A voluntary effort by a group of professionals (linguists, computer scientists, literature, journalism ) from different part of the world to preserve the ethnic languages from the North Eastern part of India has led to the development of the first ever online dictionary of North Eastern languages. Initially started with Assamese, "XOBDO" (which means 'WORD' in Assamese) now supports 20 North Eastern languages and we are looking for more volunteers for all the ethnic languages. Anybody can contribute a word along with its meaning to the online dictionary. It is then put through a discussion process among the members of the Xobdo core team of 25 members who work on it online from different parts of the world. However, our aim is to bring these languages to the fore front of the IT age with more language based applications like Search Engines, Machine Translation system etc.
Friday, October 30, 2009
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Is possessing a language a quintessentially human trait?
Some Insight into Lack of Syntax in the Natural Communication of Non-human Primates
The dichotomy between human speaking language and others do not sums up the fascination of answering questions like- where did language come from and why do humans speak language and others do not. A recent widely cited article "Language faculty: what is it, who has it and how did it evolve?" (Hauser et al., 2002) has argued recursion to be the single distinctive feature of human capacity for language. Does animal communication show any recursive ability? Hauser & Fitch (2004) states that a computational process responsible for the generative and hierarchical properties of narrow syntax is lacking in non-human primates. In recent past some empirical studies have been done which demonstrate some linguistic abilities in non-human primates. Some researchers also thought that apes have the capacity for language but never profited from a humanlike cultural milieu in which language was taught. Even then the most vital question still remains that non-human primates though seemingly have complex sequential learning abilities, so why did not they evolve a similarly complex communication system?
More to follow.....
Friday, October 16, 2009
Ar yezh a garan- THE LANGUAGE I LOVE
Oh how sweet and melodious
Is the language of mute creatures
More soothing to my soul
Than the rude language of people
How tranquilly, how tenderly
The trees talk to me
The gurgling at the water's edge
The heath on the mountains
The broom of the warrens
Waving in the wind
The golden sea of the moors
That tell me legends
That sing me verses
Is the language of mute creatures
More soothing to my soul
Than the rude language of people
How tranquilly, how tenderly
The trees talk to me
The gurgling at the water's edge
The heath on the mountains
The broom of the warrens
Waving in the wind
The golden sea of the moors
That tell me legends
That sing me verses
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
My first attempt on core Linguistic theory..
Intuition and Acceptability Judgment:
How important are these criteria for explaining linguistic phenomena?
Based on William Labov’s “When Intuitions Fail” & James D MacCawley’s “Acceptability Judgments”
Disciplines differ considerably in the relative emphasis they place on Data Collection versus Theory Construction. Linguistics, too, has subfields (including Psycholinguistics and Sociolinguistics) in which theories tend to be data-driven and others (notably Generative Grammar) that focus almost exclusively on the formulation of elegant theories, with little attention devoted to careful data collection. Unfortunately, the findings of the experimentalists in Linguistics very rarely play a role in the work of Generative grammarians. Rather, theory development tends to follow its own course, tested only by the unreliable and sometimes malleable intuitions of the theorists themselves.
The need for extending the criteria for explaining linguistic phenomena arises from the Generative grammarians’ reliance on the type of data and the methodology of data collection. Generative grammarians relied on introspective intuitions of well-formedness as their primary source of data elicitation. There is no problem in the use of intuitions as evidence for theoretical claim. But what has been identified as major problems with the use of intuitions in linguistic argumentation are the way they are collected and over-reliance on this type of evidence. Intuitions can be helpful in formulating interesting hypothesis. But when it comes to theorizing linguistic principles, they do not constitute enough evidence. In the article ‘When Intuitions Fail’ Labov has identified some conditions like social pressure, pragmatic opacity, semantic suspension etc. that promote the failure of linguistic intuition.
Generative linguists appear to regard intuitions as primary source of more direct evidence for linguistic competence than other type of data. But the problem with this belief is that knowledge of this competence is not observable. They somehow escape the semantic and pragmatic dimension of language use. By leaving all contextual factors up to the imagination, the use of primary intuitions regarding sentences in isolation is arguably more subject to irrelevant interference than an experimental method that explicitly controls context. In the Generative paradigm data arises from an explicitly metalinguistic context, one in which both the investigator and the informant are thinking about language. The investigator asks question like- ‘Can you say this?’ By contrast, sociolinguists ask- ‘Do you say this?’ Data here is gathered through observation, broadly defined as opposed to data on the basis of intuition/introspection.
Another point that the Sociolinguists relates to the need for an alternative explanation for linguistic data is the approach to variability. In Chomsky’s primary concern of ‘ideal speaker-hearer in homogeneous speech community’, variability is treated as a methodological complication. The perceived periphery of variation is reduced to the distinction of ‘core grammar’ and periphery that segments off language structure from language use. One obvious distinction between treatments of variability within the Generative tradition and the Sociolinguists is that the latter makes reference to linguistic as well as social (extra linguistic) performances.
The orientation of Sociolinguists like Labov in linguistic data is that analysis of language behavior must be based on empirical data. Empirical data represents speaker’s performance, the way they actually use language. According to them, language data should be shared with adjacent fields as Linguistic Anthropology and Conversational Analysis. Anthropological Linguists emphasizes on ethnographic methods of observation in speech communities with a primary focus on speakers as social actors rather than on abstract language pattern. In the second type of data collection (often named as Variation Studies), data have been collected in the context of conversational analysis or interviews in which the subject remains unaware that his/her linguistic usage is the focus of investigation.
In Generative grammar, grammaticality judgment using intuition is linked to competence. A speaker’s competence is the underlying ability to produce and interpret well formed sentences in a given language and to distinguish ill formed strings from the grammatical ones. The specifics of such competence are derived from eliciting intuitions of grammaticality. This link needs to be examined because the elicitation of intuitions is done via judgment of sentences which are clearly affected by performance factors. Some sentences are unacceptable while still grammatical (Colorless green ideas sleep furiously). This can be caused by semantics, processing limitations, context and many other performance factors. In these cases acceptability statements are performance data. According to Chomsky people are incapable of making judgment about grammaticality since they have no access to grammatical knowledge which is internal. The remedy can be sought in the light of intuitions and tests. In any case, performance is striped away.
Native speaker intuitions are often used as competence data. However, obtaining facts about competence is very hard, if not impossible. Data based on sampling peoples’ intuitions can be affected by misunderstanding of grammaticality and acceptability. If the linguist tries to resolve this by using his own intuitions, he/she is at the very real risk of introducing investigator’s bias into the result. Disputes about grammaticality can not be solved without reliable and comparable data. The major drawback with theories based on intuitions is that the results can be unfalsifiable, which is not the case with corpus data.
So Labov’s examination of problems in the use of intuitions either of the analyst or of the individual whose language is being studied, are quite valid. His criticism of the concept of ‘performance’ in Chomskyan terms is also convincing that performance is not only the manifestation of competence in actual language use (as Chomsky has put it), but also the effects of perception and other social factors. Therefore, in conclusion it can be said that no sources of linguistic data that linguists attempt to derive reliable information has a privileged role and need a sharing in understanding general character of grammar believing these to be affected by the social characteristics of human group.
What is It To Be Human?
Scientists generally don’t talk about love, at least not in a scientific manner. It’s seen as impossible to quantify, unpredictable, and is unlikely to survive time in a lab. Award-winning Chilean scientist Dr. Humberto Maturana is not shy of the topic, placing love at the very centre of his scientific explanation of human evolution and existence. These claims are not those of an ageing hippie or a new-age guru, but come from the recipient of the 1994 Chilean prize for Natural Sciences, and have a logic every bit as rigorous as a mathematical equation.
Dr Humberto Maturana has studied biology, medicine and anatomy, and has been Professor of Biology at the University of Chile in Santiago. He has been researching, writing, and lecturing for forty years, and though his ideas are radical and question the fundamental assumptions of Western thinking, he is being increasingly heard in scientific, educational, therapeutic and ecological circles. Some believe his thinking to be a new foundation for integrating and respecting diverse human practice. At the same time, he is insistent that he has no message, no truth, simply that, if asked, he will argue impeccably.
Dr. Maturana wants to explain humanness and how it arose simply from our being alive. But why would we want to explain humanness? Isn’t this obvious?
“Yes, it seems obvious that we understand ‘humanness’, because we live our daily life as, and in company with, human beings. Yet, for instance, to claim that human beings are fundamentally competitive animals has very different implications to claiming that human beings are fundamentally cooperative, loving animals. To claim that to be human is the same thing as being a homo sapiens, and that relationships are secondary, has very different implications to claiming that relationships of mutual respect and caring are fundamental to our becoming, and remaining, human. If we look at many of the broadly accepted ideas today, like economic rationalism, I think that it is not so obvious.”
“A scientist always explains from his experience, and is always clear about what he wants to explain. I want to explain humanness, so I am clear that I must explain the daily life of human beings, not some abstraction or principle. When I look at us in daily life, I see us flowing in language and emotions in our activity. I call this braiding of language and emotion, conversation.
“I also claim that language is not a communication tool, is not the processing of meaning, and does not take place in the brain, but takes place in our manner of interacting. I claim that language is our human manner of living together, and is a dance, or coordination, of behaviors that has become more complex. For instance, pointing is an operation in language, where we humans look in the direction of the pointing and not at the finger, while my cat, outside of language, only looks at my finger. I claim that language takes place as one behavior coordinates a second, a sort of ‘two-step’ of behaviors, and that love is central to the development of this increased complexity, and therefore to what makes us human.
“We see nowadays, wherever there is profound interference with love in the raising of children, disturbance in language development, and in the worst cases, absence of language. For example, in ‘wild’ children raised by animals.”
If love is central to our being human, then this has far-reaching implications, especially in the current rush to competition. For science, education, social practice, public policy, ethics, politics. If we are by nature loving or cooperative beings, and competition and hierarchy are cultural impositions, then they must be a negation of our humanness.
Maturana continues. “If we look at the fossil record, we see that we and chimpanzees have a common ancestor. Around six million years ago, there is a divergence which results on the one hand with modern chimpanzees and on the other hand with us. Now, chimpanzees occasionally language, and for example, some have been taught sign language. But there is a difference - they do not live in it, and we do. What else is different? Well, chimpanzees live in hierarchical relationships based in cunning, strife and competition, and such relationships do not allow for the continued intimacy that the development of language requires.
“Therefore, I argue, between six to three million years ago, beings must have arisen, our forebears, who began to live an expanded intimacy which involved active sharing of food, female-male sharing of child-rearing, frontal sex, bipedalism, and increased pleasure in caress and touch. Increased closeness could only have been maintained under an emotion of mutual respect, or a manner of interacting based in love. When this occurred, interactions became more complex, and, around three million years ago, language arose and began to be conserved as their manner of living.
“And here is the beautiful conclusion. In order for a lineage to develop which conserves language, then the fundamental way of relating must spring from the biology. In other words, we have evolved as biologically loving beings. In order for language to evolve as a manner of living, love is a precondition.
“This is not to deny what happens today, when we are in language, in terms of aggression, misery, hate. What happens for us now is that we arise and live as biologically human, but culturally more akin to apes, and that is a fundamental schism for us. But it does not negate my argument that we are biologically loving.”
We are often told to be ‘objective’, ‘un-emotional’ in our consideration of rational arguments. That if we can just be ‘Rational’, we will understand. Yet Maturana has emotions, especially the emotion of love, as underpinning rationality, and at the centre of his scientific, rational explanation of humanness. Don’t emotions deny rationality?
“No. I claim to show, based on experiments with the nervous system that we can only bring forth our realities depending on what we do, that we can make no statement about a reality that exists independently of our doing. There are therefore an infinite number of realities, or rationalities, and I say that each rationality is based in its own set of coherent experiences which we choose, emotionally, to attend to. The consequence of this is that, in living responsibly, we are aware that we live from our preferences, and that our actions flow from that. When I am in love, I can say and do different things from when I’m in distress, I live different realities. So an argument cannot be ‘the Truth’, only a coherent argument.
“I think the Western notion of a single Reality with a capital ‘R’ is our greatest difficulty. For in that understanding Reality commands us. We justify our actions according to the Truth and not according to human relationships, and emotions are nuisances to be dispensed with. And the one who tries to win an argument is always demanding the other to obey Reality, to be Rational. This leads to great misery, great justification of the actions which result in misery, and abnegation of responsibility.”
He says that in order to provide a complete explanation of humanness, he has to explain living systems, evolution, social systems, language, self-consciousness, mind, and culture. This he will do in the three-day seminar he will conduct in Melbourne in early September, and here we will simply examine some implications of his understanding, what this means for science, for education, for social practice, for politics.
He says that science is not reductionistic, that we will never explain living systems in physics or chemistry, that the propositions about Mind, Consciousness and God which come from some proponents of the new physics make no sense, are not coherent.
“Different scientists pay attention to different aspects of their experience, and this generates for them different objects. Physicists pay attention to mass, energy, velocity etc. in a coherent manner, but have no way to deal with questions about mind and consciousness. Some physicists today look for mechanisms of mind in quantum phenomena or in the ‘micro-tubule’ skeletons of cells, but this is like looking for ‘travel’ in the wheels of a car, or a picture of ‘mother’ stored somewhere in the brain. This is like trying to mix oil and water ... it is not coherent, the concepts do not mix or relate.
“Many of our difficulties come from looking in the wrong place for what we want to explain, and explanations then become inappropriate and often hugely complex. In a similar vein, I claim that language does not take place in the brain, but takes place in interactions. We will never find language in the nervous system, never find images of mother or father, never find ‘information’ stored. All we will ever find in the nervous system is nervous activity.”
“Humanness cannot be substituted. We cannot conserve competition and expect to maintain humanness. We cannot promote economic development at the cost of social cohesion and expect to maintain humanness. We cannot live our lives making human relationships secondary and expect to maintain humanness. There is no lone human, only humans in coexistence.”
Talking with Maturana is an extraordinary experience, a paradigm-shift in the broadest sense. It leaves one with a sense of unraveling of much that one takes for granted, and a sense of possibility of a different sort of world, of ‘a world in a grain of sand’, and simultaneously an understanding that is so fluid that it slips easily away. What remains is the possibility of a manner of living where certainty is replaced by trust, competition is replaced by cooperation, aggression is replaced by love, management is replaced by care and vision, control is replaced by responsibility and accountability. Where ethics is founded in human relationships, not in principles. Where humanness is our possibility, not our limitation.
“And that is the sort of world I like. That is the world I experience when I am with those I love, with friends and with family. Love is not blind, it is visionary. It makes the greatest possibilities.”
This man is a very interesting scientist, and passionately human!
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