tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14162253.post2025073674546901076..comments2024-03-28T18:57:15.124-06:00Comments on Wash Park Prophet: Murray Gell-Mann On Physics and LinguisticsAndrew Oh-Willekehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02537151821869153861noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14162253.post-5774502405178377982013-11-09T14:10:30.787-07:002013-11-09T14:10:30.787-07:00I want to debunk the singularity.
Are you in or ou...I want to debunk the singularity.<br />Are you in or out?<br /><br />http://leepavelich.wordpress.com/2013/07/26/book-review-facing-the-intelligence-explosion/Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14162253.post-34750892783567215552010-10-23T09:50:44.462-06:002010-10-23T09:50:44.462-06:00I think it's beautiful that a physicist has te...I think it's beautiful that a physicist has teemed up with the dying Soviet linguists to present their ideas. Dixon argues it best ("The Rise and Fall of Languages" Cambridge UP, 1998), but the problem with Nostratic or even positing the existence of an 'established' language family such as Sino-Tibetan (now often referred to as Sinitic and Tibeto-Burman), is that it ignores the other common process of language change: convergence. Sometimes completely unrelated languages mix: this model better explains loan words and the apparent syntactic similarities between Mongolic, Turkic, and Tungusic far better than positing the existence of an Ur-language, Proto-Altaic. Therefore, if unrelated languages can mix, how could we posit ur-languages? Only if we see all language evolution like tree branches which radiate but never re-emerge or cross, not to mention establish sound change as an absolute, could we do this. <br /><br />English, too, although Germanic, is noticeably the odd man of Germanic with its flirtations with Celtic and its romance with Romance. Simply using the exploding divergence model is too, too simplistic to explain how languages interact. <br /><br />What is really jaw-dropping silly of Gell-Mann is when he makes broad, generalizing statements like "for some reason... [linguists]...hate the idea of distant relationships." Well, clearly they are hated for the same reason they fail romantically: they just don't work. If we could actually find written evidence for far-flung connections from 80,000 years ago, I promise you the champagne would be flowing in many departments. The problem is that the NeoGrammarian Hypothesis, although generally accepted for practical reasons, has been shown to be uneven in the last 100 years we actually have recordings. We can document that some dialects change faster than other dialects, which appear to change like glaciers, even when they occupy the same space; ergo, how can we clock theoretical language changes with zero evidence backwards by millenia? Answer: we can't. Sound change in human language isn't like carbon testing. It isn't a fixed constant that can be measured. So... until we find some better graffiti, we're screwed to know what human language was like 12,000 years ago. <br /><br />Finally, it would never be considered foolish to think we had to wait until the Internet to have memes--the word itself was coined in 1976. To say 'there are certain concepts that can be expressed best in foreign languages' buggers the mind. Why is 'computer' superior to 电脑 dian4nao3 'electric-brain'? The first, an English word (Latin origins) was borrowed whole-sale into Russian and dozens, if not hundreds, of languages. The second was a calque into mainland Mandarin 计算机 jisuanji 'calculating machine'. However, the Mandarin speakers on Taiwan thought a native compound would be better, so they made diannao, and that word spread like wildfire over the rest of the Mandarin-speaking (and, by extension, Chinese-speaking) world. Foreign words often get carried with technology not because they have some superior correspondence of sound to ideas but because that's what the damned thing is called when it arrives. "Vat eez dees?" "Dees eez a kompyooter." "Vow, dats sooo kool!" Hell, even the Old Peking word for 'dog' is from Indo-European (PIE: kwon [ Sinitic qwon > quan 犬), domestication of such being an imported technology and, not to mention, a delightful snack. <br /><br />Anyway, Gell-Mann is another scientist who enjoys rocking the boat of other fields with his physics creds. He's teamed up with an embarrassing crew of guys who made their name in the Soviet days and get avoided by the younger batch in Russia. Thanks, Murray, for the Quark, and the Joyce references; now go find a retirement resort and leave the linguists alone!Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14162253.post-50642515373519334672009-09-16T18:06:17.274-06:002009-09-16T18:06:17.274-06:00The real kicker of the idea Gell-Mann is talking a...The real kicker of the idea Gell-Mann is talking about is not that that all people once spoke one language and that all languages since are descended from it.<br /><br />The novel part is the idea that there was widespread linguistic diversity perhaps 12,000 years ago, and that then some single upstart language swept rapidly across much of the world (presumably as a companion to the Neolithic revolution) and wiped almost all of the old tongues out while starting to fragment itself.<br /><br />Indeed, this erasure of old languages and with them presumably old cultures, could help explain why the writers of the Bible embraced a counterfactual YEC worldview. Not only did they lack a written history of their true legacy, they also lacked even an oral tradition as some pre-Semitic language wiped out that old way of thinking.Andrew Oh-Willekehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02537151821869153861noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14162253.post-52764879310291719822009-09-15T21:07:53.400-06:002009-09-15T21:07:53.400-06:00The archeology conspiracy website viewzone.com cal...The archeology conspiracy website viewzone.com calls the common human language "First Tongue". Wikipedia quotes nineteenth century sources saying pretty much the same thing.<br /><br />http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroglyph#Interpretation<br /><br />Of course, the Bible story of the Tower of Babel also refers to a common human language.<br /><br />I think it's foolish to think that Christopher Columbus or even the Nordic were the first fools to try to cross the oceans. I further think it's foolish to think that we had to wait until the Internet to have memes. There are certain concepts that can be expressed best in foreign languages -- those ideas get exported and imported along with the symbolic representations for those concepts.<br /><br />That's why English is so expressive. It has words and phrases like "je ne sais qua", algebra, kindergarten, chutzpah, and blitz.Michael Malakhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10007582156392845677noreply@blogger.com