Artificial Language Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

2025, Change in A Priori Artificial Languages

Handout and (rough) script for paper given at the International Conference on Historical Linguistics

2025

Artificial language systems don’t just change how we communicate, they cut into the structures that once made human subjectivity possible. What’s being lost isn’t just nuance, but the interior spaces where the unconscious used to live, in the cracks and silences of language. In this new order, where everything is performative, streamlined, legible, Romanticism holds on to what can’t be said. It insists on the pause, the break, the absence. It’s not about nostalgia; it’s about refusal. A refusal of presence, of the idea that everything should be made visible, knowable, functional. If AI promises total clarity, Romanticism wagers everything on the opaque.
As artificial systems turn meaning into smooth data flows, the poem reintroduces friction, desire not as lack, but as force. Différance instead of definition. A kind of speech that’s no longer trying to touch, but to withhold. In that withholding, there’s ethics. Not in the content, but in the form. In being willing to lose something. Romanticism, becomes a practice of remembering how to forget, and letting silence do the work that language no longer can.

2025

Current knowledge about archaeological soils comes from a long-standing but sporadic collaboration between soil surveyors and archaeologists, who focused mainly on the geoarchaeological interpretation of sites stratigraphy and soil-based environmental reconstructions, whilst the classification of these soils was less approached. The aim of this work was to evaluate the ability of the current WRB system to classify archaeological soils, considering their particularities and capacity to store information on both environmental characteristics and man-landscape interactions during the pedogenesis. The focus in this paper is on the Archaic qualifier, which was introduced in WRB ten years ago specifically to describe and classify soils in archaeological context. The study was based on a single archaeological site situated in northeastern Romania, which has a twofold historical significance: it was inhabited about five millennia ago during Cucuteni culture and it was heavily affected by warfare during WW II. The results indicated that, although the current Technosols and Anthrosols Reference Soil Groups (RSGs) are generally suitable for classifying archaeological soils, the Archaic qualifier has a narrow applicability and has been very rarely used since its allocation to the Technosols RSG. Accordingly, we proposed the supplementation of the Archaic qualifier definition, reconsideration of cambic and argic diagnostic horizons in Anthrosols and Technosols, as well as the inclusion of a new Militaric qualifier to classify warfare soils in WRB. We conclude that the classification inconsistencies are mainly related with the lack of sharply defined taxonomic criteria and research methods, which hampers the understanding of their development and spatial distribution, as well as their inventory and a better representation in the soil policy instruments. ☆ This article is part of a special issue entitled: 'Soil Memory' published in Catena.

2025, Creating Words that Work: Vocabulary Design in Artificial Auxiliary Languages

Slides for presentation at the Linguists Collective Conference and Celebration of International Mother Language Day 2025

2025, Cognitive Science

Artificial language learning (ALL) experiments have become an important tool in exploring principles of language and language learning. A persistent question in all of this work, however, is whether ALL engages the linguistic system and whether ALL studies are ecologically valid assessments of natural language ability. In the present study, we considered these questions by examining the relationship between performance in an ALL task and second language learning ability. Participants enrolled in a Spanish language class were evaluated using a number of different measures of Spanish ability and classroom performance, which was compared to IQ and a number of different measures of ALL performance. The results show that success in ALL experiments, particularly more complex artificial languages, correlates positively with indices of L2 learning even after controlling for IQ. These findings provide a key link between studies involving ALL and our understanding of second language learning ...

2025, Bilingualism: Language and Cognition

This study examined how individual differences in cognitive abilities account for variance in the attainment level of adult second language (L2) syntactic development. Participants completed assessments of declarative and procedural learning abilities. They subsequently learned an artificial L2 under implicit training conditions and received extended comprehension and production practice using the L2. Syntactic development was assessed at both early and late stages of acquisition. Results indicated positive relationships between declarative learning ability and syntactic development at early stages of acquisition and between procedural learning ability and development at later stages of acquisition. Individual differences in these memory abilities accounted for a large amount of variance at both stages of development. The findings are consistent with theoretical perspectives of L2 that posit different roles for these memory systems at different stages of development, and suggest tha...

2025, Velimir Khlebnikov 1922-2022. One Hundred Years of a Myth

This paper deals with the concepts of "universal language" common in linguistics and in the poetic Avant-garde in the period from the 1910s to the 1930s. During that period, sociopolitical reforms gave rise to new realia and concepts, which required an updated vocabulary. "Language construction" was important both for peoples with no written languages and for future international communication in the context of faith in world revolution. These factors underlie not only the renewal of language policies, but also the creation of universal languages by linguists and poets. Interlinguistics was developing during these years; within which the "Kosmoglot" society played an important role. Among the Avant-garde concepts, Khlebnikov's "star-language" and the Gordin brothers' "cosmic language of AO" are of particular importance. The Gordin brothers followed Khlebnikov but went further in their search for cognitive and linguo-social changes. This paper compares these linguistic and poetic universal languages and concludes that the orientation towards linguistic experiment in the period in question was paramount for scholars and poets alike.

2025, Studies in Second Language Acquisition

Evidence of learning following incidental exposure has been found for aspects of nonnative syntax in adults (Rebuschat & Williams, 2006, 2012; Williams & Kuribara, 2008). However, little research has tested delayed effects of learning under an incidental condition or moved beyond word order. This study investigated learning of third language (L3) morphosyntax (word order and case marking) under an incidental exposure condition. Participants were second language Spanish learners exposed auditorily to a semiartificial language, Japlish, during a semantic plausibility judgment task. Performance following exposure to L3 Japlish was assessed with acceptability judgment and picture-matching tasks that were administered immediately after exposure and 2 weeks later. Results on immediate tests showed a significant learning effect on acceptability judgment but none for picture matching. At delayed testing, results showed maintenance of the learning effect on acceptability judgment and signifi...

2025

This study tests whether prediction error underlies structural priming in a later-learnt L2 across two visual world eye-tracking priming experiments. Experiment 1 investigates priming when learners encounter verbs biased to double-object-datives (DO, "pay") or prepositional-objectdatives (PO, "send") in the other structure in prime sentences. L1-German-L2-English learners read prime sentences crossing verb bias and structure (DO/PO). Subsequently, they heard target sentenceswith unbiased verbs ("show")while viewing visual scenes. In line with implicit learning models, gaze data revealed priming and prediction-error effects, namely, more predictive looks consistent with PO following PO primes with DO-bias verbs. Priming in comprehension persisted into (unprimed) production, indicating that priming by prediction error leads to longer-term learning. Experiment 2 investigates the effects of target verb bias on error-based priming. Priming and prediction-error effects were reduced for targets with non-alternating verbs ("donate") that only allow PO structures, suggesting learners' knowledge of the L2 grammar modulates prediction-error-based priming. Highlights • Adult L2 learners show abstract structural priming in real-time comprehension. • Prediction error drives structural priming in L2 comprehension. • Grammatical knowledge constrains prediction-error-driven L2 structural priming. • Prediction-error-based priming in L2 comprehension persists into later production. • Prediction (error) constitutes a learning mechanism in late L2 acquisition.

2025, Cosmoglotta

Un articul pri li historie del litteratura in Interlingue (Occidental).

2024

The sound pattern of the language(s) we have heard as infants affects the way in which we perceive linguistic sounds as adults. Typically, some foreign sounds are very difficult to perceive accurately, even after extensive training. For instance, native speakers of French have troubles distinguishing foreign words that differ only in the position of main stress, French being a language in which stress is not contrastive. In this paper, we propose to explore the perception of foreign sounds cross-linguistically in order to understand the processes that govern early language acquisition. Specifically, we propose to test the hypothesis that early language acquisition begins by using only regularities that infants can observe in the surface speech stream (Bottom-Up Bootstrapping), and compare it with the hypothesis that they use all possible sources of information, including, for instance, word boundaries (Interactive Bootstrapping). We set up a research paradigm using the stress system, since it allows to test the various options at hand within a single test procedure. We distinguish four types of regular stress systems the acquisition of which requires different sources of information. We show that the two hypotheses make contrastive predictions as to the pattern of stress perception of adults in these four types of languages. We conclude that cross-linguistic research of adults speech perception, when coupled with detailed linguistic analysis, can be brought to bear on important issues of language acquisition.

2024, 沖縄大学紀要 (Okinawa Daigaku Kiyo)

This paper deals with the recognition of English bisyllable words by Japanese listeners at the low intermediate level of English. Our hypothesis is that English bisyllable words beginning with a strong stress are much easier to recognize than those beginning with a weak stress for these Japanese listeners of English. This assumption is based upon an analysis of statistical studies of English vocabulary and experiments performed by the authors of this paper and other researchers. Our experiment supported the hypotheses. In addition, it was discovered in the experiment that a relative frequency of occurrence of the words affected identification of the words beginning with a weak syllable. These observed variations may have been the result of a recognition processing need to obtain alternative cues of information in situations that lacked a suitable amount of information cues necessary for word identification. English bisyllable words beginning with a strong stress may require less information for identification, whereas English bisyllable words beginning with a weak stress may require alternative cues of information for identification, ie word frequency.

2024

For yeaTs, psychc10gists and psyc:hclinguists have described lunan learning and memory in terms of abstract knowledge stnJc:tures SlJCh as grammars, orthographies, prototypes, scripts and rules. These abstractions 'often have been thought to be implicit, and acquired through some implic:it process. Recently, sane theorists have • suggested that at least some of the behaviour that~been attributed to implicit, ,-~. abstract knowledge may actually arise from people's memory for individual c:ases. In this thesis, this issue is investigated by addressing the rea!l'lt c:laims of Arthur Reber and his associates for the rapid, implic:it abstraction of artificial grammars. In a series of si:I: experiments, subjects were trained with a,sample of items .... generated from an artificial grammaT, and then given.a surprise da.ssification test in which they were asked to sort new items with respect to grammatical status. In each experiment, it was demonstrated that what had previously been attributed to implicit abstraction of grammatic:a.lity was actually a function of the similarity between transfer items and specific training~erienCEs. It was also shown that variations in how subjects are asked to learn the training items affects their sensitivity to the specific: similarity of the transfer items rather than, as Reber and his associates had suggested, their sensitivity to the grammatic:a.lity of the items. These results are interpreted in terms of"breadth of transfer'-the degree to which SUbjects may generalize around their memory for specific: experiences. Other results suggest that breadth of transfer is a function of the specific: enc:oding of events, and that variables that affect the enc:oded similarity between events affect the likelihood of item-specific: transfer. All of the results are interpreted in iii terms Df a. model of stnJcturallHming tha.t suggll5ts tha.t subjects' knCl40lledge of CIJIllPlex danains is TllPresented in memcry a.s naJ1tiple traa!St and tha.t the close rela.tionship~d in these experiments betwl!lln ongina.! item lNming and subsequent tests of item ,ecogniticn and ca.tegcrical transfer is a fulcticn of the mel1101 ia.1 distributia'l of these traces. Finally, the results of post-testing questionn~res that a.sked the subjects to attribute the ba.ses of their transfer decisions indicated that the subjects' knowledge in these ta.sks is less implicit than pn!vicusly. suggested. In affirmation of the cbjective analyses of their behaviour, subjects a.ttributed their transfer decisions primarily to the similarity between training and transfer items. The results~e diSCJ5sed in terms of a general framework that suggests that the knowledge lXlderlying people's performanCE! in complex domains CDtlsists of a mixture of episodic: memory for individual instanC2S .and limited, explicit abstractions. iv '.

2024, Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

A n umber of language processing studies indicate that violations of syntactic constraints are processed differently from violations of semantic constraints (Brain imaging: e.g., Ainsworth-Darnell et al., 1998 Ni et al., in press Speeded grammaticality judgment: McElree & Gri th, 1995 Eye-tracking: Ni et al., 1998). Although these results are often taken as support for the view that the processor employs two separate modules for enforcing the two classes of constraints, we nd (in keeping with Rohde & Plaut, 1999, and Tabor & Tanenhaus, 1999) that a nonmodular connectionist network can learn a quantitative distinction between the two types of constraints. But prior connectionist studies have been inexplicit about why the distinction arises. We argue that it stems from the distinct distributional correlates of the di erent types of information: syntax involves gross distinctions semantics involves subtle ones. We also describe the Bramble Net, an attractor network which derives grammatical categories and models an approximation of the syntax/semantics distinction in qualitative terms. These results support Elman's (1990) suggestion that grammatical structures may arise by self-organization, rather than by hardwiring. They also help clarify what the grammatical structures are in a self-organizing connectionist network, and emphasize the usefulness of dynamical systems theory in grammatical explanation.

2024

Word segmentation skills emerge during infancy, but it is unclear to what extent this ability is shaped by experience listening to a specific language or language type. This issue was explored by comparing segmentation of bi-syllabic words in monolingual and bilingual 7.5-month-old learners of French and English. In a native-language condition, monolingual infants segmented bi-syllabic words with the predominant stress pattern of their native language. Monolingual French infants also segmented in a different dialect of French, whereas both monolingual groups failed in a cross-language test, i.e. English infants failed to segment in French and vice versa. These findings support the hypothesis that word segmentation is shaped by infant sensitivity to the rhythmic structure of their native language. Our finding that bilingual infants segment bi-syllabic words in two native languages at the same age as their monolingual peers shows that dual language exposure does not delay the emergenc...

2024, Jezikoslovlje

Who is Michael D. Gordin? Michael D. Gordin, the author of the monograph Scientific Babel (2015), is Rosengarten Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at Princeton University. This monograph is not the first one by this Princeton-based historian. During his approximately 15-year-long career, Michael D. Gordin has become a prolific author having written five books, having co-edited seven volumes and special issues, and having published a plethora of articles and book reviews, all mainly dealing with the history of modern science. 1 This current monograph of his addresses a centuries-long problem of the scientific language barrier. Scientific Babel Scientific Babel: How Science Was Done Before and After Global English (415 pages) consists of the introduction, eleven chapters, and the conclusion, and serves as an interesting interdisciplinary treatment of various languages of science with a special emphasis on the history of science. In other words, this monograph deals with the scientific language barrier not only from a usual linguistic, but also from a historical point of view. Starting with Latin, the author undertakes an intriguing historical journey through a variety of languages and language projects in the last 300 years which resulted in the contemporary virtually monoglot science.

2024, Jezikoslovlje

2024, Compiling a Dictionary of Babm: Problems and Challenges (Paper given in the SSL Seminar Series)

Babm is an artificial auxiliary language designed by Fuishiki Okamoto and presented to the English-speaking public in a 1962 book. It is an a priori artificial language, that is, an artificial language which does not use material from natural languages, as Esperanto does. The vocabulary of Babm was created following the general principle that words with similar meanings should be similar in form, e.g. gafc ‘a cherry’, gafg ‘a pineapple’, gafn ‘a peach’. Most of Okamoto’s book consists of a dictionary, but the words are arranged thematically, and thus it is not easy to look up words in order to understand a text. This talk will describe some (unexpected) difficulties in compiling an alphabetical dictionary of Babm.

2024, Osman ERKMEN and Gulnaz GAFUROVA (eds.) 10th International Zeugma Conference on Scientific Research: Book of Full Texts, IKSAD, Ankara

Oz is an artificial auxiliary language designed by Charles Milton Elam of Ohio. It is of the a priori type, i.e. a language created with using anything from existing languages, unlike better-known artificial languages such as Esperanto and Interlingua. In spite of its name it was a serious project,
although Elam (1932:5) states, “This book is not offered as a solution of the Auxiliary International Language problem, but is intended merely to present the case for the a priori method of language construction”. Oz has a relatively large number of tense prefixes, including those for the present, past, future, and future perfect. Its most unusual tense is the “indefinite”, which is “used when no particular time is referred to, i.e. when an attribute is predicated of a subject without calling attention to the time
at all” (Elam 1932:21), marked by the prefix in-. It is to be distinguished from the habitual action/general truth tense, although Elam appears to use it several times in this sense. An example of a sentence containing this tense marker is ep inQks ap ‘I see him’, which is “simply stating the fact of
my seeing him, which may be in past, present or future time” (Elam 1932:21). To some extent, verbs with in- can be equivalent to infinitives in e.g. English. In this paper I will look at all the occurrences of this tense in Elam (1932), the only known work on Oz, in an effort to get a clearer picture of when it is used. Of particular interest and complexity are verbs marked for both this tense and one of the dependent tenses, e.g. ep iptOv ed ek tinfoid ‘he said (that) he loved her’ (Elam 1932:23). Like the
other non-dependent tense prefixes, in- can occur on its own as a copula. There is also a prefix for the indefinite dependent tense, n-.

2024, TYPE OF CONSTRUCTED LANGUAGES

Constructed languages have different functions. Each Constructed language is created and used for a specific purpose. Constructed languages are therefore divided into certain groups according to their fields. Unlike normal language, Constructed languages are not formed over time in history. It is created for a use case and used as needed. Constructed languages are divided into 5 groups according to their types, and they are directed to productions such as "Society", "Books", "Storing Information", "Scientific Purposes" and "Series, Films". Each Constructed language is very different from each other. Constructed languages differ from each other according to their alphabet, structure and functioning. Constructed languages can be created to communicate with animals, as well as Constructed languages created to bring people together and speak only one language. At the same time, Constructed languages can be created and used in fields such as TV series and movies in terms of difficult to understand but beautiful voice.

2024

Artificial language learning research has become a popular tool to investigate universal mechanisms in language learning. However, often it is unclear whether the found effects are due to learning, or due to artefacts of the native language or the artificial language, and whether findings in only one language will generalise to speakers of other languages. The present study offers a new approach to model the influence of both the L1 and the target artificial language on language learning. The idea is to control for linguistic factors of the artificial and the native language by incorporating measures of wordlikeness into the statistical analysis as covariates. To demonstrate the approach, we extend Linzen and Gallagher (2017)’s study on consonant identity pattern to evaluate whether speakers of German and Mandarin rapidly learn the pattern when influences of L1 and the artificial language are accounted for by incorporating measures assessed by analogical and discriminative learning ...

2024, "The Letter X in Artificial Auxiliary Languages" in Froilan D. Mobo and Merve KIDIRYUZ (eds.) EUROASIA Congress on Scientific Research and Recent Trends -VIII Full Text Book, IKSAD Global Publications. pp. 18-22.

In English and some other languages, the letter x is relatively rare and might be seen as exotic. In fact, it does not occur at all, or only in foreign words in some languages, for example, Turkish. On the other hand, there are languages such as French and Somali in which x might be slightly more common, although still not one of the most frequent letters of the alphabet. One might also notice that x can stand for different sounds in different languages, or even in the same language; for example, in English it usually represents [ks], but it can also represent [z]. These are facts about natural languages; the present paper will look at such facts in artificial languages, i.e. languages which have been consciously created, and in particular, artificial languages which were designed to be used for international communication, artificial auxiliary languages. The best known such language is Esperanto. The main questions will be whether x occurs in a language, and, if so, what sound(s) does it represent? Also, although letter frequency statistics do not exist for most artificial auxiliary languages, one might be able to get some idea of the frequency of x by examining whether it occurs in common words and/or affixes. Some artificial auxiliary languages, for example Kah and Uropi, lack x. Other languages, for example Neo, have x in their alphabet and it stands for the sequence of sounds ks. In still other languages, such as Ardano and Atlas, x is pronounced like sh in English. In Latino Moderne x has the same two pronunciations as it does in English. We thus see diversity in the function of this letter in artificial languages, as well as in natural languages.

2024

Features of Language
In the early 1960s, American linguist and anthropologist Charles Francis Hockett developed a framework to analyze what makes human language unique compared to other forms of animal communication. His groundbreaking work, particularly the "design features of language," was published in 1960 and has since been considered a foundational study in linguistics. Hockett proposed 13 key features that characterize human language, setting it apart from the communication systems of other species.
Hockett's design features emphasize that human language is far more complex and adaptable than the communication systems found in animals. While certain features can be observed in primate and other animal communication, Hockett argued that only human language exhibits the full set of features. Among the most significant are productivity, which refers to the ability to generate an infinite number of messages by combining a limited set of elements, and displacement, which allows humans to talk about things that are not immediately present in time and space.

2024, Language Problems and Language Planning

è appena uscito il quinto ed ultimo volume, tratta con grande ampiezza l'etimologia delle parole esperanto "ufficiali", cioè figuranti nel Fundamento e nelle otto aggiunte fissate dall'Accademia di Esperanto, istituzione che controlla l'evoluzione della lingua. La limitatezza delle radici scelte (poche migliaia rispetto alle 15.000 che compaiono nel più grande dizionario esperanto, il Plena ilustrita vortaro) non infirma affatto la validità dell'opera, che supera ampiamente ogni opera precedente dello stesso tipo; in particolare viene data non solo l'etimologia della parola esperanto in quanto scelta da Zamenhof da una data lingua, ma anche l'etimologia delle parole in lingue etniche da cui Zamenhof ha derivato i termini esperanto. Come esempio sono esaminate le radici anonc-e s ˆajn-. Quasi ad ogni voce sono esposti i motivi, già noti o ricostruiti, che hanno indotto Zamenhof a fare quella scelta piuttosto che un'altra. Un paragone con il più voluminoso dizionario etimologico italiano, il Cortelazzo-Zolli, è in più punti favorevole al Vilborg. È terminata, con l'uscita del quinto ed ultimo volume, un'opera iniziata negli anni Sessanta e che aveva visto una comparsa parziale dodici anni fa (Vilborg 1989(Vilborg -2001)). Il primo volume era uscito nel 1989, presso l'editrice "Eldona Societo Esperanto", che ha continuato con ritmo biennale fino al quarto volume; dopo un silenzio di sei anni, appare quest'anno l'ultimo, che era però pronto in manoscritto già nel 1997. Negli anni Novanta erano apparse altre opere di ugual tema, che hanno in parte influenzato l'ultimo volume; tra queste l'Etimologia vortareto pragmata de Esperanto (1991, con aggiornamenti fino al 2000) del giapponese S. Yamasaki. Ma l'Etimologia vortareto è diretto ad un pubblico giapponese, e, forzando la provenienza etimologica, dà una grande importanza all'inglese come lingua di provenienza; in realtà assai poche sono le parole esperanto che provengono direttamente dall'inglese, ma l'inglese è soltanto una delle lingue alla pari con altre, che si rifanno a radici dalle quali

2024, Cognitive Science

Across languages of the world, some grammatical patterns have been argued to be more common than expected by chance. These are sometimes referred to as (statistical) language universals. One such universal is the correlation between constituent order freedom and the presence of a case system in a language. Here we explore whether this correlation can be explained by a bias to balance production effort and informativity of cues to grammatical function. Two groups of learners were presented with miniature artificial languages containing optional case marking and either flexible or fixed constituent order. Learners of the flexible order language used case marking significantly more often. This result parallels the typological correlation between constituent order flexibility and the presence of case marking in a language and provides a possible explanation for the historical development of Old English to Modern English, from flexible constituent order with case marking to relatively fixed order without case marking. Additionally, learners of the flexible order language conditioned case marking on constituent order, using more case marking with the cross-linguistically less frequent order, again mirroring typological data. These results suggest that some cross-linguistic generalizations originate in functionally motivated biases operating during language learning.

2024, Proc. of CogSci

Why do languages share structural properties? The functionalist tradition has argued that languages have evolved to suit the needs of their users. By what means functional pressures may come to shape grammar over time, however, remains unknown. Functional pressures could affect adults' production; or they could operate during language learning. To date, these possibilities have remained largely untested. We explore the latter possibility, that functional pressures operate during language acquisition. In an artificial ...

2024, Cuadernos LIRICO

La historia de las lenguas artificiales es la historia de un anhelo quimérico que se ha mantenido vivo con diferentes propósitos en todas las culturas y épocas. En su empeño por diluir los conflictos del lenguaje humano, y siempre bajo el amparo de la razón o del mito, los creadores de lenguas artificiales han impuesto modelos heurísticos diferentes con los que abordar las zonas más oscuras de las lenguas naturales 2 y conjugar opuestos tan potentes como la asimetría y la proporción, la pluralidad de formas gramaticales y la economía, la perfección de la regularidad y las incómodas excepciones; en suma, han revitalizado nuevas facetas de la conocida controversia griega entre convención (νόμος) y naturaleza (φύσις), caos y cosmos, para alentar la utopía de una lengua tan perfecta en sus formas como dúctil en sus propósitos. Como estas lenguas tienen la ventaja indudable de ser el producto de una ficción utópica, constituyen una singular ventana ideológica que refleja tanto la particular visión del mundo de sus autores como su ego creador; y se postularán como universales o internacionales cuando, realmente, su universalidad no alcanzará más que a una élite intelectual europea y su internacionalidad no será más que una "occidentalidad" encubierta. En cualquier caso, ya se trate de uno u otro propósito, se partirá del supuesto de que las lenguas naturales son muchas y deficientes, por lo que los diseñadores de sistemas artificiales plantearán un mundo lingüístico uniforme y regular donde pueda redimirse la maldición de Babel. En el cómo sanar la herida de la diversidad lingüística, los autores optarán bien por la vía genesíaca, creando una lengua ex nihilo (o a priori), bien Lenguas artificiales y universos femeninos

2024, Meso

Handout for talk on the artificial language Meso; given at the Sydney Language Festival, July 5, 2014.

2024, Journal of Pragmatics Volume 11 issue 2

Towards an automatic identification of topic and focus. Proceedings of the Second Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics. pp. 263-267. Geneva.

2024, Studies in the pre-judicative hermeneutics and meontology

The aim of this article is to explore the ontological difference within Parmenides's poem "Peri physeōs," with a specific focus on line B 2.3, which reads: "exists, and it is not possible not to exist" (estin te kai hōs ouk esti mē einai). By interpreting "ouk esti" as a negative judgment and "mē einai" as a negative predication, I argue that this line already conceals the essence of the ontological difference, insofar as being is not an entity, and entities are not-being. This interpretation draws on Plato's notion of negation and difference as discussed in "The Sophist," as well as on Kantian infinite judgment. The distinction between these two negations enables the development of the concept of a meontological difference between "non-being" and "non-entities," which lies at the core of the ontological difference between being and entities, and also illuminates Heidegger's pairing of Ereignis and Enteignis. Additionally, I argue that Heidegger's interpretation of Heraclitus in light of truth as alethēia relies on a similar double-negativity. Finally, I show the illuminating potential of examining the ontological difference in Parmenides by analyzing Heidegger's 1949 preface to the third edition of the treatise "On the Essence of Ground" (1929).

2024, Nagyerdei Almanach 10. évf. 20-21. szám pp. 138-148.

J. R. R. Tolkien describes the artificial language-creation as a secret vice in one of his famous lectures. In my paper I attempt to interpret this enigmatic statement. I compare the mythology conception of Tolkien with the myth-creating claim of the Early German Idealism and Romanticism. I emphasize the significance of the pleasure principle and solitude beyond the relevant notion of Tolkien. The organic, natural structure of language and myth makes the artificial creation of these two phenomena to vicious practice. I suggest that the solution of the enigmatic sentence lies in the artificial abuse of naturality.

2024

Prosodic structures often condition the realizations of morphemes in early child speech. Gel'ken ([5, 6]) found that English children are more likely to produce weak syllables that carry morphological material if they can be parsed into trochaic feet. So far, there have been only a few studies on how the acquisition of morphology is conditioned by prosody with two competing lexica (e.g. [10] on Spanish speech data by Spanish-German bilinguals). We contribute to this debate by investigating the interplay of prosody and morphology in two trochaic languages: German (a relatively strict trochaic language) and Italian (a language that allows more variant prosodic patterns). Our longitudinal production study involves three groups of children (aged 2; 10-6;05): monolingual Germans, monolingual Italians, and bilingual German-Italians. Our results suggest that weak syllable deletions in lapse positions in German sentences uttered by monolinguals and bilinguals are due to the fact that ch...

2024, Cognitive Science

Recent work suggests that cultural transmission can lead to the emergence of linguistic structure as speakers’ weak individual biases become amplified through iterated learning. However, to date, no published study has demonstrated a similar emergence of linguistic structure in children. This gap is problematic given that languages are mainly learned by children and that adults may bring existing linguistic biases to the task. Here, we conduct a large-scale study of iterated language learning in both children and adults, using a novel, child-friendly paradigm. The results show that while children make more mistakes overall, their languages become more learnable and show learnability biases similar to those of adults. Child languages did not show a significant increase in linguistic structure over time, but consistent mappings between meanings and signals did emerge on many occasions, as found with adults. This provides the first demonstration that cultural transmission affects the l...

2024, Symbolos: Revista Digital Multidisciplinaria

2024, Viku: An Art Language

Viku is a constructed language, blending primitivism and modernism, with the ambiance of Polynesian and Japanese languages.

2024, 16ο Διεθνές Συνέδριο Ελληνικής Γλωσσολογίας

Ιστορία και τυπολογία των τεχνητών γλωσσών.

2024

The Book of Shazdar is a mythopoetic manifesto of lyrical poetry, supplemented with an extended reflection of art, music, and philosophy. It is organized into four sections: 1. Lyrical poetry by Shazdar, written in the Tengwar script.... more

2024, CONTRIBUTIONS, Section of Natural, Mathematical and Biotechnical Sciences, MASA, Vol. 40, No. 2, pp. 151–160 (2019)

The soils formed on limestones and dolomites have been examined in different locations on the territory of the Republic of Macedonia. The filed researches have been performed in the course of 2010, 2011 and 2012, during which 52 basic pedological profiles were excavated, of which 34 were Rendzic Leptosol, 13 were Chromic Leptic Luvisol on hard limestones and 5 were profiles of Rhodic Leptic Luvisol on hard limestones. These soils are characterized with a profile type O-A-R; A-R; A-(B)rz-R. Seventy eight soil samples were taken for laboratory analyses. The field researches carried out in accordance with the accepted methodology in our country.The pH (reaction) of the soil solution was electrometrically determined with a glass electrode in water suspension and in suspension of 1M KCl. The humus content was determined on the basis of the carbon organic C according the Tyurin method, modified by Simakov. Rendzic Leptosols are characterized with the highest content of humus in relation to the other soils formed on limestone and dolomite. The subtype organogenic Rendzic Leptosols has highest mean value (19.47 %). The content of humus in the Amo horizon amounts to 8.50 % on average, and in the cambic horizon (B)rz 5.18 %. In the Rhodic Leptic Luvisol on hard limestones, the average content of humus in the Amo horizon amounts to 5.33 %, and in the cambic horizon B(rz) it amounts to 2.13 %. pH in H2O in the subtype organogenic Rendzic Leptosols is an average of 6.99, average value of (6.93) belong to the organomineral Rendzic Leptosols. In the Amo horizon with the cambic Rendzic Leptosols pH in H2O is 6.12 and in the cambic horizon (B)rz, pH is 6.68. In Chromic Leptic Luvisols on hard limestones there is decarbonization and weak acidification, due to which the soil solution is weak acidified and in the Amo horizon and (B)rz the average value of pH in H2O is 6.63. In the Rhodic Leptic Luvisol on hard limestones the average pH in H2O in the humus-accumulative Amo horizon is 6.94 and in the cambic horizon (B)rz pH in H2O is 6.72.

2024

Operative Motivating Hypotheses of Tool Grammar 1. Large language models (ChatGPT, Bard etc.) provide new impetus for expanded empirical ambitions in linguistic research. Despite Labov, linguistics, responding insufficiently to a big... more

2024

Preparation of this article was supported in part by operating grants to Lee R. Brooks and John R. Vokey from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. We thank Lorna Moore for her invaluable assistance in collecting the data and Kris Woeppel and Mathew Davidson for their contributions to earlier phases of the project.

2024, Türkiyat Mecmuası

Volapük (1879) ve Esperanto (1887) başta olmak üzere ortak ve evrensel bir dil oluşturmak amacıyla ortaya çıkan yapma dil girişimleri 19. yüzyılın son çeyreğinde ve 20. yüzyılın başında dünya basınında geniş yankı bulmuştur. Osmanlı matbuatında da bu popüler konuya duyarsız kalınmamış; konuyla ilgili makale ve kitaplar hazırlanmış; Volapük ve Esperanto'ya dair kitaplar tüm dünyada rağbet gördükleri yıllarda Osmanlı Türkçesine aktarılmıştır. Bu makalenin amacı yapma dillerle ilgili Osmanlı matbuatında yer alan -çoğu günümüz Türkçesine aktarılmamış- çalışmaları tanıtmak ve Osmanlı aydınının "lisân-ı umûmî" olarak nitelendirdiği bu dillere yaklaşımını tespit etmektir. Bu amaç doğrultusunda Osmanlı matbuatında yapma dillerle ilgili 1893-1917 yılları arasında çıkan altı kitap ve Servet-i Fünun dergisindeki beş makale üzerinde durulmuştur. Eserler incelendiğinde Osmanlı aydınının, teknolojik gelişmelerle giderek küçülen dünyada dil bilmeme probleminin açtığı sorunlara çözüm getiren, kısa zamanda kolayca öğrenildiği iddia edilen, herhangi bir millete ait olmayan, barışın anahtarı diye lanse edilen, "tarafsız" olarak nitelenen yapma dillere sıcak baktığı görülmektedir
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The first attempts at a constructed language to create a common and universal language, in particular Volapük (1879) and Esperanto (1887) in the last quarter of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century, had wide repercussions in the world press. The Ottoman press was also not indifferent to this popular topic, with articles and books being written on the subject such as books about Volapük and Esperanto that were translated into Ottoman Turkish during the years when they were in demand all over the world. The purpose of this article is to introduce the works that occurred in the Ottoman press regarding these constructed languages, most of which have not been translated into modern Turkish, and to describe the approach Ottoman intellectuals took toward these languages that they described as lisân-ı umûmî [the language of public life]. For this purpose, the study focuses on six books from the Ottoman press and five articles from the journal Servet-i Fünûn that were published between 1893-1917 on constructed languages. Upon examining these works, the Ottoman intellectuals are seen to have had positive views about constructed languages, to have claimed them to be easily and quickly learned and to belong to any nation, to have introduced them as the key to peace, and to have described them as neutral, which offered a solution to the problems caused by the lack of those able to speak a foreign language in a world that was getting smaller and smaller alongside the technological developments.

2024, Jahrbuch der Gesellschaft für Interlinguistik

Eine noch vergleichsweise neue und kleine Kategorie von Welthilfssprachen sind die sog. "Worldlangs", deren Vokabular und Grammatik nicht bloß auf indoeuropäischen Sprachen aufbauen, sondern auch Sprachen aus anderen Sprachfamilien berücksichtigen. Doch je mehr und je unterschiedlicher die Quellsprachen, desto mehr stellt sich die Problematik, wie die Entscheidungen für bestimmte Wörter, grammatische Strukturen etc. begründet werden können – warum gerade diese Variante, wäre nicht eine andere ebenso gut oder besser gewesen? Lugamun ist eine neue Worldlang, die dieses Problem mittels algorithmischer Unterstützung auf der Basis freier Onlinequellen wie des vielsprachigen Wörterbuchs Wiktionary angeht. Für jedes aufzunehmende Konzept werden die in den verschiedenen Quellsprachen verwendeten Wörter algorithmisch an Lugamuns Orthographie und Phonologie angepasst und dann automatisch in eine Rangfolge gebracht, auf der Basis mehrerer Kriterien wie ihrer Ähnlichkeit zu bedeutungsgleichen Wörtern in anderen Sprachen. Spricht nichts dagegen, wird der am besten gerankte Kandidat in das Vokabular von Lugamun übernommen; erscheint ein anderer Kandidat als besser, muss dies immer begründet werden. Auf diese Weise lässt sich für jedes Wort nachvollziehen, warum gerade es ausgewählt wurde. Ein ähnlich systematischer Prozess wird auch für die Auswahl grammatischer Strukturen verwendet.

2024

In 2016, information was becoming intelligence-fi nally. Humanoid robots, able to answer questions and recognize facial expressions, were an increasingly common achievement of advanced tech labs. Virtual reality, a "fi rst steps" technology since the 1990s, was seriously bidding to transform gaming, cinema, and who knew what else. Self-driving cars were on the roads of California; they were only test models (by Google and others), and were experiencing some interesting problems, but the technology was still widely expected to come to market very soon. IBM's Watson, scion of the program that had soundly defeated "Jeopardy!" champions in 2011, was being marketed to businesses and professionals as a new kind of "cognitive assistant": able to (per their advertising) take data in all its forms, understand it, learn from it and reason through it. The fi lm Ex Machina-2001 for the millennial generation-caught the moment, depicting a reclusive robotics genius and his sentient, even sensitive, creation. To many people, it seemed only a matter of time before we reached the technological tipping-point that had long been popularized by the futurist Ray Kurzweil: when powerful analytic engines, interacting online, would suddenly become collectively self-aware and transcendently smart. The virtual brain would then either make us immortal through its bits; or reduce us to our own. The infosphere, in short, seemed to be approaching The Singularity. 1 A signifi cant step along the way had to do with translation of natural language. This was a leading edge of the broader technology of natural language processing-no longer a graveyard of Artifi cial Intelligence (AI) ambition. Google and Microsoft had already for several years offered free and instant online translation between and among dozens of languages. At the same time, a number of companies, including Systran, WordLingo, and Wordbee, were offering fee-based translation softwares (presumably more powerful than the free products). Facebook, which used to offer translation, now just went ahead and did it automatically, unless you turned that feature off. (You could still turn it off.) Twitter, less boisterously, made you click an icon to obtain a tweet translation-and then asked if you wanted to improve it. And indeed, the results of online translation, the free versions, anyway, were still pretty iffy; sometimes very iffy. But couldn't you get some kind of a gist even from a very imperfect translation? And wasn't this better than no translation at all? It was of course assumed that this particular capability of the infosphere was still only on its fi rst steps. Eventually, maybe even before the rise of the machines, we could hope for its fulfi llment. Information itself-the universal machine language-would then make all discourse instantly available to any local understanding. The curse of Babel would be undone; universal machine translation would, effectively, make all languages one. Thrilling promise? Or ridiculous hype? You know better than I. If you're reading these words, they're dated; maybe very dated. As we discussed in the Introduction, nobody can keep up, for more than a moment, with the expansion of the infosphere. That is the whole reason for trying to seek the shapes of information in its past, rather than its future. In this fi nal chapter, I want to ask to what extent the real character, as envisioned in Wilkins's Essay , can offer us a critical perspective on the project of universal translation. This is a capability that the real character is supposed to support-for which, indeed, it is in part designed. In effect, the character is supposed to be able to function as a universal translation hub, turning freely at the center of the linguistic system precisely because it is not a "language" itself. This is the same kind of function, when it comes to the possibility of universal machine translation, that is claimed for the ons and offs of informational code, or Mathematical Theory of Communication Information (MTCI). I argued in the last chapter that Wilkins's real character is, to an interesting extent, phenomenologically (though not technically) congruent to the latter. In this fi nal chapter, I'm going to argue that the universalizing promise of the character, as an information technology, involves some unpalatable trade-offs at the level of ontology. The Essay towards a Real Character offers to take us to a new world. But not neces