SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
English is currently one of the dominant languages on the planet due to the spread of the US and UK empires in the last century. With the rise of technology English may be made redundant with the advent of automatic language translation.
Just waiting for made up languages to become the norm (e.g. Esperanto), or hyper language learning.
Now ponder, as Douglas Hofstadter did, translating Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky from English into French, German, and Russian (Cyrillic .GIF) or (ASCII transliteration).
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
English is King but Technology May Trump All
|
Log In/Create an Account
| Top
| 78 comments
| Search Discussion
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
(1)
(1)
He is the best of men who dislikes power.
-- Mohammed
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 27 2019, @09:03PM (15 children)
Oh yes we will stop talking to each other. Then use the computer to do it all. What sort of dystopia do these people want to live in?
(Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday January 27 2019, @09:15PM (13 children)
Get two people with brain implants and dual hearing aids (eye implant/smartglasses optional).
Brain implant recognizes intended complete sentences before they are spoken, transmits to the other person's brain implant, and allows for real-time translation with minimal delay. The noise-canceling ear pieces will play the translation as the other person is speaking, and could even use the other person's vocal signature to make the translation sound like the other person. Software will attempt to handle instances in which a person is speaking haltingly, i.e. they start speaking, halt mid-sentence, and say something different.
People won't use brain implants? Don't worry, the post-millennial generations will be fully brainwashed by Emperor Zuck.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Sunday January 27 2019, @10:08PM (4 children)
And then you have to trust the translation.
Any two real-time translators willl not agree, as a substanital part of communication is non-verbal or tonal (hence the need for /sarcasm tags, and the problems with "flat" statements being mis-interpreted, even when the "common" language is English", we can see from SN how this works between the UK, USA and Australia)
Want to start war? Hack a brain brain translator!
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Monday January 28 2019, @04:06AM
Lobotomies A Real Estate Developer!
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 1) by shrewdsheep on Monday January 28 2019, @12:56PM (2 children)
It's really called the babelfish. Ever heard of it [wikipedia.org]? Everybody trusts the babelfish. And to the contrary, it even makes the Vogons mellow (make war, not love).
(Score: 3, Informative) by kazzie on Monday January 28 2019, @04:36PM (1 child)
But the Vogons don't make love or war, they make paperwork.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 29 2019, @01:46PM
What? Seriously? You don't consider Vogon poetry warfare?
Pah. What sector are you from anyway?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 27 2019, @10:29PM (1 child)
You can put that brain implant into my head when you pry it out of my cold, dead fingers.
(Score: 3, Funny) by takyon on Sunday January 27 2019, @10:35PM
"Your proposal is acceptable."
-Zuckbie
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 28 2019, @12:13AM
Excellent! All we need then are to install some vinculums to regulate the emergent netwo((^%$*;;GGZzzQ%$#*
WE ARE THE BORG. LOWER YOUR SHIELDS AND SURRENDER YOUR SHIPS. WE WILL ADD YOUR BIOLOGICAL AND TECHNOLOGICAL DISTINCTIVENESS TO OUR OWN. YOUR CULTURE WILL ADAPT TO SERVICE US. RESISTANCE IS FUTILE.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 28 2019, @04:44AM (1 child)
Then get another implant that makes intelligent, witty, insightful comments in your voice while triggering the muscles in your jaw. You can be the best conversationalist* in the room even when asleep.
*Other people may also use AmazingConvo implants and be equal conversationalists. Implants known to the state of California to cause cancer. Offer void where prohibited.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday January 28 2019, @04:49AM
I don't think what you've proposed is impossible.
Using an advanced brain implant could be like having hours to think about each moment in a conversation. Or it could just scrape up things people have already said, string it together in a coherent fashion, and have you spit it out.
Neural lace ftw.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by kazzie on Monday January 28 2019, @07:51AM
Many moons ago, at school, a friend and I joked that it would be easier to stop trying to explain things with words, and just fit a laplink cable between our heads to do it that way.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by ewk on Monday January 28 2019, @10:56AM (1 child)
"Brain implant recognizes intended complete sentences before they are spoken, transmits to the other person's brain implant, "
Really? You want my unfettered, uncensored thoughts to be spewed out before some other part of my brain at least attempts to filtered out or convert the worst to something decent?
I didn't think so :-)
I don't always react, but when I do, I do it on SoylentNews
(Score: 5, Funny) by kazzie on Monday January 28 2019, @04:37PM
If we wanted that kind of content, we'd just browse at -1.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 29 2019, @03:04AM
https://m.webtoons.com/en/sf/seed/list?title_no=1480&page=1 [webtoons.com]
This one.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 27 2019, @09:09PM
Forums bitcoin is best sight for language future, it is beast english. It certainly the shark news in china.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 27 2019, @09:20PM (19 children)
Whoever wrote the above is not an anonymous coward, they are an anonymous IDIOT.
.
.
Esperanto did not take the place of English, and no other "made up language" will either.
Various forms of Chinese WILL become increasingly important. These changes occur due primarily due to economic forces.
Please, no more "articles" from anonymous idiots. It's just a waste of space and time.
(Score: 2) by bart9h on Sunday January 27 2019, @09:31PM (6 children)
Also, automatic translation still sucks. big time.
Cultural forces are more important than economic ones.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 27 2019, @09:43PM
Military forces are more powerful than cultural ones.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 27 2019, @10:49PM (4 children)
"Cultural forces are more important than economic ones."
-
The above is so naive it is tragic.
You need to do more traveling and see the world.
As of today you don't have a clue what the real world is about.
Economic activity is what drives the world.
Culture is along for the ride, only if it can make money. And that's how the real world works, son.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Monday January 28 2019, @04:09AM (3 children)
There’s a book whose author and title I’ve sadly forgotten as I’ve wanted to read it for years
It’s about how Coffee, Tea, Cacao, Opium and Coca changed the world
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Monday January 28 2019, @04:49AM (2 children)
Could it be "A History of the World in 6 Glasses" by Tom Standage ?
I would also recommend "Guns, Germs, and Steel" by Jared Diamond as an interesting read.
No problem is insoluble, but at Ksp = 2.943×10−25 Mercury Sulphide comes close.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Monday January 28 2019, @04:23PM (1 child)
From my army doctor grandfather
But I’ll never read it as it’s all about how wars are won or lost by public health problems. Consider that not Cortez but smallpox that conquered the Aztecs.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 29 2019, @01:28PM
This is very true. Up until the 19th century the biggest threat to a large army was disease. There are stories about how WW1 and WW2 were so different due to supply lines and better insect repellent soaked cloth.
In order for an empire to spread it has to win wars.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday January 27 2019, @09:44PM (7 children)
All languages are made up. They wouldn't exist otherwise.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 27 2019, @09:52PM
No Intelligent Design
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 27 2019, @10:32PM (3 children)
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Monday January 28 2019, @02:41AM (2 children)
And Esperanto has already evolved a new grammatical particle. And probably a lot of vocabulary.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Monday January 28 2019, @04:15AM (1 child)
“Clitic”.
Clitics are mentioned in wikipedia’s Grammatical Particle article
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clitic [wikipedia.org]
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Tuesday January 29 2019, @09:26PM
Yes, clitics are fun.
(Score: 5, Funny) by Bot on Sunday January 27 2019, @11:16PM (1 child)
Except perl.
Perl comes from /dev/random
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday January 28 2019, @05:04AM
I wish. It would make my job around here so much easier.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 28 2019, @01:37AM (1 child)
Chinese will never be important to the rest of the world. The time investment to reading the language is way too high.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 28 2019, @08:18AM
I was going to say the same. Chinese, with the writing systems they have, will never be the universal language like English is. Either Chinese will have a latin script version (like the Japanese have rōmaji) which would then have to be used by most of the Chinese or basically Chinese has no chance of being international.
I've always found it funny, when people start arguing about what language is the most used in the world. But the question is incorrectly formated. It's what language is most widely used in the world, and that's English by far. You go to any country and most likely you will find larger number of people speaking English than of any other language (obviously not including the local language(s) in that particular country).
(Score: 5, Funny) by Whoever on Monday January 28 2019, @01:55AM
I can assure you that I did not write the above.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Monday January 28 2019, @04:09PM
Chinese will not become increasingly important, unless China winds up colonizing a portion of the Earth's surface equivalent to the British Empire, and then holding on to that territory for several centuries.
Chinese has significant barriers for non-speakers to overcome, such as 4 tones, characters, and many mutually-unintelligible dialects (eg. Cantonese, Mandarin, Shanghainese, etc). Chinese is also not closely related to other major languages around it. Korean and Japanese are somewhat similar to each other, but they are much different from Chinese. In other words a French speaker has a leg up in English because there is a lot of commonality there, but that's not true for Chinese and neighboring languages.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 27 2019, @09:33PM
For the simple reason that the information required by the target language's grammar (gender, tense, honorifics, definiteness, evidentiality, etc. etc.) can be omitted in the source utterance if its grammar does not have a matching requirement.
When the info has not yet been communicated at all (quite likely for a new topic), translator has to use the most probable value and hope for the best. Which strategy naturally tends to fail at the worst possible moments.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Dr Spin on Sunday January 27 2019, @10:30PM (23 children)
There are very good reasons why English leads the pack -
It has the largest vocabulary by a very wide margin
- you can be far more specific if you have a lager vocabulary
- if you have access to a larger vocabulary,, you will be in the habit of being more specific
It is very easy to speak English badly - to the extent that "broken" or "pigin" English can be spoken with a tiny vocabulary and no grammar at all and can be understood by people who do not share a first language over much of the world (with the help of massive hand-waving, and ignoring complete gaffes).
English is associated with Freedom in many of parts of the world where they are oppressed by people speaking another language.
Hollywood movies have taught a lot of the world "English" - and probably also racism and violent behaviour (do your own Google search). They are digitalised and freely available anywhere the MAFIAA's grip is feeble - and will outlast VHS even in remote parts of the 3rd world.
None of this discounts the benefits of being bi-lingual. I use Google translate almost daily but mostly a bilingual 5 year old can do a lot better.
I doubt that machine translation will be reliable in the next 50 years, and I won't live that long.
Warning: Opening your mouth may invalidate your brain!
(Score: 2) by Bot on Sunday January 27 2019, @11:25PM (5 children)
> It has the largest vocabulary by a very wide margin
maybe that is partially a consequence of its success, IMHO English has two advantages
1. it is already a bastard language, You say English but you mean American English, which has come in contact with a lot of other european and now world languages.
2. it is so full of inconsistencies that less errors stand out (fewer LOL).
The big disadvantage is no clear and consistent rules of pronunciation, but much of this has been overcome by beefy AI.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Monday January 28 2019, @12:07AM
That's not a bug. That's the feature. You can read my other post to get the gist of it. But specifically to foreign countries deciding on which 2nd language to teach, English is preferred exactly because the students won't be able to transfer their reading and writing skills easily to speech so there's less of a lower-middle class brain drain risk.
compiling...
(Score: 2) by Dr Spin on Monday January 28 2019, @07:44AM (3 children)
You say English but you mean American English,
No I bloody well don't.
I speak several variants of English, and American ain't one of them! English English is entirely built from other European languages, although there are also bits of Arabic and various Indian languages. In London you find the youth using Vietnamese words too.
In reality there are, and have been since 1066, two main Englishes - French/Latin based - spoken by the educated, and German (Saxon) based English, traditionally spoken by the uneducated. Since universal free education (1949, I think) the uneducated have
largely died out, but that form of English is still widely used. Our rate of literacy is way higher than America's - most illiterates are recent immigrants from countries where they don't use the Latin alphabet.
There are also regional variants which differ quite considerably, although the differences are fading in most places.
Warning: Opening your mouth may invalidate your brain!
(Score: 2) by kazzie on Monday January 28 2019, @08:05AM
Compulsory education was a Victorian initiative, courtesy of a series of acts from 1870 to 1893 [www.bl.uk]. Though I wouldn't say this invalidates the rest of your statement. The separation of "school" English and "home" English is an interesting topic.
In my particular corner of the UK, the home language would usually have been Welsh (with English being the language of tuition at school). The decline in numbers of Welsh speakers in the 19th and 20th centuries may parallel the decline of the Saxon-based English you describe.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 28 2019, @03:41PM
This has literally never been true. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cross-country-literacy-rates?year=1960&country=USA+GBR [ourworldindata.org]
(Score: 2) by Bot on Wednesday January 30 2019, @08:12AM
Oi! you got a loicense for that English-English, chum?
Account abandoned.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by RamiK on Sunday January 27 2019, @11:34PM (1 child)
Yes and no. While you're right about English having a huge vocabulary. you're wrong about what it mean. In practice, it creates a language you can translate-to with a fair bit of accuracy, but typically can't translate-from properly since the target language lacks certain distinctions. Chinese has a similar "feature" where the written letters carry a lot of complicated connotations since they express different words so that can only be understood by literate Chinese readers or much of the subtext will be lost so you're forced to learned it literally "to the letter" in order to use it properly.
It's why computing is dominated by C++: A good language is well defined and easy to port in and out of. So, over time, the market slowly fills up with C++ since all it takes is one horrible decision to convert to an awful language like C++ which can't typically be undone realistically.
Effectively it's Peter principle being applied to human and computing languages.
If I couldn't convince an American native English speaking professor of literature Clean & Jerk wasn't slang for masturbation but a weightlifting maneuver without having to provide a footnote from a Kinesiology textbook, I doubt machine translation will ever become possible.
compiling...
(Score: 4, Funny) by maxwell demon on Monday January 28 2019, @12:11AM
Machine translation definitely is possible. I just translated my computer, clearly a machine, from one place to another. :-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by dvader on Monday January 28 2019, @12:21AM (9 children)
Largest vocabulary by a far margin? That's a myth.
https://www.economist.com/johnson/2010/06/23/the-biggest-vocabulary [economist.com]
In short, comparing languages isn't easy and there's no proper way to count words. Languages with on-the-fly word composition can create an almost infinite number of words (like wild life vs wildlife). But, at some point it's just a partial sentence without spaces. I don't speak Finnish or Turkish but I understand they have some extra spiffy rules for creating partial sentences without spaces (words). From the article above:
How do you compete with that? The article also discusses word roots and dictionaries. Read it, it is very interesting.
I doubt the expressiveness actually differs much between languages used in similar domains. Expressiveness is probably limited by hardware and not language. I have no proof of that though.
(Score: 2) by Appalbarry on Monday January 28 2019, @03:12AM (3 children)
And lets not dismiss the fact that Mandarin has a BIG head start in terms of native speakers, with English lagging third behind Spanish. (wikipedia) [wikipedia.org]
Mandarin Chinese 908.7 million
Spanish 442.3 million
English 378.2 million
With China expanding rapidly into pretty much every corner of the world, and the US and Britain deciding to isolate themselves, it's inevitable that Chinese will be the language that grows rapidly. Around here Mandarin is the first choice for a second language, while a lot of Chinese speakers don't even bother learning English beyond the "buying a coffee" level.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Tuesday January 29 2019, @10:36PM (2 children)
Where is "around here"?
(Score: 2) by Appalbarry on Wednesday January 30 2019, @02:28AM (1 child)
Vancouver BC and environs.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 30 2019, @03:05PM
> Vancouver BC and environs.
Of course Mandarin is the most common second language. It's a Chinese exclave, bought and paid for.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Monday January 28 2019, @04:21AM
It’s a fascinating place to live as there are so many dialects there
It’s simply expected that if you can’t find the right word you just make one up
The Dictionary Of Newfoundland English is HUGE.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Monday January 28 2019, @04:14PM (1 child)
Sure, as an agglutinative language Turkish has that ability, but it's not common. German, though an Indo-European language, has that ability to string lots of words together into one term, but it's not used. In fact, it's only a rueful joke told by non-German speakers who struggle to learn that language.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 28 2019, @07:08PM
Rechtsschutzversicherungsgesellschaften?
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Tuesday January 29 2019, @07:35PM (1 child)
English as a language and culture absorbs new and foreign words and constructs much more readily than other languages. In that sense English has the largest vocabulary since it's the sum of all other languages, minus a few orders of magnitude. It's an ugly language, but a useful one.
For example, suicide is a noun. You could very easily appropriate it as a verb: Bob suicided. English verb conjugations can be sloppily applied to random verbs shanghaied from other languages. You may be spaghettified in a warpgate (spaghetti being an Italian noun). Kondo Marie has been making the rounds on the Internet for her self-help cleaning advice (and I expect to see it on SN in the near future), and you can verbify that too: Sally KonMaried her garage. The -gate suffix is another example of something jerryrigged into the language out of thin air and can be attached to pretty much anything.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Tuesday January 29 2019, @10:38PM
As Peter Naur said, "In English, any noun can be verbed."
(Score: 2) by stretch611 on Monday January 28 2019, @03:51AM
Damn those French and their highly repressive regime.
Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P
(Score: 2) by Arik on Monday January 28 2019, @04:31AM (1 child)
True.
" - you can be far more specific if you have a lager vocabulary"
Theoretically.
" - if you have access to a larger vocabulary,, you will be in the habit of being more specific"
Maybe.
The problem is, that large vocabulary is only useful as long as we understand the distinctions between the similar words. As is nearly constantly impressed upon me here, this is not an expectation that others reliably meet. Poor dictionaries are only an excuse.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 4, Funny) by kazzie on Monday January 28 2019, @08:08AM
Does it depend on how drunk you are?
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Monday January 28 2019, @11:20AM (1 child)
My fellow soylentil, all I really need is Bud Light.
--
Forget world peace. Visualize using your damned turn signal.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Monday January 28 2019, @04:16PM
Philistine.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 27 2019, @11:36PM
...until you've read it in the original Klingon. Translations do not do it justice.
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by aristarchus on Monday January 28 2019, @12:26AM (1 child)
So why is it that all the aristarchus submissions in Dutch, German, French. Norwegian, Greek, Japanese, and American English all get rejected? I thought TMB included Unicode for a reason. Why is SN so full of "white pride" types who are incapable of speaking a white language?
(Score: 1, Troll) by aristarchus on Monday January 28 2019, @05:09AM
For those who are wondering, and modding the poor aristarchus off-topic: Polish is not a white language, it is a Slavic Language, as any Russian enthralled Trump worshipper should know, even if they live in Arkansas, and drive a $vehicle and works at a $workplace. Racist hillbillies!
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Monday January 28 2019, @12:37AM
She looks really good in that minuscule bikini of hers
Google Hangouts and Google Tranlsate both have copy and paste but she and I both write very fast. To switch back and forth so much is mentally taxing.
By contrast, my American Romance Scammer I am quite certain is a bot: despite being an artist whose paintings are on her website, she’s unable to find them when she and I talk.
For me to ask her to use her phone to snap a pic of her work stopped her cold.
And why do I persist with my decidedly unartistic chatbot?
She’s got Vast Tracts Of Land.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Monday January 28 2019, @01:19AM (2 children)
A couple things:
(1) TFA isn't exactly saying this is going to happen anytime soon. From TFA:
That's very noncommittal. I agree that this will happen "at some point." But I also agree there are huge hurdles (more on this in a minute). If you asked me for a timeline for when we reach "universal translator" capability and don't need professional translators or bilingual folks, I'd say that's at least a century in the future, possibly a lot more. But these things are notoriously difficult to predict. Note that I'm talking about full and reasonably accurate, fluid translation, not the "sorta can kinda get the gist of something" that Google Translate (and similar services) offers now.
(2) Speaking of Google Translate, didn't we talk about this a year ago [soylentnews.org]?
I'm not going to rehash Hofstadter's very insightful musings on this topic -- you can go back and read that if you didn't a year ago. Not much has changed. The fundamental issue is that machine translation currently doesn't have anything close to "understanding" of text, and until it does, accurate and fluent machine translation won't improve much more.
What I mean by this is quite simple stuff like being able to associate a pronoun with its antecedent consistently. Or, on a broader scale, sensing context and being able to connect a phrase or a pronoun to something that was discussed a few sentences back. That's a skill any child can figure out, but our current machine translation has no capability to judge that.
It's really the same problem plaguing chatbots. Despite all the wacky claims about "passing the Turing test" that have gone on in the previous few years, I submit that I could spend just a few minutes with a chatbot and ascertain that it has no understanding of basic natural language by testing stuff like I mentioned in the last paragraph. AI chatbots and translation will both grow by leaps and bounds if they start to actually "understand" text, but we're a LONG way off from that.
What we saw so far was first (a few decades ago) an overreliance on vocabulary translation and "rules." Natural languages don't do well with strict "rules" (and moving between languages will often involving navigating incommensurable constraints among the rules that do exist), so that approach is doomed to fail. Then, for the past 15 years or so, we've seen great strides in machine translation due to huge corpuses being available and mining them for patterns of larger groups of words, which then create a model that matches broader linguistic patterns.
That's a lot better than the "word-by-word" vocabulary translation with a few grammatical rules, but it still lacks ability to parse actual meaning, i.e., understanding context, why certain phrases and sentences make sense where they do (and not elsewhere), etc. That's a much tougher nut to crack, and until we do, we're going to keep seeing translations that seem vaguely okay for a phrase or even a few sentences, and then have wildly mismatched stuff, obvious usage errors that any child would notice, and occasional nonsense.
This may be "good enough" for many purposes when you're trying to get the gist of something. And that will gradually get better. But to get to the point where one can speak into a device and get a reasonably accurate translation close to what a professional translator (or even a bilingual kid) could muster... that could take a long time and a much different approach to language parsing in AI.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Monday January 28 2019, @04:26AM (1 child)
My actual experience is that Facebook romance scammers are all live human beings while those of Twitter are mostly bots that aren’t much advanced beyond Eliza
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 29 2019, @01:51PM
I was wondering where your girlfriend came from.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 28 2019, @01:31AM (1 child)
Nice way to sneak "Trump" into the headline there
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 28 2019, @05:12AM
Trick of the Art? "Art of the Deal" was just a marketing slogan to con people into signing up for the "Trump University". Explains why idiot and right wing religious nut job, and sister of mercenary Erik Prince, Betsy DeVos is still our secretary of education. Trump likes women secretaries. Easier to grab.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Arik on Monday January 28 2019, @04:21AM (6 children)
Yeah I know I don't write it right I don't have some of those keys on my keyboard.
I barely remember a word of it. It has a lot of problems but it's still the most widely spoken artificial language, right?
Or did Klingon pass it?
Anyhow, one idea with Esperanto was that it would be easy for to learn because it's (relatively) simple, it's (almost perfectly) regular, and the vocabulary is already widely known to speakers of other languages.
Well 1 is true, 2 is mostly true, 3 is sort of true. It sort-of-approximates a hypothetical 'standard European' and through that the vocabulary has inroads through for instance technical terminology worldwide, but most of it is still radically alien to speakers of many non European languages; the grammar even more so, simple as it is.
Still, on the grounds of generally easy to learn, it would probably be hard to be beat.
I think there are other grounds that should be considered, though. It's not the most expressive language, in fact IIRC I found it downright maddening how cumbersome it could be when I was really trying to work with it. It sounds a lot like Spanish or Italian but in those languages you can still pack a lot of punch into a single word; ¡dámelo! for example, powerful word. "(You) give me that!" Takes at least three words in English (unless you resort to baby-speak and say "gimme") and I don't think Esperanto can do any better. If I designed it, I think Esperanto would have a direct object pronoun that affixed to the verb.
In fact I probably wouldn't stop there. I like features that let you pack more data into shorter sentences, I find them aesthetically pleasing. But I'd try to hold myself back from going too wild with them, because it's important to preserve enough redundancy to communicate quickly over a poor quality link or over the top of loud noises now and then. There's a trade-off to be considered as long as that's a possible issue.
You can gain maximum room for meaningful distinctions by carefully utilizing your phonetic map, but there are limits. Heinlein's fictional artificial language (anyone remember what it was called?) would not actually work very well IRL because of that - mishearing a single sound inside a sentence in a natural language is likely to result in nonsense, and the subconscious is also likely to simply correct it without the conscious mind even being aware of it as a result. But in an artificial language that wrings just as much meaning out of each syllable as possible, a similar failure of hearing would be much more likely to make sense on the face of it, and thus much less likely to be detected or corrected or anyway. Heinlein's super language would simply be too frail for the real world - it would break constantly outside of a lab environment with proper headphones and microphones.
So in computing terms you do need some redundancy, checksums and the like. You can't squeeze it down infinitely. But you could squeeze it down quite a bit without causing problems if you did it carefully.
One way to do this is give all your phonemes plenty of space. The fewer phonemes you have, generally speaking, the less chance for them to be misheard. But that's not really correct. What matters is how much space you leave between them. If you have D do you really need T too? Well, maybe, but I'd pick one of them and go on through the series and only add the other later if I really don't have enough phonemes with the sparser set. The more distinctions you eliminate the more distinct the phonemes you have left actually become in practice.
There are epi-phonemic considerations too, and they play a role in many of the same calculations. For an example, t and th (the latter referring here to an aspirated t, not a fricative) are separate phonemes in many languages, but in English they are regular alterations of the same phoneme. We use the aspirated version at the beginning of a word, the other version anywhere else, barring particularly vehement speech in which case you might hear the aspirate in the middle of a word as well. The advantage of having them as different phonemes is a whole bunch more possible syllables, and thus potentially more words with fewer syllables. The advantage to doing what English does here is that it's one of those checksum-like-thingies. The vehemence with which we spit the initial consonants of words makes it easier for the listener to correctly split the sounds they hear back up into the words we intended to speak.
But as tempted as I might be to exploit a bunch of similar devices to cram more meaning into each syllable while avoiding excessive frailness, doing so might make the language much harder to learn. If we stick to just the aspiration example above - adopting the English usage would be easy for English speakers and speakers of other languages that do the same thing, but not really for everyone else. If I cram a dozen similar features in then the language might work exceptionally well - but no one would think it was particularly easy to learn anymore.
What's the current estimate of Basic Vocabulary? And how far off is it? That's what you would have to come to grips with to really map out the best balance of the phonemes - you first figure out how many distinct Basic words you need, it's going to be significantly more than Basic Vocabulary if you want to have sounds left over for fancy stuff like suffixes of course, but that's where you start. Then you figure out how many phonemes you need to fill your needs there in the minimum of syllables; 3? maybe you could squeeze it down to 2, but doing that means more phonemes you have to fit in the same space.
Anyone else actually care about this stuff?
Shalom
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 28 2019, @01:13PM
> It sounds a lot like Spanish or Italian but in those languages you can still pack a lot of punch into a single word; ¡dámelo! for example, powerful word. "(You) give me that!" Takes at least three words in English (unless you resort to baby-speak and say "gimme") and I don't think Esperanto can do any better.
Chinese can pack quite some things into a character. Do you want that? Probably not.
Anyway, “Donu!” should likely suffice given context, I think. At least that's how we use similar things in Russian (“Дай!”, “Дай сюда!”, “Отдай!” depending on what you mean) and it works just fine.
(Score: 1) by aixylinux on Monday January 28 2019, @03:34PM (1 child)
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Arik on Monday January 28 2019, @11:14PM
That doesn't sound right so I did some searching. Unfortunately I can't find the book, I may not have a copy here. From the web it seems likely I am thinking of "Gulf." He may well have used Loglan elsewhere.
At any rate the AL he described went to extremes to maximise phonemic inventory and use it all, so as to cram the largest vocabulary possible into the shortest utterences. So the phonemes approximated IPA, the language wouldn't just have a T, or a T and a D, but also aspirated AND glottal AND fricative AND affricative version of each, and so on. There's not just a click but every sort of click found in any natural language, or deducible from those, a glottal click and a dental click and a palatal click and so forth. It's hard to say just how many phonemes you would wind up with this method - the IPA claims 107 "letters" but it also has 56 additional characters that are used in combination, so the total number is vast.
By comparison Japanese has about 5 vowels and 14 consonants for a total of 29; English has about 15 vowels and 24 consonants for a total 39; in comparison to well over 100. With 5 vowels and 14 consonants, assuming all syllables are CV, you have 70 simple syllables to work with. With English phonemes, but still assuming that simple syllable structure, you'd get 15*24=360 syllables to use. But with, what, somewhere around 80 consonants and 40 vowels (a conservative guess) you'd wind up with 80*40=3200 syllables instead!
You could talk very fast if you learned a language like that, the big problem would be could you *listen* fast enough to understand it though. It's very easy to mistake each of these sounds for some of their close relatives. In most languages, the subconscious can narrow the possibilities down very quickly because only a few (or only one!) is actually possible. You thought you heard an aspirated 't' instead of the other one? Doesn't matter, they both mean the same here. You thought you heard a dental sibilant? Might be a speech defect, there aren't any words with an 's' there but if we put in a 't' it makes sense. You mind does this very quickly in the background so you rarely have to think of it. But if EVERY sound is used and EVERY possible syllable is used there's just no room for that sort of correction anymore. Oh, and if you misspeak - same thing. You can fumble over most of the sounds in a natural language and people can still easily understand you, because the sounds you're making aren't actual words, but they're close to something that is. With the phonemic inventory maxed out like this, that's no longer true - every time you misspoke the change would produce a valid word - just one with a different meaning from what you intended.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Wednesday January 30 2019, @03:29PM (2 children)
The Esperanto I learned back in the 60's didn't have upside-down question and exclamation marks.
Is that another new development in the language? With new punctuation and a new particle and the new words that it takes on from other languages, that's a clear hint that the language is evolving, and perhaps becoming natural.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Wednesday January 30 2019, @11:22PM (1 child)
I'm nowhere near current on Esperanto but I did recent skim something on it, and there are several innovations that are adopted by some users, but I was just having fun with something I vaguely remembered from years ago.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Wednesday February 06 2019, @01:56AM
Yes, I like the upside-down question marks too. Pity they're hard to type on some of my devices.