A Language That Linguists Thought Couldn’t Exist
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Re: A Language That Linguists Thought Couldn’t Exist
#2Nothing 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...
Re: A Language That Linguists Thought Couldn’t Exist
#3Nothing 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...
You can't because we don't know any possible concept, nor do we know if we can even conceive them, so we can't prove a language can express them.
Plus we already have concepts we can't express. We can't share what looks like the resulting feeling in your mind of something the other never encounter, like a color to a blind man or a sound to a deaf girl. There are many feeling and sensations that you encounter in your life you can't define.
We can't define what we don't know either. E.G: we can't define whatever happen after death because we don't know about it.
At last, some practices, like meditation, make you (quite surprisely) discovers some very simple things, yet it seems quite impossible to share it using words with another person. Here knowledge and complexity are not the issue. It's just that labelling is not a silver bullet for communication.
Re: A Language That Linguists Thought Couldn’t Exist
#4Nothing 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...
One theory about what you need for universality is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_semantic_metalanguage (but I'm not sure how much support it's received from other people).
This approach is about investigating what you would need in order to start defining other vocabulary that would let you eventually define all of the vocabulary that any language uses. However, this could be seen as an artificial process that doesn't imply that the NSM itself can be used directly for complex communication (since perhaps the definitions for many common everyday concepts might end up running to book-length). I'm also not sure how they've thought about ostensive definitions, to help distinguish things like particular colors or particular animal and plant species.
I've used toki pona, which is a deliberately small constructed language that aims to make it inconvenient to say certain kinds of things. And indeed, it is very hard to unambiguously refer to particular species, other than by ostension and subsequent convention in a particular speaker pair or community.
Re: A Language That Linguists Thought Couldn’t Exist
#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?
Re: A Language That Linguists Thought Couldn’t Exist
#6Nothing 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...
You can't because we don't know any possible concept, nor do we know if we can even conceive them, so we can't prove a language can express them. Plus we already have concepts we can't express. We can't share what looks like the resulting feeling in your mind of something the other never encounter, like a color to a blind man or a sound to a deaf girl. There are many feeling and sensations that you encounter in your…
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.
Re: A Language That Linguists Thought Couldn’t Exist
#7Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can't because we don't know any possible concept, nor do we know if we can even conceive them, so we can't prove a language can express them. Plus we already have concepts we can't express. We can't share what looks like the resulting feeling in your mind of something the other never encounter, like a color to a blind man or a sound to a deaf girl. There are many feeling and sensations that you encounter in your…
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 program that can be evaluated only by the coder who wrote it is kinda useless.
Re: A Language That Linguists Thought Couldn’t Exist
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can't because we don't know any possible concept, nor do we know if we can even conceive them, so we can't prove a language can express them. Plus we already have concepts we can't express. We can't share what looks like the resulting feeling in your mind of something the other never encounter, like a color to a blind man or a sound to a deaf girl. There are many feeling and sensations that you encounter in your…
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 is that concepts are generally recursive, they have intricate links to other concepts, which in turn link to others.
Re: A Language That Linguists Thought Couldn’t Exist
#9Nothing 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...
You can't because we don't know any possible concept, nor do we know if we can even conceive them, so we can't prove a language can express them. Plus we already have concepts we can't express. We can't share what looks like the resulting feeling in your mind of something the other never encounter, like a color to a blind man or a sound to a deaf girl. There are many feeling and sensations that you encounter in your…
What you're referring to are known as Qualia.
Re: A Language That Linguists Thought Couldn’t Exist
#10Nothing 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...
It's very tempting to think that ad-hoc linguistic experiments like this have appeared and disappeared all the time through history, with only the "fittest" surviving today.