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An amateur linguist loses control of the language he invented (2012)

newyorker.com

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Re: An amateur linguist loses control of the language he invented (2012)

#71

Post by andreasvc »

godarderik wrote: post #30

Reading this story brings to mind the history of algorithms in the field of machine translation. Early attempts at the problem attempted to explicitly define the rules of converting between tongues using meticulously laid out systems of vocabulary and syntax. This approach proved untenable, in part due to the complex and ever changing nature of language. Modern systems such as Google Translation make use of machine l…

Interlingua was constructed this way, at least its vocabulary. They made the mistake IMHO to make the grammar naturalistic, which made it very easy to read for people who already spoke a Romance language; writing, on the other hand, was made difficult by this.

You could perhaps use a typological database with grammatical features of the world's languages and somehow select an "optimal" combination from it, but that's a far cry from letting a computer determine the most efficient means of expressing information; we have no idea how to define information/meaning, so that it's still an impossible dream. I don't think the problem is that designing languages is hard per se, it's that people can't be bothered to agree on one and learn it.

Re: An amateur linguist loses control of the language he invented (2012)

#72

Post by andreasvc »

gabemart wrote: post #61

I 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…

I agree, and additionally I would say we shouldn't remove ambiguity for a more basic reason: humans are very good at resolving it. There may be lots of other areas where we have systematic biases such as estimating probabilities, but dealing with ambiguity is actually one of our big strengths so it doesn't make sense to spend so much energy on avoiding it.

This is a bit speculative, but I have the feeling there is a certain kind of personality that is typically fascinated with this idea of being able to rule out ambiguity. It seems to me a tendency to overextend the idea of mathematical rigor to other areas of life.

Re: An amateur linguist loses control of the language he invented (2012)

#74

Post by ar-jan »

gabemart wrote: post #61

I 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…

The point has also been made that ambiguity is a functional property of language, because it is more efficient from an information-theoretic point of view: context also provides information, but a purely unambiguous language would have to express that information anyway. Ambiguity also allows reusing words and sounds. (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010027711...).

Re: An amateur linguist loses control of the language he invented (2012)

#75

Post by andreasvc »

MichaelDickens wrote: post #2

Ithkuil 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…

Esperanto was designed first and foremost to be learnable, it seems to be quite successful in this regard whereas it's not a strong point of Ikthuil (as it wasn't a priority). With "ought to have looked", do you mean in your own opinion, or are you referring to some of Esperanto's original goals? I always got the impression that learnability and ease of use were bigger priorities.

Personally, I don't have much faith in the idea that you can make people's communication more precise and concise by designing the language in a certain way, just as I don't think that politically correct language leads to meaningful change. This is simply because I don't believe than language can drastically change the way people think (linguistic determinism, strong Whorfianism). Esperanto is very similar to natural languages in its (im)precision, which might just be the level where humans naturally converge to if left to their own devices.

Re: An amateur linguist loses control of the language he invented (2012)

#76

Post by andreasvc »

hackerboos wrote: post #68
MichaelDickens wrote: post #2

Ithkuil 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…

I remember a criticism of Esperanto was that it was too similar to Europeans languages. I read about a language that was similar to Esperanto but incorporated Chinese and Arabic qualities. Does anybody know this?

It's really only the vocabulary which takes from European languages, because the grammar is schematic, very regular and simple to learn. Broadly speaking, you have two options: 1) you select a specific group (e.g., European languages) and sample from their vocabulary. 2) you sample from ALL the world's languages, or generate completely random words (effectively just as hard to learn).

In the first case you have privileged one group, but in the second everyone loses ... In the second case you create an additional barrier because there is a large amount of new vocabulary that everyone has to learn, while in the other anyone who doesn't know European languages will have to learn some of its vocabulary, but that might be useful to them anyway, so it clearly seems like the better option to me.

Re: An amateur linguist loses control of the language he invented (2012)

#77

Post by Fastidious »

stuaxo wrote: post #73

If there was a site that summarised New Yorker articles in 2 pages I would be there in a flash.

That would be atrocious! You need to flavour and enjoy the reading, just the same you enjoy a nice drink, or a good cup of coffee, or you take the time to make coitus a never-ending engagement.

Just enjoy it.

Re: An amateur linguist loses control of the language he invented (2012)

#78

Post by StavrosK »

TFA:

> 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.”

Wikipedia:

> Romanization: Oumpeá äx’ääļuktëx.

> Translation: "On the contrary, I think it may turn out that this rugged mountain range trails off at some point."

Re: An amateur linguist loses control of the language he invented (2012)

#79

Post by StavrosK »

Fastidious wrote: post #77
stuaxo wrote: post #73

If there was a site that summarised New Yorker articles in 2 pages I would be there in a flash.

That would be atrocious! You need to flavour and enjoy the reading, just the same you enjoy a nice drink, or a good cup of coffee, or you take the time to make coitus a never-ending engagement. Just enjoy it.

Sometimes I need a quick snack, for the calories.

Re: An amateur linguist loses control of the language he invented (2012)

#80

Post by andreasvc »

tokenadult wrote: post #4

This 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/

That rant is certainly not definitive, he clearly has a chip on his shoulder. He lists a lot of reasons why Esperanto is not a perfect language, but (obviously) no language can be; when a language is constructed people suddenly set way higher standards, but this is not reasonable and leads to endless bikeshedding.

Still, I'd say Esperanto is an interesting case because it is undeniably the most successful constructed language, with the longest continuous (still continuing) history. It is interesting to learn it for that reason alone, and as far as learning second languages go, it is also one of the easiest to learn. That could make it a useful first step towards learning other second languages.

Why hasn't Esperanto caught on with more speakers? Maybe it has something to do with the reasons in his rant; personally I find it much more likely that it's due to network effects. Even a "perfectly" constructed language would be very unlikely to win over the vested interests and inertia of people.

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