailing approach to economics was very different from what we have in the West, and that has meant that there are fewer economists now, or that the ideas taught in economics courses are different, or something. Etc.
(Maybe you are actually proposing a direct effect of absolute community size: you need at least N people to make your community and its terminology visible enough for others to take notice. But it seems much more likely to me that the requirement there is for a certain fraction of the community, maybe a fraction “weighted by prestige” in some sense. I would expect the ideas and terminology of a 1000-person community in a country of 10M to have about the same amount of influence as those of a 100,000-person community in a country of 1B. I think.)