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Joined: Jun 2002
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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Anybody know why?
sounds like somewhere along the line, the code was changed for links...
formerly known as etaoin...
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Joined: Nov 2002
Posts: 77
journeyman
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journeyman
Joined: Nov 2002
Posts: 77 |
Jackie,
Talking (writing) amongst one another in here is one thing...in semi-real time, even though these minds appear somewhat disincarnate in cyberland (am I making any sense? I'm at work. I think much more clearly at home in the wee hours of the morning).
Reading through the old threads from over a year ago is more like chasing ghosts....none of you are there anymore, so I can't even jump in and converse. You've all moved on, and in fact *some intriguing souls have disappeared entirely from this place (and long ago, though I have only just met them!). That's all I meant. And as the 'codes changed to links', or whatever is happening to reveal different threads each time one wanders back in there, it is a bit unusual.
As you get to know me, you'll find that I am mildly obsessed with all my (beloved)ghosts...(and I am sorry to say that I have more than my share) It wasn't meant to be offensive, or even *about you all.....
and it *was supposed to be about human language, and the uniqueness of it all....until as usual, my mind got spiraling off in another direction. Oh, where is spongeman when I need him?
m
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Joined: Mar 2000
Posts: 11,613
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Mar 2000
Posts: 11,613 |
I wasn't offended, Sweetie (note the wink). You're right, in a way: I am not the same person I was a year ago; I doubt that any of us are. Something that has always rather saddened me is the thought that my graduate school experience was gone forever, the moment I graduated. I just loved it; that is the only time in my life that I have had a whole group of close friends. But it would certainly be different if I were to re-enroll with a whole new class. And even if somehow every last one of us were to go through as a group again, it still wouldn't be the same, because we would have changed: new experiences, new outlooks. I guess I'm just not a person who lets go very easily; even with things that I know must end and should end, most of the time I heave at least a small sigh of regret.
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Joined: Sep 2001
Posts: 872
old hand
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old hand
Joined: Sep 2001
Posts: 872 |
I'd be interested in y'all's comments on this hypothesis. ~ Faldage Language evolved in a leapConflicting needs may have driven rapid development of communication. 22 January 2003 PHILIP BALL
Speakers want few words; listeners want many. Language probably leapt, not crept, from squeaks to Shakespeare, two physicists have calculated. Human communication, they propose, underwent a ' phase transition', like solid ice melting to liquid water.  First out I'd like to thank these two nice physicists for taking time away from doing real science and attempting to straighten out this sorry word mess that we language speaking people of the world find ourselves in.The richness of human languages is a fine-tuned compromise between the needs of speakers and of listeners. Just a slight imbalance of these demands prevents the exchange of complex information.  Said the same thing to a guy on the bus yesterday. He said "Bullshit!" What a jerk! So languages between those of present-day humans and the limited signalling of some animals cannot really exist. There must, at some point, have been a switch from rudimentary to sophisticated language. Exactly. My dog gets confused when I say "fetch".  This contrasts with some linguists' view that language evolution was a gradual affair in which new words accumulated steadily.  If I say the word l.i.n.g.u.i.s.t. I must spit. A language that conveyed all information unambiguously, would have a separate word for every thing. Such a language would be formidably complicated for the speaker: the green of grass, for example, would be represented by a totally different word to the green of sea, an emerald or an oak leaf. But it would be ideal for the listener, who wouldn't have to work out any meanings from a word's context. Ideal for the speaker is a language of few words, where simple, short utterances serve many purposes. The extreme case is a language with a single sound that conveys everything that needs saying. Some might suggest that teenagers prefer this kind of minimal-effort tongue that forces others to figure out what their grunts actually mean.  Yes,yes,yes, the politician who speaks but a few words and we want more, the teenager who grunts. Uh, moving right along... We have devised a mathematical model in which the cost of using a language depends on the balance between these conflicting preferences. We calculate the properties of the lexicon that requires minimal effort for different degrees of compromise, from exhaustive vocabularies to one-word languages. We find that the change from one extreme to the other does not happen smoothly. There is a jump in the amount of communication, from very little to near-perfect, at a certain value of the relative weightings of speaker and hearer preferences.  Yeah, I get it...like a jump...yeah, like a...like a quantum Jump!  Human languages seem to sit right on this sudden change. When it happens, the frequency of word usages develops a distinctive mathematical form, called a power law. The power law disappears on either side of the communication jump. It has been known since the 1940s that human languages do indeed show just this kind of statistical distribution of word usage - the social scientist George Kingsley Zipf spotted the power-law behaviour. But it has never been satisfactorily explained before, although Zipf himself speculated that it might represent some kind of "principle of least effort".  Look fellows I don't want to hurt your feelings or anything but obviously your forte is not mumbo jumbo. That's the domain of linguists. Would you mind going to the back room and cooking up some nice neat math. We'll supply the wild theories, you supply the mathematical voo doo to give them class. Thanks guys, for your support.
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Joined: Dec 2000
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Dec 2000
Posts: 2,661 |
The perspective of language being "crunched" into sets of numbers reminds me a bit of why serialist composers never really got widespread exposure or developed as a form as jazz has (or communicative, for that matter).
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I can study music with a number of theories and I'll get a number of different results. I can listen to music in a number of different settings and I'll hear a number of different sounds.
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When a theory creates *art, theoretically, you should get a very artful theory.
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Joined: Jun 2002
Posts: 7,210
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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is that voo-doo, or voodoo? the whole math/language thing is a bit like early sampling that digitized sound at a chunky rate that didn't quite get all the subtleties of the information. myb... maybe, or mind-your-own-business?
formerly known as etaoin...
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Joined: Mar 2001
Posts: 4,189
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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is that voo-doo, or voodoo?Is that math/language or math\language? (I accidentally hit *Spellwreck® and they want vortex for voodoo! )
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Joined: Jun 2002
Posts: 7,210
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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I think it's manglage...
hey, did I just kine a word, or did I chop yart's liver?
formerly known as etaoin...
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Joined: Mar 2001
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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or did I chop yart's liver?What in reinyartnation® are you talkin' about!?
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Joined: Jun 2002
Posts: 7,210
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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haha. actually, it should be: mangluage · when math and language get mangled together. and isn't it rei-nyar-tation?
formerly known as etaoin...
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