Tables and chairs may be assigned grammatical bins, and these bins can be the same as those assigned to human genders (cf: "Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things", George Lakoff), but it does not mean that French people actually think that a table has anything conceptually in common with a woman, besides the pronoun used to replace it/her. (Or a man, I can't remember my French.)
There is something important lost when the speakers of a language die, yes. But what is lost is not any concept, pattern of thought, or way of looking at the world. Because there is no concept that you cannot translate across the language barrier. There is a word in Russian, I've heard, for that feeling you get when your ex walks into the room. But just because there is no word for it in English doesn't mean that I couldn't just explain it to you. Just because some Native American languages do not have the same adverbs for time that English does doesn't mean that speakers of those languages have no concept of time.
That line of logic was presented by a linguist named Benjamin Whorf in the first half of the 20th century, and has been discredited by all modern serious linguists.
There is a "mentalese" that precedes and is fundamental to language. Babies have it. Animals have it to varying degrees. It's, yknow, nice for English speakers to presume that the exotic qualities of other languages means that their speakers have equally exotic mental structures. But they think, by and large, exactly the same as "us".
I thought that that beefcake Rohan guy - you know, Miranda Otto's cousin - deserves some nod. He floored me with his "furrowed eyebrows" method of acting (much like Anna Paquin.)
Bah, Sean Astin? Please. Performance not powerful enough to merit a glance from Oscar.
on this note - whenever my brother and I would open the front door when the air conditioning was on in the summer, my Dad would immediately start counting (loudly) the money we were wasting while standing there talking to our friend who had stopped by... "One dollar! Two dollars! Three..."
Hey, don't troll this stuff out quite yet - sure it's future ware right now, but think ahead, and... more to the point, read some about it. There's more to language and computational linguistics than you might think. Just because your (former) line of work stands to be partially replaced doesn't mean that the technology is insane.
to wit, there are attributes of register, tone, and modality that can be applied not just to individual sentences, but to entire pieces of text that may be able to indicate a piece's slant, political tone, reading level, and (ahem) ability to incite readers to flame.
Some of the decision making processes you're talking about that go on during editing and truth judgments admittedly will probably not be computerized. But some of them can.
The point of the responses here are not to relegate journalism or wordsmithy (as it were) to the level of manual labor, as manual labor has been replaced by machines. But the truth is that machines are more complex now and they're ready to take on more complex tasks. Some things about language are very much NOT a mystery. Code isn't either.
but it might replace the ones who just lip-synch the press releases that are sent to them... i.e., the White House.
Beat reporters on the other hand might be helped, by police reports, witness accounts, etc, but not replaced. That's android territory and we hope, is maybe for the 22nd century, not the 21st.
...not nec a problem to be solved by the code. Which BTW probably are a leetle more complex than small shell scripts, and see a good textbook like Jurafsky and Martin (pub 2000) for why.
Re journalistic integrity - There's the possibility that a single entity could issue the release to the wire services, they could relase it in some kind of 'compiled' form (where it's just the syntax/semantic relations.) (How this could be different from how releases are issued now is a good question, but I guess there'd have to be reporters on hand to inquire about details... so maybe journalism might be saved after all... but not if templates for information were used, and the templates themselves needed to fill in the missing gaps...)
You could imagine how each news outlet could receive the relase, and use their own reconstructive code to flesh out the [NP][VP]{NP] ("who did what to who"* scenario) and then write their own story from that.
Editing scripts could decide what in the story would be details that would shine damaging light on that paper's politics, and then stuff those details in the 37th paragraph that no one reads, write a potentially-misleading headline that would allow for a reading that would tell its readers the exact slant they want to give the story, and DONE - they've printed the ostensible truth, but since few people are going to read the article, they've done their job and done it well.
"Wait a minute, isn't that what happens now anyway?" Maybe, but now papers can save that much more on spin-sters' salaries. And then there'd be yet more English majors who can't find a job. Go capitalism, yay. *shudder*
*it's who. not whom. No one has said whom in english for a century or so, and then only because they 'think' it's correct. Anytime I hear someone saying it for real, I shudder to think that they're so neurotic about their grammar that they use something they've been told is right but have never really heard themselves. None of my linguistics profs ever used "whom", EVER. I think they privately hate the word.
P.S. This entire post have been wrote by a really good scripts.
This is just the beginning. One of the coming sectors to feel the layoff-inducing effects of technology will be the wordsmiths: novelists, script writers, reporters, copywriters, editors, speechwriters, and translators. (The plus side of this are all the jobs that no one really wants or respects: some types of marketers, and the customer service reps who email (email only, since voice reco still sucks.)
As inventors realized over the course of the 20th century that human capital could be replaced by factories and assembly lines, so will computational linguists make it clear over the next one that human language isn't just a biological phenom (that's what current theory proposes) but also a mechanism that is studyable and reproducible.
It sounds like comp ling stands to be one of the next decade's hot-shit career options (in addition to intellectual property lawyer.) Now if there could only be more than, like, five or six linguistics departments who offered specializations in it, I could have a better selection of where to send my grad school apps! Who the hell wants to live in Tucson?
(Just kidding, selection committee! Wow I love mariachi music, i'd love to come live in your city!)
Eh, there is a universal translator: the idea that all ideas are experienced in the same way by humans. Ergo Universal Grammar.
So what are you waiting for... linguists are waiting for the geeks to make data gathering easier, to give us more grist for the microscope.
And besides - the more language data we get, the more complex mindlike matter we can incorporate into games and sims... so hop to it, people. You've got that girlfriend or nemesis to animate, har.
Slashdot Mirror
Tables and chairs may be assigned grammatical bins, and these bins can be the same as those assigned to human genders (cf: "Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things", George Lakoff), but it does not mean that French people actually think that a table has anything conceptually in common with a woman, besides the pronoun used to replace it/her. (Or a man, I can't remember my French.)
There is something important lost when the speakers of a language die, yes. But what is lost is not any concept, pattern of thought, or way of looking at the world. Because there is no concept that you cannot translate across the language barrier. There is a word in Russian, I've heard, for that feeling you get when your ex walks into the room. But just because there is no word for it in English doesn't mean that I couldn't just explain it to you. Just because some Native American languages do not have the same adverbs for time that English does doesn't mean that speakers of those languages have no concept of time.
That line of logic was presented by a linguist named Benjamin Whorf in the first half of the 20th century, and has been discredited by all modern serious linguists.
There is a "mentalese" that precedes and is fundamental to language. Babies have it. Animals have it to varying degrees. It's, yknow, nice for English speakers to presume that the exotic qualities of other languages means that their speakers have equally exotic mental structures. But they think, by and large, exactly the same as "us".
Why was Clive (author) allowed to post these soft-core headshots anyway?? Eyeliner? Removed shirt? WTF, NYT Magazine...
It's porn. Someone wanted to be the first guy to get Venus to Mars.
...And that's because you've been watching nothing but DVDs of Star Trek and of Episodes 1-2?
Points for being Loyal Friend on Long Journey, and for being kinda cute, sure. Points for acting? Andy Serkis beats Patty Duke's son, hands down.
I thought that that beefcake Rohan guy - you know, Miranda Otto's cousin - deserves some nod. He floored me with his "furrowed eyebrows" method of acting (much like Anna Paquin.)
Bah, Sean Astin? Please. Performance not powerful enough to merit a glance from Oscar.
on this note - whenever my brother and I would open the front door when the air conditioning was on in the summer, my Dad would immediately start counting (loudly) the money we were wasting while standing there talking to our friend who had stopped by... "One dollar! Two dollars! Three..."
No, no, I'm in agreement. The investigation part, insurmountably a human task. The writing, though? Probably somewhat automatable.
Am I correct in assuming that many reporters would love it if their editors were replaced by robot masters, then?
to wit, there are attributes of register, tone, and modality that can be applied not just to individual sentences, but to entire pieces of text that may be able to indicate a piece's slant, political tone, reading level, and (ahem) ability to incite readers to flame.
Some of the decision making processes you're talking about that go on during editing and truth judgments admittedly will probably not be computerized. But some of them can.
The point of the responses here are not to relegate journalism or wordsmithy (as it were) to the level of manual labor, as manual labor has been replaced by machines. But the truth is that machines are more complex now and they're ready to take on more complex tasks. Some things about language are very much NOT a mystery. Code isn't either.
Beat reporters on the other hand might be helped, by police reports, witness accounts, etc, but not replaced. That's android territory and we hope, is maybe for the 22nd century, not the 21st.
I'd be the richest man to ever appear on "Oprah".
Re journalistic integrity - There's the possibility that a single entity could issue the release to the wire services, they could relase it in some kind of 'compiled' form (where it's just the syntax/semantic relations.) (How this could be different from how releases are issued now is a good question, but I guess there'd have to be reporters on hand to inquire about details... so maybe journalism might be saved after all... but not if templates for information were used, and the templates themselves needed to fill in the missing gaps...)
You could imagine how each news outlet could receive the relase, and use their own reconstructive code to flesh out the [NP][VP]{NP] ("who did what to who"* scenario) and then write their own story from that.
Editing scripts could decide what in the story would be details that would shine damaging light on that paper's politics, and then stuff those details in the 37th paragraph that no one reads, write a potentially-misleading headline that would allow for a reading that would tell its readers the exact slant they want to give the story, and DONE - they've printed the ostensible truth, but since few people are going to read the article, they've done their job and done it well.
"Wait a minute, isn't that what happens now anyway?" Maybe, but now papers can save that much more on spin-sters' salaries. And then there'd be yet more English majors who can't find a job. Go capitalism, yay. *shudder*
*it's who. not whom. No one has said whom in english for a century or so, and then only because they 'think' it's correct. Anytime I hear someone saying it for real, I shudder to think that they're so neurotic about their grammar that they use something they've been told is right but have never really heard themselves. None of my linguistics profs ever used "whom", EVER. I think they privately hate the word.
P.S. This entire post have been wrote by a really good scripts.
As inventors realized over the course of the 20th century that human capital could be replaced by factories and assembly lines, so will computational linguists make it clear over the next one that human language isn't just a biological phenom (that's what current theory proposes) but also a mechanism that is studyable and reproducible.
It sounds like comp ling stands to be one of the next decade's hot-shit career options (in addition to intellectual property lawyer.) Now if there could only be more than, like, five or six linguistics departments who offered specializations in it, I could have a better selection of where to send my grad school apps! Who the hell wants to live in Tucson?
(Just kidding, selection committee! Wow I love mariachi music, i'd love to come live in your city!)
So what are you waiting for... linguists are waiting for the geeks to make data gathering easier, to give us more grist for the microscope.
And besides - the more language data we get, the more complex mindlike matter we can incorporate into games and sims... so hop to it, people. You've got that girlfriend or nemesis to animate, har.
Thank you. Two shows a night folks, tip your waitress. Happy Goat sake on special tonight.
with being a cum-guzzling whore. Keep yo judgments to yo self okay...!