truthexposer

the goal is off the grid and environmental sustainability...

I think this lack of understanding of computer technology by the media has been revealed time and time again, especially in cybersecurity. 10 years ago with Anonymous, and now perhaps with the Russians.

Semantics is never fully unambiguous, because of its interface with pragmatics, which Lojban doesn't deal with at all. There is no systematic way to unambiguously convey tone, register, etc.

This article fails to mention the vast amount of money the US poured into Japan to make Japan a base of US influence in Southeast Asia. Domestic peace, maybe, but the other side of the whole international story is a less happy picture

recursion and embedded structures has been posited by some linguists as one possible explanation for similarities between languages cross-linguistically, however, controversially, Dan Everett's work on Piraha claims that this does not exist in Piraha. The mainstream community disagrees with him however.

I believe what makes the voices robotic is due to the little amount of audio they need to generate a "usuable" voice from the system.

Speech models usually use triphones, which turns out to be a huge amount of audio. This is particularly impressive because of how little data they need.

Google used their own datasets, which are most likely massive.

pragmatic*, placing stress is less a problem of word meaning than it is of speaker adaptation for listener comprehension, emphasis, and prosodic tendencies.

Even then, I don't believe the issue is with stress. I believe that the voices sound robotic because they are using, and also admitting because it makes their results impressive in some sense, very few samples, "less than a minute" they claim. Triphones are usually what speech systems are trained on. The amount of triphones (3-phoneme-grams) to cover a language's phonemic inventory is huge (50 phonemes = 50! triphones, which could mean a few hours of audio, although many will not occur within the language given the phonotactics of the language).

What difference would that make? If different time zones give the same time, that makes no difference, as the time needed would be the local time. The local time could be in a twilight zone that works on a mod43 clock, but if you're scheduling an appt to be in the twilight zone at +800 twilight zone, +800 twilight zone will be the time you need to be at the place.

no, but I doubt that if I ask him what X-bar theory is, that he'll have any clue what I'm talking about, and that he would even think I'm talking about a theory of generative syntax.

it's a much easier way to say, I significantly doubt your credentials as a person educated in both Mandarin Chinese and linguistics

the weak form isn't debunked, but the hypothesis as a whole is debunked to a degree of being common sense, of course psychology, sociology, and anthropology may argue for stronger forms to advance their own theories, but most theories from any discipline that studies this sort of thing would agree that the influence cognition and language have on each other is not one-directional, nor are the influences very direct, and the influence that they do display on each other may be caused by some other phenomenon.

tell the eskimo seeing X different kinds of snow to any linguist and they will roll their eyes, debating whether or not to explain why the example is probably not only incorrect, but fabricated for the umpteenth time.

You're speaking out of your behind. Of course the signs are arbitrary with respect to their signifiers, that's any language, but there are still mappings between signs and their signifiers. English is no difference, am I supposed to know what a 'm' sounds like by looking at it? Look up the Rebus principle, it happens in every language.

And with respect to the phonetic shifts, from a linguistic perspective, most changes of the phonetic radical involve one change of the initial sound, i.e. bilabial to interdental, dental to alveolar, voiced to unvoiced. With respect to the phonetic inventory of the language, these shifts are only one feature shifts within an old SPE framework. These small featural differences, whether conscious or not, (usually unconscious because we acquire languages during our infancy) are picked up and used by the speaker of the language to categorize words.

I meant the development of written languages happened independently across different regions of the world, and of course at some point, languages became mutually unintelligible, and language changes within the languages happened differently.

And while of course every language descends from another, and ancient Chinese isn't understandable to a modern Chinese speaker, there is a long tradition within the Chinese language, and change within the language hasn't been shaped by things as drastic as displacement of the linguistic community, or forced political rule under a foreign power, etc.

No, he has opinions on language, not knowledge of linguistics. He is a science fiction writer. It's an actual academic discipline, you know, not just people harumphing in armchairs.

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which underlies Arrival, has been debunked for years in academia, and the movie, if detached from that hypothesis, is more of a thought experiment on the effect of the linearity of time on human thought than a thought experiment on anything related to language itself.

I've seen this sentiment a lot in Chinese-Americans that are not educated in linguistics, along with other self-loathing sentiments.

First, literacy isn't completely related to the writing system. Look at Spanish speaking countries, where the alphabet is more phonetic than the English alphabet.

Second, Chinese characters that are more complex, i.e. consists of more than one radical, are usually composed with a semantic component, giving indication to the character's meaning, and a phonetic component, which gives an indication to the sound of the character. Although this isn't a rule, it helps a lot, and it's not like English doesn't have crazy non-phonetic spellings as well (how tf is "through" supposed to be pronounced for a English learner?)

Last, the Chinese language consists of MANY homophones. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, and not one out of design, but something that is the result of being one of the oldest language families in the world. It allows for the concise expression of many things using only single syllables. You might say, but what about the crazy amount of ambiguity if the language has a lot of homophones? Well, ambiguity is a huge problem in all languages and our brains seem to manage. Now, even though homophones aren't a big problem in spoken language, because of intonation and prosody giving a clue to how to analyze sentences, written language is a different story, and it would be very hard to make an easier system to handle it. For all you engineers, the fact that Chinese has characters is essentially a performance trade off. More information density for more ambiguity.