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A Language That Linguists Thought Couldn’t Exist

nautil.us

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Re: A Language That Linguists Thought Couldn’t Exist

#31

Post by OscarCunningham »

astrodust wrote: post #8
bcherny wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't you confusing language with understanding? In computer terms (which I'm more familiar with) this is the difference between expressing a program in some language vs evaluating that program.

A Turing machine is a very simple device. Evaluating if something is "Turing complete" is simply determining if it can function like a Turing machine. Compare this with trying to define the "set of all possible concepts". What does that even look like? What is a concept? How can it be expressed? Concepts are a lot more nuanced than bare 1s and 0s because there's subjective meaning applied to them. The complexity here…

In the same way, "Turing complete" might not mean "capable of doing any possible computation". It could be that there are some computations that can be performed but not by a Turing machine. This is uncertain enough that we call it the Church-Turing Thesis. But it's hard to describe the notion of "every possible computation", so instead we compare things relative to Turning machines.

We could do the same thing with languages. Say a language is "English complete" if it can express at least everything expressible in English. I suspect all commonly used modern languages are English complete. The most obvious way I can see that a language would fail to be complete would be if it lacked nonce words or any equivalent device.

Re: A Language That Linguists Thought Couldn’t Exist

#32

Post by joe_the_user »

jostmey wrote: post #12

Ramblings of non-linguist: The problem with the human body is that is extremely hard to share information. We can absorb gigabytes of information through our eyes and other sensory organs, but we can only emit a few bits of information. When we communicate, we are essentially trying to share our thoughts through a very narrow straw that limits the flow of information. The result of this bottleneck is language. Langua…

"but we can only emit a few bits of information" [per second?]

I don't think that's true. Physical motion and even sound making in total involves a human being producing a lot more than a few bits of information per second - there are plenty of recordings of people singing, say, that can't compressed to that bitrate.

The only thing that's true is that we can pretty much only emit and absorb language information at a fairly low bitrate.

The simple explanation for this is that a language stream is something like a computer program - difficult to either produce or absorb.

And of course, language with complex structures is fairly unique to humans and provides some amazing things - the ability to help organize society and our own activity on a larger scale, to plan ahead, and etc, and etc, etc....

Edit: Good general discussion of these issues can be found in Tor Norretranders' book The User Illusion. Highly recommended.

Re: A Language That Linguists Thought Couldn’t Exist

#34

Post by ifdefdebug »

joe_the_user wrote: post #32
jostmey wrote: post #12

Ramblings of non-linguist: The problem with the human body is that is extremely hard to share information. We can absorb gigabytes of information through our eyes and other sensory organs, but we can only emit a few bits of information. When we communicate, we are essentially trying to share our thoughts through a very narrow straw that limits the flow of information. The result of this bottleneck is language. Langua…

"but we can only emit a few bits of information" [per second?] I don't think that's true. Physical motion and even sound making in total involves a human being producing a lot more than a few bits of information per second - there are plenty of recordings of people singing, say, that can't compressed to that bitrate. The only thing that's true is that we can pretty much only emit and absorb language information at a…

> I don't think that's true.

It's literally true for what we are doing right now in this moment: emitting information through a keyboard.

But even then, it feels like we are doing much better than that. Maybe because we use implicit cross-referencing all the time.

Re: A Language That Linguists Thought Couldn’t Exist

#35

Post by twic »

This seems like a dubious claim to me. If you want other examples of languages where words aren't built from meaningless atoms, look at early writing - the word for 'tree' is a crummy picture of a tree, etc.

Later on, writing developed into either using meaningless signs to represent sounds, and stringing those together (as in the case of what you're reading now), or using signs to represent fragments of meaning which are combined to form complete concepts (at least, that's how i understand Han ideograms). Rather like the business with the slide whistle.

Re: A Language That Linguists Thought Couldn’t Exist

#36

Post by ClassyJacket »

oh_sigh wrote: post #20
dTal wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So your visual cortex isn't in your brain? Would you care to point out which region(s) of the brain only receive hundreds of bits/sec? Somebody should tell the lossy video compression folks.

Yes, it is in your brain. But if you think that your visual cortex receives anything akin to a high fidelity "picture", then you are mistaken. Regarding lossy image compression, you're free to look at something briefly and try to redraw it from scratch. Even if your drawing skills are perfect, you will find that your picture will be filled with confabulations and stereotypes. > Because of a limited number of axons in…

You seem to be confusing the idea of the brain storing information in long term memory with the brain receiving information.

Not all information processed is stored.

If the brain didn't receive hundreds of megabits of information per second, nobody would be able to tell the difference between SD and HD video.

Re: A Language That Linguists Thought Couldn’t Exist

#37

Post by anateus »

Another sign language developed in isolation that linguists love to study is Nicaraguan Sign Language: https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Nicaraguan_Sign_Language

The core claim of the title, that somehow non-decomposable sign language goes counter to something doesn't match anything I've ever heard in linguistics. Many signs in ASL are fairly representational as well.

Re: A Language That Linguists Thought Couldn’t Exist

#38

Post by dredmorbius »

joe_the_user wrote: post #32
jostmey wrote: post #12

Ramblings of non-linguist: The problem with the human body is that is extremely hard to share information. We can absorb gigabytes of information through our eyes and other sensory organs, but we can only emit a few bits of information. When we communicate, we are essentially trying to share our thoughts through a very narrow straw that limits the flow of information. The result of this bottleneck is language. Langua…

"but we can only emit a few bits of information" [per second?] I don't think that's true. Physical motion and even sound making in total involves a human being producing a lot more than a few bits of information per second - there are plenty of recordings of people singing, say, that can't compressed to that bitrate. The only thing that's true is that we can pretty much only emit and absorb language information at a…

The audio channel is not the information channel.

There's an interesting video on the fastest meaningful musical tempo or speed, which looks at the interonset interval. It turns out that between 100ms and 50ms seems to be that limit: 10 to 20 beats per second. Or, at the low end, 20 Hz.

Which is the point at which a series of beats becomes a tone.

If you extend this out to a full day, and consider each beat a bit, via GNU Units:

    You have: 20 bit/s
    You want: M bit /day
            * 1.728
            / 0.5787037
That is, the human auditory system is capable of processing at best 1.7 megabits of beat-based information per day. That's only 0.2 MB (bytes), or a small fraction of an old-school 3.5" floppy disk.

Mind, that's individual beats, which isn't how we convey information, but it's an interesting data rate limitation. Language encodes at different levels, and arguably people might be able to operate at higher levels.

For spoken English, most of us can accommodate roughly 100 words/min. A typical college-educated adult can read 300 words/minute, and at the high end, perhaps double that. (The less literate are closer to the 100 words/min of spoken speech.)

If a word is considered as 8 bytes (7 characters and a space), then a sustained maximum-rate reading pace would allow for just shy 7 MB per day of information consumed.

Speaking? About 1.1 MB/day.

Both of those assume a full 24 hour day without break, interruption, or sleep.

We can absorb more information in the form of complex tonal or visual signals, but I'd argue that the retention of that information is highly limited.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=h3kqBX1j7f8

Re: A Language That Linguists Thought Couldn’t Exist

#39

Post by dredmorbius »

ClassyJacket wrote: post #36
oh_sigh wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it is in your brain. But if you think that your visual cortex receives anything akin to a high fidelity "picture", then you are mistaken. Regarding lossy image compression, you're free to look at something briefly and try to redraw it from scratch. Even if your drawing skills are perfect, you will find that your picture will be filled with confabulations and stereotypes. > Because of a limited number of axons in…

You seem to be confusing the idea of the brain storing information in long term memory with the brain receiving information. Not all information processed is stored. If the brain didn't receive hundreds of megabits of information per second, nobody would be able to tell the difference between SD and HD video.

I'd argue this isn't a confusing but a distinguishing.

oh_sigh is being downvoted for truth.

Re: A Language That Linguists Thought Couldn’t Exist

#40

Post by giardini »

oh_sigh wrote: post #13
jostmey wrote: post #12

Ramblings of non-linguist: The problem with the human body is that is extremely hard to share information. We can absorb gigabytes of information through our eyes and other sensory organs, but we can only emit a few bits of information. When we communicate, we are essentially trying to share our thoughts through a very narrow straw that limits the flow of information. The result of this bottleneck is language. Langua…

Nit: we don't absorb gigabits of information. Perhaps there is that much bombarding our senses St any given moment but the amount that actually makes it into our brain is far less, probably on the order of a hundreds of bits/sec max

Oh_sigh says:"...we don't absorb gigabits of information."

We're talking bits/second (bandwidth) here, not simply bits. So given that...

The human visual pathway has a bandwidth of about 10 megabits per second, so we build the current "view" somewhere in our brain and constantly update it with the stream of data from the visual pathways (there are several). So we're always scanning visually, always updating our view with new info.

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