5 ms·

Inuttitut, a language shaped by humility, poetry, and the land

76 points by diaphanous 6y ago

howlgarnish 6y ago
Breaking news: language is optimized to communicate concepts its speakers find useful. Meanwhile, how's the canary config for the Kubernetes L7 ingress coming along?
- diN0bot 6y ago
  i found this article interesting and beautiful, and your snarky comment unhelpful.
  - mhh__ 6y ago
    snarky comment = joke
  - howlgarnish 6y ago
    Sorry for the snark, but if you have even a casual interest in linguistics, the concept of linguistic relativity (aka Sapir-Whorf hypothesis), namely that the language you speak determines/affects your world view, has been done to death: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity This article presents yet another pop-sci version of this, with a fair dose of the "noble savage" trope to boot: > Our current climate crisis is the direct result of this unbridled exploitation ... the language had a harmonious relationship with the environment ... Could the rich vocabulary of the Inuit inspire us to redefine our relationship with nature? No, it doesn't work that way, because the strong version of the hypothesis is essentially disproven (in geek terms, all natural languages are "Turing-complete" and can be used to express anything) and evidence even for the weak version is, well, weak. Correlation does not imply causation, and Western culture won't change if we import a few more Inuit words into it.
    - dxdm 6y ago
      This is a much more useful expansion of your original comment, thank you! :)
    - pksebben 6y ago
      "Sorry, but" is a poor substitute for "my bad". The error being pointed out to you is that your tone is dismissive, which this diatribe did nothing to correct. The culture people are trying to cultivate here is one that actively avoids suppressing ideas, and dismissiveness is antithetical to that end. Furthermore, the conversation on linguistic relativism is far from done and dusted. The distinction you make between "strong" and "weak" forms sort of shows a loose grasp on the subject matter. I'm also more than a little stumped trying to figure out what correlation you meant. ... that's also not what "Turing complete" means.
      - howlgarnish 6y ago
        Correct, I'm dismissive because I don't think the article is saying anything particularly interesting or even correct. You're welcome to disagree, which is why we're arguing here in the comments section :) As far as I tell (it's not my story after all), the author appears to be asserting that Inuktitut is somehow uniquely in tune with nature in general (dubious) and that we could change the way the Western world acts by absorbing some of those words (which sounds like linguistic determinism to me, not to mention even more dubious). As for Turing completeness, my off the cuff analogy is that just like any Turing-complete programming language can implement any algorithm, any natural language can state any expressible human thought.
        pierreminik 6y ago
        There's a joke in Greenlandic, closely related to Inuktitut, about polysemy. The joke stems from Greenlandic having very little polysemy when it comes to hunting, nature, practicalities and activities, while European languages is quite a bit more polysemic in nature. I don't know how well this joke translates into English but it works very well in Danish. Here it goes: > A Danish police officer gets called on the radio by a Greenlandic hunter who has been in an accident. The hunter tells that his partner have fallen into the water and have been pulled up again but might have died from the freezing water. The officer tells the hunter to "make sure he is dead". Over the radio the officer hears a riffle shot and the hunter replies: "There, he's dead now for sure". The design of Inuktitut and Greenlandic is very in tune with nature but I agree that it doesn't mean you can absorb it's qualities into other languages. That said, doesn't mean you can't learn anything from them, as the author fo the article claims.
- dang 6y ago
  "Don't be snarky." "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
disown 6y ago
Isn't the language almost extinct and the community almost wiped out? I remember reading a while back that there are only a few hundred speakers and as more canadians move into the area, the inuit community and language were being endangered. Is there a systematic campaign to preserve the language and/or community? At the very least to set down the vocabulary/grammer/pronounciation/etc?
- unhammer 6y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inuttitut https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inuttitut says about 550 mother tongue speakers of that dialect, while https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inuktitut https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inuktitut as a whole has between 35.000 and 40.000 mother tongue speakers (and there are programs regarding Inuktitut at least https://nunatsiaq.com/stories/article/65674a_new_way_to_spread_the_inuit_language_train_the_instructors/ https://nunatsiaq.com/stories/article/65674a_new_way_to_spre... )
- protomyth 6y ago
  Every tribe is working very hard on language preservation and some are getting much better results than others. Some have been lost, but the folks in Alaska are putting a lot of effort into it. I asked a question on HN for a grant that was directed about using ML to aid in language preservation. I didn't get any responses. We were trying to expand the tools available.
  - yorwba 6y ago
    It sounds to me more like you already had a tool in mind (ML) and were just looking for some nails ;) If you approach the problem instead from the language preservation perspective and ask what is necessary to make it succeed, there are essentially two tasks: documentation (recording current speakers' knowledge of the language) and community maintenance (allowing people to keep using the language and teaching it to the next generation). Documentation basically boils down to making a lot of recordings. Since text is usually nicer to work with, transcriptions are very useful, and in theory ML would be able to help with that, but to train a speech-to-text model, you first need transcribed training data, leading to a chicken-and-egg problem. Making the data easily available and easy to contribute to is more likely to be impactful. For maintaining a community, ML can be useful by providing all the services that ML offers for speakers of more popular languages: text-to-speech, speech-to-text, predictive smartphone keyboards, machine translation, ... but all of those depend on the language being well-documented already. Otherwise, non-ML solutions are likely to be the only options (so formant-based speech synthesis e.g. with espeak-ng, dumb keyboards, rule-based translators, ...) To give a specific example, I know of a community of Kabyle speakers who want to be able to use OpenStreetMap with voice navigation in Kabyle, so they've been making a lot of recordings (using https://tatoeba.org https://tatoeba.org as a platform for the documentation part) and also have someone working on a speech-synthesis model (using Mozilla's DeepSpeech, I think). AFAIK, the project is coordinated by Muhend Beqasem, whom you might want to contact if you're interested in what they're doing: https://tatoeba.org/eng/user/profile/belkacem77 https://tatoeba.org/eng/user/profile/belkacem77
schoen 6y ago
The practice of drawing conclusions about people or their cultures based on properties of their language has been controversial since at least the original Sapir and Whorf stuff. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopi_time_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopi_time_controversy If you admire or appreciate a culture, you might argue that the culture's values or history or distinctive outlook are directly reflected in grammatical features or vocabulary of an associated language. While this might be true in some ways and to some extent, it's something that's also very easy to deceive yourself about. You can easily make up a story about how distinctions that one language does (or doesn't) draw reflect the excellence or more appropriate priorities of its speakers' culture. Like "oh, this language makes distinctions that English doesn't -- because the people who speak it are so attuned to perceiving fine details!" or "oh, this language doesn't make distinctions that English does -- showing how its speakers are not distracted by the pointless minutia that occupy us in settled industrial civilization!". A challenge to this kind of analysis is that studies of linguistic typology (deep structural features that languages do or don't have in common) show languages with, and without, particular characteristics all over the world, in languages spoken by people from all different kinds of cultures and societies. Most generalizations that might be given a higher significance just sort of fall flat when you look at typology data. Oh, that cool thing that we like in this language -- is also present in this other language from a different culture and part of the world! Oh, that thing we find annoying or irritating -- is present elsewhere too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_typology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_typology A kind of counterexample that I learned from John McWhorter's books is that complicated irregularities in languages (e.g. a very large number of noun classes with distinctive classifiers and agreement rules, or a very large number of irregular verb forms) are likely a sign of smaller and more isolated speaker communities, whereas simplification that removes these irregularities is associated with circumstances in which more people have to use a language non-natively (and therefore have a harder time mastering these details), which could include migration, social disruptions, or the widespread use of a language as a lingua franca, trade language, language of imperial administration, etc. That does mean that indigenous languages (especially if they have almost exclusively been used by a native speaker community in a relatively small area) can often be harder to learn for non-native speakers. But you still can't necessarily count on cultural generalizations based on those observations. One exercise you can try to do (maybe this is also an idea from McWhorter?) is pick a random set of characteristics that some language might have, and then try to come up with an essay explaining why those features show how awesome or admirable the speakers' culture must be. If it sounds deeply plausible, then maybe that's a sign that people aren't actually good at being objective about this. :-)
robocat 6y ago
> Don’t believe everything you’ve heard, however: there are not hundreds of words for snow. Skier’s learn a large number of words for different types of snow: everything from death cookies to boilerplate to corn snow. Vocabulary comes from interaction. I am guessing different sports have wildly expanded vocabulary for certain elements of the relevant environment?
- tremon 6y ago
  It's a guess, but surfers might have multiple different words for waves. And it's not just sports. Meteorologists have many different words to describe clouds.
  - spython 6y ago
    And entomologists and software developers have many different words to describe bugs.
- SideburnsOfDoom 6y ago
  > I am guessing different sports have wildly expanded vocabulary You're looking for the phrase "term of art" https://www.lexico.com/definition/term_of_art https://www.lexico.com/definition/term_of_art https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/term-of-art https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/term-of-... e.g. if I say I'm going to "bounce the box", I don't mean that I will throw a cardboard container at the floor, I mean that I will reboot a computer. And the sysadmins will know exactly what I mean.

76 points by diaphanous 6y ago

Breaking news: language is optimized to communicate concepts its speakers find useful. Meanwhile, how's the canary config for the Kubernetes L7 ingress coming along?

diN0bot 6y ago
i found this article interesting and beautiful, and your snarky comment unhelpful.
- mhh__ 6y ago
  snarky comment = joke
- howlgarnish 6y ago
  Sorry for the snark, but if you have even a casual interest in linguistics, the concept of linguistic relativity (aka Sapir-Whorf hypothesis), namely that the language you speak determines/affects your world view, has been done to death: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity This article presents yet another pop-sci version of this, with a fair dose of the "noble savage" trope to boot: > Our current climate crisis is the direct result of this unbridled exploitation ... the language had a harmonious relationship with the environment ... Could the rich vocabulary of the Inuit inspire us to redefine our relationship with nature? No, it doesn't work that way, because the strong version of the hypothesis is essentially disproven (in geek terms, all natural languages are "Turing-complete" and can be used to express anything) and evidence even for the weak version is, well, weak. Correlation does not imply causation, and Western culture won't change if we import a few more Inuit words into it.
  - dxdm 6y ago
    This is a much more useful expansion of your original comment, thank you! :)
  - pksebben 6y ago
    "Sorry, but" is a poor substitute for "my bad". The error being pointed out to you is that your tone is dismissive, which this diatribe did nothing to correct. The culture people are trying to cultivate here is one that actively avoids suppressing ideas, and dismissiveness is antithetical to that end. Furthermore, the conversation on linguistic relativism is far from done and dusted. The distinction you make between "strong" and "weak" forms sort of shows a loose grasp on the subject matter. I'm also more than a little stumped trying to figure out what correlation you meant. ... that's also not what "Turing complete" means.
    - howlgarnish 6y ago
      Correct, I'm dismissive because I don't think the article is saying anything particularly interesting or even correct. You're welcome to disagree, which is why we're arguing here in the comments section :) As far as I tell (it's not my story after all), the author appears to be asserting that Inuktitut is somehow uniquely in tune with nature in general (dubious) and that we could change the way the Western world acts by absorbing some of those words (which sounds like linguistic determinism to me, not to mention even more dubious). As for Turing completeness, my off the cuff analogy is that just like any Turing-complete programming language can implement any algorithm, any natural language can state any expressible human thought.
      - pierreminik 6y ago
        There's a joke in Greenlandic, closely related to Inuktitut, about polysemy. The joke stems from Greenlandic having very little polysemy when it comes to hunting, nature, practicalities and activities, while European languages is quite a bit more polysemic in nature. I don't know how well this joke translates into English but it works very well in Danish. Here it goes: > A Danish police officer gets called on the radio by a Greenlandic hunter who has been in an accident. The hunter tells that his partner have fallen into the water and have been pulled up again but might have died from the freezing water. The officer tells the hunter to "make sure he is dead". Over the radio the officer hears a riffle shot and the hunter replies: "There, he's dead now for sure". The design of Inuktitut and Greenlandic is very in tune with nature but I agree that it doesn't mean you can absorb it's qualities into other languages. That said, doesn't mean you can't learn anything from them, as the author fo the article claims.
dang 6y ago
"Don't be snarky." "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

disown 6y ago

Isn't the language almost extinct and the community almost wiped out? I remember reading a while back that there are only a few hundred speakers and as more canadians move into the area, the inuit community and language were being endangered. Is there a systematic campaign to preserve the language and/or community? At the very least to set down the vocabulary/grammer/pronounciation/etc?

unhammer 6y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inuttitut https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inuttitut says about 550 mother tongue speakers of that dialect, while https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inuktitut https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inuktitut as a whole has between 35.000 and 40.000 mother tongue speakers (and there are programs regarding Inuktitut at least https://nunatsiaq.com/stories/article/65674a_new_way_to_spread_the_inuit_language_train_the_instructors/ https://nunatsiaq.com/stories/article/65674a_new_way_to_spre... )
protomyth 6y ago
Every tribe is working very hard on language preservation and some are getting much better results than others. Some have been lost, but the folks in Alaska are putting a lot of effort into it. I asked a question on HN for a grant that was directed about using ML to aid in language preservation. I didn't get any responses. We were trying to expand the tools available.
- yorwba 6y ago
  It sounds to me more like you already had a tool in mind (ML) and were just looking for some nails ;) If you approach the problem instead from the language preservation perspective and ask what is necessary to make it succeed, there are essentially two tasks: documentation (recording current speakers' knowledge of the language) and community maintenance (allowing people to keep using the language and teaching it to the next generation). Documentation basically boils down to making a lot of recordings. Since text is usually nicer to work with, transcriptions are very useful, and in theory ML would be able to help with that, but to train a speech-to-text model, you first need transcribed training data, leading to a chicken-and-egg problem. Making the data easily available and easy to contribute to is more likely to be impactful. For maintaining a community, ML can be useful by providing all the services that ML offers for speakers of more popular languages: text-to-speech, speech-to-text, predictive smartphone keyboards, machine translation, ... but all of those depend on the language being well-documented already. Otherwise, non-ML solutions are likely to be the only options (so formant-based speech synthesis e.g. with espeak-ng, dumb keyboards, rule-based translators, ...) To give a specific example, I know of a community of Kabyle speakers who want to be able to use OpenStreetMap with voice navigation in Kabyle, so they've been making a lot of recordings (using https://tatoeba.org https://tatoeba.org as a platform for the documentation part) and also have someone working on a speech-synthesis model (using Mozilla's DeepSpeech, I think). AFAIK, the project is coordinated by Muhend Beqasem, whom you might want to contact if you're interested in what they're doing: https://tatoeba.org/eng/user/profile/belkacem77 https://tatoeba.org/eng/user/profile/belkacem77

schoen 6y ago

The practice of drawing conclusions about people or their cultures based on properties of their language has been controversial since at least the original Sapir and Whorf stuff. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopi_time_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopi_time_controversy If you admire or appreciate a culture, you might argue that the culture's values or history or distinctive outlook are directly reflected in grammatical features or vocabulary of an associated language. While this might be true in some ways and to some extent, it's something that's also very easy to deceive yourself about. You can easily make up a story about how distinctions that one language does (or doesn't) draw reflect the excellence or more appropriate priorities of its speakers' culture. Like "oh, this language makes distinctions that English doesn't -- because the people who speak it are so attuned to perceiving fine details!" or "oh, this language doesn't make distinctions that English does -- showing how its speakers are not distracted by the pointless minutia that occupy us in settled industrial civilization!". A challenge to this kind of analysis is that studies of linguistic typology (deep structural features that languages do or don't have in common) show languages with, and without, particular characteristics all over the world, in languages spoken by people from all different kinds of cultures and societies. Most generalizations that might be given a higher significance just sort of fall flat when you look at typology data. Oh, that cool thing that we like in this language -- is also present in this other language from a different culture and part of the world! Oh, that thing we find annoying or irritating -- is present elsewhere too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_typology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_typology A kind of counterexample that I learned from John McWhorter's books is that complicated irregularities in languages (e.g. a very large number of noun classes with distinctive classifiers and agreement rules, or a very large number of irregular verb forms) are likely a sign of smaller and more isolated speaker communities, whereas simplification that removes these irregularities is associated with circumstances in which more people have to use a language non-natively (and therefore have a harder time mastering these details), which could include migration, social disruptions, or the widespread use of a language as a lingua franca, trade language, language of imperial administration, etc. That does mean that indigenous languages (especially if they have almost exclusively been used by a native speaker community in a relatively small area) can often be harder to learn for non-native speakers. But you still can't necessarily count on cultural generalizations based on those observations. One exercise you can try to do (maybe this is also an idea from McWhorter?) is pick a random set of characteristics that some language might have, and then try to come up with an essay explaining why those features show how awesome or admirable the speakers' culture must be. If it sounds deeply plausible, then maybe that's a sign that people aren't actually good at being objective about this. :-)

robocat 6y ago

> Don’t believe everything you’ve heard, however: there are not hundreds of words for snow. Skier’s learn a large number of words for different types of snow: everything from death cookies to boilerplate to corn snow. Vocabulary comes from interaction. I am guessing different sports have wildly expanded vocabulary for certain elements of the relevant environment?

tremon 6y ago
It's a guess, but surfers might have multiple different words for waves. And it's not just sports. Meteorologists have many different words to describe clouds.
- spython 6y ago
  And entomologists and software developers have many different words to describe bugs.
SideburnsOfDoom 6y ago
> I am guessing different sports have wildly expanded vocabulary You're looking for the phrase "term of art" https://www.lexico.com/definition/term_of_art https://www.lexico.com/definition/term_of_art https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/term-of-art https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/term-of-... e.g. if I say I'm going to "bounce the box", I don't mean that I will throw a cardboard container at the floor, I mean that I will reboot a computer. And the sysadmins will know exactly what I mean.