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The Analytical Language of John Wilkins
- johngossman 2y agoGreat story. Wilkins and his language also feature in Stephenson’s “System of the World” books. The excellent book “In the land of invented languages” by Arika Okrent dedicates chapter 2 to Wilkins. I should point out, I didn’t go seeking information about Wilkins, but his language just seems to come up randomly for me. Okrent’s book also has excellent introductions to Esperanto and Lojban. Lojban is a modern attempt to create a language without ambiguity. That turns out to be hard…speaking takes on some of the characteristics of writing a mathematical proof.
- KineticLensman 2y ago> Stephenson’s “System of the World” books Minor nit: “System of the World” is the third novel in the Baroque Cycle, after Quicksilver and The Confusion. I really enjoyed these books for the SF world-building perspective on the emergence in the 17th Century of modern science and finance, global trade, communications, etc. Many of the normal comments on Stephenson’s writing style apply, YMMV.
- senkora 2y ago+1 to "In the land of invented languages". We read it in a conlang'ing class that I took in college and it was a solid read.
- jonwilks 2y agoGuess I should look into this...
- selimthegrim 2y agoThis is not Newton's former roommate, btw.
- zelias 2y agoAfter reading _Quicksilver_ I began to wonder if a Universal Language, as conceived by Wilkins, could have an extremely powerful effect on the "thought patterns" one might instruct an LLM to use when responding to a specific prompt.
- VyseofArcadia 2y agoSapir-Whorf[0] but for computers? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity
- adonovan 2y agoBorges's short stories are almost perfect nuggets for computer scientists, seemingly covering such topics as recursion (Garden of Forking Paths), the consequences of infinite memory (Funes), complexity theory (Library of Babel), virtualization (Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius), and so on.