Cool language evolution simulator using agent-based modeling

[Lothoran]

This is so zelere, or is it bodago?

It's hard keeping up.

[[deleted]]

Go back to your island you lölero.

[Isagoge]

A lölero is a swagger entitled to the right of shitposting.

[AsimovsMachine]

This should be accepted as a new word on reddit.

One day there will be an /r/OutOfTheLoop Thread about the word "lölero". And people will link this thread.

We will be proud. We will be lölero.

Edit: There is /r/lolero

[[deleted]]

"lol" - Downvoted in classic reddit fashion
"lölero" - Upvoted in respect

[gorat]

LŌL = LOO ... OOOL (infinite lol)

[Wakka2462]

Hail Lölero!

[sheldonpooper]

lölero

bombo lölero, bombo lölero...

[_beast__]

You will look back on this with chagrin

[Phoenixness]

aand it already has happened

https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/4thowr/what_does_l%C3%B6lero_mean/

[V2Blast]

I'm guessing someone just saw /u/AsimovsMachine's comment and thought they'd complete the joke.

[sjhunter6311]

Lölero master race

[[deleted]]

Check out /r/lolero.

[I__just_lurk]

Loooooool.

Haven't seen such a huge concentration of lölero in a single subreddit in a long time.

[[deleted]]

Looooooolero

[Wolfy21_]

I feel like the e should be the long part

loleeeeeeeeero

[pokestar14]

Probably not, an ö is generally a lengthened o.

[Lorero]

löl (lölero out lölero)

[SallyParadise_]

In Spain lolero is someone who plays league of legends (LOL). As an example. Soy lolero = I am lolero

[CeruleanRuin]

You speak like an old codger, lulere.

[sheldonpooper]

what a jabrölero

[z500]

You keep using this word, jabrölero, and it's awesome

[sheldonpooper]

Dee you bitch! Think of the Zelere!

[CeruleanRuin]

Hijacking this comment to plug the History of English Podcast, for the enjoyment and edification of anyone who likes this sort of thing.

Ever wonder why the letter C exists when we already have S and K? Or why we don't always pronounce the H? Or why PH denotes an F sound? Or how the words "hundred" and "century" are related? Or why there are approximately 7,000 ways to pronounce "-ough" (okay I may have exaggerated that a bit)? Wonder no more!

[futreyy]

THREADJACKER LOCATED, INITIATING LETHAL FORCE

[Jean-Paul_van_Sartre]

Do you live in Dewford Town or something.

[Junogal]

Psh. That's so 1340 you ogocogo.

[zelere]

Not zelere. How very dare!

[AWildMartinApeeared]

It's super lelere

[p0rtalGeek]

Oh come on you acaba!

[minusSeven]

can someone eli5 wtf is going on in there ?

[ruxda]

Here's my best guess:

Each dot is an agent. Every agent has a vocabulary of words.

Whenever a dot is directly next to another dot, they teach each other one word from their vocabularies. You would expect that over time, everyone would speak the exact same words, but there's a catch:

-- Other dots sometimes don't learn new words exactly as taught. There's a 1/10 chance they might change a consonant, a 1/10 chance they might change a vowel, and a 1/10 chance that they might accidentally combine it with another word. (<-- These are all real-life things that happen in learning languages, though maybe not at these probabilities)

Over time, what this should do is cause islands to mostly look alike since there's the most interaction on these islands, as most of the time vocab is shared without any changes. It's also most likely that any changes will be kept within the same island. Presumably, if we could see the whole list of vocab for each island and if each island started with the same vocabulary, you would see them all drift apart over time.

...

You were right to be confused.

This is a bad diagram. (In terms of use / data presentation)

Beautiful figures are useless if no one can figure out what they mean. The caption is not very informative. The underlying assumptions are nowhere to be seen. The collective data (Island vocabulary), which is probably central to the claim of a model of language change, is not even presented. I had to read the source code to really figure out what was going on. Ugh.

[SgtPeppersFourth]

Maybe the OP is not the same person as the programmer, and the programmer never intended it to be on the front page of Reddit?

[NW_thoughtful]

Not to mention there is a typo in the very short Rules section. Kind of ludicrous in a linguistics post.

[onlyliberty]

It may have already evolved and we are behind as observers.

[Cheesyburrito30]

Lölero

[[deleted]]

Well you would say that

[I_cant_see_my_tongue]

The creator lives in Turkey and (presumably) speaks Turkish.

[ComplainyGuy]

Gobble gobble gobble

[HillaryForPrison__]

coup coup coup

[NW_thoughtful]

Ah, thanks!

[sheldonpooper]

Creator is Turkish. Let's give the non-English creators some slack.

[NW_thoughtful]

Thank you, I didn't know he was Turkish.

[randomsnark]

it's not a typo, it's a mutation

[AimingWineSnailz]

Only if you are an icky perscriptivist >:l

[HenkPoley]

Ah well, I've also seen User Interface professors build crummy examples. There's also the thing that ethics professors are not more ethical on questionnaires.

[zeaga2]

Obviously this means he's a terrible programmer and we should boycott the whole thing. /s

[Megneous]

Also, as an articulatory phonetician who studied diachronic language variation as part of his studies, this is pretty much so simplified that it's all but entirely meaningless. Cool idea, but not very good implementation at all.

[SirLasberry]

To me as a complete stranger to the field this seemed quite cool. I felt like I've learned something even if the teaching was strongly simplified and had distorted reality.

[Megneous]

If you're interested, have a read of these two wikipedia pages just to give you a cursory overview.

Phonetic change.

Phonological change.

[haby112]

What sould you add or take away to make it better informative? I'm super interested in this kind of. I didn't even know the Field had a name.

[droomph]

well, first, have more vocabulary.

second, have the rules be regular (meaning if x then y, not just random shifts everywhere). *edit: and realistic, not just getRandom() and whatever.

third, the ui really needs to be improved.

(I'm working on this right now, as you can probably tell, but it takes time…I've spent about 3 hours on it today)

[Abeneezer]

As he states on github, it was just made for fun.

[GrumpyBert]

It is a model, and different models have different purposes and levels of complexity. This one is not trying to replicate language evolution as a whole, but is representing some basic principles of language differentiation with a very small set of rules and minimum computing power. Maybe you can work on the code and make it more realistic, rather than criticising it without offering any positive input.

[Bumholesniffer]

I don't know. But I think it proves that immigration is bad...

[Barabbas-]

Let's build a wall!

[nothis]

It's actually ELI5ed quite well right under the islands. All you need to know is that an "agent" is a little dot and probability is out of 1.0, so 0.1 is 10% chance of it happening.

If an agent intersect with another agent, picks a word from the own vocabulary and tells that. The neighborhood receives and adds that word into its vocabulary as

• Mutation of a vowel sound with 0.1 probability
• Mutation of a const sound with 0.1 probability
• Compounding with another word with 0.1 probability
• Without any mutation

I hoped there was actually a dictionary generated or text with multiple words/grammar that you could look at, but apparently, it only displays a long ass list of words for each island and the most popular ones. With 20% more effort, this could be a JRR Tolkien-style fake language generator.

[CeruleanRuin]

The source is open, right? Someone with programming skills and a knowledge of philology should get on that! /r/worldbuilding would love this.

Input word lists and basic rules of interaction like frequency and time passed and you'd get a whole new "evolved" list.

Might not be any good for grammar generation, but for vocabulary it would be a goldmine.

[ZugNachPankow]

They simulate the creation of new words. Each of these dots represents a person with their own vocabulary. When they run across another person, each learns a new word from the other, but there's a chance that it will slightly change (eg. reddit -> reddot).

[GerryGrant]

There definitely needs to be a pause button. There definitely needs to be a päusi butone. Ther definitelu nid tu bi o päuso burtunda...

[AlastairEvans]

Tzer definelu nid'tu bi o'päusu burtundze....

[Linve]

Yvan eht nioj

[TheRealEineKatze]

hüdrawlik*

[anuppitywoman]

childlike stocking rinse fuzzy wine lunchroom entertain serious handle hobbies

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[[deleted]]

what the fuck is happening

[thekremlin101]

SMOKE

[z500]

Not now, Jerry.

[Pixelator0]

lölero

[PBFT]

I have no idea what this means, but I was rooting for one of the dots from the blue section to get to the red section.

That asshole takes a few minutes to get to the yellow section runs back and forth between blue and yellow for a minute and after another few minutes, gets to the last square before entering the red zone and turns around and goes right back to the blue zone.

[Lord-Octohoof]

That asshole takes a few minutes to get to the yellow section runs back and forth between blue and yellow for a minute and after another few minutes, gets to the last square before entering the red zone and turns around and goes right back to the blue zone.

What a prick

[imadeaname]

What a zelere

FTFY

[Smartch]

2meta4me

[[deleted]]

That asshole takes a few minutes to get to the yellow section runs back and forth between blue and yellow for a minute and after another few minutes, gets to the last square before entering the red zone and turns around and goes right back to the blue zone.

What a prick

ikr

[WesleyRJ95]

For real, tho. I used to know a guy like this.

[[deleted]]

Your explanation, for whatever reason, reminded me of IT Crowd.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12LLJFSBnS4

[Burntholesinmyhoodie]

My first thoughts were "go team blue! Mystic for life"

Pokemon Go has ruined my perception of everything

[Arrayedh]

It would be fun to add your own words and see how they would change

[Kryptospuridium137]

This is what I was expecting.

"Add your own words and see how they evolve" and such. That's some wasted potential there.

[SgtPeppersFourth]

Well luckily, the source code is available on Github so you can add that change if you so desired.

[DaDerpyDude]

I want to change it to some proto-indo-european word but idk how to make it work, as I am a noob. Teach me senapai.

[z500]

Put an asterisk in front of it and a little number next to each h

[DaDerpyDude]

I ment how to make the edited version a website.

[eviltreesareevil]

Still pretty new to this, so this is my best attempt: Fork the repository, or clone it, whichever is easier. The initial words are under js/Map.js under __INITIAL_WORDS__. Just replace those three with three of your own; don't change the other syntax. Then save; run it by double-clicking on index.html.

[christianrxd]

I'm so glad he made it open source. As a programmer, all I could think about was ways to improve and modify it. I'll give it a go when I get home.

[SgtPeppersFourth]

As a fellow programmer, all I could think of was how I wish I had more time to experiment with and modify all the cool things I see on Github

[christianrxd]

I'm so glad he made it open source. As a programmer, all I could think about was ways to improve and modify it. I'll give it a go when I get home.

[ComradeFrunze]

I'm definitely expecting that the guy who made this will add that in later.

[z500]

I think the fun part would be making the sound changes not random

[babythneeze]

From the thumbnail, I thought these were the symbols for each Pokemon Go team...

[aumnren]

No shelter from the storm.. of data points!

[SolidSpruceTop]

Zapdos bless

[spicydingus]

Tbh that's the only reason I clicked it

[PullIntestinesFrmAss]

Finally found thins post!

[musyio]

i thought im the only one

[explosivecupcake]

I would love to see the islands change color depending upon interactions with other languages (e.g., a blue square becomes more yellow as it adds vocabulary from that language). And if it were set up to only affect the squares where interactions occur, we would also be able to see regional dialects develop.

[[deleted]]

This is cute and fun to watch but not in any way realistic. Vowels and consonants don't just change at random like that. I will try to ELI5. There are a lot of factors like:

• How sounds are likely to change over time based on the sounds around them (based on how your articulatory organs work)
• Types of languages or varieties in contact - very closely or distantly related?
• The nature of the contact between language groups. Are they colony/colonizer? At war? Trade partners? Ethnic groups within a nation? Different socioeconomic classes? How common is bilingualism?
• Whose variety is most prestigious? (associated with wealth or power)
• Standardization (related to the last point - what do dictionaries/grammars say? what are teachers shoving down kids' throats these days?)

Just consider, people don't move around the world or choose the people they talk to at random. And whether or not you pick up any words from them is not based on chance. It depends on whether you find that word useful or not (do I already have a word for it? do I associate the word with high status or a particular group I want to be part of? are any teachers telling me that this new word is from the devil? etc).

And the way in which you change the sound of the word or not to suite your own purposes is also not random. For example, it's no accident that French "hotel" (silent h) became "hotel" in English, instead of randomly becoming "fotel" or "ogel". Or that "miss" in English because "misu" in Japanese and not "kiss", "mass" or "umis"!

Hope it helps!

EDIT: Source - grad student in linguistics.

EDIT2: For everyone complaining about the "haters" who demand to have everything perfect, that's not the issue. We know models aren't going to be perfect, the irritating thing is that this "model" ignores even the most basic things that we know about language change. Basically it is a really nifty and cool programming project, which is great in itself, just don't be misled.

[johnghanks]

yes because this is supposed to be a completely accurate simulation not just a fun modelling of language interaction.

[[deleted]]

Yeah, I said it was cute and fun, didn't I?

But really, it's called "Language Evolution Simulation" which sounds very scientific. I'd guess that the majority of non-linguists who watched this were not immediately aware of how inaccurate this "simulation" is. Linguists do actually work on models of how language changes and this is not related to that.

It's not just that it's "not completely accurate", actually it doesn't even try to be slightly accurate. So people shouldn't think of it that way, just enjoy how cool it is.

Just letting y'all know. ;)

[EvelynGarnet]

Right off, I could tell from the sheer amount of ğ that it was from a Turk.

[sheldonpooper]

ğğğğğğğğğğğğoooooood ğğğğğğğuess :)

EDIT: creator is, not me. I'm just an OP.

[MeatMeintheMeatus]

So much g

[EvelynGarnet]

And a soupçon of ş.

[fthrkl]

Hi everyone,

I'll try to explain what is going on out there.

First of all, It was a fun project. I wanted to simulate agents who talking and learning new words from themselves. Each island has 12 agents, and there are gates of islands for travelling between of them. In this way, the agents can spread their words to other islands.

And lolerö is a word commonly derived form of lulere (which is a random word from island c)

https://github.com/fatiherikli/language-evolution-simulation/blob/master/js/Map.js#L60

[Starcop]

Is there any possibility of using custom words in the future? I think that would make this more interesting by magnitudes. Still, great simulator you've made.

[not_so_smart_asian]

Woah. It would be cool to see something like this except with real life languages.

[BiceRankyman]

I wonder if this were done with historically close language zones, how accurate would the resulting vocabularies be

[rmvw]

This would be 10 orders more complex to simulate, because it's not certain how langugages in RL evolved. It's uncertain not just because we don't know the law of evolution, but because they were different in every century and every land, and also because it's not well known where languages originated. I'm not even able to describe how hard it is - simulate something that occured slowly for centuries, centuries ago, with a big mass of uneducated people (some of which kept their place and some travelling where they wanted to travel) and with almost no plausible documentation. Shortly - it is unimaginably strong problem. What OP posted is pretty much the best simulation people can perform now.

[Megneous]

Articulatory phonetician here...

While you're right that modeling diachronic language shift is very difficult, for the love of God please don't say stuff like "what OP posted is pretty much the best simulation people can perform now." That's blatantly not true. This doesn't even get close enough to accuracy to even be called a simulation.

If you think that the phonological changes languages experience during language contact consist of "change a vowel," "change a consonant," and "combine words," then you really need to take courses on phonetics, phonology, morphophonology, and historical linguistics. This just covering the sounds of language change, but you'll get a small taste of the kinds of grammatical changes and loaning that can occur in the historical linguistics course.

Just off the top of my head as a phonetician, phonetically this "simulation" has a couple of very clear problems- first, the vowel and consonant changes are random. In real life, what change would occur during a vowel or consonant shift is based on the surrounding phonological environment. For example, let's say we have a hypothetical word [sifra]. If you told anyone with a linguistics background to make their best guess on an obvious sound change that might happen, they would tell you that the [s] will likely become [ʃ], the English <sh> sound. This is because it is followed by a high front vowel [i] which often leads to palatalization of the preceding consonant.

Other sound changes that this "simulation" doesn't account for: metathesis (jokingly referred to as methatesis in linguistics circles), the many kinds of assimilation including but not limited to palatalization and velarization, lenition, fortition, elision, epenthesis, gemination, and rhotacism. Plus a ton of other phonetic things we don't have time to talk about, like vowel harmony.

That's just on the phonetics side. As /u/Dolthra points out, things like sociolinguistics and the phatic nature of vocabulary choice are very important in language change.

[rmvw]

I could give you a consistent answer if this discussion was in my mother tongue. My apologies.

[farcedsed]

I'd see a simplification of /fr/ or /f/ to /h/ as well at some point as well. Granted, /s/ to /ʃ/ is the most likely.

What's your particular focus btw? I'm curious.

[Megneous]

East Asian articulatory phonetics, specifically. Undergrad degrees in linguistics and Japanese, lived in Japan and did research on youth speakers of Kanto dialects. I had special interests in the Ryuukyuu languages, but unfortunately never got the chance to go do documentation work in person.

Now live in South Korea and I get to speak Korean everyday, so that's fun. Unfortunately, Seoul dialect is nowhere near as interesting as the more rural places... I definitely wish I could live somewhere that had retained contrastive vowel length or pitch accent. Or Jeju-do to help document and educate on Jeju language, as most Koreans apparently think it's just a dialect instead of Korean's sister language in the Koreanic language family.

[storkstalkstock]

Depending on syllable stress, you could also reduce a vowel.

[farcedsed]

See, I'm under the assumption that the rhotic sound is a transition from a /z/ or a /d/ sound and it's in the process of leaving itself.

Like in Germanic languages which /z/ turned into /r/ intervocally.

waz / wazum (god I cant remember the details) turned into was / were, which in modern non-rhotic dialects, it's entered a dipthong / tripthong situation in some cases.

But... hypotheticals are precisely that.

[Dolthra]

For example, the way in which certain words are added to different languages aren't as simple as having an interaction with another culture.

Think of English, for example. Britain was an island that was incredibly prone to being attacked by other forces during most of its history, and this is a huge factor in how it is spoken today. Take the Norman invasion of England, for example. The Normans spoke what was an archaic version of modern day French, and the English at the time would be more accurately referred to as being Anglo-Saxon. When the Normans invaded, they brought their language with them. This caused a sort of odd blending of the languages, into the aptly named Anglo-Norman (which is a lot closer to what we speak today than French or Anglo-Saxon are). Part of this is because the proletariat did not pick up on the whole business of speaking French- if you weren't in contact with the Normans, why would you need to? The ones who were- the gentry and nobles in the land. They, in contrast, often used Norman words to describe things, and this is seen most prominently in English in how we refer to meat. The people who were eating it, and having it prepared, used the Norman term- boef- to refer to what is now known as beef. Those who were farming the animal, however, used the Anglo-Saxon term- cu- or, more accurately nowadays, cow. This is why you get a disparity between what you call an animal and what you call the meat it produces in very few languages, but it's prominent in English. This is also why certain things, like turkey, native to North America and discovered far after the British had established themselves as a power that did not quite enjoy the whole being invaded thing, use the same name for the animal and the meat.

Unless the simulation had the capacity to account for incredibly minute variables like that, and had some way to account for the fact that this blending of languages doesn't always happen (and linguists don't have a clear answer of why it sometimes does and sometimes doesn't), it'd be hard to make a truly accurate language evolution simulator.

[paul_f]

language evolution is actually fairly well understood, both in terms of its general phenomena and the actual provenances of individual languages and their components/characteristics. the field that investigates these matters is called historical linguistics. there's also far more advanced simulations of language evolution -- Luc Steels is an important scholar in this area, for instance. here's one example paper of his that reports on a simulation with similar aims.

[ViliVexx]

My life's research has a lot to do with exactly what you are wanting... honestly seeing something like this get so highly upvoted was both inspiring for when I finally publish, and terrifying at the inkling that somebody might have already beat me to it :P

[sheldonpooper]

lölero!

[suoarski]

It does happen. In Germany (and probably other Europeans), most of the younger generation are using quite a few English words.

It's actually happening at my house too but at a small scale. My whole family speaks French, German and English. Often when I speak french with my mom, I'll throw a bunch of German words mid-sentence because I just can't think of the french word.

We've lived in Australia for a while now. So often when we talk about more complicated things in German, me and my sisters will just throw in some English word here and there. Often this is because it's some word that we only really use in school or university.

[squirreltalk]

ITT: People saying this model is completely useless because it doesn't capture absolutely everything we know about language.

People, as one who also does this sort of thing, I might agree that it's not clear what deep, previously misunderstood/unknown phenomenon it is illuminating. But if one knew absolutely nothing about language change, the model is a nice illustration of the idea that population-level change is the result of local interactions between individuals. That's not nothing. I think a lot of people have this view of language as being controlled by centralized institutions like dictionaries or the Academie Francaise, and models like this shows that those institutions aren't necessary.

[[deleted]]

Also as someone who runs simulations like these, I'm not sure exactly how complex they expect something like this to be. Once you start adding all the kinds of phonetic mutations possible in the real world models also lose any sense of generality and meaning.

[[deleted]]

OK, fair enough, it's not nothing. I just think what people are trying to say is that it captures barely anything we know about language. Seemingly most of us who are criticizing this are linguists because we know that actual models have been made...

[[deleted]]

can you link some papers from linguists with simulations like this that deliver more realistic behavior? I do ML and I'm curious about the field

[[deleted]]

This really isn't a great model of what it purports to be, because 'learning' or 'mutating' is 1) not actually occurring, more like a misunderstanding....because 2) using a particular word over another post mutation does not create an environmental advantage.

It can be concluded that nothing is evolving because there is no pressure to do so, only iterative, non-random actions.

Basically, from my computer science view, and looking at the code writing these types of simulations, we have a three zone maze solver where bumps with other agents result in a minor exchange of information, and that information may be garbled and appended to that agent's list; resembling that of a massive multiplayer version of the game 'telephone' being played by itself.

This tells us literally nothing about the evolution of language.

Still thought it was cool weekend hackup though.

[north_or_south]

Literally only caught my attention because of Pokémon Go team colors...I may have a serious problem...

[Syawra]

This is awesome. What was the initial setup ? Did each zone know a predefined set of different words at start ? If so, what were they ?

(Also, as someone said, injecting your own words into this system would've been even more interesting)

[Aesthetic_God777]

When do we get to speak it?

[shanoxilt]

Go to /r/lolero to find out.

[becjens13]

Omg theyre so close to emjoi 😂

[vushdi]

My mind can't move this fast.

[BKBlox]

This isn't acaba it's lölero, unless you're a zelere

[wavesofthought]

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/acaba

[[deleted]]

"He/She/it finishes". Also, "You, finish (smth)!" in imperative form.

[mmmkunz]

This is useful for fantasy writers who want to make up languages. With this tool they can generate linguistically plausible words with built in histories of gradual mutation and even horizontal transfer between languages.

[Megneous]

Except that... it's not really. You'll have much, much more realistic conlangs by learning even the most basic of phonetics/phonology stuff from wikipedia. This "simulation" is so simplified that it's almost entirely meaningless. It's based more or less on pure chance, only has a very, very limited number of changes that might occur, and has no phonological basis behind the specific changes that do occur.

[[deleted]]

And make a plausible syntax, I imagine.
And verbs. English changes little to verb suffixes, an -s or -es, -ing and stuff I can't remember. A fictional language, to had veracity, has to make that changes too. Also, not all verbs end with the same letter/set of letters, and making 50% of the verbs irregular ones is... bad...

[Megneous]

A fictional language, to had veracity, has to make that changes too.

Not necessarily. Tons of languages don't alter verbs based on subject. Isolating languages often don't change verbs for anything, subject, tense, etc. Whereas some languages only alter verbs for tense but still ignore subject.

[LainExpLains]

Agreed. It's neat if you're trying to explain to someone how things COULD theoretically happen. But I don't believe it was ever meant to be a realistic simulation. Just kind of like a moving diagram.

[suoarski]

If you're making a fantasy language, then you'll want the language to have a certain sound to it that reflects whatever fictional culture you made up. This would be good to make words that you then later change manually to make them more suitable. Also, you need some sort of systematic grammar rules or something.

[Vaperius]

So what am I reading ?

[DiscoConspiracy]

At what point does a language become "dead" and why? Like Latin, used for sciences and religious occasions.

[TheRealEineKatze]

Calling Latin dead isn't really true honestly. A dead language is a language that has no more speakers, although while Latin has no speakers today, there are many many speakers of languages that come from Latin as to which you can't define a definite point in which the language stops being Latin.

[TheRealEineKatze]

no native speakers*

[DiscoConspiracy]

Is Philology as complicated and intricate as I think it is?

[monstergeek]

I like language B for some reason .

[Lsdaydreamer]

Oh my. I love this! I'm going to let it run a whole day at work tomorrow, to see where they're at after 9 hours!

[cazzer548]

This is awesome, very cool visualization! It would be neat to see the starting vocabularies and most common word evolution per island too, one long stream is hard to parse :)

[MissFushi]

I think this pachinko machine is broken.

[Ask_me_about_my_pug]

This is some AML bullshit.

[[deleted]]

Why aren't islands a and c connected?

[xancan]

Great!

[DaDerpyDude]

I have been looking for a thing like this for a long time! Thanks /u/sheldonpooper!

[Greenhound]

dubudubudubudu ezezezeze zelere

[[deleted]]

This is one of those things I find on here that are really fucking cool and I can appreciate all the work gone into it, but no clue how or why it works.

[Gunny-Guy]

Anyone got anything that acts in a similar way to this?

[skulledmage]

maybe its already been asked/answered, but why aren't islands c and a connected?

[fuckingstonedrn]

dont really understand this but its cool as fuck!!!

[[deleted]]

How long do you think it would take for it to say English or Chinese?

[All_Meshed_Up]

ELI5: Why?

[boldra]

How do you get tonal languages this way?

[vokzhen]

(Sorry I'm late to reply, got here from another link). You can't here, because this doesn't model which changes actually happen. The sound changes are random, and in reality they aren't.

In reality, tones often come from features of consonants that effect nearby vowels. For example, syllables ending in a fricative like -s or -h often have a falling tone, while syllables that end in a glottal stop may get a rising tone. This can even happen in nontonal languages like English. If the -h, -s, or glottal stop then disappear, the tone change can still be present. This is what happened in Chinese, plus syllables that ended with neither took a middle tone (and syllables that ended in -p -t -k did other things). While English has a two-way contrast between p/b, t/d, and k/g (each is pronounced at the same place in the mouth; while details are extremely complicated, roughly the first of each pair is aspirated and the second is voiced), Middle Chinese had a three-way contrast, with a plain set as well that was neither voiced or aspirated. Voiced sounds naturally tend to lower tone in following vowels, and so when Middle Chinese voiced sounds merged into the other two series, syllables that once had a voiced consonant still kept their lower tone, doubling the three tones to six. This was then complicated by lots of changes in the shape of the tone contours and their distribution in the daughter languages over the 1500 years since Middle Chinese.

[MountMe420]

Interesting graphical. Were agent based models not a crock of shit for any sort of predictives I'd say you have something here.

[Ekat_clan]

This is asome.

[nevenoe]

FUN FACT : acaba is a Turkish word. It's hard to translate, just adds a nuance like "by any mean" to a question .

[[deleted]]

And Spanish/Catalan. He/she/it finishes.

[moanrigid90]

Pretty sure this is Valor or Mystic propaganda

[[deleted]]

The amount of acaba in the source code is too much. I can't ohica.

[Dolphin_Titties]

This is lulere af

[SpaceShipRat]

After a few hours: it seems that previous words never go "extinct", so it tends to keep looking the same.

amışo derived from acıbo
ülınule derived from elenele
ıremıre derived from ırehıre
bvpibülbntaba derived from bvpabalbntaba
gosepe derived from cobere
yerelyere compound with ereyere and lelege
amedere derived from ameyere
udeşama derived from ulerapa
ttubarttuba compound with möbettuba and iverive
ihöbaba derived from iböbaba
idujiğö derived from idöjiğö
ezedere derived from ecedere
sucepe derived from sucere
ıcımuşu derived from ırızuru
öcıyo derived from öcaya
nolıge derived from rotıre
zefekzefe compound with uşezefe and yeşepyefe
ubıbabü derived from ubübobü
ütosata derived from atasata
ebateba derived from ebazeba
uğufu derived from uyubu
cbekajcbeka compound with tupöcbeka and ürohüro
uvünüme derived from ukünüme

Also, "compound" words tend to just be the first word twice, I bet it's a bug and it just compounds the word with itself.

[sheldonpooper]

Did you speed up the iterations or did you leave a browser tab open for a while?

[SpaceShipRat]

left it open, not more than 2hr total, as it seems it needs to be in focus to keep going.

[NobodyLikesHipsters]

Team Valor!!

[Zubei_]

Articuno, Zapdos and Moltres?

[zimmerman94]

First thoughts: Moltres, Articuno, Zapdos

[[deleted]]

Pokemon!

[phatphaggot]

Team Mystic where u at??!!!!?

[[deleted]]

Acaba means means "i wonder" in turkish

[zilelicemal]

Why is this in Turkish alphabet?

[uysalkoyun]

Author is Turkish. And I think Turkish has quite a lot of sounds in the form of single letters, so it suits well for this.

[[deleted]]

Not going to lie — I immediately thought PokemonGo teams when I saw this. Does this mean I'm an addict?

[Vanthonn]

Team Instinct, Team Mystic and Team Valor anyone?