data jungle adventures

We communicate all the time and have acquired a system of communication tools, a set of symbols such as sounds, gestures or written characters or symbols. That is the coarse definition of language. It is said that language is species-specific to humans and aided the development of civilisation as writing permits inter-generational unbiased transmission of knowledge. There is communication in animals but more tightly spatial or temporally nit to current events, with way less abstraction.

Slang, formally known as variations

Language is also code and anything but static. It varies between populations (of a city for example), times, and social settings. We know that dialects, the subspecies of a language, differ in pronunciation, selected vocabulary and expression (eg Welsh or Austrian). Not to be confused with an accent which is only a pronunciation variant.

Jargon, l’argo, verlan, and the rest of them

While we understand jargon as the language used for highly technical content. With a vocabulary inaccessible to the general public it is not specifically designed to exclude ‘audiences’. Also, some professions with a certain standing in society may utilise their own vocabulary partly to enhance the dignity of their profession and skills and also to increase their efficiency. General language may be too imprecise for a certain scientific or technical detail requiring an enhancement.

But, in other cases, jargon is created deliberately to mislead, exclude and obstruct meaning to a subset of the communicators (authorities?!). French ‘verlan’ uses the inversion of syllables to cypher common french into a suburban slang inaccessible to the outside. Although verlan is now part of everyday french vocabulary but not formally accepted.

Religion has a conservative approach and preserves ‘correct forms’ of language while linking it to rituals and their validity. The language used in certain religious actions in India led to one of the important schools researching linguistics and phonetics.

Pidgin and creoles

Pidgins are the product of the world’s ongoing migration event and more economically driven dispersal of humans. They are the pragmatic combination of two (or more) languages combining vocabulary while abandoning complex grammar. Yes, I speak pidgin French. Creoles are an evolved pidgin, where new grammar emerges and is developed by 2+ generations of pidgin users.

What the heck is Lebanese? Is Lebanese creole? An adventure into sociolinguistics.

Non-verbal

While sign language has its own linguistic concepts, we all know the contextual information that we lose when texting. Gestures, tone of voice, body postures, etc.

What are linguistic concepts?

Now that we have been through language types, let us dive into the mechanics.

• Phonetics, or loosely defined as pronunciation, is the study of the anatomy, physiology, neurology, and acoustics of speaking.
• Grammar, the relation of words in a sentence, covers classes of words according to their function and associated word-from variation (declination). We split this into syntax, defined as the relations between words in a sentence and morphology zooming into the internal grammatical structures of words.
• Semantics, the study of meaning, focuses on the relationship of words, definitions, and contrasts.

All this is true for spoken, acted or written language.

Artificial or constructed languages

This is where it gets interesting; instead of having naturally evolved along with social structures, culture and technics languages have been designed too. Those invented languages serve a purpose. logic, philosophical or experimental. They can also be auxiliaries and help with international communication or be purely artistic.

We all know Esperanto, the designed language based on Spanish language concepts was intended to replace English as the dominant lingua franca associated with colonialism and biasing the distribution of power and wealth. Other languages do not borrow concepts (grammar, phonology, etc) from existing languages but create those from scratch. Those apriori languages are also used to talk to non-humans. No animals or plants but…

Programming languages are formal and inherit two of the naturally evolved language, syntax and semantics. Opposed to natural languages they can be intellectual property if developed in a commercial context. Coding languages range from low to high-level (including assembly and machine language). Low-level languages are binary and can be read by hardware/machines while high-level ones are written and read by humans. Assembly languages take care of the conversion or better compile high to low-level instruction.

The core difference (for humans) is that natural language allows semantic interpretation and ambiguity, while programming languages are strict and less tolerant. Python error message below.

Truth value of a Series is ambiguous. Use a.empty, a.bool(), a.item(), a.any() or a.all()

Programming languages can be evaluated or compared based on their simplicity, capability, abstraction, efficiency, structure, compactness, and locality (of memory use). But can we also compare natural languages using those criteria? Can we learn from the strictness of programming languages and the sometimes higher and more rigid level of abstraction?

Object-oriented?

While the ‘machine’ interpretation of python, javascript and friends is strict and does not allow interpretation or ambiguity there is some flexibility. Objects which can be translated to grammatical elements (such as pronouns, verbs, articles, etc) in natural languages, can be defined by the user of programming languages. The objects can serve a dedicated purpose with tight rules for their content usage and validation. They can also have ‘customised’ methods which compare to grammar. Imagine you could define how a verb is conjugated depending on context.

While this is comparable to slang, natural languages do not seem to have a formal (or formalisable) method of creating objects (or grammar elements)

But what about machine-generated language?

Hold on that is already a lot to digest. Generated stuff comes next, first for landscapes and art.