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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.
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.
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?
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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?
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Would this be considered Pigeon Pidgin?
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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
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.
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."
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.
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?
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
Imagine unintentionally cussing out your boss, or worse spouse, because you were tone deaf.....
***Blackholes are where the gods divided by zero.***
I still think the White Space language is more dynamic...
Business \Busi"ness\, n.;
A scam in which all people involved perceive as beneficial...
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.
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
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.
Enquiring minds want to know...
Wah!
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.
[javac] 100 errors
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
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
I know for a fact that it makes a shitty cookbook. I have a food processor jammed with tribbles. Who knew you had to shave them first? Worse than peeling potatoes. At least potatoes don't make noise when they scream.
This is America, damnit. Speak Spanish!
"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....
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
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.
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.
Maybe I'm addicted, but if played any Next Gen Starfleet sound, I could identify it and tell you what it meant. I've been actually thinking of using sonic indicators for things like new email, as well as various sysadmin tasks like specific syslog entries.
I'm getting there with DS9...have season 3 waiting. I'm on the second-to-last disc of season 2.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
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?
a'oo. dinebizaad eii nizhoniee'. trans: yes, the navajo language is beautiful.
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http://www.hellection.com
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.
----
http://www.hellection.com
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
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
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.
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.
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
"Put that in your pod and launch it. :P"
They also call it "light speed" when they travel several solar systems over in the time it takes to hit a convenience store. Yeah, they're so good at labelling thins properly.
"Derp de derp."
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.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
and don't forget about harpo, who also very efficiently communicated with whistling..
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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 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..."
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.