From hubeyh at mail.montclair.edu Mon Sep 9 02:24:45 2002 From: hubeyh at mail.montclair.edu (H.M. Hubey) Date: Sun, 8 Sep 2002 22:24:45 -0400 Subject: [language] Re: [evol-psych] Bushman click languages Message-ID: <><><><><><><><><><><><>--This is the Language List--<><><><><><><><><><><><><> Steven D'Aprano wrote: >And language is too important to let the essential meaning of the word >be diluted by those who would talk about the language of art. Art does >not communicate, any more than words use language. Art is the medium of >communication, not the body that communicates. > > I wrote earlier that language is very-well-defined. I am copying this out of a book. I think it should be read carefully, and saved and referred to regularly by anyone who has an interest in this topic. I am copying from this book because it is short, concise and has other wonderful applications which will interest the readers. The relevance of this will be shown below. If I am going thru all this trouble of typing it seems those who want to comment should at least read carefully and think a while about what all this means. {Note": The set inclusion sign is denoted by @, or I use the word "is-in" to mean the same thing. The symbol "->" and "=>" are both arrows, and used differently. The notation P(i+1) used once means P subscript i+1. Elsewhere the subscript is simply lower case e.g. Pi is P sub i except where integers are used e.g. P2, P3, etc) ) From page 331 of Banks, Signal Processing, Image Processing and Pattern Recognition, Prentice-Hall, 1990. ----------------------------------start here ----------------------------------------- [1] We begin by abstracting the basic elements of an ordinary (written) language. An alphabet is a finite nonempty set V whose elements are called letters. A word w (over V) is a finite string of zero or more letters of V, and its length is |w| being the number of letters in the string. ... The set of all words over V is denoted by W(V) or just W if no confusion over the set of letters is likely. [2] If P, Q @W [mine: e.g. P,Q is-in W) then PQ (or P*Q) denotes their concatenation. Note that concatenation is associative ... P is a subword of Q if Q=P1*P*P2 for some P1,P2 @W. Subsets of W are called languages (over V). [3] A generative grammar (or phrase structure grammar is a quadruple G=(Vn,Vtm,S,F) where Vn and Vt are disjoint alphabets, S at Vn, and F is a finite set of ordered pairs (P,Q) such that P,Q at W(V), where V=Vn.union.Vt and P contains at least one letter of Vn. The elements of Vn are called nonterminals, and those of Vt terminals, while S is called the initial letter. If (P,Q)@F we write P ->Q [4] Such an element (P,Q) is called a rewriting rule or production. We say that P generates Q directly and write P=>Q is there exist words R,T and a production P1->Q1 @F such that P=R*P1*T and Q=R*Q1*T. Similarly, we say that P generates Q and write P=>*Q if there exists a finite sequence of words P0,..., Pk such that Po=P, Pk=Q and Pi=>P (i+1) for 0<=i<=k-1. Thus P=>* Q = P= P0=>P1...=>Pk=Q. [5] The language L(G) generated by G is then defined by L(G) = {P: P at W(Vt), S=>*P} .... The rules of production (i.e. elements of F) defined above are very general and without some restrictions lead to significant problems in formal language theory. A hierarchy of grammars is therefore introduced, each being more general than the following grammar. The four main types may be defined as follows: [6] Type 0 or unrestricted grammar allows productions as defined above. Type 1 or context-sensitive grammar allows only production of the form..... Type 2 or context-free grammar allows productions of form A -> P where A at Vn, and P at W(V). Type 3, or finite-state or regular grammar allows productions of the forms A -> BP, or A -> P, where A,B @Vn, P at W(Vt). ---------------------------------------------end here ----------------- Before Larry gets boringly pedantic, we should notice that the restriction to "letters" is for simplicity. We can assume that we use a phonemic or phonetic alpahbet ( and that there are no extra monstrocities such as English "two, too, to" etc. These certainly make things more complicated but do not add to the discussion. Now the real problems are elsewhere. (I numbered the paragraphs to make it easier for later discussion and referral, but I will not put comments here now because it will get too long.) Arguments against this from linguists (not all linguists) are various kinds. Probably the most common one (and the most confusing one) is this one: THIS LANGUAGE PRODUCES ALL KINDS OF THINGS! WHAT KIND OF A LANGUAGE IS THAT? Yes it does, and so it should. Indeed, I give an example right from this book, on page 339, and I will quote. --------------------------start here -------------------- In this section we shall describe some of the more widely used pattern languages and their primitives. The first was developed to deal with two-dimensional picture type objects which do not link together naturally at single points. This means that simple concatenation of symbols cannot be applied without some simplification of picture primitives. In order to reduce the problem to a concatenation language the picture description language (PDL) is defined in terms of primitives, each of which has only two points (head and tail) which can be joined to other primitives..... -----------------------end here----------------------------------- Note: No circularity. There are primitives. Now, here is the main problem. And it is a very general one. Some linguists want to know why these grammars can be used for things other than natural language such as English. The answer is quite simple. Did they ask their teacher why there are no integers for counting only apples? Did they ask their physics teachers what kind of physics uses equations for electrical circuits (e.g. TV tuner) the same equation that can be used to model the sugar-insulin cycle ? Did they ask why the equation for the propagation of sound waves after an integral transform happens to be the same equation as that of a pendulum? There are many many such examples. The best answer is yet another question: Why should the mathematical formulation of language not be able to also model other things? I deleted many things but they are all trivially non-germane. What is really required is what is called "maturity" (mathematical maturity). That is the crux of the problem. The rest is boring detail. The historical explanation is simply that because of the development of digital computers, the field suddently went on a trip on a super-highway and it is much different than riding on a donkey cart. There is a book called "Thirty Years That Shook Physics" (about the relativistic and quantum explosion). That also lost a lot of old-time physicists. That is how life is. The same thing happened to economics. So now it is the time of linguistics. -- M. Hubey hubeyh at mail.montclair.edu /\/\/\/\//\/\/\/\/\/\/http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey ---<><><><><><><><><><><><>----Language----<><><><><><><><><><><><><> Copyrights/"Fair Use": http://www.templetons.com/brad/copymyths.html The "fair use" exemption to copyright law was created to allow things such as commentary, parody, news reporting, research and education about copyrighted works without the permission of the author. That's important so that copyright law doesn't block your freedom to express your own works -- only the ability to express other people's. Intent, and damage to the commercial value of the work are important considerations. You are currently subscribed to language as: language at listserv.linguistlist.org To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-language-4283Y at csam-lists.montclair.edu -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hubeyh at mail.montclair.edu Thu Sep 12 03:52:37 2002 From: hubeyh at mail.montclair.edu (H.M. Hubey) Date: Wed, 11 Sep 2002 23:52:37 -0400 Subject: [language] Overlapping genetic and archaeological evidence suggests neolithic migration Message-ID: <><><><><><><><><><><><>--This is the Language List--<><><><><><><><><><><><><> Public release date: 10-Sep-2002 Contact: Ruthann Richter richter1 at stanford.edu 650-725-8047 Stanford University Medical Center http://med-www.stanford.edu/MedCenter/MedSchool/ Overlapping genetic and archaeological evidence suggests neolithic migration STANFORD, Calif. - For the first time, Stanford researchers have compared genetic patterns with archeological findings to discover that genetics can help predict with a high degree of accuracy the presence of certain artifacts. And they say the strength of this link adds credence to theories that prehistoric people migrated from the Middle East to Europe, taking both their ideas and their way of life with them. "The recovery of history is really a jigsaw puzzle," said Peter Underhill, PhD, senior research scientist in the department of genetics and one of the study's authors. "You have to look at genetics, material culture (archeological findings), linguistics and other areas to find different lines of evidence that reinforce each other." The researchers' mathematical analysis showed that a pair of mutations on the Y chromosome, called Eu9, predicted the presence of certain figurines from the Neolithic period with 88 percent accuracy and the presence of painted pottery with 80 percent accuracy. The study is published in the September issue of Antiquity. "The strength of the association is very surprising," said Roy King, MD, PhD, associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford who co-authored the study. "The genetic measures are very precise, and archaeology is pretty precise - either a figurine is there or it isn't. The strength of the correlation is driven by the strength of our measures." It is known that agriculture spread from the Middle East to Europe during the Neolithic period about 12,000 years ago, but for many years archeologists have debated how this occurred. Was it due to the movement of people or to the movement of ideas? Previous genetic analysis of people living today suggests a migration - that the people moved - but critics have questioned this view. The latest study reinforces evidence of a migration in which people brought their ideas and lifestyle with them. Genetics can answer the question in a roundabout way. Human DNA sequences today may shed light on our ancestors because some portions of the human genome change very slowly. One of these is the Y chromosome. Women carry two X chromosomes, while men have one X and one Y. The X and Y cannot exchange DNA like the 22 pairs of non-sex chromosomes in humans or the paired X chromosomes in women. As a result, a man should have a carbon copy of the Y chromosome of his father, grandfather and so on. But sometimes a harmless mutation, a misspelling in the genetic code, occurs. The mutation will be passed on to all the man's male descendants. If millions of men have the same mutation, then they all share a distant paternal ancestor. Underhill studies pairs of mutations on the Y chromosome in current populations. He combines data about the geographic distribution of the mutations with information about when the mutations arose to trace historical migrations. While reading a previous paper on Y-chromosome mutations in Science that Underhill co-authored, King thought the geographic distribution of some pairs of mutations paralleled that of Neolithic decorative ceramics. King, a psychiatrist with a PhD in mathematics and a deep interest in art history, called Underhill and suggested they compare the two sets of data. Critics argue that the contemporary gene pool does not reflect what happened thousands of years ago because people have moved around too much since then. Many also see genetics as an entirely separate line of investigation from archaeological work. Researchers had compared genetic studies to language evolution, but no one had attempted to link genetics and material culture. Underhill agreed to undertake the analysis with King. The Science paper Underhill co-authored described the Y chromosomes of more than 1,000 men in 25 different Middle Eastern and European geographic regions. They found that the frequency of four pairs of mutations was highest in the Middle East but also significant in eastern and southern Europe. While it is likely that all the mutations studied originated prior to the Neolithic period, the distribution suggested a westward migration. The researchers took the distribution of the four pairs of Y-chromosome mutations found to originate in the Middle East and compared it to the regions where certain decorated ceramics have been found in Neolithic sites. They focused on figurines and pottery with painted geometric and abstract designs. Most of the figurines are female; researchers have speculated that they were used for magic or religious purposes, as amulets or charms, or even as dolls for children, King said. The researchers found a strong correlation in their study between the Y-chromosome mutations and the presence of certain artifacts. Nonetheless, Underhill remains cautious. "No gene on the Y chromosome is going to program you to make pottery," he said. Instead, the Y-chromosome mutation pairs used in the study are simply population markers that in this case were compared to ceramics. The same mutations could be compared to many different types of artifacts. King and Underhill hope that archaeologists will follow them in trying to blend these two lines of historical evidence. They are continuing to gather genetic data from areas in Greece near Neolithic archaeological sites and in western Turkey, which researchers believe to be the jumping-off point for Neolithic migration. ### Stanford University Medical Center integrates research, medical education and patient care at its three institutions - Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford Hospital & Clinics and Lucile Packard Children's Hospital at Stanford. For more information, please visit the Web site of the medical center's Office of Communication & Public Affairs at http://mednews.stanford.edu. http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2002-09/sumc-oga091002.php -- M. Hubey hubeyh at mail.montclair.edu /\/\/\/\//\/\/\/\/\/\/http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey ---<><><><><><><><><><><><>----Language----<><><><><><><><><><><><><> Copyrights/"Fair Use": http://www.templetons.com/brad/copymyths.html The "fair use" exemption to copyright law was created to allow things such as commentary, parody, news reporting, research and education about copyrighted works without the permission of the author. That's important so that copyright law doesn't block your freedom to express your own works -- only the ability to express other people's. Intent, and damage to the commercial value of the work are important considerations. You are currently subscribed to language as: language at listserv.linguistlist.org To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-language-4283Y at csam-lists.montclair.edu From hubeyh at mail.montclair.edu Wed Sep 25 04:38:28 2002 From: hubeyh at mail.montclair.edu (H.M. Hubey) Date: Wed, 25 Sep 2002 00:38:28 -0400 Subject: [language] Linguists Decipher Warning Message in Genome] Message-ID: <><><><><><><><><><><><>--This is the Language List--<><><><><><><><><><><><><> Linguists Decipher Warning Message in Genome February 1, 2039 BOSTON--A group of researchers at MIT's Chomsky Institute announced yesterday independent confirmation of their discovery of a series of messages encoded in apparently dormant or unused sections of the human genome. "We're able to report replication of our results by at least three independent teams," explained the team's project director Klara Tulip. "We hence feel quite confident about the results and felt that they were significant enough to warrant preliminary public release." Exploiting evolved, mathematical models derived from iterative analyses of network-available audio, video and text files in more than 200 languages, the team scanned files in the Human Genome Library for patterns consistent with the presence of a "semantic system." "We were actually using the Genome Library as a control data-set to be sure that our model wasn't producing false positives," explains Tulip. "We'd developed a mathematical and algorithmic formulation of a meta-language descriptive of all known human linguistic systems and needed to test it against some non-random data that we assumed had no semantic content. We we're stunned to find that the genome contains sequences consistent with an implied linguistic system." Within days of discovering the presence of "semantic sequences" the team had also isolated a "Rosetta Stone" enabling them to partially decipher and translate a number of passages. "The genome appears to contain a linguistic system of remarkable economy," notes Tulip. "Like a coded message that includes detailed instructions for how it is to be decoded." Though declining to reveal the full results of their analysis, noting that some 97% of the human genome consists of biologically unused sequences with "a statistically significant chance of containing decipherable semantic content," the team did release translations of a "number of passages of public interest," including the warning "NOT TO BE REMOVED EXCEPT BY END USER." Among other messages, the team isolated at least 42 varied repetitions of the instruction to "[not] fold, spindle, or mutilate" and two apparently inconsistent warranties, one claiming "absence of defect in material or workmanship for 180 days from formulation" and one disavowing "all warranties of fitness for use except as otherwise required." "Our initial analysis has uncovered a number of repetitions, counter-factuals, and internal- inconsistencies suggesting that these genomic messages are a product of the same evolutionary forces driving reproduction of the non-semantic portions of the genome," observes Tulip. Responding to news of the team's discovery, critics, including a number of prominent linguists and bioinformaticians, characterize the research as a Rorschach Test revealing more about the researchers' assumptions than about the meaning of human genes. "You have to look closely at their model, at what their meta- linguistic model assumes about the world," notes Harvard Professor of Statistics Joseph Climb. "If you go into the world with a sufficiently abstract model of 'language' you'll start finding Shakespeare inside rocks and twigs." Discounting such criticism as "mathematically unsophisticated," project leader Tulip points to the astronomical odds against "a chance consistency that would permit our model to identify such a vast pool of semantically significant sequences. Our genome has something to say. The real question is why--what evolutionary purpose could these messages serve?" http://futurefeedforward.com/front.php?fid=64 -- M. Hubey hubeyh at mail.montclair.edu /\/\/\/\//\/\/\/\/\/\/http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey ---<><><><><><><><><><><><>----Language----<><><><><><><><><><><><><> Copyrights/"Fair Use": http://www.templetons.com/brad/copymyths.html The "fair use" exemption to copyright law was created to allow things such as commentary, parody, news reporting, research and education about copyrighted works without the permission of the author. That's important so that copyright law doesn't block your freedom to express your own works -- only the ability to express other people's. Intent, and damage to the commercial value of the work are important considerations. You are currently subscribed to language as: language at listserv.linguistlist.org To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-language-4283Y at csam-lists.montclair.edu