briggs@RIACS.ARPA (10/02/84)
From: Rick Briggs <briggs@RIACS.ARPA>
In response to the flood of messages I recieved concerning the
ambiguity-free natural language, here is some more information about it.
The language is a branch of Sastric Sanskrit which flourished
between the 4th century B.C and 4th century A.D., although its
beginnings are somewhat older. That it is unambiguous is without
question. (I am writing two papers, one for laymen and one for those with
AI background). A more interesting question is one posed by Dr. Michael
Dyer, that is "is it a natural language?".
The answer is yes, it is natural and it is unambiguous. It
would be difficult to call a language living and spoken for over a
millenium with as rich a literature as this langauge has anything but a
natural language. The problem is that most (maybe all) of us are used
to languages like English (one of the worst) or other languages which
are so poor as vehicles of transmission of logical data. We have
assumed that since all languages known have ambiguity, that it is
a necessary property of natural languages, but there is no reason to
make this assumption. The complaint that it is awkward to speak
with the precision required to rule out ambiguity is one based on
(I would guess) the properties of Engish or other common Indo-European
languages.
If one were to take a specific formulation such as a semantic
net and "read" it in English the result is a cumbersome mass of
detail which nobody would be willing to use in ordinary communication.
However, if one were to take that same semantic net and translate it
into the language I am studying you get (probably) one very long word
with a series of affixes which convey very compactly the actual meaning
of the semantic net. In other words, translations from this language
to English are of the same nature as those from a semantic net to
English (hence the equivalence to semantic nets), one compact structure
to a long paragraph.
The facility and ease with which these Indians communicated
indicates that it is possible for a natural language to serve all
purposes of artificial languages based on logic. If one could say
what one wishes to say with absolute clarity (although with apparent
redundancy) in the same time and with the same ease as you say
part of what you mean in English, why not do so? And if a population
actually got used to talking in this way there would be much more
clarity and less confusion in our communication. Sastric Sanskrit
allows you to say WHAT YOU MEAN without effort. The questions
"Can you elaborate on that?" or "What exactly are you trying to say?"
would simply not come up unless the hearer wished to go to a deeper
level of detail.
This language was used in much the same way as language found
in technical journals today. Scientists would communicate orally
and in writing in this language. It is certainly a natural language.
As to how this is accomplished, basically SYNTAX IS ELIMINATED.
Word order is unimportant, speaking is thus comparable to adding a
series of facts to a data-base.
What interests me about this language is:
1) Many theories derived recently in Linguistics and AI were
independently in use over a thousand years ago, without
computers or any need to eliminate ambiguity except for
precise thinking and communication
2) A natural language can serve as a mathematical (or artificial
language) and thus the dichotomy between the two is false.
3) There are methods for translating "regular" Sanskrit into
Sastric Sanskrit from which much could be learned from NLP
research.
4) The possibilities of this language serving as interlingua
for MT.
There are no translated texts and it takes Sanskrit experts a
very long time to analyze the texts, so a translation of a full work
in this language is a way off. However, those interested can get
a hold of "Vaiyakarana-Siddhanta-Laghu-Manjusa" by Nagesha Bhatta.
Rick Briggs
NASA Ameselman@sdamos.UUCP (Jeff Elman) (10/03/84)
Rick, I am very skeptical about your claims that Sastric Sanskrit is an unambiguous language. I also feel you misunderstand the nature and consequences of ambiguity in natural human language. | The language is a branch of Sastric Sanskrit which flourished |between the 4th century B.C and 4th century A.D., although its |beginnings are somewhat older. That it is unambiguous is without |question. Your judgment is probably based on written sources. The sources may also be technical texts. All this indicates is that it was possible to write in Sastric Sanskrit with a minimum of ambiguity. So what? Most languages allow utterances which have no ambiguity. Read a mathematics text. |The problem is that most (maybe all) of us are used |to languages like English (one of the worst) or other languages which |are so poor as vehicles of transmission of logical data. I think you have fallen victim to the trap of the egocentrism. English is not particularly less (or more) effective than other languages as a vehicle for communicating logical data, although it may seem that way to a native monolingual speaker. | The facility and ease with which these Indians communicated |indicates that it is possible for a natural language to serve all |purposes of artificial languages based on logic. How do you know how easily they communicated? I'm serious. And how easily do you read a text on partial differential equations? An utterance which is structurally ambiguous may not be the easiest to read. |If one could say what one wishes to say with absolute clarity (although |with apparent redundancy) in the same time and with the same ease as |you say part of what you mean in English, why not do so? And if a |population actually got used to talking in this way there would be |much more clarity and less confusion in our communication. Here we come to an important point. You assume that the ambiguity of natural languages results in loss of clarity. I would argue that in most cases the structural ambiguity in utterances is resolved by other (linguistic or paralinguistic) means. Meaning is determined by a complex interaction of factors, of which surface structure is but one. Surface ambiguity gives the language a flexibility of expression. That flexibility does not necessarily entail lack of clarity. Automatic (machine-based) parers, on the other hand, have a very difficult time taking all the necessary interactions into account and so must rely more heavily on a reliable mapping of surface to base structure. | As to how this is accomplished, basically SYNTAX IS ELIMINATED. |Word order is unimportant, speaking is thus comparable to adding a |series of facts to a data-base. Oops! Languages may have (relatively) free word order and still have syntax. A language without syntax would be the linguistic find of the century! In any event, the principal point I would like to make is that structural ambiguity is not particularly bad nor incompatible with "logical" expression. Human speech recognizers have a variety of means for dealing with ambiguity. In fact, my guess is we do better at understanding languages which use ambiguity than languages which exclude it. Jeff Elman Phonetics Lab, Dept. of Linguistics, C-008 Univ. of Calif., San Diego La Jolla, CA 92093 (619) 452-2536, (619) 452-3600 UUCP: ...ucbvax!sdcsvax!sdamos!elman ARPAnet: elman@nprdc.ARPA
morgan@uicsl.UUCP (10/09/84)
xx Some observations and a question: 1. My local Sanskrit expert tells me the language your are referring to is not Sastric Sanskrit, but an artificial language derived from it by philosophers. Sastric Sanskrit was a natural language, with ambiguity and syntax. The artificial language was intentionally designed to have the properties you mentioned, more or less as modern logicians invent artificial languages that have some properties of natural languages. One could (in principle) do the same for English, if one had the same talents as the Indians you mention. 2. It is not clear whether the ubiquitous ambiguity (!!) of real natural languages is a reflection of something fundamental about the human mind, or just the inevitable result of the immense complexity of human grammars. After all, even syntactically trivial languages like pascal can have ambiguity problems. 3. There is no system of measurement that allows us to rank natural languages in expressive power. There do not seem to be any languages with any kind of expressive deficit. There are no primitive languages unless you count made-up languages (including pidgins) and languages that are in the final stages of extinction (i.e. nobody really counts as a native speaker any more). English is neither more nor less efficient than any other language for "transmitting logical data". 4. It is certainly interesting (though not all that unusual) if the Sastric scholars were using theories that are considered modern. I'd appreciate it if you'd send me a copy of your paper setting forth their theories. 5. If the language you describe can be used with such ease, clarity, facility, etc., why is it so hard for Sanskrit scholars to translate? J. Morgan Dept. of Linguistics U. of Illinois Urbana, IL 61801 uicsl!morgan
jerry@oliveb.UUCP (Jerry Aguirre) (10/17/84)
>> J. Morgan uicsl!morgan >> ...................................... There do not seem to be any >> languages with any kind of expressive deficit. ...................... This struck a choard. I remember a PBS TV show about the Australian aborigines and the difficulties studying them. There is apparently no way to phrase "what if" types of questions. The anthropologists had to tell them a thing was so, get their response, and then tell them it was not so. This would seem to me to be a serious "expressive deficit". Any aborigines on the net care to verify this? Jerry Aguirre {hplabs|fortune|idi|ihnp4|ios|tolerant|allegra|tymix}!oliveb!jerry
steiny@scc.UUCP (Don Steiny) (10/20/84)
> >> ...................................... There do not seem to be any > >> languages with any kind of expressive deficit. ...................... > > This struck a choard. I remember a PBS TV show about the Australian > aborigines and the difficulties studying them. There is apparently no > way to phrase "what if" types of questions. > This would seem to me to be a serious "expressive deficit". When I was a linguistics student I took a class in "field methods" where our professor (Dr. William Shipely) pretended he was a Maidu Indian and we pretended we were linguists trying to preserve the language. Bill is probably the only person alive who speaks this particular branch of Maidu. We would ask "how do you say X" and from the questions we tried to write a grammar of Maidu. Doing this is a fascinating experience that caused me to bump against some assumptions that I did not even know I had. When we asked very indian questions, like "he runs like the wind". We were shocked to find that you could not say anthing like that. Bill claimed that the Maidu could not grammaticaly make a metaphor or a syllogism. On the other hand, the Maidu could make many distinctions that we could not make. For instance, they have a quotative mood. This means that if you are reporting something someone else told you, you have to use a special verb inflection. When anthropologists (linguists were a type of anthropologist at this time) first started studying the Native American languages, they were shocked to find that did not have the same grammatical categories that Indo-European languages had. For instance, several months ago I posted part of an essay by Benjamin Whorf where he pointed out that the Hopi have no tense and that they do not conceive of time in sequence the way we do. From one point of view, these langauges lack expressive power. They cannot express things we find extremely important. From still another point of view, our language lacks expressive power because we have to kludge to say some things and there are other things we cannot express at all. The point is not that every language can express all the things that any other language can express, because this is not true. The point is that every language can express everything the speakers of that language wish to express. To say that some group or another is lacking because they cannot express the same things we can is politics. The Madiu had a pleasant existance and they lived in harmony with their enviornment. Since the native Americans lost their status as the dominate social groups on this contenent, we tend to devalue their world-view. If you think about it, without syllogisms and metaphor there is no basis for logic. They could not have developed a technology like ours. In Proto-Indo European, "weaver of words" was a metaphor for "poet". This shows that metaphor has existed for a long time in Indo-European. They way our societies developed might have been preordained by the language we use to view the world. What would the society of the Maidu be like in 100 years, 1000 years? We have no way of knowing, but it is mind candy to speculate. Remember, the rules are: "no deduction, no induction." The statement that "all languages have equal expressive power," is make to be neutral. If we define the set of things that we believe that are necessary for a language to have more or less expressive power we are forced to make value judgements. If we accept that people in every language express everything the could ever want to, we are led to trying to understand the different worldviews of different people without making a value judgement. -- scc!steiny Don Steiny - Personetics @ (408) 425-0382 109 Torrey Pine Terr. Santa Cruz, Calif. 95060 ihnp4!pesnta -\ fortune!idsvax -> scc!steiny ucbvax!twg -/
morgan@uicsl.UUCP (11/01/84)
Interesting though this topic is, I'm almost sorry I brought it up, since it seems to be close to clogging up net.ai and probably should be moved to net.nlang. But before it goes I should say that none of the putative examples of expressive deficits offered here are persuasive. They are all based on somebody who knew somebody, and/or on conclusions formed from very superficial and impressionistic evidence. A claim that there is something one language can express and another can't--and I mean CAN'T express, not just can't express as economically--is a very important claim indeed, barring trivial cases where one culture can't say anything about some topic (e.g. VLSI) because they never heard of it. Such a claim would therefore have to be backed with serious evidence based on intensive systematic investigation. So far I haven't seen anything like that. I'm also skeptical of claims that some cultures have no metaphor, based on the fact that they find it strange to say somebody runs like the wind. Metaphor (probably not really a linguistic problem anyway) can vary from culture to culture, as reflected in judgements of natural vs. unnatural metaphor, so differences can't be taken as evidence for the absence of metaphor. That is not to say that there are not fascinating systematic differences between languages that reflect important differences between cultures; there clearly are. And it may be that language A offers the user a more efficient means than language B to communicate certain kinds of messages, whereas B is better for some other kinds. But there is no reason to suppose that there are languages (other than pathological cases like pidgins and dying languages) that are on balance expressively inferior in comparison with other languages. There have been claims to that effect in the past, but they were based on racism and/or ignorance, not on fact. One can't rule out the possibility that eventually such evidence might emerge, but as far as I know there is none now; and personally I doubt that there ever will be.
robison@eosp1.UUCP (Tobias D. Robison) (11/06/84)
NOTE: This memo contains a SPOILER regarding one of Peter Dickenson's novels!!!!!!! I think it's silly to talk of deficiencies, but to those who worry about a language that is "deficient": what happens when the native speakers of that language are asked to deal with the inability of their language to express something? Many languages easily adapt and fill in the deficiency. Most European languages easily borrow words as needed from each other, and even grammatical constructions. I'm going to use "gezellig" at the next genuine opportunity, now that I have some idea of what it means. Peter Dickenson has a fascinating novel (sorry, as usual I can't give the name) in which a linguist is dealing with an Aboriginal tribe that, as a feature of their language, cannot express things that are contrary to fact. He is eventually taken prisoner by them, and his method of escape is to attack their system of witchcraft. He utters the statement: "there is no witching", which is comprehensible by the aborigines, but forces them to consider the possibity that although they can discuss witchcraft, it may not actually exist. He does this with great regret, KNOWING THAT IT WILL CHANGE THE LANGUAGE AND THE CULTURE. I'm mentioning all this here to support a simple point -- languages can adapt. If a language is incapable of expressing something, perhaps it never really needed to. When it has to, perhaps it will. - Toby Robison (not Robinson!) allegra!eosp1!robison or: decvax!ittvax!eosp1!robison or (emergency): princeton!eosp1!robison