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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.
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?
I for one, tweet, tweeeet, tweet, tweettweet, tweet tweet overlords!
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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?
The Penguin Producer
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
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.
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.
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.***
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
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
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. --
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.
Funny, when I translated it I got
"Buy more ovaltine"
Etiquette is etiquette. He kills his mother but he can't wear grey trousers.
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!
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'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...}
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.
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
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.
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
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