Re: [9fans] Simplified Chinese plan 9

[Eris Discordia <eris.discordia@gmail.com>]

> Once again, words you use recklessly turn out to have actual definitions.

I am aware of those definitions. Please refer to the Jared Diamond lecture 
titled "The Great Leap Forward" to (gracefully) understand what I am 
talking about. It is supposed in the discussion of language evolution I 
referred to (and Diamond beautifully explains in that lecture) that pidgins 
and creoles may be clues to to the "universal language/grammar" contained 
in human genetic heritage: the innate linguistic capability of humankind. 
Those two categories of "proto-languages" show the emergent nature of 
language and that when confronted with a new medium--on a plantation in a 
community of slaves and masters of various origins or in an electronic 
messaging system--humans tend to rework from scratch or from whatever 
available material a complete language guided by their inborn universal 
language. A few generations is all it takes to go from "proto-language" to 
language.

My argument was that in case of electronic messaging systems the 
"proto-language," while creating new symbols and even new syntax, never 
evolves into a full-blown language no matter how many generations use it 
(to date, at least two consecutive generations). In fact, because it is 
bound to subcultures that come and go, and because it is used to set up 
"cliques" within larger communities of users of the medium its usage never 
becomes effortless and "natural." The effort required to learn and keep up 
with the flavor of the month is part of the price one pays to stay in the 
clique. Hence, what I wrote: "they aren't subject to the same dynamism, 
particularly same constraints, the core of language is."

> Namely, I don't think you could discover a systemic grammatical deviation
> from English in leet or text-speak or whatever.

"Doesn't afraid of anything," eh? Or "inb4 pr0n?" "Amirite desu?" I have 
encountered dozens of those consistently-used constructs but you've been 
coding too much and IRCing too little, apparently, which is appreciable but 
undermines your judgment about "text-speak."

(Just in case, that third example performs at least three contortions at 
once: combines the Japanese SOV sentence order with English's SVO, uses a 
Japanese word in a semantically wrong, subculture-specific manner, and 
employs a "cool" version of "am I right" with only a subset of connotations 
that "am I right" can carry. Syntactic, lexical, and semantic.)

> These are novel and amusing orthographies and in-crowd jargon and nothing
> more [...]

I think we agree there: I said they were fad.

> I also doubt that we'll have the kind of technology you're talking about 
[...]

I cannot guarantee things but I can tell you this: expect speech synthesis 
from neural readings for motor incapacitated (think Stephen Hawking) in one 
decade or less. And, of course, I have my doubts, too, but I also have my 
hopes _and_ my thought experiments.



--On Saturday, September 12, 2009 02:39 -0600 Daniel Lyons 
<fusion@storytotell.org> wrote:

>
> On Sep 12, 2009, at 1:05 AM, Eris Discordia wrote:
>
>> There's a discussion of evolution of languages that involves a
>> language going from pidgin to creole to full-blown. Maybe "text-ese"
>> is some sort of pidgin, or more leniently creole, that draws on the
>> "speakers'" native language but the point here is that it will never
>> evolve into a full-blown language.
>
>
> Once again, words you use recklessly turn out to have actual definitions.
> From Wikipedia:
>
> "A pidgin language is a simplified language that develops as a means of
> communication between two or more groups that do not have a language in
> common..."
>
> "A creole language, or simply a creole, is a stable language that
> originates from a mixture of various languages. The lexicon of a creole
> usually consists of words clearly borrowed from the parent languages,
> except for phonetic and semantic shifts. On the other hand, the grammar
> often has original features and may differ substantially from those of
> the parent languages."
>
> I'm sure you'll provide us with the definitions from Merriam-Webster as
> well.
>
> In other words, a pidgin is what you get when you have two groups without
> a common language being forced to communicate. A creole is what you get
> when their kids learn the pidgin as a first language. Linguists and
> physicists have a bad habit of making their jargon colorful so I'll only
> deduct half the usual points.
>
> I agree with your conclusion, but I disagree with a couple steps in your
> reasoning. Namely, I don't think you could discover a systemic
> grammatical deviation from English in leet or text-speak or whatever.
> These are novel and amusing orthographies and in-crowd jargon and nothing
> more—people pronounce ROFL and LOL to be ironic and cute, not because
> they think they're words and would be surprised to learn their true
> origin. My wife and her best friend have a policy of pronouncing those
> abbreviations by spelling them out and then saying the last word
> ("double-you tee ef fuck") to be funny. Also, plenty of people think in
> English differently than I do yet we all manage to communicate to the
> same degree (i.e. poorly but well enough to get by).
>
> I also doubt that we'll have the kind of technology you're talking about,
> because I think 90% of the hard part of being a programmer comes from
> learning to think rigorously and that will be the stumbling block for
> anything digital that wants to try and digitize our thoughts. This is
> also the crux of my argument against the idea that computers will someday
> program themselves: the real barrier isn't hardware or motivation, it's
> that by the time you teach someone to be explicit enough that a computer
> can derive what they're trying to do, you've made them a programmer
> already (see Prolog for example). Same with strong AI: nobody has a clue
> how to word the problem precisely enough to write a program to solve it.
>
> —
> Daniel Lyons
>
>