be alone? Would we even understand what the concept of what it means to be alone if it weren’t for language?
A part of me always regretted dropping that Ancient Languages class. What I would have done to have another conversation with Kyla. I never even introduced myself to her in that class. I just caught her name during roll call on the first day. My ‘conversation’ with her was just a reaction to what she said. She was sitting about two rows in front of me so she might have never even caught sight of my face.
For the next few months, I’d think about Kyla whenever I would find myself daydreaming on a bench on campus. Maybe I would finally run into her again. I’d introduce myself, say I remembered her from our first day of class and then maybe we would be able to get coffee and speak about linguistics.
That never happened.
I didn’t seriously start thinking about linguistics until my second semester of college. I took a course called Algorithmic Language Processing that changed my life. That course was all about making a computer understand conversational and written language, much like online translators and search engines. Understanding language in a way that makes mathematical sense is a complicated task and this is what this course taught us students to do. My professor was the leading researcher on Natural Language Processing in the world. That’s when a computer can take conversational text and figure out what you are trying to communicate.
The point of this Algorithmic Language Processing class was to take Natural Language Processing to the next level. My professor believed that all languages were extremely similar. Some people believe that language shapes the way you think. You hear people say, “There isn’t a way to say what I mean in this language” or “this idea doesn’t translate well from Japanese to English.” My professor thought this was bogus because he believed that language was an extension of a human brain. He also believed that human beings share neurological circuitry such that we feel the same base set of emotions.
Throughout the entire semester he argued that every spoken language shares the same base structure. He developed algorithms that statistically showed the similarities between the semantic reasoning, classification, tokenization, stemming, tagging, and parsing of different languages. That class was as much of a mathematics and computer science class as much as it was a linguistics class.
I haven’t properly introduced Professor Craig. I was entranced by his work. Maybe it was him that introduced me into linguistics and then into philology. I would go to his office hours to talk about language and words. We would go to coffee shops where his graduate students would discuss their research amongst each other.
One day at a coffee shop, I proposed a conjecture that was even more radical than what he taught us in Algorithmic Language Processing. I told him that I had done some preliminary work showing that it may be possible that all of the spoken languages came from a common lineage. That got Professor Craig’s immediate attention.
He said, “That sounds like a fantastic idea -- but how do you propose you could ever gather enough evidence to support such a claim?”
I took out my computer and showed him a rough program I built using some of the equations I studied in Algorithmic Language Processing. I told him that I downloaded 10,000 books and works of text from the university library’s website. These texts spanned thousands of years beginning with the first documented form of language. Then I used his algorithms to show the statistical similarities between different language structures over time.
Professor Craig interrupted me and said, “I’ve attempted to do work like this before, and then I stopped. I could find similarities but that’s not enough to prove anything beyond reasonable doubt.”
I knew he was going to say that. I had been working for months
A part of me always regretted dropping that Ancient Languages class. What I would have done to have another conversation with Kyla. I never even introduced myself to her in that class. I just caught her name during roll call on the first day. My ‘conversation’ with her was just a reaction to what she said. She was sitting about two rows in front of me so she might have never even caught sight of my face.
For the next few months, I’d think about Kyla whenever I would find myself daydreaming on a bench on campus. Maybe I would finally run into her again. I’d introduce myself, say I remembered her from our first day of class and then maybe we would be able to get coffee and speak about linguistics.
That never happened.
I didn’t seriously start thinking about linguistics until my second semester of college. I took a course called Algorithmic Language Processing that changed my life. That course was all about making a computer understand conversational and written language, much like online translators and search engines. Understanding language in a way that makes mathematical sense is a complicated task and this is what this course taught us students to do. My professor was the leading researcher on Natural Language Processing in the world. That’s when a computer can take conversational text and figure out what you are trying to communicate.
The point of this Algorithmic Language Processing class was to take Natural Language Processing to the next level. My professor believed that all languages were extremely similar. Some people believe that language shapes the way you think. You hear people say, “There isn’t a way to say what I mean in this language” or “this idea doesn’t translate well from Japanese to English.” My professor thought this was bogus because he believed that language was an extension of a human brain. He also believed that human beings share neurological circuitry such that we feel the same base set of emotions.
Throughout the entire semester he argued that every spoken language shares the same base structure. He developed algorithms that statistically showed the similarities between the semantic reasoning, classification, tokenization, stemming, tagging, and parsing of different languages. That class was as much of a mathematics and computer science class as much as it was a linguistics class.
I haven’t properly introduced Professor Craig. I was entranced by his work. Maybe it was him that introduced me into linguistics and then into philology. I would go to his office hours to talk about language and words. We would go to coffee shops where his graduate students would discuss their research amongst each other.
One day at a coffee shop, I proposed a conjecture that was even more radical than what he taught us in Algorithmic Language Processing. I told him that I had done some preliminary work showing that it may be possible that all of the spoken languages came from a common lineage. That got Professor Craig’s immediate attention.
He said, “That sounds like a fantastic idea -- but how do you propose you could ever gather enough evidence to support such a claim?”
I took out my computer and showed him a rough program I built using some of the equations I studied in Algorithmic Language Processing. I told him that I downloaded 10,000 books and works of text from the university library’s website. These texts spanned thousands of years beginning with the first documented form of language. Then I used his algorithms to show the statistical similarities between different language structures over time.
Professor Craig interrupted me and said, “I’ve attempted to do work like this before, and then I stopped. I could find similarities but that’s not enough to prove anything beyond reasonable doubt.”
I knew he was going to say that. I had been working for months
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