Tag: languages

Explaining the Unconscious

Cormac McCarthy published the first nonfiction piece of his career, a 3000-word essay titled “The Kekulé Problem”. It is studded with suggestive details about the anatomy of the human larynx, what happens to dolphins under anesthesia, and the origins of the click sounds in Khoisan languages, all marshalled to illuminate aspects of a profound pair of questions, Why did human language originate, and how is it related to the unconscious mind?

and a followup

We’ve little reason to assume that the common structure of language—which all human languages share—is either the most effective or indeed the only form which language can take. The fact that all languages can be translated one into the other should tell us something about the common nature of their histories. The structure of these languages—their syntax and grammar and their general form—more than suggests that they have a single origin. But it further elicits the question as to whether or not this is a structure which enjoys an independent standing. Or whether other forms might be not only possible but even preferable. If intelligent beings from other parts of the universe should attempt to converse with us would their language be translatable? Would it share enough of our notions of how to go about describing the world for us to correlate it? Our languages in their form and in their structure are a single language. They are the languages of this world but they are not—that we know of—languages of the universe. We’ve no reason to believe that there is, or could be, such a thing. We might further consider that the form of language and its usage have at once influenced our view of reality as indeed has our experience of the world continued to influence our language. There is little evidence for selection in the shaping of language. A good part of what we experience appears in the form of frozen accident. As indeed does a good part of human experience in general.

Debiasing language

ask the database “father : doctor :: mother : x” and it will say x = nurse. And the query “man : computer programmer :: woman : x” gives x = homemaker. In other words, the word embeddings can be dreadfully sexist. This happens because any bias in the articles that make up the Word2vec corpus is inevitably captured in the geometry of the vector space. “One might have hoped that the Google News embedding would exhibit little gender bias because many of its authors are professional journalists”.

if we can identify this reliably, we can remove the troglodyte voice completely

Future languges

The most ancient languages we know of are visibly impoverished compared to modern languages today. It just takes longer to say similar complex things in those languages. Assuming that the size and interconnectedness of populations speaking the main languages continues to increase into the future, we can make some obvious predictions about future languages.

After Aramaic

Aramaic is in a splintered and tenuous state. Yet it was the English of its time—a language that united a large number of distinct peoples across a vast region, a key to accessing life beyond one’s village, and a mark of sophistication to many. The Aramaeans themselves were in Babylon only temporarily: The Assyrians, who spoke a language called Akkadian, ousted them. But the Assyrians unwittingly helped the Aramaeans’ language extinguish their own. Namely, the Assyrians deported Aramaic-speakers far and wide, to Egypt and elsewhere. The Assyrians may have thought they were clearing their new territory, but this was like blowing on a fluffy milkweed and thinking of it as destruction rather than dissemination: The little seeds take root elsewhere. At this point, I am supposed to write that English’s preeminence could end as easily as Aramaic’s. Actually, however, I doubt it: I suspect that English will hold on harder and longer than any language in history. It happened to rise to its current position at a time when 3 things had happened, profoundly transformative enough to stop the music, as it were: print, widespread literacy, and an omnipresent media. Together, these things can drill a language into international consciousness in a historically unprecedented way, creating a sense of what is normal, cosmopolitan, cool even—arbitrary but possibly impregnable. If the Chinese, for example, rule the world someday, I suspect they will do it in English, just as King Darius ruled in Aramaic and Kublai Khan, despite speaking Mongolian, ruled China through Chinese translators 0.7 ka BP. Aramaic held sway at a time when a lingua franca was more fragile than it is today.

Gorilla speech

“She doesn’t produce a pretty, periodic sound when she performs these behaviors, like we do when we speak”. This suggests that some of the evolutionary groundwork for the human ability to speak was in place at least by the time of our last common ancestor with gorillas, estimated to be around 10M years ago.