Ryan Rhodes ⚙️🧠
@langofmind
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Cognitive Science! Assistant Teaching Professor @rutgersccs Catch me on YouTube:
Joined October 2019
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Arrival is one of my favorite movies! It raises so many interested questions about language, culture, biology, and the mind. So I made a video about it! Check it out! 👇
Alien Linguistics — The Science of Arrival via
@YouTube
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This is the high quality linguistics research the journals don't want you to see
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For those who slept during their linguistic anatomy class
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MM/DD/YYYY is the best format because it organizes the date from lowest entropy to highest entropy, easing you in
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Re-reading early Chomsky, he repeatedly makes the claim that a grammar with a finite alphabet that generates sentences of finite length may produce an infinite set of sentences. Is this true, mathematically?
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This meme is funny, but it kind of bugs me. And I'll tell you why:
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Context free grammars? You think language just fell out of a coconut tree??
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Month = log2(12) = 3.59 bits
Day = log2(31) = 4.95 bits
Year = log2(2024) = 10.98 bits
Checkmate Euros
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this is the ideal authorship ordering scheme, absolute peak
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Male philosophy majors may have the lowest fertility rates, but consider their intellectual fecundity (also low)
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It's insane to me that /-s/ in English is plural for nouns and singular for verbs and absolutely no one questions this
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I'd think finite elements combined into finite-length strings would produce a large set (maybe uncountably large), but not infinite. Very happy to be wrong about this!
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These adaptations are always so inaccurate compared to the source material
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The word "adobe" (sun-baked brick) comes from ancient Egyptian with almost no change in meaning!
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How often do you think about the Austronesian expansion?
Every day
fuck the Roman Empire how often do you think about the Polynesian migrations
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Rewatching Arrival, the most realistic aspect of this movie is how no one listens to the linguist
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This is such a thorny issue, because it intersects bad ideas about language limiting thought (which have driven a lot of linguistic erasure) and valid ideas about languages encoding cultural knowledge (which motivates language preservation).
But a few clarifying points 🧵
Why is it a wild claim that languages indigenous to a land can describe it more specifically, facilitating more precise monitoring?
There’s words for flavors in my mother tongue that don’t have English equivalents. Plenty of my mom’s cooking advice is predicated on knowing them
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Wow, the onion is really going to attack me, personally
wtf man
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Linguistics is a modeling science. The purpose is to create formal models that describe the behavior of a system. The models can be falsified by checking the outputs of the model against the outputs of the system.
Which is exactly how theoretical physics happens to operate!
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I've said it many times, but truly phonetics is a dark art
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My mom came and sat in on my intro to cog sci class this morning--a big lecture hall class with >100 students. AND SHE RAISED HER HAND AND ASKED A QUESTION
I'm dying
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Is it weird to anyone that in all their travels the Austronesians never established any permanent settlements on the Australian continent? Were they avoiding it? Was it just an effect of currents or natural barriers?
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This might be the most personally relatable meme I've ever seen
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If this is a reference you get, congrats you've been exposed to too much linguistics. Please step outside and get some air
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@LinaJan02491152
I don't think this is true. I've cooked recreations of ancient Roman and Mesopotamian recipes, and I think you can do a lot with herbs, salt, and fermentation. It wasn't all tasteless mush!
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Now tell me ChatGPT doesn't have genuine understanding, I dare you
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Chomsky casually dropping the "we" in a book he is the sole author of
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Monolingual linguists: I lead others to a treasure I cannot possess
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Ok, new version - with color!
I did my best! Initial phoneme of the numerals 1-10 in a variety of languages. Some interesting patterns here!
Let me know if there are any errors!
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"western civ" bros are deeply unserious. "Have you read the Iliad?" Bro, the Iliad is FICTION
Do you know the history of the Hittite empire? Of Arzawa, of Wilusa? Do you know the exploits of the great kings? Hattusili, Muwatalli, Suppiluliuma?
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If you understand this, you have achieved psycholinguistics
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This is the worst injustice the English language has ever endured and I won't stand for it
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We all already know how to use language, maybe it's time for linguists to call it quits
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Well, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a title of a journal article that goes this hard
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This reads like a parody of how a physicist would approach language
Classical Latin was complex compared to modern languages. (More noun cases, more verb forms…) But its predecessors were even more complex, back to Proto-Indo-European. Yet there must have been a time when languages evolved to *increasing* complexity. When was the peak, and why?
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The syntactician with nonstandard grammatical intuitions.
The phonologist who can't pronounce the department chair's name.
The typologist who only speaks English.
The phonetician who probably should have been a physicist.
They are... the linguistics department
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I think I fixed all the errors that were mentioned, and I added a few more languages that people had asked for. It's starting to get unwieldy!
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The exact situation I found myself in during the global recession. Solution: more linguistics degrees
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If imaginary numbers just give an additional axis for the vowel chart, arguably languages are already using it!
Vowels can vary in lots of dimensions: height, backness, rounding, tone, phonation, and length.
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Quick look on WALS shows that there are more languages without gender marking than languages with it: 145 vs 112
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Floridians about to discover "straight" is a sexual orientation the same way ling 101 students discover they do, in fact, have an accent
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Why this bothers me: when people say "basically every language other than English", it's likely they're thinking of a particular set of languages: the languages of Europe
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This is probably the best example image of recursion that exists.
Chomsky and Halle holding a picture of Chomsky and Halle holding a picture of Chomsky and Halle
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It's good to expand our linguistic scope beyond English, but let's not replace it just with popular European languages we might have studied in high school! There are a lot of languages and a lot of diversity!
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Linguists: how do you answer questions like "is Tamil an older language than Sanskrit?" at the father's day barbecue? asking for a friend
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And honestly, not even all European languages have gender! Non-IE languages like Basque, Finnish, and Hungarian don't!
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@olliesayeed
I don't know why but I have such a hard time wrapping my mind around this obvious concept
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Every linguist has intrusive thoughts about doing language deprivation experiments
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The most famous thing Chomsky has ever written (colorless green ideas sleep furiously) is complete nonsense.
What is he, stupid?
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Apparently it is not too late to become a whale phonologist
Sperm whales have equivalents to human vowels.
We uncovered spectral properties in whales’ clicks that are recurrent across whales, independent of traditional types, and compositional.
We got clues to look into spectral properties from our AI interpretability technique CDEV.
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The average linguistics undergrad will go through this entire journey in their first year. It's a wild ride
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The ship of thesaurus problem: if you gradually replace every word of an essay with a more erudite and obscurantist synonym, will it be the same essay?
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Identifying AI generated images is a crucial skill for navigating an online ecosystem that is becoming inundated with AI generated content. Here are a few tips to recognize AI images 👇
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Ok, so we can't say delve anymore, because ChatGPT says it too much.
Any other words I need to permanently avoid to prove I'm a human?
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I disagree, but the inverse ("LLMs are good cognitive models") is also wrong.
Hot take: what LLMs demonstrate is that language (specifically, the corpus) has way more information in it that is accessible via linear regression than we thought.
Hot take: the unreasonable effectiveness of large language models is an illusion and the real scientific discovery is that human language is massively less complex than we thought it was.
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Do philosophers ever cite SEP in their published papers? What about non-philosophers? Have you ever cited an SEP article?
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Lots of languages, with lots of speakers, have no gender marking at all: Mandarin, Turkish, Bengali, etc
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Graduating highschool: I don't know anything
1 year of college: I know everything
4 years of college: I don't know everything
1 year of grad school: I don't know anything
6 years of grad school: no one knows anything
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5. Many linguists (including me) are convinced that all languages are equivalently expressive - every language can express the same set of human thoughts.
There is no such thing as "untranslatable" words - any word can be translated. We might just have to use more than one word!
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How common is it across languages to have a separate word for an animal and the meat of that animal?
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Does the word for "nose" start with a nasal consonant in non-Indo-European languages? How common is this?
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On Monday, I had my students debate the function of language. Is language primarily for thought, or primarily for communication? I split the class in half and had each group argue for one side. Left is how they felt before the debate. Right is how they felt after.
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Hold up, did Chomsky invent rule-based generative phonology as an undergrad??
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I did my best! Initial phoneme of the numerals 1-10 in a variety of languages. Some interesting patterns here!
Let me know if there are any errors!
using the first letter in the Latin transliteration of each word is so arbitrary.
doing by first phoneme would probably be much more interesting
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This idea that language has supernatural power, or that magic is mediated through language (eg spells, curses, incantations)--is this idea universal? Do all languages have this power for their speakers?
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1. Yes, languages very often encode unique cultural knowledge. But the knowledge precedes the language - you can't gain the knowledge simply by being exposed to the right word forms.
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Linguists, are we ok?
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