4 ms·

Nothing on the size of ABSL's vocabulary. Is there a linguistics notion of turing completeness? Ie. How do I know if a language is capable of expressing any pos

Nothing on the size of ABSL's vocabulary. Is there a linguistics notion of turing completeness? Ie. How do I know if a language is capable of expressing any possible concept ("program")? Is this even a meaningful question? Also note that ABSL is only around 100 years old, and see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Sayyid_Bedouin_Sign_Language https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Sayyid_Bedouin_Sign_Langu...

sametmax 9y ago
You can't because we don't know any possible concept, nor do we know if we can even conceive them, so we can't prove a language can express them. Plus we already have concepts we can't express. We can't share what looks like the resulting feeling in your mind of something the other never encounter, like a color to a blind man or a sound to a deaf girl. There are many feeling and sensations that you encounter in your life you can't define. We can't define what we don't know either. E.G: we can't define whatever happen after death because we don't know about it. At last, some practices, like meditation, make you (quite surprisely) discovers some very simple things, yet it seems quite impossible to share it using words with another person. Here knowledge and complexity are not the issue. It's just that labelling is not a silver bullet for communication.
- bcherny 9y ago
  Aren't you confusing language with understanding? In computer terms (which I'm more familiar with) this is the difference between expressing a program in some language vs evaluating that program.
  - sametmax 9y ago
    A program that can be evaluated only by the coder who wrote it is kinda useless.
    - crawfordcomeaux 9y ago
      Unless you think of programs as having a general structure with specific parts to be filled in by the coder before or during evaluation. This is how we can design a language for communicating general solutions to people's individual internal issues. Like self-help mad libs.
  - astrodust 9y ago
    A Turing machine is a very simple device. Evaluating if something is "Turing complete" is simply determining if it can function like a Turing machine. Compare this with trying to define the "set of all possible concepts". What does that even look like? What is a concept? How can it be expressed? Concepts are a lot more nuanced than bare 1s and 0s because there's subjective meaning applied to them. The complexity here is that concepts are generally recursive, they have intricate links to other concepts, which in turn link to others.
    - OscarCunningham 9y ago
      In the same way, "Turing complete" might not mean "capable of doing any possible computation". It could be that there are some computations that can be performed but not by a Turing machine. This is uncertain enough that we call it the Church-Turing Thesis. But it's hard to describe the notion of "every possible computation", so instead we compare things relative to Turning machines. We could do the same thing with languages. Say a language is "English complete" if it can express at least everything expressible in English. I suspect all commonly used modern languages are English complete. The most obvious way I can see that a language would fail to be complete would be if it lacked nonce words or any equivalent device.
      - astrodust 9y ago
        > I suspect all commonly used modern languages are English complete... English is just one language, and while perhaps unusually expressive because of the amount of abuse it's received over the centuries, plus its ability to wholesale absorb new words on a whim, it is incapable of expressing some things with the same degree of succinctness and precision other languages have. There are words in other languages that take a paragraph to explain in English because of all the cultural context they contain, or because they refer to things that most people who speak English have never seen, nor felt a need to describe with that degree of precision. The problem with using English as a basis is it's very hard to explain in English what the language is incapable of expressing. This is like a fish trying to explain what they can do on land when the very concept of land is hazy at best.
- custos 9y ago
  What you're referring to are known as Qualia. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia
  - sametmax 9y ago
    TIL
  - kbenson 9y ago
    Under the assumption that the whole "you need to be exposed to something X times before you really remember it" thing is true, I love when I get reintroduced to stuff like this that I've completely forgotten about since it was last mentioned.
schoen 9y ago
One theory about what you need for universality is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_semantic_metalanguage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_semantic_metalanguage (but I'm not sure how much support it's received from other people). This approach is about investigating what you would need in order to start defining other vocabulary that would let you eventually define all of the vocabulary that any language uses. However, this could be seen as an artificial process that doesn't imply that the NSM itself can be used directly for complex communication (since perhaps the definitions for many common everyday concepts might end up running to book-length). I'm also not sure how they've thought about ostensive definitions, to help distinguish things like particular colors or particular animal and plant species. I've used toki pona, which is a deliberately small constructed language that aims to make it inconvenient to say certain kinds of things. And indeed, it is very hard to unambiguously refer to particular species, other than by ostension and subsequent convention in a particular speaker pair or community.
Florin_Andrei 9y ago
It's very tempting to think that ad-hoc linguistic experiments like this have appeared and disappeared all the time through history, with only the "fittest" surviving today.
hashmal 9y ago
There is no such thing as a kind of turing completeness in linguistics. natural languages are not even finite and are rarely used to express "computations."
- jfoutz 9y ago
  Infinite tape is a requirement for Turing completeness. A whole lot of language is used for making sets of things, and inclusion or exclusion from those sets. Take, for example, your comment. And mine. Maybe set definitions and memberships aren't computation though. I think they are, but I'm a fuzzy thinker.

sametmax 9y ago

You can't because we don't know any possible concept, nor do we know if we can even conceive them, so we can't prove a language can express them. Plus we already have concepts we can't express. We can't share what looks like the resulting feeling in your mind of something the other never encounter, like a color to a blind man or a sound to a deaf girl. There are many feeling and sensations that you encounter in your life you can't define. We can't define what we don't know either. E.G: we can't define whatever happen after death because we don't know about it. At last, some practices, like meditation, make you (quite surprisely) discovers some very simple things, yet it seems quite impossible to share it using words with another person. Here knowledge and complexity are not the issue. It's just that labelling is not a silver bullet for communication.

bcherny 9y ago
Aren't you confusing language with understanding? In computer terms (which I'm more familiar with) this is the difference between expressing a program in some language vs evaluating that program.
- sametmax 9y ago
  A program that can be evaluated only by the coder who wrote it is kinda useless.
  - crawfordcomeaux 9y ago
    Unless you think of programs as having a general structure with specific parts to be filled in by the coder before or during evaluation. This is how we can design a language for communicating general solutions to people's individual internal issues. Like self-help mad libs.
- astrodust 9y ago
  A Turing machine is a very simple device. Evaluating if something is "Turing complete" is simply determining if it can function like a Turing machine. Compare this with trying to define the "set of all possible concepts". What does that even look like? What is a concept? How can it be expressed? Concepts are a lot more nuanced than bare 1s and 0s because there's subjective meaning applied to them. The complexity here is that concepts are generally recursive, they have intricate links to other concepts, which in turn link to others.
  - OscarCunningham 9y ago
    In the same way, "Turing complete" might not mean "capable of doing any possible computation". It could be that there are some computations that can be performed but not by a Turing machine. This is uncertain enough that we call it the Church-Turing Thesis. But it's hard to describe the notion of "every possible computation", so instead we compare things relative to Turning machines. We could do the same thing with languages. Say a language is "English complete" if it can express at least everything expressible in English. I suspect all commonly used modern languages are English complete. The most obvious way I can see that a language would fail to be complete would be if it lacked nonce words or any equivalent device.
    - astrodust 9y ago
      > I suspect all commonly used modern languages are English complete... English is just one language, and while perhaps unusually expressive because of the amount of abuse it's received over the centuries, plus its ability to wholesale absorb new words on a whim, it is incapable of expressing some things with the same degree of succinctness and precision other languages have. There are words in other languages that take a paragraph to explain in English because of all the cultural context they contain, or because they refer to things that most people who speak English have never seen, nor felt a need to describe with that degree of precision. The problem with using English as a basis is it's very hard to explain in English what the language is incapable of expressing. This is like a fish trying to explain what they can do on land when the very concept of land is hazy at best.
custos 9y ago
What you're referring to are known as Qualia. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia
- sametmax 9y ago
  TIL
- kbenson 9y ago
  Under the assumption that the whole "you need to be exposed to something X times before you really remember it" thing is true, I love when I get reintroduced to stuff like this that I've completely forgotten about since it was last mentioned.

schoen 9y ago

One theory about what you need for universality is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_semantic_metalanguage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_semantic_metalanguage (but I'm not sure how much support it's received from other people). This approach is about investigating what you would need in order to start defining other vocabulary that would let you eventually define all of the vocabulary that any language uses. However, this could be seen as an artificial process that doesn't imply that the NSM itself can be used directly for complex communication (since perhaps the definitions for many common everyday concepts might end up running to book-length). I'm also not sure how they've thought about ostensive definitions, to help distinguish things like particular colors or particular animal and plant species. I've used toki pona, which is a deliberately small constructed language that aims to make it inconvenient to say certain kinds of things. And indeed, it is very hard to unambiguously refer to particular species, other than by ostension and subsequent convention in a particular speaker pair or community.

Florin_Andrei 9y ago

It's very tempting to think that ad-hoc linguistic experiments like this have appeared and disappeared all the time through history, with only the "fittest" surviving today.

hashmal 9y ago

There is no such thing as a kind of turing completeness in linguistics. natural languages are not even finite and are rarely used to express "computations."

jfoutz 9y ago
Infinite tape is a requirement for Turing completeness. A whole lot of language is used for making sets of things, and inclusion or exclusion from those sets. Take, for example, your comment. And mine. Maybe set definitions and memberships aren't computation though. I think they are, but I'm a fuzzy thinker.