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Mathematical
Services. 2024-08-18 10:19:26 - Paul D. Foy - Languages As I get older I ponder that there are so many languages I do not know, so many ways of people communicating to me that are barred to me. So that even though in my life I have tried to become familiar with half a dozen or so languages there are still so many I do not know very well or have only rudimentary competence at communicating in. So what do I do? I tried using some of the American's excellent offerings to write software, where you can set at your computer and work in any language with your program and indeed switch between them - easy. There seems to be no demand for that - so puzzling. I now need to get to grips with new languages - Hungarian, Uralic languages, I have no time left, I can't wait years to slowly pick up another one or too, I need to do it faster. So what do I do. I fall back on the advice of mathematicians (the knowledge and techniques of which I use throughout my life) - John G. Thompson, imparted at a dinner in Manchester. "It's just the words that count, that's all you need" (I can't remember the exact quote). I understand. I just muddle along looking at words, the roots and stems and things, I can read about the endings and word order and grammar online and piece things together. Readings easy enough I've experience enough, I've seen all sorts of constructs before. I'll do it like that, won't worry too much about it. Perhaps a friend will say a few words to me. 2026-06-10 06:41:31 - Paul D. Foy - I composed all this comment using an AI tool (WisprFlow). It's amazingly powerful - it didn't make a mistake, it corrected my mistake, my uhms and errs - perhaps you wanted to see that? I think what it produced is OK. It is what I wanted to say: I learned how AI is doing things. Traditional languages were based on learning the structure: putting the grammar together, word order, endings for verbs, endings for adjectives, endings for nouns, gender, things like that. You thought what you wanted to say then you worked out the structure in the language. Old ways of translating, perhaps Google Translate did that but now the game has changed, it seems, and I'm appreciating it. AI has come along and it looks at the context of things. It looks at the tokens and their meanings within the context so instead of getting phrases such as "How are you?" Now you might have a structurally correct response for that but the colloquial, the correct thing in the local language in some context in Bengali is "How do you exist?" It is S-O-V in Bengali: Subject, Object, Verb. "You how exist?" That is the colloquial, the correct language form for "How are you?" in Bengali. AI does all this behind the scenes powerfully. I can understand what is going on more better now. 2026-05-17 08:22:54 - Paul D. Foy - I have new energy in this endeavour - I am learning Asian languages. Again I am basing my strategy on this advice, but I am making sure those introductory texts I use enable me to fill in the greeting words with grammar and structure. Structure is important as the human brain is limited and you can remember things better if there is some reason to fall back on. I've also observations on these languages. Arabic, yes its a tonal language read from right to left, but (early days yet) seems to have a perfectly valid structure and each character of ita alphabet has an umambiguous sound. It's just the characters don't use the Roman script we are used to. There's no difference developing computer infrastructure based upon these characters - they are just different pixels in a grid pattern. Why didn't the Arabs develop computers before Europeans (or Americans) and start to communicate in their language like this? Perhaps they weren't as busy fighting wars to need desperately to - we were warring and invading them! Too busy making food. Just a thought. There's all sorts of Indian languages as well. Same question. And large Indian civilisations have been around since 3000BC, writing as well. Yes you can get a long way with just the words, but a bit more is needed, certainly for a professional set up. Post a comment: |