“auxlangs”

Boy, boy, boy. Syntax across languages, a massive compilation of programming language features, is so damn cool, so damn useful, so damn usable in its text-only simplicity, in its many angles to approach the collection (sorted by language or by categories, or all in one big page). If you’re a programmer you must bookmark this. Now. (If only a similar thing existed for general languages…)

Just think of the responsibility, the challenge, the opportunity. One third of the population is still young enough to be natural born digital citizens (see Classmate PC and the OLPC XO laptop), to easily master an international language (whichever one), to be taught about doubt (“Just think of the tragedy of teaching children not to doubt…”), to receive the best education we can give them…

Remember that character in Neal Stephenson’s Diamond Age, catatonic at page 169 at discovering a quarter million Chinese girls thrust to his care? Well, look around and realize we’ve been given a ship of 1.8 billion souls. Just think of the opportunity.

(Statistic according to the U.S. Census Bureau, international)

Hoy, en la fila para ordenar de Il Tavolo, que siempre es exquisito, habia un grupo de amigas que siendo su primera vez pidieron una enumeracion de lo que ofrecia el bistro. Ya para terminar la retahila menciona el cajero que tenian “tes de raspberry y naranja”. “Naranja y que?”, pregunta confundida una de las amigas (la mas bella, de cejas oscuras y cabellos claros, a la Kate Winslet). “Naranja y raspberry”, responde inmutable el cajero y sigue impasible durante la larga pausa en que la amiga evidencia seguir en ayunas. “Uno de naranja,” acaba respondiendo atolondrada.

Siguieron el resto de las amigas y ya para cuando toco mi turno habia encontrado en mi Blackberry (!) la traduccion de raspberry, que me evadio en ese momento. “Frambuesa!” Es lo primero que le digo al cajero. “Es raspberry en epanhol”. “Es lo mismo”, me responde enfadado. Pero no, no lo es. Porque con frambuesa te hubieras comunicado, con raspberry confundiste.

Lejos, muy lejos, estoy de ser un purista del espanhol o un paranoico anticolonialista (si acaso soy el colonialista…). Como cualquier amigo puede atestiguar y al igual que muchos de ellos, mi lengua materna es el spanglish y hoy en dia escribo (blogs, correos, messenger) casi siempre en ingles siempre que mi interlocutor lo hable aunque sea como segunda lengua. Pero trato siempre que hablo con alguien que solo habla espanhol de anotar mi spanglish natural con sinonimos o parafraseos en espanhol. No hacerlo, no intentarlo siquiera, es lo que me espanto de este cajero. Si no te preocupa que te entiendan, para que hablar?

Ahora que siguiendo esta logica del entendimiento la verdad es que no hay mas que reconocer que sino fuera por flojera, condicionamiento, y, si, pedanteria tendria todo el sentido del mundo sustituir blog por bitacora, messenger por mensajeria instantanea, marketing por mercadeo (la otra vez vi marquetin!), link por enlace y asi (en vez de etcetera, que es nomas latin para “y el resto…”). Hasta ahi todo va bien para los academicos pero porque parar ahi? Por que no es medico de ninhos el pediatra, medico de la piel el dermatologo, musculo del corazon el miocardio, aprendiz por si mismo el autodidacta, inflamacion del estomago la gastritis y asi?

Y bueno, ya siguiendo esta logica de entendimiento hasta sus ultimas consecuencias, por que no aprender Esperanto, “el buen lenguaje”?

anglo latin; the origin of latin america as a word; my high school wasn’t bilingual, it was English with Spanish as a second language; I always say math and language are the same ability because they’re the same thing, math is just specialized talk about numbers; but then zoology is just talk about animals…; the difference is that math is, in a farly unparalleled way, advanced through language itself (as opposed to, say, zoology, which, advances chiefly through observation); the way forward in language is through logic; logic is syntax; understanding is synthesizing and paraphrasing; {an algorithm just like flooding to create a machine that understood, as previously defined—one wouldn’t even need to define what a word is}; Wikipedia syntax highlighting!

Glorious, thought-drunken night.

Here I go trying to coin yet another neologism ^ELZR in yet another abuse of the universal soapbox that is the blog. This time, why not be grand?, I’m going to tackle the most famous neologism lack of all: a name for the decade that yawns between 2000 and 2009. In written form, one usually calls it the 2000s but the “two thousands” is just plain silly. Other proposed names, taken from the 2000s pedia, are the “noughties” (the least narrowspread of the proposals), “the zeroes”, “double zeroes”, the “aughts”, “double-aughts”, “oh’s”, “double oh’s”, “oh-oh’s” “aughties”, “oughties”, “2K’s”, “uh-ohs”, “zoogs”, and “ozies”. Obviously, the search still continues.

So here’s my stab at it: let’s call it, elliptically, “the first decade”. It’s a tad millenialist but also fittingly portentous. It is also universal (“la primera decada”, “la première décennie”, “die erste Dekade”, “最初の十年”, “a primeira década”, “Первое десятилетие”, “la prima decade”), easily extendable (2010-2019 is “the second decade”, 2020-2029 “the third decade”, and so on), perfectly memorable, immediately understandable, and, let’s face it, just plain cool. It’s a whole new language for talking and thinking about our century.

Here some usage examples:

• Wikipedia is a multilingual, Web-based, free-content encyclopedia project, born with the first decade.^WP
• By the second decade, we’ll be adding more than a year, every year, to human life expectancy.^ELZR
• Third-decade ipods will be able to carry every piece of content ever created.^ELZR
• At the beginning of the fifth decade, there will be 9 billion people on the planet.^ELZR

Here’s a (controversial) idea for a language test inspired by the famous Turing test for artificial intelligence^WP:

The test could be easily constrained to test for more specific capabilities: one could test for written command of language X by only permitting written communications, test only for accent by limiting “communication” to the spoken repeating of the judge’s written sentences, and so on.

It is simply stated but almost a “thought test”^WP—it could be done, but there would be a myriad practical complications and scaling would be a bitch. What’s important about it, though, is that it is a valid test to demand of (foreign) language learning: passing it should at least be its hypothetical goal.

The problem is that ridiculously few people would pass it if it where applied today. And because it seems impossibly difficult most people turn away, dismiss the test as wrong or irrelevant, and sink their heads in the sand (“what shouldn’t be, can’t be right”). Which only highlights the current sorry state of language education. It is NOT asking too much. It is not asking for exceptional performance—it doesn’t ask of you to be a Nobel-prize, a literati, or a rapper. It’s merely demanding average, pick-a-guy-from-the-street native-speaker capabilities. Why isn’t that a valid goal to ask of language education?

You could say that most people don’t need native-speaker level to start benefiting from a foreign language and that’s entirely true. But it is just as true that not reaching it is a serious, frustrating, even painful hurdle to communication. A hurdle that will plague ever more people the more the world shrinks. Some of the world’s smartest people can’t get their r’s right hard as they try. And we mock them for it. (Soon, we will be the mocked ones for not getting our intonations right.)

Well looked, Turing level is perhaps even a modest goal. We all possess it already in the language we are born into and we all contained within us the same language potentiality at birth. So it should be perfectly achievable and shouldn’t take nearly as much time as starting from zero.

Yes, I know. We are nowhere near knowing how to reach such a level efficiently. It’s too hard and too long a goal—currently. But we should at least strive for it. (And be honest with students on what the status quo of our language technology is: no more “Learn to speak Chinese in 21 days!”—for now.) Languages are some of the most complex and powerful artifacts we have created. It’s only to be expected that their learning is one of the most complex and difficult challenges we face.

But it is also one of our most rewarding (and valuable) experiences. I want to commoditize it.

Chances are we are on the brink of Turing level language translation^ELZR. Why aren’t we even close to practical Turing level language learning? I’d still want it.

With that, Danny Hillis^{W, E} introduces his idea for Aristotle, an AI tutor that will move in a smarter web he calls the knowledge web. I find his dream somewhat unconvincing, somewhat pedantically unrealistic and somewhat suspicious of oversimplification. (Even though he considers it but a steppingstone towards Neal Stephenson’s Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer^{WP, ELZR}, which I love.) It is from the eminent responses to his essay where there’s gold.

I’m floored too. (And envious!) What Meaningful Machines lyrically calls «flooding» in a recent Wired article, Me Translate Pretty One Day, is a stunningly beautiful translation algorithm, baffling in its simplicity.

Though if it’s simple to state and understand, it’s only because it relies on operations on a terrifying (computational, mathematical) scale. (Like the first time one invokes inside a theorem, say, the set of all possible sets, there’s a mixture of fright and awe—we can barely believe our moxie to write such thoughts.) In a very real way, the algorithm is written in Moore’s law language and if it escaped us all it’s mostly because our words are so shy, so inadvertently constrained by past assumptions.

Ah! How exciting! Machine language translation is on the horizon.

Ah, the ever-recurring techno-myth: a dirt-cheap educational contraption to revolutionize third world children’s education. I can’t even remember when I heard about it first. I was thrilled though, enthused. But then with the undelivering years went my excitement. For one thing, the deployment plan is based almost entirely on governments, which is a nonstarter. More importantly, there might be better options. Cellphones are already a phenomenal worldwide success, even in the poorest countries, and that’s because they’re tangibly, immediately useful. A recent Economist article, Splitting the Digital Divide, mentions other less obvious but intriguing options.

And yet, reading yesterday’s New York Times article, For $150, Third-World Laptop Stirs Big Debate (yup, there’s been some price adjustment), made me think again of the amazing possibilities that can unfold from a personal mobile computer in the hands of a child. Blame it on Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age^AM with its amazing book-machine, the Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer —every self-learner’s wet dream.

At any rate, it seems to me that (save actual existence and deployment) the crucial factor for success will be software and so, for what it’s worth, here’s a promise: If and when Negroponte’s brainchild ever sees daylight, I shall stop whatever I’m doing, for three months, to develop mindblowing educational software for it. There, I said it.

Have you thought just how much you can say, in this tongue we speak in right now, just with words made of just one piece of sound? How short, how sweet, how wow! No? You think it’s no big deal? Well, my hard to please friend, I ask you then to put all that I’ve just said (and a wee bit more that I still have to pour), in words as short as mine, in a tongue that is not the tongue we speak in right now.

We’ll talk then.

(And if you got a thing or two, nice or bad, to say back to this post, please please a form fool and keep your words short. Thanks!)