7 ms·

Talking is throwing fictional worlds at one another

69 points by dnetesn 6y ago

dgellow 6y ago
The title is a bit clickbaity, but some parts of the article were interesting (there is a lot of noise though, if what you’re looking for are technical details). In case some of you are interested by the “merge” structure they mention, you can look for “Minimalist Program”, by Chomsky and others. That’s where it comes from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimalist_program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimalist_program
- 082349872349872 6y ago
  relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/2043/ https://xkcd.com/2043/ I've worked with some clever animals, and agree they didn't show any signs of recursive embedding (they "lex" but don't "parse"), but must note that modern anglophone humans are relatively embedding-impoverished compared with prior centuries, a reduction which we can observe in comparing the number of stack levels necessary to parse the subordinations and coordinations[1] in the dendritic periods of the 1st president of the US with the number necessary to parse the sequential utterances of the most recent. [1] https://www.archives.gov/exhibits/american_originals/inaugtxt.html https://www.archives.gov/exhibits/american_originals/inaugtx... > "In these honorable qualifications, I behold the surest pledges, that as on one side, no local prejudices, or attachments; no separate views, nor party animosities, will misdirect the comprehensive and equal eye which ought to watch over this great assemblage of communities and interests: so, on another, that the foundations of our National policy will be laid in the pure and immutable principles of private morality; and the pre-eminence of a free Government, be exemplified by all the attributes which can win the affections of its Citizens, and command the respect of the world."
  - throwaway_pdp09 6y ago
    I'm not a linguist but that to me is more a list (a sequence of qualifiers) than a recursion (a nesting). However, a quick browse shows I'm wrong so for those who also aren't sure https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/3252/what-is-recursion https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/3252/what-is... https://www.thoughtco.com/recursion-grammar-1691901 https://www.thoughtco.com/recursion-grammar-1691901
    - ppod 6y ago
      I'm not sure that those links completely show that you're wrong. The example you're replying to appears deeper than it is because each nested element is quite broad, so the absolute depth is not as much as it might seem (I think).
      - 082349872349872 6y ago
        Agreed, there are listings, but even they are not always just a flat unary tree. For instance, there's the structure within the listing of: (no ((local prejudices) or (attachments)) no (separate views) nor (party animosities)) which is itself embedded within ... will misdirect ... as on one side ... so, on another, ... etc.
    - 082349872349872 6y ago
      Try diagramming that sentence. (base: "I behold pledges") Even just the last few words of that sentence: ... exemplified by all the attributes which can win the affections of its Citizens, and command the respect of the world. have more structure than the pair of sentences: On @foxandfriends Now Enjoy
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
    Re: the XKCD strip While "carhouse" may not be a thing, you might be surprised to learn of the existence of a "car condo" (or "motor condo"): https://www.irongatemotorcondos.com/ https://www.irongatemotorcondos.com/ Yes, really. This business not only exists, but is thriving.
  - kortex 6y ago
    I've been working on a conlang based on word vectors and "morphemes are phonemes", a very tight coupling between the syllables and semantics (it's an abugida but written in ascii). Gu=earth, va=motion, mu=machine, things like that. Initially there was no requirement for order of the morphemes, guvamu=muvagu=vagumu, whatever sounded best. Then I ran smack into, "what's the difference between a ground vehicle (car) and an earth-mover?" So I needed recursion and a bit more grammar to make this hierarchical word fusion work better.
    - ummwhat 6y ago
      This reminds me a lot of Chinese. Many of the words are 2-3 character descriptions. Eg the word for machine is used as a suffix for flying machine (airplane), thinking machine (computer), washing machine etc. For historical reasons related to steam engines, the word for train roughly translates as fire machine. Another good example is how ying can be combined with the character for land to describe England (ying guo), further combined with people to describe the English (ying guo ren), or combined with the character for writing to describe English (ying wen). The same thing works for France (fa guo), Germany (de guo), America (mei guo) etc. It also works with the generic word for foreign. Foreign country (wai guo), foreigner (wai guo ren), foreign language (wai wen). My personal favorite is the word for faucet translates as "water dragons head".
fiblye 6y ago
The note about the Piraha language not having embedding is incredibly interesting. Example taken from Wikipedia: >Everett stated that Pirahã cannot say "John's brother's house" but must say, "John has a brother. This brother has a house." in two separate sentences. Compounding this on the apparent lack of numbers/counting, expressing higher order concepts seems like it'd be borderline impossible in the language as-is. I wonder if many other languages started out "simple" like this, and developed grammatical complexity alongside their society? Of course, the issue here could just be a lack of understanding and insufficient ability to ask questions to native speakers by people researching it. It only has 250 speakers and picking it up as a second language with zero resources leaves plenty of room for error. More recent research suggests it might be possible, but no non-native speakers are really sure.
- WaxProlix 6y ago
  Everett is an extremely controversial figure within linguistics, to put it very mildly. Recursive embedding is one of the foundational marks of human language (though not the only), and finding a natural language without it would cast long shadows across the existing literature while making that language's "discoverer" very famous. His data have been challenged by a number of other linguists, despite Everett's attempts to keep others from access to first hand sources. Note too that the existence of alternate constructions such as "John has a brother. This brother has a house." do not preclude the language's ability to accommodate embedding. Anyway, I'm no orthodox Chomskyist (in part because I'm not well enough educated to be:) but I think all of Everett's claims should be taken with as many grains of salt as we can find in our immediate vicinity.
  - derriz 6y ago
    Traces of recursion have been found in animal "language" also - https://www.nature.com/scitable/blog/cognoculture/the_less_human_humans_recursion/ https://www.nature.com/scitable/blog/cognoculture/the_less_h... describes recursive elements to certain bird song. More recently here's a recent experiment - https://cosmosmagazine.com/people/behaviour/complex-linguistic-feature-not-unique-to-humans/ https://cosmosmagazine.com/people/behaviour/complex-linguist... - which seems to show that some primates have similar "recursive" reasoning skills as young (under 4) children.
j-pb 6y ago
Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/114/ https://xkcd.com/114/
- howlgarnish 6y ago
  I'm generally a fan, but that's quite possibly the least funny XKCD ever.
  - j-pb 6y ago
    My computational linguist friend disagrees and asked me to design this for his iPad: https://m.imgur.com/gallery/oPzM8U7 https://m.imgur.com/gallery/oPzM8U7
KhoomeiK 6y ago
Shameless plug for my essay [1] that discusses some similar ideas to this article. I focus more in-depth on what the consequences of compositional grammar are for ML-based NLP and why we should be looking to theories of psycholinguistics and philosophy of language for inspiration as a research community. [1] https://rohan.bearblog.dev/humans-spoke-vectors/ https://rohan.bearblog.dev/humans-spoke-vectors/
eindiran 6y ago
I feel like the Piraha stuff comes up every so often, and I feel obligated each time to link to the famous Nevins and Pesetsky rebuttal: https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/94631/Nevins-2009-PIRAHA%20EXCEPTIONALIT.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/94631/Nevins-... Beyond the disagreement about what recursion is (as used to define the faculty of language narrow (FLN), from the Chomsky, Hauser, Fitch paper mentioned in the interview), there are significant problems with Everett's argument in general which are covered quite well in the rebuttal.
- derriz 6y ago
  Here's Evert's response to the rebuttal: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/215992069_Cultural_constraints_on_grammar_in_Piraha_A_reply_to_Nevins_Pesetsky_and_Rodrigues_2007 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/215992069_Cultural_...
  - bloak 6y ago
    It doesn't inspire confidence that the German examples in that response are all wrong. But I can recommend Everett's book "Don't sleep, there are snakes", which is only partly about language.
    - derriz 6y ago
      I'm curious (having some basic German) what's wrong with the German examples? Isn't most of the German taken from the article he is responding to? edit - actually I think I see it - he's not inflecting the articles correctly after "von"?
      - Zickzack 6y ago
        The claim is that "the English possessive is potentially recursive, while the Saxon genitive [its counterpart in German] is not". I think they are confusing some issues. And by the way, I thought Saxon genitive was a term from English grammar. Anyhow, in German, you can use the Saxon genitive in preposition, if the word in Genitive can be used like a personal name: "ich sehe Karls Auto". And it is true that you cannot recurse on that: "ich sehe Karls Bruders Auto" is not German, except maybe in German poems two hundred years ago, when the language was raped. Even "ich sehe meines Vaters Auto" will sound outside of the norm. However, you can recurse in postposition: "ich sehe das Auto meines Vaters", "ich sehe das Auto des Bruders meines Vaters". You do not have to say "ich sehe das Auto vom Bruder von meinem Vater". Several edits, sorry.
kieckerjan 6y ago
Interesting interview, but weird that the interviewer pulls the title "Talking Is Throwing Fictional Worlds at One Another" from his own words, not the interviewee's. I guess he was rather smitten with his own turn of phrase.
- fuzzfactor 6y ago
  _The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense._ ― Tom Clancy
- hashkb 6y ago
  And wanted to prove his own point.
azangru 6y ago
> Despite that seeming constraint, Adger argues in his new book, Language Unlimited, that the sentences we make are infinite in faculty, form, and expression. This is such a journalist thing to write. The idea that the number of sentences that can be produced using a given language is potentially infinite is such an old one that it hardly has anything to do with Adger, and Adger hardly needed to "argue" it.
ppod 6y ago
> We don’t do this by putting the two words in a sequence, like an artificial intelligence or a bonobo would do. Instead we build a new hierarchical unit. This unit puts together the verb drink with the noun wine to create the phrase drink wine, with wine being the grammatical object of drink. AI can do compositionality.
aerovistae 6y ago
I wish this had less of a clickbait title. I have no idea what the article is about other than linguistics.
klunger 6y ago
"I think about it like even numbers. There’s an unlimited number of even numbers but obviously they’re limited, right? Because 3s and 7s aren’t in there. Language is like that. There’s an unlimited number of possible things we can say, of sentence structures, but not anything can be a sentence structure. So you’re absolutely right. Language is unlimited, but it’s unlimited in a limited way." This is such a tantalizing idea, but there doesn't seem to be anyway to extend it beyond "we don't know what it would be like to think with a different language paradigm, but it would probably be different." I want to know how human thoughts are shaped and constrained by human language.
- 082349872349872 6y ago
  an attempt: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23856845 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23856845 or Story of Your Life Formal diagrams (still potentially unbounded combinations of a bounded symbolic repertoire, but connected in more than just a temporal dimension) are as close as I can think of at the moment. Anyone know of more recent work on https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/2002/01/UsingTensorDiagrams.pdf https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/... ?
- dorchadas 6y ago
  The issue, in my opinion, is separating the fact from the language shaping the thought to the thought shaping the language. It quickly leads into strong linguistic relativity, which has been proven wrong. And even the weak form, in my opinion, isn't very strong proof that it's necessarily a specific language, as opposed to cultural influences, affecting it.

69 points by dnetesn 6y ago

The title is a bit clickbaity, but some parts of the article were interesting (there is a lot of noise though, if what you’re looking for are technical details). In case some of you are interested by the “merge” structure they mention, you can look for “Minimalist Program”, by Chomsky and others. That’s where it comes from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimalist_program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimalist_program

082349872349872 6y ago
relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/2043/ https://xkcd.com/2043/ I've worked with some clever animals, and agree they didn't show any signs of recursive embedding (they "lex" but don't "parse"), but must note that modern anglophone humans are relatively embedding-impoverished compared with prior centuries, a reduction which we can observe in comparing the number of stack levels necessary to parse the subordinations and coordinations[1] in the dendritic periods of the 1st president of the US with the number necessary to parse the sequential utterances of the most recent. [1] https://www.archives.gov/exhibits/american_originals/inaugtxt.html https://www.archives.gov/exhibits/american_originals/inaugtx... > "In these honorable qualifications, I behold the surest pledges, that as on one side, no local prejudices, or attachments; no separate views, nor party animosities, will misdirect the comprehensive and equal eye which ought to watch over this great assemblage of communities and interests: so, on another, that the foundations of our National policy will be laid in the pure and immutable principles of private morality; and the pre-eminence of a free Government, be exemplified by all the attributes which can win the affections of its Citizens, and command the respect of the world."
- throwaway_pdp09 6y ago
  I'm not a linguist but that to me is more a list (a sequence of qualifiers) than a recursion (a nesting). However, a quick browse shows I'm wrong so for those who also aren't sure https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/3252/what-is-recursion https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/3252/what-is... https://www.thoughtco.com/recursion-grammar-1691901 https://www.thoughtco.com/recursion-grammar-1691901
  - ppod 6y ago
    I'm not sure that those links completely show that you're wrong. The example you're replying to appears deeper than it is because each nested element is quite broad, so the absolute depth is not as much as it might seem (I think).
    - 082349872349872 6y ago
      Agreed, there are listings, but even they are not always just a flat unary tree. For instance, there's the structure within the listing of: (no ((local prejudices) or (attachments)) no (separate views) nor (party animosities)) which is itself embedded within ... will misdirect ... as on one side ... so, on another, ... etc.
  - 082349872349872 6y ago
    Try diagramming that sentence. (base: "I behold pledges") Even just the last few words of that sentence: ... exemplified by all the attributes which can win the affections of its Citizens, and command the respect of the world. have more structure than the pair of sentences: On @foxandfriends Now Enjoy
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
  Re: the XKCD strip While "carhouse" may not be a thing, you might be surprised to learn of the existence of a "car condo" (or "motor condo"): https://www.irongatemotorcondos.com/ https://www.irongatemotorcondos.com/ Yes, really. This business not only exists, but is thriving.
- kortex 6y ago
  I've been working on a conlang based on word vectors and "morphemes are phonemes", a very tight coupling between the syllables and semantics (it's an abugida but written in ascii). Gu=earth, va=motion, mu=machine, things like that. Initially there was no requirement for order of the morphemes, guvamu=muvagu=vagumu, whatever sounded best. Then I ran smack into, "what's the difference between a ground vehicle (car) and an earth-mover?" So I needed recursion and a bit more grammar to make this hierarchical word fusion work better.
  - ummwhat 6y ago
    This reminds me a lot of Chinese. Many of the words are 2-3 character descriptions. Eg the word for machine is used as a suffix for flying machine (airplane), thinking machine (computer), washing machine etc. For historical reasons related to steam engines, the word for train roughly translates as fire machine. Another good example is how ying can be combined with the character for land to describe England (ying guo), further combined with people to describe the English (ying guo ren), or combined with the character for writing to describe English (ying wen). The same thing works for France (fa guo), Germany (de guo), America (mei guo) etc. It also works with the generic word for foreign. Foreign country (wai guo), foreigner (wai guo ren), foreign language (wai wen). My personal favorite is the word for faucet translates as "water dragons head".

fiblye 6y ago

The note about the Piraha language not having embedding is incredibly interesting. Example taken from Wikipedia: >Everett stated that Pirahã cannot say "John's brother's house" but must say, "John has a brother. This brother has a house." in two separate sentences. Compounding this on the apparent lack of numbers/counting, expressing higher order concepts seems like it'd be borderline impossible in the language as-is. I wonder if many other languages started out "simple" like this, and developed grammatical complexity alongside their society? Of course, the issue here could just be a lack of understanding and insufficient ability to ask questions to native speakers by people researching it. It only has 250 speakers and picking it up as a second language with zero resources leaves plenty of room for error. More recent research suggests it might be possible, but no non-native speakers are really sure.

WaxProlix 6y ago
Everett is an extremely controversial figure within linguistics, to put it very mildly. Recursive embedding is one of the foundational marks of human language (though not the only), and finding a natural language without it would cast long shadows across the existing literature while making that language's "discoverer" very famous. His data have been challenged by a number of other linguists, despite Everett's attempts to keep others from access to first hand sources. Note too that the existence of alternate constructions such as "John has a brother. This brother has a house." do not preclude the language's ability to accommodate embedding. Anyway, I'm no orthodox Chomskyist (in part because I'm not well enough educated to be:) but I think all of Everett's claims should be taken with as many grains of salt as we can find in our immediate vicinity.
- derriz 6y ago
  Traces of recursion have been found in animal "language" also - https://www.nature.com/scitable/blog/cognoculture/the_less_human_humans_recursion/ https://www.nature.com/scitable/blog/cognoculture/the_less_h... describes recursive elements to certain bird song. More recently here's a recent experiment - https://cosmosmagazine.com/people/behaviour/complex-linguistic-feature-not-unique-to-humans/ https://cosmosmagazine.com/people/behaviour/complex-linguist... - which seems to show that some primates have similar "recursive" reasoning skills as young (under 4) children.

j-pb 6y ago

Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/114/ https://xkcd.com/114/

howlgarnish 6y ago
I'm generally a fan, but that's quite possibly the least funny XKCD ever.
- j-pb 6y ago
  My computational linguist friend disagrees and asked me to design this for his iPad: https://m.imgur.com/gallery/oPzM8U7 https://m.imgur.com/gallery/oPzM8U7

KhoomeiK 6y ago

Shameless plug for my essay [1] that discusses some similar ideas to this article. I focus more in-depth on what the consequences of compositional grammar are for ML-based NLP and why we should be looking to theories of psycholinguistics and philosophy of language for inspiration as a research community. [1] https://rohan.bearblog.dev/humans-spoke-vectors/ https://rohan.bearblog.dev/humans-spoke-vectors/

eindiran 6y ago

I feel like the Piraha stuff comes up every so often, and I feel obligated each time to link to the famous Nevins and Pesetsky rebuttal: https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/94631/Nevins-2009-PIRAHA%20EXCEPTIONALIT.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/94631/Nevins-... Beyond the disagreement about what recursion is (as used to define the faculty of language narrow (FLN), from the Chomsky, Hauser, Fitch paper mentioned in the interview), there are significant problems with Everett's argument in general which are covered quite well in the rebuttal.

derriz 6y ago
Here's Evert's response to the rebuttal: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/215992069_Cultural_constraints_on_grammar_in_Piraha_A_reply_to_Nevins_Pesetsky_and_Rodrigues_2007 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/215992069_Cultural_...
- bloak 6y ago
  It doesn't inspire confidence that the German examples in that response are all wrong. But I can recommend Everett's book "Don't sleep, there are snakes", which is only partly about language.
  - derriz 6y ago
    I'm curious (having some basic German) what's wrong with the German examples? Isn't most of the German taken from the article he is responding to? edit - actually I think I see it - he's not inflecting the articles correctly after "von"?
    - Zickzack 6y ago
      The claim is that "the English possessive is potentially recursive, while the Saxon genitive [its counterpart in German] is not". I think they are confusing some issues. And by the way, I thought Saxon genitive was a term from English grammar. Anyhow, in German, you can use the Saxon genitive in preposition, if the word in Genitive can be used like a personal name: "ich sehe Karls Auto". And it is true that you cannot recurse on that: "ich sehe Karls Bruders Auto" is not German, except maybe in German poems two hundred years ago, when the language was raped. Even "ich sehe meines Vaters Auto" will sound outside of the norm. However, you can recurse in postposition: "ich sehe das Auto meines Vaters", "ich sehe das Auto des Bruders meines Vaters". You do not have to say "ich sehe das Auto vom Bruder von meinem Vater". Several edits, sorry.

kieckerjan 6y ago

Interesting interview, but weird that the interviewer pulls the title "Talking Is Throwing Fictional Worlds at One Another" from his own words, not the interviewee's. I guess he was rather smitten with his own turn of phrase.

fuzzfactor 6y ago
_The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense._ ― Tom Clancy
hashkb 6y ago
And wanted to prove his own point.

azangru 6y ago

> Despite that seeming constraint, Adger argues in his new book, Language Unlimited, that the sentences we make are infinite in faculty, form, and expression. This is such a journalist thing to write. The idea that the number of sentences that can be produced using a given language is potentially infinite is such an old one that it hardly has anything to do with Adger, and Adger hardly needed to "argue" it.

ppod 6y ago

> We don’t do this by putting the two words in a sequence, like an artificial intelligence or a bonobo would do. Instead we build a new hierarchical unit. This unit puts together the verb drink with the noun wine to create the phrase drink wine, with wine being the grammatical object of drink. AI can do compositionality.

aerovistae 6y ago

I wish this had less of a clickbait title. I have no idea what the article is about other than linguistics.

klunger 6y ago

"I think about it like even numbers. There’s an unlimited number of even numbers but obviously they’re limited, right? Because 3s and 7s aren’t in there. Language is like that. There’s an unlimited number of possible things we can say, of sentence structures, but not anything can be a sentence structure. So you’re absolutely right. Language is unlimited, but it’s unlimited in a limited way." This is such a tantalizing idea, but there doesn't seem to be anyway to extend it beyond "we don't know what it would be like to think with a different language paradigm, but it would probably be different." I want to know how human thoughts are shaped and constrained by human language.

082349872349872 6y ago
an attempt: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23856845 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23856845 or Story of Your Life Formal diagrams (still potentially unbounded combinations of a bounded symbolic repertoire, but connected in more than just a temporal dimension) are as close as I can think of at the moment. Anyone know of more recent work on https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/2002/01/UsingTensorDiagrams.pdf https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/... ?
dorchadas 6y ago
The issue, in my opinion, is separating the fact from the language shaping the thought to the thought shaping the language. It quickly leads into strong linguistic relativity, which has been proven wrong. And even the weak form, in my opinion, isn't very strong proof that it's necessarily a specific language, as opposed to cultural influences, affecting it.