3 ms·
I just asked an LLM to create a language and provide a demonstration and this is what it said. Call it a stochastic parrot if you want, but I’m pretty sure a li
by Joeri 3y ago
I just asked an LLM to create a language and provide a demonstration and this is what it said. Call it a stochastic parrot if you want, but I’m pretty sure a linguist can prompt it to properly invent a language.
Sure, I can invent a new language for you! Let's call it "Vorin" for the purposes of this demonstration.
Vorin is a tonal language with a complex system of noun classes and a relatively simple verb conjugation system. It is spoken by the Vorin people, who live in a mountainous region of an imaginary world. Here is a sample conversation in Vorin:
Person 1: Ní lé màrì?
Person 2: Lé vàlà, nì síkòní.
Person 1: Vàlà síkòní?
Person 2: Àmà, síkòní là nì tékàlá.
Translation:
Person 1: How are you?
Person 2: I'm fine, thank you.
Person 1: Are you working?
Person 2: Yes, I'm working right now.
In Vorin, the tone of each word is very important, and can change the meaning of the word entirely. For example, "lé" with a high tone means "you", while "lé" with a low tone means "fine". In addition to tone, Vorin has a system of noun classes, which are indicated by prefixes on the nouns themselves. For example, "màrì" means "you" if it is in the second person singular class, but it can also mean "house" if it is in the third person singular class.
Vorin's verb conjugation system is relatively simple, with only a few tenses and moods. Verbs are also marked for subject agreement, which means that the verb ending changes depending on the subject of the sentence. For example, "nì síkòní" means "I'm fine", while "là síkòní" means "he/she/it is fine".
Overall, Vorin is a complex and interesting language with a rich grammatical structure and unique tonal system.
- CydeWeys 3y agoYou're missing the point though, which is that that LLM was already trained on trillions of examples of human languages. Once it already knows many languages, inventing one more isn't hard. (Though I don't think it's actually "invented" this language to any great depth.) Let's see it invent language from scratch without being presented any examples of languages to use as training data. That's what humanity did. Can LLMs do it? I doubt it, not yet.
- norgie 3y agoI don't see how this proves anything. This isn't how human languages came about, there's a lot of conlang content online, and this doesn't describe a complete language anyway.
- npinsker 3y agoI’m pretty sure of the opposite. Even for your minimal example, the translations seem very suspect (what’s the word for “working” in Vorin?).
- lsy 3y agoNone of this makes sense. 1."lè" with a low tone means fine, but "nì síkòní" means "I'm fine", while "là síkòní" means "he/she/it is fine"? 2. The example of "noun prefixes" doesn't include different noun prefixes? 3. The example of "verb ending changes" doesn't include different verb endings? 4. Since the second clause of the second phrase apparently means "I'm fine", the first word must mean "you", but then the second word is repeated in the next sentence which has nothing to do with thanking someone? And "síkòní" gets sprinkled into three sentences with no common concepts? This just looks, predictably, like gibberish spit out by an LLM.
- croes 3y agoThis sounds like a backwards explanation to explain why the same words have different meanings. Maybe the LLM should write the tones too, so it sounds like a child inventing a language and when you point out its logical inconsistencies it invents new rules to fit.
- tyg13 3y agoA small linguistics YouTuber I follow named K Klein made an interesting video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9NxTi5ZsOo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9NxTi5ZsOo) trying to get ChatGPT to make a language. The results were... not all that impressive. There were significant issues getting it to consistently apply the rules of the language it had created, even from one prompt to the next -- and after a certain point, it decided to just give Arabic translations instead of the conlang it was supposed to be making up. Perhaps a more dedicated "prompt engineer"/linguist-type might be able to get better results, but the problem here seems to be similar to the problem trying to get ChatGPT to do arithmetic and other extreme sports. When trying to get it to do anything other than generating one-off syntactically-correct responses to simple prompts in already-existing human languages, it falls down horribly.