I really enjoyed this article when it was new. Not long ago, when I was learning Octopress, my first post was Hello World in Rust and Ithkuil. (I just wanted to make sure code formatting was working.) I have no idea how correct the translation is. I just googled around until I found someone else's.
An amateur linguist loses control of the language he invented (2012)
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Re: An amateur linguist loses control of the language he invented (2012)
#102If there was a site that summarised New Yorker articles in 2 pages I would be there in a flash.
You can't say that on Hacker News. The downvote brigade will nail you every time for disagreeing with them. You can not comment on the verbosity of articles or unrelated extra paragraphs and asides that don't serve the overall narrative in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, etc.
Re: An amateur linguist loses control of the language he invented (2012)
#103That was an interesting read, but the reporter's breathless assertions frequently got in the way of appreciating Quijada and his idea. I mean, things like: > A sentence like “On the contrary, I think it may turn out that this rugged mountain range trails off at some point” becomes simply “Tram-mļöi hhâsmařpţuktôx.” Simply? We could have used LZW algorithm and the sentence could probably become even shorter, just a "s…
The English text is 97 ASCII encoded bytes. Compressed with zlib: 86 bytes. Compressed with lzma: 98 bytes. The Ithkuil representation is just 30 UTF-8 encoded bytes. Compressed with zlib: 39 bytes. Compressed with lzma: 47 bytes. (Measured using python's zlib/pylmza modules to avoid e.g. file header overhead) It's hard to achieve this kind of compression without an external dictionary. What Quijada has created with…
Actually, using zlib format gets you an unnecessary 2 byte header and 4 byte footer, so the proper sizes are 80 and 33.
I'm having trouble figuring out what's going on with lzma because the spec is lying about the header, so I won't attempt to guess the correct number there.
Re: An amateur linguist loses control of the language he invented (2012)
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
58 different phonemes means the language is just substituting one form of complexity for another. And apq’uxasiu for 'gawk' doesn't strike me as a particularly huge win for conciseness.
> And apq’uxasiu for 'gawk' doesn't strike me as a particularly huge win for conciseness. It seems like it's missing the linguistic equivalent of huffman coding: make frequently used things shorter. Also, it's hardly concise with respect to time if you have to spend 30 minutes consulting a dictionary to utter a single sentence.
The huffman coding strategy relies too much on culture to remain properly useful over different groups and time.
Re: An amateur linguist loses control of the language he invented (2012)
#105"Among the Wakashan Indians of the Pacific Northwest, a grammatically correct sentence can’t be formed without providing what linguists refer to as “evidentiality,” inflecting the verb to indicate whether you are speaking from direct experience, inference, conjecture, or hearsay"
This is amazing. But I can't grasp the difference between inference and conjecture - they are both 'figuring out' what happened rather than knowing or hearing?
Re: An amateur linguist loses control of the language he invented (2012)
#106I found this article fascinating and satisfying. I'm curious about the desire to reduce ambiguity, which seemed to be emphasized as a motivation for the creation of Ithkuil and some of the other languages mentioned. Is it desirable to completely eliminate ambiguity? I can see why it would be desirable in a scientific paper or a public political debate. But in everyday interactions, (intentional) ambiguity plays many…
Ambiguity is necessary for art. If there is no room for interpretation, then its just a photo-of-words.
Re: An amateur linguist loses control of the language he invented (2012)
#107This is attracting some reader interest here, so I should probably mention, for other Hacker News participants deeply interested in human languages, a definitive analysis of Esperanto[1] explaining why Esperanto has not caught on with more speakers. [1] http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/ranto/
There is also other criticism of Esperanto that's worth reading (imho). Here's a linguist and former Esperanto-proponent's opinion on the community surrounding the language. http://www.christopherculver.com/writings/esperanto.html
One of the final paragraphs really resonates with my own experiences of international (mostly EU) meetings:
""" During recent travels to Spain, I had the opportunity to observe participants in a pan-European seminar on youth and globalisation. While English was the default language of this group, in conversations between any two people the participants would often switch to the native language of one or the other. For example, a young man from France would greet another in English, but upon discovering that his conversation partner is from Italy, would switch to Italian. This would not find approval among Esperantists. Ironically, English proves the neutral choice here. It is often seen as a sure bet for international communication among young people in many countries, but it is well understood that other languages may serve just as well. In the Esperanto movement, on the other hand, there is an ideological attachment to Esperanto which mandates its use even if there are other, more culturally rich possibilities. """
My experience was at large international demo-parties. I mainly noticed this for English and German, but that's because I speak those two languages relatively fluently (Dutch is my mother tongue). The same must have been happening around me for French or Spanish (or who knows what else) as well, but I don't speak those languages well enough to tell for sure whether they were using (say) Spanish as a common bridging language or were native speakers.
And yes, English is usually the sure bet. Although some of the comments elsewhere ITT have piqued my interest to perhaps learn some Spanish in the future, especially if it's really that easy to learn. Funny, I used to hate learning language (French and German) in high school. It's only later in my life that I found out I actually have quite a knack for it :) (I should probably blame the way it was taught, but I can't really get that much worked up about it, I'm pretty satisfied with the quality of my education overall)
Re: An amateur linguist loses control of the language he invented (2012)
#108This is attracting some reader interest here, so I should probably mention, for other Hacker News participants deeply interested in human languages, a definitive analysis of Esperanto[1] explaining why Esperanto has not caught on with more speakers. [1] http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/ranto/
There is also other criticism of Esperanto that's worth reading (imho). Here's a linguist and former Esperanto-proponent's opinion on the community surrounding the language. http://www.christopherculver.com/writings/esperanto.html
Hello. You cite the case where "a young man from France would greet another in English, but upon discovering that his conversation partner is from Italy, would switch to Italian." I'm not sure how frequent such a case would be. The dominance of English has pushed other languages to the sidelines in France.
As an Esperanto speaker, I have no objection to anyone using any language on any occasion, and I'm happ. I have just returned from an Esperanto conference in Dinan, Brittany. I was able to use some basic Breton with a few individuals, but the sky did not fall on my head.
I wish you well with your language learning. You may wish to add Esperanto one day.
Re: An amateur linguist loses control of the language he invented (2012)
#109Ithkuil seems like what a language should be: as the article said, it is both precise and concise. It looks the way Esperanto ought to have looked. I find Quijada's effort deeply impressive. I don't know much about designing human languages, but I know how hard it is to design a decent programming language (see http://colinm.org/language_checklist.html ), and building a serious human language seems orders of magnitud…
Given that you're communicating to an agent who can use context for disambiguation, all efficient languages will be ambiguous. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010027711... (Sorry for the paywall...) So maybe Ithkuil isn't what a language should be after all. And maybe that's why no natural language looks like it...
So basically language decoding is multimodal like one of the other comments here said? Like in digital communication, perfect decoding needs appropriate SNR (context) in addition to optimal spectral efficiency (conciseness/preciseness of the language). Interesting research.
Re: An amateur linguist loses control of the language he invented (2012)
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
Language should not be concise. Redundancy is built into the language for a reason - language communication is extremely noisy and if there's two-bit-error distance between "I love you" and "I killed and ate your dog" then the usage of this language by humans would not be comfortable. Moreover, people communicating are imperfect. So if you have a language which is very precise and concise, you would have to spend a l…
Case in point, the Turkish I problem has had tragic consequences: http://gizmodo.com/382026/a-cellphones-missing-dot-kills-two...
Having to deal in the past with the code broken due to Turkish having two i's and weird case conversion rules (for both i and I, case change goes to the other letter which is not present in ASCII) I can only be happy it didn't come to these proportions.