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The Infancy and Adolescence of Artificial Languages: by Noah Savage
The Infancy and Adolescence of Artificial Languages: by Noah Savage
Artificial Languages
By Noah Savage
The Search for the Perfect
Language
• Umberto Eco’s book The Search for the Perfect
Language covers a multitude of proposals,
creations, and observations regarding “perfect”
languages.
• What the searchers consider “perfect” varies, but
what they all have in common is that cognitive
linguistics has decided the ultimate realism of
what they sought.
• We will use the findings illustrated in Feldman’s
book to evaluate the realism of what has been
found by those language searchers and others.
Umberto Eco
• Umberto Eco is a professor at the
University of Bologna.
• His career is all over the place—Eco
has been a scientist, a historian, a
novelist, and a lot more. He has
also received more academic
honors than can be listed on this
slide.
• He is the author of the bestselling
novel The Name of the Rose.
• Most importantly to us, he is the
author of The Search for the Perfect
Language.
Jerome Feldman
• Jerome Feldman is the author of
From Molecule to Metaphor.
• He is Professor of Computer
Science at UC Berkeley.
• His focuses include Information
Technology, Computer Science,
and Cognitive Science.
• He is also focused on helping
underrepresented groups find
opportunities in the field of
Information Technology.
Infancy
John Dee
• We will begin our story in medias res with
the famous English magician John Dee.
John Dee
• In the 16th century, the man discovered a
unique primitive unit.
• Dee’s writings have been interpreted to
claim that this primitive is primitive for all
things, the way they are, independent of
personal construal.
• What do you think it is?
Why, It’s this symbol, of course!
Monad
• This symbol, called the Monad and
introduced in the essay Monas
Hieroglyphica, was touted as means of
generating all alphabets, sounds, and
words, and as they were, rather than how
they appeared to be, to boot.
• In other words, Monad is the ultimate
semantic primitive, from which one
generate all linguistic units.
• The Monad “restores the language of
Adam”, according to Dee.
• (The term “monad” is used in many places
and by a variety of philosophical traditions,
but we’ll focus only on Dee’s symbol.)
How does it work?
• This is how we get the sound [i]:
How does it work?
• The average first and second frequencies of the
sound waves produced by vibrating vocal cords
and amplified by the shape of the vocal tract of
the vowel [i] are 300 and 2500. If one adds up
the number of the most salient shapes in the
Monad (4) and multiplies it by the number of
days in a week (7), we get 28, the same number
as the sum of the aforementioned frequencies
divided by 1000.
• The “love” heart can be made by placing the
bottom part of the Monad above the top.
• Etc.
Did John Dee really believe that?
• No. Dee’s methods were even more
complicated than those in the previous
examples.
• Dee’s specific means of generating
meaning from the Monad involved lengthy
geometric computations, kabbalism, and a
fair amount of self-confidence.
All of which begs the question:
• Are children born with the innate faculty to
generate sounds, concepts, and letters via
differential calculus performed on the Monad?
• More research is necessary to verify this, but
even if his creation becomes discredited, Dee
deserves credit for finding a way to combine
semantic primitives, objective reality, and
religious mysticism into a single project.
Ars Magna
• Another project, this one earlier and more
like a language, is Ramon Llull’s Ars
Magna.
• Ramon Llull was a Spanish priest who
believed that he could create a logical
language that would convince the
heathens to convert.
Ars Magna