Linguistic News
Apr. 24th, 2009 09:39 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fiat_knoxFirst of all, breaking news about the script used by the 4,000 year old Indus Valley Region culture:-
Artificial Intelligence Cracks 4,000-Year-Old Mystery
An ancient script that's defied generations of archaeologists has yielded some of its secrets to artificially intelligent computers.
Computational analysis of symbols used 4,000 years ago by a long-lost Indus Valley civilization suggests they represent a spoken language. Some frustrated linguists thought the symbols were merely pretty pictures.
"The underlying grammatical structure seems similar to what's found in many languages," said University of Washington computer scientist Rajesh Rao.
The Indus script, used between 2,600 and 1,900 B.C. in what is now eastern Pakistan and northwest India, belonged to a civilization as sophisticated as its Mesopotamian and Egyptian contemporaries. However, it left fewer linguistic remains. Archaeologists have uncovered about 1,500 unique inscriptions from fragments of pottery, tablets and seals. The longest inscription is just 27 signs long.
In 1877, British archaeologist Alexander Cunningham hypothesized that the Indus script was a forerunner of modern-day Brahmic scripts, used from Central to Southeast Asia. Other researchers disagreed. Fueled by scores of competing and ultimately unsuccessful attempts to decipher the script, that contentious state of affairs has persisted to the present.
Among the languages linked to the mysterious script are Chinese Lolo, Sumerian, Egyptian, Dravidian, Indo-Aryan, Old Slavic, even Easter Island — and, finally, no language at all. In 2004, linguist Steve Farmer published a paper asserting that the Indus script was nothing more than political and religious symbols. It was a controversial notion, but not an unpopular one.
Rao, a machine learning specialist who read about the Indus script in high school and decided to apply his expertise to the script while on sabbatical in Inda, may have solved the language-versus-symbol question, if not the script itself.
"One of the main questions in machine learning is how to generalize rules from a limited amount of data," said Rao. "Even though we can't read it, we can look at the patterns and get the underlying grammatical structure."
Rao's team used pattern-analyzing software running what's known as a Markov model, a computational tool used to map system dynamics.
They fed the program sequences of four spoken languages: ancient Sumerian, Sanskrit and Old Tamil, as well as modern English. Then they gave it samples of four non-spoken communication systems: human DNA, Fortran, bacterial protein sequences and an artificial language.
The program calculated the level of order present in each language. Non-spoken languages were either highly ordered, with symbols and structures following each other in unvarying ways, or utterly chaotic. Spoken languages fell in the middle.
When they seeded the program with fragments of Indus script, it returned with grammatical rules based on patterns of symbol arrangement. These proved to be moderately ordered, just like spoken languages.
As for the meaning of the script, the program remained silent.
"It's a useful paper," said University of Helsinki archaeologist Asko Parpola, an authority on Indus scripts, "but it doesn't really further our understanding of the script."
Parpola said the primary obstacle confronting decipherers of fragmentary Indus scripts — the difficulty of testing their hypotheses — remains unchanged.
But according to Rao, this early analysis provides a foundation for a more comprehensive understanding of Indus script grammar, and ultimately its meaning.
"The next step is to create a grammar from the data that we have," he said. "Then we can ask, is this grammar similar to those of the Sanskrit or Indo-European or Dravidian languages? This will give us a language to compare it to."
"It's only recently that archaeologists have started to apply computational approaches in a rigid manner," said Rao. "The time is ripe."
Citation: "Entropic Evidence for Linguistic Structure in the Indus Script." By Rajesh P. N. Rao, Nisha Yadav, Mayank N. Vahia, Hrishikesh Joglekar, R. Adhikari and Iravatham Mahadevan. Science, Vol. 324 Issue 5926, April 24, 2009.
And then, this:-
Roots of Language Run Deeper Than Speech
The rules of grammar you follow while speaking may not reflect what you're thinking.
In a study published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers found that speakers of subject-verb-object languages -- "Bill eats cake" -- reverted to a subject-object-verb form when asked to communicate with their hands.
"Bill cake eats" may sound counterintuitive to an ear weaned on English or any of the one-half of human languages that modify subjects with verbs, but it appears to follow the natural order of our cognition.
"This may reflect the real thought that comes before language," said study co-author Susan Goldin-Meadow, a University of Chicago psychologist. "It seems pretty natural."
Goldin-Meadow's team asked forty people -- ten speakers apiece of English, Mandarin Chinese and Spanish, each of which follows the SVO order, and ten speakers of Turkish, which follows an SOV order -- to describe a series of simple actions, such as a girl turning a knob, with gestures.
Regardless of their native language, the subjects almost universally preceded object with verb: girl knob turns.
"We expected that the language they spoke would influence the language of their gestures, but it didn't," said Goldin-Meadow.
To test whether the subjects used subject-object-verb as a communicative strategy, they were given a series of illustrated transparencies, each depicting one element of a scene, and told that order was irrelevant: the final layered montage would look the same regardless of its assembly. The subjects still put object before verb.
"It almost speaks to the independence of language from thought," said Goldin-Meadow.
The implications of these unexpected results aren't yet clear. Speakers of subject-verb-object languages may actually experience a constant low-level cognitive stress from translating their thoughts into less-intuitive speech patterns, though Goldin-Meadow said it would likely be so tiny as to be undetectable.
However, such a cognitive load could become more apparent in neurologically damaged children, or in children who have trouble learning a subject-verb-object language.
"There's no evidence for this," she cautioned, "but maybe looking at kids with problems is the first step. Maybe we could understand that the child is thinking in a different way, and teach them a translation strategy."
Link to the document
An ancient script that's defied generations of archaeologists has yielded some of its secrets to artificially intelligent computers.
Computational analysis of symbols used 4,000 years ago by a long-lost Indus Valley civilization suggests they represent a spoken language. Some frustrated linguists thought the symbols were merely pretty pictures.
"The underlying grammatical structure seems similar to what's found in many languages," said University of Washington computer scientist Rajesh Rao.
The Indus script, used between 2,600 and 1,900 B.C. in what is now eastern Pakistan and northwest India, belonged to a civilization as sophisticated as its Mesopotamian and Egyptian contemporaries. However, it left fewer linguistic remains. Archaeologists have uncovered about 1,500 unique inscriptions from fragments of pottery, tablets and seals. The longest inscription is just 27 signs long.
In 1877, British archaeologist Alexander Cunningham hypothesized that the Indus script was a forerunner of modern-day Brahmic scripts, used from Central to Southeast Asia. Other researchers disagreed. Fueled by scores of competing and ultimately unsuccessful attempts to decipher the script, that contentious state of affairs has persisted to the present.
Among the languages linked to the mysterious script are Chinese Lolo, Sumerian, Egyptian, Dravidian, Indo-Aryan, Old Slavic, even Easter Island — and, finally, no language at all. In 2004, linguist Steve Farmer published a paper asserting that the Indus script was nothing more than political and religious symbols. It was a controversial notion, but not an unpopular one.
Rao, a machine learning specialist who read about the Indus script in high school and decided to apply his expertise to the script while on sabbatical in Inda, may have solved the language-versus-symbol question, if not the script itself.
"One of the main questions in machine learning is how to generalize rules from a limited amount of data," said Rao. "Even though we can't read it, we can look at the patterns and get the underlying grammatical structure."
Rao's team used pattern-analyzing software running what's known as a Markov model, a computational tool used to map system dynamics.
They fed the program sequences of four spoken languages: ancient Sumerian, Sanskrit and Old Tamil, as well as modern English. Then they gave it samples of four non-spoken communication systems: human DNA, Fortran, bacterial protein sequences and an artificial language.
The program calculated the level of order present in each language. Non-spoken languages were either highly ordered, with symbols and structures following each other in unvarying ways, or utterly chaotic. Spoken languages fell in the middle.
When they seeded the program with fragments of Indus script, it returned with grammatical rules based on patterns of symbol arrangement. These proved to be moderately ordered, just like spoken languages.
As for the meaning of the script, the program remained silent.
"It's a useful paper," said University of Helsinki archaeologist Asko Parpola, an authority on Indus scripts, "but it doesn't really further our understanding of the script."
Parpola said the primary obstacle confronting decipherers of fragmentary Indus scripts — the difficulty of testing their hypotheses — remains unchanged.
But according to Rao, this early analysis provides a foundation for a more comprehensive understanding of Indus script grammar, and ultimately its meaning.
"The next step is to create a grammar from the data that we have," he said. "Then we can ask, is this grammar similar to those of the Sanskrit or Indo-European or Dravidian languages? This will give us a language to compare it to."
"It's only recently that archaeologists have started to apply computational approaches in a rigid manner," said Rao. "The time is ripe."
Citation: "Entropic Evidence for Linguistic Structure in the Indus Script." By Rajesh P. N. Rao, Nisha Yadav, Mayank N. Vahia, Hrishikesh Joglekar, R. Adhikari and Iravatham Mahadevan. Science, Vol. 324 Issue 5926, April 24, 2009.
And then, this:-
The rules of grammar you follow while speaking may not reflect what you're thinking.
In a study published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers found that speakers of subject-verb-object languages -- "Bill eats cake" -- reverted to a subject-object-verb form when asked to communicate with their hands.
"Bill cake eats" may sound counterintuitive to an ear weaned on English or any of the one-half of human languages that modify subjects with verbs, but it appears to follow the natural order of our cognition.
"This may reflect the real thought that comes before language," said study co-author Susan Goldin-Meadow, a University of Chicago psychologist. "It seems pretty natural."
Goldin-Meadow's team asked forty people -- ten speakers apiece of English, Mandarin Chinese and Spanish, each of which follows the SVO order, and ten speakers of Turkish, which follows an SOV order -- to describe a series of simple actions, such as a girl turning a knob, with gestures.
Regardless of their native language, the subjects almost universally preceded object with verb: girl knob turns.
"We expected that the language they spoke would influence the language of their gestures, but it didn't," said Goldin-Meadow.
To test whether the subjects used subject-object-verb as a communicative strategy, they were given a series of illustrated transparencies, each depicting one element of a scene, and told that order was irrelevant: the final layered montage would look the same regardless of its assembly. The subjects still put object before verb.
"It almost speaks to the independence of language from thought," said Goldin-Meadow.
The implications of these unexpected results aren't yet clear. Speakers of subject-verb-object languages may actually experience a constant low-level cognitive stress from translating their thoughts into less-intuitive speech patterns, though Goldin-Meadow said it would likely be so tiny as to be undetectable.
However, such a cognitive load could become more apparent in neurologically damaged children, or in children who have trouble learning a subject-verb-object language.
"There's no evidence for this," she cautioned, "but maybe looking at kids with problems is the first step. Maybe we could understand that the child is thinking in a different way, and teach them a translation strategy."
