[HN Gopher] The Analytical Language of John Wilkins
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       The Analytical Language of John Wilkins
        
       Author : benbreen
       Score  : 32 points
       Date   : 2024-04-25 05:37 UTC (17 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (en.wikipedia.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (en.wikipedia.org)
        
       | johngossman wrote:
       | Great story. Wilkins and his language also feature in
       | Stephenson's "System of the World" books. The excellent book "In
       | the land of invented languages" by Arika Okrent dedicates chapter
       | 2 to Wilkins. I should point out, I didn't go seeking information
       | about Wilkins, but his language just seems to come up randomly
       | for me.
       | 
       | Okrent's book also has excellent introductions to Esperanto and
       | Lojban. Lojban is a modern attempt to create a language without
       | ambiguity. That turns out to be hard...speaking takes on some of
       | the characteristics of writing a mathematical proof.
        
         | KineticLensman wrote:
         | > Stephenson's "System of the World" books
         | 
         | Minor nit: "System of the World" is the third novel in the
         | Baroque Cycle, after Quicksilver and The Confusion.
         | 
         | I really enjoyed these books for the SF world-building
         | perspective on the emergence in the 17th Century of modern
         | science and finance, global trade, communications, etc. Many of
         | the normal comments on Stephenson's writing style apply, YMMV.
        
         | senkora wrote:
         | +1 to "In the land of invented languages". We read it in a
         | conlang'ing class that I took in college and it was a solid
         | read.
        
       | jonwilks wrote:
       | Guess I should look into this...
        
       | selimthegrim wrote:
       | This is not Newton's former roommate, btw.
        
       | zelias wrote:
       | After reading _Quicksilver_ I began to wonder if a Universal
       | Language, as conceived by Wilkins, could have an extremely
       | powerful effect on the "thought patterns" one might instruct an
       | LLM to use when responding to a specific prompt.
        
         | VyseofArcadia wrote:
         | Sapir-Whorf[0] but for computers?
         | 
         | [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity
        
       | adonovan wrote:
       | Borges's short stories are almost perfect nuggets for computer
       | scientists, seemingly covering such topics as recursion (Garden
       | of Forking Paths), the consequences of infinite memory (Funes),
       | complexity theory (Library of Babel), virtualization (Tlon,
       | Uqbar, Orbis Tertius), and so on.
        
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       (page generated 2024-04-25 23:01 UTC)