Adrian Buck > Recent Status Updates

"...in fact, Kanzi's success cannot be attributed to experimental sophistication. Kanzi learned to undetstand speech and use lexigrams symbolically without explicit training." - like creole evolves from pigeon.

"My point is not that these instructions are located outside the child in the language community, but that there are no instructions (except in the imaginations of those who write texts on innate or 'proper' grammar and syntax). A set of basic design rules or principles is simply siperfluous."

"Language universals are, in this interpretation, only statistical universals, but supported by the astronomical statistics of millions of speakers over tens of thousands of years."

"[universal rules or implicit axioms of grammar] have emergenced spontaneously and independently in each evolving language, in a response to universal biases in the selection processes affecting language transmission."

"This immiscibility is reflected in the brains of fluent bilingual speakers, who tend to have different neural localization for the two languages they know." - Really? I be surprised if a language had a single neural localization.

"Like a species, then, the language of whole society is a natural reservoir of variation, with some features becoming less diverse and others becoming more diverse over time."

"[the relationship between language and people is symbiotic...it naturally evolves] to bring the reproduction of the two organisms into closer alignment, since this is the best way to insure the success of both."

"Instead of approximating an imaginary ideal of communicative power and efficiency, or following formulae derived derived from an alleged set of innate mental principles, language structures may simply reflect the selection pressures that have shaped their reproduction" - cf Selfish Sounds

"Language evolution is probably thousands of times more rapid than brain evolution" - hence language adapts to children's brains rather than vice versa. But is there any evidence of this in the literary record?

"Even very unusual and exotic behaviours can be taught, if one begins with what an animal already intends to do, then step by step extrapolates and generalizes to new variations on the theme." - good advice for language teachers, start with L1.

"Over countless generations languages should have become better and better adapted to people, so that people need to make minimal adjustments to them" - learning a language is more difficult than he would like, for children, and especially adults, because learnability is not the sole goal of language, it is also used to defend a group identity. Some languages are like this than others - English, for example.

"...the theory that innate knowledge of grammar is the heritage of all human children simply asserts the answers to these messy questions, and leaves it to evolutionary biology and neuroscience to explain how the answers are derived...it may be worth asking if [it] is biologically plausible and if there really [is] no alternative"

"Yet another well-connected colleague knew of at least one MEP who had returned to Romania when he discoevered that he could make more money in Bucharest from graft than he could in Brussels" - Shocking!

"...Orbán delivered his much-quoted speech about building an illiberal state in Hungary, in imitation of Singapore, China, India, Turkey and Russia..." - it's an odd list...

"She was a little surprised when I asked her whether Romanian students learn Hungarian: "It's too difficult, and English is far easier. They see it and hear it everywhere from childhood..." - English or Hungarian?

"The fatuous notion that the Rumanians were direct descendents of the Romans in Dacia had been around for some time in the 1600s and 1700s. It gave people humiliated by Turks, by Hungarians, and by Austrians, a certain self-importance" - pot, kettle, black. Was the remark about Romans and the English meant to be ironic?

"The Romans were in Britain for more than twice as long, but, apart from the priests, English people didn't learn Latin"... possibly because 'the English' didn't arrive in Britain until after the Romans left. The Romano-British did speak Latin, and maybe if the German tribes hadn't turned up, we'd all be speaking a Welsh version of Romanian.

"Besides, can you imagine the Hungarians accepting a Rumanian - A Vlach -as their king? And can you imagine them acknowledging his son, Mátyás, (or Matthias) as one of the greatest of all Hungarian kings?" - as in Britain, relatively few monachs have shared their ethnicity with their people. A monarch isn't legitimised by his ethnicity.

"It can't be said that the Hungarians made any secret of their aims: they'd declared in 1873 that 'our primary obligation is not be liberal; our first duty is to ensure that Hungary endures and survives" - long before Trianon, when did Hungarians first sense that their state was under existential threat?

"Because symbols do not directly refer to things in the world, but indirectly refer to them by virtue of referring to other symbols, they are implicitly combinatorial entities whose referencial powers are derived by virtue of occupying determinate positions in an organized system of other symbols"

Receiving a mild electric shock when you hear the word 'cat'...a similar but less intense response will also be produced with 'dog', 'meow', 'animal'... and 'mat'...' "All of these distinct associative relationships are brought into relationship to one another by the symbolic relationship."

"This produces a pattern of learning that tends to exhibit more or less discrete stages. Since the number of combinatorial possibilities that must be sampled in order to discover the underlying symbolic logic increases geometrically with each additional level of recoding, it is almost always necessary to confine rote learning to one level at a time..." - plateaus in 2LL.

"Instead of hundreds or even thousands of trials, the availability of symbolic coding allowed [the chimps] to bypass further trials altogether, an incredible increase in learning efficiency." - I experience this using clozemaster.

"Because the combinatorial rules [i.e. grammar] encode not objects by ways in which objects can be related, new symbols can immediately be incorporated and combined with others based on independent knowledge about what they symbolize" - I wouldn't say this is immediate in natural language.

"This poses an interesting problem that every pet trainer has faced. You can't train what NOT to do unless the animal first produces the disallowed behaviour." - teachers need to force mistakes from their students in order for them to learn better?

"To learn symbols we begin by learning symbol-object correlations, but once learned, these associations must be treated as no more than clues for determining the more crucial relationships."

"Words point to objects (reference) and words point to other words (sense), but we use sense to pick out the reference, not vice versa." - is there a connection with this, and with Wittgenstein's denial of ostensive definition?

"One cannot escape the impression that the level of British intelligence and competence in both civil and military positions in the period 1763-1783, was, on the whole. though not in every case, low. Whether that was bad luck, or owing to the almost exclusive hold of the ultrapriviledged on decision making positions is not clear beyond question. The underprivileged and middle class often do no better."

"[The British government] was not interested in Americans because they considered them rabble or at best children whom it was inconceivable to treat - or even fight - as equals."

"Given the intention to retain sovereignty, insistence on the right to tax was justifiable per se; but it was insistence on a right 'you know you cannot exert', and in the face of evidence that the attempt would be fatal to the voluntary allegiance of the colonies, that was folly."