Rich and Strange Aeons

An interesting article on the complexity of sentences, in relation to writing and community size.

2017-11-25T17:47:06Z

This link goes to a longish article on the complexity of sentences and changes therein. Those who are familiar with the literature of the 18th or 19th centuries, including such documents basic to the USA as the Declaration of Independence, may have noticed a difference in the length and complexity of many sentences from those periods, compared to those of the current era. The author says that there is a real difference, across not just time but also languages: it is written languages which most reliably embed clauses in each other like Russian dolls. Even oral languages which have the tools for such behavior may have likely acquired them from contact with written languages.

Does that mean purely oral languages are simpler? Nay! Though their sentences are allegedly childishly simple (examples given include "It will be possible? You will teach me. I will make bread." "He came near those boys. They were throwing spears at something then."), their complexity "erupts" elsewhere, with frighteningly complex word formation, such as in polysynthetic languages.

However, not all complexity is the same. The author claims that the word-formation form of complexity requires massive amounts of memorization, by speakers "marinating" in the language from childhood, and makes analogy to a rise in compound words in modern English whose meaning is not derivable by pattern. (Examples given: "A house boat, for example, is a boat that functions like a house, but a housecoat is a coat you wear in a house, and a housewife fits neither pattern.") Whereas syntactical complexity is generative: once learned, you can generate it, and decompose it, with equal ease and glee.

My lay grasp of linguistics is far from able to judge the accuracy of the claims. I would note though that it's not a matter of the article contrasting modern Western languages to indigenous ones like Yupik: the claim is that the earliest written languages also showed the pattern:

"According to linguist Guy Deutscher, the earliest clay tablets (about 2500 B.C.) of the ancient language Akkadian reveal few embedded clauses. The same is evidently true of the earliest stages of other ancient written languages such as Sumerian, Hittite, or Greek. Although these languages boasted a profusion of grammatical features suitable for expressing subtle nuances of meaning, and included a variety of fancy word-building techniques, they avoided complicated sentence recursion."

(Bold emphasis mine.)

So instead of recursive embedded clauses, you get long run-on sentences of chained clauses. Which rings a bell about something I found odd in translations of old Sumerian and Akkadian writing.

Finally, the article tries to link this to esoteric vs. exoteric communities. Small isolated communities can build up memory-taxing stores of word building patterns, which in turn keep the community isolated; large and diverse communities need something with clearer rules. The esoteric community needn't just be some small ancient tribe: modern scientific discourse is identified as an area where sentence complexity diminishes, while non-transparent compound nouns or phrases grow in use.

"Evidence shows that the most insular scientific communities have led the march away from elaborated sentences in favor of complex, compressed nouns: Science articles in specialist publications such as the Journal of Cell Biology contain fewer relative clauses and more noun compounds than articles in publications like Science, which target a more diverse community of scientists."

(That said, I recall a friend's advisor explaining scientific language differently: given a desire to appeal to many people for whom English is not their first language, the acts of keeping sentences simple and free of colorful idioms, and using unambiguous vocabulary, are virtues.)

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Google fail

2017-05-07T17:42:12Z

I was trying to pick up my Japanese studies again, and turning to Google Translate as a way to get some daily phrases. "A bowl of rice" was given the plausible characters 米のボウル, but transliterated as "Amerika no booru". Cooked rice (kome) and America do share a kanji, but you wouldn't read it that way!

I shared with my friend in Japan, who laughed, then said you wouldn't read it as "Amerika" even when talking about America.

Also that "kome no booru" was like a bowl made out of rice (plant) or something, and not something you'd say; instead you'd use "ichizen", ichi-zen, zen being an oddly specific counter for bowls of rice or pairs of chopsticks.

So, multiple levels of machine translation fail!

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naming my racist elf

2017-02-20T00:27:04Z

Ari told me a trick he uses as a GM for naming NPCs: pick a language to be thematic, type words into Google Translate, use. So one NPC is Hungarian or something for "Betrayer", and is intended to backstab the PCs at some point, and the players have no clue.

Neat trick, but one not relevant to most of my PCs these days, where I expy some anime heroine and don't try to hide my work. (Latest: Kyouko the Dungeon Slayer, an adaptation of Sakura Kyouko.)

But someone was recruiting for an all-evil PbP game, which isn't my usual thing, but I got tempted to try to think of something anyway, It's D&D3.5, so I figured I'd start with a druid, for maximum mechanical cheese. Evil druid? Sure, he wields the power of nature for evil. Or he wields the power of nature, and is a selfish jerk. If you want philosophy, you can talk about predator/prey, nature red in tooth and claw, social darwinism.

Race? (Meaning species). I like elves as an idea, but have been avoiding them, because a 1st level 100 year old character just hurts my head. But for the character I was forming? The guy who can feel superior because he lives 10x longer than you is a perfect fit.

And even better, there's the gray elf subrace, with +2 Int. Literally smarter than you. (D&D swaps gray and high elves from Tolkien: "high elves" are like the Sindar default, gray elves the longer-lived and smarter and more arrogant 'Noldor'.)

Great, a racist gray elf druid! What to name him? I tried thinking of 'elvish' names on my own, but wasn't getting far. (I hate coming up with names.) Time to try the language trick! What are elvish languages? Tolkien was inspired by Welsh and Finnish, Order of the Stick uses pseudo-Latinate names. I started with Welsh. What's a word? Well, 'racist'. So I type that in... and get 'hiliol'.

Hiliol the elf. I dunno about you, but I figured I was done on the first try. Feels vaguely elvish, doesn't have an obvious gender. (I was figuring I'd go for androgyny, a la Vaarsuvius in Order, though he's since become male -- trying to improve the human stock by fathering lots of half-elves. But anyway.)

That was a stroke of luck, really; I've since tried some other words, and they translate to words that are so flagrantly Welsh as to be intrusive. Like 'twyllwr' for "deceiver" or 'celwyddog' for "liar". (Hiliol's Big Crime was fraud, trying to convince foolish humans that he could give them elven lifespan.)

Finnish could have worked, its 'racist' is "rasistinen", though I just realized it sounds like an import of 'racist', so maybe not.

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Pronoun compression

2016-02-26T03:23:24Z

So, you'd think languages would tend to shorten the length of commonly used words. And in English, all pronouns are short. 'our' is arguably two syllables. 'theirs' is one syllable though a lot of phonemes. But I, you, though, we, your, ... all short.

Spanish too, mostly: yo, tu, el, ella. (But, nosotros). Even though inflections mean you often don't need them.

In Japanese, not so much. Of the truly excessive list of pronouns, I think all are 2+ syllables. Of the standard ones, watashi (I) and anata (you) are both three. Some informal ones are two (ore, boku). A standard really formal one is four (watakushi, I). And if you want to indicate possession, that needs another syllable, e.g. 'watashi no' for 'my'.

But, apparently, pronouns aren't used as much in Japanese. Raising a chicken and egg question: are they dropped because they're long, or are they long because they're easily dropped? At any rate, all I read says Japanese is good at dropping parts of its syntax in favor of context (more so than other languages?) so don't need to say 'I' if you're obviously talking about yourself.

Also, simply using 'anata' is often rude, and it's more proper to use people's names. And some girls trying to be cutesy will instead of using watashi, or the cutesy variant atashi, use their own names, like "Mariko-chan is hungry" instead of "I am hungry".

Which seems like a lot of work! Except... the pronouns *are* long, I realize, so the opportunity cost is a lot less. Personal names are typically 2-3 syllables, family names commonly 3-4 syllables, add a standard honorific and we're talking 3-5 syllables. Given that the alternatives are generally three syllables themselves, using the name might not take any more time. Or it might take 5 syllables to 3 -- Nakajima-san vs. anata -- but I don't know how our brains process that. Is it just as bad as using 3 for 1, two extra syllables, or is it "only 67% longer" vs. "three times longer"?

And for the cutesy usage, well, not only are personal names shorter than family names on average, they can be further truncated, especially if you're being cutesy. One manga Mariko I know of is Mari-chan (or -tan, or -chin) to her friends, and presumably if she were the sort of girl to refer to herself in the third person she'd use those forms too. No longer than atashi, then.

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translation audiences and honorifics

2015-12-23T19:19:22Z

So there are various philosophies of translation, how literal or high level you should be, how much to preserve meaning vs. experience. For example, samurai daimyo and ninja could be translated as knight lord and assassin. This would make them seem more familiar to European cultures and preserving or 'translating' the experience -- after all, samurai isn't exotic to Japanese people -- at the potential cost of shades of meaning, and the exoticness that might be why someone wants to read the translation in the first place.

One specific disagreement I've seen is over Japanese honorifics: -san, -chan, -kun, etc. Pro translators seem to pride themselves on full naturalization, turning -san into Mister and relatives, -chan into endearments if anything, and such. Anime/manga fans generally prefer preserving them, and that has taken over professional manga translations, which now usually have an honorifics guide in the front. I prefer that myself, as I can easily see uses of honorifics that would be hard to translate without contortion[1], and it's not much work to have learned them.

But I realized, part of it may be due to the difference in intended audience. Pro novel translators probably assume that theirs may be the only novel from that language read by many of the readers, and aim to minimize the work expected of the readers. Anime/manga fans generally read or watch many such works, often trying to learn Japanese for real themselves, so for us, the not very large amount of work in learning is amortized among many works.

[1] One example: it seems easy to translate Gingko-san as Mister Gingko, or Hayate-san as Miss Hayate. But what if someone's gender is unknown or non-binary? You've got a choice problem in English that simply doesn't exist in Japanese, where -san can apply to anyone or anything.

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Duolingo retrospective

2014-05-19T05:56:37Z

So, I have completed the Duolingo Spanish tree. All of it is solid gold, even the optional extras. So, what's it mean, in the end. Have I learned Spanish? Is it a Spanish course? Is it worth it?

No, no, and maybe.

Just walking over tonight, I tried naming things I passed and realized lots of common things I hadn't seen words for (that I recall): bank, store, ice, ice cream, hamburger... store might be in there, but we seem to be shown 'businessman' and 'entrepreneur' and 'business' and 'institute' (and 'utilize') far more. Also I opened up El Pais's website, and while I could get some meaning out of the articles, it's definitely not total understanding.

And at that, DL hardly ever explains anything; I'm pretty sure I got through the verb tense exercise easily because I *had* studied Spanish grammar, with memories of the shape if not the content of Latin grammar. If doing things the pure DL way... I dunno.

I'll also note they encourage you to "immersive exercises", i.e. making money for them by translating articles for them, which I haven't done. Mostly because I didn't feel ready, and also if I'm going to do that I've got a dual language book of top Spanish stories to read instead...

Seems to me that it's far from a complete course in itself; if you rely on it solely, you will certainly learn something, but not even enough to be a good tourist. ("Where is the bathroom?" You could form the sentence, but I'm not sure we've seen 'bathroom'.) But as a gamified complement to proper study, sure. Mostly, if you'd be twiddling with computer or phone games anyway, doing DL exercises is going to be infinitely more productive than playing Angry Birds or Freeciv or Boggle or whatnot. Even low-brain mode via doing exercises you already know well is probably more productive.

So my current plans: keep my streak going and tree golden because it's at least something; maybe dip back into German to learn something there; perhaps more likely to go try to read newspapers with dictionaries open, or my story book, than their own immersion. But we'll see.

ETA: one way to get more out of DL is to read the comments, of course. I've learned some stuff there, hopefully contributed a bit as well. Sort of outsourced teaching, though you also have to be smart and mentally filter what you read -- not all the comments are sound. Still better off with a good text...

ETA2: but as I told my friends in January, a flawed system you use is better than a better one you don't, so there's that; DL kept me 'studying' Spanish when pure self-study wasn't.

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Dialect heat map

2013-12-24T02:40:24Z

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/12/20/sunday-review/dialect-quiz-map.html

Server load or the various plugins in my browser mean I don't see a "Share" link for my maps. My first result was near Richmond VA and couple of other nearby cities; my second one, with some different questions and a few different answers to old ones, put me in upstate NY, Maine, and Wisconsin, with "nearest cities" of Rochester, Providence, and Springfield MA. My heat maps for individual questions are all over the place, especially the first time I took it (second one overlapped with Chicago more often, but still didn't end up there.)

I grew up a solitary and bookish child to parents from Boston and LA/Berkeley, in gifted/magnet schools, then lived in intellectual California for 10 years, Indian grad school for 8, and now in Cambridge. I've deliberately adopted "you all/y'all" as useful and thanks to knowing the originator of http://www.popvssoda.com/ I frankly have no idea what word I grew up with, though I think I got "soft drink" from my parents. I suspect I just confuse the system.

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links

2012-12-21T01:48:23Z

Mesoamerican eschatology
http://squid314.livejournal.com/346913.html
badly needed by Russia
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/dec/17/mayan-apocalypse-mania-grips-russia

NYC, where languages go to die
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-20716344

Fermi Paradox solution: Earth is light and most habitable planets you can't get off with chemical rockets
http://james-nicoll.livejournal.com/4110898.html

gun ownership demographics
http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/18/in-gun-ownership-statistics-partisan-divide-is-sharp/

Chicago bike wars
http://seattlebikeblog.com/2012/12/17/chicago-mayor-i-want-seattles-bikers-and-the-jobs-that-come-with-them/

Chinese characters vs. pinyin
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4367

Hobbit movie reviews
http://james-nicoll.livejournal.com/4106480.html
http://whswhs.livejournal.com/198021.html
http://glvalentine.livejournal.com/357415.html

Texas lawmakers discover cutting birth control means more expensive
babies
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/07/us/likely-increase-in-births-has-some-lawmakers-revisiting-cuts.html?_r=0

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Pictionary and the evolution of writing

2012-11-04T05:16:05Z

At a party tonight, people playing a homegrown version of Pictionary, basically Difficult All Play with made up words. A neutral player picks a word and shows it to the drawer of each team, and they race ot make the guesser say the word; no limit on the abstraction of the word. We saw expertise, irrelevant, vulgar, and tact (which was going on when I left.) The winners of the earlier words used "sounds like" techniques, e.g. Vulcan + car = vulgar. This was banned for the 4th round on the grounds of being too powerful. Progress by non-sounds like teams was, uh, amusing.

It occurred to me that "sounds like" is recapitulating the evolution of writing. First, pictures of concrete objects or verbs, then ideograms for the more suitable abstract concepts like 'up'... and then instead of arbitrary graphical symbols for the hard stuff, phonemic techniques to elicit the sounds of the arbitrary spoken word people already know.

This suggests a compromise, based on the vast majority of Chinese characters: people can use a partial 'sounds like' technique, indicating part of the sound but combining it with a other symbols that suggest the meaning domain. E.g. 'vulcan' + pictures suggesting politeness or rudeness or the populace.

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links: sweatshops, languages, democracy

2011-09-25T23:35:58Z

BAD

Amazon's sweatshops http://al-zorra.livejournal.com/783296.html

GOOD

language speeds; languages differ in meaning per syllable and # of
syllables spoken, but the product is about the same
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2091477,00.html

conlang Q&A
http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1898948,00.html

Klingon article
http://www.slate.com/id/2217815/

*Intense* analysis of "The Girl Who Waited" http://doctorwho.livejournal.com/8025322.html

Saudi Arabia gives women right to vote and run
http://www.smh.com.au/world/saudi-king-gives-women-right-to-vote-20110925-1krzf.html

North Dakota oil boom
http://www.npr.org/2011/09/25/140784004/new-boom-reshapes-oil-world-rocks-north-dakota?ft=1&f=1001

rocket launch limited by slow computers
http://www.npr.org/2011/09/25/140740389/launch-logistics-speedy-rocket-slow-electronics?ft=1&f=1001

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