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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)

#171

Post by thefalcon »

awinter-py wrote: post #61
thefalcon wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

fascinating. what city? It sounds like you're not a native -- in your observation, is the ability to navigate easily in the 'rotated downtown' area correlated with having grown up nearby? That would make a cool study.

I'm in the Central Valley (CA), and I notice that this is a pattern that seems to be repeated up and down the 99 (Downtown parallels the freeway while the rest of the city exists on a normal grid).

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

#173

Post by Razengan »

thanatropism wrote: post #169
Razengan wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah I meant 1D. My thought train at the time was occupied with our writing systems being 2D.

So, that's the whole thing about manifolds. A (hollow) circle lives in 2D space, but is actually one-dimensional. How so? I can continuously map it to two 1D structures, one straight line for the top part and one straight line for the bottom part. Now, there are moments (such as a cursive "e", for example) where our line crosses itself (so there's a point in two different "regions" of the line), so we can't say that…

> even though our characters are darn-close-to-being-1D

I assume you meant 2D there. I kind of get what you're saying.

What about Chinese/Japanese characters, surely they're not 1-dimensional? Our vision is still 2D though, with the sensation of depth being provided in the processing layer. What might actual 2-dimensional or 3-dimensional "text" be like? Say written by 4D beings with 3D eyes. [0]

(the primary topic on this page being systems that we may not relate to, comprehend, or even imagine, after all.)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four-dimensional_space#Visual_...

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

#174

Post by Razengan »

shuzchen wrote: post #157
Razengan wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a layman in this space but I've been thinking about the idea of numbers a lot, mainly for fictional world-building, how aliens may use them, and wondering if they really are universal.. One of the things that strikes me, is how we just started with integers and then tried to fit everything into them. I mean they're fine for counting , but kind of a hackjob for measuring . Like sure, integers may exist in reality…

What value is there in counting "one tree, two trees" given you have small trees, large trees, new trees, dead trees, and trees of different species? You can't substitute any given "two trees" with any other "two trees", much less practically substitute any individual person with another. I can easily imagine an alien culture that highly internalizes individuality and thus finds no need to apply an arbitrary value (c…

That's very interesting; imagining beings that effortlessly "name" or label everything individually..if that's what you're saying.

The idea still needs a bit of fleshing out to count for cases when you're working with hundreds of practically identical things, e.g. cells and atoms.

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

#175

Post by gliese1337 »

mosqutopi wrote: post #7

Perhaps we should first try to understand dolphin's language. Another suggestion for aliens to understand our language would be first to show then how evolution in earth has happened. Any high technology creature able to travel across the universe must have been studying some kind of evolutionary path. Perhaps studying the neurons they could infer a lot of information about how our mind interacts with the environment…

     Any high technology creature able to travel across the universe must have been studying some kind of evolutionary path.
Why? What bearing does the study of biological evolution have on the physics and engineering of space travel?

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

#176

Post by thesz »

mcguire wrote: post #160
zingermc wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I'm being too literal, but how can a grammar be Turing complete? The usual definition of Turing completeness is being able to simulate an arbitrary Turing machine. Typical human languages don't do beta reductions like Lambda Calculus, so I fail to see how a grammar (or the language produced by the grammar) can be said to compute anything.

Regular expressions = regular languages. Stack machines = context free languages = primitive recursive functions. (?) Turingmachines = context sensitive languages = total recursive functions. (?) Or something like that.

You are wrong.

Primitive recursive functions alone are able to recognize formal languages: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PR_(complexity) PR is the complexity class of all primitive recursive functions—or, equivalently, the set of all formal languages that can be decided by such a function.

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

#177

Post by thanatropism »

Razengan wrote: post #173
thanatropism wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, that's the whole thing about manifolds. A (hollow) circle lives in 2D space, but is actually one-dimensional. How so? I can continuously map it to two 1D structures, one straight line for the top part and one straight line for the bottom part. Now, there are moments (such as a cursive "e", for example) where our line crosses itself (so there's a point in two different "regions" of the line), so we can't say that…

> even though our characters are darn-close-to-being-1D I assume you meant 2D there. I kind of get what you're saying. What about Chinese/Japanese characters, surely they're not 1-dimensional? Our vision is still 2D though, with the sensation of depth being provided in the processing layer. What might actual 2-dimensional or 3-dimensional "text" be like? Say written by 4D beings with 3D eyes. [0] (the primary topic o…

> I assume you meant 2D there. I kind of get what you're saying.

If you were to remove the exact point of overlap in our cursive "e", we would have a 1D structure, even if a discontinuous one. And it would still be legible as an "e". This is what I mean by "darn close": infinitesimally so.

I haven't thought this through, but probabily every character in a legible sans serif point can be subject to this removal-of-overlaps process and still remain legible.

As for Japanese: katakana seems reducible to 1D by the same criteria; hiragana is certainly not, let alone ideograms (kanji/hanzi in chinese).

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

#178

Post by sidegrid »

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?

Interdimensional.
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