3 ms·
Really brilliant article. Thanks! I'm wondering whether the premise of the language as not Turing complete holds up though. The article claims that the Piraha
by madair 17y ago
Really brilliant article. Thanks!
I'm wondering whether the premise of the language as not Turing complete holds up though. The article claims that the Piraha language lacks abstractions, including counting. Perhaps that could count as incompleteness, but I'm not so sure, and the article doesn't say enough to clear it up. Even if a person cannot use recursive linguistic forms, such as "I saw the dog by the river", they can say, "I saw the dog. The dog is by the river". Can they also say, "Another dog came to the river"? Is that enough context, without tracking the precise count?
Another thought, just because they don't care about a historical fact, is the fact that the story can be told in the language enough for completeness? Even without precise numeric counts?
Does Turing completeness even make sense as a description for a natural language?
- nwatson 17y agoI'm using "Turing complete", perhaps incorrectly, in the sense that Larry Wall (inventor of Perl) did in a related article at http://www.perl.com/lpt/a/997 http://www.perl.com/lpt/a/997, where he says: "Basically, you can say pretty much anything in any human language, if you work at it long enough. Human languages are Turing complete, as it were." Pirahã seems to be a language where expressing certain kinds of complex ideas doesn't work. Sure, one might say "I saw the dog. The dog is by the river." I'm not sure that's the same as "I saw the dog which bit me while I was down at the river yesterday looking for fresh-water oysters to feed my mother-in-law to impress her because she's telling my wife I'm a loser because my alligator hunting sucks." My impression is it's hard to express the latter thought in the language, even breaking it up into separate sentences, without using recursion, which the language lacks, at some point.
- wjdix 17y agoIt is not in fact impossible to express that sort of sentence in Piraha. Embedding is accomplished by "noun-ifying" a clause by adding "-sai". The debate is whether or not this suffix represents actual embedding/recusion. This debate has been discussed at length in Language and other sources.
- DougBTX 17y agoI'm not sure if this applies, but... can't you convert any recursive algorithm into a looping one? In which case iterating over the loop will let you say anything. But this seems to take the metaphor too far :-)