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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

#61

Post by jdmichal »

dTal wrote: post #14
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…

Note that the average speed of communication in different languages is the same, even though they differ in verbosity and expressiveness. This is why Spanish speakers seem to speak so fast - Spanish has more syllables on average. So the bottleneck would appear to be, not the physical limitations of communication, but the rate at which we can structure information to be consumed by another mind. Rather like how the li…

The "machine-gun" sound of Spanish is more due to it being syllable timed, while English is stress timed.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isochrony#Syllable_timing

Spanish also has heavy syllable merging, even across word boundaries. (Vowels merge together and hiatus turns into di- and triphthongs.) This reduces the number of actual syllables in speech.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synalepha

Re: A Language That Linguists Thought Couldn’t Exist

#62

Post by extr »

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 would argue that you're confusing "brain receiving complete information" with "brain doing inference on what information it does receive to get you close enough". You don't need the full screen to tell that the image is SD vs HD, you just need to glance at a small segment. That's not 100s of mb/sec. You know that the rest of the video is happening in your peripheral, and maybe you can tell what's going on. But in actuality you're receiving a very low bit rate version of that, and your brain is simply telling you "X & Y are happening in HD in your peripheral" and it's convincing enough.

Re: A Language That Linguists Thought Couldn’t Exist

#63

Post by jfoutz »

hashmal wrote: post #50
bcherny wrote: post #2

Nothing on the size of ABSL's vocabulary. Is there a linguistics notion of turing completeness? Ie. How do I know if a language is capable of expressing any possible concept ("program")? Is this even a meaningful question? Also note that ABSL is only around 100 years old, and see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Sayyid_Bedouin_Sign_Langu...

There is no such thing as a kind of turing completeness in linguistics. natural languages are not even finite and are rarely used to express "computations."

Infinite tape is a requirement for Turing completeness. A whole lot of language is used for making sets of things, and inclusion or exclusion from those sets. Take, for example, your comment. And mine.

Maybe set definitions and memberships aren't computation though. I think they are, but I'm a fuzzy thinker.

Re: A Language That Linguists Thought Couldn’t Exist

#64

Post by lend000 »

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…

> we can only emit a few bits of information.

Perhaps if you measure against the text representation in ASCII, but it's not necessarily easy to quantify all of the other meaningful information that comes from tone, volume, accent, gestures, etc.

Such is to say that monkeys and birds can effectively transmit no information, which is not true.

Re: A Language That Linguists Thought Couldn’t Exist

#65

Post by wutbrodo »

ifdefdebug wrote: post #34
joe_the_user wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

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

The claim is that we _can't_ emit more than a few bits per second, and the rebuttal is that we can. Providing an example that's under the threshold is completely irrelevant.

Re: A Language That Linguists Thought Couldn’t Exist

#66

Post by dredmorbius »

stan_rogers wrote: post #44
dredmorbius wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been tackling this from a different PoV (see recent comments) of audio bitrate sensing (20 Hz is the beat/tone boundary, where beats become tones , corresponding to about 0.2 MB/day of data acquisition), or of speaking and reading rates. At 100 words/min spoken speech, humans can transmit about 1.1 MB/day sustained (24 hours without interruption). At 600 words/min reading rate (a very high rate, roughly double t…

If you think that the information transferred by human speech consists only of the words spoken, you have a rather shallow view of language. You're also processing information taken from pace, pitch, timbre, intonation, volume, timing and direction (among other things). The written word is to speech what choreographic notation is to dance - it's enough to give you the gist, but you wouldn't mistake it for the real th…

You're arguing a claim I didn't make.

Re: A Language That Linguists Thought Couldn’t Exist

#67

Post by falsedan »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #52
falsedan wrote: post #5

> words in this language correspond to holistic gestures […] even though ABSL has a sizable vocabulary. I don't follow: many ASL signs are completely distinct. There are some incorporations, like classifier CL:3 (vehicle) includes a modified 'V' sign. What exactly is the claim: that a language cannot have a 1:1 mapping of simple representation and meaning i.e. is unambiguous and context-free?

They are saying each word in ABSL is a unique sign without being composed from other sign elements. In BSL, for example, [as I learnt it some time ago, at a basic level] the signs for class and group share the hand movement but use respectively the hand-shapes for C and G; they're compound gestures. Or any easier one, vehicles like car, bus, etc. are signed by miming use of a steering wheel and saying/mouthing the wo…

> In BSL, for example, [as I learnt it some time ago, at a basic level] the signs for class and group share the hand movement but use respectively the hand-shapes for C and G; they're compound gestures.

Same in ASL. But I wouldn't call it a compound sign, since it's not combining the COLLECTIVE sign with TOPIC CLASSIFIER:INITIAL C/G IN ENGLISH sign.

Would you consider ASL HURRY as a compound sign, since it uses the H handshape as a mnemonic in it? How about ELEVATOR and its C?

I would consider compound signs to be things like THROAT DOCTOR, PET STORE, SKIRT LONG, where we use two signs with distinct meanings which are easily comprehended in isolation, but when used together communicate a different concept.

> One expects to quickly run out of new sounds (or signs) if you don't compound/combine them atomically.

I can see this with the limited options available in spoken languages: there only a few hundred ways to combining vowel-consonant pairs, but a few thousand ways to combine fingers+limb+facial expression+short movement (although the challenge becomes how to reduce interpretation errors i.e. was that index finger flicking down 3 times or thumb flicking up twice?).

Re: A Language That Linguists Thought Couldn’t Exist

#68

Post by kelingua »

As a linguist, I have to refute some of the claims made in this article. The understanding for the past few decades is more in line with ABSL than represented. The only hold-outs are hard and fast supporters of Universal Grammar in the face of contradictory evidence. The only genetic factor commonly recognized as important to language development is merely the ability to learn language. Even recursion within language is in doubt due to the language Pirahã. For the most part, UG is held up by die-hard defenders of Chomsky, or is given as introductory education in Linguistics despite not being the widely held view.

Re: A Language That Linguists Thought Couldn’t Exist

#69

Post by astrodust »

OscarCunningham wrote: post #31
astrodust wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 l…

> I suspect all commonly used modern languages are English complete...

English is just one language, and while perhaps unusually expressive because of the amount of abuse it's received over the centuries, plus its ability to wholesale absorb new words on a whim, it is incapable of expressing some things with the same degree of succinctness and precision other languages have.

There are words in other languages that take a paragraph to explain in English because of all the cultural context they contain, or because they refer to things that most people who speak English have never seen, nor felt a need to describe with that degree of precision.

The problem with using English as a basis is it's very hard to explain in English what the language is incapable of expressing. This is like a fish trying to explain what they can do on land when the very concept of land is hazy at best.

Re: A Language That Linguists Thought Couldn’t Exist

#70

Post by andrepd »

Someone wrote: post #25
ABCLAW wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is incorrect. Even the spinal nerve bundle processes orders of magnitude more information just in keeping you balanced on your feet or chair. Perhaps you meant we only commit a few hundred bits of information to long term memory per second under uninteresting conditions? *Sorry for piling on! I didn't see the other two replies and went to get coffee before finishing my reply.

oh_sigh: "the amount that actually makes it into our brain is far less, probably on the order of a hundreds of bits/sec max" ABCLAW: "Even the spinal nerve bundle processes orders of magnitude more information just in keeping you balanced on your feet or chair." Does that information actually make it to the brain? I thought sending a signal to the brain to process it there and then send back balancing signals would t…

The cerebellum is part of the brain, and it is responsible for balancing and motor coordination.
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