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?"

Comments

Imagine this other African language.....

[i_want_you_to_throw_]

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.

Re:Imagine this other African language.....

[DLWormwood]

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.

Off-topic, I know, but you can actually get some of the code via declassified documents...

From that page...

NAMES OF COUNTRIES
AFRICA...ZHIN-NI................BLACKIES
CHINA....CEH-YEHS-BESI..........BRAIDED HAIR
ITALY....DOH-HA-CHI-YALI-TCHI...STUTTER
JAPAN....BEH-NA-ALI-TSOSIE......SLANT EYE

Amazing how Native Americans were so politically incorrect then, no? (-;

Re:Imagine this other African language.....

[line.at.infinity]

On the other hand, Japanese communication was completely decrypted by the US, which, needless to say, helped greatly during the war.

-1 Flamebait

[anaphora]

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.

Re:-1 Flamebait

[RackinFrackin]

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.

I agree completely with your point, but I'll add that redundancy plays a large part in being able to understand garbled or partially lost messages. The pattern-matching mechanism can decipher these damaged messages because it knows roughly what to expect. If it hears the phrase "give me all your cash, I have a gub", then it will correct it to "gun". This is caused by the redundancy of language -- "gun" is a common word, "gub" is not. This is closely related to Maximum Likelyhood Decoding, which is used in error correcting codes.

Re:-1 Flamebait

[michael_cain]

but rather the sophisticated pattern-recognition mechanisms in the brain that compensate for this

Humans are extremely good at extracting (and making sense of) frequency information. Here's an interesting experiment that I've seen performed.

Start with a clip of someone talking, relatively slowly and clearly, digitally recorded with 8-bit linear samples and the MSB a sign bit (ie, the range is -128 to 127). Play that and, while there is audible static, the speech is still clear. Now replace the LSB with one, effectively converting to 7-bit samples. Play the modified clip, the static level has increased, but you can still understand the speech. Replace the next LSB with one, yielding 6-bit samples, play it again. Each time you replace another bit position with ones, the static level increases. At more significant bit positions, the total volume tends to increase as well, so you'll have to turn the volume on the playback device down, or scale things in some fashion.

The amazing thing is that, when only the sign bit remains, most people can still make out what is being said. At that point, the only information present is the frequency data (zero crossings). OTOH, humans are miserably bad at hearing phase phenomena.

Natural Language

[mopslik]

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.

Beneficial for Many

[mlmitton]

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?

Re:Beneficial for Many

[Gudlyf]

One interesting observation I had is that I don't see how you could teach this language in a book unless it was sheet music. It realistically could only be taught via audible means, and forget lip reading for the deaf.

Re:Beneficial for Many

[garcia]

My father and I can whistle very loud. When I was little I could hear him quite a distance. I had exactly 5 minutes to get home from when I heard that.

So a) I better be in range to hear it and b) I better be back within 5 minutes.

I have no problems attracting attention to those who I want to know where I am. Most of my friends know that I can make your ears ring for 5 to 10 minutes if I am close enough to you (5 to 10 ft) and I can quickly get them to notice me :)

Re:Dumbfounded by the Feebleness

[torpor]

Who is to say that the language R2D2 spoke wasn't the most common language in the known galaxy?

Why should droids have to learn a *human* language, if in fact humans are an insignificant minority in the grand scheme of the Star Wars universe ...

Frankly, I find your lack of faith disturbing.

Re:Used for future?

[torpor]

what use would learning a dead language be?

As anyone with half a bit can tell you, language is useful for two reasons:

1) because other people can speak it

and

2) because other people can not speak it

Re:Yeah, little Ewoks amazed me too

[theLastPossibleName]

I swear one of the Ewoks spoke a dialect of the Philippines. The scene where they see 3CPO for the first time. I can't write in the dialect, but they say "Mah ganda" which means how beautiful.

Re:Bad Reference

[clifyt]

"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?)"

It could just be relative pitch.

For instance, the gregorians had, I believe, a system of writting music that simply said Up Down Same. Did it have have to be the same notes? No, just perceptible up / down from the last.

There is a music dictionary out there that was used in the 50s that did the same thing...you know the theme, and ya just look up up / down / repeat and it will tell ya the song...its a shame its not updated these days, but still works for most classical pieces (if ya know one of the themes).

I read this article this morning but I didn't pay enough attention to it to remember....

Re:Dumbfounded by the Feebleness

[Anonymous Coward]

I always assumed that it was a cultural thing. Remember, in the first movie, when Obi Wan Kenobi and Luke walked into the Mos Eisley Cantina: when the droids started to follow them in, the barkeep said "Hey! We don't serve their kind here!" It looked like there was a history with droids that left them unpopular. I figured that utility droids were left unable to talk to remind them of their place, or something like that.

Good summary

[bartash]

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?"

Re:Used for future?

[Descartes]

Then go to the Vatican and compare what you hear there with two-thousand-year-old texts.

Nope, sorry. The Latin they speak in the church is actually quite different from what was spoken by the Romans. In some ways proving that Latin isn't dead by your definition. Eccleciastical Latin (what the church uses) has fairly different pronunciation and a lot of new vocabulary, sortof like modern english vs. shakespeare.

Julius Ceasar's "Veni, vidi, vici" didn't sound like "veenee, veedee, veechee" but more like "waynee, weedee, weaky"

For a good demonstration of this, get a classics major and a music major to read the text of the same latin hymn. Of course that could start a fistfight.

In some ways the whistling language is probably quite far from dead, by your definition, because as it falls from general use it'll get more condensed.

Re:Dumbfounded by the Feebleness

[yerricde]

So he had to resort to the good ol PC speaker.

Applications driving the IBM PC speaker can do sigma-delta modulation, the same principle behind Sony SACD, to reproduce arbitrary waveforms. The "Inertia Player" modplayer for PC did this.

I'm going with an AC's hypothesis that utility droids' lack of formant-synthesized speech must be a cultural thing.

Re:navajo language

[double_plus_ungod]

a'oo. dinebizaad eii nizhoniee'. trans: yes, the navajo language is beautiful.

Man! this stuff really carries!

[lobsterGun]

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.

Re:Signing

[CODiNE]

You have no idea how many companies are trying to get the deaf video-relay market. I have a Sorenson VP-100 here, works pretty good. You punch in the phone number you want and it connects to their interpretors at the nearest center... that person uses a head-set phone and I can talk to hearing people over the "phone". Of course deaf connect directly to each other...

Videophones are common among the deaf, the major players I know on the West Coast are Sorenson, Sprint, IP-Relay, and HandsOn. Sorenson gives them away for free, others require you buy your own webcam. You hearing folks should thank us, we're setting up the the base market of videophones for ya. Start with the deaf, spread to the Uni's and Community Colleges, hearing people who learn ASL buy webcams so they can talk to deaf people in sign langauge... they tell their friends to buy one, or show them how to use their webcams... finally there's people who have videphones to call! Now people have incentive to buy them. :)

-Don.

Re:ASL

[CODiNE]

Deaf people from different countries actually can communicate with each other just fine, give them a few hours and they can talk about nearly anything. The languages are visual so even when they are very different it doesn't take too long to figure out each other's signs for basic things and work from there.

A deaf person could say, watch someone tell a story in a foreign sign language and by the end of it be able to tell you the basic story and will know some of their signs.

In a spoken language it's much harder, but if you're a linguist it's quite possible. ;-)

As for the names, the fingerspelled stuff is their English name, not the name they personally identify with, it's the one they use to sign checks or pay bills, I've met several deaf people that didn't know how to spell their own names in English, and they grew up here. So if I meet a deaf person from another country my English name isn't even mentioned, it's pointless if they don't use the same Roman characters we do... still out of habit most deaf in America first spell their english names then show the sign that belongs to them. Foreign names are very cool by the way... they usually look totally different from the sort of names we use here.

-Don.