Comments for Archis's Blog

Comment on Processes need conviction, scrutiny, and validation by ansuman

ansuman — Sat, 19 May 2012 23:22:24 +0000

Nice !!! Are you diving this week then..

Comment on Good going Nokia by Bhavik Vora

Bhavik Vora — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 20:35:55 +0000

Yup, I never thought it will do something like that. Nokia has a real customer connection, and I have seen one who uses Nokia never wants to go away from it.

Comment on Middle Class Morality by LR

LR — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 14:44:24 +0000

Due to the lack of insight in this post – and the amount of over-simplification based on unsubstantiated supposion – I think it should be retitled: MIddle Schooler Philosophy.

Comment on Who is Archis? by neurobe

neurobe — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 01:51:01 +0000

Hey, just need to contact me and I can supply some C snippets for interfacing to the Pendant EEG thru a virtual COM port.
bruce
PN

Comment on The rise of context-free language by Brian Barker

Brian Barker — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 13:00:30 +0000

Following the recent correspondence about Esperanto, I don’t know if you or colleagues are interested by we’re organising an Esperanto stand at the London Language Show at the end of this week.

If you know of anyone interested there’s an taster course on Saturday afternoon as well. Tickets to the show are free, but you need to book using this link http://www.thelanguageshow.co.uk/page.cfm/link=7

Comment on The rise of context-free language by archisgore

archisgore — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 04:25:48 +0000

Wow you’ve had me thinking for the last half hour…. my entire premise was that as language becomes a commodity, it becomes simple. Now that you’ve mentioned it, I can’t get it out of my head. As language becomes a commodity, it would tend to get more complex, artistic and expressionist. My original post was to get ideas on what the experimental setup would look like. You’ve given me a good starting point there. Not saying I have the funds to conduct said experiment, but might just be possible if I could isolate communications between various people talking on facebook, and then trying to see if their vocabulary/grammar differs based on whom they’re communicating with. If we could cluster people based on their fluency, we could observe if among similar fluency, people tend to be richer in their use of language.

Don’t hold me to this – this is just what came into my head, and me expressing appreciation for the comment. Thank you!

Comment on The rise of context-free language by archisgore

archisgore — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 03:45:53 +0000

That’s an interesting thought. So essentially complexity is added due to stagnation? When everyone reaches a certain level of fluency, it opens doors for increase in complexity, and lack of fluency is what dictates simplicity? I need to ponder this some… very intriguing. Thanks for the comment anonymous!

Comment on The rise of context-free language by anonymous

anonymous — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 03:39:49 +0000

From my limited understanding of linguistics I believe that the longer a group of people is isolated from others, the more complex its language becomes. Languages drift pretty quickly — within a few hundred years it becomes pretty much incomprehensible. And it always gets more and more complicated. Children can learn language of almost any complexity.
What makes language simplify is its contact with non-native speakers. Simple languages are the ones of traders. This is why English is relatively simple, and relatively simpler than it used to be.

So I don’t think your belief that the brain prefers simplicity is borne out by the evidence of comparative linguistics.

Comment on The rise of context-free language by archisgore

archisgore — Sun, 18 Sep 2011 09:20:07 +0000

I think we had better go into what we mean by complexity for a bit. When I say complex, I am speaking purely of redundant formations. Formations/phrases/words that express the same meaning regardless of what form is used. Whereas, when the number of words/rules increase to convey “new” meaning, it is not adding to entropy, because it is a necessity.

I disagree with the “but we still need a more descriptive way to communicate with humans.” Not necessarily. You may want to convey more “information” than is captured in the three words “movie Redmond tonight.” Whether you’re communicating with a machine or a human, language does not dictate intent. So I don’t think we need more descriptive means to communicate ‘with humans’. Instead, i would say we need to convey different information sometimes, and hence have to create a discriminant construct in the language to indicate the deviation – that’s not addition of undue complexity, because it is a necessity. Conversely, if more than one such discriminant exists, it becomes redundant – that is complexity. On the other hand, while the three-phase construct may have begun simply due to making it easy for us to communicate with a machine, there is no denying that if there was no loss of information while doing so, then we did in fact hit upon a more context-free and simplified way to express it.

Bill Chapman – I stand corrected. I seem to have quoted Esperanto without sufficient background research. What I wanted to say is this: What we know as “English” today, is not what I knew as English in a different country 10 years ago, and that wasn’t what I read as English from the 18th century either. While the name remains, the language is drastically different. A “new” language may have sounded exciting, but perhaps the reason it isn’t widely in used, while possibly due to political reasons, is also partially due to the fact that the language which a large part of the world knew was open to adaptation. If something was too complicated, and hence prompted a new language, it would be easily picked up by the current tongue too, and it was.

Comment on The rise of context-free language by Bill Chapman

Bill Chapman — Sun, 18 Sep 2011 08:02:15 +0000

You wrote, “Esperanto certainly came out of a need, but building out a complete new language may not have been the solution.” It’s worth saying that Esperanto is not particularly new – its speakers will be celebrating the language’s 125th anniversary next year. Furthermore, Esperanto’s vocabulary and structures are not “completely new” but were taken from existing languages.