[HN Gopher] BCI lets completely "locked-in" man communicate
___________________________________________________________________
BCI lets completely "locked-in" man communicate
Author : sizzle
Score : 180 points
Date : 2022-04-20 17:50 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (arstechnica.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (arstechnica.com)
| MBCook wrote:
| Wasn't communicating with locked-in people a big "breakthrough"
| in the 80s or 90s that sadly later ended up being debunked as
| basically wishful thinking?
|
| Unfortunately it seems like this kind of thing pops up every 5-10
| years so I've become quite skeptical of it.
| uniqueuid wrote:
| Well, here's the paper in nature communications:
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-28859-8
|
| One might worry that a good enough heuristic (i.e. word
| completion) will generate sensible sentences even from noise
| input. However, in this case, he is typing his son's name.
| MBCook wrote:
| I remember hearing similar things.
|
| The difference here may be that I think in many of the cases
| I'm thinking about it might not have been locked-in so much
| as people thought to be in comas or with other serious damage
| he where the truth is they probably weren't capable at all.
|
| That doesn't seem to be the case here. He seems to lack the
| physical ability to communicate but I'm not sure there is a
| reason he would lack the mental ability.
| 9oliYQjP wrote:
| Does it say if the researchers knew his family members' names
| in advance? Wouldn't the "a ha!" moment be when the patient
| shares something that the researchers couldn't possibly find
| out on their own and that wouldn't be interpreted via his
| family's help? None of that appeared to happen here.
|
| Having said that, I've just skimmed the Nature article. But
| what stands out is that they had 86 days of unsuccessful
| communication before they changed strategies and then all of
| a sudden started reporting success. I really hope this works
| but we should remain skeptical for the possibility of abuse
| here. Other commenters in this thread have reported that the
| researchers have committed misconduct in their brain
| research.
|
| The only thing I fear more than being in the discussed
| patient's situation is being in their situation and having my
| thoughts incorrectly interpreted at best or outright
| manipulated at worst.
| gus_massa wrote:
| Perhaps hire the Randi foundation to design an experiment.
| This is not "physic", but they have a lot of experience
| designing foolproof test for voluntary and involuntary
| fraud.
|
| For example:
|
| Make one person roll a dice and tell the number to the
| patient ensuring that nobody else can hear it. Kill the
| person that roll the dice to ensure the result is secret.
| Make another person read the BCI and write down the result.
| Repeat this 18 times and then look at the video and compare
| the dice and the BCI. It's a success if they guessed
| correctly at least 9 times. The expected number of correct
| answers is 3, and the probability to guess 9 randomly is
| only 0.1%.
|
| If they do this only once, live streaming the experiment it
| is enough for me, but perhaps it's better to have a lower
| probability for a random guess. Also, I like that the
| "success" threshold is one half of the experiments. It's
| easy to explain, not too much in case it's not perfect, and
| less than a half is not impressive.
| wmichelin wrote:
| This is one of the most beautiful pieces of technology I have
| ever seen. This gives me hope. I can't imagine the feeling of
| finally being able to communicate after being trapped inside of
| your own body.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| This is sort of thing we should focus on.
| matthoiland wrote:
| At some point in each of our lives, we'll be dependent on the
| empathy of another to keep us alive and comfortable. Designing
| and discovering technology now will help us all then, and help
| others that are suffering right now.
| CyberDildonics wrote:
| markus_zhang wrote:
| Getting a relevant job I guess? I work in data domain so I'm
| thinking about working for say medical team to solve their
| data pipeline issues. However it requires 1) I get a deeper
| understanding of data engineering, which I just moved in
| since last job and have about one year of experience, and 2)
| TBF a job in such a team, which is definitely more difficult
| than getting one in say gaming or ads domain.
| roughly wrote:
| One thing I'd suggest is to not underestimate the value of
| your current skill set or your ability to contribute to
| this kind of work - it's easy when you work at a tech
| company around a bunch of other techies and big systems to
| see how much more you have to learn, but odds are if you've
| been in the industry for even a couple years, you've got an
| enormous amount of experience relevant to any organization
| trying to wrangle computers.
| mulmen wrote:
| I'd like to know more about the input UX. Does it do any
| prediction? Is it a variant of T9?
|
| Touch screens are also low fidelity input devices. The lessons
| learned on streamlining BCI inputs could have wider applications.
| Like building a web app over dialup.
| jffry wrote:
| There are two videos linked from the "supplementary
| information" section of the paper:
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-28859-8#Sec14
|
| In particular, the second video shows sessions where he is
| spelling out words with the audio-interactive system
| evandale wrote:
| I always flip between space travel and medical science as being
| our greatest achievement. For me, the covid vaccines and this
| story give medical science the lead.
| sam1r wrote:
| Does anyone know the speed/ rate at which the German patient
| would communicate words or sentences?
| rbultje wrote:
| "On average, 121 min were spent spelling and the average length
| of these communications was 131 characters per day. The
| patient's intelligible messages comprised 5747 characters
| produced over 5338 min, corresponding to an average rate of
| 1.08 characters per minute."
| Wojakmeme wrote:
| I wonder if this is caused by the mans mental state or the
| technical limitations.
| jffry wrote:
| The second video accompanying the actual paper should give a
| good sense. It's not the fastest but it's still incredible:
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-28859-8#Sec14
| lqr wrote:
| In another life I would love to be a BCI researcher.
| the_only_law wrote:
| In another life I'd just try and do it.
| [deleted]
| andrei52 wrote:
| paulpauper wrote:
| hmm...what if you accidently divulge your crypto seed phrase
| not-my-account wrote:
| Ah yes I'd much rather remain locked-in than divulge my
| precious seed phrase /s
| spicybright wrote:
| It's the only counter to rubber hose decryption!
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| charcircuit wrote:
| How? It would take forever to type out and most people don't
| even have it memorized.
| wnolens wrote:
| I've sat at the bedside of my mother and grandmother, both
| seemingly unconscious (for different reasons) and mostly
| unresponsive until they passed.
|
| My grandmother would cry (tears would flow) when some family
| members came by and spoke about her condition in front of her. My
| mother would jerk her hand away from my father's when he was too
| fidgety with her. It would appear that they were both
| experiencing some form of consciousness, just trapped and likely
| very scared. So I took care of the swatting away of others and
| spoke softly to them to let them know they weren't alone.
|
| I wish they could have expressed their needs in that moment.
| sudden_dystopia wrote:
| "...and for his caretakers to play his favorite band, Tool, very
| loud. But it's the communications with his young son that tug at
| the heartstrings..."
|
| I dunno, the request for Tool, very loud gets me a little misty
| eyed.
| plmpsu wrote:
| Aye.
| crad wrote:
| You and I both
| jstanley wrote:
| Article doesn't answer the important question: did he get his
| beer?
| uniqueuid wrote:
| I assume he is supplied with nutrients via a tube and cannot
| swallow, so probably not. And even if, he would not get to
| taste it :(
| mulmen wrote:
| The article mentions requesting different foods. If he
| couldn't taste then that would be a waste of effort. Why
| waste the time to ask for something you can't experience?
| javajosh wrote:
| Alcohol need not be tasted to be "experienced".
| zamadatix wrote:
| The article mentions requesting different foods. Not just
| the beer.
| dqpb wrote:
| They could at least put some drops on his tongue
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| I was thinking the same, a few ice cold beer drops, and
| they could ask him if he can taste it.
|
| Edit: seems his requests could have been conceded through
| his feeding tube:
|
| "The first message was a simple thanks to Birbaumer and the
| rest of the team. Other messages related to the man's care
| preferences: asking for a head massage or for more gel on
| his eye (which was prone to dryness) and requesting a
| higher head position when visitors were present. He even
| made suggestions for improving the performance of the
| spelling system.
|
| Eventually, he could make specific dietary requests for his
| feeding tube: soup with meat, sweet pea soup, and curry
| with potato. And he did request a beer and for his
| caretakers to play his favorite band, Tool, very loud."
|
| Unfortunately he's locked-in because of progressive muscle
| atrophy, so recovery isn't likely.
| shard wrote:
| Maybe he just misses the mild buzz from the alcohol.
| glenstein wrote:
| >I assume he is supplied with nutrients via a tube and cannot
| swallow, so probably not
|
| You can definitely still experience alcohol. There was a GQ
| article about Richard Norris, recipient of a face transplant,
| who went to the store and got himself some Wild Turkey which
| he ingested via a tube to his stomach.
|
| > He reaches into the brown bag, pulls out a bottle of Wild
| Turkey. [...] "For my throat," he says. He can't take over-
| the-counter medications, he says. Too risky with his meds.
| There's a backpack at his feet. He opens it, pulls out some
| tubing and a wide syringe, about a half-inch across, the kind
| you use to give medicine to horses. [...] He hooks the
| syringe to the tubing, lifts up his shirt. [...] He opens the
| Wild Turkey and starts pouring.
|
| https://www.gq.com/story/richard-norris
| uniqueuid wrote:
| It's stories like this that really bring home how much progress
| we've made in medical research.
|
| There were immensely innovative studies in brain research all
| over the past 50-60 years, but this is still breathtaking.
| TaupeRanger wrote:
| Not much. This probably only marginally improves a patient's
| quality of life beyond what we were already capable of
| providing with existing systems. It's better than nothing of
| course, since you made a general point about medical research,
| the life expectancy of the average American has only gone up 5
| years over the past 40 years (excluding declines due to COVID).
| uniqueuid wrote:
| I would strongly disagree.
|
| The decreasing life expectancy in the US is probably, _ahem_
| , largely attributed to a medical system that is not
| particularly well-optimized for boosting mass life expectancy
| (despite being world-class in absolute quality of care, I
| assume).
|
| If you look closely, past decades have brought immense
| breakthroughs such as
|
| - the first completely synthetic new antibiotic
|
| - dramatic improvements in spatial and temporal resolution of
| imaging systems (MRI, PET etc.)
|
| - actually useful robotic assistance for surgery
|
| - easy, simple, and widespread techniques that are
| nevertheless life-saving, including a broad awareness for
| important events such as cardiac arrest and stroke
|
| - much better, faster and more accurate laboratory work, down
| to the DNA level
|
| And that's only a fraction of it which a layman such as
| myself can come up with from the top of my head!
| spicybright wrote:
| It really is. I see too often wins like this get overlooked by
| the general pessimism everyone seems to have about the world.
|
| But through a lot of hard work, we gave someone living in a
| black mirror-style horror the start of being able to
| communicate again.
|
| Give it 20 years and I'm sure we'll have a standard box to
| stick on someone's head to let them communicate reasonably well
| (or at least enough to order a cold beer).
| TaupeRanger wrote:
| Well part of the pessimism comes from overstatements of the
| effects of such research, as evidenced by your comment. There
| is basically zero evidence that this device provides better
| quality of life than the systems that already existed. This
| is essentially a fluff piece, likely financed by the company
| that made the system. Real breakthroughs are few and far
| between, and it's been like this for decades.
| goodells wrote:
| I'd offer some pushback, from someone with hands-on
| experience. I'm a paramedic and work alongside other
| medics, nurses, and physicians who have seen a wave of
| change in evidence-based medicine over just the course of a
| few decades. Not everything is flashy and glamorous like a
| brain-computer interface. No press release that makes it to
| the top of HN is going to talk about the choice of isotonic
| crystalloids or sedation agents on intracranial pressure,
| but we're making great strides, even if by definition
| "marginal" ones.
|
| Modern resuscitation is like nothing I have ever seen
| before. Over the past 100 years, we have gained an almost
| complete understanding of cardiac electrophysiology, acid-
| base balance, hematology. In the worst-case scenario that
| you get hit by a car in a major US city, you will likely
| have TXA forced into your bloodstream through an
| intravenous catheter within 13 minutes to counteract the
| body's incorrect hyperfibrinolytic reaction. Your heart
| rhythm will be constantly analyzed and treated according to
| ACLS which has essentially been studied and modified to
| death by the AHA in a gradient descent pattern - we're
| stuck in a local minimum where the antidysrhythmic of
| choice alternates between amiodarone and lidocaine. When
| you arrive at the hospital, a FAST ultrasound scan will be
| performed where the culmination of materials science and
| informatics comes together to quickly identify blood in the
| retroperitoneal space without incurring the logistics of
| getting a trauma patient into a CT scanner. All this while
| a neurologist checks 12 of your cranial nerves and someone
| checks the tone of your rectal sphincter - because evidence
| shows us this is an important sign. In the case that you
| have an intracranial bleed, you'll be followed with MRI
| (which I'm convinced is the closest we've gotten to Star
| Trek scanner technology) to identify the penumbra of a
| stroke based on the deoxygenation of hemoglobin. We can now
| scan a variety of elements with magnetic resonance
| spectroscopy besides just precessing hydrogen atoms, which
| is helpful in identifying neoplastic lesions without the
| daunting task of a brain biopsy.
|
| Not everything is gloom-and-doom at the financing of some
| big company.
| manholio wrote:
| That contains so much jargon that it has to be 100%
| legit. The rectal sphincter tone though.
| goodells wrote:
| I can try to break it down for an uninitiated audience.
|
| "isotonic crystalloids" - Solutions such as normal saline
| used to restore volume proportionally to the bloodstream
| and intracellular spaces (as opposed to hypotonic or
| hypertonic, isotonic solutions just match the normal
| blood's osmolality)
|
| "sedation agents" - The patient is out, you keep 'em out,
| ideally without tanking their blood pressure. Different
| than paralysis.
|
| "electrophysiology" - Electrical conduction through the
| heart.
|
| "acid-base balance" - Various chemical processes and
| enzymes in the body only work well within a certain pH
| range, and long-term, only a narrow pH range is
| compatible with life.
|
| "hematology" - Blood and its components, including the
| cascade of enzymes and clotting factors involved in
| coagulation.
|
| "TXA" - Tranexamic acid - An anti-anti-clotting agent,
| which stops the body from breaking down blood clots. In
| the context of trauma, it allows your body to form the
| needed clots to avoid imminent exsanguination.
|
| "ACLS" - Advanced Cardiac Life Support - The AHA
| algorithm for identifying and treating life-threatening
| heart rhythms that most paramedics, RTs, nurses, etc. and
| above are trained on. In practice, this means that an
| unresponsive patient or code situation can be run to a
| certain standard with the staff who are immediately
| summoned in any clinical area of any hospital within
| about 30 seconds.
|
| "antidysrhythmic" - In the ACLS algorithms, it's a drug
| (usually a potassium channel blocker or sodium channel
| blocker or both) that acts on the cardiac action
| potential to do something that tends to make lethal
| dysrhythmias stop and return to a normal sinus rhythm.
| How exactly, you'd need to ask a cardiologist or
| specialized pharmacist.
|
| "FAST [ultrasound] scan" - Focused assessment with
| sonography for trauma - it's just an ultrasound of the
| flank area to detect blood around the kidneys
| ("retroperitoneal space") which has a high mortality rate
| and usually requires emergency surgery.
|
| "cranial nerves" - Your brain can communicate with the
| rest of your body either through your spinal cord, or
| through the cranial nerves which are direct interfaces
| for things like smell, sight, tongue movement, etc.
| Checking these is an important part of determining of a
| brain injury or spinal cord injury is present.
|
| "rectal sphincter tone" - If it's present, then it's
| unlikely that spinal cord injury above a certain level
| has occurred.
|
| "intracranial bleed" - It's bleeding, in your brain.
|
| "magnetic resonance spectroscopy" - The original MRI
| technique was based on spinning all the hydrogen atoms in
| your body such that they aligned head to toe, then
| detecting electromagnetic induction in a coil as they
| were jarred back and forth at a megahertz frequency.
| Nowadays, we can do this with other atoms like phosphorus
| in the same way.
|
| "precessing" - The pattern of relaxation of an atom
| similar to a spinning top where it goes from the
| aforementioned align orientation (forced by a strong
| magnet to align head to toe), and gradually relaxes to
| its random orientation while spinning at the Larmor
| frequency (megahertz frequency of the corresponding type
| of atom).
|
| "penumbra" - The border between healthy living brain
| tissue and dead brain tissue at the outside territory of
| a brain injury post-stroke.
|
| "neoplastic" - Uncontrolled cell growth, similar to
| cancer except not all neoplasms are cancer, some are
| benign tumors which will never be able to
| metastasize/spread to other parts of the body.
| wnolens wrote:
| Interesting to see a paramedic on HN. I thought we were
| all desk jockeys here :) Thanks for your service to
| others.
| filoleg wrote:
| > There is basically zero evidence that this device
| provides better quality of life than the systems that
| already existed.
|
| IMO it is less about which purpose this specific device is
| used for, and more about what this breakthrough has the
| potential to enable us to do in the future, using this tech
| as the basis to build on top of (assuming it is proven a
| success and all the kinks are worked out).
|
| If there was a standardized "smart hat" that I could put on
| my head that would allow me to control my AR glasses in an
| efficient way, that would be crazy. Because right now,
| that's one specific concern regarding AR usability, since
| current solutions with buttons and touch surfaces and voice
| controls and making hand gestures are awkwardly
| inconvenient and feel clunky.
|
| UI/UX paradigm for certain consumer device categories
| completely shifts. A lot of accessibility problems get
| resolved. Hardware itself on a lot of consumer devices can
| become much simpler and more robust, since there is no need
| for much hand-driven interaction.
|
| And that's just a singular the most obvious example I
| could've thought of. There are plenty of potential amazing
| things that could be enabled by this tech, even if the
| specific use case for it that was presented in the article
| might not "provide better quality of life".
| sydthrowaway wrote:
| Perhaps there is hope for BCI. I always thought the signals was
| just noise.
| bogwog wrote:
| There's got to be some AI magic that can make sense of it. It'd
| at least be cooler than seeing a teddy bear riding a skateboard
| in times square.
| sodality2 wrote:
| I feel like you're understating the awesomeness of a teddy
| bear riding a skateboard in times square, though.
| emteycz wrote:
| We've been able to turn brain signals into words for at least a
| decade, if not more. The only problem is the skull. It was
| verified on epilepsy patients (who needed to have their skull
| open) way back.
| petethedog wrote:
| This may work or may not. But the two researchers seemed not to
| be that honest in the past. [0] They probably try to restate
| authority...
|
| [0] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02862-4/
| sonicggg wrote:
| Very curious on what is his motivation is to keep on living.
| There's really no hope for any meaningful improvement in quality
| of life. Latest research was just so disheartening, as apparently
| ALS is a prion-like illness.
|
| As of today we barely have a good grasp on treating viral
| illnesses (and even bacteria is coming to bite us back). I don't
| foresee any effective treatment for this type of illness in the
| next few decades.
| implying wrote:
| Isn't it sad that he has to type out his only messages to the
| world letter by letter, and he spends his time typing out the
| names of mega-brands?
|
| "...'(son's name) moechtest du mit mir disneys die hexe und der
| zauberer anschauen auf amazon' - 'would you like to watch
| Disney's witch and wizard with me on amazon' on day 461"
| seabird wrote:
| He's talking to his kid. Joe Average isn't going to tell his
| son that he has plans to use the BCI to transcend this mortal
| coil and claim the power of God. He's going to do what this guy
| did -- ask for a beer, to hear some of his favorite music
| again, and to enjoy something simple with his kid that doesn't
| require a lot of physical input or talking from him.
| rich_sasha wrote:
| If you have to laboriously spell each word letter by letter,
| German is a very unfortunate language to use.
| uniqueuid wrote:
| Not a specialist, but the complex grammar of German tends to
| carry more information than English, which draws on a much
| larger vocabulary but flattened a formerly complex grammar into
| more words to say the same.
| ineedasername wrote:
| I asked one of my comp ling profs, who cut their teeth at
| Bell Labs, about this question.
|
| She said that, as spoken, information density is fairly
| similar from language to language. Languages that express the
| same information using more phonemes tend to be spoken using
| more phonemes per unit of time, and it what (in some
| circumstances though not all) can contribute to the
| perception that people speaking in one language speak much
| faster.
|
| I suppose that might not help much when the issue is writing
| though, or any circumstance where phonemic production is at a
| fixed rate regardless of language.
| treeman79 wrote:
| I think it was 39 bits per second of information.
| Regardless of language.
|
| Languages with denser information are spoken slower. Vice
| versa.
|
| https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aaw2594
| rich_sasha wrote:
| I find French full of nuance (=bits of information) and
| habitually spoken very fast.
| ineedasername wrote:
| Thanks for the reference to back up my recollection of a
| lecture, nice to know my memory (and professor) are
| correct. It was (and is) fascinating to me that there are
| these sorts of constants.
| simulate-me wrote:
| German is famous for its compound nouns. My feeling is
| compound nouns are noticed by English speakers due to their
| explicit verbosity, but I don't have any data to back that
| up.
| 1ris wrote:
| And English also features compound nouns, for example
| "compound noun". Usually (but not always) a space is within
| the word, so it's not that obvious. This language feature
| is a little less popular in english, but works very
| similar.
| lgessler wrote:
| It's ironic because English is just as compound friendly.
| Take a German compound like Sprachwissenschaft ("language-
| science", i.e. linguistics). Now consider an English
| compound like "Earth science". The only difference is that
| it is convention in English to put a space between the
| words in a compound, whereas in German they are written
| without spaces. Things only seem different because of the
| impressive length some single "words" can reach in German,
| but English is just as capable of crazy compounds. Take
| this example that was discussed in a linguistics paper:
| "gay clergy book row priest", i.e. the priest who was
| involved in a controversy about a book about gay clergy.
| Quite convoluted, but we're not as awed by it, just because
| it happens to be spelled with spaces in between each part.
| emteycz wrote:
| It's just like any other language, except without spaces.
| Czech language can do exactly the same, but we usually use
| the space - looks nicer.
|
| For example, the longest Czech word:
| Nejnezdevetadevadesateroznasobovavatelnejsimi = [do
| something] by those most not multipliable by 99.
| simulate-me wrote:
| My impression when studying German is that the German
| language has more compound words that are singular words
| in English. e.g. Armbanduhr (watch), Aussehen
| (appearance), Hauptstadt (capital), Staubsauger (vacuum),
| anything ending with Zeug, etc. That doesn't necessarily
| mean German is longer on average.
| gnud wrote:
| An Armbanduhr is a wrist watch, not just a watch. I'm
| sure the Germans often shorten to it 'uhr', just like the
| English do.
|
| Capital is short for capital city.
|
| Vacuum is also short for vacuum cleaner.
|
| I'll grant you Aussehen - that's a single word in
| english. But longer than the German one.
| simulate-me wrote:
| Yes, you can make the English words longer if you wish.
| But it's very common to shorten them.
| vmception wrote:
| That's generous. I see differences, I don't see more/less or
| any tendencies between German and English. I see some areas
| where inefficiencies are introduced in German, I see some
| areas where more information information is conveyed.
| Somewhat curious about this topic of more data per second, by
| language, so anything that reduces the anecdotes in favor of
| a study would be welcome!
| uniqueuid wrote:
| Yeah, I'd be interested in a proper study of this. There
| are tons of papers on _speech_ information density, which
| is not the same as character information density.
|
| One thing that provides a lot of contextual information in
| German are the inflections and suffixes, i.e.
|
| "Kochin" - female cook
|
| "Koch" - male cook
|
| "Kochchen" / "Kochle" ... - diminuitive cook
|
| "Kochs" - possessive / "the cook's ..."
|
| etc.
| vinay427 wrote:
| That's perhaps true, but not necessarily relevant to word
| length. Much of the added information in German relative to
| English is encapsulated in articles, which are around 3-5
| letters, which I suspect is not the most significant factor
| for German word length.
|
| As an aside, German also relies heavily on modal verbs
| (nearly as much as English does), far more than even related
| languages such as Spanish. There are many distant or
| unrelated languages with more informative verb
| conjugations/inflections.
| pjlegato wrote:
| Linguists refer to these traits you're describing by
| classifying languages as being more or less "synthetic" or
| "analytic."[1] Broadly speaking, synthetic languages tend to
| encode information by modifying words (e.g. the articles
| "der" vs "dem" in German); analytic languages tend to encode
| information via adding words and word order (e.g. "the"
| versus "to the" in English.)
|
| Real languages exist somewhere on a spectrum. Languages in
| the Indo-European family show an empirical historical
| tendency to become less synthetic and more analytic over time
| and via contact with other languages. German is more
| synthetic than English, but less synthetic than Russian, and
| much less synthetic than very old IE languages such as Vedic
| Sanskrit. English is more analytic than German, but less
| analytic and more synthetic than Afrikaans. Some non-IE
| languages such as Finnish are extremely synthetic.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_language ,
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytic_language
| uniqueuid wrote:
| Excellent, that's precisely the pointer I was looking for.
| Thanks!
| c0mptonFP wrote:
| How does Mandarin compare on that scale
| robbedpeter wrote:
| It's a stereotypically analytic language.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytic_language
|
| >>For example, Mandarin Chinese has many compound words,
| giving it a moderately high ratio of morphemes per word,
| but since it has almost no inflectional affixes at all to
| convey grammatical relationships, it is a very analytic
| language.
| bencollier49 wrote:
| Does this mean that languages become more synthetic if
| they're left on their own? Did Latin and Sanskrit develop
| in greater isolation? This is a fascinating subject.
| beAbU wrote:
| Your comment and the linked Wikipedia pages has challenged
| my understanding of my native language, Afrikaans.
|
| Based on the description I would classify Afrikaans as
| synthetic, not analytic.
|
| Afrikaans has an origin as a pidgin Dutch spoken by slaves
| and other lower classes. Afrikaans speakers can communicate
| effortlessly with Dutch and Flemish speakers for example.
| Our grammar is decidedly germanic and we make use of
| morphemes in stead of separate words.
|
| Held: hero Heldjie: diminutive hero Helde: plural
|
| Heldin: female hero Heldinnetjie: diminutive female hero
| Heldinne: plural
|
| Although it should be noted that explicit female versions
| of nouns is falling out of favour to some degree.
| seabird wrote:
| According to what I've read (which could very well _not_
| be representative of the language as it 's spoken by your
| community), grammatical gender (which Dutch still has) is
| largely dead in Afrikaans. There is no case system
| present in Afrikaans. Much like in English, you wouldn't
| modify the article of the word because that word is part
| of some innate class ("gender") of nouns. _Die_ held,
| _die_ heldin, _die_ helde, etc. In German, you would have
| _der_ Held (hero), _die_ Heldin (heroine), _die_ Helden
| (heroes) / _die_ Heldinnen (heroines), and those articles
| would change depending on the noun 's role in the
| sentence (ie "der Held" -> "dem Helden", if the hero is
| the one receiving something in a sentence).
|
| English and Afrikaans still have remnants of grammatical
| gender and case, but it's not really enough to be
| considered a prominent feature of the language.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Also the fact that the verb often stands at the end of the
| sentence (Verbklammer), which means that you need to wait quite
| a bit until you can be sure what happened.
| rpastuszak wrote:
| Persian wants to have a word with you:)
|
| The position of the verb in that language is fixed so it
| needs to *always* stand at the end of the sentence.
|
| I remember translating news articles from BBC Persian and
| having to read five lines of text before reaching the verb. I
| love suspense.
| tazjin wrote:
| Could be worse, could be Russian!
|
| Either way, you could take shortcuts like leaving out vowels
| (works pretty well in most languages and is even the default in
| some, e.g. in Arabic).
| caymanjim wrote:
| Something like this is likely to turn into something more akin
| to Stephen Hawking's communication device over time, where
| words and whole phrases can be selected as easily as letters.
| Hawking's device was pretty primitive, too. A few iterations on
| a device like this--combined with a patient willing to put in
| what I imagine is an excruciating level of effort--could
| probably learn to communicate in near-real-time. Assuming this
| isn't just another misrepresentation. I fully expect someone
| will solve the problem even if it's not these guys.
| bendbro wrote:
| He has a lot of time!
| [deleted]
| caca3 wrote:
| caca3 wrote:
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(page generated 2022-04-20 23:00 UTC)