2 ms·

My guess is that if you had a really big, wide-ranging and high-quality corpus of a completely unknown human language then you probably would be able to deciphe

by bloak 4y ago

My guess is that if you had a really big, wide-ranging and high-quality corpus of a completely unknown human language then you probably would be able to decipher and translate it. If you could deduce or guess the grammatical structure the next step might be to look at which nouns can be subjects of which verbs, for example, and it might then be possible to guess which nouns refer to humans and which verbs describe actions that can normally only be performed by a human, and then ... well, there's lots of statistical stuff you can do with a really huge corpus ... It's an interesting problem to think about but it's not a problem we're ever likely to encounter in real life. It's more likely we'll discover a corpus of some alien, non-human language than a huge corpus of a completely unknown human language.

inglor_cz 4y ago
The Voynich manuscript is fairly extensive (over 200 pages), illustrated, and we still do not know what the heck of a language it is written in. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voynich_manuscript https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voynich_manuscript
- ncmncm 4y ago
  ...assuming it is really language at all, and not just deliberate gibberish.
  - SemanticStrengh 4y ago
    entropy analysises seems to indicate it is natural language like so not too much redundancy and not too much noise/randomness.
- Maursault 4y ago
  After seeing your comment, I watched a TED Ed about it[1], and now I am convinced, for it to have survived for so long, it is a relic and time forgot why it was saved. It's Leonardo Da Vinci's childhood notebook, has to be, there is no other explanation for why it would have been kept since the 15th Century. So it's likely to be derivative of Italian, Latin, and other languages he spoke and wrote. No, wait... it very well could have been created by some other weird kid from the 15th Century no one's heard of. Come on. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NS4CbBJQ84 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NS4CbBJQ84
- SemanticStrengh 4y ago
  hey this was really interesting to read. I like the aztec hypothesis, anyway hoax or not it seems it has received a tremendous amount of work at a time where half of those concepts hadn't even been discovered, except of course if they had conserved paper for 200 years, which I find not that unlikely tbh.
- bloak 4y ago
  Yes, the Voynich manuscript is worth mentioning here, but it doesn't qualify as a really big, wide-ranging and high-quality corpus: it's about 35 thousand words (if the things that look like words are words), whereas a million words would still be a small corpus by today's standards; it's a single document (for example, it might contain no first-person pronouns, no future tenses, almost no mention of individual people, ...); and we have no idea about the quality (for example, perhaps it was copied by someone who didn't understand it and is such a bad copy that even someone who knows the language and the script would find it hard to understand). Still, it is definitely worth mentioning here.

by bloak 4y ago

inglor_cz 4y ago

The Voynich manuscript is fairly extensive (over 200 pages), illustrated, and we still do not know what the heck of a language it is written in. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voynich_manuscript https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voynich_manuscript

ncmncm 4y ago
...assuming it is really language at all, and not just deliberate gibberish.
- SemanticStrengh 4y ago
  entropy analysises seems to indicate it is natural language like so not too much redundancy and not too much noise/randomness.
Maursault 4y ago
After seeing your comment, I watched a TED Ed about it[1], and now I am convinced, for it to have survived for so long, it is a relic and time forgot why it was saved. It's Leonardo Da Vinci's childhood notebook, has to be, there is no other explanation for why it would have been kept since the 15th Century. So it's likely to be derivative of Italian, Latin, and other languages he spoke and wrote. No, wait... it very well could have been created by some other weird kid from the 15th Century no one's heard of. Come on. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NS4CbBJQ84 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NS4CbBJQ84
SemanticStrengh 4y ago
hey this was really interesting to read. I like the aztec hypothesis, anyway hoax or not it seems it has received a tremendous amount of work at a time where half of those concepts hadn't even been discovered, except of course if they had conserved paper for 200 years, which I find not that unlikely tbh.
bloak 4y ago
Yes, the Voynich manuscript is worth mentioning here, but it doesn't qualify as a really big, wide-ranging and high-quality corpus: it's about 35 thousand words (if the things that look like words are words), whereas a million words would still be a small corpus by today's standards; it's a single document (for example, it might contain no first-person pronouns, no future tenses, almost no mention of individual people, ...); and we have no idea about the quality (for example, perhaps it was copied by someone who didn't understand it and is such a bad copy that even someone who knows the language and the script would find it hard to understand). Still, it is definitely worth mentioning here.