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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?"
Luke Skywalker did in Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. In Star Wars he had to rely on C-3PO.
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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
Especially important in this case because it has to travel longer distances. It seems to be mostly used for longer distance which would give a lower signal/noise ratio.
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
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?
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
A small quibble, but according to cognitive science, I believe that it's not actually redundancy built into language that allows us to pick out someone talking over static, but rather the sophisticated pattern-recognition mechanisms in the brain that compensate for this. This is also the reason that spotting typos can be tricky without careful reading... the brain tends to autocorrect for defects, so in effect you're "seeing" the correct word, in spite of the typo (a similar mechanism allows us to see a "complete" visual field in spite of the blind spots created on the retina where the optical nerve connects) However, IANAL(inguist) so I could be off on this. Interesting idea, though.
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
"I'm all for the preservation of culture and language, but, c'mon -- the Navajos were valuable but it's not like they were a crucial part of the war effort, like radar."
Others disagree.
From Navajo Code Talkers: World War II Fact Sheet:
"Praise for their skill, speed and accuracy accrued throughout the war. At Iwo Jima, Major Howard Connor, 5th Marine Division signal officer, declared, "Were it not for the Navajos, the Marines would never have taken Iwo Jima." Connor had six Navajo code talkers working around the clock during the first two days of the battle. Those six sent and received over 800 messages, all without error." (emphasis added)
Considering how important Iwo Jima was to winning the war in the Pacific, I think it's safe to say that without the Navajo code talkers, the war would've dragged on much longer, with a questionable outcome.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
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
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.
I believe that any language that does not have native speakers is considered "dead". So latin is dead since no one grows up with latin as a first language.
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
No.
You can thank the U.S. Military for those gems, as those were simply part of the code used.
Word............Navajo......................Liter
WHEN............GLOE-EH-NA-AH-WO-HAI........WEASE
WHERE...........GLOE-IH-QUI-AH..............WEASE
WHICH...........GLOE-IH-A-HSI-TLON..........WEASE
Or do you think they went around saying 'weasel hen' every time they wanted to know what time something was going to happen?
When a thing has been said, and said well, have no scruple. Take it and copy it. --Anatole France
Useless knowledge ahoy!
:)
Actually, the song is called "The Fishin' Hole", lyrics to which can be found here or here (non-whistling MIDI here)....though I think your versions might just be the more popular in the long run.
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
Iwo Jima wasn't particularly important to the end of WWII. It was taken to serve as an emergency landing site for damaged B-29's coming back from Japan. It was used as a base for P-51 Mustangs, flying as bomber escorts.
Folks like to dramaticize the importance of the island, simply because it was hard won, the famous picture was taken there, etc. Most military historians will tell you that the US had the war in hand at that point, and Iwo Jima could've been skipped over for a less defended island (the US skipped many islands on its Pacific campaign--after naval supremecy was achieved, the Japanese troops on those islands didn't go anywhere).
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.
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
Probably the meaning is determined by the pitch contour, as is the case in many tonal languages, which use pitch contour to convey grammatical information. It sounds like this is the case, listening to the example. The idea is that the meaning comes from how the tone changes from the beginning of the word to the end. You don't need perfect pitch for this, although native speakers are probably more skilled at it - having had all that pitch discrimination experience as a child.