Nathan Tyree: On being a geek.
Last night a friend and I were having a conversation about languages. It stemmed from an episode of Penn a Teller Bullshit. This dumbass Nostradamus pimp dude was explaining that you could find the name of the anti-christ in one of old Nostra's quatrains if you inserted a "silent Latin H." The friend and I both knew that Latin has no such thing as a silent H.
Discussion of this led to talk about the evolution of the Indo-European languages (primarily we were interested in the Romance languages). Then, suddenly Star Trek Enterprise was mentioned.
I exclaimed (with great vitriol) that the universal translator was an absurd idea. I argued that as the translator was often shown to function in the show, it was an impossibility. For those who don't know, this device seems to be able to extrapolate an entire language from a few sentences.
I argued that although it seems likely that the computer could glean the rules of sentence structure from such input, it would still be boggled by vocabulary. Some languages (like English) have millions of words (many with several meanings). The computer should take days (if not months) to learn an entire language.
I further argued that the machine shouldn't be able to learn at all by just listening to native speakers of a language talking. A language must first be taught referentially. Displacement (the ability to talk about things removed from us in time or space) comes later.
After some time, my friend and I realized: We're geeks. Oh yeah, Look at this
And This
Mood: Geeky
Music: Something about aliens in love
Browsing: Geeks with guns
Last night a friend and I were having a conversation about languages. It stemmed from an episode of Penn a Teller Bullshit. This dumbass Nostradamus pimp dude was explaining that you could find the name of the anti-christ in one of old Nostra's quatrains if you inserted a "silent Latin H." The friend and I both knew that Latin has no such thing as a silent H.
Discussion of this led to talk about the evolution of the Indo-European languages (primarily we were interested in the Romance languages). Then, suddenly Star Trek Enterprise was mentioned.
I exclaimed (with great vitriol) that the universal translator was an absurd idea. I argued that as the translator was often shown to function in the show, it was an impossibility. For those who don't know, this device seems to be able to extrapolate an entire language from a few sentences.
I argued that although it seems likely that the computer could glean the rules of sentence structure from such input, it would still be boggled by vocabulary. Some languages (like English) have millions of words (many with several meanings). The computer should take days (if not months) to learn an entire language.
I further argued that the machine shouldn't be able to learn at all by just listening to native speakers of a language talking. A language must first be taught referentially. Displacement (the ability to talk about things removed from us in time or space) comes later.
After some time, my friend and I realized: We're geeks. Oh yeah, Look at this
And This
Mood: Geeky
Music: Something about aliens in love
Browsing: Geeks with guns
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Anyway, I think that it's just tapping into the translatee's brain, and making them speak english. :P