Assorted Language Questions

[Comrade Ceasefire]

Not a language question, but something interesting I found in my X feed

https://twitter.com/x/status/1775531115874246837

I love that kind of analysis, especially when they use millions of words. ("Now try Hawaiian", snickered my wife.)
Trying to do the same with phonemes instead of written text is a lot harder. "Try Hawaiian", she snickered again. (People like her cause unrest.)
There are other techniques and mathematical "laws", e.g. Zipf's Law that are used to analyze word frequencies.

Zipf's law - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

There's a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Adelaide who recently solved a murder case from 1948. (I say "solved", but he "only" narrowed down the possibilities and then the internet flesh engine did the rest. )

His next "hobby" project is to try to solve the origin of the mysterious, and quite barmy, 15th-century codex called the Voynich Manuscript.

Voynich manuscript - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

It's still an open question as to whether it is a coded work, or written in some unknown language, or whether it's an elaborate hoax. Interestingly, the frequency and types of word groups seem to obey Zipf's law. From the wiki article:
"...suggesting that text is most likely not a hoax but rather written in an obscure language or cipher".

 

[Birdjaguar]

^^^ That is one of the most interesting unsolved puzzles. Let us know what he comes up with.

 

[Comrade Ceasefire]

^^^ That is one of the most interesting unsolved puzzles. Let us know what he comes up with.

I didn't realize that Derek Abbott et al have been working on it for a few years now!

The project description: Cracking the Voynich code

https://www.eleceng.adelaide.edu.au/personal/dabbott/wiki/index.php/Cracking_the_Voynich_code

A youtube video:

An Honours thesis:

https://www.eleceng.adelaide.edu.au/personal/dabbott/wiki/images/b/bd/Final_Seminar_Slides.pdf

A poster presentation:

https://www.eleceng.adelaide.edu.au/personal/dabbott/wiki/images/4/44/Project_141_Exhibition_Poster.pdf

Final report for 2014:

https://www.eleceng.adelaide.edu.au/personal/dabbott/wiki/index.php/Semester_B_Final_Report_2014__Cracking_the_Voynich_code

A masters thesis:

https://www.eleceng.adelaide.edu.au/personal/dabbott/wiki/images/0/00/Masters_project_141_the_final_thesis_Ruihang_Feng_1674940.pdf

 

[Birdjaguar]

I tried to watch that video. The speaker's accent was a bit hard for my bad hearing, but the added music was just annoying and made everything even harder to understand. Vidos as entertainment are one thing, but when the goal is to inform, the entertainment aspects should be vetted. I'll try again later.

 

[Comrade Ceasefire]

I tried to watch that video. The speaker's accent was a bit hard for my bad hearing, but the added music was just annoying and made everything even harder to understand. Vidos as entertainment are one thing, but when the goal is to inform, the entertainment aspects should be vetted. I'll try again later.

I haven't watched it yet - so thanks for the warning.
I just bundled together some of the reports from the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Adelaide Uni to show how they are analyzing the text.

 

[Gori the Grey]

The video gives away its secret at the very end.

They used Google Translate

Now why didn't I think of that?

 

[Comrade Ceasefire]

The video gives away its secret at the very end.

They used Google Translate

Now why didn't I think of that?

You were probably preoccupied trying to recall an appropriate poem, under the misapprehension that:
Better the silver-tongued devil you know, than the silicon-tongued devil you don't.

 

[Comrade Ceasefire]

Will American AI kill European culture?
BRUSSELS — Europeans are racing to create their own artificial intelligence chatbots to stop U.S.-made tech from gobbling up their economies, culture and even languages themselves.

From Madrid to Sofia, European Union countries have launched and supported a flurry of initiatives aimed at creating chatbots that are truly fluent in local languages.

The latest AI technology powering tools like the popular ChatGPT chatbot hinges on "large-language models" or LLMs — systems capable of eerily human-like conversation. Language is at the core of these innovations, and the EU — a Tower of Babel with 24 official languages, from Lithuanian to Maltese — wants the booming tech to click with its own cultural content and quirks.

“Mark Twain should not erase Stendhal,” France’s Economy Minister Bruno Le Maire said at a tech event in Cannes in February. “We don’t want to settle just for English … Going ahead, we don’t want our language to be weakened by algorithms and AI systems.”

Will American AI kill European culture?

EU is building chatbots to save its languages.

www.politico.eu

And that's why you need chatbots to protect your language?