Vernacular Revolution
Before print, Latin was the language of knowledge, governance, and God. Print capitalism elevated French, German, English, and eventually hundreds of other vernaculars to the status of commercially viable and, eventually, politically sovereign languages. The vernacular revolution did not just change what was written; it changed who could write, who could read, and who could imagine themselves as members of a community whose founding text was accessible to them. The natural language interface is a vernacular revolution of structurally equivalent magnitude: it elevates ordinary human speech to the status of a building language, displacing the learned, specialized, gatekept language of code.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The sacred languages of the pre-modern world — Latin in Catholic Europe, Arabic in the Islamic world, Classical Chinese in East Asia, Sanskrit in Hindu India — organized knowledge hierarchies around linguistic competence. To read Augustine in Latin, one had to master a language whose acquisition required years of formal instruction accessible only to the clerical and