From theory to data: Representing neurons in the 1940s

Recent literature on the role of pictorial representation in the life sciences has focused on the relationship between detailed representations of empirical data and more abstract, formal representations of theory. The standard argument is that in both a historical and epistemic sense, this relationship is a directional one: beginning with raw, unmediated images and moving towards diagrams that are more interpreted and more theoretically rich. Using the neural network diagrams of Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts as a case study, I argue that while in the empirical sciences, pictorial representation tends to move from data to theory, in areas of the life sciences that are predominantly theoretical, when abstraction occurs at the outset, the relationship between detail and abstraction in pictorial representations can be of a different character.     

A possible Late Pleistocene echo of world linguistic and cultural accordance

A comparison of words in the Akarimojong and Gaelic languages reveals a large number of similar words with related meanings. Not only are there many isolated words in common between the two languages, but also there are many themetic words related to cultural activities such as construction of dwellings, animal husbandry, cultivation, food processing and personal adornment. Extension of the research reveals the existence of Akarimojong words with similar meanings to words or phrases in Hebrew, Sumerian, Akkadian, Spanish and Tibetan among other languages. The geographic spread of these modern languages and the extensive commonalities between thematic word lists suggests that the various languages formed a single entity some time in the past, possibly as early as the Late Pleistocene.     

A word of a natural language has 2.718 different meanings or slightly more

The capacity of lexical decision-making in the brain conforms to the indefiniteness latent in natural languages. The average number of different meanings per word of a natural language is measured to be 2.805 +/- 0.005 irrespective of whether the language is Chinese, English or Japanese. If one can almost perfectly comprehend words and sentences written in a natural language in a context-dependent manner, the average number of different meanings per word would reduce to e (= 2.718281828459...), the base of natural or Napierian logarithms.     

How do we use language? Shared patterns in the frequency of word use across 17 world languages

We present data from 17 languages on the frequency with which a common set of words is used in everyday language. The languages are drawn from six language families representing 65 per cent of the world's 7000 languages. Our data were collected from linguistic corpora that record frequencies of use for the 200 meanings in the widely used Swadesh fundamental vocabulary. Our interest is to assess evidence for shared patterns of language use around the world, and for the relationship of language use to rates of lexical replacement, defined as the replacement of a word by a new unrelated or non-cognate word. Frequencies of use for words in the Swadesh list range from just a few per million words of speech to 191 000 or more. The average inter-correlation among languages in the frequency of use across the 200 words is 0.73 (p < 0.0001). The first principal component of these data accounts for 70 per cent of the variance in frequency of use. Elsewhere, we have shown that frequently used words in the Indo-European languages tend to be more conserved, and that this relationship holds separately for different parts of speech. A regression model combining the principal factor loadings derived from the worldwide sample along with their part of speech predicts 46 per cent of the variance in the rates of lexical replacement in the Indo-European languages. This suggests that Indo-European lexical replacement rates might be broadly representative of worldwide rates of change. Evidence for this speculation comes from using the same factor loadings and part-of-speech categories to predict a word's position in a list of 110 words ranked from slowest to most rapidly evolving among 14 of the world's language families. This regression model accounts for 30 per cent of the variance. Our results point to a remarkable regularity in the way that human speakers use language, and hint that the words for a shared set of meanings have been slowly evolving and others more rapidly evolving throughout human history.     

Rank Diversity of Languages: Generic Behavior in Computational Linguistics

Statistical studies of languages have focused on the rank-frequency distribution of words. Instead, we introduce here a measure of how word ranks change in time and call this distribution rank diversity. We calculate this diversity for books published in six European languages since 1800, and find that it follows a universal lognormal distribution. Based on the mean and standard deviation associated with the lognormal distribution, we define three different word regimes of languages: “heads” consist of words which almost do not change their rank in time, “bodies” are words of general use, while “tails” are comprised by context-specific words and vary their rank considerably in time. The heads and bodies reflect the size of language cores identified by linguists for basic communication. We propose a Gaussian random walk model which reproduces the rank variation of words in time and thus the diversity. Rank diversity of words can be understood as the result of random variations in rank, where the size of the variation depends on the rank itself. We find that the core size is similar for all languages studied.     

Medical knowledge and the improvement of vernacular languages in the Habsburg Monarchy: A case study from Transylvania (1770-1830)

In all European countries, the eighteenth century was characterised by efforts to improve the vernaculars. The Transylvanian case study shows how both codified medical language and ordinary language were constructed and enriched by a large number of medical books and brochures. The publication of medical literature in Central European vernacular languages in order to popularise new medical knowledge was a comprehensive programme, designed on the one hand by intellectual, political and religious elites who urged the improvement of the fatherland and the promotion of the common good by perfecting the arts and sciences. On the other hand, the imperial administration's initiatives affected local forms of medical knowledge and the construction of vernacular languages. In the eighteenth century, the construction of vernacular languages in the Habsburg Monarchy took on a significant political character. However, in the process of building of the scientific and medical vocabulary, the main preoccupation was precision, clarity and accessibility of the neologisms being invented to encompass the medical phenomena being described. In spite of political conflicts among the 'nations' living in Transylvania, physicians borrowed words from German, Hungarian and Romanian. Thus they elevated several words used in everyday language to the upper social stratum of language use, leading to the invention of new terms to describe particular medical practices or phenomena.     

Response by H. H. Pattee to Jon Umerez’s Paper: “Where Does Pattee’s “How Does a Molecule Become a Message?” Belong in the History of Biosemiotics?”

Umerez’s analysis made me aware of the fundamental differences in the culture of physics and molecular biology and the culture of semiotics from which the new field of biosemiotics arose. These cultures also view histories differently. Considering the evolutionary span and the many hierarchical levels of organization that their models must cover, models at different levels will require different observables and different meanings for common words, like symbol, interpretation, and language. These models as well as their histories should be viewed as complementary rather than competitive. The relation of genetic language and human language is the central issue. They are separated by 4 billion years and require entirely different models. Nevertheless, these languages have in common a unique unlimited expressive power that allows open-ended evolution and creative thought. Understanding the nature of this expressive power and how it arises remains a basic unsolved problem of biosemiotics.     

Modes of Continuity and Change in Action Sign Systems

ABSTRACT

This paper opens with stories of continuity and change from ethnographic accounts. It proceeds to a brief examination of the use of film as a recording device for action sign systems, then to the work of two archaeologists in the field of dance and human movement. Next, the recording of sign languages is examined, and finally a case of recent transformation of a ritual (the Dominican rite of the Catholic Mass) is explored, followed by an exposure of some of the reasons why “transformations” occur in rituals, dances, and sign languages throughout the world.

Despite the growing interest among the human sciences in bodies, the notion of moving persons and their signifying acts/actions tends to remain absent from ethnographic accounts and sociocultural theory. Once it is realized that (1) people enact their selves to each other in words, movement, and other modes of action, and that (2) all human selves are culturally defined, as time/space itself is culturally defined, it then becomes possible to develop strategies for a systematic investigation of human actions.

It is argued that the adoption of movement literacy not only as a methodological resource, but as a further development in the evolution of social scientific disciplines, seems necessary. When literacy enters the picture, the understanding of continuity and change in patterned human movement across time will finally come into its own.     

Learning and Long-Term Retention of Large-Scale Artificial Languages

Recovering discrete words from continuous speech is one of the first challenges facing language learners. Infants and adults can make use of the statistical structure of utterances to learn the forms of words from unsegmented input, suggesting that this ability may be useful for bootstrapping language-specific cues to segmentation. It is unknown, however, whether performance shown in small-scale laboratory demonstrations of “statistical learning” can scale up to allow learning of the lexicons of natural languages, which are orders of magnitude larger. Artificial language experiments with adults can be used to test whether the mechanisms of statistical learning are in principle scalable to larger lexicons. We report data from a large-scale learning experiment that demonstrates that adults can learn words from unsegmented input in much larger languages than previously documented and that they retain the words they learn for years. These results suggest that statistical word segmentation could be scalable to the challenges of lexical acquisition in natural language learning.     

The Altyerre Story—‘Suffering Badly by Translation’

In culture‐contact situations, it is commonplace for words to be borrowed from other unrelated vernaculars, for their pronunciations to be changed, and their meanings modified to fit new contexts. The Arandic word altyerre is a rather extreme example of this, and at the end of the nineteenth century, the ‘translation’ of the related word Alcheringa as ‘dream‐times’ sparked a debate that, in some forms, continues to this day. In this article, I discuss some of the reasons why this particular word struck such a controversial chord. I give an updated semantic perspective on the word altyerre , drawing on evidence from Arandic languages and from other languages in Central Australia. Then I examine some of the consequences of both religious and secular interpretations of altyerre and show how the popularisation of this word and its translations has impacted on its meanings in current usage.     

Some remarks on the Ural-Altaic substrate in Old Canary and Etruscan languages as a contribution to linguistic neolithic anthropology in Eurasia and North Africa

The suffixes of the nominal declension in the Old Canary and Etruscan languages are very similar to the corresponding elements of the Sumerian and Ural-Altaic tongues. Also many words of funeral and generally cultic provenance are derived from common roots in these languages. So one may assume that the Indoeuropean tongues of (West) Europe overlaid a common substratum of Ural-Altaic type which was alive still in the time of Megalithicum.     

Birds of a feather speak together: Understanding the different dialects of animals can help to decipher their communication

As humans, many animal species that communicate via vocalization show a wide range of accents and dialects driven by environmental and social factors.

All human languages come with dialects not just as a result of geographical distance between different tribes or groups but also as a part of their local culture and heritage. “Dialect or the speech of the people is capable of expressing whatever the people are,” said Sterling K Brown, an American actor. A Southerner in the USA, a Sicilian in Italy or a Bavarian in Germany would be easily recognizable as such, but also often stresses his or her dialect to signal where they come from geographically and culturally.

… many animal species from multiple taxa have evolved forms of vocal communication that are subject to geographic, genetic, environmental, behavioural and social variations.

Dialect and accents are not unique to humans: Many animal species from multiple taxa have evolved forms of vocal communication that are subject to geographic, genetic, environmental, behavioral, and social variations. One more or less universal factor behind the variety of animal dialects is that some convergence or conservation of vocalization can confer selective or competitive advantages.One area of confusion lies in the use of terms such as dialect and accent, which have more clearly defined meanings in the context of human languages. Here, accents refer to the way the same words are spoken, varying in acoustic frequency or intonation but not in enunciation or form. Accents are thus a subset of dialects, which also bring variations in vocabulary, grammatical structure and idiom within a common underlying language.     

A phylogenetic analysis of the evolution of Austronesian sibling terminologies

Social structure in human societies is underpinned by the variable expression of ideas about relatedness between different types of kin. We express these ideas through language in our kin terminology: to delineate who is kin and who is not, and to attach meanings to the types of kin labels associated with different individuals. Cross-culturally, there is a regular and restricted range of patterned variation in kin terminologies, and to date, our understanding of this diversity has been hampered by inadequate techniques for dealing with the hierarchical relatedness of languages (Galton’s Problem). Here I use maximum-likelihood and Bayesian phylogenetic comparative methods to begin to tease apart the processes underlying the evolution of kin terminologies in the Austronesian language family, focusing on terms for siblings. I infer (1) the probable ancestral states and (2) evolutionary models of change for the semantic distinctions of relative age (older/younger sibling) and relative sex (same-sex/opposite-sex). Analyses show that early Austronesian languages contained the relative-age, but not the relative-sex distinction; the latter was reconstructed firmly only for the ancestor of Eastern Malayo-Polynesian languages. Both distinctions were best characterized by evolutionary models where the gains and losses of the semantic distinctions were equally likely. A multi-state model of change examined how the relative-sex distinction could be elaborated and found that some transitions in kin terms were not possible: jumps from absence to heavily elaborated were very unlikely, as was piece-wise dismantling of elaborate distinctions. Cultural ideas about what types of kin distinctions are important can be embedded in the semantics of language; using a phylogenetic evolutionary framework we can understand how those distinctions in meaning change through time.     

The Universality of the Semantic Structure of Emotion Terms: Methods for the Study of Inter- and Intra-Cultural Variability

The issue of cultural universals versus linguistic relativity is currently one of the most intensely debated topics in sociocultural anthropology. Emotion terms have long served as a contested area and we provide a brief review. The primary aim of the paper is to introduce methods that facilitate the objective analysis of empirical findings on the extent to which semantic structure is shared among different languages. The main finding of this paper is that Chinese-, English-, and Japanesespeaking subjects assign basically similar meanings to 15 common emotion terms. The differences among the three languages are genuine and statistically significant but small. One of the particularly impressive aspects of the present findings is the extent to which they are consistent with previous research traditions that posit cultural and semantic universals. Differences also exist in the performance of Chinese and Japanese bilingual subjects when performing tasks in English compared to performing the same tasks in their native language, [emotions, inter-cultural and intra-cultural variability, cultural universals, linguistic relativity, Chinese, Japanese]     

Lateral and Vertical Transfer in Biology,Linguistics and Anthropology: An Account of Widely Neglected Ideas in the Formation of Evolutionary Theories

The scope of this paper is to highlight models of reticulate evolution in a dual sense: (1) by stressing the importance of early models of horizontal/lateral transfer instead of models of unilinear vertical transfer in biology, linguistics, anthropology and related disciplines, and (2) by demonstrating that the acceptance of evolutionism as leitmotif in the nineteenth century was only possible by intense and repeated networks between scholars of different academic realms which lead to the assumption that the development of biological species and human cultures could be perceived as part of the same co-evolutionary process. Contrary to these widely popularized models of unilinear evolution, I would like to draw attention to alternative theories emphasizing the horizontal transfer of words, phenotypes/genotypes, and culture traits. Examples are the method of areal typology in linguistics, the theory of endosymbiosis in biology, and the anti-evolutionist attitude in Boasian anthropology, combined with an emphasis on the diffusion of culture traits. Further, it shall be pointed out that, even when—after the general dismissal of evolutionist ideas in the beginning of the twentieth century—the idea of co-evolutionary processes in the development of human populations and languages was again forwarded in the late twentieth century, this ‘modern synthesis’ of genetics, linguistics and archeology relied largely on interdisciplinary reticulations between sciences and humanities and serves as another example of reticulate evolution.     

Back to the future: education for systems-level biologists

We describe a graduate course in quantitative biology that is based on original path-breaking papers in diverse areas of biology; each of these papers depends on quantitative reasoning and theory as well as experiment. Close reading and discussion of these papers allows students with backgrounds in physics, computational sciences or biology to learn essential ideas and to communicate in the languages of disciplines other than their own.     

A molecular semiotic view of biology. Interferon and 'homeokine' as symbols.

A term "homeokine" was introduced as a generic name covering cytokines and protein hormones which serve the purpose of intercellular communication within the animal body for homeostasis and ontogenetic development. The homeokine system, in its complex way of functioning, seems to be analogous to another communication system, human language. Individual homeokine molecules are likened to words; they have meanings and are viewed as symbols, representing those conditions or events inside and outside the body which are relevant to homeostasis. Extending this view, any protein and other molecule can be considered to take on the character of sign, when integrated into a purposive system of higher hierarchy, because the molecule then represents a meaning relative to the system as a whole that is lacking in the isolated state. Living systems with their biological macromolecules as semantic units are constructed upon the principle of double articulation, just like human languages with words as the semantic units. The structure and function of a molecule (of protein and any other substance) are associated with each other, with various degrees of arbitrariness, as are the expression and the content of a sign in general. Namely the activities or the sign functions of biological molecules are determined by the organized system they belong to, and not vice versa.     

A grounded theory of abstraction in artificial intelligence

In artificial intelligence, abstraction is commonly used to account for the use of various levels of details in a given representation language or the ability to change from one level to another while preserving useful properties. Abstraction has been mainly studied in problem solving, theorem proving, knowledge representation (in particular for spatial and temporal reasoning) and machine learning. In such contexts, abstraction is defined as a mapping between formalisms that reduces the computational complexity of the task at stake. By analysing the notion of abstraction from an information quantity point of view, we pinpoint the differences and the complementary role of reformulation and abstraction in any representation change. We contribute to extending the existing semantic theories of abstraction to be grounded on perception, where the notion of information quantity is easier to characterize formally. In the author's view, abstraction is best represented using abstraction operators, as they provide semantics for classifying different abstractions and support the automation of representation changes. The usefulness of a grounded theory of abstraction in the cartography domain is illustrated. Finally, the importance of explicitly representing abstraction for designing more autonomous and adaptive systems is discussed.     

Language and imagery: effects of language modality

Across spoken languages, properties of wordforms (e.g. the sounds in the word hammer) do not generally evoke mental images associated to meanings. However, across signed languages, many signforms readily evoke mental images (e.g. the sign HAMMER resembles the motion involved in hammering). Here we assess the relationship between language and imagery, comparing the performance of English speakers and British sign language (BSL) signers in meaning similarity judgement tasks. In experiment 1, we found that BSL signers used these imagistic properties in making meaning similarity judgements, in contrast with English speakers. In experiment 2, we found that English speakers behaved more like BSL signers when asked to develop mental images for the words before performing the same task. These findings show that language differences can bias users to attend more to those aspects of the world encoded in their language than to those that are not; and that language modality (spoken versus signed) can affect the degree to which imagery is involved in language.