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Since they only investigated 37 languages, isn't this only really evidence that they found a feature that ties 98% (~= (38/39) of languages together? Languages
by powera 11y ago
Since they only investigated 37 languages, isn't this only really evidence that they found a feature that ties 98% (~= (38/39) of languages together? Languages are known for having a few outliers with completely crazy rules.
Also, if two sentences are considered together, the average DLM would be significantly lower for those sentences than for one random sentence of the same length. So I'm not sure what this theory implies other than "the definition of a sentence can be vague".
- protomyth 11y agoDoes anyone have a list of the 37 languages used?
- krasin 11y agoIt's on the page 3 in the paper: Ancient Greek, Arabic, Basque, Bengali, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latin, Modern Greek, Persian, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Tamil, Telugu, Turkish
- tlb 11y ago70% (26/37) of those are Indo-European (I think). No Amerindian, Polynesian, or Austronesian languages represented.
- jcranmer 11y agoIndonesian is an Austronesian language. Actually, more important is the lack of Niger-Congo languages--these are the most numerous by number.
- BossHogg 11y agoNor a single indigenous African language which I find particularly strange given Africa's somewhat central (/s) role in human developmental history.
- Tuna-Fish 11y agoI count 24 indo-european languages. Not indo-european: Arabic, Basque, Chinese, Estonian, Finnish, Hungarian, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, Tamil, Telugu, Turkish, Hebrew Your point still stands.
- canjobear 11y agoI'd love to have more interesting languages in the sample. If you speak such a language, and you are willing to parse ~2000 sentences for me, get in touch :)
- protomyth 11y agoDid you approach any of the Native Americans tribes? The Navajo in particular are very up on promoting their language (they even translated Star Wars).
- lisivka 11y agoRussian language is artificial language: it is created by Mikhail Lomonosov. It is based on language used in Russian (at Kiev Rus`) churches (so it have "Russian" in it name), which, in turn, is created by two Greeks: Cyril and Methodius using Greek alphabet and South Slavic language. It is better to use natural Slavic language, such as Polish or Ukrainian.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- dang 11y agoPlease keep nationalist politics off HN.
- ArkyBeagle 11y agoThere's a reasonably well-supported taxonomy of languages, so sample size sufficiency is for experts only.
- canjobear 11y agoLead author here. It's true that longer sentences will have longer dependency length on average. That was one of the big methodological problems with previous papers that tried to show this. In the paper, we deal with this by doing stats on dependency length growth rate as sentences get longer, rather than averaging dependency lengths from sentences of different length. I'm sure that among the 7000 languages of the world there are some that don't minimize dependency length. But I'd be content showing it's an overwhelming tendency rather than a true "universal"!