[HN Gopher] Ithkuil, the Most Complicated Language
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Ithkuil, the Most Complicated Language
Author : lisper
Score : 129 points
Date : 2023-05-21 16:54 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (en.wikipedia.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (en.wikipedia.org)
| xena wrote:
| There's some great progressive rock by Kaduatan that uses Ithkuil
| for their lyrics: https://youtu.be/uuYmkZ-Aomo
| schoen wrote:
| Wow! Quite a contrast with "sike tu li pona, li pona tawa mi,
| li pona tawa ma".
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mkNvlqEM8rk
| jstarfish wrote:
| Toki Pona is far more elegant in its simplicity, and doesn't
| require the use of every diacritic ever documented...
| yarg wrote:
| > The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis postulates that a person's language
| influences their perceptions and cognitive patterns. Stanislav
| Kozlovsky proposed[8] in the Russian popular-scientific magazine
| Computerra that a fluent speaker of Ithkuil, accordingly, would
| think "about five or six times as fast" as a speaker of a typical
| natural language.
|
| This seems to assume that one is thinking in their spoken
| language - but is that generally the case?
|
| Outside of reading, writing and communicating, I damned near
| never think in natural language.
|
| I don't know about other people, for anything technical I'm
| generally thinking in structures, not words.
| danjoredd wrote:
| I don't think that language and thought are the same thing, and
| I certainly don't think language affects speed of thought, but
| I think in English all the time. It depends on the person,
| really. Some people have a strong internal monologue, others
| have a weak one, and others don't have one at all. Its a weird
| phenomenon, and AFAIK nobody knows why people have varying
| levels of internal monologuing.
| p-e-w wrote:
| The idea that language and thought are the same thing was
| discarded decades ago, and no linguist uses the pop term
| "Sapir-Whorf hypothesis" anymore (though linguistic relativity
| is still sometimes discussed).
|
| If the cited claim was even remotely true, there would be
| significant differences in the "speed of thought" between
| speakers of natural languages also (which differ in semantic
| density). Such cognitive superiority would have obvious real-
| world consequences, but no such phenomenon appears to exist.
| kortex wrote:
| Precisely. Languages have more or less information density
| ("bits per symbol"), but when you look at information rate
| per unit time, it all works out to pretty similar.
|
| Kind of like how QAM256 can convey more bits per symbol than
| QAM16, but it needs a lower baud for a given noise level,
| channel bandwidth, and error rate. You can squeeze out
| efficiency of a channel, but you can't overcome the noisy
| channel coding theorem max rate.
|
| https://seantrott.github.io/information/
| jerry1979 wrote:
| If this is topic is new to you, it is worth checking out some
| conversations about inner voice over at reddit:
| https://old.reddit.com/r/nosurf/comments/10tnb8g/do_you_have...
| throw4847285 wrote:
| Inspired by a Heinlein novella? No thank you.
|
| Why is it that sci-fi authors trick otherwise smart people into
| thinking they have the key to some kind of universal truth as
| opposed to just being skilled prose stylists with a sense of
| drama?
| skupig wrote:
| What is it about creative projects that tricks otherwise
| rational people into inventing unfounded characterizations of
| their creators? There's not one sentence in the entire article
| to suggest Quijada thinks that way.
| lucideer wrote:
| Because those otherwise smart people are _looking_ for that
| universal truth and if they didn 't find it in scifi they'd
| find it somewhere else.
| throw4847285 wrote:
| Nah. Compare it with fantasy authors. Nobody thinks that
| Tolkien or Robert Jordan was putting forward some kind of
| aspirational project for better living through whatever. But
| people read Asimov and take psychohistory way too seriously,
| or read Heinlein and become a libertarian crank or invent a
| language. And let's not dwell too much on the extreme end of
| that scale, a certain writer with some funny ideas about
| mainstream psychology.
| digging wrote:
| > Nobody thinks that Tolkien ... was putting forward some
| kind of aspirational project for better living through
| whatever.
|
| Actually I think that's a fair argument to make about LOTR.
| The simple, rustic wholesomeness of the Hobbits, the valor
| and respect of the Men, and even the friendship of a Dwarf
| and an Elf destroyed rapacious greed multiple times. I
| think even the Scouring episode at the end of the novels,
| while it may seem unimportant to the _plot_ , can be
| considered important to the _message_ of resisting
| industrialization. But I 'm not a Tolkien scholar myself so
| take this all with a grain of salt.
| schoen wrote:
| I think Tolkien in particular felt he had a moral and
| spiritual message, although the way to act on it, if any,
| presumably wouldn't be to pretend to be living in his Third
| Age.
| rerdavies wrote:
| Tolkien is very obviously putting forward some kind of
| aspirational project for better living through whatever.
| Namely that small ordinary people (hobbits) who come from
| the Shire (the green pastures of England) and live in
| Hobbit holes (quant English cottages and farmhouses) are
| more powerful than kings, wizards, and unspeakable evil
| (Hitler), despite the fact that they live in the shadow of
| a golden age (the British Empire) that will never happen
| again. Plus the evils of industrialization, in case you got
| to the end without spotting the obvious. But social class
| matters intensely, and it's a shame that people are
| forgetting that. (The great virtue of Samwise Gamgee being
| not just that he is loyal, but most importantly that he
| knows his place in the order of things).
| shp0ngle wrote:
| For some reason, I started laughing uncontrollably when listening
| to the actual example linked there.
|
| https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c9/Ithkuil_...
| strikelaserclaw wrote:
| sounds arabic
| hoosieree wrote:
| It's the audio equivalent to a Java programmer reading APL for
| the first time.
| kortex wrote:
| I fucking love ithkuil, in the same way I love marble machines
| and Rube Goldberg devices. Like as a concept, in practice, how
| it sounds actually spoken, the writing system. Every thing
| about it is just so _extra_. It has its goals and design
| criteria, and it just goes full send on them, fuck everything
| else, like ease of pronunciation, and I respect that.
| TRiG_Ireland wrote:
| How do you feel about Kay(f)bop(t)?
| tempodox wrote:
| Almost sounds like a speech recording played backwards.
| Actually playing this sample backwards indeed makes little
| difference to me.
| optimalsolver wrote:
| To me it sounds like a Samoyedic Lithuanian dialect of Guarani,
| with classical Arabian inflections.
| fernirello wrote:
| That's why a perfectly understandable Ithkuil course is right
| over there, a couple hexagons away
| DoctorOW wrote:
| > _Moreover, in line with this, Quijada has stated he does not
| believe a speaker would think necessarily any faster because even
| though Ithkuil is terse, a single word requires a lot more
| thought before it can be spoken than it would in a natural
| language._
|
| I can't imagine what this is like to think before I have words to
| describe them. My current thought process is an inner monologue
| and I can't imagine how I'd think if I couldn't put words to my
| ideas immediately.
| stefncb wrote:
| It happens in any other language too, at least for me.
| Sometimes you have a thought but can't quite put it into words.
| My guess is that it's simply more pronounced in Ithkuil.
|
| Also, anecdotally, my inner monologue is sometimes behind my
| "real" thoughts. I can think faster than I can speak, even in
| my own head.
| masklinn wrote:
| It's also super common with multiple languages, where you
| know what you mean in one language, but have trouble
| expressing it in an other.
| ajuc wrote:
| Do you ever think in images or actions? For example when I'm
| navigating in a new place I sometimes have this "reorientation
| moment" when I thought something is forward, but I realize it's
| actually to the right. At the moment it feels like I have a map
| of the world in my mind and it rotates around me :) I get
| slight vertigo even :)
|
| As for actions you probably don't think to yourself "I should
| kick the ball in 3.. 2.. 1.. now! with THIS amount of spin and
| THAT power" - you just kick it when it's appropriate. Inner
| monologue would be too slow and too imprecise to think about
| these things. The same mode of thinking works for other things
| too. For example bad habits are automatic - you don't need to
| think "I should alt-tab to browser and open hackernews" - it's
| one thought expressed without language.
| juujian wrote:
| I mean, how do I even know what I say before I said it?
| Speaking is such a social act, you can definitely pan out and
| say a few words (even if it's fillers) before your brain
| catches up and you create a plan. And then you adjust your plan
| based on audience response. The obsession with precision is
| strange. Vagueness in spoken language is a feature, not a bug.
| It makes social situations easier to navigate if you have an
| "out".
| ajuc wrote:
| Different languages are precise and vague in different
| domains.
|
| For example English requires articles. You can have a book or
| the book. You cannot just have book. In my native language we
| don't have articles. If I want to specify it's "a" book I can
| (with the word to the effect of "some"), if I want to specify
| it's "the" book I can (with the equivalent of "this" or
| "that"). But by default we don't care.
|
| On the other hand every verb encodes gender in my language.
| So when author wrote in English "Somebody in the audience
| said >I was with you<" - the translator has to guess what was
| the gender of that person. Because "was" is a different word
| depending on the gender of that person :)
|
| EDIT: I'm -> I was, because in present tense verbs can be the
| same :)
| stefncb wrote:
| What's your native language?
| Joker_vD wrote:
| I'd guess it's one of the non-Southern Slavic languages
| (e.g. Polish or Russian): those languages repurposed what
| used to be past participles (and so, just like
| adjectives, had genders) to be past tense verbs
| themselves. The Southern ones (e.g. Bulgarian) did not do
| this.
| ajuc wrote:
| Yup, Polish.
| ted_dunning wrote:
| Past tense in Russian also has gender. I was => byl for
| the masculine case but to byla for a female subject.
| thriftwy wrote:
| Not caring whether it is a book or the book pales in
| comparison to not caring whether it's foot or leg.
| juujian wrote:
| Love that example.
| quirkot wrote:
| That's totally wild. A huge part of my experience is trying to
| cram my thoughts into words that so rarely seem to fit. Makes
| texting (or any text communication without other context)
| stressful
| gleki wrote:
| Discord server for Ithkuil exists btw
|
| https://discord.com/invite/WgFrX8J
| fsiefken wrote:
| Like typing with a modified Dvorak like keyboard layout I imagine
| it would be more comfortable to think, read and speak in Ithkuil.
| It took me three months to switch from Qwerty to a Dvorak-like 20
| years ago. I still can type both, even though it feels
| significantly less comfortable to type in Qwerty, I guess I'm
| spoiled. How long would it take for me to learn Ithkuil? I don't
| have to speak it as there is no one understanding it (except
| other dorks on the internet), so it's better to learn to read and
| write my personal notes in Ithkuil. This means I should also have
| a dvorak like Ithkuil TNIL keyboard layout. Is there such a
| thing? Ideally I also want to converse with a LLM trained on
| Ithkuil texts. As there are very few TNIL (the latest version)
| texts I wonder if somekind of translator can be build that can
| translate a large relevant body of English texts for me into
| Ithkuil.
| ibejoeb wrote:
| It seems more like, if you do manage to internalize some of the
| language, that you might be able to augment your thinking
| language rather than replace it. For the things that are not
| readily expressible in your native language, Ithkuil could
| serve to characterize those thoughts. I do wonder how robust
| recall would be, though, in terms of time and fidelity.
| lordnacho wrote:
| What are some interesting examples of things I could express
| in Ithkuil?
|
| Suppose for an English speaker. I get that it will be weird
| to write an answer in English. Could be really interesting if
| someone has a good example though.
| thrtythreeforty wrote:
| One of my favorite examples:
|
| Aistlatervielliml - skipping an opportunity because it's
| not ideal, despite the likelihood that an ideal instance
| will never come
| random_upvoter wrote:
| Does Ithkuil have any provisions to express power
| dynamics between speaker and listener, say politeness
| levels? For instance all languages that I know have
| constructions to soften up requests, or make statements
| less assertive.
| p-e-w wrote:
| But that concept can also be expressed in English - which
| you just did.
|
| If you simply run the English description you gave
| through a Huffman coder, you should get a compressed
| version that is the same length or even shorter than the
| Ithkuil word (English usually compresses to about 1 bit
| per character).
|
| Is Ithkuil anything more than a compressed encoding of
| English? Can it express any concept that English is
| fundamentally incapable of expressing?
| adastra22 wrote:
| No, because English is the linguistic equivalent of
| Turing complete. There is no concept you can't express
| (if verbosely) in English.
|
| But the weak form of Sapir-Worf is that verbosity and
| grammar matters, that we tend to think in shortest forms,
| and that if we had a mother tongue or native-level
| language that was expressive, precise, and minimally
| ambiguous, that would be reflected in the clarity of our
| thinking.
| ajuc wrote:
| One example where natural language is clearly suboptimal
| is math. Most people can do simple transformations on
| equations with small polynomials in memory. But that's
| thinking in formulas.
|
| When you try to do it in plain English it becomes very
| hard.
| adastra22 wrote:
| I agree. Wouldn't it be interesting then to see what we
| could accomplish if we unlocked similar formalisms for
| critical thinking and daily life?
|
| I'm not a fan of Ithkuil actually, as I think it takes it
| too far. But I do wonder how much clearer our thinking
| would be if we had a logical / rational language as our
| mother tongue.
| olddustytrail wrote:
| It's suboptimal but not impossible. As a child I won a
| prize (not first place, just a mention) in a national
| mathematical competition despite the fact no-one had
| taught me algebra yet. The judges found my reasoning
| "interesting" and I got the right answers to the puzzles.
|
| Of course when, a couple of years later, I was taught
| algebra, I was wondering why I hadn't been told before!
| p-e-w wrote:
| > English is the linguistic equivalent of Turing complete
|
| Proof?
| mcguire wrote:
| By construction. Assume language L has concept C
| expressed by term T, while English does not have a simple
| term for C. Further, assume that English speakers have a
| frequent need to express C.
|
| English will simply absorb T and trundle off like the
| demented lunatic it is. Examples include remuda,
| schadenfreude, and obi, all of which are copacetic
| English words after a remarkably short period of time.
| adastra22 wrote:
| You are asking for a proof of a negative, which can't be
| proven. Nevertheless I offer the entire field of
| computational semantics, which has yet to generate a
| counter-example.
| kortex wrote:
| English (or any human language with the possible
| exception of Piraha) is not a formal grammar, but if it
| was, it would behave like a recursively enumerable one,
| at the top of the Chomsky hierarchy. Given enough time
| and enough text, you can express anything computable.
|
| Think about it this way, I give you instructions in
| english, and you have to follow them:
| You are acting as a turing machine. Your symbols are s1,
| s2, ..., sn. Here are your processing rules: ... Here is
| your tape: ... Begin!
|
| You could follow that process to the letter, given enough
| time, focus, and tape (insert xkcd reference about rocks
| in the desert).
| p-e-w wrote:
| This makes no sense to me. What does computability have
| to do with semantic expressiveness? You've demonstrated
| that English can generate every sequence of tokens, not
| that it can express every concept.
| adastra22 wrote:
| That's the Chuch-Turing thesis, combined with
| computational semantics. Computational semantics gives us
| formal logical statements for anything you might want to
| say, the Church-Turing thesis states that computational
| processes are equivalent to these logical formalisms, and
| you've accepted that any computational process can be
| represented in English (if verbosely).
|
| The only exception would be things not express able on
| our semantic models which you might want to say. No one
| has ever been able to offer up an example of something
| that couldn't be represented in a logical formalism,
| so...
| ted_dunning wrote:
| Except that you missed that the original comment was
| using computational completeness metaphorically, not
| literally.
| kortex wrote:
| If a concept can be expressed as a sequence of tokens,
| then bam, we're done.
|
| If a concept can't be expressed as a sequence of tokens,
| then it doesn't really matter, because no language can,
| since some concepts exist which are not computable, and
| all languages have the same drawback.
|
| Either way, "English is the linguistic equivalent of
| Turing complete" is valid, since it is at the top of the
| hierarchy, and as powerful as any other language (eg
| everything Ithkuil can express, so can English).
| p-e-w wrote:
| > everything Ithkuil can express, so can English
|
| Imagine there is a concept that no language can express.
|
| Now Ithkuil introduces a new word that is defined as that
| concept.
|
| But English (and all other languages) still cannot
| express that concept. So the idea that all/most languages
| are expressively equivalent appears to be false.
|
| The Chomsky hierarchy is about _grammatical_
| expressiveness, not about semantic expressiveness. I see
| no reason to believe that all languages have the same
| semantic expressiveness, which is what I understood the
| above claim to mean.
| adastra22 wrote:
| That's what the original form of the Sapir-Worf
| hypothesis was about. IIRC they were studying indigenous
| languages which lacked a word for numerical concepts.
| E.g. there's a bunch of languages/cultures which
| allegedly only have a words for "one", "two", and "many."
| Do people in these cultures not have a concept of
| "three"? Early studies suggested that might be the case.
| Sapir and Worf wondered if perhaps these people would be
| incapable of understanding the notion of "three", as
| appeared to be the case, because they lacked the word for
| it.
|
| Turns out the results didn't replicate though, for a
| variety of reasons. Even in cases where the source
| languages didn't have higher numbers (which was much less
| common than originally thought), the speakers of course
| had a way of referencing numbers. In at least one case I
| believe the language had no unique number words at all,
| and what the linguist had thought was the word for "one"
| was in fact "alone", and the word for two was "couple"
| (as in "married couple"), and so on. They did indeed have
| such figurative words for larger numbers, and a place
| system for speaking of even larger amounts (e.g. a dozen-
| dozen people).
|
| The Sapir-Worf hypothesis also falls flat in another way:
| if we cannot conceive of a concept without a word for it,
| then how did language develop? Clearly there must be a
| way to learn a new concept, think about it, and _then_ be
| the first to coin a new word for it.
|
| The original, strong form of the Sapir-Worf hypothesis is
| largely discredited today. But not the weak form, which
| is expressed thusly: "The language we speak influence the
| ways in which we think." This _does_ seem to be largely
| true.
|
| There are studies but I'd rather point to some anecdotal
| examples that illustrate more why I find this
| interesting. Learning math, critical thinking, and
| engineering has enabled me to reason much more precisely
| about things than I did as a teenager. Having been
| through the community college system, I also have
| observed the great difficulty a lot of people less
| interested in scientific thinking have had in adopting
| various concepts in critical thinking. Like the
| difference between conditional implication (if) and
| biconditional statements (if and only if). In everyday
| English we often say "if", when in fact "if and only if"
| is the more correct statement. Or we say "A or B" when we
| mean "A or B, but not both" (exclusive-or).
|
| In English these longer forms are cumbersome, and the
| other alternative, "if" or "or", are in fact
| abbreviations of the longer forms "if and only if" and "A
| or B, but not both". So we decide that the shorter forms
| can mean either form, and resort to cumbersome language
| when clarity is required. If I tell you "I wear a hat if
| it is sunny" and you see me come indoors with my hat on,
| can you infer that it is sunny outside? No, because I
| said nothing about what I do when it is cloudy, not sunny
| outside. Maybe I wear a hat then too. If I had said "I
| wear a hat if and only if it is sunny" it'd be a
| different story. But that doesn't feel right because we
| know that people often shorten "if and only if" to just
| "if", and so we might feel justified in assuming the
| speaker meant they wear a hat if and only if it is sunny
| outside.
|
| But in Lojban, Ithkuil, and Toaq, each truth table
| possibility is assigned a unique, approximately equal-
| length and unambiguous word/morpheme to represent it.
| It's like we coined the word "ba" to mean "if and only
| if." So the two statements become "I wear a hat if it is
| sunny" and "I wear a hat ba it is sunny". They are equal
| length so why wouldn't I pick the one that I mean? Then
| "if" can go back to meaning "if" exclusively, and never
| "if and only if".
|
| You might say that people aren't used to making such
| finely tuned logical distinctions, but that sounds a lot
| like what a Chinese person might say about conjugating
| for tense and number in English, or for gender in most
| other Indo-European languages. Why does a verb change
| form based on the number of thing, its gender, or whether
| it happened in the past or future, or was an ongoing
| activity? And how can you possibly keep this all straight
| while speaking at fluent speeds? But in fact native
| speakers of English have no trouble doing so.
|
| Maybe, just maybe, if we all spoke Lojban or Toaq or
| Ithkuil or whatever, these fine logical and critical
| thinking distinctions will be as natural to us as the
| verb changes in "he went", "she goes", or "I will go"
| are, which any native speaker gets correct without even
| consciously having to think about it, yet nevertheless
| confounds learners of English.
| TRiG_Ireland wrote:
| Even the weak Sapir-Worf hypothesis is quite tricky to
| test in practice. It's likely true, but quite hard to
| prove. Guy Deutscher's excellent book _Through the
| Language Glass_ documents much of the work that 's been
| done in that area. Mostly, what's amenable to testing is
| colour perception and absolute direction, more than
| anything else.
| variaga wrote:
| >Now Ithkuil introduces a new word that is defined as
| that concept.
|
| You are assuming the consequent. How exactly did Ithkuil
| 'define' a new word as that concept if the concept can't
| be expressed in Ithkuil ("any language")?
|
| Even assuming you could do such a thing, why couldn't
| every other language define a word to mean that concept
| in the same way? Why wouldn't English - in particular -
| just _make the new Ithkuil word also an English word?_
| adastra22 wrote:
| > since some concepts exist which are not computable
|
| Is this true?
| kortex wrote:
| Fluency in Ithkuil is probably impossible practically speaking.
| John Quijada himself doesn't consider himself fluent.
|
| I actually think LLMs trained on conlangs is a super cool idea,
| but you'd need a huge corpus to do that. Kind of a
| bootstrapping problem.
| fsiefken wrote:
| The new 2023 Ithkuil addresses part of the learnability. Yes
| I need a large corpus, that's why I thought maybe some kind
| of rough automatic translator can be built to aid in getting
| this body and the LLM trained
| ted_dunning wrote:
| But that will only train the LLM on Ithkuil expressions
| that came from English (or whatever you translated from).
| The interesting point is the expressivity beyond that.
| p-e-w wrote:
| > I imagine it would be more comfortable to think, read and
| speak in Ithkuil
|
| There are some cognitive scientists who believe that the
| ability to use language is built into the human brain, and
| (natural) language acquisition basically involves just setting
| the "parameters" of that built-in system.
|
| If that is true, there's no reason to assume that a highly
| constructed language like Ithkuil can ever be as comfortable to
| use as a natural language that has evolved to be compatible
| with our brain's language mechanism.
|
| Language has been with humans for a very long time (up to 100k
| years according to some hypotheses); it's not just another tool
| like a keyboard layout, which I believe might be the main
| reason why all conlangs from the past 100 years have failed to
| reach widespread adoption, despite their numerous claimed
| advantages. The assumption that humans are able to
| intellectually construct a language that is usable as a human
| language in the same way natural languages are lacks any
| evidence.
| Konohamaru wrote:
| Generative grammar is extremely nativist. The truth is,
| people will learn anything society forces them to learn. In
| Piraha society nobody is forced to learn recursion and
| consequently nobody thinks recursively or in numbers.
|
| The global languages of A.D. 2023 (English, French, etc...)
| are probably stuck in a similar "Chomsky tarpit" as Piraha,
| but because we're so globalized and together nobody is brave
| enough to look out of this tarpit.
|
| I am constructing a conlang codename LXX (because it has 70
| phonemes, 15 vowels and 55 consonants, but they were
| carefully chosen to be learnable to pronounce unlike Ithkuil)
| for the purpose of getting at least one human society out of
| this tarpit.
| fsiefken wrote:
| The new 2023 ithkuil addresses this with only 32 consonants
| and 9 vowels
| tikhonj wrote:
| > _which I believe might be the main reason why all conlangs
| from the past 100 years have failed to reach widespread
| adoption_
|
| Given how much people hate learning much more basic things--
| new programming languages, new operating systems, new tools--
| it seems hard to come to any conclusion about conlangs based
| on popularity! Languages are hard to learn, have _immense_
| cultural significance and are dominated by network effects.
| The potential advantages of a constructed language are, at
| best, illegible. What would push anybody to learn a brand new
| language well enough to actually use it?
|
| Whether or not a language becomes popular tells us little to
| nothing about the language itself.
| kortex wrote:
| As someone who tinkers with conlangs as a hobby and has been
| working on a similarly highly-engineered language not unlike
| ithkuil in features, this is one of the main things I
| struggle with.
|
| Actual natural language is very fluid. Spelling,
| pronunciation, grammar, all shift around, and for all manner
| of reasons. But the main one is efficiency. Humans are always
| subconsciously trying to cram as much information into as
| little time as possible, while preserving enough intent. This
| means extra redundant information whittles away, but there
| has to be enough redundancy for error correction.
|
| With these highly compressed languages, the problem becomes
| that a slight mispronounciation or misspelling can totally
| mess with the meaning in ways which lead to confusion. There
| are just too many phonemic sounds (a given sound difference
| is phonemic if the distinction matters, eg in English, p and
| p' (aspiration) is non-phonemic, but in Korean it is)
|
| When you actually analyze languages for their "baud rate" so
| to speak, languages with more symbol diversity (English) have
| less phonemes per unit time, while languages with less symbol
| diversity (Italian) have more phonemes, but the overall
| entropy per unit time works out pretty much the same. (I
| can't find my exact source right now, but if you poke around
| keywords like spoken language entropy rate, there's quite a
| bunch).
|
| Basically when you have machine code as a language, you
| pretty much need machine brain to process it.
|
| Edit: here's a start of some sources:
|
| https://seantrott.github.io/information/
|
| Which mostly cites
| https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aaw2594
|
| Also: re why no conlangs have taken over, momentum is a huge
| thing. We still have big iron running COBOL. Now imagine you
| hear COBOL from the moment you are born, for hours a day, you
| start babbling in COBOL, basically everyone around you
| converses in COBOL. It would be thoroughly entrenched.
|
| There's a reason "English follows other languages down dark
| alleys, beats them up and rifles through their pockets for
| vocabulary". It is _the_ lingua franca. It 's incredibly
| flexible and extensible, and combined with superpower
| hegemony, it dominates. Any dominant language is bound to
| acrete vocab and eject dead weight (though why we still have
| dental fricatives is really weird).
| zubairshaik wrote:
| Where would you say Esperanto sits on the "natural" scale,
| since it's design goal is to be easy to learn and use as
| opposed to being highly compressed? As I wouldn't say its
| "[s]pelling, pronunciation, grammar, all shift around, and
| for all manner of reasons".
| TRiG_Ireland wrote:
| Many children have acquired Esperanto naturally, as a
| first language, and that does seem to work without any
| problems.
| rerdavies wrote:
| That seems like a very dangerous experiment to conduct on
| a child.
| Garlef wrote:
| > has evolved to be compatible with our brain's language
| mechanism.
|
| Under the hypothesis that there actually is such a "language
| mechanism": There would be a host of other mechanisms a
| language needs to compatible with - such as spoken and
| written word - that might have contributed adversarial
| constraints along the way (from the perspective of optimal
| adjustment of a language with respect to this mechanism).
| meepmorp wrote:
| There's a whole strand of work in phonology (and other
| linguistics areas) called optimality theory, and the basic
| idea is that what you see in surface-level language is the
| the result of solving a competing constraints problem.
| meepmorp wrote:
| > There are some cognitive scientists who believe that the
| ability to use language is built into the human brain, and
| (natural) language acquisition basically involves just
| setting the "parameters" of that built-in system.
|
| This, by the way, is essentially what Chomsky means by
| "universal grammar," in his writing - the inborn language
| capability and its fundamental structure. His theoretical
| framework even went through a period where it was called
| Principles and Parameters.
| pohl wrote:
| Just yesterday I was pondering Ithkuil, the Sapir-Whorf
| Hypothesis, and LLMs.
| Semaphor wrote:
| A little bit of discussion 2 years ago:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29103477
| bertil wrote:
| A month ago, a father shared a very compelling story about how
| his young son started his own conlang and how ChatGPT was able to
| learn it from a few examples and converse into it.
|
| Has that trend taken over more established conlang? Would it make
| sense for those communities to train an LLM to speak that
| language as fluently as possible to help materialize it: build
| lessons, have a conversation partner at any time, and possibly
| discuss grammar?
| int_19h wrote:
| Even GPT-4 is not actually that good at it, and breaks down
| past a few simple rules. If you want an LLM to actually learn a
| language, today, you have to include enough of that language in
| its training data to begin with (I'm not sure if anyone tried
| it with fine-tuning).
| julienchastang wrote:
| There was an article about Ithkuil a while back in the New Yorker
| [0]. It's a funny read. The most successful constructed language
| remains Esperanto, I believe.
|
| [0] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/12/24/utopian-for-
| be...
| pmoriarty wrote:
| Doesn't Klingon have more speakers than Esperanto?
| ithkuil wrote:
| it sounds like one of those things which people wish they
| were true but are likely not.
|
| There are 10k fluent esperanto speakers and an order of
| magnitude more "active speakers".
|
| According to http://klingon.wiki/En/FluentSpeakers there are
| ~30 fluent klingon speakers
|
| My father is a fluent esperanto speaker. He's in the 10k
| group. I can understand the language a bit passively. I'm
| among 1 million people who can. There are 10 million people
| who have learned a bit of esperanto in their lives.
|
| I don't think kingon numbers are nowhere close to that, but I
| only found a reference to the fluent klingon speakers (the
| 20-50 of them)
| jiggawatts wrote:
| Interesting that GPT 4 will happily translate to Esperanto,
| Klingon, Elvish, Aramaic, and Babylonian, but throws its up when
| asked to translate to Ithkuil!
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| It's... interesting... to note that the example of a text in
| ithkuil takes up about as much space as the normal English text,
| due to how large ithkuil has to be written compared to regular
| text.
| uoaei wrote:
| Spoken language tends to converge at ~40 bits per second for
| all natural human languages.[1] I wouldn't be surprised that if
| separate scripts were developed independently for each language
| they would all converge on a certain rate of information per
| square centimeter as well.
|
| [1] https://www.science.org/content/article/human-speech-may-
| hav...
| fsiefken wrote:
| If you look at the v4 example sheet liked to at ithkuil.place
| you see that it is roughly the same length as English, keep in
| mind it has a larger alphabet so to really compare one needs to
| transcribe to the ascii adaptation
| ur-whale wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AAJlr5C8fPA (skip to 03:00)
| ilaksh wrote:
| He made a version of Ithkuil called "Ilaksh" which is what I used
| for my name on here.
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