Sorry for the snark, but if you have even a casual interest in linguistics, the concept of linguistic relativity (aka Sapir-Whorf hypothesis), namely that the language you speak determines/affects your world view, has been done to death: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity
This article presents yet another pop-sci version of this, with a fair dose of the "noble savage" trope to boot:
> Our current climate crisis is the direct result of this unbridled exploitation ... the language had a harmonious relationship with the environment ... Could the rich vocabulary of the Inuit inspire us to redefine our relationship with nature?
No, it doesn't work that way, because the strong version of the hypothesis is essentially disproven (in geek terms, all natural languages are "Turing-complete" and can be used to express anything) and evidence even for the weak version is, well, weak. Correlation does not imply causation, and Western culture won't change if we import a few more Inuit words into it.
"Sorry, but" is a poor substitute for "my bad". The error being pointed out to you is that your tone is dismissive, which this diatribe did nothing to correct. The culture people are trying to cultivate here is one that actively avoids suppressing ideas, and dismissiveness is antithetical to that end.
Furthermore, the conversation on linguistic relativism is far from done and dusted. The distinction you make between "strong" and "weak" forms sort of shows a loose grasp on the subject matter. I'm also more than a little stumped trying to figure out what correlation you meant.
Correct, I'm dismissive because I don't think the article is saying anything particularly interesting or even correct. You're welcome to disagree, which is why we're arguing here in the comments section :)
As far as I tell (it's not my story after all), the author appears to be asserting that Inuktitut is somehow uniquely in tune with nature in general (dubious) and that we could change the way the Western world acts by absorbing some of those words (which sounds like linguistic determinism to me, not to mention even more dubious).
As for Turing completeness, my off the cuff analogy is that just like any Turing-complete programming language can implement any algorithm, any natural language can state any expressible human thought.
There's a joke in Greenlandic, closely related to Inuktitut, about polysemy. The joke stems from Greenlandic having very little polysemy when it comes to hunting, nature, practicalities and activities, while European languages is quite a bit more polysemic in nature.
I don't know how well this joke translates into English but it works very well in Danish. Here it goes:
> A Danish police officer gets called on the radio by a Greenlandic hunter who has been in an accident. The hunter tells that his partner have fallen into the water and have been pulled up again but might have died from the freezing water. The officer tells the hunter to "make sure he is dead". Over the radio the officer hears a riffle shot and the hunter replies: "There, he's dead now for sure".
The design of Inuktitut and Greenlandic is very in tune with nature but I agree that it doesn't mean you can absorb it's qualities into other languages. That said, doesn't mean you can't learn anything from them, as the author fo the article claims.
Well, I don’t think the point was to “import words from a specific language”. That’s a bit too dismissive IMHO.
Anyhow, as an Italian living in the Netherlands, I can tell that to a certain extent this concept does exist: look, people here use the same words for different meanings “in context”. So guess what? Code written by a Dutch often contains a Context object that affects how a generically named Business object behaves.
I wonder how it is in Germany? I guess they don’t use the 80 col code formatting rule :P
I think there's strong evidence for weak forms of the hypothesis. For example, the available colour names in a language affects the way people classify colours as measured by the way they perform a task in which language is not used. See Guy Deutscher's "Through the language glass" for an overview of this and many other fun things.
There's also the whole business of how propagandists twist language around in order to influence people. How is that not an example of language affecting people's world view?
Isn't the language almost extinct and the community almost wiped out? I remember reading a while back that there are only a few hundred speakers and as more canadians move into the area, the inuit community and language were being endangered.
Is there a systematic campaign to preserve the language and/or community? At the very least to set down the vocabulary/grammer/pronounciation/etc?
Every tribe is working very hard on language preservation and some are getting much better results than others. Some have been lost, but the folks in Alaska are putting a lot of effort into it.
I asked a question on HN for a grant that was directed about using ML to aid in language preservation. I didn't get any responses. We were trying to expand the tools available.
It sounds to me more like you already had a tool in mind (ML) and were just looking for some nails ;)
If you approach the problem instead from the language preservation perspective and ask what is necessary to make it succeed, there are essentially two tasks: documentation (recording current speakers' knowledge of the language) and community maintenance (allowing people to keep using the language and teaching it to the next generation).
Documentation basically boils down to making a lot of recordings. Since text is usually nicer to work with, transcriptions are very useful, and in theory ML would be able to help with that, but to train a speech-to-text model, you first need transcribed training data, leading to a chicken-and-egg problem. Making the data easily available and easy to contribute to is more likely to be impactful.
For maintaining a community, ML can be useful by providing all the services that ML offers for speakers of more popular languages: text-to-speech, speech-to-text, predictive smartphone keyboards, machine translation, ... but all of those depend on the language being well-documented already. Otherwise, non-ML solutions are likely to be the only options (so formant-based speech synthesis e.g. with espeak-ng, dumb keyboards, rule-based translators, ...)
To give a specific example, I know of a community of Kabyle speakers who want to be able to use OpenStreetMap with voice navigation in Kabyle, so they've been making a lot of recordings (using https://tatoeba.org as a platform for the documentation part) and also have someone working on a speech-synthesis model (using Mozilla's DeepSpeech, I think). AFAIK, the project is coordinated by Muhend Beqasem, whom you might want to contact if you're interested in what they're doing: https://tatoeba.org/eng/user/profile/belkacem77
It sounds to me more like you already had a tool in mind (ML) and were just looking for some nails ;)
Well, like all people looking to get grants, I had a pot of money we could get but we had to use a tool to do it. Welcome to grants in 2020 where ML is one thing that gets funded and language preservation is not funded but actually needed as COVID seems to be removing a fair number of people who know the language.
Maybe you can do a dual-use project, where, if the ML part turns out to be not that useful, at least the data you collected or the baseline model you developed have a positive impact as well.
Supposedly there's an Inuttitut Rosetta Stone project although I don't see much else about it online. [0]
I tried to get access to the Iñupiat Rosetta Stone at one point but failed even though I have the "unlimited" "all languages" Rosetta Stone subscription. It seems like the tribe manages registration and acts as a gatekeeper. [1] I'm sure it has to do with who funded the project or something, but you'd think for endangered languages you'd want to make it as easy as possible to access language learning resources.
> but you'd think for endangered languages you'd want to make it as easy as possible to access language learning resources.
For a lot of Native Americans/First Nations peoples, it's actually a highly contentious issue. Some of them don't want outsiders, with no connection to the culture or the group, coming in and learning it just to prove they can, especially when children of the group haven't had the opportunity to learn it because of colonialism and other, often horrible, things.
The Hopi are known for this, and actually decided to forego teaching the language at a school because they couldn't guarantee Navajo students wouldn't sign up for it.
So, really, there's a lot more involved than it just being an 'endangered language' that everyone should have the right to learn and that they should want everyone to learn. There's a lot of ethnolinguistic and postcolonial issues involved as well.
I remember when I first read about the Treaty of Wangxia being shocked that one of items in the treaty was that China would revoke a law that made it illegal for outsiders to learn Chinese. [0]
The very idea that it could be forbidden to learn a language seemed nonsensical to me at first, although upon reflection, it must have been a good way to keep foreign ears from prying too much (I believe China's ban on foreigners learning Chinese was more about counterintelligence and less about wanting Chinese speakers to have some deep, authentic connection with the culture).
I hate stuff like that hostility between Hopi and Navajo people though. If anything, learning a neighbor's language tends to bring people together!
> I hate stuff like that hostility between Hopi and Navajo people though. If anything, learning a neighbor's language tends to bring people together!
I tend to agree, but I also respect the wishes of the various groups. They've undergone experiences at the hands of colonizers that I can't begin to imagine, and if they want to try to preserve something of their culture so that it stays in their culture, and not just let any outsider with a passing interest learn it, I support them in that. Though I do wish more were like the Cherokee Nation, which offers free online courses for anyone across various levels of Cherokee, also integrating culture and such.
Well, the bigger issue is that a lot of folks like to write grants to serve Native Americans and then get the money and don't provide the service, or, and this is a personal favorite, don't ask the reservation if they even need the service. Special awards to those who not only got money granted to provide and unneeded service, but by virtue of their applying to serve the reservation, got the legitimate reservation organization's grant blocked and unfunded.
It is actually illegal, as in there is a tribal resolution, for me to provide any demographic information to any entity without tribal permission.
The worst part is those folks who say they are Native American from a particular tribe and are NOT on that tribes enrollment rolls. They are always fun to deal with.
The decline of Inuktut wasn't principally caused by displacement or natural population decline, but rather the residential school system that attempted to completely assimilate young Inuit (and other indigenous) kids. Children were systematically removed from their communities and sent to English (sometimes French) religious boarding schools. They were physically punished for speaking their mother language. [0]
Inuktut is mostly stable, though "vulnerable," and strongest in Nunavik (the region in the article), I suspect because the somewhat-devolved region employs it as the primary language of instruction. [1]
The practice of drawing conclusions about people or their cultures based on properties of their language has been controversial since at least the original Sapir and Whorf stuff.
If you admire or appreciate a culture, you might argue that the culture's values or history or distinctive outlook are directly reflected in grammatical features or vocabulary of an associated language. While this might be true in some ways and to some extent, it's something that's also very easy to deceive yourself about. You can easily make up a story about how distinctions that one language does (or doesn't) draw reflect the excellence or more appropriate priorities of its speakers' culture. Like "oh, this language makes distinctions that English doesn't -- because the people who speak it are so attuned to perceiving fine details!" or "oh, this language doesn't make distinctions that English does -- showing how its speakers are not distracted by the pointless minutia that occupy us in settled industrial civilization!".
A challenge to this kind of analysis is that studies of linguistic typology (deep structural features that languages do or don't have in common) show languages with, and without, particular characteristics all over the world, in languages spoken by people from all different kinds of cultures and societies. Most generalizations that might be given a higher significance just sort of fall flat when you look at typology data. Oh, that cool thing that we like in this language -- is also present in this other language from a different culture and part of the world! Oh, that thing we find annoying or irritating -- is present elsewhere too.
A kind of counterexample that I learned from John McWhorter's books is that complicated irregularities in languages (e.g. a very large number of noun classes with distinctive classifiers and agreement rules, or a very large number of irregular verb forms) are likely a sign of smaller and more isolated speaker communities, whereas simplification that removes these irregularities is associated with circumstances in which more people have to use a language non-natively (and therefore have a harder time mastering these details), which could include migration, social disruptions, or the widespread use of a language as a lingua franca, trade language, language of imperial administration, etc. That does mean that indigenous languages (especially if they have almost exclusively been used by a native speaker community in a relatively small area) can often be harder to learn for non-native speakers.
But you still can't necessarily count on cultural generalizations based on those observations. One exercise you can try to do (maybe this is also an idea from McWhorter?) is pick a random set of characteristics that some language might have, and then try to come up with an essay explaining why those features show how awesome or admirable the speakers' culture must be. If it sounds deeply plausible, then maybe that's a sign that people aren't actually good at being objective about this. :-)
Your comment is a very good counterpoint to Sapir-Whorf-hypothesis-like opinions, but unfortunately it's also so general that it could've been posted on any article about language and culture, since you don't reference any specific content.
The submitted article doesn't talk about grammar and morphology or other typological features, so criticizing it on the grounds that there's no relationship between typology and geography is rather beside the point.
What it does talk about is specific vocabulary like amiraijaut for September, the "time when antlers lose their velvet". That's reflective of Inuttitut speakers insofar as that they must've been living close enough to animals with antlers to observe the loss of velvet at the time when that translation was coined.
That kind of connection between language and culture is rather uncontroversial. For example, it was inferred that proto-Austronesian speakers already had pigs, dogs and chickens based on the words for these animals across different branches of the language family being cognates that allowed reconstruction of those words in the proto-language. That hypothesis also squares with the archaeological evidence http://press-files.anu.edu.au/downloads/press/n2320/html/ch1...
Of course vocabulary can be learned (as the author herself demonstrates) and transmitted outside the original context (e.g. this comment), so the cultural link is rather weak. People who've never seen a velvet-covered antler can still talk about amiraijaut in the same way that people who do not worship a god of war can still talk about Mars and his month March.
> Don’t believe everything you’ve heard, however: there are not hundreds of words for snow.
Skier’s learn a large number of words for different types of snow: everything from death cookies to boilerplate to corn snow. Vocabulary comes from interaction.
I am guessing different sports have wildly expanded vocabulary for certain elements of the relevant environment?
e.g. if I say I'm going to "bounce the box", I don't mean that I will throw a cardboard container at the floor, I mean that I will reboot a computer. And the sysadmins will know exactly what I mean.
31 comments
[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 77.0 ms ] threadMeanwhile, how's the canary config for the Kubernetes L7 ingress coming along?
This article presents yet another pop-sci version of this, with a fair dose of the "noble savage" trope to boot:
> Our current climate crisis is the direct result of this unbridled exploitation ... the language had a harmonious relationship with the environment ... Could the rich vocabulary of the Inuit inspire us to redefine our relationship with nature?
No, it doesn't work that way, because the strong version of the hypothesis is essentially disproven (in geek terms, all natural languages are "Turing-complete" and can be used to express anything) and evidence even for the weak version is, well, weak. Correlation does not imply causation, and Western culture won't change if we import a few more Inuit words into it.
Furthermore, the conversation on linguistic relativism is far from done and dusted. The distinction you make between "strong" and "weak" forms sort of shows a loose grasp on the subject matter. I'm also more than a little stumped trying to figure out what correlation you meant.
... that's also not what "Turing complete" means.
As far as I tell (it's not my story after all), the author appears to be asserting that Inuktitut is somehow uniquely in tune with nature in general (dubious) and that we could change the way the Western world acts by absorbing some of those words (which sounds like linguistic determinism to me, not to mention even more dubious).
As for Turing completeness, my off the cuff analogy is that just like any Turing-complete programming language can implement any algorithm, any natural language can state any expressible human thought.
I don't know how well this joke translates into English but it works very well in Danish. Here it goes:
> A Danish police officer gets called on the radio by a Greenlandic hunter who has been in an accident. The hunter tells that his partner have fallen into the water and have been pulled up again but might have died from the freezing water. The officer tells the hunter to "make sure he is dead". Over the radio the officer hears a riffle shot and the hunter replies: "There, he's dead now for sure".
The design of Inuktitut and Greenlandic is very in tune with nature but I agree that it doesn't mean you can absorb it's qualities into other languages. That said, doesn't mean you can't learn anything from them, as the author fo the article claims.
Anyhow, as an Italian living in the Netherlands, I can tell that to a certain extent this concept does exist: look, people here use the same words for different meanings “in context”. So guess what? Code written by a Dutch often contains a Context object that affects how a generically named Business object behaves.
I wonder how it is in Germany? I guess they don’t use the 80 col code formatting rule :P
There's also the whole business of how propagandists twist language around in order to influence people. How is that not an example of language affecting people's world view?
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Is there a systematic campaign to preserve the language and/or community? At the very least to set down the vocabulary/grammer/pronounciation/etc?
I asked a question on HN for a grant that was directed about using ML to aid in language preservation. I didn't get any responses. We were trying to expand the tools available.
If you approach the problem instead from the language preservation perspective and ask what is necessary to make it succeed, there are essentially two tasks: documentation (recording current speakers' knowledge of the language) and community maintenance (allowing people to keep using the language and teaching it to the next generation).
Documentation basically boils down to making a lot of recordings. Since text is usually nicer to work with, transcriptions are very useful, and in theory ML would be able to help with that, but to train a speech-to-text model, you first need transcribed training data, leading to a chicken-and-egg problem. Making the data easily available and easy to contribute to is more likely to be impactful.
For maintaining a community, ML can be useful by providing all the services that ML offers for speakers of more popular languages: text-to-speech, speech-to-text, predictive smartphone keyboards, machine translation, ... but all of those depend on the language being well-documented already. Otherwise, non-ML solutions are likely to be the only options (so formant-based speech synthesis e.g. with espeak-ng, dumb keyboards, rule-based translators, ...)
To give a specific example, I know of a community of Kabyle speakers who want to be able to use OpenStreetMap with voice navigation in Kabyle, so they've been making a lot of recordings (using https://tatoeba.org as a platform for the documentation part) and also have someone working on a speech-synthesis model (using Mozilla's DeepSpeech, I think). AFAIK, the project is coordinated by Muhend Beqasem, whom you might want to contact if you're interested in what they're doing: https://tatoeba.org/eng/user/profile/belkacem77
Well, like all people looking to get grants, I had a pot of money we could get but we had to use a tool to do it. Welcome to grants in 2020 where ML is one thing that gets funded and language preservation is not funded but actually needed as COVID seems to be removing a fair number of people who know the language.
I tried to get access to the Iñupiat Rosetta Stone at one point but failed even though I have the "unlimited" "all languages" Rosetta Stone subscription. It seems like the tribe manages registration and acts as a gatekeeper. [1] I'm sure it has to do with who funded the project or something, but you'd think for endangered languages you'd want to make it as easy as possible to access language learning resources.
[0] https://www.rosettastone.com/endangered/projects/ [1] http://www.north-slope.org/assets/images/uploads/RS_Request_...
For a lot of Native Americans/First Nations peoples, it's actually a highly contentious issue. Some of them don't want outsiders, with no connection to the culture or the group, coming in and learning it just to prove they can, especially when children of the group haven't had the opportunity to learn it because of colonialism and other, often horrible, things.
The Hopi are known for this, and actually decided to forego teaching the language at a school because they couldn't guarantee Navajo students wouldn't sign up for it.
So, really, there's a lot more involved than it just being an 'endangered language' that everyone should have the right to learn and that they should want everyone to learn. There's a lot of ethnolinguistic and postcolonial issues involved as well.
The very idea that it could be forbidden to learn a language seemed nonsensical to me at first, although upon reflection, it must have been a good way to keep foreign ears from prying too much (I believe China's ban on foreigners learning Chinese was more about counterintelligence and less about wanting Chinese speakers to have some deep, authentic connection with the culture).
I hate stuff like that hostility between Hopi and Navajo people though. If anything, learning a neighbor's language tends to bring people together!
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Wanghia
I tend to agree, but I also respect the wishes of the various groups. They've undergone experiences at the hands of colonizers that I can't begin to imagine, and if they want to try to preserve something of their culture so that it stays in their culture, and not just let any outsider with a passing interest learn it, I support them in that. Though I do wish more were like the Cherokee Nation, which offers free online courses for anyone across various levels of Cherokee, also integrating culture and such.
It is actually illegal, as in there is a tribal resolution, for me to provide any demographic information to any entity without tribal permission.
The worst part is those folks who say they are Native American from a particular tribe and are NOT on that tribes enrollment rolls. They are always fun to deal with.
Inuktut is mostly stable, though "vulnerable," and strongest in Nunavik (the region in the article), I suspect because the somewhat-devolved region employs it as the primary language of instruction. [1]
[0] Excerpt from the Truth and Reconciliation commission's report: http://wordalive.wycliffe.ca/stories/what-residential-school..., also https://www.clo-ocol.gc.ca/en/timeline-event/indian-resident...
[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/inuit-inuktitut-stats-c..., https://www.kativik.qc.ca/school-board/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopi_time_controversy
If you admire or appreciate a culture, you might argue that the culture's values or history or distinctive outlook are directly reflected in grammatical features or vocabulary of an associated language. While this might be true in some ways and to some extent, it's something that's also very easy to deceive yourself about. You can easily make up a story about how distinctions that one language does (or doesn't) draw reflect the excellence or more appropriate priorities of its speakers' culture. Like "oh, this language makes distinctions that English doesn't -- because the people who speak it are so attuned to perceiving fine details!" or "oh, this language doesn't make distinctions that English does -- showing how its speakers are not distracted by the pointless minutia that occupy us in settled industrial civilization!".
A challenge to this kind of analysis is that studies of linguistic typology (deep structural features that languages do or don't have in common) show languages with, and without, particular characteristics all over the world, in languages spoken by people from all different kinds of cultures and societies. Most generalizations that might be given a higher significance just sort of fall flat when you look at typology data. Oh, that cool thing that we like in this language -- is also present in this other language from a different culture and part of the world! Oh, that thing we find annoying or irritating -- is present elsewhere too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_typology
A kind of counterexample that I learned from John McWhorter's books is that complicated irregularities in languages (e.g. a very large number of noun classes with distinctive classifiers and agreement rules, or a very large number of irregular verb forms) are likely a sign of smaller and more isolated speaker communities, whereas simplification that removes these irregularities is associated with circumstances in which more people have to use a language non-natively (and therefore have a harder time mastering these details), which could include migration, social disruptions, or the widespread use of a language as a lingua franca, trade language, language of imperial administration, etc. That does mean that indigenous languages (especially if they have almost exclusively been used by a native speaker community in a relatively small area) can often be harder to learn for non-native speakers.
But you still can't necessarily count on cultural generalizations based on those observations. One exercise you can try to do (maybe this is also an idea from McWhorter?) is pick a random set of characteristics that some language might have, and then try to come up with an essay explaining why those features show how awesome or admirable the speakers' culture must be. If it sounds deeply plausible, then maybe that's a sign that people aren't actually good at being objective about this. :-)
The submitted article doesn't talk about grammar and morphology or other typological features, so criticizing it on the grounds that there's no relationship between typology and geography is rather beside the point.
What it does talk about is specific vocabulary like amiraijaut for September, the "time when antlers lose their velvet". That's reflective of Inuttitut speakers insofar as that they must've been living close enough to animals with antlers to observe the loss of velvet at the time when that translation was coined.
That kind of connection between language and culture is rather uncontroversial. For example, it was inferred that proto-Austronesian speakers already had pigs, dogs and chickens based on the words for these animals across different branches of the language family being cognates that allowed reconstruction of those words in the proto-language. That hypothesis also squares with the archaeological evidence http://press-files.anu.edu.au/downloads/press/n2320/html/ch1...
Of course vocabulary can be learned (as the author herself demonstrates) and transmitted outside the original context (e.g. this comment), so the cultural link is rather weak. People who've never seen a velvet-covered antler can still talk about amiraijaut in the same way that people who do not worship a god of war can still talk about Mars and his month March.
Skier’s learn a large number of words for different types of snow: everything from death cookies to boilerplate to corn snow. Vocabulary comes from interaction.
I am guessing different sports have wildly expanded vocabulary for certain elements of the relevant environment?
And it's not just sports. Meteorologists have many different words to describe clouds.
You're looking for the phrase "term of art"
https://www.lexico.com/definition/term_of_art
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/term-of-...
e.g. if I say I'm going to "bounce the box", I don't mean that I will throw a cardboard container at the floor, I mean that I will reboot a computer. And the sysadmins will know exactly what I mean.