language

__________

Language is the human ability to acquire and use complex systems of communication, and a language is any specific example of such a system. The scientific study of language is called linguistics.

The philosophy of language, such as whether words can represent experience, has been debated since Gorgias and Plato in Ancient Greece, with later thinkers such as Rousseau arguing that language came from emotions, while others like Kant held it came from logical thought. 20th-century philosophers such as Wittgenstein argued that philosophy is really the study of language. Major figures in linguistics include Ferdinand de Saussure and Noam Chomsky.

Estimates of the number of languages in the world vary between 5,000 and 7,000. However, any precise estimate depends on a partly arbitrary distinction between languages and dialects. Natural languages are spokenor signed, but any language can be encoded into secondary media using auditory, visual, or tactile stimuli – for example, in graphic writing, braille, or whistling. This is because human language is modality-independent. Depending on philosophical perspectives regarding the definition of language and meaning, when used as a general concept, “language” may refer to the cognitive ability to learn and use systems of complex communication, or to describe the set of rules that makes up these systems, or the set of utterances that can be produced from those rules.

__________

added page via this tweet:

Real talk #oldaily http://t.co/sd4GftasZ2

from Stephen

real talk:

There is no language instinct – yes, we have the capacity to learn a language, but what`s key here is that language is something that is learned, and not the basis for learning. …. We learn language the way we learn everything else: by observing examples of language being used, by imitation and practice, and finally, by reflection.

Original Tweet: https://twitter.com/oldaily/status/546794470159564800

http://aeon.co/magazine/culture/there-is-no-language-instinct/

‘Rules’ don’t get applied in indiscriminate jumps, as we would expect if there really was an innate blueprint for grammar. We seem to construct our language by spotting patterns in the linguistic behaviour we encounter, not by applying built-in rules. Over time, children slowly figure out how to apply the various categories they encounter. So while language acquisition might be uncannily quick, there isn’t much that’s automatic about it: it arises from a painstaking process of trial and error.

from play..no?

..cognitive neuroscience research from the past two decades or so has begun to lift the veil on where language is processed in the brain. The short answer is that it is everywhere. Once upon a time, a region known as Broca’s area was believed to be the brain’s language centre. We now know that it doesn’t exclusively deal with language – it’s involved in a raft of other, non-linguistic motor behaviours. And other aspects of linguistic knowledge and processing are implicated almost everywhere in the brain. While the human brain does exhibit specialisation for processing different genres of information, such as vision, there appears not to be a dedicated spot specialised just for language.

..the verbal problems always turn out to be rooted in something other than language.

Language is, after all, the paradigmatic example of co‑operative behaviour: it requires conventions – norms that are agreed within a community – and it can be deployed to co‑ordinate all the additional complex behaviours that the new niche demanded.

From this perspective, we don’t have to assume a special language instinct; we just need to look at the sorts of changes that made us who we are, the changes that paved the way for speech. This allows us to picture the emergence of language as a gradual process from many overlapping tendencies.

Children have far more sophisticated learning capacities than Chomsky foresaw. They are able to deploy sophisticated intention-recognition abilities from a young age, perhaps as early as nine months old, in order to begin to figure out the communicative purposes of the adults around them. And this is, ultimately, an outcome of our co‑operative minds. Which is not to belittle language: once it came into being, it allowed us to shape the world to our will – for better or for worse.

________

makes me think of the internet of haecitties and deep address ness and Chris – like could we get to that underlying element.. at least for global convos.. without it being all about tech translating for us. and not giving up local culture/language. et al..

and makes me wonder if the morphing could/will go to infinity to create unlimited idiosyncratic jargons.. if we want..

does a document everything.. and nothing.. ness get us there..? here:

__________

convo mar 2015:

Chomsky & Krauss: An Origins Project Dialogue

led protest of vietnam war – and since been marginalized in media

talking of Noam and Richard (wrote a book about him)

Noam’s respect and generosity to people..

8 min – on looking forward to college – then finding out it was much the same

10 min – on persuasion as violence

teaching as a seduction..

16 min – similarity of chemistry and linguistics

18 min – 99% of use of language never even gets expressed – it’s internal – it takes a tremendous act of will – not to do what we call – talking to yourself

talk to self

22 min – shift from external to internal.. observable to not so

24 min – when allowed self to be puzzled – (begin of modern science – 1950s) – realize you know nothing – rather than everything… when start asking what’s going on in the internal..

26 min – important thing about language is not communication.. not external but internal… traditional view – language used in formulating thought.. modern view – language evolved as instrument of communication –

28 min – animal and human communication systems differ radically; human language – free creative activity – can be used for communication but primarily just used for thinking – internally – design of language -..

externalization is kind of peripheral to language..

..core principles… how you construct/interpret thoughts.. the way it’s externalize doesn’t enter into that.. language is fundamentally – audible (or whatever sensory modality) thought..

30 min – huge literature on evolution of language – very curious – because subject doesn’t exist – languages change but they don’t evolve.. what evolves is the capacity for language – which is something in your head..

32 min – the capacity for language is virtually identical across all humans…

35 min – getting internal snowflake out of your mouth – very complicated process…

38 min – the ability to be puzzled about what you see – you don’t learn to have arms and legs – you’re designed that way

39 min – we don’t learn how to see – we are born with sight

42 min – susan curtiss – and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genie_%28feral_child%29

she was very clever – she was deceiving scientists that she was acquiring language

no studies on language, can study on sight – because our sight similar to animals we can study.. no other with language like ours

44 min – bee communication system

48 min – language and freedom – asked to write that article – which he has a lot to say about language and a lot to say about freedom – but not much to say about and

52 min – strong weight of evidence against pinker claims – ie: brian ferguson – one thing he said – in our lifetime – since enlightenment – there has been moral progress – at the same time – creation of device that could destroy us all

55 min – rousseau – unique about humans – internal creative capacity

56 min – any institutions that inhibit or constrain that free creative capacity are fundamentally illegitimate unless they can justify themselves…. any hierarchy – whatever – should be subject to challenge – they’re not self-justifying

__________

deep learning

Monica

Noam

junto

dis\order as language problem.. mis\understanding..

disney therapy et al – as language

..

________

words

communication

read

write

literacy

_________

output

idiosyncratic jargon

_________

interesting – from Seth – april 2015

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2015/04/the-noise-in-our-head-and-artificial-intelligence.html

One reason we easily dismiss the astonishing things computers can do is that we know that they don’t carry around a narrative, a play by play, the noise in their head that’s actually (in our view) ‘intelligence.’

It turns out, though, that the narrative is a bug, not a feature. That narrative doesn’t help us perform better, it actually makes us less intelligent. Any athlete or world-class performer (in debate, dance or dungeonmastering) will tell you that they do their best work when they are so engaged that the narrative disappears.

I have no idea when our computer overlords will finally enslave us, but it won’t happen because we figured out a way to curse them with a chattering monkey. 

i’m guessing this narrative he’s talking about – is the lizard brain.

but i’m also wondering – since i just finished listening to chomsky con mar 2015 above.. are we just not listening-to/understanding/embracing/using/freeing-up/grokking our natural/internal chatter. like – are we replacing a natural/needed chatter with an unnatural/chatterish chatter. ie: are we letting society dictate what chatter (talking to self) is, by imposing assumptions of what that chatter should be about.

i guess i’m wondering if the absence of chatter for people in the zone.. is really the absence of unnatural/imposed chatter. the absence of the chatter of the science of people.. ness

externalization is kind of peripheral to language..

________________

no words

@leashless

What if the words we use to describe emotions limit our understanding of ourselves as much as using Roman numerals crippled European math?

Phytophile (@phytophilemusic) tweeted at 4:48 AM – 22 Sep 2016 :

@pigworker @leashless what about new languages? or perhaps this is why we have music, art, and other multimedia. (http://twitter.com/phytophilemusic/status/778908815337095168?s=17)

begs we embrace means we have today to let idio jargon approach limit of infinity…
means for 7bill.. new everyday ness..that io dance

_________________

New Scientist (@newscientist) tweeted at 5:12 AM – 5 Nov 2016 :

When politics fills the language gap, can science be neutral? https://t.co/5iWqXljLJZ https://t.co/kY5sY8V9a3(http://twitter.com/newscientist/status/794859839600136193?s=17)

WE ALL speak the same language, according to the linguist Noam Chomsky. A Martian scientist, he has observed, “might reasonably conclude that there is a single human language, with differences only at the margins”.

To Earthlings, however, such differences often look anything but marginal. For some, they are barriers to be overcome. But for many others, they are borders to control and identities to be kept apart.

[..]

In his new book Decoding Chomsky, Knight (who mounts his own critique from a position on the radical left) argues that Chomsky needed to deny any connection between his science and his politics in order to practise both while based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an institution that was heavily funded by the US military.

[..]

Language “is not properly regarded as a system of communication”, he declared. “It is a system for expressing thought, something quite different.” In this view of language, other people are peripheral. As far as Chomsky is concerned, says Knight, language “exists for talking to just one person – yourself“. Other workers in the field do not deny the social implications of their studies, but opt to leave them unspoken.

[..]

Trenchant and compelling as Knight’s critique of Chomsky is, few scientists would follow him all the way to his concluding vision of science united with revolutionary politics. But maybe it wouldn’t hurt for researchers to hint at their personal values. After all, as climate scientists know only too well, they will be suspected of bias however strictly they stick to the data.

Noam

________

Maria Popova (@brainpicker) tweeted at 6:57 AM – 16 Jan 2017 :

Mary Oliver on how books saved her life and why the passion for creative work is the greatest antidote to pain https://t.co/PMkz4jVUEx https://t.co/xroio4gz1V (http://twitter.com/brainpicker/status/820993479304159232?s=17)

I read the way a person might swim, to save his or her life. I wrote that way too.

[..]

I did not think of language as the means to self-description. I thought of it as the door — a thousand opening doors! — past myself. I thought of it as the means to notice, to contemplate, to praise, and, thus, to come into power.

[..]

You must not ever stop being whimsical. And you must not, ever, give anyone else the responsibility for your life.

_________

fb share by Jon Husband:

Yes !! Roger Schank, a pioneer of natural language process and its relationship(s) with AI, makes similar points regularly.

<< The great Lewis Lapham:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_H._Lapham

“The internet is maybe the best and brightest machine ever made by man, blessed with a near-infinite expanse of miraculous application. Language is not yet one of them. Computers scan everything but hear nothing. Even if they knew where to find or how to make a cosmos best suited for human habitation, how would they send word of the discovery?

They know not who they are or what they do.

The strength of language doesn’t consist in its capacity to pin things down or sort things out. “Word-work,” said Toni Morrison, accepting the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993, “is sublime…because it is generative,” its felicity found in its reach toward the ineffable. “We die,” she said. “That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.” Shakespeare shaped the same thought as a sonnet, comparing his beloved to a summer’s day, offering his rhymes as surety on the bond of immortality—“So long as men can breathe or eyes can see / So long lives this and this gives life to thee.”

Google can bring the news that E=mc2, but­­ Google doesn’t know what E is. Doesn’t know that in the first of its many meanings, E is the mind of man (nature looking creatively back on itself) embarking on the voyages of discovery—Odysseus, great-hearted and wide-wandering on the wine-dark sea, Charles Darwin sailing for the enchanted islands in the Galápagos, Humboldt climbing Mount Chimborazo, Michelangelo reaching upward toward the horizon of the Sistine ceiling, deaf Beethoven directing the performance of his Ninth Symphony in Vienna in 1824, giving voice to the joy of learning that wonders never cease.” >>