h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Entry: Varieties of Language (from LTE) - A857964
Author: Della the Cat womanRednecks going postal, and drying up like beef jerky) - U179697

My entry is 'Varieties of Language from LTE) and can be found at A857964. I hope it is acceptable for editing!

ido seems to be dying out, mainly of self inflicted wounds.

partly this is due to the way it was set up to have a much faster process for including and removing words. this had the side effect of making it hard to produce dictionaries.

interlingua and volapuk have similar problems with languages dying out, mainly due to their failure to replace esperanto, and dwindling population resulting in fewer people wanting to learn them.

I hope this helps.

hi Della,

interesting entry,

What does 'LTE' stand for?

More generally, i felt this entry was a little unfocused... i can't point to anything specific yet. sorry. I'll try to have another look and say something more constructive soon.

Asides from the content, hows your guide-ml?

Your header text here gives you a nice clear break in the text.

Even A less imposing header text here can be helpful...

If that's double-dutch (you didn't mention that one! ) then let me know and i'll try to explain it better.

Although you don't *have* to learn guide-ml, but some formatting really does improve the article.

If you really don't want to get into all that - Don't Panic! - the sub-eds can usually deal with it.

Thanks for your comments!, LTE is 'Learning Technologies in Eduation' a paper I was doing for the GDLT (Grad Dip In Language Teaching). I decided to recycle what was a Power Point presentation, when I had collected about 60% more material than I could actually use!
I haven't learned any Guide ML - yet. I keep meaning to..)

I found this article hard to read, there aren't any transitions or unifications of your different subjects. Just based on your title, your artificial entertainment language section is much much too long, compared to real languages, which can be quite varied all on their own.

Why is the loss of a language catastrophic? The humans that speak it are still alive. What goes away, other than another cause for misunderstanding?

"Why is the loss of a language catastrophic?" Because a language is not just a symbol system, to some degree, it reflects a culture, and a way of looking at the world. There are elements to each language and the worldview it reflects, that are unique... any translation can never really be more than approximate, therefore in my view, the Islamic belief that the Koran in translation isn't the Koran and therefore is no more sacred than the phone book, is one I have a lot of sympathy with... (Yeah, I ended a sentence with a preposition - so sue me!)

I decline your tort.

Ending a sentence with a preposition is no-no in Latin, and has nothing to do with English, which is perfectly comprehensible with whole strings of prepositions and prepositional phrases dangling on the end of things.

I have a good friend who supposes that most languages are mostly fungible, with only a few words in each that are untranslateable. He asserts 'challenge' is an American English one.

The original language for the Bible is Aramaic and Hebrew and Greek, yet most versions Christianity eagerly try to get it translated into each language it comes across. What is particularly (deliberately small c) catholic about the Bible that Klingons can read it?

I have only read the first few suras of the Qu'ran (in English) and one of the very first things it asserts is that it is a plain book that is easy to understand, and that it is the seal on God's word. It can't possibly claim to be easy to understand if it's only properly understandable in Arabic.

I'd like to know what any Muslim here has to say, but I had always understood that the Koran *should* ideally be read in Arabic, as it isn't actually sacred in translation... So non-Arab Muslims are obligated to learn Arabic. (Not easy!)
The Bible is interesting, if translated and then translated back.. I am reading 'The Jesus Sutras', by Martin Palmer. They comprise pieces of the Bible, translated into Chinese and back, in the 7th century. They show how important cultural essence is to language - and also, give the English-speaking reader a whole new perspective on what can become too familiar, hence over-looked or misunderstood.

What is it you suppose that Christians are achieving with their imperfect translations that unfortunate or heretical practical experience wouldn't stop?

The reason I ask, is that often human language is very redundant.

Has Coke sucessfully imposed an American culture ethos on China, if they have changed and refined their trademark's ideograms, or are they coopting or starting a new cultural tradition?

(and, wandering back to the subject) Aren't entertainment languages bad, as they prevent learning of real human cultures?

No, SeaChange, I am not saying that I agree with the Islamic approach regarding translation... I am just saying that no translation is *ever* faithful to the original, as it can't really be.. Where does this leave us if/when we meet actual extra-terrestrials, given the social and cultural misunderstandings here on Earth?
Languages for entertainment are a huge amount of fun! I get annoyed with 'Ennerprise' though, as they have Hoshi learning a language in 24 hours (!) which is of course not possible! Languages are not closed systems like codes or ciphers!

Oh! You jumped ahead of me.

I was trying to get from you some unifying themes, that you knew stuff about, with which you can sew this entry together. If you integrate the post you just made into your article, and a few small snippets about Islam/Arabic and the loss of culture from our natter, it'd be quite interesting, and I bet it'd get into the Edited Guide.

Thanks SeaChange, I'll probably do that next week - it's Friday evening here and now, end of the day and end of the week, and I don't feel like doing *anything* brainy right now!

no, they are not closed systems like codes and cyphers.

but artificial intelligence work on scripting and frames has demonstrated that a given situation can be handled with only a certain (small) number of alternative possibilities.

add to that that the universal translator is supposed to have a complete database of the thousands of earth languages, plus a number of extraterrestrial languages as well. As has been pointed out in various sources, the translator works by building up translation matrixes based on probabilities, which is not that different to how current speech recognition systems work.

the only difference is that hoshi can learn the possible translations that the computer has recognised, before it is sure of what the exact translations are. that way she can vary her language on the fly and get quite a bit ahead of the understanding of the computer.

Also, she doesn't learn a language in 24 hours. what she learn is a vocabulary of a few hundred words (probably anything up to 2000) plus a basic phrase book of a phew hundred phrases.

because they are in a tightly constrained situation, there is a limited number of things that they can say, and a limited number of ways that they can say them.

Also, if you look at the series that are set later (especially the next generation) you often see them encourage various members of the crew to take members of new species on a guided tour of the ship so that they can expend both the vocabulary and the phrase book.

There was a Star Trek (TNG?) episode about the contextual nature of language; in which the aliens always talked about things in relation to already known and shared stories and metaphor. Therefore, they needed to create a mutually contextual heroic story with their captain and the captain of the Enterprise by marooning them on some asteroid (Deep Space 9?).

Talk about language being a virus from outer space-Laurie Anderson must've loved that one.

It'll soon be Friday night here too. Give those brain modules a rest and rev up some other, less rigorous ones.

What annoyed me, Xyroth, in the episode in question 'Two Days and Two Nights', is that she *did* learn a language in 24 hours! (Risan. She was shown conversing with a middle-aged Risan couple at a resort, no translator in sight - and in Enterprise, they're clunky things, the size of the old 1980s 'brick' mobile phones..) She never had a slip up with vocabulary, neither did the alien guy she had a fling with - he learned English in less than 24 hours! My students in the tutoring I do, are at Lower Intermediate level (usually) and are welded to their electronic dictionaries. One is a Croatian man who lives a few houses down and across from me (!) - English is his sixth language, and despite that he and the Chinese fixate on grammar, they have bigger problems with vocab. That's why I accuse the 'Enterprise' writers if 'fairy science'. In TNG and DS9, they were much more careful!

TNG and DS9 have a UT that can instantly tranlate any language (VOY is even worse at that, there must be even less to go on in the Delta quadrant) that is clearly impossible. I really don't get how Hoshi transates written language with out even context to go on. the UT is apparently supposed to read the minds of the speakers, text has no mind.

But that is going very off-topic, back to the entry. I think it is very good, but the title could be changed (the LTE bit isn't really needed) and some headers could be included. It is a little uneven, in the direction of artificial languages. (And, i don't remember Borg having a language, other than that which 7 or 9 wrote her diaries in in "Raven" and Kim translated which we never heard or saw) You should either write more about the others, or make it more clear what the entry focuses on. You have made a good start, keep going!

Tango

that episode has not hit terrestrial tv in the uk yet, so I can't comment.

however I was pointing out that the universal translator as a technology is not something beyond extrapolation from the current state of the art. The methodology is already here, it is just waiting for the technology to catch up (especially processing speed and good fast algorithms).

written language is not that much more difficult. you currently have in some research labs ocr equipment that feeds the words into language analysis software to improve the ocr and provide extra error correction. if this was fed into the above mentioned universal translator for spoken languages, it would not be completely unexpected if there was some degree of sucess.

back to the entry, and the main problem with it is it only covers convincingly a couple of the sections it mentions itself, and these are the "artificial" ones.

another problem is in clasifying "basic english" as a unity language. although it was always presented to non-english speakers in this way, it was always quite unashamedly a propoganda language designed to push you into learning a minimal english, thus forcing you to learn the rest of english.

this is why you sometimes come across basic spanish and basic french as well.

Thanks for your comments - I came across the Borg language on a website, and I think the official Star Trek site might have something about it too.
I do get annoyed at the UT myself... and I admit my entry is biased towards Artificial languages - which, BTW, could have their own entry!
I am studying ESOL teaching and linguistics, which I find fascinating, sometimes I find it a bit hard to know where to stop!

A744860 is an edited entry on the kligon language, a very confusing language, whole sentences can be said in one word!

Tango