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Topic: Languages in SC2 (new thread) (Read 18074 times)
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Art
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The Ur-Quan uses a particularly striking means of trans-species communication. The Talking Pets, an Ur-Quan invention genetically engineered for the purpose, telepathically interpret Ur-Quan commands into the spoken languages of subordinate species, and reverse the procedure when receiving extra-special transmissions.
Problem is this is ambiguous. Telepathically interpreting could mean directly passing along thoughts, or it could mean hearing a spoken command and knowing what it means because they can read thoughts. I lean toward the latter because "interpret" seems to imply that there's something actually there to interpret the meaning of, like a spoken command, while just passing along thoughts would be telepathically "transmitting" or "relaying".
Also, this:
The Ur-Quan are unwilling to communicate directly with other species
because to do so would be demeaning. Therefore, when giving orders or
interrogating enemies, the Ur-Quan use "Talking Pets," large-brained, frog-
like creatures which are non-sentient, but possess the telepathic/empathic
ability to translate all languages.
also leans on the other side; they don't possess the ability to communicate telepathically but to translate all languages telepathically, which implies that there's still the use of real languages going on; nothing is said about the language-less interpretation of thoughts. They don't say, for example, "possess the telepathic/empathic ability to hear Ur-Quan thoughts and translate alien languages".
And I do find it easier to imagine that a nonsentient nonthinking Talking Pet would need to hear a spoken command as a cue to start translating. If Talking Pets can operate without that, then it raises questions about how Talking Pets receive signals to let them know that certain thoughts are meant to be transmitted and certain others not. Speaking to a Talking Pet also answers the question of how the Talking Pet sorts between conscious thoughts that are meant to be broadcast and secret thoughts -- the Talking Pet might not be able to think but it could certainly be trained to tell when a stream of sound and a stream of thought were somehow in sync with each other, one following the other's pattern, and to translate just those thoughts.
Regarding ancient cultures & translation: How do the Chenjesu, Spathi, Earthlings (Farnsworth, the Captain), and others translate Precursor writings? There's obviously not going to be a rosetta stone (unless it's a Precursor child's primer complete with Holograms but no holos of precursors themselves since we don't know what they look like).
We're given very very little knowledge of anything the Precursors wrote in the first place, right? Which is consistent. If you read Frederik Pohl's Gateway novels, upon which the idea of the Precursors seems largely based, there are some interesting bits where they make early headway with the ancient Heechee language. If you see a very common phrase repeated on all sorts of devices that all shoot deadly rays, you might think that word means "ray gun", and the next time you saw something with those marks on it you'd think twice before pointing it at yourself and pushing the button. If there's been a huge, concerted effort to study the Precursors starting with the Chenjesu then they may even have gotten far enough to have fragmentary translations like the "Appendages of Dawn" fragment, which is appropriately vague and ambiguous, or for the Spathi (with Chenjesu help) to get a reference to "10 garbage dumps". But it is notable that most of the time Precursor writing is just a big mystery.
The big exception is of course the Vindicator's computer, and maybe a UT is the best explanation for how even an expert like Farnsworth could've gotten it to speak English. (At the very least there must've been a powerful AI trying to learn English while he was trying to learn the computer's language.) One would think that the Precursor computer would be a great resource for the Precursor language, but it may be that all Farnsworth did was learn to understand a simpler code used by the computer itself and bypass the Precursor-language related parts of it, translating its displays into English by trial and error. He certainly worked really hard on doing it, and maybe we shouldn't blame him for giving up after that difficult task. There's something a bit strange about Zelnick's gift, and it may not be just a natural talent (didn't the Arilou say he'd very recently been to Unzervalt?).
New questions: How does Chenjesu communication work? They communicate naturally by electromagnetic radiation and Hyperwave; they presumably didn't start learning our spoken languages till we broadcast them over radio waves. This raises the question of things like names; why should they be called the "Chenjesu" and have names like "Tzz-Tzer-Tzak" when their natural bodies don't speak in sounds that could be transliterated like that. Obvious answer is that it's for our benefit, but then where do the names come from? My inclination is to think that they have patterns of radio frequencies that are their names, and they just pick a simple way of playing those frequencies as static over a receiver and allowing how we hear those sounds to be their names, which would explain why their names are so... staticky.
Mmrrnrrhrrm: I see these guys as interesting. A race of robots could both hear and make sounds with much more precision than we biological humans. So, if they communicate by sound, the sound-making mechanism or set of sounds could be have a lot less range in pitch and tone and still convey really complex information, since a very tiny adjustment in pitch or length would be perceptible to them -- like the imaginary Speedtalk Heinlein wrote about in Gulf. That would explain why their words are long consonant stretches (which I imagine as them making a sort of low modulated humming noise).
Chmmr: Their names are prolly just meldings of Chenjesu and Mmrrnrrhrrm names. It's interesting that they do seem to be more generally pronounceable, though; possibly they want to decrease awkwardness with other races that way; the Process may have partly involved installing better vox capabilities.
Orz: Yeah, we have no idea what these guys speak, though it's something that our computer can sort of translate, so we should be glad. One thing is that it's weird that they talk at all, since they claim to be projections of a single entity -- why would they come into our universe with a language ready-made for them? Did they crib it from the Androsynth or the VUX? Why are they called "Orz"? Is it some arbitrary thing they picked as a detail to make themselves more believable as a mortal race -- like giving themselves fish bodies and styling their starships a certain way?
Interesting point: We know the Orz's first foreign contact was with the VUX, and the VUX may've been the first people they actually tried to communicate with.
We also know that there's a VUX captain whose name is... ORZ. Coincidence? Maybe, but ripping off some random guy's name to be the name of their race 'cause they can't think of anything else... sounds like an Orz thing to do. (There's also a Spathi named Pkunky, but I'm not as inclined to look into that.)
Spathi: Not a whole lot to say except that their accent and their tendency to forget random words for things makes me think they aren't speaking their native tongue at us. And the Spathi have special reason to know our language, since they're a neighboring race whose only real job was to guard us after the war was over and check to make sure we weren't playing any tricks by obsessively monitoring our world.
Umgah: See, their stilted English grammar makes me think they're not talking through a translator, 'cause *all* alien languages are going to have a very different grammar and interpreting the sentences in proper English grammar is exactly what a translating device is supposed to do. The messed-up English has to be them speaking that way to us, either 'cause they think it's funny or 'cause they're a lot worse at languages than at gengineering (which might be how the Spathi caught on to their hoaxes).
Ilwrath: This is the one that gets me, since the whole "Dwe, the Dill-Rats, warship yuubuu!" thing is something that'd be near-impossible to translate from one language to another. Far-fetched to say that the proud Ilwrath were actually speaking English? Maybe, but it simplifies that exchange a heck of a lot. And the overthrow of the priesthood class certainly could've entailed major, widespread cultural change, including a rather arbitrary installation of a new language, esp. if we go with the "Umgah are bad at learning languages" theory -- why learn a new one when you can humiliate your marks by making them learn the enemy's language for some stupid and arbitrary reason? (The Ilwrath do seem to enjoy it when Dogar and Kazon give stupid and arbitrary orders.) They may have already known English, anyway; their whole race are loyal "Captain Satellite" viewers, and the way he says it makes me think he means it's a show produced by non-Ilwrath (humans?).
Supox: We thought the VUX were fast learners, but the Supox's whole biological imperative is about cultural assimilation. Wouldn't surprise me if they learned English pretty quickly upon monitoring our transmissions for the first time and had a standard English greeting ready just in case they met us.
Mycon: See, Mycon probably do need some kind of translator, and may even only have humanoid Mycon to do negotiations and such; their basic nature may not really require language -- they communicate by uploading their memories to new offspring -- and their physiology certainly makes speaking human languages unlikely. Their name, "Mycon", is just a Greek word for "fungus". It seems to be common human practice to use Greek to give names to other races (Androsynth, Slylandro, Mycon). They might retain the ability to form speaking units, and still have unique spoken words like Juffo-Wup and names like Shloosh because of the spoken commands from their creators (possibly the Precursors).
Slylandro: Do Slylandro really "talk" in sound? And would those sounds be even audible to us without a translating computer? I'm inclined to think a word like "Drahn" is a Precursor artifact, if not an actual Precursor word then maybe their way of representing the pattern of a much deeper sound that can't be heard by people whose ears aren't designed for really dense gases.
Dnyarri: See, my question is if this guy actually talks. I think he does; he has a voice that sounds very, well, earthy and solid and not like thoughts just dropping into your head. And he moves his little mouth. I have my doubts about whether truly talking through thought is reasonable -- we think words, but do we think in long, coherent sentences? When we do think a sentence, how much total thought does that represent compared to all the muddle below? And how well would we be able to tell a thought that popped into our heads from outside from one of our own thoughts? There might be good reasons that a Dnyarri or Talking Pet needs to communicate in spoken words, beyond for appearance's sake in the game; we might not have the equipment for mind-to-mind communication, and talking might be so integral to how we think that Dnyarri themselves use spoken language, even when compelling you.
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meep-eep
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No. You suffer from the misapprehension that language "contains" objective meaning. It contains no such thing. Language only means something because people agree it defines something -- the sounds or letters themselves mean nothing. Without any prior knowledge of what the language means, you will see *nothing* inside of the "data";
You seem to misunderstand. I do not claim the actual sounds or letters have an intrinsic meaning, but the way words are used together *can* tell you something about it's meaning.
For example, take the sentence "I looked up to the sky and *SWOFK* a falling star.". You'll probably will know what *SWOFK* means now. Usually, there will be more possibilities, and when you begin almost everything will be unknown. But when you combine all the sentences, you will find limits to what words can mean, and as you go along there will be less and less degrees of freedom.
It's like a system of many equations with many unknowns. If you've got enough independant equations, you can fill in the unknowns. It's probably too enormous a task for a human to do, but I expect a future computer can be made to do it.
Though a little bit of outside knowledge can make this operation a lot easier.
Well, it *is* a lack of imagination, whatever other reasons there are behind it. Even if the writers are capable of greater imagination, they choose not to use it, perhaps because they think the viewers or the producers don't have much imagination.
Ok, I see we interpreted "unimaginative" differently. I saw it as "being the result of a lack of imagination", while you appearantly meant it as "showing no imagination". I can live with that.
And anyway, the elder race explanation is a stupid one. It's not the "real" explanation -- it was introduced in Star Trek: The Next Generation long after the original series established that most races in the galaxy look human, and actually claimed that other races' *history* had to closely follow human history because that was a Law of Nature.
I do not know of this claim, but ST isn't always internally consistent. I would not claim any of those as the "real" explanation.
Even TNG's attempted explanation, bold as it was, was still ridiculous. The "seeding" was suppposed to have happened billions of years before all these sentient species developed, meaning that while human beings' ancestors were little hairy shrew-like things they had some sort of hidden code in their genes to become five-and-a-half-foot tall, five-fingered, bipedal, large-brained, hairless beings, where males were taller and stronger and females had enlarged mammary glands as a secondary sexual characterstic, etc. And so did *every other damn race*. That's *not* how evolution and natural selection work (and of all the things sci-fi writers often get wrong, what evolution actually *is* seems to be number one).
They may have meant to imply that the "evolution" of the species was in fact a pre-programmed event, with natural selection having only a marginal influence. It's rather silly imho, but if that is necessary for a consistent story, I'm prepared to accept that for a fact in the ST universe.
Lewis Carroll made a hobby out of creating made-up words and defining them in terms of other nonsense words, and writing whole stories with them, and even though the entire framework is pure standard English, the words are incomprehensible.
Where Lewis Carroll defined made-up words it's almost always in plain English. But usually he didn't even explain them, though you always get an idea of what they mean from the context.
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“When Juffo-Wup is complete
when at last there is no Void, no Non
when the Creators return
then we can finally rest.”
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meep-eep
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No. Actually it's the exact opposite! Regional accents exist because even people who start out speaking languages perfectly begin to slowly make mistakes, and then make the same mistakes more and more commonly.
I'm not talking about why there are different accents, I'm talking about why people in some region all speak with the same accent. Which is partly because they copy from eachother.
That's not proof, but I think the burden of proof is on those who think UTs exist, since I don't think there's much in-game evidence for it and all real-life evidence makes them horrendously unlikely.
Oh, so that's what this discussion was about. 
My crusade is to get sci-fi fans out of the habit of *assuming* UTs exist in whatever new sci-fi they're watching/reading/playing because it's just the sort of thing people can build in the future, y'know?
I know many sci-fi fans, but I know of noone ever having assumed that.
Not that they usually make any problems of UTs in sci-fi, they just accept it as a fact of the universe they're watching. Which I think is the idea of sci-fi.
At least people have come to accept that flying cars, food pills, and teleporters are ridiculous, but this universal translator thing really has a grip on people, if only because it makes filming sci-fi movies so much easier.
While I wouldn't assume these things exist in sci-fi, I wouldn't say they are necessarily ridiculous. But I won't say any more about this, lest this discussion explode any further.
I usually can go on for very long discussing a hypothetical topic, but I'm afraid this thread is exploding. For every little point someone makes follows a long text by you (Art) explaining your views with many examples. I think all those examples aren't necessary; your point usually is clear after your first paragraph (and if it isn't, we can always ask for a clarification). All those examples tempt the reader (well me at least) to just interject a small side remark, but that usually seems to be the starting point for another text explosion.
So I'll be trying to get out of this discussion, only responding to the points where my own earlier remarks are misinterpreted. I don't know whether I'll ever succeed though.
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“When Juffo-Wup is complete
when at last there is no Void, no Non
when the Creators return
then we can finally rest.”
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Art
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You seem to misunderstand. I do not claim the actual sounds or letters have an intrinsic meaning, but the way words are used together *can* tell you something about it's meaning.
For example, take the sentence "I looked up to the sky and *SWOFK* a falling star.". You'll probably will know what *SWOFK* means now. Usually, there will be more possibilities, and when you begin almost everything will be unknown. But when you combine all the sentences, you will find limits to what words can mean, and as you go along there will be less and less degrees of freedom.
It's like a system of many equations with many unknowns. If you've got enough independant equations, you can fill in the unknowns. It's probably too enormous a task for a human to do, but I expect a future computer can be made to do it.
Though a little bit of outside knowledge can make this operation a lot easier.
My original rant has already gone over the top, so I'll just say no, you can't, and it has nothing to do with how powerful your computer is.
Ok, I see we interpreted "unimaginative" differently. I saw it as "being the result of a lack of imagination", while you appearantly meant it as "showing no imagination". I can live with that.
I do not know of this claim, but ST isn't always internally consistent. I would not claim any of those as the "real" explanation.
They may have meant to imply that the "evolution" of the species was in fact a pre-programmed event, with natural selection having only a marginal influence. It's rather silly imho, but if that is necessary for a consistent story, I'm prepared to accept that for a fact in the ST universe.
As a Star Trek fan I'm willing to *suspend* disbelief, the same way I can believe in gods and magic when I'm reading high fantasy. It may not make the story less compelling or fun, but it makes the story less believable, and therefore reduces the degree to which Star Trek is interesting as actual speculation about the future (which it tries to pretend to be sometimes).
And preprogrammed evolution that can ignore vastly different starting conditions and environments on different planets is not just silly but every bit as fantastic as gods and magic. Especially the TOS-era evolution of societies just like ancient Rome and Egypt and such.
Where Lewis Carroll defined made-up words it's almost always in plain English. But usually he didn't even explain them, though you always get an idea of what they mean from the context.
The only time he actually did that was when Humpty-Dumpty explained the first verse of "Jabberwocky", and that wasn't very convincing (or meant to be very convincing). I meant more like The Hunting of the Snark, where we know certain things happen if the Snark is a Boojum and other things happen if it isn't, and certain things that go along with the Snark being a Boojum or not, but never any hint as to what either a Snark or a Boojum actually is in our language.
And no, you really can't get an idea of what they mean from context. That's the point -- you can make a good guess, and the guess might make sense to you, but it's always written in a way so that some totally different guess would make just as much sense.
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Art
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I'm not talking about why there are different accents, I'm talking about why people in some region all speak with the same accent. Which is partly because they copy from eachother.
Yeah, but it's one of those concentric-circle effects; even in small areas people vary, and vary more as they get farther away from each other. In My Fair Lady Professor Higgins says he can tell what street in London someone lives on by their accent, which, I'm told, is only a slight exaggeration. It's less true in modern America because of how often we move and because we all watch TV and learn from that, of course.
I usually can go on for very long discussing a hypothetical topic, but I'm afraid this thread is exploding. For every little point someone makes follows a long text by you (Art) explaining your views with many examples. I think all those examples aren't necessary; your point usually is clear after your first paragraph (and if it isn't, we can always ask for a clarification). All those examples tempt the reader (well me at least) to just interject a small side remark, but that usually seems to be the starting point for another text explosion.
So I'll be trying to get out of this discussion, only responding to the points where my own earlier remarks are misinterpreted. I don't know whether I'll ever succeed though.
Mea culpa. My own at-home situation may be exacerbating my tendency to be overly argumentative about such things, but we don't need to get into that.
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Death 999
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We did. You did. Yes we can. No.
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Art,
Please do not assume that I know nothing of the subject I am talking about. I have looked extensively into ciphers and codes, I know the difference between them, and so forth. Assuming that the other person in a conversation is appallingly ignorant and/or stupid is not a very productive form of communication.
The examples I was thinking of as far as decoded languages were thus:
After World War II, the decryption team that tackled the Japanese naval code wanted to stay in practice, so they found all of the old unbroken ciphertexts that they could. Several of them were alchemical texts that basically had no 'native' language to be broken into, as they replaced the structural elements of the language with shorthands, and all of the verbs and nouns were encoded. Not ciphered, encoded. In some cases, the codes were rotating, which alien languages would be unlikely to do.
The only hints they had to work with were the intentionally vague illuminations put into the manuscripts. They were intentionally vague to hinder decryption, yet they were enough.
They succeeded in all but one case, and that one is suspected to be a fake, not really a message at all.
Second, a mathematician-historian attempted to use Bayesian methods to decipher a long text of an ancient language much older than Etruscan. Given only about 100 pages of text, she managed to very strongly constrain the meanings. She provided a best-guess meaning, but that was attacked as being too unfounded. However, she was quite willing to admit that it was simply the least-unlikely meaning guess based on the mathematical model, and other guesses of varying similarity also ranked highly. I cannot remember her name, the language, etc. This is frustrating, I will look around.
Thirdly, Etruscan is not a great example. How much Etruscan text do we have? The Bayesian methods one might use would require large sample sizes. I doubt that we have more than 10 megabytes of Unicode-format Etruscan text, total. If we were to dredge up, say, a few gigabytes of data with context supplied, we would run an excellent chance of translating the language from scratch. Sure, that's a heck of a lot of text for people writing with chisels. But the question at hand is not deciphering ancient Etruscan, it's futuristic first contacts.
Futuristic ships might send out a low-entropy signal designed to start up a primer. A cleverer primer than the one sent by the folks broadcasting from Vega in Contact, which stymied everyone on earth for a while. Something like the Arecibo bitmap broadcasts -- very low entropy, fairly obvious interpretation. Depending on how smart the two sides are, the computers might be ready to translate before the captains have gotten to the bridge.
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« Last Edit: August 16, 2004, 10:12:10 pm by Death_999 »
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definite
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A mathematician-historian attempted to use Bayesian methods to decipher a long text of an ancient language much older than Etruscan. Given only about 100 pages of text, she managed to very strongly constrain the meanings. She provided a best-guess meaning, but that was attacked as being too unfounded. However, she was quite willing to admit that it was simply the least-unlikely meaning guess based on the mathematical model, and other guesses of varying similarity also ranked highly. I cannot remember her name, the language, etc. This is frustrating, I will look around.
Thirdly, Etruscan is not a great example. How much Etruscan text do we have? The Bayesian methods one might use would require large sample sizes. I doubt that we have more than 10 megabytes of Unicode-format Etruscan text, total. If we were to dredge up, say, a few gigabytes of data with context supplied, we would run an excellent chance of translating the language from scratch
I would like to read the algorithms you describe and test them with Chinese documents. Since we definitely have millions of Chinese documents. We have enough training set and test set.
. Sure, that's a heck of a lot of text for people writing with chisels. But the question at hand is not deciphering ancient Etruscan, it's futuristic first contacts.
If it can properly solves ancient Etruscan without prior Etruscan knowledge, the same technique can be used to first contacts.
But in order to develope the mircle technique, we should solve following problem first:
Given a long binary bit string as training instance, and a shorter binary bit string as test instance, explain what does the test instance mean.
If the problem solved, there will be no problems in the fields of deciphering text, OCR, WSD and translation. :-)
In terms of WSD, would you mind to tell me what does the 'right' mean in following text.
Testee: "Turn left?"
Examiner: "Right"
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Yes, Captain. I am a lying, boneless, toady dweeb
but I am YOUR lying, boneless, toady dweeb!
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Bobucles
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Please do not assume that I know nothing of the subject I am talking about. I have looked extensively into ciphers and codes, I know the difference between them, and so forth. Assuming that the other person in a conversation is appallingly ignorant and/or stupid is not a very productive form of communication.
You forget that this is a public forum. Clearly stating and defining topics that are not well known is a polite thing to do. And it lets everyone join in on the conversation, not just the few people discussing it.
If you were to do such a thing with private chat... that would be another matter entirely.
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Death 999
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We did. You did. Yes we can. No.
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Supposing you have started a thread on a specialized field, when someone says something you disagree with, there is a big difference between asking them for some justification and/or credentials, and proceeding to give a lecture on the basics of the field in a manner which suggests that they had no right to butt in.
Given a long binary bit string as training instance, and a shorter binary bit string as test instance, explain what does the test instance mean.
If the problem solved, there will be no problems in the fields of deciphering text, OCR, WSD and translation.
In terms of WSD, would you mind to tell me what does the 'right' mean in following text.
Testee: "Turn left?"
Examiner: "Right"
Some strings are harder than others. Your example is indeterminate. Obviously, if you are attempting to give a primer to an alien species, you will attempt to make your string relatively easy. And it is this which makes the problem completely different from the solving of ancient languages. You have a lot of common context with the aliens, and both of you are trying to make it easy on the other. This is itself a very important clue as to the meaning.
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« Last Edit: August 18, 2004, 08:14:24 pm by Death_999 »
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meep-eep
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The only time he actually did that was when Humpty-Dumpty explained the first verse of "Jabberwocky", and that wasn't very convincing (or meant to be very convincing). I meant more like The Hunting of the Snark, where we know certain things happen if the Snark is a Boojum and other things happen if it isn't, and certain things that go along with the Snark being a Boojum or not, but never any hint as to what either a Snark or a Boojum actually is in our language.
In the Hunting of the Snark he didn't define either Snark or Boojum at all. Neither in terms of other words, nor in plain English.
And no, you really can't get an idea of what they mean from context. That's the point -- you can make a good guess, and the guess might make sense to you, but it's always written in a way so that some totally different guess would make just as much sense.
You do know certain constraints. You know that a snark is a creature, how it tastes, that it gets up late, how it is to be captured.
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“When Juffo-Wup is complete
when at last there is no Void, no Non
when the Creators return
then we can finally rest.”
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Death 999
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We did. You did. Yes we can. No.
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Also, the snark really WAS a Boojum, you see...
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definite
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Some strings are harder than others. Your example is indeterminate. Obviously, if you are attempting to give a primer to an alien species, you will attempt to make your string relatively easy. And it is this which makes the problem completely different from the solving of ancient languages. You have a lot of common context with the aliens, and both of you are trying to make it easy on the other. This is itself a very important clue as to the meaning.
In your example, you need to define what is the simple message and the simple meassage representation. Do you have that in mind?
Ok, alien has sent a message to you. Your computer has already store them in binary bits form. What's your algorithm to solve/decipher it?
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« Last Edit: August 20, 2004, 10:09:38 pm by definite »
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Yes, Captain. I am a lying, boneless, toady dweeb
but I am YOUR lying, boneless, toady dweeb!
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Death 999
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We did. You did. Yes we can. No.
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You can answer this yourself -- explain the logic you use as you decode the following transmission.
You receive a signal composed of flashes of two different lights of different colors. Here I represent that so: 0 means both lights are off. 1 and 2 are the bits for the two lights; 3 means both are on.
2012220220212202220112202222022120222220
1212022222202112022222220111202222222202
2210222222222012210222222222202121022222
2222220112102222222222220221102222222222
2220121102222222222222202111022222222222
2222011113122201012220110212231222010212
2011011223112201012220110221232122010212
2011022123111201011220110212131122010221
1011000
(transmission stops -- all zeroes)
See what you can figure out from that. I pose this as an open problem. Also, does anyone have anything to say back to these aliens?
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« Last Edit: August 23, 2004, 09:54:33 pm by Death_999 »
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