Translation & Language

"Ambiguity actually makes language more efficient, by allowing for the reuse of short, efficient sounds that listeners can easily disambiguate with the help of context. (...) By comparing certain properties of words to their numbers of meanings, the researchers confirmed their suspicion that shorter, more frequent words, as well as those that conform to the language’s typical sound patterns, are most likely to be ambiguous — trends that were statistically significant in all three languages. (...) It is “cognitively cheaper” to have the listener infer certain things from the context than to have the speaker spend time on longer and more complicated utterances. The result is a system that skews toward ambiguity, reusing the “easiest” words. Once context is considered, it’s clear that “ambiguity is actually something you would want in the communication system.” (...) - Amira from Bookmarklet

"As long as words a different sense will bear, // And each may be his own interpreter, // Our airy faith will no foundation find; // The word’s a weathercock for every wind." — John Dryden, The Hind and the Panther (1687) :-) - Amira

"In 1776, whether you were declaring America independent from the crown or swearing your loyalty to King George III, your pronunciation would have been much the same. At that time, American and British accents hadn't yet diverged. (...) It is the standard British accent that has drastically changed in the past two centuries, while the typical American accent has changed only subtly. Traditional English, whether spoken in the British Isles or the American colonies, was largely "rhotic." Rhotic speakers pronounce the "R" sound in such words as "hard" and "winter," while non-rhotic speakers do not. (...) It was around the time of the American Revolution that non-rhotic speech came into use among the upper class in southern England, in and around London. (...)" - Amira from Bookmarklet

"According to John Algeo in "The Cambridge History of the English Language" (Cambridge University Press, 2001), this shift occurred because people of low birth rank who had become wealthy during the Industrial Revolution were seeking ways to distinguish themselves from other commoners; they cultivated the prestigious non-rhotic pronunciation in order to demonstrate their new upper-class... more... - Amira

“The history of the world’s languages is largely a story of loss and decline. At around 8000 BC, linguists estimate that upwards of 20,000 languages may have been in existence. Today the number stands at 6,909 and is declining rapidly. (...) The problem with globalization in the latter sense is that it is the result, not a cause, of language decline. (…) It is only when the state adopts a trade language as official and, in a fit of linguistic nationalism, foists it upon its citizens, that trade languages become “killer languages.” (…) The first case of massive language die-off was probably during the Agrarian (Neolithic) Revolution, when humanity first adopted farming, abandoned the nomadic lifestyle, and created permanent settlements. As the size of these communities grew, so did the language they spoke. (...) Permanent settlements changed all this, and soon larger and larger populations could stably speak the same language. (…) What people find useful, they will use. (...)" - Amira from Bookmarklet

"The state is the only entity capable of reaching into the home and forcibly altering the process of language socialization in an institutionalized way. (...) For the state, the goal is to bind individuals to itself, to an imagined homogeneous community of good citizens, rather than their local community. (...) If [minority nations] do not want to remain politically without influence,... more... - Amira

“Isn’t language loss a good thing, because fewer languages mean easier communication among the world’s people? Perhaps, but it’s a bad thing in other respects. Languages differ in structure and vocabulary, in how they express causation and feelings and personal responsibility, hence in how they shape our thoughts. There’s no single purpose “best” language; instead, different languages... more... - Amira

"It is commonly agreed by linguists and anthropologists that the majority of languages spoken now around the globe will likely disappear within our lifetime. The phenomenon known as language death has started to accelerate as the world has grown smaller. "This extinction of languages, and the knowledge therein, has no parallel in human history. K. David Harrison's book is the first to focus on the essential question, what is lost when a language dies? What forms of knowledge are embedded in a language's structure and vocabulary? And how harmful is it to humanity that such knowledge is lost forever?" http://www.amazon.com/When-La... - Amira

“In philosophy of mind, the language of thought hypothesis (LOTH) (...) our thoughts have a language-like structure that is independent of natural language. (...) There is a language of thought, and that it has a more logical form than ordinary natural language. This view has an added bonus: it tells us that, if you want to express yourself more clearly and more effectively in natural language, then you should express yourself in a form that is closer to computational logic - and therefore closer to the language of thought. (...) Thoughts as represented in a “language” (sometimes known as mentalese) that allows complex thoughts to be built up by combining simpler thoughts in various ways. In its most basic form the theory states that thought follows the same rules as language: thought has syntax. (...) LOTH implies that the mind has some tacit knowledge of the logical rules of inference and the linguistic rules of syntax (sentence structure) and semantics (concept or word meaning). (...)" - Amira from Bookmarklet

“We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages. The categories and types that we isolate from the world of phenomena we do not find there because they stare the observer in the face; on the contrary, the world is presented in a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions which has to be organized by our minds-and this means largely by the linguistic systems of our minds.” — Benjamin Lee Whorf http://amiquote.tumblr.com/post... - Amira

“Human language, coupled with human maternal care, enables the consciousness to bifurcate very early and extensively. Without the self-reflective properties inherent in a reflexive agent- recipient language, and without the objectification of the human infant — a very different kind of humanity would arise. Human consciousness, as constructed by human language, becomes the vehicle through which the self-reflective human mind envisions time. Language enables the viewer to reflect upon the actions of the doer (and the actions of one’s internal body), while projecting forward and backward — other possible bodily actions — into imagined space/time. Thus the projected and imagined space/time increasingly becomes the conscious world and reality of the viewer who imagines or remembers actions mapped onto that projected plan. (...) Having once marked this imagined time into units, the conscious viewer begins to order the anticipated actions of the body into a linear progression of events. A personal narrative then arises through the vehicle of language. (...)" - Amira from Bookmarklet

"While Kanzi and family are bonobos, the kind of language they have acquired — even if they have not manifested all major components yet (....) Therefore, although their biology remains that of apes, their consciousness has begun to change as a function of the language, the marks it leaves on their minds and the epigenetic marks it leaves on the next generation. (...) They explore art,... more... - Amira

"Originally on the British Isles. there were a group of Celtic tribes that lived throughoutBritain. They spoke Celtic languages, which live on as Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Welsh, and Manx. These Celtic-speaking peoples were the original inhabitants of Britain, but then come the English. The Anglo-Saxon invasion wasn't so much an "invasion", as a mass migration over hundreds of years." - Amira from Bookmarklet

"We propose a uni ed neural network architecture and learning algorithm that can be applied to various natural language processing tasks including: part-of-speech tagging, chunking, named entity recognition, and semantic role labeling. This versatility is achieved by trying to avoid task-speci c engineering and therefore disregarding a lot of prior knowledge. Instead of exploiting man-made input features carefully optimized for each task, our system learns internal representations on the basis of vast amounts of mostly unlabeled training data. This work is then used as a basis for building a freely available tagging system with good performance and minimal computational requirements." - Amira

Mamihlapinatapai is a word from the Yaghan language of Tierra del Fuego, listed in The Guinness Book of World Records as the “most succinct word”. See also: Volunteer’s dilemma http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... - Amira from Bookmarklet

there's a word like that in Japanese, half as long -- can't think of it now. (Maybe cross-post over to the Linguistics group ;-) But how does one define that "look" which presumably represents undisclosed intentions? - Adriano

If the "look" "occurred", it means that both are aware of it, and that may be just the signal to "come" closer and find out whether the intentions are similar :-) - Amira

"At present, linguists predict that over 50 per cent of the world’s languages will no longer be spoken by the turn of the century. (...) I am a romantic and romantics are nowadays always disillusioned because the world is no longer how they had hoped it to be. I had gone to the top of the world and had wished to find elderly folk sitting around telling stories. Instead, I found adults and children glued to television screens with a bowl of seal soup on their lap, playing exceedingly violent and expletive crammed Hollywoodian video war games. Time and time again, I discovered this awkward juxtaposition of modernity meets tradition. Out in the Arctic wilderness, hunters dressed head to toe in skins would answer satellite phones and check their GPS co-ordinates. (...) Some Polar Eskimos may live in tiny, wind-beaten wooden cabins with no running water, but Amazon delivers. Most 8 year-olds who live in Qaanaaq and the remote settlements have the latest smartphones. Media entertainment... more... - Amira from Bookmarklet

"Lingua-francas are the languages of wider communication, such as enable vast empires to have a common administration, and also allow international contacts. (…) Q: How much longer do you think English has as a global language? It will continue to be used until there is a workable alternative, and not a moment longer. It appears that language technology will soon provide that alternative, allowing speakers to go on using every mother-tongue, and yet be understood by speakers of any other language. (...) Q: Will Chinese or another language take its place? Probably not. All languages that might compete (except French, whose global days have probably passed) are regionally focused, hence limited as to global utility; and I do not anticipate a new round of global colonization, say from China, India or Indonesia. Technology will probably make a single replacement unnecessary anyway. (…) Everyone will increasingly use their own languages, and the world - given the necessary information... more... - Amira from Bookmarklet

Yeah. The imminent future of pervasive machine translation is pretty much only as imminent as AI. - Andrew C (✓) from Android

"The methods of genetic analysis – and finds that modern language originated in sub-Saharan Africa and spread across the world with migrating human populations. (...) “We show that each of these language families evolves according to its own set of rules, not according to a universal set of rules,” (...) It suggests rather that language is part of not a specialised module distinct from the rest of cognition, but more part of broad human cognitive skills.” The paper asserts instead that “cultural evolution is the primary factor that determines linguistic structure, with the current state of a linguistic system shaping and constraining future states”. (...) Instead of a simple set of brain switches steering language evolution, cultural circumstance played a role. Changes were the product of chance, or perhaps fulfilled as-yet-unknown needs. For whatever reason, “the fence over, ball kicked” might have been especially useful to Indo-European speakers, but not Austronesians. (...) “There... more... - Amira from Bookmarklet

Oh, fascinating! - Jenny R

“For decades, research into the brain basis of language was limited to the study of the effects of neurological disease and brain lesions on human language processing and production. Nowadays, however, new techniques are allowing researchers to create a picture of a normal brain at work processing language - helping to shed light on the mysteries of language and the brain.” - Amira from Bookmarklet

“The Mind is a Metaphor, is an evolving work of reference, an ever more interactive, more solidly constructed collection of mental metaphorics. This collection of eighteenth-century metaphors of mind serves as the basis for a scholarly study of the metaphors and root-images appealed to by the novelists, poets, dramatists, essayists, philosophers, belle-lettrists, preachers, and pamphleteers of the long eighteenth century. While the database does include metaphors from classical sources, from Shakespeare and Milton, from the King James Bible, and from more recent texts, it does not pretend to any depth or density of coverage in literature other than that of the British eighteenth century.” - Amira from Bookmarklet

"Our brains have undergone “neuronal recycling,” where writing has shaped itself over time to be easy on our visual systems. (...) Reading and writing is a recent human invention, going back only several thousand years, and much more recently for many parts of the world. We are reading using the eyes and brains of our illiterate ancestors. (…) We probably possess innate circuitry that responds specifically to animal-call-like sounds, and so our brain is better able to efficiently process a spoken word that means an animal call if the word itself sounds animal-call-like. (...)Our brains evolved to perceive objects, not object-parts, because objects are the clumps of matter that stay connected over time and are crucial to parsing and making sense of the world. (...)We have seen that human non-pictorial visual signs appear to possess a characteristic signature, and we have seen that this signature is not a result of chance. (...) (i) we wish to read words, not letters; and (ii) we have... more... - Amira from Bookmarklet

Robert Logan's The Alphabet Effect: "many of the seminal ideas in Western science, mathematics, jurisprudence, politics, economics, social organization and religion are intrinsically linked with the phonetic alphabet. . . . Of all mankind's inventions, with the possible exception of language itself, nothing has proved more useful or led to more innovations than the alphabet." (...) Logan follows the underlying assumption of the pictographic theory in arguing that "the absence of Western-style abstractions and classification schemes in Chinese culture is related to the differences in writing systems" (...) The paradox of the narrative of alphabetic literacy lies in its claim of a cognitive divide between oral and visual cultures. In order to make this claim, a great deal has to be ignored about how information and ideas are stored and transmitted. The essential shortcoming in the narrative lies in its desire to provide a simple explanation of cultural differences by theorizing that... more... - Amira from Bookmarklet

“The way we talk about complex and abstract ideas is suffused with metaphor. (...) even the subtlest instantiation of a metaphor (via a single word) can have a powerful influence over how people attempt to solve social problems like crime and how they gather information to make “well-informed” decisions. (...) people do not recognize metaphors as influential in their decisions; instead they point to more “substantive” (often numerical) information as the motivation for their problem-solving decision. Metaphors in language appear to instantiate frame-consistent knowledge structures and invite structurally consistent inferences. Far from being mere rhetorical flourishes, metaphors have profound influences on how we conceptualize and act with respect to important societal issues. We find that exposure to even a single metaphor can induce substantial differences in opinion about how to solve social problems. (…) systems of metaphors in language can encourage the creation of systems of... more... - Amira from Bookmarklet

"We were watching "Flickering Lights", a Danish crime caper. She's Danish and I speak the language passably. They did an acceptable job with most of the dialogue, though they couldn't really capture the clash of dialect when the Copenhagen toughs find themselves in rural Jutland. What annoyed me this time was that they didn't translate but transposed proper names and places, apparently in the belief that English-speaking audiences want a movie set in Denmark to seem as though it were set in Cleveland." - Shannon Jiménez from Bookmarklet

“Insight into human symbolic behavior and into human interaction through symbolic mechanisms comes from all sorts of disciplines: not only from linguistics, philosophy, psychology, and cultural anthropology, but from attitude research and public opinion study, from new techniques in psychotherapy, from physiology and neurology, from mathematical biology and cybernetics. How are all these separate insights to be brought together? (…) I have examined the problem long enough to believe that it cannot be done without some set of broad and informing principles such as is to be found in the General Semantics of Alfred Korzybski.” Abstraction ladder: Hayakawa’s version starts with a real live animal, Bessie the cow. Bessie lives at a farm, together with a lot of other cows and animals." - Amira from Bookmarklet

@Todd Hoff you are right. - Amira

“Nancy Maryboy, Ph.D., a Dine/Cherokee cosmologist from Arizona says; “The Western view looks at ego, self and the boundaries between self and other while Native languages talk about relationships and process. That’s why Native people introduce themselves by clan.” Another significant difference is that Native languages are verb based, while English is structured on nouns”. The laws of motion form the foundation of Western physics. Western science has simply failed to discover the underlying order inherent in the periodicity or circularity of motion due to its obsession with things (nouns) versus the process (verbs) of things. “Nouns are snapshots of a flowing reality,” Alford said. A person from a noun-based language such as English is programmed to watch dancers, he explained, while a person with a verb-based perspective would see or feel the experience of dancing.” - Amira from Bookmarklet

"At TEDxRainier, Patricia Kuhl shares astonishing findings about how babies learn one language over another -- by listening to the humans around them and "taking statistics" on the sounds they need to know. Clever lab experiments (and brain scans) show how 6-month-old babies use sophisticated reasoning to understand their world." - Amira from Bookmarklet

In this new RSAnimate Steven Pinker shows us how the mind turns the finite building blocks of language into infinite meanings. Taken from the RSA's free public events programme www.thersa.org/events - Amira from Bookmarklet

“Human thought, for the majority, is not simply the individual outcome of our evolved neural architecture, but also the result of our borrowing of the immense symbolic and intellectual resources available in language. (…) language and culture affect the perceptual qualities of different sensory channels to varying degrees (perhaps more in some phenomenal qualities than in others) is the most defensible (and arguably, this is what Whorf was arguing all along). Time, for example, may be difficult to perceive in certain ways if you are not culturally trained to habitually conducting yourself in relation to time appropriately: certainly, there is deep cultural difference in the degree to which people orient themselves by the clock, and varying emphases that societies place on recurrence or irreversibility of time. This isn’t to say that language is a perceptual world, but rather than languages can induce certain perceptual biases that may be more or less difficult to overcome. (…) ‘Every... more... - Amira from Bookmarklet

fantastic article, got me thinking of Kaspar Hauser again ;-) just ordered Susan SCHALLER's Man without Words (1995). Amira, thanks for your pointer. - Adriano

:) - Amira

“Language infects and inflects our thought at every level. The words in our vocabularies are catalysts that can precipitate fixations of content as one part of the brain tries to communicate with another. The structures of grammar enforce a discipline on our habits of thought, shaping the ways in which we probe our own “data bases,” trying, like Plato’s bird-fancier, to get the right birds to come when we call. The structures of the stories we learn provide guidance at a different level, prompting us to ask ourselves the questions that are most likely to be relevant to our current circumstances. None of this makes any sense so long as we persist in thinking of the mind as ideally rational, and perfectly self-transparent or unified. (...) “Looking at ourselves from the computer viewpoint, we cannot avoid seeing that natural language is our most important ‘programming language.’ This means that a vast portion of our knowledge and activity is, for us, best communicated and understood in... more... - Amira from Bookmarklet

"We dont ask ourselves where languages come from because they just seem to be there: French in France, English in England, Chinese in China, Japanese in Japan, and so forth. Yet if we go back only a few thousand years, none of these languages were spoken in their respective countries and indeed none of these languages existed anywhere in the world. Where did they all come from? Linguist Merritt Ruhlen, author of The Origin of Language: Tracing the Evolution of the Mother Tongue, details the factors that determine the development and evolution of regional dialects." - Amira from Bookmarklet

"Old English was the West Germanic language spoken in the area now known as England between the 5th and 11th centuries. Speakers of Old English called their language Englisc, themselves Angle, Angelcynn or Angelfolc and their home Angelcynn or Englaland. Old English began to appear in writing during the early 8th century. Most texts were written in West Saxon, one of the four main dialects. The other dialects were Mercian, Northumbrian and Kentish. The Anglo-Saxons adopted the styles of script used by Irish missionaries, such as Insular half-uncial, which was used for books in Latin. A less formal version of minuscule was used for to write both Latin and Old English. From the 10th century Anglo-Saxon scribes began to use Caroline Minuscule for Latin while continuing to write Old English in Insular minuscule. Thereafter Old English script was increasingly influenced by Caroline Minuscule even though it retained a number of distinctive Insular letter-forms. " - Amira from Bookmarklet

Thanks for sharing. I am really into this subject. :-) - Maitani