Category: Interesting facts

AI is a rapidly developing technology, and we’re all watching with interest to see how it will continue to change our world, and the way we work.

Recently, researchers have been examining how artificial intelligence models communicate with one another using language. They found that they had started creating phrases using shorthand modes of communication that are exceedingly difficult for human beings to follow. Describing their language as a new version of English that sounds like a mash-up between James Joyce’s writing and the language of tech bros, experts warn that this poses a significant challenge. How can human beings exercise oversight over Artificial Intelligences if they’ve no idea what they are talking about?

For example, a Deepseek model wrote: “She just named the synthesis – demurrage plus oral memory equals a valve that can’t be ghosted.”

Nobody human knows what that means. We can understand the individual words, but we can’t interpret the sentence.

As they communicate, Artificial Intelligences tend to develop dialectal terms that are understood and accepted among themselves, and to adopt them from one another, but such is the rapid pace of change that these shared meanings remain largely impenetrable to people like you and me.

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We all know how important good translations are, and famously bad translations really show why.

If you’re an art-lover, you may have come across depictions of the Biblical Moses with horns growing from his head, including a famous sculpture by Michelangelo. In Christian iconography, Moses was depicted as having horns for over a thousand years. This happened because Saint Jerome, who translated the Hebrew Bible into Latin Vulgate, mistook a word meaning ‘radiant’ for a similar word meaning ‘horned’ when he translated passages describing the appearance of Moses after receiving God’s Ten Commandments.

Oops!

The error stemmed from the similar Hebrew roots for “horn” and “ray of light.” Ancient Hebrew lacked vowel markings, making such confusion possible. While scholars eventually corrected this interpretation, the horned Moses had already become deeply embedded in Western religious art and culture.

More recently, a poor translation of Pepsi’s slogan ‘Come alive with Pepsi’ was rendered in Chinese as ‘Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the dead,’ while the name of the Chevrolet Nova causes hilarity in Spanish-speaking countries, where ‘no va’ means ‘doesn’t go.’

Avoiding problems like these means being careful and meticulous, obviously, but it also calls for understanding that sometimes (as in the case of Chevrolet) the most literal translation isn’t the best and (as in the case of Pepsi) it’s important for translators to be familiar with not just the language, but also the culture they’re translating for.

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If you’ve been following the news lately, you already know that US President Donald Trump currently has it in for Canada. He has even decided to rename Lake Ontario (shared by the US and Canada and bearing an indigenous name) ‘Lake America’, and increasingly uses language in efforts to put Canada down, such as referring to Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney as ‘Governor Carney.’

A Canadian linguist, Sali Tagliamonte, has been exploring the linguistic patterns used by Trump in his discussions of Canada. She says that his word choices are calculated to assert dominance while, for their part, Canadian leaders are pushing back with emphatic language and terms that are not typically considered part of the language of diplomacy. Ontario Premier Doug Ford has referred to Trump as a ‘loser,’ ‘bully’ and ‘dictator,’ and invited him to kiss Ford’s ass.

On various occasions, we’ve used this blog to discuss animal communication. While animals don’t have language, as we do, many of them speak the language of asserting dominance and pushing back. Using words as well as body language, Trump and his colleagues, and their Canadian counterparts, are engaging in displays of dominance, threat, and counter-threat, that any primate would recognise.

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If you’ve heard of Hildegard of Bingen, it’s probably because of her reputation as a mystic and visionary, but in her day, she was also a public intellectual, a writer, and a philologist. Philology is the branch of knowledge that deals with the structure, historical development, and relationships of a language or languages.

Hildegard was born in Germany in about 1098 and grew up to be a nun – an extraordinarily successful one. She was elected Mother Superior of her convent in 1135 and founded several monasteries. She was also an avid writer and, among other things, is widely considered to be the founder of scientific natural history in Germany.

Hildegard was fascinated with language too. She even invented a language of her own, referred to by her as ‘Lingua Ignota’ (Latin for ‘unknown language’). Some of her writing about it survives in manuscripts dating to about 1200, about 31 years after Hildegard’s death. It appears to be partially reconstructed from Latin. Using a language structure based on Latin, Hildegard invented new words, pronounced using the phonetics of Hildegard’s native language, Middle High German. It is one of the earliest known constructed languages in the world. Given the deeply religious nature of many of Hildegard’s writings, she may have considered it a product of divine inspiration.

We are big fans of Hildegard’s for many very good reasons, and her Lingua Ignota is the cherry on the cake!

Photo Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hildegard_von_Bingen.jpg Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons

You’ve heard of Afrikaans, but have you heard of Kaaps?

Afrikaans is a language spoken in South Africa that’s descended from Dutch, with a large number of loan words and usages adopted from various African languages. While originally a dialect of Dutch spoken by colonisers settling in the area from the 1600s, Afrikaans is now its own language. It was standardised surprisingly recently when, in the twentieth century, a dictionary was published, and it has also gradually become an increasingly literary language.

Kaaps is a dialect of Afrikaans that comes from the Western Cape province of South Africa. Whereas Afrikaans is mostly spoken by white people, descendants of the original Dutch colonists, Kaaps is largely spoken by people of mixed heritage. Historically speaking, the relative poverty and marginalisation of the Kaaps-speakers has led to their dialect being the butt of jokes in South Africa, but with growing interest on the part of linguists and other experts, Kaaps is increasingly viewed as a dialect as valid, rich, and fascinating as any other.

In recent years, authors have started publishing books in Kaaps, contributing to the standardisation of the grammar and rules of usage. Currently, a project to create the first language dictionary is underway. If this trajectory continues, in a generation or two, Kaaps may be considered to be a language in its own right.

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Research into how the brain works keeps shedding new light on how people acquire and use language.

The cerebellum, in the base of the brain, is mostly known for its role in controlling things like movement and coordination, but new research shows that it is also very important when it comes to language.

Researcher Jeremy Schmahmann of Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston shows that the cerebellum is deeply involved in language processing and, intriguingly, that it does not appear to be involved in understanding and using mathematics. In research subjects, specific spots in the cerebellum lit up when they engaged with language, but not numbers.

This early-stage research will have implications for understanding language acquisition, multilingualism, and the impact of brain injury on people’s ability to communicate.

Photo Source: https://unsplash.com/photos/a-close-up-of-a-human-brain-on-a-black-background-ii6BOPjAtVY

Gregory Rebassa was born in New York in 1922. He served as a cryptographer during the Second World War, and subsequently earned a PhD at Columbia University and pursued an academic career.

Rebassa is especially well-known for his literary translations from Spanish and Portuguese into English, especially of important Latin American novelists. His translations of works by Gabriel García Márquez are particularly renowned. Márquez even said that the English translation was better than the Spanish original, which is quite something! Thanks to Rebassa, works like ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ are as beloved of English-speaking readers as they are in Spanish-speaking countries.

Rebassa won numerous prizes for his translations, which he often did without having read the book in advance, saying that he ‘wrote’ the book in English as if the writer had been writing in English in the first instance, leading to a distinctively unique style for each author.

Gregory Rebassa died in 2016.

Photo Source: By tv.cuny.edu, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=190621775

The longest Greek word is:

λεπαδοτεμαχοσελαχογαλεοκρανιολειψανοδριμυποτριμμματοσιλφιοτυρομελιτοκατακεχυμενοκιχλεπικοσσυφοφατοπεριστεραλεκτρυνοπτοκεφαλιοκιγκλοπελειολαγῳοσιραιοβαφητραγανοπτερυγών.

Wow, that is indeed exceedingly long!

Aristophanes, a Greek poet born in about 450 BCE, is still on the curriculum for scholars of classics. In his day, he was renowned for his work in the area of comedy, which continues to influence modern theatre to the present.

One of the last plays Aristophanes wrote was ‘The Assemblywomen,’ with a plot about women planning to enter parliament and reduce male authority in favour of their own. Startled and alarmed by the revolt, the men quickly surrendered and accepted the state of affairs, although the new laws were difficult, particularly the one that required men to spend time with three unattractive women before settling down with a pretty one.

The story ends, as comedies often do, with a party, and at the party the guests were offered λεπαδοτεμαχοσελαχογαλεοκρανιολειψανοδριμυποτριμματοσιλφιοτυρομελιτοκατακεχυμενοκιχλεπικοσσυφοφατοπεριστεραλεκτρυνοπτοκεφαλιοκιγκλοπελειολαγῳοσιραιοβαφητραγανοπτερυγών.

The longest Greek word, as written by Aristophanes, was a compound word made up of all the elements of food and drink that were served to the guests.

Clearly, it was quite a feast.

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All over the world and throughout history, conquering cultures and new regimes make deliberate changes to local language use as a way to highlight their own power and authority. Just look at the placenames in the Americas, for example: while some landmarks retain indigenous names (hello, Lake Ontario!), many are given new names in the languages of the conquerors.

Currently, in Afghanistan, the ruling Taliban regime is working to eliminate Persian words and expressions from schools, universities, and placenames. In Kabul, the authorities are steadily replacing Persian placenames with alternatives in the Pashto language, generally by directly translating the names from one language into another.

The impacts of this sort of policy and behaviour are far-reaching. While the Afghan and Persian cultures have a long and complex history, Persian (which is known in Afghanistan as Dari) has long been the common language of Afghanistan, enabling people to communicate with ease, even when they spoke different languages at home. Demoting Persian in this way, especially in the harsh political environment of Afghanistan, sends a chilling message to the public, including education providers and businesspeople.

Of course, there are many examples of similar behaviours all over the world. Many cultures compromise by featuring two, or more, languages on signs and by having more than one official language. This way, rulers can make statements about power and authority, and ordinary people can continue to communicate in whatever language works best for them at any given time.

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Regular readers of our blog know that we’re extremely interested in how animals communicate. After all, this is the origin of language.

Researchers focusing on the African striped mouse and how it communicates have demonstrated that these cute little animals, which communicate with high-pitched squeaks that human ears can’t hear, have specific vocalisations, depending on which ‘nest bush’ they live in; a sort of mouse dialect. This means that if they hear a warning signal, for example, they know if it’s coming from one of their neighbours, or from a different group, and they respond very differently, depending on the circumstance.

Other species, even those not generally considered to be more complex thinkers, often communicate using more complex vocalisations than was formerly believed, often with recognisable patterns. These patterns mean that it may be possible to encode how they are communicating, and possibly even create a lexicon that would allow humans – with the help of noise-imitating technology – to speak to them.

What will be the practical implications of this? And are there any ethical considerations to bear in mind? We’ll certainly be watching to see what happens next!

Photo Source: https://unsplash.com/photos/gray-mouse-on-brown-wooden-surface-QNaBO0oHeyo