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I haven't seen Arrival myself but I had a discussion with someone who did and, boy, did he was extremely on the linguistic determinism side! After some remines

by thesz 10y ago

I haven't seen Arrival myself but I had a discussion with someone who did and, boy, did he was extremely on the linguistic determinism side! After some reminescence and analysis of the discussion I came to bold conclusion that defending strong Sapir-Worf hypothesis is very much akin to racism. Basically, you prohibit someone not fluent in the language of your choice the ability to see the world just like you do or even better. Just to give one food of thought - most of human languages are two-level (like van Wijngaarden two-level grammar) with the extremely outstanding examples like Nigerian (and I heard there are fixed-grammar languages here and there, but they are rare). Two-level grammars are Turing complete and thusly you can express any concept in most of them. The expression effort will differ at start but if concept is important enough it will be expressed concisely in every one of them. To quote B.Stroustrup "users require LOUD SYNTAX for new features and succinct syntax for familiar ones". Just like real languages evolve.

zingermc 10y ago
Maybe I'm being too literal, but how can a grammar be Turing complete? The usual definition of Turing completeness is being able to simulate an arbitrary Turing machine. Typical human languages don't do beta reductions like Lambda Calculus, so I fail to see how a grammar (or the language produced by the grammar) can be said to compute anything.
- aleeds 10y ago
  From what I understand, the idea is you have some string S and an input T, and running a grammar G on ST will produce an output. Sometimes they won't halt. Just like a Turing machine. In this analogy G is the 'universal Turing machine'
  - zingermc 10y ago
    Interesting! I think I am starting to get it. To double check, is running a grammar the same as parsing?
    - thesz 10y ago
      The two-level grammars are doing things in two steps: parsing of part of the text yields a grammar for parsing the rest of it. The Algol-68 was specified using two level grammar and if I understand it correctly, the declaration part constrained parsing of the statement part so that only valid expressions can be parsed. Parsed statements are valid in the semantic sense, i.e., the subscription can be applied only to array values and parser will reject subscription for scalar values. To generate the grammar you need to execute some function. And this function depends on the part of input.
      - zingermc 10y ago
        Wow, the two-level grammar concept is incredible! I have some learning to do. Thank you for sharing.
- mcguire 10y ago
  Regular expressions = regular languages. Stack machines = context free languages = primitive recursive functions. (?) Turingmachines = context sensitive languages = total recursive functions. (?) Or something like that.
  - thesz 10y ago
    You are wrong. Primitive recursive functions alone are able to recognize formal languages: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PR_(complexity) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PR_(complexity) PR is the complexity class of all primitive recursive functions—or, equivalently, the set of all formal languages that can be decided by such a function.

by thesz 10y ago

zingermc 10y ago

Maybe I'm being too literal, but how can a grammar be Turing complete? The usual definition of Turing completeness is being able to simulate an arbitrary Turing machine. Typical human languages don't do beta reductions like Lambda Calculus, so I fail to see how a grammar (or the language produced by the grammar) can be said to compute anything.

aleeds 10y ago
From what I understand, the idea is you have some string S and an input T, and running a grammar G on ST will produce an output. Sometimes they won't halt. Just like a Turing machine. In this analogy G is the 'universal Turing machine'
- zingermc 10y ago
  Interesting! I think I am starting to get it. To double check, is running a grammar the same as parsing?
  - thesz 10y ago
    The two-level grammars are doing things in two steps: parsing of part of the text yields a grammar for parsing the rest of it. The Algol-68 was specified using two level grammar and if I understand it correctly, the declaration part constrained parsing of the statement part so that only valid expressions can be parsed. Parsed statements are valid in the semantic sense, i.e., the subscription can be applied only to array values and parser will reject subscription for scalar values. To generate the grammar you need to execute some function. And this function depends on the part of input.
    - zingermc 10y ago
      Wow, the two-level grammar concept is incredible! I have some learning to do. Thank you for sharing.
mcguire 10y ago
Regular expressions = regular languages. Stack machines = context free languages = primitive recursive functions. (?) Turingmachines = context sensitive languages = total recursive functions. (?) Or something like that.
- thesz 10y ago
  You are wrong. Primitive recursive functions alone are able to recognize formal languages: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PR_(complexity) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PR_(complexity) PR is the complexity class of all primitive recursive functions—or, equivalently, the set of all formal languages that can be decided by such a function.