John Quijada and Ithkuil, the Language He Invented

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/12/24/121224fa_fact_foer?currentPage=all

by ph0rque • 13 years ago

78 27 13 years ago

Classical Sanskrit was designed with this exact goal in mind.

http://www.aaai.org/ojs/index.php/aimagazine/article/view/46...

There are still native speakers of Sanskrit. The cool thing about Sanskrit is that not only is its syntax formalized, but people have tried to give an account of its semantics over thousands of years.

goldfeld• 13 years ago

And it comes with the added benefit of making one able to read ancient literature in it's original form. Thanks for the link, fascinating stuff that such a language would be the perfect match for AI. Stranger than fiction.

batgaijin2• 13 years ago

what does that mean that NLP and sanskrit go so well together? Is that accidental?

cscurmudgeon5• 13 years ago

It is definitely accidental given that they had no computers back then. It makes sense as Classical Sanskrit was an effort to remove ambiguity in Vedic Sanskrit and improve precision while still being a natural language. A lot, not all, of modern NLP is about removing ambiguity.

The way we describe grammars can be attributed to one of the first Sanskrit grammarians, Pāṇini.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backus%E2%80%93Naur_Form

The idea of semantic roles can also be traced back to him.

http://elies.rediris.es/elies11/cap5111.htm

_pmf_• 13 years ago

Thank you for this!

anuraj3• 13 years ago

There are no native speakers of Sanskrit - some people have tried to revive Sanskrit by speaking it - sometimes in large groups. Usage of Sanskrit as a day to day language probably ended hundreds if not thousands of years ago. There are still books written in the language and quiet a number of people can understand it. It is a matter of debate if Sanskrit was any time used as a primary language for communication.

cscurmudgeon5• 13 years ago

It is a matter of debate if Sanskrit was any time used as a primary language for communication.

It is not a matter of debate as there are speakers even today. Declining definitely, but still significant.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanskrit#Contemporary_usage

The 1991 and 2001, census of India recorded 49,736 and 14,135 persons, respectively, with Sanskrit as their native language.[1]

habosa2• 13 years ago

This article is a great read, I read it a while back and was blown away. I never gave any thought to the advantages of any language over any other, I always looked at it with the programmer's lens. Just as all modern programming languages are Turing Complete and therefore equivalent (preferences aside), I assumed that the same would be true for most spoken languages. Ithkuil and the like really show that there is a lot more room for variety than most people imagine.

th0114nd2• 13 years ago

To say that all languages are equivalent because they are Turing Complete is just not true. That means they can decide the same class of problems, it does not mean they can or do decide them in the same way. In particular some languages are inherently faster than others.

javert• 13 years ago

> That means they can decide the same class of problems, it does not mean they can or do decide them in the same way.

OK so far...

> In particular some languages are inherently faster than others.

Which is an example of deciding the same class of problems, just doing in in a "different way."

So your example is not providing a counterexample to the claim; it's providing an example.

habosa2• 13 years ago

I understand, I'm saying that this article suggests that there may be languages which enable us to solve entirely different problems.

Maybe the comparison of a classical computer vs. a quantum computer is more apt. There are many problems which they can both do, but for some a quantum computer is infinitely more efficient. For some linguistic problems, a certain language may be much more efficient.

tunesmith2• 13 years ago

Not sure where I read it, but it was recently - languages that sound faster really just tend to have more syllables per concept, and all languages generally tend to have the same speed of communicated concept.

jliechti1• 13 years ago

This reminds me of an interesting short story entitled "Understand" that I read a few years ago. The premise of the story deals with the question "what would it be like to find meaning and order in everything you saw?". Naturally, language is one facet of this.

"I'm designing a new language. I've reached the limits of conventional languages, and now they frustrate my attempts to progress further. They lack the power to express concepts that I need, and even in their own domain, they're imprecise and unwieldy. They're hardly fit for speech, let alone thought."

Full story here: http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/under.htm

webreac• 13 years ago

"Ithkuil has two seemingly incompatible ambitions: to be maximally precise but also maximally concise". I immediately thought about perl.

flyinRyan• 13 years ago

What? You thought of perl as maximally precise? Have you ever used it? I wish I could find the link about MJD doing some perl consulting, fixing an apparent bug and then finding that what appeared to be a bug was yet another perl special case.

tragomaskhalos• 13 years ago

Some years ago I read a wonderful - and very opinionated - book entitled "The Loom of Language", which opined that had Wilkins' "Real Character" (briefly described in the article) become the norm for scienfific discourse then scientific progress would have ground to a halt, because Wilkins' scheme systematised human knowledge into a fixed hierarchy of concepts, but made no allowance for new concepts. I wonder if Ithkuil might suffer from the same essential weakness (which is not to detract from the awe in which one must hold such an exquisitly intricate creation)

John Quijada and Ithkuil, the Language He Invented

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