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Spoken Language Could Tap Into "Universal Code"

Posted by samzenpus on from the it-means-what-it-means dept.

sciencehabit writes: While we know a lot about language but we know relatively little about how speech developed. Most linguists agree that a combination of movement and sound like grunts and pointing probably got us started, but how we decided which sounds to use for different words remains a mystery. Now, an experimental game has shown that speakers of English might use qualities like the pitch and volume of sounds to describe concepts like size and distance when they invent new words. If true, some of our modern words may have originated from so-called iconic, rather than arbitrary, expression—a finding that would overturn a key theory of language evolution.

83 comments

  1. I shall call this code... by bazmail · · Score: 0

    ...pseudo-code. And this article pseudo-journalism.

    Now everyone, write an article that contains the word "code" in the title. It will make morons feel smart when they read it.

    1. Re:I shall call this code... by Darinbob · · Score: 1

      And this comment is pseudo-criticism.

  2. Nothing to see here... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I guess "Speakers of Exact Same Language Have Similar Views on Words" isn't quite as exciting as the idea of a "universal code". Snow Crash's ideas on universal language had more merit than this paper.

    1. Re:Nothing to see here... by thinkwaitfast · · Score: 1

      Or Daniel Quinn before that.

    2. Re:Nothing to see here... by Zontar+The+Mindless · · Score: 2

      I guess you did not read the entire article:

      Of course, the study used only native English speakers, and Kita says it’s crucial to test speakers of other languages to see if the findings hold. Perlman is already taking that advice to heart. Recently, he ran a similar study among deaf children at a boarding school in rural China. He found that the deaf children and their hearing counterparts, all native Mandarin speakers, consistently used longer and louder sounds to make up words for big objects and shorter and softer to make up words for small objects. There was one difference from the English-language speakers: They used higher pitches for bigger objects and lower pitches for smaller objects. Perlman suspects the tendency may have something to do with Chinese folk performances, which use high pitch to express strength and power.

      So, no, it's not necessarily something that deserves to be trumpeted as a "Universal Code", but it is nonetheless an interesting result which probably does merit further investigation.

      --
      Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
    3. Re:Nothing to see here... by nobodie · · Score: 1

      A "real" linguist here, one who specializes on the complex and semantic sound aspects of English. (in other words, I focus on how sounds are often semantically important in English, as they are in Chinese, but differently semantic)

      The mistakes here are all based on not understanding that we have a built-in sound system that uses pitch, pitch change, length of vowel hold and variation in length of vowel change as well as loudness to affect meaning. The simplest example, for native speakers is: "Yeah, right." If I give the "right" part a very low pitch, set both lengths the same and add a higher pitch with a slight rise on the "yeah" part you get a phrase which says the exact opposite of the apparent semantic meaning of "yes, I agree." (as in "no, you are an idiot"). If you reverse the sonic structures (low "yeah" and higher and rising "right") you get the strong semantic meaning.

      So, everything they are pointing to has existing semantic meaning in English, which kind of ruins their ideas unless they can show that these structures have the same meaning in all languages(which they don't).

      the end of the article is a gentle rebuttal:" “From the data they have, there’s a big jump to the conclusions that they are making. But you have to start somewhere. I’m quite sympathetic with the conclusions.” Sympathetic? How very kind of you.

      --
      Subversion of spatial scale luxury decoration ideas.
    4. Re:Nothing to see here... by nobodie · · Score: 1

      They needed to do some meta-analysis of existing work first. There is quite a bit, even some existing meta work done on sound systems. Really, I speak Chinese and English and am aware of the similarities and difference. It is interesting about the use of high-pitch in the part of the countryside they were working in (but I would bet that the people in Yunnan might have some different sound options as would people in Xizang, GuangDong or the Manchu or any of the radically different language areas around China.

      My students in Suzhou, China considered the highest pitches to be signs of opera, since the sung performances often used very high pitch. As well, I often saw comedians who would use a very high pitch to comic effect. All of these are quite different from what they were talking about since they were not semantic, rather meta-linguistic in themselves, "registering" comedy, or high drama or whatever was normal for that milieu.

      I don't think that their direction of study is valid simply because they haven't done the meta-work to actually be prepared for this. If they doubled back and actually did that work then it might be of some use.

      --
      Subversion of spatial scale luxury decoration ideas.
  3. Languge itself derives... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    ... from the ability and need to communicate fundamentals about where food is, where threats are and where mates are. AKA it's very positional/structural. I'm sure all language traces back to even the simplest organisms, things that we wouldn't call 'language' as we know it but are in fact communication (aka remembering and knowing where food is, mating opportunities are, etc). It makes sense because uniting and forming groups against others is a necessary strategy if one is to survive on the planet and that requires communication at some level, even if some of us arrogant humans who are being dropped off and in a sense 'born yesterday' in evolutionary history wouldn't see it like that.

  4. TSA-Speak! by PolygamousRanchKid+ · · Score: 4, Funny

    a combination of movement and sound like grunts and pointing

    That exactly describes how the TSA agent communicated with me, as he instructed me to walk into the ball fryer scanner in the Philadelphia airport a while back.

    --
    Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
    1. Re:TSA-Speak! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      And it got the job done.

    2. Re:TSA-Speak! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Said the slave to his master

    3. Re:TSA-Speak! by blue+trane · · Score: 1

      Let's make a programming language based on that! You grunt and point a lot, and the computer figures out how to do it!

  5. Doubt there's much universal here... by NicBenjamin · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The reason is if there was some sort of universal, or natural grammar/vocabulary/etc. inherent to the human animal you would expect languages to tend towards this universal. They don't. There's some small things (many words for mother start with 'm'), but after years of research Chomsky's got a tiny and ever-shrinking list of large universal things. What seems to be going on is that a big part of what we use language for is identifying group membership (ie: ebonics, in the UK you can frequently identify both someone's home county and their class from their accent, etc.), which means that almost anything goes.

    This particular study is somewhat interesting, they put a bunch of college students in a room and had them make up new words for for concepts like big vs. small, and their partners were able to guess whether it was big or small at greater then 50%. It does not say how much greater. They were also able to find some commonalities in the new words vs. their opposites. Then they repeated with Mandarin-speakers in China, and got a slightly different set of commonalities.

    So I suspect that non-verbal cues had a part to play, and they'll have a devil of a time proving that their vague commonalities between big vs. small were not simply a reflection of English usage.

    1. Re:Doubt there's much universal here... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Just a point of order: ebonics refers to black language, or is abused to mean the study of black culture (ebony + ics). It doesn't relate to group membership of just any group, particularly not pasty white British people :)

      Also, your theory that group membership determination is anything but an accidental feature of language is fairly weak, I'm not sure Chomsky has ever claimed anything like that? The reason it does so can easily be pinned on co-evolution in separated communities before the invention of rapid transit, same as the evolution of any things that are isolated from each other (e.g. Darwin's study).

      BTW the Indo-European thing is still a fairly huge mystery. Many languages do indeed share a common root, and it's not "some small things". But it's not, as you say, universal, and this universality hypothesis is also pretty weak.

    2. Re:Doubt there's much universal here... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      There was a linguistic "science" fad for a while, claiming that there was a "Universal Grammar" inherent in human neurology and that language is genetically transmitted. One of the leaders of the claim was Noam Chomsky, who is sometimes called the "father of modern linguistics". It was a critical part of his earlier pseudo-scientific work: it's been thoroughly debunked since, but when I was much younger was still being taught by the sort of people who thought the "Platonic ideal" was how languages worked, that words had a "real meaning" that languages strove towards, and that understanding the "Universal Grammar" could allow understanding of the "true meaning" of language, one inherent in human genetics.

      Chomsky went on later to get involved in far left wing politics, where his core ideas are equally sensible sounding and popular among college students unexposed to reality, to actual politics as his linguistic models bear to neuophysiology or actual language. Sadly, I worked with a stack of students who tried to bring his silly ideas about language to their understanding of computer science, and who were as badly confused about the relationship between meaning and circuitry as they were about the relationship between exciting coffee shop analysis with privileged college kids, and real politics.

    3. Re:Doubt there's much universal here... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I think the "ebonics" confusion here is just a punctuation problem. Change the commas in that parenthetical to semicolons and the meaning becomes clearer.

    4. Re:Doubt there's much universal here... by Half-pint+HAL · · Score: 2
      At the risk of strawmanning, there's a heck of a lot of variety in the production of bread worldwide, and yet most bread is made using certain basic ingredients: wheat, water and yeast. There are some that use other grains, and there are some that use other raising agents, so wheat and yeast aren't universals. But if we abstract away, we have "starchy grain" as a universal, and "raising agent". Chimsky failed to find universals because he was operating too near the surface -- but that's not his fault, as the area of research was only starting to open up, and people of his time didn't understand the brain well enough. Chomsky was looking for a single, unitary "language acquisition device", while it now looks as though language is a complex interaction of multiple parts of the brain.

      The point about the Mandarin speakers is valid, though. We in the west are culturally primed to associate "up" with rising tones -- it's right there in the name "rising tones"... not to mention "high notes", so declaring a "universal" out of what could just be a shared cultural artefact is highly premature.

      I think it's an intriguing study, and I use the word "intriguing" to mean it makes you thi, but provides absolutely no answers. The article mentions kiko-booba, but I've never seen anyone go into detail on that one. I would be interested to hear whether it has the same effect on illiterate peoples.

      --
      Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
    5. Re:Doubt there's much universal here... by AthanasiusKircher · · Score: 5, Informative

      The reason is if there was some sort of universal, or natural grammar/vocabulary/etc. inherent to the human animal you would expect languages to tend towards this universal. They don't.

      Yeah, the thing is -- the actual study doesn't make any claims about anything being "universal." The only person who used the word "universal" was in the news story linked in TFS, and that person quoted in the news story was "not involved in the study."

      In sum, the authors of this study don't make ANY claims that this is uncovering some sort of "universal code."

      (Which, I might note, you'd be able to discover easily if Slashdot actually linked to the bloody study directly, as I did above, rather than a crappy news summary.)

      Instead, the authors' conclusion is much more subtle and intended to take a "middle ground" approach beyond the two extreme positions in language formation. One extremist position (a kind of Platonic Chomskian ideal) is that meaning is universal and ultimately derived from sort of inherent connection between word and object. The other extremist position (classically associated with Saussure) is that the connection between word and object is completely arbitrary, i.e., that we can choose any name for any concept and it would all work just as well. It's hard to believe, but there are actually plenty of linguists who subscribe to something close to this latter view.

      Anyhow, if you truly believe connections between words and meanings are arbitrary (in technical language, the "sign is arbitrary," that is, the connection between signifier and signified is completely determined by linguistic convention), then you run into historical problems concerning the origin of language. You make up weird myths where people went around grunting and pointing and only able to use body language for a while. But then some hominid would vocalize an arbitrary sound and point, resulting in the "arbitrary" connection between sound and meaning.

      While this undoubtedly happens, I think anyone with any common sense realizes that actual language conveys a lot of subtle meaning by the SOUND of words, some of which may actually echo the sound of an actual thing, and some of which may be much more subtle, with certain phonemes (e.g., "sn" in English often equals something stealthy or something having to do with the nose), word length, etc. conveying a very general sense of meaning.

      Anyhow, that's where this study comes in. The authors (who actually did more than the "charades" study which was clearly uncontrolled; read the link above) try to make a claim that meaning can be conveyed by fairly non-specific verbal cues. That means that the "sign is NOT arbitrary" requiring bootstrapping by having the hominid point at things and grunt first, but rather than language and gestural meaning can develop concurrently, with the expressiveness of possible verbal utterances (shaping the tone of a word, length of a word, etc.) able to carry associations.

      In basic terms, what they're saying is quite simple: basic sounds can convey meaning, and thus it's possible to create novel meanings in new words due to associations of those sounds. This may seem to be a really obvious thing, but to people in linguistics who are wed to the "arbitrary sign" theory, it's important research. The study itself summarizes what I've said at the end:

      Given the traditional linguistic principle of the arbitrariness of the sign, many scholars have maintained that, in these systems, the vocal channel primarily functions to carry the arbitrary linguistic components of a message, while the visible gestural channel conveys the iconic, non-linguistic components. Stemming from this idea, some have proposed that spoken languages must have originated as iconically grounded systems of manual and other visible bodily gestures, and at some point in human history, arbitrary vocalizations w

    6. Re:Doubt there's much universal here... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Hell- the'll have a hard time proving it wasn't all related to the way people moved their eyebrows as they said 'big' or 'small'.

    7. Re:Doubt there's much universal here... by meta-monkey · · Score: 1

      One extremist position (a kind of Platonic Chomskian ideal) is that meaning is universal and ultimately derived from sort of inherent connection between word and object. The other extremist position (classically associated with Saussure) is that the connection between word and object is completely arbitrary, i.e., that we can choose any name for any concept and it would all work just as well.

      You also have people who claim that the object does not exist without the concept. That a chair is only a chair when your brain perceives it as such. Otherwise it's just a collection of atoms.

      --
      We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
    8. Re:Doubt there's much universal here... by thinkwaitfast · · Score: 1

      Note that yeast occurs naturally in the environment and doesn't need to be explicitly added. Mix flour with water and let it sit uncovered for two days, bake it and you have bread. If you save part of the uncooked bread and add it to a new water/flour mixture, you only have to wait a few minutes and not days. The uncooked bread is called mother. Yeast was not discovered (at least observed) until about 1700 and the invention of the microscope. Mid 1800's, Pasteur finally recognized was yeast was as a living organism.

    9. Re:Doubt there's much universal here... by amalcolm · · Score: 1

      "pasty white British people" - I'm just back from my holiday, you insensitive clod!

      --
      Time for bed, said Zebedee - boing
    10. Re:Doubt there's much universal here... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      They say that 50% of twin pairs develop their "secret twin language" or cryptophasia/ideoglossia. The less they interact with adults, the more likely they are to develop their own language, which appears to rest on which of the twins is developing, phonetically, slower than the other. I think that many linguists do themselves a disservice when they handwave these extremely common and important case studies when looking at overall human language development.

      We know that some children, raised in an environment where speaking was forbidden, then removed from that environment, never speak.

      My 5-month-old daughter has been babbling for 2 months now, but her motor cortex is unlikely developed enough to form words, despite sounding like she's trying to.

      All these point to tribes being able to develop a full, spoken language within a single generation (if not, just a few years). Of course pointing and thumping is useful, as an educational tool, but the more used/acquired a language is, the fewer signs and pointing appear (save for Italian, for whatever reason, they never understood me if I had my hands in my pockets). This seems to be more out of laziness/convenience, which leads to dialects.

      As for the Kiki-Bouba effect? I believe it doesn't have as strong a bearing on spoken language as they think. If you travel through Germany, the different way that people say "Good Morning" varies so much from town to town that they use complete different saliency.
      In English, these sound like:
      High German: Gut'n Morg'n
      Koelsch: Yutuh Morscha
      Hessisch: Gooten More-gay

      These are the same words, in the same language, that sound completely different when coming out due to the dialect alone. The hard 'GA' of Hessisch resembling the Kiki while the soft 'ga' of Koelsch resembles the Bouba.

    11. Re:Doubt there's much universal here... by Half-pint+HAL · · Score: 1

      I don't think there's a lot of physical metaphor involved in the form of the word for morning, though.

      --
      Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
    12. Re:Doubt there's much universal here... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Not being a linguist, I would absolutely assume that words and meanings were arbitrary. You keep referring to that as if it's extremely obviously wrong to anybody with common sense. I don't think it is common sense.

      One proviso though -- just because the choice is arbitrary doesn't mean any word would work just as well. You could call "fire" a "snarflehopplehoggen", but if you use the word every day you'll probably abbreviate it. Thus, the most commonly-used words can be expected to be shorter. Likewise, you could have "robotsauce" be the past tense of "sneak", but I think once you have words that are seemingly-related, you've now established a pattern that other words can congeal around.

      It's not that fire is inherently a short word, but the non-arbitrariness isn't so much innate as it is a product of fire's importance to man during the course of linguistic development. It's not that "sn" is inherently stealthy, it's that we had one or two arbitrary stealth words that had "sn" and we made new ones based on that.

      So the position I suggest is I guess not the absolute most version of "choose any name for any concept" -- but I assert that it doesn't take even one step toward the position of any universal meaning or inherent connection between word and object*. I posit that these connections are an emergent behaviour.

      By the way, what other "stealth" words include "sn" but are not obviously derivative of sneak?

      * Let me take one step toward that position now though -- I can accept that a baby's crying is basically a universal code that's hard wired into us all, and maybe some other primitive associations like nails on a chalkboard. Although I've read that babies actually cry with an accent, which is amusing, but we fundamentally recognize "crying" and we mostly don't fundamentally recognize the accent in crying.

    13. Re:Doubt there's much universal here... by sjames · · Score: 2

      So you're a red and flaky British person?

    14. Re:Doubt there's much universal here... by AthanasiusKircher · · Score: 1

      Not being a linguist, I would absolutely assume that words and meanings were arbitrary. You keep referring to that as if it's extremely obviously wrong to anybody with common sense. I don't think it is common sense.

      Onomatopoeia exists. There are words that bear a resemblance to sounds. Basically, my position (and, I think, the authors') is that such very basic connections can form a foundation for meaning in many words. Yes -- that connection may be lost over long spans of time, but it can be "bootstrapped" that way.

      To take the example I made of "sn" -- there's something about that particular combination of sounds which could work well for connecting certain concepts. For example, if I wanted to describe a "snake," the long hiss followed by a sudden cutoff to "n" without an intervening vowel could suggest both the sound of the snake and the sense of suddenness. This quickness of a hissing with a sudden cutoff works well with other "sn" words too (snap, snip, snag, snare, snick, snuff, etc.).

      Am I claiming that all of these words are derived from such an onomatopoeic connection? No. Obviously they all have their own etymologies. Am I claiming that these words inherit some sort of "universal" meaning from the "sn"? ABSOLUTELY NOT. What I'm saying is that there might be some aspect of the phonology in the sound of those words which might connect back to some attempt at onomatopoeia or a kind of "sound metaphor" connection (which is not directly imitative of a sound, but rather imitates some sort of sound which can make a metaphorical connection to a related concept).

      (This is what the study refers to as "iconicity." )

      Or, to make my point another way -- I don't think there's any "inherent" or "universal" connection between the word "snake" and the animal. Obviously. But perhaps some minor aspect of the sound of the word might carry information that aligns better with other characteristics of the snake, compared to other words. For example, I don't think "melody" would be a good word to describe a dangerous snake... in almost any language. The phonemes in "melody" are soft and flowing, so perhaps a culture that worships snakes and values their beauty could use the word "melody" to describe them, but most Indo-European languages would likely not.

      Take Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky, an example of "nonsense poetry." It begins:

      'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
      Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
      All mimsy were the borogoves,
      And the mome raths outgrabe.

      Most of those words aren't English, but they clearly convey some associations. A "slithy" tove sounds very different from if it were a "mimsy" tove, no?

      That is to say that there is something in the phonetic structure of "slithy" that would have us guess an association different from other made-up words. It's probably associations with similar-sounding words, but that's my whole point (and the authors') -- if you're making up a new word, you choose a "sound" that is appropriate given associations of that sound. And given the appropriate level of context clues and associations, the potential meanings of that word are limited a bit.

      So the position I suggest is I guess not the absolute most version of "choose any name for any concept" -- but I assert that it doesn't take even one step toward the position of any universal meaning or inherent connection between word and object*. I posit that these connections are an emergent behaviour.

      And I agree that they are emergent behavior, in the sense that verbal "sound" connections in advanced language are NOT basic onomatopoeia anymore. The point is that once you build a few onomatopoeic connections, you can create sonic metaphorical meaning that might endow even certain vowels or consonants or phonetic units or expressiveness (where words are accented, whether they rise or fall

    15. Re:Doubt there's much universal here... by mcswell · · Score: 1

      Chomsky wrote about syntax, not the lexicon. This study has no bearing on his work.

      As for this study, It's quite possible (IMO quite likely) that no matter how iconic brand new words might be, that has no bearing on the iconicity of English. For one thing, English is not a tone language, so the pitch contours of made up words (one of the things they claimed speakers agreed about) have no bearing on real English words. More importantly, tens of thousands of years separate modern English from the beginnings of language, and sounds have evolved more or less at random since then. Over time, sound changes pretty much affect words across the board, without regard to the semantics of the words. That's why Germanic words typically have an /f/, for example, where Latinate languages have a /p/ ('father' vs. 'padre' is a typical example). Lots of non-Germanic words entered English via (mostly) French, but they didn't come in because of their phonetics, they came in because of their semantics (French borrowings tend to fall into semantic domains).

    16. Re:Doubt there's much universal here... by mcswell · · Score: 1

      Chomsky's ideas in linguistics are far from dead; most theories of syntax, whether overtly Chomskian (minimalism) or conceived in reaction to some of it (GPSG and its descendant HPSG, LFG), share the basic assumption that there are innate (genetically transmitted) aspects [pun intended] of language. So no, it has not been debunked, nor are (IMO) his ideas silly. It was some of his predecessors' ideas about language that were silly--Skinner, for instance.

      I don't know who you were referring to that 'thought the "Platonic ideal" was how languages worked, that words had a "real meaning" that languages strove towards, and that understanding the "Universal Grammar" could allow understanding of the "true meaning" of language, one inherent in human genetics', but that was never Chomsky's idea. He was a syntactician, not a semanticist, and made no such claims about meaning, teleology, or UG. (He had--and still has--a theory of UG, but not what you describe.)

      Finally, it was not _later_ that Chomsky got involved in left wing politics, he's been in that since at least the 60s.

    17. Re:Doubt there's much universal here... by mcswell · · Score: 1

      'Chomsky was looking for a single, unitary "language acquisition device", while it now looks as though language is a complex interaction of multiple parts of the brain.' There is no inherent contradiction between a "language acquisition device" that deals with syntax (Chomsky's domain, apart from his detour with Morris Halle into phonology) and the notion that language is an interaction between multiple parts of the brain, in fact that's exactly what you'd expect: one part for syntax, another part for vision, another part for converting sound to possible words (in spoken languages), and so forth. That's called modularity. The contradiction would be if everything was mushed together, and there was no division between, say, syntax and our model of the word based on vision.

    18. Re:Doubt there's much universal here... by mcswell · · Score: 1

      "you'd be able to discover easily if Slashdot actually linked to the bloody study directly, as I did above, rather than a crappy news summary" Thank you!

      As for the iconicity: I don't doubt that language in its origin was iconic to some extent; modern signed languages are to some degree iconic, the more so the more recently they grew up. But I do think that tens of thousands of years of sound change have pretty much erased the iconicity in languages like English, with rare exceptions (mom, flit/fly/flutter/flip), and more prevalent ideophones in some languages.

    19. Re:Doubt there's much universal here... by Half-pint+HAL · · Score: 1

      I suppose you're right, in which case what I should have said was that Chomsky was wrong to focus so narrowly on syntax. His attempts to dicorce "grammaticality" from meaning still poison linguistics to this day. Every single course I have taken on grammars (in both linguistics and computing) spends a lot of time on CFGs but doesn't even mention Tesnière's valency model, which, published just a couple of years after Chomsky published CFGs, managed to fill the disjoin between Chomskyan grammar and real language.

      --
      Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
  6. Movements and grunts? by Viol8 · · Score: 4, Funny

    "Most linguists agree that a combination of movement and sound like grunts and pointing probably got us started"

    Presumably these linquists work at universities and are simply observing students on a sunday morning after a night out.

    1. Re:Movements and grunts? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.

    2. Re:Movements and grunts? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I'm looking forward to the Language Log debunking.

    3. Re:Movements and grunts? by mcswell · · Score: 1

      Yeah, I went there before even reading the comments here. But as a poster pointed out above, the actual article (as opposed to the press release) is much more measured.

  7. Ob by Hognoxious · · Score: 5, Funny

    Article is a glorty kleed of pweb. Summary is blonty, unwerreled and in parts totally baylous.

    --
    Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
    1. Re:Ob by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Score: -1, Blonty.

    2. Re:Ob by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Article is a glorty kleed of pweb. Summary is blonty, unwerreled and in parts totally baylous.

      Not everyone can be a hoopy frood.

    3. Re:Ob by Hognoxious · · Score: 1

      Thaby. Whoff, but caminously, thaby. But such ef quabb in this yarg...

      --
      Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
    4. Re: Ob by sabbede · · Score: 2

      Pweb? Really? Did you not blarg it vignially? Don't comment on it if you didn't blarg it.

    5. Re:Ob by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      aperrbbb! typical of a gazorbanoid. if erb yeal bubbob, instead of zat orko torzep, maybe emmorby unday amelaba. bleeeb!!!

    6. Re:Ob by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Dimple monkey, twice the pudding octopi for tango man.

      Very blender shoe, cellular. Scooter my daisy heads.

    7. Re: Ob by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

      Why is everyone posting unreleased Nirvana song lyrics ?

    8. Re: Ob by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      LOL!

      No. Seriously. I just about busted a gut reading that post, because I was just talking with someone about Weird Al's 'Smells like Teen Spirit' spoof. (When he asked Nirvana for their permission to write it, he told them it was going to be about how nobody could understand their lyrics.)

  8. Unsympathetic by Artem+S.+Tashkinov · · Score: 1

    Well, I'm not so sympathetic with the conclusions.

    Firstly, English is perhaps the most vocal language among all existing languages on Earth, it has far too many words which sound like the object being described.

    Secondly, there's German.

    Thirdly, and let me quote the article, "Their guesses were not nearly as good as the face-to-face participantsâ"35.6% right versus 82.2%â"but they had only one round in which to make their guess." Now, I'm not a mathematician but everything below 50% sounds like a wild guess to me.

    1. Re:Unsympathetic by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Now, I'm not a mathematician but everything below 50% sounds like a wild guess to me.

      Depends how many possible words they had to choose from. If there were many words to choose from then 35.6% right will be better than choosing a word at random.

    2. Re:Unsympathetic by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      TFA seems to imply that they had to choose one word from eighteen, so yes, 35.6% is considerably better than chance.

    3. Re:Unsympathetic by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Always be wary when you see probabilities close to e^(-1) = ~0.3679 or 1 - e^(-1) = ~0.6321.

    4. Re:Unsympathetic by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      There are other problems here. The claim that this somehow falsifies what linguists think has no justification. What they think is that the words we use NOW are not iconic. That says nothing about the origin of language. Nor does the article itself claim this. In fact, a lot of linguists think that iconicity is a likely source of new words, and it's well-known that there are languages of the world that have some iconic words. The important thing is that, IN GENERAL, there is no connection between sound and meaning of words, not that there are no examples where there is a connection.

    5. Re:Unsympathetic by afeeney · · Score: 1

      I'm definitely not convinced of anything by this study, but it does suggest that there might be something worth examining more rigorously. If the study could be consistently replicated with people who don't have a language (or language family) in common, then it would be more indicative.

      It should also be audio-only, since the instructions of "don't use facial expressions" are almost futile, considering how many our expressions are involuntary or unconscious.

    6. Re:Unsympathetic by mcswell · · Score: 1

      "English is perhaps the most vocal language among all existing languages on Earth, it has far too many words which sound like the object being described."

      Huh? I have no idea what you mean by "vocal", nor what that has to do with onomatopoeia, nor what those English words are that sound like the object being described--I'd probably grant you 'moo' and maybe 'meow', but beyond that?

  9. Re:Lingustics is for cows. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Hi user sexconker (1179573)

    http://news.slashdot.org/comme...

  10. Meanwhile actual linguists... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    What real linguists know is that:
    1. Language is a behaviour of the brain. External communication is secondary.
    2. Very little of modern word formation is iconic, though iconic symbols were likely important in the first origins of words.
    3. "pitch and volume of sounds" are important in every language when the arbitrary symbols are insufficient. Pidgin communication is full of exactly that kind of communication.

    Language is right on the boundary between behaviours which are conscious and behaviours which are unconscious, and it turns out that the overwhelming majority of it is unconscious. Which is why people who don't study language scientifically have such poor insights into what language really is and what parts of it are universal.

    1. Re:Meanwhile actual linguists... by thinkwaitfast · · Score: 1

      1. Language is a behaviour of the brain.

      Isn't it also a feedback loop where language also influences the structure of the brain?

    2. Re:Meanwhile actual linguists... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Isn't it also a feedback loop where language also influences the structure of the brain?

      For the evolution of human species, the feedback just about the only explanation for the complexity of both language and the brain. The human language faculty is vastly different from anything remotely comparable in any other animal.

      For a human individual, the effect is real but extremely small.

  11. Look at me, I read Snow Crash! by wonkey_monkey · · Score: 1

    Okay, I haven't really, but I wanted to say I had.

    --
    systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
    1. Re:Look at me, I read Snow Crash! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I make references to it at least twice a year without ever having read it, I'm willing to bet most people do the same. I'm not sure if anyone has ever actually read any of Neil Stephenson's books.

  12. Language is a mystery, Tom said mysteriously by TheRealHocusLocus · · Score: 4, Funny

    We gathered in a large conference room lit with fluorescent lights. You know, the kind that always has one light in the corner flickering, and it seems to draw your whole attention. Fidgeting in chairs, a rustle of paper, forms to fill out, name and gender blah blah and it's like --- hello! --- we're broke and we're 'day labor' students just selling our blood and our souls and bodies for research for a quick buck, and we've got to move on to the next indignity! The ad on the website said 'sociological research project' so we were reasonably sure there would be no picking and prodding.

    It was bizarre even for us lab rats. The organizers seemed to be conducting a game of 'charades' and broke us into groups, assigning words printed on cards like up, down, rough and stuff. We were supposed to invent new words for these things and try to communicate them to the others with a combination of vocalizations (yes they used the silly term, it sounds ridiculous when you 'vocalize' it don't you think?) and gestures and (as it turns out) giggles and nervous smiles.

    This went on for a couple of hours, they kept re-forming the groups and repeating the experiment, scoring the success of our guesses as to which test word was being used... it was fun. I noted early on that the more attracted you are to the the person doing the charade, the more likely you were to guess the correct answer. I wonder if the researchers noted this and I used it as a pickup line, leaning close to this foxy lady and whispering, "Do you think they've controlled for the fact that your voice sounds so sexy when you make that low rumble in your throat that means, 'rough'?" Of course, I used her made-up word, which sounded like 'blaaaargh' Her laugh was surprised and sudden, and if they had a card that said promise it would have lit up the board. With a nod offered her my number on a card, and she wrote hers. Promise indeed.

    As we passed behind the conference table between each round to be assigned new groups with one of the 'test words' I glanced at the laptop computers. It seemed they were recording the sounds we made and plotted them out in some sort of dot-language. So this is some kind of language research, I guessed, to examine the brain wiring of money-hungry research lab rats. Then a real lunch (not just donuts and coffee, what a surprise!) and the final round began.

    The last round was one-to-all where each person got up in front and charaded the whole room. By now we realized there were only a few words being tested and we had gotten pretty good at guessing which one. I had taken a seat next to blaaaargh-girl and touched her knee briefly as I sat. She had smiled. Life is good. When she was called up to charade the room I muttered 'blaaargh' and she giggled.

    She stood at the front of the room and took the card which indicated which 'primordial' word she was to communicate. Her eyes widened for a moment, and I'd swear her eyes darted from side to side, as if scanning for some adversary. It was a bit odd and no one else seemed to pick up on it, but it was clearly... fear? I guess she and I were so in tune at that moment I felt what ever she was feeling. I felt a sudden tingle in my spine and my heart raced. What was written on that card? She seemed to gather herself and faced the group. There was a certain helplessness in her expression, as if she was being compelled to do something. I felt a surge of protective instinct and was rising from my seat... as

    She flung her arms wide, spun her head until the long straight hair swung around and for a moment, wrapped around her face. The flickering light finally gave up and the room dimmed a little. She took a long intake of breath and shouted, long and shrill,

    "Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!"

    The lights went out. The Universe became noise and chaos. I felt as if I was falling.

    But we were not on a station platform. We were on the track ahead as the nightmare, plastic column of fetid black iridescence oozed tightly onward through its fifte

    --
    <blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
    1. Re:Language is a mystery, Tom said mysteriously by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      (+6, Hastur, Hastur, Has

    2. Re:Language is a mystery, Tom said mysteriously by meta-monkey · · Score: 1

      Bravo.

      --
      We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
    3. Re:Language is a mystery, Tom said mysteriously by tepples · · Score: 1

      (+6, Hastur, Hastur, Has

      Mushroom mushroom.

    4. Re:Language is a mystery, Tom said mysteriously by Toshito · · Score: 1

      Bravo!

      --
      Try it! Library of Babel
  13. I never bought the arbitrary expression theory by sabbede · · Score: 1
    iconic expression just makes more sense. Concepts can be formed without language (iconic), but arbitrary expression seems to imply otherwise.

    But what I find most interesting is that English speakers would develop a tonal language. That's weird.

  14. Explains why . . . by Skeptical1 · · Score: 1

    there's a "gin and tonic" in every language in the galaxy.

  15. Not exactly new by 140Mandak262Jamuna · · Score: 2
    Everytime people from two different languages meet, once they stopped killing each other in such encounters, the communication largely consists of mimicking nature in sound and gesture. "Me Jane! You Tarzan!" supposed to teach the concept of me and you by gestures and associate names with the entities. (It does not matter the account is fictional. It is how the author of that fiction imagines he would communicate with people of different language).

    Curiously, it assumes they both would understand the gestures. Tarzan would know Jane is pointing to herself as an entity not pointing to her shirt and him as another entity not his chest as a body part. Further assumption is that objects have names and the association is arbitrary. Of course, Tarzan story quickly proceeds to a stage where Jane and Tarzan swap stories about the day the fiend in human shape challenged one to swing across the swimming baths of the club by the rings hanging from the ceilings and cunningly looped the last ring back against the wall, leaving one with no choice to drop into the pool in full evening attire. This is where it becomes very fictional. Well, in real life does not fit into 90 minute movies. But I digress.

    The point is, it is very well known imitation of natural sounds and gestures would be a more basic universal form of communication. And it is not a stretch to argue that is how the languages must have born.

    Noam Chomsky further extended the concept with the insight that all human beings are born with a language instinct. "Objects have names". "Actions have names". "Order of the words (subject verb object etc) matters", "the names of objects and actions can have qualifiers" etc etc. The child has these concepts already programmed. But the actual names and actual order of the words in a sentence etc get burnt in at an early age. When children of different languages mix constantly they form language-mixtures called creoles and there one can actually observe the birth and evolution of a language. Some of the well recorded recently created creoles suggest these concepts very well.

    --
    sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
  16. That's All Well and Good by Greyfox · · Score: 1

    But what does it mean? We should discuss it over a Genessyan Oonyx!

    --

    I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?

  17. well if its universal by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    and supposedly when based off English - please explain why Americans are incapable of saying Herb but resort to erb!

    1. Re:well if its universal by wardrich86 · · Score: 1

      Same reason why Brits are incapable of saying "aluminum" but resort to "aluminium"

    2. Re:well if its universal by thinkwaitfast · · Score: 1

      I used to work with a guy named Herb. So it's not incapacity.

    3. Re:well if its universal by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Well we wrote the language so we get authors prerogative so I guess you can just add aluminum to the list of words Americans cant say

    4. Re:well if its universal by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Whilst Sir Humphry David proposed the existance of the element and initial called it "aluminum" he very quickly renamed to "aluminium' to fall in line with existing standards, actually either Ørsted or Wöhler is credit with actually producing it.

      "Sir Humphry Davy proposed the name aluminum, back before the element was officially discovered. However, the name 'aluminium' was adopted to conform with the -ium names of most other elements. In 1925, the American Chemical Society decided to go back to the original aluminum, so the United States uses a different name from most other countries."

      So once again it just americans demonstrating how individual they are or that by staying a little longer as loyal subjects of the crown they may have grasped a better handle on the mother tongue! .

  18. International View by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    speakers of English might use qualities like the pitch and volume of sounds to describe concepts like size and distance when they invent new words

    The linguistics who have hold dear their views should have visited Russia. That way they would have gotten their examples much faster. Example:
    -I got a biiig fish yesterday.
    -Surely it was just a big fish?
    -No, it was biiiig!
    -Now you're just exaggerating.

  19. Origins by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Language came from a big black obelisk.

  20. The kind of white people who speak ebonics by tepples · · Score: 1

    a big part of what we use language for is identifying group membership (ie: ebonics)

    Just a point of order: ebonics refers to black language, or is abused to mean the study of black culture (ebony + ics). It doesn't relate to group membership of just any group, particularly not pasty white British people :)

    In context, it means group membership of those who self-identify with a group that speaks a historically black dialect. Where I come from, white people who associate with such groups are called by a word that literally means "suppliers of hairpieces".

  21. Look out for Namshubs by OpenSourceFool · · Score: 1

    Makes me want to re-read Snow Crash, even with all the gratuitous penetration and self-indulgent hero (Hiro) pity.

  22. In English, please! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    "While we know a lot about language but we know relatively little about how speech developed."

    While we know relatively little about how sentences are construct.

  23. Grunts & Pointing - probably, but .. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    What's interesting is what languages it led to. The differences in languages between some parts of the world are quite - - large..
    So the development process was probably the same. Due to regional distances we developed different sounds.
    - I think ..