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A linguist on Arrival's alien language (2016)

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Re: A linguist on Arrival's alien language (2016)

#51

Post by thefalcon »

awinter-py wrote: post #23
ihm wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think one point of Sapir-Worf is that aspects of different languages reinforce different concepts and ways of thinking. The language is often the bearer of the culture's store of concepts. One famous example is the Guugu Yimithirr language[0], which uses absolute directions (North, South, East, West) instead of relative ones (left, right, in front of, behind). So one would say, "Can you pass me the salt to your Nor…

natives of grid-based cities can always find north as well. Interestingly the street grid isn't a language feature.

My city is grid based, but downtown is rotated 45 degrees from the cardinal directions. This leaves me constantly confused and confounded while downtown, not least because the transition streets from downtown to the rest of the city are all at crazy angles (that is, unlike anything where I grew up).

As you say, this isn't a language feature. For me the concepts of N,E,W,S and the easy visualization matters more than my language. I picture a map, but not the words on the map.

Re: A linguist on Arrival's alien language (2016)

#52

Post by 3131s »

katamaritaco wrote: post #43
skizm wrote: post #25

What bothered me the most is that the way they start the "conversation" with the aliens is by using names and human concepts (walking, eating, etc.). I'm not a trained linguist or anything, but it seems to me they should start with concepts that are universal: mainly numbers. Maybe as a CS guy I'm biased (since my language is symbols and numbers), but literally every conceivable language has to contain numbers of som…

For what it is worth, numbers are not necessarily a 'universal concept'. One of the most talked about examples is Piraha[0], a language which doesn't really represent numbers. This is interesting because a study done by Everett and Frank[1] shows that this can actually have effects on cognition, providing some evidence for the Sapir-Wharf hypothesis[3] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirah%C3%A3_language [1] http:/…

One of the reasons Everett is talked about so much is because his claims are controversial. Many linguists have criticized his methodologies. I have a background in linguistics but have never looked into Everett's work too thoroughly, but from what I have seen I am skeptical of his claims that Piraha lacks recursion. Still, an interesting line of inquiry and it would be nice if there were enough linguists to actually generate a wide body of research on the many endangered and minority languages. As it stands now, most languages are dying out almost completely undocumented.

Re: A linguist on Arrival's alien language (2016)

#53

Post by shas3 »

dudeonthenet wrote: post #17

It's also worth making the distinction between the movie and the impressive short story that the movie is based on, which the article completely fails to mention: Ted Chiang - Story of Your Life [1] I've read Chiang's book about two years before the movie aired and it really is top-notch speculative fiction that I highly recommend to any Sci-Fi lover. Even though Denis Villeneuve, Eric Heisserer and Ted Chiang himsel…

[spoiler] Also, the story clearly has a theme of a person being a helpless observer of their own life (prescience or not (see Gwern's post [0]). The movie has a time-travel twist that's very, to use an indian term, "masala".

[0] https://www.gwern.net/Story%20Of%20Your%20Life

Re: A linguist on Arrival's alien language (2016)

#54

Post by JumpCrisscross »

ihm wrote: post #21
awinter-py wrote: post #15

I've never understood the core question of S-W. Is it that you can't have a word without having a concept for it? That seems like a no-brainer. Neanderthals weren't able to build airplanes, and their language probably didn't have a word for airplane (presumably), but B wasn't the cause of A. The vedic indians had flying vehicles in their literature and were also not able to build airplanes. Most cultures that can bui…

I think one point of Sapir-Worf is that aspects of different languages reinforce different concepts and ways of thinking. The language is often the bearer of the culture's store of concepts. One famous example is the Guugu Yimithirr language[0], which uses absolute directions (North, South, East, West) instead of relative ones (left, right, in front of, behind). So one would say, "Can you pass me the salt to your Nor…

> one point of Sapir-Worf is that aspects of different languages reinforce different concepts and ways of thinking

There is a link between whether a culture's language requires temporal markers and various economic markers.

"For example, a German speaker predicting rain can naturally do so in the present tense, saying: Morgen regnet es which translates to ‘It rains tomorrow’. In contrast, English would require the use of a future marker like ‘will’ or ‘is going to’, as in: ‘It will rain tomorrow’" [1]. It is found that "speakers of [timeless] languages: save more, retire with more wealth, smoke less, practice safer sex, and are less obese."

[1] http://www.anderson.ucla.edu/faculty/keith.chen/papers/Langu...

Re: A linguist on Arrival's alien language (2016)

#55

Post by Razengan »

sidegrid wrote: post #49
TuringTest wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not so sure that numbers are universal. If your species were hive-like or highly solipsistic, you wouldn't necessarily have the need for numbers (although it is still plausible that they could use "us" vs "them", or "myself" vs "the outside world", but that's not exactly the same as "plural"). Even humans have languages that don't have numbers above of "one, two, three, many"; so long for generalized numbers bein…

How would you build a spaceship (or international ship... Whatever) without a concept of numbers?

How do we make music without having a name for each frequency?

Sure we use letters and numbers to represent them, and words for many musical concepts, but people have been making music without knowing these and since long before they were codified..

The number line is a continuous stream, right? Carrying on from my earlier comment [0], an alien species could use a smooth gradient of colors to represent numbers; their senses may be such that they interpret a distinct shade, or a "step" or "tick", after a small difference in wavelength/frequency, and they use those steps to represent integers, and a transition between two shades to represent fractions..

So if I want to tell you I want 1 of something, I just show you a deep violet. If I want 2, I "say" a ever-so-slightly less saturated violet. Green may mean a million, and reds would be used for astronomical scales. :)

But they may not "think" in terms of "numbers" as we do; they would just see and imagine colors and associate them with a sense of quantity, or comparison..

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13969500

Re: A linguist on Arrival's alien language (2016)

#56

Post by gliese1337 »

maxxxxx wrote: post #11
cletus wrote: post #2

One big issue with communicating with aliens is sensory differences with humans. Humans perceive a sound range, the so-called visibl spectrum and certain limited smells (compared to man animals). Even here there are animals that perceive different spectra and the magnetic field. What's more human communication relies on a basic common wiring (e.g. Paus s between words seem to be basically universal regardless of lang…

This makes me wonder: is there a specific advantage in us being able to see the specific wavelengths we see or is it just a random thing and we would be fine if we could see only other wavelengths like UV or infrared?

It's not entirely "random", but it is contingent. I.e., yes, we would be fine if we could see other wavelengths. Indeed, there are creatures than can see other wavelengths. Lots of insects and birds can see UV, and lots of snakes (specifically pit vipers) can see IR.

Seeing IR difficult because it is blocked by water and our own bodies radiate it, so it would be useless for our retinas to be able to detect it. You need completely different kinds of eyes (hence pit vipers' eponymous pit organs).

IR aside, the visual spectrum is centered where it is because that's where the sunlight that can make it through our atmosphere is brightest. We're adapted to see the light that's actually there, in nature. The range of light that's available actually does include some UV, and the ancestral tetrapod presumably could see that, which is why birds still can; mammals, however, went through a period in our evolution where our primarily-nocturnal ancestors had no need for four-color vision (because there wasn't enough light to support it) and not much UV was available to them, so we lost the UV sensitivity entirely and went down to only 2 kinds of receptors. This is why, e.g., dogs (and most other mammals) are colorblind. Apes eventually independently re-evolved a third color receptor because that was advantageous in things like identifying edible fruit which were important to their lifestyle, but there was never a strong evolutionary pressure to regain UV sensitivity.

Re: A linguist on Arrival's alien language (2016)

#57

Post by plttn »

lutusp wrote: post #47
plttn wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I remember the book correctly, they talk more about their attempt at using numbers, but due to the way heptapods think (all of time happening at once), the math concepts are actually harder than physical concepts.

> If I remember the book correctly ... No book, sad to say. The movie is based on a Ted Chiang short story named "The story of your life." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Story_of_Your_Life There are a number of books out there named "The Arrival" or a variation thereof, but they have no connection with the movie. I only post this to keep people from ordering books with that name, hoping to acquire more depth than the…

Right. I meant to say the short story.

Re: A linguist on Arrival's alien language (2016)

#58

Post by tyingq »

croon wrote: post #29
awinter-py wrote: post #15

I've never understood the core question of S-W. Is it that you can't have a word without having a concept for it? That seems like a no-brainer. Neanderthals weren't able to build airplanes, and their language probably didn't have a word for airplane (presumably), but B wasn't the cause of A. The vedic indians had flying vehicles in their literature and were also not able to build airplanes. Most cultures that can bui…

The article specifically mentions examples like thunder as a verb vs noun, and time as passing objects vs recurring. Obviously as a species we can develop concepts we have no words for to begin with, this is evolution. But that would also mean that they can evolve separately, which in turn means different languages can have different concepts that can't be translated. At least not without detours, or loss of meaning.…

There isn't a reasonable English equivalent for schadenfreude that's less than 4 words, but the concept isn't new.

Re: A linguist on Arrival's alien language (2016)

#59

Post by awinter-py »

pebblexe wrote: post #48
vidarh wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first problem here is that you mentioned Sapir-Whorf, and Saphir-Whorf does not have a precise definition. You simply be talking past people with respect to how strong a degree of relativity you are claiming. I can agree that different languages are more suitable for different purposes and affect how we express different problems. That is consistent with a very weak form of Sapir-Whorf. If that's the extent of yo…

What's the difference between 'determines' and 'influences'? I mean isn't that just a sliding scale? If a concept is incredibly difficult to formulate in a given language, could it not be said that the language has limited my thinking?

How do you distinguish between the case where your language is limiting your thinking vs the case where your thinking is limiting your use of the language?

If an individual can't express a concept, how can you be sure they 'possess' that concept?

(answer might be found in bilinguals. There was an early saint from capadoccia who was grateful some of the more sophisticated greek heresies couldn't even be expressed in his language).

Re: A linguist on Arrival's alien language (2016)

#60

Post by yourapostasy »

macintux wrote: post #38
skizm wrote: post #25

What bothered me the most is that the way they start the "conversation" with the aliens is by using names and human concepts (walking, eating, etc.). I'm not a trained linguist or anything, but it seems to me they should start with concepts that are universal: mainly numbers. Maybe as a CS guy I'm biased (since my language is symbols and numbers), but literally every conceivable language has to contain numbers of som…

My memory is a bit fuzzy, but didn't the physicist start with numbers before Adams' character was involved, and get nowhere?

Yes, in the movie they mentioned that, and also later on after Adams' character made her initial breakthroughs, they also mentioned that they figured out enormously complex human concepts are like fundamental building blocks to the aliens, while simple human concepts like numbers were a gulf of complexity to communicate between the species.
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