There are 15 messages in this issue.
Topics in this digest:
1a. Re: Jarda racial names
From: Herman Miller
1b. Re: Jarda racial names
From: Alex Fink
2a. Re: "Language is related to financial saving patterns" (apparently)
From: Douglas Koller
2b. Re: "Language is related to financial saving patterns" (apparently)
From: Matthew George
3a. Related to the recent discussion about counting the number of possib
From: Daniel Burgener
3b. Re: Related to the recent discussion about counting the number of po
From: George Corley
3c. Re: Related to the recent discussion about counting the number of po
From: Matthew George
3d. Re: Related to the recent discussion about counting the number of po
From: George Corley
3e. Re: Related to the recent discussion about counting the number of po
From: Alex Fink
3f. Re: Related to the recent discussion about counting the number of po
From: Logan Kearsley
4. OT: Middle Egyptian dictionary/grammar in Russian
From: MorphemeAddict
5a. CHAT: the Ithkuil of programming languages?
From: Alex Fink
5b. Re: CHAT: the Ithkuil of programming languages?
From: Logan Kearsley
5c. Re: CHAT: the Ithkuil of programming languages?
From: neo gu
5d. Re: CHAT: the Ithkuil of programming languages?
From: Daniel Burgener
Messages
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1a. Re: Jarda racial names
Posted by: "Herman Miller" [email protected]
Date: Mon Feb 25, 2013 6:35 pm ((PST))
On 2/24/2013 9:35 PM, George Corley wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 24, 2013 at 8:17 PM, Herman Miller<[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> I've been thinking about Sangari racial diversity and how to go about
>> naming the different groups in Jarda. I figure that the most apparent
>> differences would be in facial features and fur characteristics. There's a
>> group I've called "silverfurs" because of the pale color of their fur
>> (actually a bit more golden than silvery in appearance, but it's considered
>> a shade of non-ultraviolet-reflecting white, which I gloss as "silvery").
>> The Mayushi (a group that lives on an island to the southeast) belong to a
>> related race with more of a yellowish golden color to their fur.
>>
>> So one obvious option is to name the groups by their distinctive
>> characteristics.
>>
>> füljêzŏ shortfurs
>> łağjêzŏ silverfurs
>> tṛaljêzŏ yellowfurs (Mayushi)
>> diṛvazŏ littlenoses
>> ğirjazŏ longears
>>
>
> Are any of these traits environmentally conditioned the way human skin
> color is? That could certainly to a similar association with race.
The "silverfur" type is an adaptation to the cold southern lands;
besides the light fur color they have other adaptations to the cold
climate. Some northerners may have similar adaptations, but they belong
to a different race. The "shortfur" race is adapted to warmer climates.
Maybe the sizes of noses and ears are also adaptations to local
conditions, but I haven't figured out the specifics.
> A lot of this has to do with the fact that humans don't actually have
> physical races, of course, and the traits we're using to categorize people
> are usually polygenetic traits that exist on a continuum, rather than
> simple binary traits. The genetics of your conspecies might be somewhat
> different.
Maybe so, but I imagine things like ear length and nose size are ranges
on a continuum also. Eye color could be another variable. But there must
have been quite a bit of interbreeding over the years, and probably no
clear racial boundaries remain.
>> Or maybe each group just has its own name (like Mayushi, Mizarga, and
>> Kavargi), and Jarda has adopted a historical version of those names.
>>
>
> Why not do both. One name might be pejorative, and another more formal or
> proper. In fact, there are all kinds of interesting social tricks you can
> do when you give an ethnic or racial group multiple names. Plus, calling
> back to what I said before, if your species is like humans in terms of
> genetic diversity, then different cultures may well divide up the "races"
> in different ways.
Yes, it's likely that Tirelat or Lindiga would have a different
categorization of races than Jarda. Maybe from a Jarda-centric point of
view, everyone living on the western continent (Tavishantse) would
generically be labeled as "westerners", when actually the deepest racial
divisions are found among the western races. Tirelat would keep those
separate, while being vague on the "eastern" races of Nyakiramya.
Messages in this topic (4)
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1b. Re: Jarda racial names
Posted by: "Alex Fink" [email protected]
Date: Tue Feb 26, 2013 10:12 am ((PST))
On Mon, 25 Feb 2013 21:35:54 -0500, Herman Miller <[email protected]> wrote:
>On 2/24/2013 9:35 PM, George Corley wrote:
>> Are any of these traits environmentally conditioned the way human skin
>> color is? That could certainly to a similar association with race.
>
>The "silverfur" type is an adaptation to the cold southern lands;
>besides the light fur color they have other adaptations to the cold
>climate. Some northerners may have similar adaptations, but they belong
>to a different race. The "shortfur" race is adapted to warmer climates.
>Maybe the sizes of noses and ears are also adaptations to local
>conditions, but I haven't figured out the specifics.
It's not in fact clear that light human skin colour is environmentally
conditioned! It seems that light skin doesn't so much have an _advantage_ in
climes receiving less UV light as simply a comparative lack of a disadvantage
-- light skin still raises your chance of melanoma, there's just less
environmental susceptibility to it. (I'm not sure what the score is for
vitamin D).
An alternative hypothesis that's been advanced is sexual selection: skin
colour, being extremely visible and salient, is a natural trait for sexual
selection to act on. The theory then goes that there is a preference for
lighter-skinned mates in various human sub-populations, but this can only run
away and produce a population-level genetic change in regions where low UV
levels don't make that too deleterious. Peter Frost is one anthropologist
holding this is what happened in Europe:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Frost_(anthropologist)>; another take on
the idea is
<http://darwinstudents.blogspot.com/2009/06/why-do-europeans-north-asians-and.html>
The conculture applicability of sexual selection effects to fur colour, sizes
and shapes of ears and noses, etc., should be clear...
Alex
Messages in this topic (4)
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2a. Re: "Language is related to financial saving patterns" (apparently)
Posted by: "Douglas Koller" [email protected]
Date: Tue Feb 26, 2013 12:43 am ((PST))
> Date: Mon, 25 Feb 2013 08:18:26 -0600
> From: [email protected]
> Subject: Re: "Language is related to financial saving patterns" (apparently)
> To: [email protected]
> On Mon, Feb 25, 2013 at 2:02 AM, Douglas Koller wrote:
> > It's a PDF, apparently, which means that Douglas won't be reading it any
> > time soon while he's on the mainland.
> That's weird. Is his computer there 15 years old or something?
YouTube, Facebook, and PDFs are apparently echt verboten here. Whether that's a
nation-wide directive or a campus phenom, I cannot say -- I haven't pursued it
(though sans my prompting, ashen-faced students did once mention that Facebook
was a no-no). Perhaps the benevolent powers that be don't want the masses
exposed to videos of frat boys teabagging each other, sledding down six flights
of dormitory stairs on a mattress, or worse, 9,000 pix of someone's cat
(however cunnin'). Dunno. But *no* Delason grammar for Douglas. *No* clicking
on interesting YouTube tidbits posted here on the list. And *no* seeing if
Prof. Chen is shilling snake oil. The computer smiles, tut-tuts, and politely
flips me the bird.
> This is a big reason why I want to see the paper. I really should just go
> ahead and read it. I recall hearing that he used some typology database
> for his weak/strong FTR values, which might be better, but there's always
> complications.
Indeed. It *would* be nice to know what his parameters are, at the very least.
From what I've read thus far (and *seems* to be insinuated in some of the
critiques), it seems as capricious as a gym teacher picking teams for a
4th-grade kickball game (Hungarian, over here -- English, over there).
> As far as "leap to saving behaviour" -- data first, theory later. IF he
> has proved that future marking affects saving behavior (which I'm not
> certain he has), or that there's some correlation at least, THEN you should
> see if the hypothesis explains it. After all, it's not evidence unless it
> actually exists.
I'm hard-pressed myself to explain why this particular study so rabidly sticks
in my craw the way it does. Maybe someone laced my Wheaties with steroids
yesterday. Maybe it's Chen's "Ta-da!" tone in the interview. Perhaps I'm just
in a temper. But to my way of thinking, and even cutting him slack on what
strong/weak FTR means, he's only at the "The majority of American inmates
report having drunk milk at some time." stage, and if he left it at that, I'd
say okay. But he's gone right to, "Broadly speaking, there seems to be
something about milk-drinking that leads to criminal behavior." (if you factor
out all the socio-religio-economic and educational considerations, what else is
left?). He doesn't hedge his bets with "Well, of course, it's more complex
than that." or "Of course, these are only preliminary findings." (cutting him
additional slack on the limitations of a four-minute interview); no, no, he
hedges them with "Broadly speaking, you can effectively say..." Well no, you
can't. (or yes, you *can*, but broadly speaking I've never read a study that
effectively disproves a correlation between [x] in an L1 and invading Poland,
or Brie and larceny, either).
> I think I have said that we won't be able to tell
> everything about how language influences thought without much more accurate
> brain scans (indeed, I think I was referring more to how language works in
> general) --
Yes, I tweaked here to make it relevant to the topic at hand. But my point was
that I take your point.
> and even then, it will take time and effort to analyze the
> data. But that doesn't and shouldn't stop people from inferring things
> from more indirect evidence. One of the keys to science is that you could
> be proven wrong at any instant, after all.
Which is why even the most ebullient scientist usually leads with, "We find
these results very encouraging." and not, "We've effectively found the cure for
cancer!" (if there are hand-springs, it's off camera). Infer away, that's what
hypotheses are for, but tread softly and cautiously, if you're in front of a
mike, I guess (maybe that's my beef)? Someone can write a book called "China
Ascending" and attribute it to the zen-like properties of a non-dedicated
grammatical future, citing Chen's study. Yale won't mind the free publicity.
Maybe Chen gets a stint on "Charlie Rose" (someone can snap him a couple of
bucks to get a decent haircut). But I still think it's a little early to pop
the champagne corks and call it "science". Would the study be nearly as
compelling if it reached some rather anti-zen conclusion?
Kou
Messages in this topic (10)
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2b. Re: "Language is related to financial saving patterns" (apparently)
Posted by: "Matthew George" [email protected]
Date: Tue Feb 26, 2013 9:41 am ((PST))
Even if there's some substance to this (questionable) claim, the nature of
the relationship is still not established. Perhaps underlying cultural
tendencies are responsible both for the structure of the language and the
attitude towards saving - leading to those two things being correlated but
causally unconnected. It might be possible to change one without altering
the other in any way.
Matt G.
Messages in this topic (10)
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3a. Related to the recent discussion about counting the number of possib
Posted by: "Daniel Burgener" [email protected]
Date: Tue Feb 26, 2013 5:19 am ((PST))
Randall Monroe, creator of the webcomic xkcd tackled a very similar
question today:
http://what-if.xkcd.com/
He dodges the "what about infinite sentences?" question that we discussed
by asking how many different tweets were possible, and then does some
estimation using information theory. So it sounds like the number he
arrives at is a rough estimate for the number of different thoughts that
can be communicated in a tweet, rather than just being grammatically
different.
-Daniel
Messages in this topic (6)
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3b. Re: Related to the recent discussion about counting the number of po
Posted by: "George Corley" [email protected]
Date: Tue Feb 26, 2013 5:50 am ((PST))
On Tue, Feb 26, 2013 at 7:18 AM, Daniel Burgener
<[email protected]>wrote:
> Randall Monroe, creator of the webcomic xkcd tackled a very similar
> question today:
>
> http://what-if.xkcd.com/
>
> He dodges the "what about infinite sentences?" question that we discussed
> by asking how many different tweets were possible, and then does some
> estimation using information theory. So it sounds like the number he
> arrives at is a rough estimate for the number of different thoughts that
> can be communicated in a tweet, rather than just being grammatically
> different.
It's a good thought experiment. Using Twitter to give it an arbitrary
limit lets you make the problem solvable, and then leads to a really useful
idea -- what's the information density? Calculating the number of valid
English sentences ends up going nowhere because there is essentially an
infinite number, and even with the arbitrary limits, there might as well be
an infinite number of possible tweets.
Messages in this topic (6)
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3c. Re: Related to the recent discussion about counting the number of po
Posted by: "Matthew George" [email protected]
Date: Tue Feb 26, 2013 9:39 am ((PST))
And then, what about abbreviations? Abbrvs oft are n form defd, but r
comprhbl to pps fluent in base lang - at worst they take some puzzling out.
And that's excluding using languages/codes other than English.
At present, there is to my (very limited) knowledge no theoretical
understanding of the informational content of *concepts*. And that, rather
than words, is what would really matter to the information density.
Matt G.
Messages in this topic (6)
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3d. Re: Related to the recent discussion about counting the number of po
Posted by: "George Corley" [email protected]
Date: Tue Feb 26, 2013 9:49 am ((PST))
On Tue, Feb 26, 2013 at 11:39 AM, Matthew George <[email protected]> wrote:
> And then, what about abbreviations? Abbrvs oft are n form defd, but r
> comprhbl to pps fluent in base lang - at worst they take some puzzling out.
>
Actually, at worst people actually fail to understand them. I have no idea
what "defd" means. But then, people fail to understand words, sometimes.
Also, if you think the method Monroe cites for determining information
density of a text, it might account for abbreviations to some extent.
> And that's excluding using languages/codes other than English.
>
Well, yes. Theoretically, Chinese should be far more information dense than
English, and it does seem that way anecdotally (I have seen Chinese
microblog posts that would translate to far more than 140 characters in
English), but only in terms of the written language. An entirely different
test would be needed to determine information density of the actual spoken
language.
> At present, there is to my (very limited) knowledge no theoretical
> understanding of the informational content of *concepts*. And that, rather
> than words, is what would really matter to the information density.
>
True. No one really knows if "concepts" even exist cognitively. Does
language map directly onto our unfiltered perception of the world, or is
there an intermediate stage? The best we can do is compare two languages
using a parallel text, though that runs into its own problems, as getting a
translation to say exactly the same thing as the original can be difficult
and unnatural.
Messages in this topic (6)
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3e. Re: Related to the recent discussion about counting the number of po
Posted by: "Alex Fink" [email protected]
Date: Tue Feb 26, 2013 10:50 am ((PST))
On Tue, 26 Feb 2013 08:18:59 -0500, Daniel Burgener <[email protected]>
wrote:
>So it sounds like the number he
>arrives at is a rough estimate for the number of different thoughts that
>can be communicated in a tweet, rather than just being grammatically
>different.
"Number of thoughts", ish, but it's clear that the counting _is_ being done in
a way that includes "fake" information like choice between different
grammatical structures. Consider for example Shannon's completion experiment
with a sentence like "Yesterday I went to the store and _". Two possible
continuations are "bought" and "purchased" which it's quite defensible to say
express the same _concept_, but they count as different to the entropy: one's a
"b", the other's a "p".
That is:
On Tue, 26 Feb 2013 11:49:30 -0600, George Corley <[email protected]> wrote:
>On Tue, Feb 26, 2013 at 11:39 AM, Matthew George <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> At present, there is to my (very limited) knowledge no theoretical
>> understanding of the informational content of *concepts*. And that, rather
>> than words, is what would really matter to the information density.
>
>True. No one really knows if "concepts" even exist cognitively. Does
>language map directly onto our unfiltered perception of the world, or is
>there an intermediate stage? The best we can do is compare two languages
>using a parallel text, though that runs into its own problems, as getting a
>translation to say exactly the same thing as the original can be difficult
>and unnatural.
Well, Shannon's theory does a lot of what parallel texts can do, without
needing the parallelism. That's the awesome thing about it: take a large
enough corpus that you can make entropy estimations and you then know (at least
subject to approximations involved in the way you counted) how much information
is in any given text, in a _particular concrete unit_ (the bit).
The trouble, if you call it a trouble, and if you grant that the difference
exists(!), is that it can't filter out "real, conceptual" information, from
"fake, grammatical or lexical" information. That is one thing the parallel
text approach would do better -- as George notes, translation presupposes
concepts exist in at least some sense.
>> And then, what about abbreviations? Abbrvs oft are n form defd, but r
>> comprhbl to pps fluent in base lang - at worst they take some puzzling out.
>
>Actually, at worst people actually fail to understand them. I have no idea
>what "defd" means. But then, people fail to understand words, sometimes.
> Also, if you think the method Monroe cites for determining information
>density of a text, it might account for abbreviations to some extent.
Well, abbreviations would increase the bit rate, but if done informally the way
Matthew did here, a good part of the increase would be particularly "fake":
e.g. the difference between "comprhbl" and "comprehbl" and "cmprhbl" and
"cmprhsbl" and all the myriad other variants someone might dream up would make
a contribution to the entropy.
A briefscript, by contrast, would give you the compression without nearly so
much of this pointless variation.
Alex
Messages in this topic (6)
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3f. Re: Related to the recent discussion about counting the number of po
Posted by: "Logan Kearsley" [email protected]
Date: Tue Feb 26, 2013 11:35 am ((PST))
On 26 February 2013 10:39, Matthew George <[email protected]> wrote:
> And then, what about abbreviations? Abbrvs oft are n form defd, but r
> comprhbl to pps fluent in base lang - at worst they take some puzzling out.
>
> And that's excluding using languages/codes other than English.
>
> At present, there is to my (very limited) knowledge no theoretical
> understanding of the informational content of *concepts*. And that, rather
> than words, is what would really matter to the information density.
There was a conversation on this very topic recently in my semantics
class. I don't think the idea of the information content of concepts
is particularly meaningful, nor relevant, because language does not
convey concepts. Language conveys information which is evidence that
you can use to infer concepts. What concepts come up in your brain as
a result of exposure to language depend not only on the linguistic
evidence but also on all of your prior knowledge and reasoning, and it
really doesn't make sense to try to measure the communicative capacity
of language based on all that stuff in your head that's different from
person to person.
I'm fairly convinced that there's no theoretical understanding of how
to measure concepts because concepts are not objective measurable
things. But information is, and information is what language conveys,
so it makes sense to evaluate language in terms of information.
On 26 February 2013 11:50, Alex Fink <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Tue, 26 Feb 2013 08:18:59 -0500, Daniel Burgener
> <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>>So it sounds like the number he
>>arrives at is a rough estimate for the number of different thoughts that
>>can be communicated in a tweet, rather than just being grammatically
>>different.
>
> "Number of thoughts", ish, but it's clear that the counting _is_ being done
> in a way that includes "fake" information like choice between different
> grammatical structures. Consider for example Shannon's completion experiment
> with a sentence like "Yesterday I went to the store and _". Two possible
> continuations are "bought" and "purchased" which it's quite defensible to say
> express the same _concept_, but they count as different to the entropy: one's
> a "b", the other's a "p".
I would argue that there is really no such thing as "fake"
information; concepts may be very close together, and maybe the author
of a particular tweet wouldn't care about the distinction between
them, but true perfect synonyms are incredibly rare, and there's
always *some* reason why one word or one structure was picked over
another one.
-l.
Messages in this topic (6)
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4. OT: Middle Egyptian dictionary/grammar in Russian
Posted by: "MorphemeAddict" [email protected]
Date: Tue Feb 26, 2013 7:50 am ((PST))
Does anyone know of a decent Middle Egyptian dictionary and grammar book in
Russian?
stevo
Messages in this topic (1)
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5a. CHAT: the Ithkuil of programming languages?
Posted by: "Alex Fink" [email protected]
Date: Tue Feb 26, 2013 11:15 am ((PST))
Last night, Sai and I were talking about kitchen-sinkiness when he
claimed Ithkuil to be kitchen-sinky. I objected: Ithkuil isn't
kitchen-sinky 'cause the kitchen-sink ethos requires grafting
everything on in haphazard ways with little regard for an overall
systematicity or aesthetic. That's not Ithkuil; Ithkuil has a
profusion of categories, but there's a place for everything and
everything's in its place.
I went on, metaphorically, saying that Perl is kitchen-sink while
Python isn't, even though they're pretty much equicapable. Which led
to the question of what the Ithkuil of programming languages is. And
we both, simultaneously and independently, suggested APL. Marks a
bunch of funny categories like array rank throughout which other
languages haven't even heard of as categories, and of course is
crazily compact and has a crazy charset.
Agree, disagree? What is the <your favourite conlang here> of
programming languages, or the <your favourite programming language
here> of conlangs, or the ...?
Alex
Messages in this topic (4)
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5b. Re: CHAT: the Ithkuil of programming languages?
Posted by: "Logan Kearsley" [email protected]
Date: Tue Feb 26, 2013 11:29 am ((PST))
On 26 February 2013 12:15, Alex Fink <[email protected]> wrote:
> Last night, Sai and I were talking about kitchen-sinkiness when he
> claimed Ithkuil to be kitchen-sinky. I objected: Ithkuil isn't
> kitchen-sinky 'cause the kitchen-sink ethos requires grafting
> everything on in haphazard ways with little regard for an overall
> systematicity or aesthetic. That's not Ithkuil; Ithkuil has a
> profusion of categories, but there's a place for everything and
> everything's in its place.
>
> I went on, metaphorically, saying that Perl is kitchen-sink while
> Python isn't, even though they're pretty much equicapable. Which led
> to the question of what the Ithkuil of programming languages is. And
> we both, simultaneously and independently, suggested APL. Marks a
> bunch of funny categories like array rank throughout which other
> languages haven't even heard of as categories, and of course is
> crazily compact and has a crazy charset.
I read the title, thought "APL", and then was disappointed when you
mentioned it already. :)
Since APL has been taken, I will propose J as another possible contender.
> Agree, disagree? What is the <your favourite conlang here> of
> programming languages, or the <your favourite programming language
> here> of conlangs, or the ...?
Well, I don't think we can have a conversation about this without
mentioning Fith as the FORTH of conlangs.
I had thought that Lojban might be comparable to Prolog, but now I'm
thinking its more of a Haskell.
Toki Pona is, of course, Lambda Calculus.
-l.
Messages in this topic (4)
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5c. Re: CHAT: the Ithkuil of programming languages?
Posted by: "neo gu" [email protected]
Date: Tue Feb 26, 2013 11:52 am ((PST))
I also thought of APL when I saw the subject line.
Messages in this topic (4)
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5d. Re: CHAT: the Ithkuil of programming languages?
Posted by: "Daniel Burgener" [email protected]
Date: Tue Feb 26, 2013 12:06 pm ((PST))
>
> Well, I don't think we can have a conversation about this without
> mentioning Fith as the FORTH of conlangs.
> I had thought that Lojban might be comparable to Prolog, but now I'm
> thinking its more of a Haskell.
>
Agree on the Haskell. My first thought was "What would Haskell be?" but
then I read your post before actually trying to come up with something and
you seem to have a perfect idea.
How about Ido as C++? They're both reforms on one of the most widely-used
languages.
Messages in this topic (4)
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