Evolution of the Alphabet

Klingon for Beginners!

The Hardest Words to Translate?

(These were collected by a questionable translation company, but I can vouch for the Russian. Pochemuchka means something like "little why-asker." It's a neat word.)

1. Ilunga: Bantu language of Tshiluba for "a person who is ready to forgive any abuse for the first time, to tolerate it a second time, but never a third time." However, there is no independent evidence that the word actually means what the translation company claims. When asked for confirmation by one reporter, representatives of the Congo government recognized the word only as a personal name. Furthermore, the translation company failed to respond to inquiries regarding the survey.
2. Shlimazl (שלימזל): Yiddish for a chronically unlucky person. (Cf. Schlemiel). (NOTE. In colloquial Italian, it is very common to use the word sfigato with exactly the same meaning, in Dutch and German one says pechvogel^[1], also used in colloq. German is the word Schlamassel, which refers to an unlucky situation)
3. Radiostukacz: Polish for a person who worked as a telegraphist for the resistance movements on the Soviet side of the Iron Curtain. It is not a real word, only a mistake or a hoax.
4. Naa (なぁ or なー): Japanese word originating in the Kansai (関西) area of Japan, especially in Osaka (大阪府), to emphasize statements or agree with someone.
5. Altahmam (التهمام) †: Arabic for a kind of deep sadness.
6. Gezellig †: Dutch for cosy (room, house, chair, etc.), pleasant (evening spent with friends), friendly (atmosphere). Similarly, German gesellig, having the second and third meaning.
7. Saudade †: Portuguese for a certain type of longing.
8. Sellaadhiroopavar † (செல்லாதிருப்பவர்): Tamil for a certain type of truancy.
9. Pochemuchka (почемучка): Russian for a person who asks a lot of questions (usually a child).
10. Klloshar †: Albanian for loser. Could be derived from French clochard (tramp).

Robots learn language

"(PhysOrg.com) -- Communication is a vital part of any task that has to be done by more than one individual. That is why humans in every corner of the world have created their own complex languages that help us share the goal. As it turns out, we are not alone in that need, or in our ability to create a language of our own.

Researchers at the University of Queensland and Queensland University of Technology have created a pair of robots who are creating their own language. The bots, which are being taught how to speak but not given specific languages, are learning to create a lexicon of their own.

The bots, which have been aptly named Lingodroids, consist of a fairly basic setup when it comes to hardware. The robot consists of a mobile platform that has been equipped with a camera, a laser range finder, and a sonar setup that allows for the mapping and avoidance of obstacle. In order to allow them to talk, they are also equipped with a microphone and speakers.

The Lingodroids develop language in the way that most human languages have probably developed, but making up words to name the places that they visit, and then share that name with the other around you. The bots basically find something that they have not seen in the past, create a word based on a random combination of syllables, and then tell the other robot the word that they have just created. Then the robots memory files will link to the word to that specific location.

Currently the robots are learning new words by playing games, and can only name locations, but the researchers hope that in the future these Lingodroids will be able to create a more complex language.

More information: Research paper: Schulz, R., Wyeth, G., & Wiles, J. (In Press) Are we there yet? Grounding temporal concepts in shared journeys, IEEE Transactions on Autonomous Mental Development

via IEEE"

How to Talk with a Dolphin

"A DIVER carrying a computer that tries to recognise dolphin sounds and generate responses in real time will soon attempt to communicate with wild dolphins off the coast of Florida. If the bid is successful, it will be a big step towards two-way communication between humans and dolphins."


Read the rest of the article here:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21028115.400-talk-with-a-dolphin-via-underwater-translation-machine.html

A Universal Philosophical Refutation

A philosopher once had the following dream:
First, Aristotle appeared, and the philosopher said to him, "Could you give me a fifteen-minute capsule sketch of your entire philosophy?" To the philosopher's surprise, Aristotle gave him an excellent exposition in which he compressed an enormous amount of material into a mere fifteen minutes. But then the philosopher raised a certain objection which Aristotle couldn't answer. Confounded, Aristotle disappeared.
Then Plato appeared. The same thing happened again, and the philosophers' objection to Plato was the same as his objection to Aristotle. Plato also couldn't answer it and disappeared.
Then all the famous philosophers of history appeared one-by-one and our philosopher refuted every one with the same objection.
After the last philosopher vanished, our philosopher said to himself, "I know I'm asleep and dreaming all this. Yet I've found a universal refutation for all philosophical systems! Tomorrow when I wake up, I will probably have forgotten it, and the world will really miss something!" With an iron effort, the philosopher forced himself to wake up, rush over to his desk, and write down his universal refutation. Then he jumped back into bed with a sigh of relief.
The next morning when he awoke, he went over to the desk to see what he had written.

It was, "That's what you say."

[From Raymond Smullyan, 5000 B.C. and Other Philosophical Fantasies. St. Martin's Press, 1983]

"New Words" by George Orwell

From an unpublished essay by G. Orwell, written around 1940:

"At present the formation of new words is a slow process (I have read somewhere that English gains about six and loses about four words a year) and no new words are deliberately coined except as names for material objects. Abstract words are never coined at all, though old words (e.g. “condition”, “reflex”, etc.) are sometimes twisted into new meanings for scientific purposes. What I am going to suggest here is that it would be quite feasible to invent a vocabulary, perhaps amounting to several thousands of words, which would deal with parts of our experience now practically unamenable to language. There are several objections to the idea, and I will deal with these as they arise. The first step is to indicate the kind of purpose for which new words are needed."

Read the rest here:

http://georgeorwellnovels.com/essays/new-words/

A Language Researcher Who Talks to Parrots

"Most pet owners talk to their animals at one time or another, and some do every day. But how much do our pets actually understand? Is their perception anything like ours? These are the questions that fascinate Irene Pepperberg and she's looking for answers from the animals themselves, specifically -- African Grey Parrots. The Harvard psychology professor is a bit like the character Dr. Doolittle because she's been talking to parrots for decades. With help from the National Science Foundation, she's researching how much the birds understand about shapes, numbers and colors. Her next phase of research involves how the parrots detect optical illusions, and whether they perceive them the way humans do. Her research will also reveal more about how a bird's vision works."

Ladle Rat Rotten Hut

"Wants pawn term, dare worsted ladle gull hoe lift wetter murder inner ladle cordage, honor itch offer lodge dock florist. Disk ladle gull orphan worry ladle cluck wetter putty ladle rat hut, an fur disk raisin pimple colder Ladle Rat Rotten Hut." 

This is how the story of Ladle Rat Rotten Hut begins. I assure you, you already know who Ladle Rat is and you've heard her tale many times before.  Don't believe me? Go here: http://www.exploratorium.edu/exhibits/ladle/, listen to the story and read along if you want.  And "pear tension" to the intonation.

A Modern Rosetta Stone

"The Rosetta Disk is intended to be a durable archive of human languages, as well as an aesthetic object that suggests a journey of the imagination across culture and history.

The Disk surface shown here, meant to be a guide to the contents, is etched with a central image of the earth and a message written in eight major world languages: “Languages of the World: This is an archive of over 1,500 human languages assembled in the year 02008 C.E. Magnify 1,000 times to find over 13,000 pages of language documentation.” The text begins at eye-readable scale and spirals down to nano-scale. This tapered ring of languages is intended to maximize the number of people that will be able to read something immediately upon picking up the Disk, as well as implying the directions for using it—‘get a magnifier and there is more.’ "

Read the rest here: http://rosettaproject.org/disk/concept/

The Strange Dance Language of Bees

From the article:

"Honeybees don’t have much in the way of brains. Their inch-long bodies hold at most a few million neurons. Yet with such meager mental machinery honeybees sustain one of the most intricate and explicit languages in the animal kingdom. In the darkness of the hive, bees manage to communicate the precise direction and distance of a newfound food source, and they do it all in the choreography of a dance. Scientists have known of the bee’s dance language for more than 70 years, and they have assembled a remarkably complete dictionary of its terms, but one fundamental question has stubbornly remained unanswered: How do they do it? How do these simple animals encode so much detailed information in such a varied language? Honeybees may not have much brain, but they do have a secret. "   
Read the rest here.

The Birth of a Word

"MIT researcher Deb Roy wanted to understand how his infant son learned language -- so he wired up his house with videocameras to catch every moment (with exceptions) of his son's life, then parsed 90,000 hours of home video to watch "gaaaa" slowly turn into "water." Astonishing, data-rich research with deep implications for how we learn."


You can watch the TED talk here: http://www.ted.com/talks/deb_roy_the_birth_of_a_word.html

A Linguist in Wonderland

Lewis Carroll on semantics/syntax:

"Then you should say what you mean,” the March Hare went on.

“I do,” Alice hastily replied; “at least—at least I mean what I say—that’s the same thing, you know.”

“Not the same thing a bit!” said the Hatter. “Why, you might just as well say that ‘I see what I eat’ is the same thing as ‘I eat what I see’!”

“You might just as well say,” added the March Hare, “that ‘I like what I get’ is the same thing as ‘I get what I like’!”

“You might just as well say,” added the Dormouse, which seemed to be talking in his sleep, “that ‘I breathe when I sleep’ is the same thing as ‘I sleep when I breathe’!”

Lost in Translation

If you go here: http://tashian.com/multibabel/  and type in any sentence, it will be translated back and forth between a bunch of different languages. The results are...special:

Original English Text:

I really should be doing homework right now instead of playing with silly internet translation games.

Translated to Chinese:
我应该确实现在做分配虚度光阴与愚蠢互联网转换比赛的变动。

Translated back to English:
I should truly now make the allocation to waste time convert the change of competition with the stupid Internet.

Translated to German:
Ich sollte zur Zulage die Änderung wirklich jetzt machen dem Bekehrten der Rückweisung der Zeit vom Wettbewerb mit dem dummen Internet.

Translated back to English:I should really now make the extra pay the modification for the converted one of the rejection of the time of the competition with the stupid Internet.

Translated to Spanish:
Ahora tendría traer realmente al salario adicional la modificación para aquélla convertida de la denegación del período de la competencia con el Internet opaco.

Translated back to English:
Now it would have to really bring to the additional wage the modification for that one turned of the refusal of the period of the competition with the opaque Internet.

Ancient Alphabet Soup #1

Today's Ancient Alphabet Soup flavour is Cypriot! This particular script originated in Ancient Greece, on the island of Cyprus. It is probably derived from Linear A (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_A). The alphabet consists of syllabograms and vowels:

Text-based adventures!

Have you ever wanted to create your own text-based adventure game? I recently wrote my own in Python. It's quite primitive. The player can't do much besides collect coins and then buy a useless text dragon, at which point they win the game. I highly recommend Python if you're just starting to learn programming - it's fun and easy! (At first. Then it gets very, very hard. And painful.)

If you want to experiment with a programming language that's dedicated to the creation of text adventures, try Inform. (It's completely free!) From their website: "Inform is a design system for interactive fiction based on natural language. It is a radical reinvention of the way interactive fiction is designed, guided by contemporary work in semantics." Inform's code is written in plain English. It actually parses sentences, so you could write: "The room is in the basement. The room is dark," and Inform will create an object called ' Basement room' with an attribute of being dark. There's a great tutorial on how to create your own game here: http://brasslantern.org/writers/howto/i7tutorial.html

The Language Construction Kit

"This set of webpages (what's a set of webpages? a webchapter?) is intended for anyone who wants to create artificial languages— for a fantasy or an alien world, as a hobby, as an interlanguage. It presents linguistically sound methods for creating naturalistic languages— which can be reversed to create non-naturalistic languages. It suggests further reading for those who want to know more, and shortcuts for those who want to know less.
—Mark Rosenfelder"

Explore the kit here: http://zompist.com/kit.html

Starting the year with a little philosophy...

Where does the meaning of a word come from? Plato believed all things derive their meaning from a metaphysical realm of perfect forms and ideas. Diogenes, a cynic who lived in a barrel, refutes him quite well:

"Plato was discoursing on his theory of ideas and, pointing to the cups on the table before him, said while there are many cups in the world, there is only one `idea' of a cup, and this cupness precedes the existence of all particular cups.
"I can see the cup on the table," interupted Diogenes, "but I can't see the `cupness'".
"That's because you have the eyes to see the cup," said Plato, "but", tapping his head with his forefinger, "you don't have the intellect with which to comprehend `cupness'."
Diogenes walked up to the table, examined a cup and, looking inside, asked, "Is it empty?"
Plato nodded.
"Where is the `emptiness' which precedes this empty cup?" asked Diogenes.
Plato allowed himself a few moments to collect his thoughts, but Diogenes reached over and, tapping Plato's head with his finger, said "I think you will find here is the `emptiness'."