Slashdot Mirror
Whistle While You Work
kukickface writes "Have you ever watched Star Wars and been amazed that Human beings could understand what R2D2 is saying? An ancient yet almost dead language called Silbo Gomero seems to be reality's closest equivalent. Could this type of language be used in the future to ease natural language processing pains?"
as loud as that. The Ju/'hoansi language made famous by Nixau in the Gods Must Be Crazy. Could you imagine that kind of clicking radiating for two miles?
It's so nice that they are keeping it going. It was Stalin that said "Take away their language, take away their souls". Imagine the good that the Navajo talkers did in WW II. Would've been a shame if we didn't have them. The war would have been WAY tougher.
Have you ever watched Star Wars and been amazed that Human beings could understand what R2D2 is saying?
No.
Could this type of language be used in the future to ease natural language processing pains?"
No.
However, I particularly liked the MP3.
Hey, Servando!
What?
Look, go tell Julio to bring the castanets.
OK.
Hey, Julio!
What?
Lili says you should go get the kids and have them bring the castanets for the party.
OK.OK.OK.
Why is this funny? The MP3 is 57 seconds, that's why. Everybody wants streamlined things, and that includes language.
So which human could understand R2D2?
Devil Ducky
MY peers would get out of jury duty.
"Have you ever watched Star Wars and been amazed that Human beings could understand what R2D2 is saying?"
Uhmm... No.
If we're whistling, then it wouldn't been natural would it?
-William Shatner can be neither created nor destroyed.
you know, a friendly greeting that sounded like a wolf whistle when she walked by, and I got dismissed for sexual harassment. Thanks a lot.
"Have you ever watched Star Wars and been amazed that Human beings could understand what R2D2 is saying?"
You do realize that Star Wars was a movie, not a documentary, don't you?
So much for whistling at my co workers... oh wait what co workers, ive been unemployed longer than cowboy neal : )
I for one, tweet, tweeeet, tweet, tweettweet, tweet tweet overlords!
This type of language would only be useful in a desolate environment. The reason the article states that whistling was used, was to communicate over long distances (up to two miles). How many people live within two miles of you? There's a reason this language died in the first place.
The World is Yours.
Someone starts eating crackers.
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
SAN SEBASTIAN, Canary Islands (AP) -- Juan Cabello takes pride in not using a cell phone or the Internet to communicate. Instead, he puckers up and whistles.
Uh... which end?
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
Would this be considered Pigeon Pidgin?
The Penguin Producer
And what do R2's ramblings translate to?
"Greetings Slashdotters. You have way too much time on your hands. That is all."
Not worth the effort I guess.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur
this whole situation could be neatly summed up with a word starting with P, although I can't remember what it is even if it'd save my life.
Even as a small child when 8-bit micros had speech synthesizers, I wondered why, in the technologically advanced Star Wars society that damned robot couldn't speak in a human (or whatever) language. Look at C3PO. 3 million languages? They had space craft capable of superluminal travel, weapons the size of a moon, and a damned robot that sounded like a ZX Spectrum loading Manic Miner.
Stick Men
Oh well, if people want to waste their time learning Klingon, I guess even R2D2 has its place.
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
You insensitive clod!
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
Ask Dylan
Help fight continental drift.
Could this type of language be used in the future to ease natural language processing pains?
You mean like the roaring success of esperanto?
Long-distance communication benefits aside, this is just another language that would have to be learned by two parties as a common basis. Any language, either English (which is rapidly dominating the globe) or Finnish (random choice) could be substituted given a significant number of interested individuals.
It is impressive, though. Certainly must make good party tricks.
So inefficient. We should have a way to systematically communicate in as few bits as possible. I mean, 5 bits per letter, and up to, say, 10 letters per word? Way too much. We should learn to communicate like computers, and compress information on the fly. We have these super powerful brains... why communicate the long way? Shouldn't we be speaking something like shorthand? If bzip2 can compress the documentation of independance to 1KB, shouldn't we be able to crunch it on the fly and expand it again? Why must it take so long to communicate something complex when it can be carried over the internet in a fraction of a second?
This was really interesting to me personally. I have a young nephew whose vocal chords don't work, and it doesn't look like he'll ever be able to talk normally. However, there's no reason to think that he won't be able to learn to whistle. He's still quite young, but he's already learned various clicks and pops that he can make with his mouth to get your attention. But if he could learn to whistle, and associate a vocabulary with that whistling, it would obviously help him communicate. I suppose there are quite a few mute people that could benefit from this. Who else could benefit?
"My girlfriend's got sodium laureth sulfate hair."
oic
No, not tomorrowland and Star Tours...how about the whistling going on in the Tiki Tiki Tiki Tiki Room?
Why not esperanto instead? Certainly more intuitive than whistling!
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
Then I would have to find a new way to make obscene derogatory passes at highly attractive women.
If the dollar is an "I owe you nothing", then the Euro is a "Who owes you nothing." - Doug Casey
I always assumed only C3P0 could understand R2D2. Now it's suppose to be an actual language and not a computer protocol?
All these years I've wondered my the R2 units never got a $1.50 speach chip.
While an interesting article, not exactly slashdot material... especially since there is no correlation.. I dont know what R2D2 saying, heck i doubt even people who are tripped up on drugs would. Can we have some better moderation?
That's ok dude, this is Slashdot (if there ever was any, you'd just hear a bunch of crude metaphors about 'fingering' and 'fscking').
"You know you don't act like a scientist, you're more like a game show host." Dana Barret
Have you ever watched Star Wars and wondered why R2D2 could understand speech, but could not speak?
Even in the 70's it was blazingly obvious which one of these two tasks was easy, and which one was difficult.
Those who would give up liberty in exchange for security and DRM should switch to Microsoft Palladium!
C3PO was his interpreter. In the X-Wing, Luke had to read what he was saying from a screen in the cockpit.
I feel all dirty and nerd-like for posting this. I hope you are happy.
[o]_O
"Could this type of language be used in the future to ease natural language processing pains?"
No, of course not.
-B
Why didn't anyone ever think of that before? Oh wait, they did. It's called Morse Code.
I know that this is a a little different -- morse code can be used to make any word, not just 400 as is the case with the language mentioned in the article, but still... What's the big deal?
quote: Could this type of language be used in the future to ease natural language processing pains?
i don't see how... can any linguist/CS person explain to me why this is not a bu%^&*)t question?
(there we go again -1 flamebait)
I suspect the "language" is probably closer to the tribal drum codes used in Africa than a true spoken language.
This chirpy brand of chatter is thought to have come over with early African settlers 2,500 years ago. Now, educators are working hard to save it from extinction by making schoolchildren study it up to age 14.
Wow I bet THAT's popular with the kids - I'm surprised spammers haven't started printing messages on ceiling tiles so that when children are told just how much time they are going to be wasting being forced to learn something pointless they have something to look at.
As we all know the subjects we all love and care deeply about are the ones we were forced to do as children such as RE (Religious Education) and PE (Physical Education). You know something is popular when the word "forced" is used.
ancient yet almost dead
Never thought of the two as mutually exclusive...
Emacs: for people who just never know when to
When I was younger I wrote a sci-fi story about a religious sect called the "Lingists" (hey, 16 years old, c'mon...) whose soul purpose was the rapid creation of new languages as a means of deterring interception.
... any Language Majors' know of similar 'language invention' schemes?
The "Lingists" made their fortune renting themselves out - two at a time. Each pair would 'invent a special language' designed *specifically* for the situation they needed to communicate about - if it were a military situation, they had their own tools to describe it in a radically different-sounding 'new' language, or if they were being used for a business negotiation, something entirely different. A sort of 'human' public/private key generation method.
The plot of the story mostly revolved around the kinds of situations that a pair of Lingists would find themselves in - leased out to the Mafia to be used as translators across contintental divides, negotiating business deals, etc. But I was always fascinated with the kinds of rules such a system would require in order to truly work.
I lost this story when I moved to another country, but I keep thinking I ought to go back to it and re-visit it in new, technological light. Perhaps there is a future for a group whose purpose is the invention of entirely new forms of human language for new situations.
When I see stories like this, about a language as simple as "4 vowels, 4 consonents", it inspires me to have a closer look at this idea
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
method of getting bullshit posted to Slashdot. Do you want to learn how to whistle so as not to sexually harass the females who might listen in on your "conversation"? Would you like to become a charter viewing member of goatse.cx? Does your wash and dry itself while you drive it home to work? Fuck thei Ancient language shit, next you nitwits will discover Gullah. Give us all a fucking break!!!
Everyone knows that it's Star Trek that's a documentary!
Here is an example of Silbo: http://www.agulo.net/silbo/silbo.mp3
I can't tell which are the 8 language elements as described in the article, but they seem to use at least duration and rising vs. falling pitch as 'letters'.
every stain tells a story
Imagine unintentionally cussing out your boss, or worse spouse, because you were tone deaf.....
***Blackholes are where the gods divided by zero.***
George Bush is already using this with Tony Blair. Interesting thing is that each whistled pattern ends with "Here, Boy!"
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
Although a whistle-based language is certainly possible, as the article proves, I don't think that producing sound is the challenge for computers or robots.
Speech recognition is continuing to improve. Currently, computers can either recognize most speech from a single person or most people on a single topic. Speaker-to-speaker variations (that make fully automated ay-person, any-word recognition hard) would plague even a whistle language - people would whistle with an accent.
The real challenge is in producing meaning, not sound. Understanding the meaning and intent of the words (however they are voiced) is a challenge as is constructing langauge that is in turn properly understood by human listeners.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
"Could this type of language be used in the future to ease natural language processing pains?"
Humans don't adapt to their environment. They adapt the environment to them. That said, the answer to your question is simply 'no' and slightly more verbosely 'Humans are not going to change the language they speak just so a computer can understand. We'll just fix the computers.'
...natural language processing pains. What you really need is more fiber in your diet. Clear that right up.
Anyone ever heard of Morse Code? It's essentially chirping noises, you could whistle it, and it's reached a hell of a lot further than 2 miles. So pucker those lips and kiss my ham .- ... ...
The article doesn't mention language processing either, and i'm hard pressed to see how it fits in. Generally a pretty pathetic post all around...
I still think the White Space language is more dynamic...
Business \Busi"ness\, n.;
A scam in which all people involved perceive as beneficial...
No, on two counts:
- It's hardly a breakthrough in natural language processing to shift load onto the human by making them learn a new language. What do you think "typing" is but a specialized sign language? Making them learn a new language defeats the whole purpose and makes for a rather hollow victory.
- While "word rate" varies somewhat from culture to culture, "information rate" is basically a constant. To express "The little boy was hit by a blue ball and started to cry, but his mother cheered him up with some cookies." will take about the same amount of time in spoken langauge in all languages (meant for face-to-face interaction).
And that's assuming what you really meant was "speech recognition pains". The real problem with "natural language recognition" is the stupifyingly complex sentences we utter, with their amazing context-sensitivity and ambiguities. NLP isn't a solved problem even on plain text which removes the vast majority of acoustical ambiguities that speech recognition has to deal with. (You still have problems like "ram" (verb, noun), but that's part of NLP.)(It's actually somewhat surprising that there's as much varience as there is in the length of the written version of that sentence; you can see in many languages that speaking has been more importent then writing. I suspect over the next hundred years some of the more verbose letter-based written languages will start condensing down to be more like English, which is one of the more compact letter-based languages. Thank the Anglo-Saxons.)
Creating an acoustically simpler language will necessarily mean that artificial language will be slower to communicate with. (If you could communicate at the same rate as English, then by pretty much by definition it would as complex.) Again, "reducing" the problem like this isn't so impressive and doesn't really solve the problem.
Basically, this is not useful for human-computer interaction. Limited forms of it have been useful in the other direction, though, but I don't know how the sounds mapped to information. AFAIK jet-fighter cockpits use acoustic signals, but they aren't used to convey digital information like words, they convey analog information like distances or speeds.
-1 Redundunt , shall we say
for the last time people, I am "frodo from middle eaRTH", not "middle eaST".
1. No mention of SW in CNN link.
2. No mention in CNN link of using it to communicate with computers/AI/natural language processing.
3. From the CNN link:
"I use it for everything: to call to my wife, to tell my kids something, to find a friend if we get lost in a crowd," Cabello said."
Yelling works this way too.
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
I wonder if it is possible to somehow make music with Silbo Gomero. I assume regular whistling-along would become impossible or at least more difficult--but then again, people speaking pitch-based langugages can sing, so maybe it's possible with Silbo as well :)
That said, I wish they had more details about the language in the article... Though here's what I found so far:
Wikipedia entry, and another link mentioned there.
Even more pathetic is the fact that it worked.
(as an aside, I checked out your ProfQuotes link. Any idea when that was started? The humor section of our newspaper at Rose-Hulman had a Wacky Prof Quotes section back in 1999 or so, and it was always the funniest part of the paper.)
...
How to ensure that your co-workers will beat the bejeepers out of you:
Whistle while you work...
I'd suggest it would be more profitable for him to learn ASL, since that's a relatively widely used language - plus, he'll be able to communicate with deaf people.
fortune -o
When I played the sample conversation from the site, our two cockatiels really reacted. I don't know whether the Silbo speakers would have understood the tiels' replies, though.
There have been a few other highly-tonal languages described in the linguistics literature, for which such whistled conversations are possible. I recall one from Mexico that was described (with recordings) in a linguistic class that I took once. I don't remember how large the vocabulary was; Silbo may well have more morphemes.
One point the prof made was that a lot of languages can be understood even if some major parts of the phonetics are lost. In English, we can understand whispered speech, though that loses all voicing and voicing is significant in English.
But such whistled languages are extremes, where nearly everything but the tones are lost. It is impressive.
OTOH, an info theory person should be able to explain why any language can be reduced to just two phonemes without loss. But I probably don't need to explain this here.
Morse code comes close to this, with only three symbols (dot, dash and space). I'd bet that this could be used for a whistled version of English.
Probably the most fun computer example of such reduction is the Whitespace language, in which the only characters are space, tab and newline.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Doing a direct translation from say, Japanese to English has been giving linguists and translators a lot of head aches. Things like "out of sight, out of mind" come out as "Blind insanity" What looks promising is a third language, like Esperanto have more promise as a "middle ware" language. Japanese Esperanto English, for examples. Whistles, just don't have the vocabulary.
Could this type of language be used in the future to ease natural language processing pains
Ermmm..... NO.
The problem with natural language processing is mainly understanding the human voice, dialect, vocabulary and context. The only possible use I see is that these sounds have less overall tonal and frequency variance, so compression should be much more efficient than normal speech.
But still, it would not replace the need for speech recognition/processing unless you expect everyone to learn this language of whistles, which I can safely say will never happen.
At best this could be used either as a computer generated hash of the original processed speech or as a user created "secret code" to replace mouse gestures and the like... but both ideas seem very impracticle.
I can't whistle! why, oh why was I born?!?
Repeat after me. Computers are tools, they adapt to us, not us to them.
One short toot means, this conversation is getting old let's stop soon.
One "silent but deadly" means, I really think it's time for you to go.
One long butt ripper means, you've overstayed your welcome now get the Hello out of my ori^H^Hffice
The people in Star Wars don't understand R2-D2. Luke has a little computer in his X-wing that translates what R2-D2 says and shows it in red letters. And they could get the general sense of what R2 was saying from the pitch, but not know EXACTLY what he was saying. Notice that only C-3PO actually conversed with him?
Enquiring minds want to know...
Wah!
The Whistling language is a REAL langauge which arose out of a REAL need.....esperanto fulfills no more real need than does Klingon. It's fun & interesting, but not useful (despite whatever high hopes the inventor had). If English gets replaced as worldwide diplomatic/technical langauge, it'll be by Chinese or Hindi.
Imagine the applications of such a language!
Speech recognition with a whistling language would be much more accurate, since there's less of an issue with accent... text files could be compressed into a MIDI format... hard-of-hearing individuals would have a much easier time understanding what's being said.
There are also musical implications; is it possible that any existing works of music might have some meaning in such languages?
I have also known of research into the possibility that music accelerates a child's development... is it possible that combining spoken and whistled languages might introduce a new developmental factor?
The Penguin Producer
ProfQuotes started last December. The idea is from the math newspaper at the University of Waterloo, it's also the funniest part of the paper there.
Jason
ProfQuotes
LOL
Give him a point mods
Could this type of language be used in the future to ease natural language processing pains?
Ummm, no.
The whole point of natural language processing is that I shouldn't have to learn another language to talk to the computer - it should learn to understand the language I'm already using.
BWHAHAHAHAHA! What a nerd! I'm sorry, but dude, it's just a movie! Get real.
how about trying to understand what Charlie Brown's teacher is saying?
...that with all the advanced technology lying around the Star Wars universe, nobody figured out how to solder a cheap little speech synthesis chip into a droid.
Plus, any word that you can spell with the English alphabet, you can use in morse code.
Or I have an even better thought which saves even more time, it would go like this:
But seriously...
I could also take this time to mention that musical instruments have also been used for long distance communications, all over the world. Talking drums in Africa, didgeridoos in Australia, and even more recently, the drummers on the front lines in the US civil war, issuing battle commands via the drum. All the instruments have their own "language" associated with them.
-CausticPuppy "Of all the people I know, you're certainly one of them." -Somebody I don't know
Is there a translation for the incessant whistling throughout the movie?
Now all we need is a language based on farting!
Steve's Computer Service, Hobbs, NM
i want my WoIP!
I wonder if those whistling competitions and cowboy songs will suddenly become politically incorrect.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
He'll be much better off if he learns ASL and doesn't travel much
---- It puts the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again. It does this whenever it's told.
This is an official karma whore and his sig is the real thing he wants to get to +5.
Of course, StockTheory is a scam site designed to do illegal things like pump and dump and scam people out of money.
"Have you ever watched Star Wars and been amazed that Human beings could understand what R2D2 is saying?"
I'm not amazed, m'kay kids, it's just a movie. Not real. Theatrical. A staged act. Fictional. M'kay?
Humor and polictical commentary rolled into one brief package. Though you'll likely get modded as a troll I appreciate your near-brilliant effort (and I am apparently on the other side of the political fence from you). Good work.
Yeah. I had reservations about posting this for exactly the reasons you stated. The Star Wars reference was just the first thing I thought of while imagining people communicating in Silbo.
As far as natural language processing goes. I am a Computer Scientist. Just like any other engineer or scientist I get inspiration from many places. Natural language processing has always been a fascination of mine. There are problems with machines interpreting natural languages like english. I was just trying to point out that maybe there is an alternate avenue here; a langauge that we speak so that the machine can understand us.
This is not a hard thing to get straight:
C3P0 is a protocol droid--his function is to interact with people. He has a huminoid shape. He knows 3 billion forms of communication. I assume his primary function would be to attend a family of wealth, educate them on protocol, translate visiting dignataries. He is a mechanical steward of the household.
R2D2 is a repair droid. His primary function is not to interact with humans. He is built for his function: he is small and round. He has many attachments which do different tasks. As seen in Episode One, he has magnetic treads so he can repair a ship in mid-flight.
Your modem does not speek English, so why should R2? His primary task would be to talk to damaged machines, and co-ordinate tasks with other R2 units. We can only assume that his whistle speech could be ramped up for more data transfer over long distances when he can't physically plug in i.e. talking to other R2's during repairs.
You wouldn't expect C3P0 to use a "hyperspanner"--why do you expect R2D2 to talk to people?
several mexicans i know have a rudimentary whistling dialect from communicating incognito on the border. (coyotes and stuff)
No.
--- Ban humanity.
Have you ever watched Star Wars and been amazed that Human beings could understand what R2D2 is saying?
No, though just today I've been amazed by encountering someone who was amazed at a grown man playing dress up pretending to understand what another man in a domed cylinder was whistling.
a language is revived.. which sounds like birds tweeting... and this is on the canary islands, right? are you SURE that CNN didn't just interview a couple birds?
Comment: Yes I realise the username 'fuckfuck101' makes me sound intelligent, no you cannot buy it from me.
In the movies? I always thought it was C3PO who translated for r2d2. Seemed only time Luke or anyone else knew what he or other R-series droids was saying was when the droids were hooked up to a ships console and it printed out on their screen in the ships.
J
Abiit, excessit, evasit, erupit.
They could? I thought only C3PO could understand him. He could understand the human commands, but they couldn't understand him. Or am I forgetting something?
And commenting on the posters (or editors) comments aren't off topic. If they aren't relevant, they shouldn't be included in the posting.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
I don't know about natural language processing but IP over Silbo would make a much better project!
---- It puts the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again. It does this whenever it's told.
ah, you broke my elaborate code... my ego is smashed to pieces :)
would you now care to tell me what the relevance is of the quoted question, instead of making fun of me? i bet you can, you sound quite intelligable...
thank you kindly for your attention!
Quote from an intersting summary:
"My brother was once hiking around Gomera with a friend. They ran out
of drinking water and asked a local person for some. This person said
she didn't have any (it was a very dry area!) but her neighbor up the
mountain could help. "I'll let her know you're coming" she said, and
whistled up the mountain. They walked up the mountain. My brother
walked ahead and arrived first. When he got to the house, a stranger
sitting there said: "Ah, there you are. The water's right around the
corner there; but where is your friend?"
Read Epic the first RPG novel.
I was surprised to see The Clangers weren't mentioned yet. The Clangers were little aardvark looking creatures that live on the moon and communicate by whistling. It was a kids' TV program in the UK, but became a typical 'cult' thing with students watching, etc.
The whole program was just these weird puppet things whistling at each other, with some guy narrating over it. Really creepy, but it was quite big at the time.
See pictures of the Clangers.
Lots of other samples, pictures, and bits and bobs at http://www.clangers.co.uk/home.htm
mogorific carpentry experiments
Slashdot in general doesn't post enough of these kinds of stories. I wonder if this would have made it if not for the R2d2 reference.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Have you ever watched Star Wars and been amazed that Human beings could understand what R2D2 is saying?
Actually no, not at all.
The reason we can have R2D2 in a conversation is that there's someone else in it too, interpreting the negative linguistic space. Ditto with Chewie.
e.g.:
R2: Beep beep beepledee boop!
C3PO: What do you mean, I prance around like a gay frenchman at a Ren fair?
Chewie has the additional advantage of being a biped with mobile arms and facial features, capable of exhibiting body language.
"Rawwwwrararar" + hug == "I am happy to see you out of carbonite encasement!"
"Rawwwwrararar" + flailing arms == "I am angry at this negative power coupling!"
Other cues include voice pitch, speed, and inflection. Situational context helps too.
I can now whistle at women without being immediately slapped!
The humans CAN'T understand what R2D2 is saying. That's why the other, useless, annoying. british robot is always hanging around. What's worse is the new movies don't have a Han Solo-type character to "shut him up or shut him down."
here.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
A project to handle translations using Esperanto as an intermediary and archival language was started some years ago. It has had some interesting and useful partial successes, even without any official support to speak of.
m if you're interested. (Needless to say, most of the site is in Esperanto. ;-)
To work well, the programmers writing the translation code did make a few tweaks to written Esperanto. This is to simplify the parsing task, and help in generating things required in the target language that aren't in Esperanto, as well as to clarify some of the few ambiguities in Esperanta syntax.
You can read about it at http://www.langmaker.com/db/mdl_esperantodedlt.ht
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
In fact, while I remember - in case you want to go looking they are generally referred to as 'speech surrogates', although that covers a very broad range including things like drum communication and so forth.
fortune -o
It was outlawed in the 1970s as the result of lobbying by American television manufacturers. It turned out it was changing channels on TV sets that used ultrasonic remote controls. The American TV manufacturers were losing business to Japanese TV manufacturers that were using infrared remote controls. I remember a guy in a bar getting beat up during Super Bowl because when he talked he changed the channel to My Mother the Car.
Yeah yeah.. a whistling language, that's all fine and dandy. But when, may I ask you, does the Silbo Garmero-to-Klingon dictionary come out.
that I have seen from several people I know. I suppose my alias has something to do with it.
This language is 2500 years old...before radio, telegraph, etc. What better way to communicate over long distances....you don't need to carry an instrument with you since your mouth and hands should always be with you, unless you run across an angry big animal.
I don't see any practical use for this today except for people who can't talk and need to shout. You can't shout in sign language...people can't see you at a distance without binoculars.
As for R2D2, there are some things he said that are perfectly understandable. For example, when R2D2 and C3P0 were left alone after meeting master Luke, R2D2 and C3P0 had the following conversation...
R2D2 (beeping): Do you think he likes me?
C3P0: No, I don't think he likes you at all!
R2D2 (beeping): Do you like me?
C3P0: No, I don't like you either.
R2D2: *SIGH*
Granted, without C3P0 it would be hard to understand R2D2, just like it's hard to understand Kenny on South Park.
As you can tell, this stuff interests me. I love geeking about this stuff.
You mean you *don't* understand R2D2?
I went on one of those driving "Jeep tours" out near Vail, CO this past summer. While the guide _was_ a prick, he did know how to yodel quite well, and supposedly lived in Austria (or maybe it was Switzerland) during WWII as a young boy (He was old enough and had the accent to prove it). He told us that while the Germans occupied his countryside, him and his friends who didn't approve of the Nazi's communicated from one mountain to another by yodeling. They in turn were able to avoid German patrols and such by communicating via yodelling... something the Germans didn't take the time to try and decipher I guess.
I also tried single phonemes with some success but not as much as I had hoped. Maybe I'll try clicks next.
(C) Kaki Sain, 2011. By reading this, you have illegally copied my property to your brain.
hrm, doesn't seem much different than listening to the ol' 110/300 bps modem . . . after a while, you could certainly pick out certain patterns; with enough experience, i'd imagine you could decipher/emulate (eliminating parity of course ;-) )
-D
I always was more amazed at how humans could always understand Lassie's barks and yips.
"What's that Lassie? Timmy is stuck in the well by the old mill?"
The CNN article incorrectly suggests that the Mexican version of silbo is derived from the Canaries' Silbo Gomero. The Mexican whistled language develeped independently in a mountanous area far more rugged as the Canaries. This is an example of parallel development under similar circumstances.
In the European Alps, the solution was to develop yoddling (seriously).
I'm surprised that someone has brought it to light. The people who know silbo usually kept it to themselves, and were not fond of sharing the language with others.
La Gomera is the last of the Canary islands, one that has no access to the rest of the world save by ferry. The island is (not very well) known for a number of peculiar traits. The natives are not a fishing society despite living on an *island*, and they are known for a very very particular type of pottery they make there. (When asked if there were many who knew how to make pots in this fashion, a native answered "Oh yes, lots of us" and explained that at least 10 or 12 in the village knew the art.)
Barbara Kingsolver is an author who traveled to the island to escape the frenzy of the gulf war in the early 90's, and stumbled over the culture quite by accident. After some time there, she found that the language was designed to travel the great distances *that had nothing in between*. From one hilltop to another was fine, especially when there weren't many people in earshot, but in a building it would have no application, and we have a hard enough time hearing someone right next to us on the street. Imagine trying to listen to them around eighty others all whistling out to each other.
For great distances in hiking parties, or feild workers perhaps, but this has almost no application in a society that has already been *built* around the communication methods that we already have established.
{...reality is wrong, Dreams are for real...}
for the same reason the starships made a loud noise when they blew up in the vacumn of space.
True, the interplanetary gases are far too thin to carry sound as we know it, but exploding spacecraft still make electromagnetic noise, which interferes with other spacecraft's radios.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Does a word start at, say, a definite F sharp and go down to E flat? More likely, there are general concepts of "very high" pitch, "high" pitch, "medium" pitch, and so on. But that severely limits the possible combinations.
So latin is dead since no one grows up with latin as a first language.
"Nobody grows up with pre-Norman Old English as a mother tongue. Therefore, English is dead."
Pfft. Latin is hardly dead. It just forked into Spanish (which in turn forked into Portuguese), French, and Romanian (a branch showing heavy Slavic contributions), and the trunk of Latin became known as Italian.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Face it, People gave instructions to R2D2 in english, he replied in whistles. So he has the ability to understand english, but can't afford a $20 voice synthesizer chip? Whatever.
a'oo. dinebizaad eii nizhoniee'. trans: yes, the navajo language is beautiful.
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http://www.hellection.com
Superb! It's like a reality tv show, without having to actually see the dumb fucker.
Alternatively, go see Moonie and Broon.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Comment removed based on user account deletion
from the same navy dot mil address:
I
Most letters had more than one Navajo word representing them. Not all words had to be spelled out letter by letter. The developers of the original code assigned Navajo words to represent about 450 frequently used military terms that did not exist in the Navajo language. Several examples: "besh- lo" (iron fish) meant "submarine," "dah-he- tih-hi" (hummingbird) meant "fighter plane" and "debeh-li-zine" (black street) meant "squad."
debeh-li-zine is "black sheep", not "black street". and it's phonetically dibEH-thli-zhiNEH
spelled D-I-B-hightoneE-(space)-slashL-I-Z-H-I-N-hightone
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http://www.hellection.com
Huautla Mazatec from Mexico, can also be whistled. The phenomenon is discussed in the paper referenced here
Judging from this summary, they're not almost extinct either: 72,000 speakers, 27,000 monolingual.
Still hoping for Gentle Treatment...
Yeah, why bother saving some dumb panda bear that eats only bamboo and can't even take care of their offsprings? There are plenty of cows and chickens around for people to eat. They are more practical and we should spend our money on them instead.
Just because a language is dying doesn't mean that we shouldn't bother saving it. A language defines one's culture. A culture is never lost when the language is kept alive. We want to preserve as many culture as we can the same way we want to preserve as many species of animal as we can. It adds the richness to the diversity of life on Earth.
I grew up in Taiwan with Taiwanese as my mother tongue. There were vast literatures and poetries written in Taiwanese. However, during the Japanese colonial period, the people were forced to abolish their language and speak Japanese. When Japan lost the war and Taiwan was taken by the Nationalist in China, people were then forced to speak Mandarin instead. This cut off the culture root and the younger generation can speak only Mandarin now. They don't know the Taiwanese history. They don't know the Taiwanese literatures. They don't know the Taiwanese poetries. They don't even speak Taiwanese.
Now you are telling me that we should just leave this language to die? Then I propose that we just leave all the endangered species to die!
how is this for insightful:
this has nothing to do with political correctness. i has to do with having to come up with new nouns given a set vocabulary. not having seen white people or other people of african descent, the most logical way of describing them was of course, with descriptive words.
the english translations of the words don't quite do the descriptions justice either. for instance, zhini or ZHIN-NI as the navy spells it does describe the color black, but calling them "blackies" is subjective from an english translator's perspective.
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http://www.hellection.com
I was not amazed that humans could understand R2D2 because they can't. It's a FILM and so they just pretended he could. I'm sorry if I broke your illusions :)
No. Because Star Wars is a cheesy science fiction B-movie.
Unfortunately, it seems to have all but died out, highly localised as it was. I'm surprised that it wasn't mentioned in the article - I thought it was as well known as the Canaries version.
Whistling is highly effective in mountainous terrain - the lack of trees and absorbent vegetation allows a greater range than would be expected in lowland areas. That's why hill walkers are encouraged to carry a whistle - in an emergency, it can be heard from a couple of miles away.
(gratuitous Beavis and Butthead) Hehe - he said 'Aas'
oh brave new world, that has such people in it!
That with roughly 4,000 "words," they managed to cram in Servando, Julio and Lili (see "transcript" of silbo.mp3 on the CNN page).
This reminds me of the time you could try to whistle into a modem to get a connection.
Hmmm a language of not only humans but also machines brought together by Captain crunch whistles.
When I was your age we didn't have music file sharing utilities. We had to go out to a store and shoplift the CD.
Good point. I had mistakenly assumed that because the English translator was doing it for a military web page, he/she didn't have a need to sugar coat the translation. I didn't think that he/she would have his/her own "us vs. them" bias creep into the translation.
Those who complain about affect & effect on
In other words, all signal information other than those key points is ignored by the brain.
This fact can be used in speech recognition, as it tells us we can dispense with most of the signal, and only look at the key points. This will allow computers to handle accents much better, as you're dealing only with a very specific set of points and their relative position, which would be consistant within an accent.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
...seeing this or a similar whistling language on 321-contact on PBS? I remember an old man in the snow whistling to his buddy on a mountain. Then they had all this stuff about trying to determine if they were actually communicating by isolating them in separate rooms and asking them to whistle with one another through specific questions. Great intro to scientific research and into a cool language!
Well, now I know where the Adam's Family's Cousin It fits in...
We can only hope ...
Or do they spit their phonemes out faster?
Listen to a Japanese speaker, such as a voice actor in subtitled anime. Japanese has a reduced nominal phoneme inventory, fewer than that of Spanish but a bit more than that of 'Nesian languages. Japanese speakers do spit out phonemes quickly, so quickly in fact that speakers often elide unaccented 'i' and 'u' to palatalization or rounding of the previous consonant.
Worse yet, listen to a Toki Pona speaker. Toki Pona's minimalist phoneme inventory compares to those of 'Nesian languages such as Hawaiian. But Toki Pona speakers generally reduce ideas to simpler terms before saying them.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Of course it can! All we have to do is convince everyone to learn it in addition to whatever languages they already speak. People will learn it in droves! Everyone will quickly become proficient, damn the effort! All so that we can easily speak to our electronic devices and save those poor natural language parsing software developers from needless effort. Forget all those neural-networks and whatnot. Let's do it the hard way, like men!
They'll even make movies in Silbo, because everyone will be fluent and will want to completely immerse themselves!
When lacking arguments, a human subspecies called dum-dums, always revert to word nit-picking.
And that's homosapiens to you!
> If we're whistling, then it wouldn't been natural would it?
What???? Saying a whistle is unnatural means speech is unnatural, means barks, sqwaks, etc are also unnatural. IMO, NOTHING is unnatural, as all of it existed beforehand. Of course, you can argue that lab-controlled chemical reactions are unnatural, but it's a stretch (again, IMO). If a totally "wild," uneducated human could do it (and they could, if they existed), it's natural.
Insightful, my ass.
Have you ever watched Star Wars and been amazed that Human beings could understand what R2D2 is saying?
Erm, no. Being amazed that Human beings [sic] can understand what R2S2 is saying is like being amazed that Tinkerbell can fly, or that no one recognized Superman when he wore glasses. All are fictions, and thus no amazement is possible.
Okay, you still find it amazing? Well, then I will share with you the amazing news that I am really an android from the year 2525, capable of translating 4500 languages simultaneously.
Neopets - the best free game on the Int
Well, it's a bit of a stretch from the concept of the article and the spirit of natural language processing, it could be an interesting compromise. Considering that all current human/computer interactions put some stress on the human to communicate on the computer's terms.
OTOH, with whistles, you'd probably lose the ability to do voice-print identifications..
my sig's at the bottom of the page.
When I told a buddy of mine (who happens to be Cherokee) about the Code Talker movie awhile back the conversation went something like this.
Me: Dude there making a movie about the code talkers
He: Cool, which ones?
Me: Navajo.
He: Fucking Navajo! They get all the damn credit!
Still cracks me up.
..which just shows that the human brain is ill-adapted for thinking and was probably designed for cooling the blood-T P
Whistling is neither more or less natural than any other system of making sounds for communication. It's merely less common.
No, I haven't. It's a movie!! Human's didn't understand R2, they just did what George Lucas told them to do!
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
And it means: .... of a monkey
- stop watching that old movie you
Have you ever watched Star Wars and been amazed that Human beings could understand what R2D2 is saying?
They're actually just acting.
(see previous post)
Ok I give up - you hopeless f..ktarts
"I suspect over the next hundred years some of the more verbose letter-based written languages will start condensing down to be more like English, which is one of the more compact letter-based languages"
While letter-based entry is easy for computers to be designed to do, symbol based output is much more efficient than letter based words. It's a lot easier to write fast car in Japanese -- 2 characters (one for speed, one for car) vs. 7 in English + space or hyphenation.
Before you whine that learning a few thousand symbols would be hard, stop and consider how you read. Unless you're 5 or younger, you probably read by doing word recognition instead of sounding each letter out by phonics rules, and then comparing to words you know. Your visual vocabulary is probably many tens of thousands of words strong, nothing compared to the couple thousand kanji that Japanese people use daily.
And, for those who haven't learned specific characters you, you can always include explanitory text in one of the character-based languages (ala furigana).
Look into linguistics sometime, you'll find that communication is a really fascinating science.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
"Could this type of language be used in the future to ease natural language processing pains?" Man, I hope not!
I understand you point. My feelings are more along the lines of separating "data" and "commands", which has been the basis for modern computing anyway.
In this way you could use the whistles (or grunts, or whatever else) to generate commands while your native language is used for data. This is much the same way that string literals are separated from programming statements in languages like C.
In the case of voice print ID, they don't really looks at what you say, but try and match the sound patterns to a prerecorded password. This would not change at all. You wouldn't use a whistle, you could use an audible literal just like your current password is a string literal.
1. when i was in mazatlan the taxi drivers used whistle-language over their cb radios. don't know if it was made up, or based on an indian language. this would have been in the mid-80s.
2. national geographic did a story once on whistle-languages in the andes.
It was fun to hear the whistling across the office as one person after another clicked on the link to the mp3 of the language.
I heard it from up the aisle and went to investigate. It was coming from a guy's headphones, and he was wearing them. They guy that was wearing the headphones didn't even think he had the volume up particularly loud. The guy across from him said he could hear it over the music he was listening to.
I greatly desire to see an English text to Silbo translation engine. It would be kind of cool to hear the classics in Silbo.
If it's such a natural form of communication, why isn't it more common? Outside of some birds, most animals that I'm aware of don't use it. I am no expert of any kind on animal life, but most animals that I know of use more gutteral forms of communication. How many things whistle?
... computer understand. Learning to whistle so a computer can understand you is no more natural then if we used a binary language of screetching and silence.
Regardless, in the computing context of "natural language" processing, it means to understand speech. People talk
-William Shatner can be neither created nor destroyed.
The Scientific American article said that Silbo was not an indigenous language that preceded the Spanish colonization of the Canary Islands. It said that Silbo was a dialect of Spanish. It said that Silbo whistlers used the same vocabulary, syntax and grammar as the local dialect of Spanish. It said that Silbo whistlers mouthed the same words that they would be using if they were speaking Spanish, except that they were doing whatever they needed to do with their lips to whistle. But the movement of their tongues, teeth etc were all as if they were speaking Spanish.
As the CNN article said, this resulted in a reduced number of phonemes, and they were different from those of Spanish. But a practiced listener could still understand what was being said by recognizing the rythym of the speech and by mapping the Silbo words onto their equivalent in Spanish.
The Island is volcanic, with one central conical caldera. The surface of the is scored by deep valleys radiating from the caldera. The Scientific American article explained that Silbo was much better than regular Spanish for communicating from one valley to the other. Whistles carried farther than regular speech. And all the phonemes carried equally well. So, either the whole message got through, or no message got through.
A-way back in the 70s, Tod Loufbourrow had a SBC robot that could take commands in whistles, and then drive a motorized platform around. I remember when this book came out... I drooled over the schematics.
8 10 456818/qid=1069198003/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_1/103-183022 3-6513417?v=glance&n=507846
7 8. htm
For more info, see:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0
http://www.slacc.com/slacc_club/Newsletters/dec
http://www.inc.com/magazine/19961015/2080.html
BEEEEEEEEEEEP-BIP!Q KKZKK
BEEEEEEEEEEEEKRKKRKRKKZKZKZKK
Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted!
Reason: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
I know EXACTLY what you mean. I'm deaf and I get sick of all these hearing people who learn sign language WORDS and nothing at all of the grammar or culture that goes with being unable to hear.
So they sign straight english which is exactly like reading anything that's been through Babelfish. (I actually use Babelfish to show them how it looks for us) Worse is since sign languages are visual the only way you CAN describe someone is by their physical appearance, unless they always have a skateboard with them or something...
My name means tall, some of my friend's names are : black, mole, curly hair, big eyes, boy(he's older now but keeps it for sentimentality), long eyelashes(that's my girlfriend heh), blind(yup, he is), smile, laugh, frown, mustach and LOTS of asian people with signs connnected to their eyes.
These names don't offend the deaf at all, and can be changed easily if for some reason the person doesn't want it anymore. Perhaps they stop skateboarding, grow up, move to a new town, do something famous, or get a really bad reputation somehow.
So how do you explain someone who's name you can't recall? Well he's this tall, has glasses, he's black, he's bald, he limps... and he's sick a lot, RIGHT! That guy!
We have problems with P.C. hearing people telling us how rude we are... trying to change people's names they don't like, spreading new P.C. signs they've invented for other countries or nationalities. It's funny since the new signs STILL describe those people, now instead of K on the eyes for Korean it's rice-paddy hats. Instead of C on the eyes for Chinese, it's the old style communist coats. Instead of mimicing the stereotypical Russian leg kicking dance it's now wiping Vodka off the chin...
Why doncha guys go fix the english language first? Start calling Japan Nihon or Nippon, and Spain Espania... nobody has proven to me how open minded they are with all this P.C. crap... quite the opposite in fact.
-Don.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
"Hey Pikachu! Say something normal, like: 'Douglas.'"
(Attention, Citizens of Cory)
(It's actually somewhat surprising that there's as much varience as there is in the length of the written version of that sentence; you can see in many languages that speaking has been more importent then writing. I suspect over the next hundred years some of the more verbose letter-based written languages will start condensing down to be more like English, which is one of the more compact letter-based languages. Thank the Anglo-Saxons.)
Actually you should thank the Normans probably, and the old French they spoke. Up until the Norman invasion of 1066, Old English (such as the text of Beowulf) had the standard Germanic set of of 4 declinations (cases) and three genders, which, left at that would have left English somewhere between Dutch and German today. The resulting linguistic mix in England resulted in a much simplified language. This has happened in other languages too. Think of the numerous creoles or of Afrikaans from South Africa, which evolved in only 300 years from Dutch into a language that is even simpler than English in terms of grammatical bagage, due to the mixed languages spoken in South Africa at the time.
...will no doubt provide a Silbo Gomero language interface soon.
It'll become the most irritating search known to man. Excepting - maybe - MSN.
A good way to check for spelling errors (other than clicking spell on the toolbar) is to read the entire document backwards (bottom to top, right to left)
it is only after a long journey that you know the strength of the horse.
and don't forget about harpo, who also very efficiently communicated with whistling..
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Baptists Are Saving Homosexuals
Why, do they think that they may need them for something later?
reminds me of that joke, somthing about melons, and a ball park? (the complete joke escapes me now, though)
No, that one's about a bale of hay, three nuns, and a kangaroo.
You can still try.
Anyone else hear bad whale song?
The wave forms are simular enough that I fail to see why one would be unable to teach a bird how to speak this language. If that could happen, then imagine the many possible uses for this. Could this then give us further insight into inteligence...
I would mod this up if had had mod points.
The Greeks coined the term 'barbarian' simply as a way to say 'someone who goes bar bar' - that is, 'someone "I" cannot understand' - With a snooty disregard for the person's origins. Later, however, the terms took on its full perjorative meaning of 'uncouth'.
From this site on Macedonian culture
"That man Philip, not only he is not a Greek, but also he does not have anything in common with the Greeks. If only he would have been a barbarian from a decent country - but he is not even that. He is a scabby creature from Macedonia - a land that one can not even bring a slave that is worth something from".15)
"15) The statement of Demostenes can be found in any publication of his speeches called Philippics.
"The question why Demosthenes named Philip as a barbarian becomes imminent. Majority of the scientists believe that the term "barbarians" in the ancient period was used to refer mainly to people that spoke language that Greeks could not understand, usually accompanied by a dose of disregard towards the culture of the people speaking that language. It is well known that all the people that did not speak Greek were named "barbarians", whereas the Greeks from the city-states used the word "xenoi" when referring to one-another.16)
"16) For detailed explanation regarding the meaning of the term "barbarians" in the ancient world refer to Synthia Syndor Slowikowski: "Sport and Culture in the Ancient Macedonian Society" (The Pennsylvania State University, 1998, p. 30)"
Subduction leads to orogeny
I'd like to see humans that speak using this language write code. It would probably look like music with notes, bars, etc.
It is funny that you mention your cockatiels reacting to Silbo Gomero, mine didn't react to it at all... But on the other hand, since they do not seem very keen on learning my language, I started trying to learn theirs ;-)
Maybe we deserve this world ?
> Ecept that I can type faster then I can talk.
In which case I hope your speech therapy is going well.
A reasonable speaking rate is 200 words per minute, and I can manage up to 400 words per minute (although the listener would have to pay close attention for that), whereas one is considered a very fast typist if one can manage 100 words per minute. 200 words per minute - which virtually anyone can speak - is almost unheard of for typing.
When I was at university, a supervisor of mine wrote a program that recognises whistles and acts accordingly depending on the whistle it hears.
Take a look at it here. I don't think it's maintained, though someone might be interested in picking up where he left off.
I beg to differ - this is contextual inference, not linguistic redundancy. If you had never had any exposure to guns and/or robbery you would not be able to infer the word through the context.
"Give me all your cash, I have a Picasso/kebab/cheque/etc."
Q.
Insert Signature Here
Actually, you moron, captain crunch whistles provided a 2600Hz tone which was the tone of the 'blue box' (used primarily to hack the phone system) and had nothing to do with modems connecting whatsoever. You sicken me.
I know EXACTLY what you mean. I'm deaf and I get sick of all these hearing people who learn sign language WORDS and nothing at all of the grammar or culture that goes with being unable to hear.
At the top of a culture, people laugh, at the bottom, they weep. Reverse the ordering and the only thing different would be the players, IMHO.
Considering the enormous time and effort it takes most people to (mis-) learn even the rudiments of a natural language, given your druthers, would it really please you better to live in a world where no bothered at all?
To mail me, remove the 'mailno' from my email addy.
"Yeah. It smells, too..."
But all of them, sound, optical image and electro-magnetic fields (in a way as they are used now) have a common problem: they are incompatible with our brains, with the way our brains represent information when storing or processing it.
Therefore I think that the only communication media format that has a future (long-term investors! pay your attention here!) is the one that could be easily adapted for read and write operations between brains and computers.
How many natural languages do we have on earth? Why? The way we feel the information inside our brains does not depend on the language we use later to express our feelings. Solution: just scan the feeling and transfer it.
Personally, I want a wireless modem implanted to my brains to connect to my computer, to communicate with my computer, and to communicate with other people through the comupter, especially with those who has same implanted wireless modems.
Less is more !
Spell checking advice on /.
Call Satan - check whether he has his ski gear on
The Singularity is closer than you think
Quant
check out http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/~alistair/research/ dphil/jckh/altcomm.html
Other whistle languages include articulation so that consonants interrupt the flow of the whistle. The people from Aas in the Pyrenees speak a Spanish-derived dialect which used to be adapted into a whistle language in a similar way to the Silbo Gomera whistle language used by shepherds high up in the mountains in the Canary Island of La Gomera (Classe 1957). Both languages share common traits: the Spanish linguistic framework, the method of whistling, the similar form of signals and the functional purpose of the signalling.
http://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe= UTF-8&q=%2Bwhistling+%2Blanguage&btnG=Google+Searc h&meta=
in my life God comes first.... but Linux is pretty high after that
Francis Smit
Could you write in all caps next time? I had trouble reading that.
If you're sayin' coming here was a bad idea, I'm beginning to agree with you.
;)
Or in other words, everything I need to know I learned from Star Wars.
I would think a real human language that has stood the test of time (say still around in written & spoken form after 2,000 or more years) would be better suited for archival use. An artificial language that's a hundred years old? Fad.
At school my friends were:
Flake : He had the most extreme excema youve ever seen
Big : He was 6'5'' or something
Mole : he had a big mole on his face
Four : He had glasses
Limpy : He had a comedy limp for a year because he smashed his leg in an accident - he doesnt limp any more
Chair : Wheelchair bound fat boy - his other nickname was 'dick' because he was a bit of a dick
Charlie : Fat self pitying kid with no real personality - kinda like charlie brown
These were cool names, but the number of times a gym teacher would give us shit for using them!!!
They always listened to the translation from C3PO, and when Luke was flying his X-wing to Dagobah, he had to read what R2 was saying on a little text monitor. Doesn't anybody pay attention to details.
R2 units did understand human language, although they could not reproduce it.
Did you notice how bigoted that sounds? That's how you sound, buddy.
Face it, learning any language properly is a huge investment in time. How about some appreciation for the fact that these people were at least TRYING to learn to communicate in your language?
It's extremely difficult to become fluent in a language without being immersed in it for a good length of time. If it annoys you that not everyone is able to do this, then YOU are the one with the problem.
Yeah, you might think so, but you'd be wrong. ;-)
The primary use of a good archival language would be that you could get good (i.e., both correct and readable) computer translations to other languages. This disqualifies all "natural" human languages. Simple inspection of the results of computer translators shows that they are good for a laugh, but not usable for much more than trivial translation work. This has been true for a quarter century or so, and there's no prospect of it improving in the forseeable future.
The fundamental problem is that it's easy to produce human languages via software, but attempts to write valid parsers for human language have been dismal failures. All of our languages are far too ambiguous and inconsistent for the feeble parsing ability of computer software.
If you want good translations, what you need is a source language that can be easily and unambiguously parsed by software. Esperanto itself doesn't satisfy this, but experimenting has shown that only small changes are needed to remove its problems. The result is a language that is understandable by both humans and computers.
You also need a dictionary of base morphemes that each have exactly one meaning. But that's just a matter of setting up a central archive and a procedure for adding morphemes to the list.
Actually, there's nothing magical about Esperanto for this purpose. If all you want is a standardizes archival language for translation purposes, there are many others that would do as well. But Esperanto has a few advantages. It's easily pronouncable by most humans, for example. If you don't care about that, a purely computer-readable language would do, perhaps based on XML.
A century of experience has shown that Esperanto is easy for people to learn, and there are a million or so fluent speakers around the world. This simplifies the job of developing a population of translators to the archival language. Again, there are other artificial languages that are about as easy to learn; Esperantos only advantage is the number of its speakers at present.
The main remaining problem is translation to the archival language. At present, this can only be done by people fluent in the source languages. Software can be developed to speed the task, but it still takes humans to do part of the translation.
BTW, note that English isn't that old a language, spoken or written. It has existed for only around 1000 years, so it might just be a fad. The "Old English" of the 10th century is not readable by native speakers of modern English. The Greeks can read text from 2500 years ago, though sometimes with a bit of difficulty. So if you want a language that has stood the test of time, you'd be better off going with Greek than English.
OTOH, Esperanto was primarily based on Latin. Its morphemes come from many languages, but mostly from Latin and/or its modern descendants. The grammar is radically simplified, of course, and much less ambiguous than Latin was. So you could argue that Esperanto has a pedigree going back over 2000 years. But this isn't relevant when considering it for archival purposes. What's important is how usable the language is by computers.
It's more likely that we'll just stumble around and not develop a real archival language. We'll probably end up with a jumbled mish-mash of XML dialects, and a real nightmare of a task trying to write the translators.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Good thing your brought up Latin, Latin also is logical and unambiguous enough for computer ingestion with only slight modification, and even uses the beloved world standard ISO-latin character set (haha). In fact, it is much better choice for archival language, what with 2000+ year history & preservation/use in science and religion. I think there's a VERY good chance it will be around in 1000+ more years. Recognizable english, probably not. Chinese yes. Hindi yes. Arabic yes. I really wonder at the statistics of 1-2 million fluent esperanto speakers, sinced based on poll. More likely that many people had it as a hobby for a few years.
Of course it sounds bigoted when you reverse the roles like that.
An American complaining about "dirty Mexicans taking our jobs" is not the same as a Mexican complaining about being treated unfairly in the United States.
Are you suggesting that a white person and a black person both living in the United States have equal experiences? I'm sorry but Archie Bunker wasn't in the same position as George Jefferson.
My complaint was not about hearing people who aren't wonderful signers, it was about those who come in and think they're going to fix us.
The American who is afraid of a minority group has xenophobia, the foreigner who is afraid of the majority is being cautious as a survival mechanism.
Learning a language is a huge investment... but it doesn't excuse the large number of hearing parents who never bother to learn their deaf child's language. Have you seen Mr. Holland's Opus? That situation is common among the deaf... a deaf person is considered lucky if their parents learned sign language.
No, a deaf person explaining how they feel oppressed is not bigotry, the situation does not go equally both ways.
-Don.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
Shut up asshole. To you and your deaf friends at deaf schools, you are special and deafness is representative in probably 50% of the people you interact with.
News: most people don't see or interact with deaf people. If they choose to do so, why can't they practice their sign language skills?
You try to act superior by putting up the "I am more worldly than you, a sheltered being" and "I am a victim" cards, but you have to learn to shut up about both of those.
Deafness is YOUR problem, not other peoples. You should be trying to reach the level of normal people, instead of expecting society to bring themselves down to your level. You are the wonder, not society.
I am not blaming you, but I hope you see reality so that you can make progress towards treating and respecting people without a 'holier-than-thou' attitude. You are a total stranger to me, and I just gave you 10 minutes of my time. Please don't disregard it.
Cover your eyes and click this link!
"This gubblick contains many nonsklarkish English flutzpahs, but the overall pluggandisp can be glorked from context"
From The Jargon File - where it actually shows up as "glark".
"My complaint was not about hearing people who aren't wonderful signers, it was about those who come in and think they're going to fix us"
I'm not deaf, but I understand your frustration. Those blasted do-gooders are always trying to help in ways that just aren't needed, with no understanding of the complexities involved.
For example: there was a time when we used the expression "Invalid". There was no shame in being called an invalid, because it implied injuries sustained in military service (ie "invalid for combat duties"). This little piece of history was missed by the do-good crowd, however, who insisted for a while that "disabled" was a better term. When it was pointed out that the word "disabled" had no positive connotation, they settled on "alternately abled". Now, last time I checked, being confined to a wheelchair does not confer on me the ability to fly (lets make sure...up, up, and away...nope, still here), so exactly where the "alternate" part comes in eludes me (although if I understand correctly, things are somewhat different for the deaf or blind). Did any of this mucking about with language directly add to the lot of those in need? No. Did give the do-gooders a false sense of superiority to be able to criticize others over a word, without actually having to do anything useful? Sure did. I think "Quads" hit the nail on the head.
There should be a principle: If you want to try to make someone's life better, have the courtesy to ask them what's wrong with it first.
Perhaps we need to have the uncontrollable "Do-gooder" trait declared a mental illness, like obsessive-compulsive disorder. Then they could form action committees and support groups for themselves and get the hell off everyone else's backs.
Action speaks most simply. But you can get arrested or preyed upon for that. So people and animals have developed less liable forms of communications with more florishes like crickets and brightly colored birds.
The efficient use of language opcodes is not what natural language is about, until it becomes overrun with homonymic acronyms like "NLP".
Whistled notes are easier to recognize digitally. Vowel formats are much more easily distinguished digitally than consonants.
Languages with distinctive grammars are probably worth preserving. Stack grammars like Hopi may be useful in a functional programming interpretor ?
But Lojban was probably as doomed as Whitehead and Russell's attempt to form a perfect mathematical language.