LL-L "Language programming" 2009.01.16 (08) [E]

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L O W L A N D S - L - 16 January 2009 - Volume 08
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From: Sandy Fleming <sandy at scotstext.org>
Subject: LL-L "Language programming" 2009.01.16 (06) [E]

> From: Mark Dreyer <mrdreyer at lantic.net>
> Subject: LL-L "Language programming" 2009.01.12 (06) [E]
>

> It occurs to me we have been talking at cross purposes. I have augered
> in on language (the term) similar to that in Afrikaaans of for example
> 'haatspraak' = hate-speech &c, Whereas you are more precisely focussed
> on for example the term as expressed in 'Die Skotse Taal' = The
> Scottish Tongue. As far as focus applies, it seeems to me you have the
> best of it.

Yes, that's right, since the discussion started with my objection to the
idea that great mathematicians arose because of their native language
(eg French). While I don't dispute that there have been a lot of great
French mathematicians, you don't build a Laplace or Fourier out of
having to count in twenties instead of tens. It's not because of their
language that Einstein and Newton made their respective discoveries,
either.

As for brains and computers, yes, they both process data but so does a
card loom or a mechanical change-maker. A computer is much more like a
very big (though minaturised), very fast mechanical change-maker than a
human brain.

Computers have always been publicised as thinking machines but the more
you work with them the more you realise that whether they think or not,
they don't do it the way the brain does. Artificial intelligence
research hasn't gone the way we expected. Programs that seem human are
nothing but a bag of tricks, image and voice recognition is very
difficult for computers, while chess and computation is very easy for
them, but difficult for us.

An interesting contrast between the brain and computers is that the less
data you have, the better computers are with it. But the human brain
seems to work better with more data rather than less. For example, you
may be visiting someone for the first time and they send you
instructions with street names and their house number and some words
like "right" and " second left". You follow these (probably written down
somewhere in the car because you tend to forget things that aren't
data-rich) and get there. Three months later you visit her again but you
don't have the instructions. You can't remember any street names or even
what her house number was. Nevertheless you drive straight there because
you recognise most things on the way. Recognising all these pictures
involves a HUGE amount of data, and if you wanted to program a computer
to do this, you'd probably do it with the street names rather than
storing pictures of everything along the route. Even if you did it the
"human" way in a computer it would be an illusion: the computer would
have to be doing immense amounts of calculation - more than a human
being could do in a million lifetimes - behind the scenes.

This is why mnemonic systems generally involve turning words and numbers
into pictures or other sensations in your head. It may be one reason why
languages have so many words meaning approximately the same thing, and
why orthographies are never quite the simple, logical systems you might
expect to work best.

Sandy Fleming
http://scotstext.org/

•

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