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Monkeys With Syntax
jamie writes "The Campbell's monkey has a vocabulary with at least six types of basic call, but new research published in the PNAS claims that they combine them and string them together to communicate new meanings. (Login may be required on the NY Times site.) For example, the word for 'leopard' gets an '-oo' suffix to mean 'unseen predator.' But when that word is repeated after 'come over here,' the combination means 'Timber!' — a warning of falling trees. Scientists have known for some time that vervet monkeys have different warning calls for different predators — eagle, leopard, and snake — but unlike the Campbell's monkeys, vervets don't combine those calls to create new meanings, a key component of syntax. The researchers plan to play back recordings to the monkeys to test their theories for syntax errors."
FP!
THL phish sticks
But when they throw "exceptions", look out!
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
And the GNU toolchain folks expect to have a working compiler front end by some time early next year.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Syntax. Semantics. Not same. Doh!
Ook!
OOK!
learn from yesterday, plan for tomorrow, party tonight
or one out of three ain't bad
There are so many people out there who have been pushing for "animals can speak!" and "we taught monkeys to use sign language!" And it's like, as a linguist, one has to pull out all sorts of jargon and details about why this isn't actual language.
Those scientists who have been studying animal language as a non-pseudoscience have been waiting for anyone to show SYNTAX in animal language. You have have 1 trillion different words in a language, and it has a finite range of expressions... meanwhile you can have 10 different words, that with the right syntax can generate an infinite range of expressions.
That's why I think this is so cool... a chance to really look at a real proto-syntax, because all human languages have a very strongly developed syntax.
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
They'd make great Slashdot editors! hahahahahahaha!
CDE open sourced! https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/
They played the Ballmer Monkey Dance back to them, and they all started flinging chairs, and then went out and bought Macs.
Table-ized A.I.
The monkey version of "Timber!" is “Boom boom krak-oo krak-oo krak-oo". So, in monkey it's 8 sylables, and in English it's 2. No wonder humans became the dominant species, we had more time to get out of the way after the falling tree warning.
Haha, they said PNAS.
what seems the most interesting to me is that when you think about it, should the monkeys go on as they do, communication will become more complex. given a few thousand years and a very luckily unscathed civilization and habitat (ha...), does anyone else not find the idea of them eventually forming some semblance of civilization possible, and intriguing? personally i say seal the suckers off and go god complex on their asses, time to play some real life spore
The monkeys' lawyers just served papers on the researchers for copyright violations and the making of unauthorized reproductions of the primates' intellectual property. Spokesape Lance Link said "The researchers have submitted my clients' calls to several funding agencies. This is clearly intent to distribute my clients' intellectual properties, and we will therefore be seeking compensatory and punitive damages of one billion bananas for each call infringed upon."
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Violate Strunk and White just once and they'll fling shit at you.
Have gnu, will travel.
All you have to do to get around the pay wall is have a referrer from google. Like say from here.
The researchers plan to play back recordings to the monkeys to test their theories for syntax errors.
Create a very long string of recordings of unrelated calls and play them back to check for buffer overflow errors...
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
Straight from PNAS instead of the NYT summary:
Chimpanzees modify recruitment screams as a function of audience composition
The full text should be available to anyone in the US for free, AFAIK (and possibly to those outside the US as well). One thing you will notice on that page is that the NYT is around 2 months late summarizing that article, it was published online in PNAS back in October.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I can't help but feel that you'd have to continuously use new groups of monkeys from the same community, otherwise you'd risk teaching them what you THINK certain calls mean, and they'd begin responding in that fashion...
http://www.tenjou.net/
"Dr. Zuberbühler said he planned to play back recordings of given calls to the Campbell's monkeys and to test from their reactions whether he had correctly decoded their messaging system."
They haven't done that, and yet got published in PNAS? While I don't work in animal communication, I'd have thought that would be required for any claim of having decoded messages.
Or possibly they didn't get published in PNAS - I can't find anything resembling this on the PNAS web site (I have paid-for access.)
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
... read Slashdot and Fark to have know that monkeys have language. Not News.
I'm sure there'll be a lot of enlightening commentary about this pretty soon, but my first reaction to it is that the example cited by TFA is not clearly syntactic, in the strictest linguistic sense. Look, for example, at this quote:
So, the meaning we are told for "krak-oo" is not a clear function of the meanings of "krak" and "-oo." The second paragraph makes an even more problematic claim: "boom" and "krak-oo," combined together, means something completely different than the parts.
What's the problem with this? That one of the paradigmatic properties of syntactic constructions in human language is compositionality, the principle that the meaning of an expression made of parts A and B is a function of the meanings of A and B themselves, and of the manner in which they are combined in the expression. So the meaning of Dog bites man is a function of the meanings of the words, and the way in which they are combined (so that it doesn't mean the same thing as Man bites dog).
This doesn't mean that there isn't no non-compositionality in human language, or even in syntax, but rather that compositionality is typical of syntax, and noncompositionality is typical of morphology. There's in fact tons of noncompositionality in human language, but it's hard to argue that monkeys have a semblance of human language unless you can clearly argue that the meanings of the subparts of the complex calls combine compositionally.
Are you adequate?
"The Campbell's monkey has a vocabulary with at least six types of basic call"
Wow, that's three more than a Congressman.
Quoting TFA again:
Another way of expressing the problem I see with these examples: the researchers are looking at the individual calls "boom," "krak" and "-oo" as analogues of human language words or morphemes. However, if you look at them as analogues of syllables instead, then the argument looks much more flimsier. The English word disco shares a syllable with both disfluency and psycho, but that is not evidence of syntax or morphology; the meaning of disco is not a function of the meanings of dis and co.
Are you adequate?
That's how it began!
Infuriate left and right
I second that wholeheartedly. This was precisely my reaction. My, you must be a linguist.
Are you adequate?
They want to play back intentionally malformed phrases? I guess they'll need to prepare to the Campbell monkeys' equivalent of "What did you just call my mother?" ;)
And when you gaze long enough into the code, the code will also gaze into you.
In humans language is something cultural, even syntax is something you learn from others, is not builtin. If is the same on monkeys maybe the ones from a region have a different syntax or semantics than others from far away.
Chhk Ahk Kaa Kaa Kaa Ha!
as long as its not monkeys with semtex
Did they spank the monkeys?
Fuck you.
I guess they'll know they had a "syntax error" if the monkey fails to understand the warning and gets killed by the falling tree.
Your homepage is a Google Sites page. How's that working out for you, Professor Bobo?
Interesting... Except for the syntax thing, you'd have Slashdot editors.
That is all.
Ook!
And be careful who you call monkey here.
I have an alternative hypothesis to the one presented in the summary. (Haven't RTFA, fwiw).
I propose that the word for "leopard" really is the word for "tree". Why?
Well, suppose the suffix "-oo" means "get up into", and the "come[s] over here" part refers to the trees, not the monkeys.
Observe that getting up in the trees is a good way to avoid leopards, and that when you yell "Timber!", it's because trees are coming your way. That way, what the monkeys say should still produce the same behaviour as with the summary's language, but the words seem to have more stable, consistent meanings.
If this were not the case, one might expect the monkeys to say "leopard + comes-over-here" and "tree + comes-over-here", or something similarly systematic.
Also, observe how (human) children apply simple and logical (but sometimes wrong) rules to construct sentence patterns; something like the thought "hey, the expression "you're going down" must mean that relative to you, I'm going up. Yeah! "I'm going up, you [word]!"". Key point being: simple rules, a consistent inverse relationship between up and down. Wouldn't it make sense that monkeys have a similarly simple and consistent language?
Note also that the monkeys signal different behaviours when they observe or suspect eagles and snakes. The word for "eagle" might really mean "duck and cover", and the word for "snake" might really mean "stand really still, on your toes, and look down", since that is how they handle these different kinds of predators.
It might also be more effective to say "get up in the trees" and "get up in the trees" versus "there's a leopard coming" and "there's a [different non-climber] coming"; that way, you can get away with a smaller vocabulary, a more restricted vocal apparatus (since you don't need many different sounds), etc. Just cheaper overall.
My cents tw-oo ;-)
But first, be sure to mount a scratch monkey! :)
http://edp.org/monkey.htm
In an astonishing scientifically gripping squize of events, the US Environmental Protection Agency's Crack scientists discovered the find of the millnium ... Males have Pinus!
EPA Administrator, Ms Johnson said, "What dis I hear ... I wonts one ... Youze gotz a gizvs itsz to me ... I da Boz herz. Daz whuz spoz da dooz caiz I amz da ruz."
I think it's past my bed time.
But now I have the sudden urge to work on a new DARPA grant proposal....
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
Underestimated them again... “Boom boom krak-oo krak-oo krak-oo" actually means
"I didn't really want to do this, you know. I want to be a lumberjack"
Seriously, how often does a monkey have to dodge falling trees?
If I had a DeLorean... I would probably only drive it from time to time.
I think the evidence is that while early civilised human beings were smaller and weaker than hunter-gatherers, this is no longer true (at least in the West).
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Maybe this carries the implication that our ancestors most likely invented agglutinative languages before isolating ones?
For all the kids here that studied Philosophy of language and AI, you should know what the Chinese Room thought experiment is all about and why syntax does not equal semantics.
I would at least wait for the Monkeys' Greatest Hits to be released, and how their fans receive it before handing a banana to any of the monkeys in lab coats for this discovery.
Remember, as humans we are least bias towards syntax, and worse adding meaning to it when all other things being equal it is nearly impossible to prove it exist. I guess you could say, our own search for meaning tends to get of our way when it comes to our search for meaning involving language and other species.
Living in Chile
The politically correct name is "Perl Monks".
I wrote my first program at the age of six, and I still can't work out how this website works.
In a drug-induced stupor, my spirit guide came to me and dubbed me "Monkeys With Syntax". Miss him, I will.
So where can I send my resume for the next expedition...
Really, we're missing something important here. Animals communicate fine with other species, yet we have no idea where to start to translate their thoughts as expressed in their body language, scents and cries. We've moved too far from that baseline. Self critique has always been a weakness of the scientific method, it's high time for some holistic science.
So, let's see:
eeeee = leopard
eeeee-oo = unseen predator
kuuu eeeee = timber! (or is that "kuuu eeeee-oo"?)
I don't see the syntax, just reuse of some phonetic inventory. For syntax, you'd need more elements, and they'd need to be combined in more varied combinations.
150 comments and no one has used the phrase "code monkey."
/. is all growns up.
[sniffle] My little
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."
somewhere there's a web site written in monkeyish called boom-krak-oo.org where monkeys discuss the meanings of all the peculiar noises humans make.
Except monkeys have syntax?
One of the key assumption of the Chinese Room thought experiment is that programs do not have semantics. I would argue this is wrong.
Sure, programs do have semantics. How do you suppose the program to be interpreted to behave on a computer? A program is a reduction from one semantics to another, higher level to lower level. If we succeed in AI, that means we now have a program that reduces human semantics down to machine semantics, the instruction set for von Neumann architecture. Or if you will, operational semantics of lambda calculus.
I once had a signature.
You're thinking of "syntax" and "morphology" as some sort of essentialist categories, with necessary and sufficient conditions for something to count as one of them. I, on the other hand, am certainly thinking at least of "morphology" as the historical end-result of (human) language change, given certain facts about our psychology; and I am skeptical that any essentialist definition of phonology would satisfy me, because it would entail that a clear line between morphology and syntax, and I regard it as a virtue of the "historical end-result" approach that it implies there is no such line.
What I would say is that whatever theory of emergence of language you're thinking of, it's better to look at the phenomena in question in their own terms, instead of trying to analogize them too strongly to something else they're not. The monkey calls have their own combinatorics, which doesn't show clear evidence of compositionality of meaning (indicated by the fact that you have to resort to lots of polysemy to make the case for compositionality). The comparisons can be interesting, but there's little point IMO in arguing that those combinatorics are "really" syntax or morphology, when the differences can be pointed out so straightforwardly.
Are you adequate?
... about falling objects when they're collecting nuts and fruit from trees, thus ensuring each other's safety.
Before long, we will discover the monkey words for "method statement" and "risk assessment", but by then it will be too late.
Maybe they are simply racist monkeys and are calling the researchers "crackers".
Table-ized A.I.
I hope we get to see the first real talking money within this generation,
where we can teach them to utter real words to replace their grunts and screeches.
Got any other free web hosting companies I can switch to then? Geocities went out of business. I had to move my web site somewhere but Google was the only free option for me.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
Snoo-PNAS usual I see
We already know how to commune with monkeys... Just take a glance at the White House...
This needs more cowbell!!!