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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?"
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.
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.
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."
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
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
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.
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.
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.
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