I have always wondered what it would be like to live in Ancient Rome. Odds are I'd be poor and have to join the army to keep from becoming homeless, or worse: I'd be a slave. But if I became one of the aristocracy, or at least a wealthier family, then I would have it made. Anyway I find it hard to imagine that if computers and robots take over doing all of humanity's dirty work, then humanity will have no way to get by. Obviously SOMEbody will get by (the owners of the machines?) but consider the following.
A major food company gradually phases out human workers. They own countless farms, and they fire the farmers. They automate all their factories, they automate their lower levels of administration, distribution, and all the other human-run parts of their industry. But they do this because it's cheaper. And now they can produce far more than they ever could before. They're a food company, so the price of their food goes down, partly because they can now make more for almost nothing, partly because the people they fired have no jobs. But if the only jobs now available to humans are (presumably) in public relations, professional sports, entertainment, etc., then what's to stop our society from entering a new era of "bread and circuses," one in which there are two classes: the rich who get more because they are famous or do unique work, and the aristocracy who need not work because their needs are provided for by the machinery doing all the grunt work?
Then there would be no reason for anyone to be poor, because that station would be filled by the machines. Of course there are countless factors to look at and probably countless reasons why the above fantasy is just that: but I would like to hear them in following comments!
I agree with you on that last point, but I would prefer to generalize further. Nobody who speaks a language of ANY level of complexity has any right to criticize people who speak ANY other language. Just as it is not stupidity to speak Ebonics, neither is it arrogance to speak Standard American English, or Middle English for that matter. Nor are the rules of English grammar that complicated, but native speakers must view it through the kaleidescope of acquisition. That is, you do not learn the grammar of English, you just internalize it as a child, and you don't get it all from one trusted source. You hear different people speak different dialects and you put together your own idiolect without any true standard to point at and say "there are the nuts and bolts of my grammar." Asimov had his heart in the right place, but problems with literacy are not rooted in language. Also keep in mind that writing is not Language, it is a secondary system of representation. So while simplifying spelling could help (but consider how much more difficult it is to be literate in China, and their literacy rate is 93.3%), simplifying grammar would be neither easy to do, easy for people to learn, adopted by anyone, nor long-lived. Complexity in languages arises from speakers like you and me and everyone else. It is not bestowed by college professors. Indeed, Ebonics is in many ways FAR more complex.
I saw a lot of this in my freshman "English" class, and I find there are 3 reasons why this happens.
1) Natural language change. "Because" shortens to "cuz" because it's a high frequency word with an unstressed syllable. "Like" and "I mean" tend to get used in ways I find analogous to the Ancient Greek "men" and "de" discourse particles. Overall, this is not a bad thing (no matter what anyone says: it's a fact of Language and if it didn't happen we would all be speaking Proto-Indo-European), but it is not good paper writing (at least not yet).
2) English teachers don't know English grammar. Is it that surprising? I learned more about English in one year of high school Latin than in all my years of "Language Arts" classes, and it's simple why. One learns Latin from the ground up: you have to understand the way cases are used and the way verbs are inflected in order to read anything. In English, we have very little inflection, and much of it is on the pronouns. Furthermore, one does not "learn" a native language, one "acquires" it, which is to say that the process is different. You don't actively think about the rules of grammar when you start speaking: your brain does these mental gymnastics for you. This is why it's not accurate to say that these students have "bad grammar." I'm sure what they say is grammatical in their own idiolects, otherwise they wouldn't say it. But English teachers should be able to explain how the grammar of formal English, the paper-writing register, works by convention. That is, they should know when to use "who" and when to use "whom." But none of my past English teachers could tell you the difference between those words, and that is a huge problem.
3) ENTRANCE ESSAYS. Obviously this is a problem that pervades the writing styles of these kids, so presumably they did not just forget how to write after they got accepted to uni. So either somebody else wrote their essays (which should be considered cheating and grounds for immediate expulsion if discovered), or somebody let them in even though they write like that. If you want to blame anybody, it's the application readers I'd question first.
I hate these, usually because when I've gotten burned by them it was because they were not clear about EXACTLY what they were asking. By this I mean, that I would read your #1 and think "okay, I will necessarily complete this objective as I go through the list, because it does not specify that I should read all of the instructions BEFORE completing any of the tasks thereby assigned!" And so, if I were going to give an exercise like this to a class of my own, the first step would have to say "Read all of the instructions first!"
Think about this too:
Presumably we cannot be convicted for our thoughts. So clearly nobody can be arrested for just THINKING about what child pornography would look like, even though it's a pretty deviant thought. Let's say he drew this kind of cartoon himself, alone, just for himself, and the police found it while searching for ACTUAL crime. Would the courts go so far as to put a man in jail for drawing a picture? And what, really, is the difference between that and this? He did have to FIND the picture, and he did apparently KEEP the picture, but it still seems like a stretch. Honestly I don't even think the Simpsons look human enough. And there's another thing, what about anthropomorphic pornography? Would they have to calculate the presumed age of the fictional victims in dog/cat/furry years?
Re:This is what linguists have been waiting for
on
Monkeys With Syntax
·
· Score: 1
I basically agree. What we are seeing here is probably indeed the rise of Language (capital L) in this species. However I think it's a far cry from seeing the development of SYNTAX. It seems to me that what these primates have is a certain number of vocal signs (like monosyllables), and the possibility to combine multiple signs to achieve a greater range of meaning (like multisyllabic words). But meaning, as has always been apparent, is NOT to be mistaken for syntax. I can flip you the bird and you understand exactly what I mean, but there's no syntax there.
It does seem to me that, now that this species has this leg up communication-wise, their development of Language might be growing exponentially. So it might not be long (relatively not that long, which means I have no idea how long) before they really do put two signs together and come up with a SYSTEMATIZED method for expressing themselves.
You vastly underestimate the "study." There is a researcher named Daniel Everett who has been studying the Piraha for years. He is fluent in their language and has written about them for a long time. This is not the result of a single "experiment," but merely a peek into what researchers have been studying for over 20 years.
You didn't RTFA. The 1, 2, many system is prevalent in other cultures that have been studied, but the Piraha are unique in that they have only 2 words for counting. However, the text is wrong in saying that they convey ranges of numbers. The best way to think of these two words is "relatively a little" and "relatively more." Therefore they can be used with discrete as well as continuous quantities, and their use is highly sensitive to the context of the situation, similar to how in English you would say "this building" but "that bug" even if both of them are right next to you.
I wholeheartedly agree with you, and I wonder if perhaps the influence of appealing to the media may have colored this article. "We found out the hearing range of early humans" doesn't sound quite as good without the possibility of altering previously held ideas about the past. Honestly, I think the best method we'll have for determining when language came about will be an expansive study of ancient artwork and tools, trying to find out if the information necessary to make them could have been transmitted without language. Of course it would have to be more complicated than that small summary, but I think there's hope.
It's actually very interesting how big a role context plays. If a child sees a ball under a table and hears adults referring to it as a ball, the child knows that it is a ball. However, the child cannot be sure exactly what makes it a ball. Does it have to be shiny? Does it have to be round? Does it have to be under a table? Does it have to be in the daytime? Does it have to be a certain color? Does it have to be positioned in a certain way? Does it need to be a certain size? Since the child does not have all this information, overextensions occur. For instance, a child may refer to a dog as a rug because he thinks "rug" means "something furry." Meaningful input is also a huge part of the acquisition mechanism, as you say, but it goes beyond emotional reaction. Actually, children are resistant to correction. If your child keeps making a mistake over and over again, instruction will not help, only time and hearing the correct usage enough. This goes along with the "Active Construction of a Grammar" model.
Try looking at the "history" tab of the article. Not only can you view the page as it was at that certain time, but you can compare the page with later or newer versions with a special tool that hilights alterations in red.
IAAL (I am a linguist), and I believe you are correct. Language is a colligation of sound and meaning, but this technology merely distinguishes sounds: it is a vastly simplified model, not of how children acquire language, but of how children pick up phones. The phone is the most basic unit of the physical (sound) aspect of language, so if this technology is to have any use at all, it has a very long way to go.
From TFA: Expanding on some existing ideas, he and a team of international researchers developed a computer model that resembles the brain processes a baby uses when learning about speech.
This sentence means nothing. How do they know their computer model resembles the brain processes? Because they got the same outcome? Is that enough to verify what goes on in the mind of a child?
How about this: as soon as their program can distinguish allophones, I will be impressed. Allophones are different sounds in a language that native speakers do not distinguish, but which nevertheless occur in certain environments. For instance, in English we do not distinguish the voiced th sound and the voiceless th sound, but we do distinguish f and v, even though the only difference in both pairs is voicing. The difference is that exchanging f and v can change the meaning of a word, but changing voiced th and voiceless th only makes the word sound funny.
This sounds true and logical: cartographers add in imaginary side-roads for the same reason. But in an encyclopedia, printing misinformation to catch plagiarists would be a deplorable compromise of integrity. Mistakes for so simple a purpose should affect no more than punctuation, spelling, or syntax.
I really don't think that downloadable movies, music, and games can save this ship. The Wii already has downloadable games (AND original content no less!), and everybody who cares enough about music and movies already has iTunes.
>>I don't get it, doesn't Prince own his own music?!?
Unfortunately, contracts usually--if not always--give all the artist's songs to the Suits. Paul McCartney has tried for a while to buy his songs back from Michael Jackson, who bought the company that owned his copyrights. So I'm fairly certain that Prince is doing this by himself.
I don't think a guy who is known to most of the world simply as "Prince" has many financial worries. But he is making a bold statement, no matter which way you look at it. He's giving away music in the face of the vigilanti-tending music industry. And I'm sure, since he's had to work with these bastards before, that he's doing it legally. How hard is it to write new songs and put them on CDs? I'm sure he didn't just lure the Suits into making his CDs then hijack a truckfull and start throwing them out to fans on the streets.
A new theory should explain everything just as well as the old plus more.
This is a very high standard when applied generally. Suppose somebody disproves a current theory but cannot "explain everything just as well as the old plus more." Every so often, perhaps the rudimentary must precede the complex.
Serves them right! My girlfriend cancelled on me a few times so she could stay home and play with her new ipod. Then she broke up with me. Rot in hell you vile yet stylish machinations of satan!
Slashdot Mirror
I have always wondered what it would be like to live in Ancient Rome. Odds are I'd be poor and have to join the army to keep from becoming homeless, or worse: I'd be a slave. But if I became one of the aristocracy, or at least a wealthier family, then I would have it made. Anyway I find it hard to imagine that if computers and robots take over doing all of humanity's dirty work, then humanity will have no way to get by. Obviously SOMEbody will get by (the owners of the machines?) but consider the following.
A major food company gradually phases out human workers. They own countless farms, and they fire the farmers. They automate all their factories, they automate their lower levels of administration, distribution, and all the other human-run parts of their industry. But they do this because it's cheaper. And now they can produce far more than they ever could before. They're a food company, so the price of their food goes down, partly because they can now make more for almost nothing, partly because the people they fired have no jobs. But if the only jobs now available to humans are (presumably) in public relations, professional sports, entertainment, etc., then what's to stop our society from entering a new era of "bread and circuses," one in which there are two classes: the rich who get more because they are famous or do unique work, and the aristocracy who need not work because their needs are provided for by the machinery doing all the grunt work?
Then there would be no reason for anyone to be poor, because that station would be filled by the machines. Of course there are countless factors to look at and probably countless reasons why the above fantasy is just that: but I would like to hear them in following comments!
I agree with you on that last point, but I would prefer to generalize further. Nobody who speaks a language of ANY level of complexity has any right to criticize people who speak ANY other language. Just as it is not stupidity to speak Ebonics, neither is it arrogance to speak Standard American English, or Middle English for that matter. Nor are the rules of English grammar that complicated, but native speakers must view it through the kaleidescope of acquisition. That is, you do not learn the grammar of English, you just internalize it as a child, and you don't get it all from one trusted source. You hear different people speak different dialects and you put together your own idiolect without any true standard to point at and say "there are the nuts and bolts of my grammar." Asimov had his heart in the right place, but problems with literacy are not rooted in language. Also keep in mind that writing is not Language, it is a secondary system of representation. So while simplifying spelling could help (but consider how much more difficult it is to be literate in China, and their literacy rate is 93.3%), simplifying grammar would be neither easy to do, easy for people to learn, adopted by anyone, nor long-lived. Complexity in languages arises from speakers like you and me and everyone else. It is not bestowed by college professors. Indeed, Ebonics is in many ways FAR more complex.
I saw a lot of this in my freshman "English" class, and I find there are 3 reasons why this happens.
1) Natural language change. "Because" shortens to "cuz" because it's a high frequency word with an unstressed syllable. "Like" and "I mean" tend to get used in ways I find analogous to the Ancient Greek "men" and "de" discourse particles. Overall, this is not a bad thing (no matter what anyone says: it's a fact of Language and if it didn't happen we would all be speaking Proto-Indo-European), but it is not good paper writing (at least not yet).
2) English teachers don't know English grammar. Is it that surprising? I learned more about English in one year of high school Latin than in all my years of "Language Arts" classes, and it's simple why. One learns Latin from the ground up: you have to understand the way cases are used and the way verbs are inflected in order to read anything. In English, we have very little inflection, and much of it is on the pronouns. Furthermore, one does not "learn" a native language, one "acquires" it, which is to say that the process is different. You don't actively think about the rules of grammar when you start speaking: your brain does these mental gymnastics for you. This is why it's not accurate to say that these students have "bad grammar." I'm sure what they say is grammatical in their own idiolects, otherwise they wouldn't say it. But English teachers should be able to explain how the grammar of formal English, the paper-writing register, works by convention. That is, they should know when to use "who" and when to use "whom." But none of my past English teachers could tell you the difference between those words, and that is a huge problem.
3) ENTRANCE ESSAYS. Obviously this is a problem that pervades the writing styles of these kids, so presumably they did not just forget how to write after they got accepted to uni. So either somebody else wrote their essays (which should be considered cheating and grounds for immediate expulsion if discovered), or somebody let them in even though they write like that. If you want to blame anybody, it's the application readers I'd question first.
I hate these, usually because when I've gotten burned by them it was because they were not clear about EXACTLY what they were asking. By this I mean, that I would read your #1 and think "okay, I will necessarily complete this objective as I go through the list, because it does not specify that I should read all of the instructions BEFORE completing any of the tasks thereby assigned!" And so, if I were going to give an exercise like this to a class of my own, the first step would have to say "Read all of the instructions first!"
Think about this too:
Presumably we cannot be convicted for our thoughts. So clearly nobody can be arrested for just THINKING about what child pornography would look like, even though it's a pretty deviant thought. Let's say he drew this kind of cartoon himself, alone, just for himself, and the police found it while searching for ACTUAL crime. Would the courts go so far as to put a man in jail for drawing a picture? And what, really, is the difference between that and this? He did have to FIND the picture, and he did apparently KEEP the picture, but it still seems like a stretch. Honestly I don't even think the Simpsons look human enough. And there's another thing, what about anthropomorphic pornography? Would they have to calculate the presumed age of the fictional victims in dog/cat/furry years?
I basically agree. What we are seeing here is probably indeed the rise of Language (capital L) in this species. However I think it's a far cry from seeing the development of SYNTAX. It seems to me that what these primates have is a certain number of vocal signs (like monosyllables), and the possibility to combine multiple signs to achieve a greater range of meaning (like multisyllabic words). But meaning, as has always been apparent, is NOT to be mistaken for syntax. I can flip you the bird and you understand exactly what I mean, but there's no syntax there.
It does seem to me that, now that this species has this leg up communication-wise, their development of Language might be growing exponentially. So it might not be long (relatively not that long, which means I have no idea how long) before they really do put two signs together and come up with a SYSTEMATIZED method for expressing themselves.
My idea for preventing the submission of blank e-mails or e-mails lacking that attachment you were going to remember:
put the recipient address field below the message field
would that be helpful for anyone besides me? y/n
Why, hello there embedded infomation. I'd like to introduce you to my friend the hex editor. You two should get on swimmingly!
You vastly underestimate the "study." There is a researcher named Daniel Everett who has been studying the Piraha for years. He is fluent in their language and has written about them for a long time. This is not the result of a single "experiment," but merely a peek into what researchers have been studying for over 20 years.
You didn't RTFA. The 1, 2, many system is prevalent in other cultures that have been studied, but the Piraha are unique in that they have only 2 words for counting. However, the text is wrong in saying that they convey ranges of numbers. The best way to think of these two words is "relatively a little" and "relatively more." Therefore they can be used with discrete as well as continuous quantities, and their use is highly sensitive to the context of the situation, similar to how in English you would say "this building" but "that bug" even if both of them are right next to you.
I wholeheartedly agree with you, and I wonder if perhaps the influence of appealing to the media may have colored this article. "We found out the hearing range of early humans" doesn't sound quite as good without the possibility of altering previously held ideas about the past. Honestly, I think the best method we'll have for determining when language came about will be an expansive study of ancient artwork and tools, trying to find out if the information necessary to make them could have been transmitted without language. Of course it would have to be more complicated than that small summary, but I think there's hope.
I think you mean:
q: How do you make another billion dollars?
Yes it does! Gosh, if only he'd realized that he works at Microsoft, why... the USABILITY testing would have gone a whole lot better.
It's actually very interesting how big a role context plays. If a child sees a ball under a table and hears adults referring to it as a ball, the child knows that it is a ball. However, the child cannot be sure exactly what makes it a ball. Does it have to be shiny? Does it have to be round? Does it have to be under a table? Does it have to be in the daytime? Does it have to be a certain color? Does it have to be positioned in a certain way? Does it need to be a certain size? Since the child does not have all this information, overextensions occur. For instance, a child may refer to a dog as a rug because he thinks "rug" means "something furry." Meaningful input is also a huge part of the acquisition mechanism, as you say, but it goes beyond emotional reaction. Actually, children are resistant to correction. If your child keeps making a mistake over and over again, instruction will not help, only time and hearing the correct usage enough. This goes along with the "Active Construction of a Grammar" model.
Try looking at the "history" tab of the article. Not only can you view the page as it was at that certain time, but you can compare the page with later or newer versions with a special tool that hilights alterations in red.
IAAL (I am a linguist), and I believe you are correct. Language is a colligation of sound and meaning, but this technology merely distinguishes sounds: it is a vastly simplified model, not of how children acquire language, but of how children pick up phones. The phone is the most basic unit of the physical (sound) aspect of language, so if this technology is to have any use at all, it has a very long way to go.
From TFA:
Expanding on some existing ideas, he and a team of international researchers developed a computer model that resembles the brain processes a baby uses when learning about speech.
This sentence means nothing. How do they know their computer model resembles the brain processes? Because they got the same outcome? Is that enough to verify what goes on in the mind of a child?
How about this: as soon as their program can distinguish allophones, I will be impressed. Allophones are different sounds in a language that native speakers do not distinguish, but which nevertheless occur in certain environments. For instance, in English we do not distinguish the voiced th sound and the voiceless th sound, but we do distinguish f and v, even though the only difference in both pairs is voicing. The difference is that exchanging f and v can change the meaning of a word, but changing voiced th and voiceless th only makes the word sound funny.
This sounds true and logical: cartographers add in imaginary side-roads for the same reason. But in an encyclopedia, printing misinformation to catch plagiarists would be a deplorable compromise of integrity. Mistakes for so simple a purpose should affect no more than punctuation, spelling, or syntax.
I really don't think that downloadable movies, music, and games can save this ship. The Wii already has downloadable games (AND original content no less!), and everybody who cares enough about music and movies already has iTunes.
>>I don't get it, doesn't Prince own his own music?!?
Unfortunately, contracts usually--if not always--give all the artist's songs to the Suits. Paul McCartney has tried for a while to buy his songs back from Michael Jackson, who bought the company that owned his copyrights. So I'm fairly certain that Prince is doing this by himself.
I don't think a guy who is known to most of the world simply as "Prince" has many financial worries. But he is making a bold statement, no matter which way you look at it. He's giving away music in the face of the vigilanti-tending music industry. And I'm sure, since he's had to work with these bastards before, that he's doing it legally. How hard is it to write new songs and put them on CDs? I'm sure he didn't just lure the Suits into making his CDs then hijack a truckfull and start throwing them out to fans on the streets.
Well that's only if you negate it. If you reverse it, you get Microsoft's real slogan: Business Ready People.
I believe the term is "circular reasoning." It should be linked somewhere in the above Wikipedia article.
A new theory should explain everything just as well as the old plus more.
This is a very high standard when applied generally. Suppose somebody disproves a current theory but cannot "explain everything just as well as the old plus more." Every so often, perhaps the rudimentary must precede the complex.
haven't you seen V for Vendetta?
Serves them right! My girlfriend cancelled on me a few times so she could stay home and play with her new ipod. Then she broke up with me. Rot in hell you vile yet stylish machinations of satan!