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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?"
If we're whistling, then it wouldn't been natural would it?
-William Shatner can be neither created nor destroyed.
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.
Why not esperanto instead? Certainly more intuitive than whistling!
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
Everybody wants streamlined things, and that includes language.
Well, most natural languages have built into them a great deal of redundancy. This is why you understand someone talking over static, even if some of the sounds are lost. Thus, streamlining language has the effect of cancelling out some of the inherent error correction.
There's probably a few common ones people could recognize, but given that you can't rely on your average person to distinguish tone and pitch reliably (ever been to a karaoke bar?), there's a limit to how much useful communication you could develop out of beeps and whistles.
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.
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 wondered why, in the technologically advanced Star Wars society that damned robot couldn't speak in a human (or whatever) language.
Because it was a movie! R2D2 couldn't speak English for the same reason the starships made a loud noise when they blew up in the vacumn of space.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
From what I can gather about Silbo it's based on relative frequency. You don't have to have perfect pitch to speak/process it, you just have to be able to generate and identify changes in pitch.
You can communicate anything with beeps and whistles - the trick is doing it efficiently. Heck, you could whistle morse code if you wanted to.
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Unlike klingon, there are actually people (not many, but they exist) who speak Esperanto as their native (read first) language. God help us if there are any native speakers of Klingon. I keep hoping the UN will adopt Esperanto as their official language, thus allowing official documents to be translated into Esperanto and making the whole transfer from one language to another so much easier (each country would need a few Esperanto translators, as opposed to one for every freaking language under the sun).
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
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.
Why not? After all, what are letters besides symbols representing a sound? (In phonetic languages anyways). Granted, you would either need to create a new written language to correspond with the oral one, or define combinations of existing letters to represent specific sounds.
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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.
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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.
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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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That isn't true. If you ever saw the episode, "Isle of the Giant Pokemon", Pikachu, Bulbasaur, Charmander and the gang are serperates from Ash and friends. The pokemon meet up with the Team Rocket Pokemon as well. The interesting thing about this episode is the Pokemon are subtitled. Yes, thats right, subtitled. So Pikachu would say, "pika-pika-pikachu!", it wuld translate it to, "Ash wouldn't leave us behind, he loves us".
I believe the language of each pokemon is basically built on tone and infliction of the name. Meowof managed to learn to speak english though.
The subtitling of the Pokemon is what makes "The Isle of the Giant Pokemon" the best pokemon episode ever.
squirtle, squirtle!
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
Sure thing. However, the Iwo Jima campaign incurred 28,000 casualties, with nearly 7,000 killed. It sure didn't save 7,000 folks in bomber crews.
I was just correcting the original post, which stated
Iwo Jima had its bit, but the war would've been won, without much more difficulty, if the US didn't invade it. You could argue the US didn't need to do any more invading once it achieved naval and air supremecy because of the eventual use of atomic weapons. (Not a good argument, mind you, because it wasn't decided to use nuclear weapons until after the Iwo Jima campaign.)
and don't forget about harpo, who also very efficiently communicated with whistling..
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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?
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