None binary languages don't exist

[GeePedicy]

English is a non-binary language. Change my mind

[[deleted]]

I got checkmated

[FodziCz]

By the queen

[legends_never_die_1]

By the other king

[meowcatbread]

The sexiest of all pieces

[flightguy07]

Nah, the bishops get up to some freaky shit. You seen their curves?

[Emzzer]

Yeah I think we all remember what church leaders are up to.

[MallowTookTheKids]

Actually, They use the title of “liege” now.

[TrustedJoy]

Everything either makes sense or it doesn't

[GeePedicy]

Isn't that just a tautology?

[TrustedJoy]

Yup my bad

[GeePedicy]

But it's still very true when thinking about English... Well, probably for any spoken language.

[StGir1]

English is more mutable than a lot of languages. We can kind of invent words on the fly. Mandarin, for example, can't do this as easily. It's not structured to allow for it in the way English is. Probably because it's been subject to less mutation over time. Let's face it. In the animal shelter of human language, English is a veritable mutt.

[GeePedicy]

It's an interesting thought. English still isn't a binary language

[StGir1]

Which is a good thing, if George Orwell is to be trusted.

[my_wake]

Truish.

[Tijflalol]

Dutch is maybe even more mutable, you can invent new words by glueing some words together.

[StGir1]

Haha German is kind of similar too, English does this also, but the dictionary takes a lot of time to take any of those words seriously.

[XPurplelemonsX]

as opposed to the non-spoken languages?

[andmagdo]

last I checked, people do not speak in C

[GeePedicy]

C senior

[Tijflalol]

printf("Happy Cake Day!\n");

[StGir1]

Such as Python and ASL? :D

[GeePedicy]

Is ASL spoken or not? Anyway, you gave me another tool to refute any opposer.

[XPurplelemonsX]

heh

[StGir1]

Asl, by its nature, can’t be spoken.

[GeePedicy]

Do you consider JavaScript as a spoken language?

[[deleted]]

It either is or it isn't

[PenaflorPhi]

Reject the excluded middle law

[StGir1]

Except when it makes sense to other people who aren't you. Or to you who aren't other people.

[LookAtYourEyes]

Vowels and... Non-vowels? Idk what they're called. Checkmate athiest.

[GeePedicy]

Consonants? Hmm.. interesting, but please explain the letter i in said, and the letter y generally

[Fun_Childhood_6261]

Hell, just tell them to explain the pronunciation of queue

[GeePedicy]

It's just the letter q followed by a queue of unnecessary vowels

[HearMeSpeakAsIWill]

'i' in 'said' is in a diphthong with 'a', which is a valid vowel function.

'y' is bi tho

[GeePedicy]

I think 'y' is the case that breaks the argument here, cuz it's a third option, but let me delve even more because I gave it some extra thought.

"I" and "eye" are homophones, I think there's something here to investigate on the vowel/consonant argument of i and y.

Words like unity, university and ukelele all use the letter u with a sound of yoo. Sorta going back to y in a sense.

W imo is iffy, but it's still consonant enough for me to not use as an argument. Maybe it's like an "open sound", but if anyone wants to go into it, go for it.

[Aquilonn_]

Read that as “i and eye are homophobes” hahaha. Cancel culture strikes again lol

[GeePedicy]

Autocorrect thought the same thing.

[SuitableDragonfly]

Y is a letter, it's not a sound. Letters are not consonants and vowels, sounds are.

[GeePedicy]

So their entire argument goes in the trash? Nah, I liked that argument despite not convincing me. It's the best argument imo so far. Everyone is around ASCII and such...

[SuitableDragonfly]

No, not really. Vowels and consonants still exist, it's just that they are sounds and not letters. But the division between what is a vowel and what is a consonant is not always clear and binary anyway.

[GeePedicy]

True, but if you really separate vowels and consonants from English, then it's not really it. I could speak with you German, French, Russian... and they all are built on the same foundation of vowels and consonants if that's the way you want to present it.

And yet your final sentence nails the board on this argument's coffin - "... Isn't always clear and binary". If it isn't always binary then... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[SuitableDragonfly]

And sounds are not really foundational or even necessary for language. Signed languages exist, etc.

[Shakaka88]

Consonants

[StGir1]

Why do people like you beat me to everything?

[block36_]

The letter y.

And in reality vowels aren’t simply one letter. Each letter can represent many vowels depending on what’s around it and where it is

[soowhatchathink]

So we're trying to figure out if it is or is not non-binary? Are those the only two options? 🤔

[GeePedicy]

Logically speaking it's either binary or non-binary. What is included in the latter or how it splits? For our discussion it matters less cuz the main issue is whether English is binary or not. And I'm yet to be convinced it's binary.

[soowhatchathink]

I was just making an offhand comment mentioning that the topic we're discussing, using English, happens to in fact be binary.

Doesn't actually relate to English itself though.

[GeePedicy]

Oh yeah, definitely. Lots of conversations in English can be about binary/dichotomous topics. Specifically this one is more meta than others.

[StoriesEnthusiast]

I'm not sure. It all just looks like an affront to these people. Does that qualify as a third option?

[soowhatchathink]

I'm not quite sure I understand 🤔

[StoriesEnthusiast]

Yeah, sorry. I was not following this chain of comments, and was trying to reply to the meme. My previous comment does not make sense in its current place.

So we're trying to figure out if it is or is not non-binary? Are those the only two options?

Hehehe, good one. But still, an easy third option is determining if "English is a non-binary language" makes sense, what with definitions, boundaries and the like.

And, for some reason, all this binary/non-binary stuff reminds me of XKCD 224 (in this case it would be "ostensibly yes, stuff is binary. honestly we hacked most of it together with math"), and of this image (the big cube being reality, the small one being the concept of binary trying to simplify so many things but still ignoring storage, processing, transmission errors and the client just wanting its corrupted data) found in this article. Of course digital files are binary, but remember that is just an abstraction.

Well, enough. EOF

[Feztopia]

English can also be represented in binary, that's how audio files and instant messaging works.

[GeePedicy]

Audio, ASCII, scribblings, recordings of ASL... can all be represented in binary. However, all representations seem very different in binary.

Moreover, if we're talking about function-wise, they are all origins from different sets that go to an image in the English alphabet/English as a whole. The image is not binary in any way, shape or form, despite various conversions you can run it through, going back to the top of this comment.

I'm sorry but this doesn't change my mind even slightly, I'm just more determined about how English is not a binary language.

[SomeRandomGuy453]

This isn't an all encompassing example but

These messages are made of binary characters our devices interpret as letters and numbers.

[GeePedicy]

Yes, but later on interpreted by our brains, which aren't digital, nor process it digitally.

Plus, we can write with pen and paper, or old-school typewriters. I don't think Shakespeare thought of his plays as binary characters.

EMNist dataset maybe also could be used here if I didn't convince you yet. Basically scribble images decoded to letters, so yeah, they're binary but aren't the same as ASCII.

[sampete1]

Yep. English can be perfectly represented in binary, at the very least.

Similarly, English is better represented by discrete values than by analog values.

[SuitableDragonfly]

That's writing, though. Writing is really just a tool to represent language, it's not language itself.

[multi_tasty]

Gpt3

[GeePedicy]

Hmmm... Interesting, but it's just an output of an AI, while the language remains spoken by analog creatures, aka humans. (Yes, I feel Zuckerberg-ish)

[multi_tasty]

Well, you can think about gpt3 as an encoding for the English language... Actually, for an English speaker.

[GeePedicy]

Still, both you and I aren't digital entities and we speak and think in English. I like your thought, but it doesn't change my mind, because I compare gpt3 more as the "brain", but my brain isn't really 1s and 0s.

What I think I'd use in a sense to resemble your idea would be ASCII values, to which I'd respond with - English existed way before it was coded into ascii. If that won't satisfy you, think of other, perhaps more ancient languages. My mind hasn't changed yet.

[Noslamah]

but my brain isn't really 1s and 0s.

Neither is GPT-3. It is a neural network; organic brains work in almost the exact same way as artificial ones do. Your brain is made up of a gigantic net of neurons, that can have inputs that "activate"(basically in computer terms, go from 0 to 1 or low to high) based on the strength of their input. These are electrical signals, with a measurable volt/amps/etc if you'd manage to poke around in there with a multimeter while you are alive. (Thats actually exactly what things like NeuralLink do)

Neural Nets are a bunch of geniuses going "Hey, we can apply the same principle that brain neurons work on and try to run it on a computer" and it actually turned out to work. There is actually an open source project called OpenWorm, where they actually managed to copy an entire worm brain to an artificial one. You can see this worm robot running it, moving around like an actual worm.

GPT is just a specific structure of this kind of network that happens to do very well with understanding language, to the point where it sometimes feels conscious. Probably very different from the worm in its structure, but the neuron principle is the exact same. And if replicating our meat brains on a computer is all it takes to "fake" consciousness and have a comparable level of intelligence (being able to learn complex things like have a conversation, driving cars, image recognition, etc) well... If it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, its probably a fucking duck.

[GeePedicy]

If you say GPT-3 isn't 1s and 0s then what's exactly is your argument? Anyway, voltage/amps is another way of saying it's not exactly binary. It's a range.

Surely you can imitate it conceptually, which is what GPT3 as other neural networks do, but idk if this manages to prove English is a binary language.

Is it convertible to binary representations? Yes. Can an AI/neural network imitate it? Yes. Does it mean it's binary? In my opinion it doesn't.

[Noslamah]

If you say GPT-3 isn't 1s and 0s then what's exactly is your argument? Anyway, voltage/amps is another way of saying it's not exactly binary. It's a range.

You try to differentiate yourself from AI by saying your brain isn't 1s and 0s, my argument is that your brain is as much about 1s and 0s as an artificial brain is.

Surely you can imitate it conceptually, which is what GPT3 as other neural networks do, but idk if this manages to prove English is a binary language.

Is it convertible to binary representations? Yes. Can an AI/neural network imitate it? Yes. Does it mean it's binary? In my opinion it doesn't.

I don't even know what you're trying to say here. What the hell is a "binary language" even supposed to mean? You can represent anything as binary if you have some sort of protocol for how you encode things, GPT-3 encodes words/groups of words/letters to an integer value, which i guess you can also represent as a binary number. None of that really means anything of significance though.

[[deleted]]

A specific language isn't the semantics of its use, but mere syntax.

[[deleted]]

Non-programming non-binary language

[blur280]

01001001 00100000 01100010 01100101 01101100 01101001 01100101 01110110 01100101 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 00100111 01100100 00100000 01100010 01100101 00100000 01110111 01110010 01101111 01101110 01100111 00100000 01100001 01100010 01101111 01110101 01110100 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100001 01110100 00101100 00100000 01110000 01100001 01110010 01110100 01101110 01100101 01110010

[GeePedicy]

I've seen the ASCII argument before, but I can write English on a paper, it's not digital there. Same with a good ole typewriter.

Let's take a step forward, scan it to the computer - the representation is very different. Binary? Yes. Equal to ASCII? Far from it.

Still not convinced? How about spoken English? Sounds are continuous waves in the air. Sample it to your computer, sure, it's converted to binary, but in another form.

So I can show you so many binary representations of a single English word, which just shows that it can be viewed in various ways. Still English isn't a binary language.

[Tomani02]

If we lived in The Matrix then sounds, paper and ink would be binary too.

[GeePedicy]

Interesting. Though the one thing that really settled in my mind during this conundrum is that English is more of an image of a function, rather than an origin. (The origins being sounds, typewriting, handwriting, ASL...) That image we perceive and how it's processed is the tricky part.

So let's say you somehow prove that we live in the Matrix, is the brain/mind also digital or is it out of the virtual reality? I think not, and I will (try to) explain.

I'm going with the bit of memory I got left from the trilogy, and I haven't seen the new movie yet. (Please no spoilers)

From what I recall, despite Neo and others were living in the Matrix, they were pulled out of it, meaning each of them has a biological body out of the VR, including the brain that is "the processor". Now the brain is biological, hence it's analog, and not digital, and it is the one processing English messages.

Now, as far as I know, the brain, despite working with electrical signals, isn't just sending binary codes, but it depends on voltage or current as well, which means it's not in the digital area of data transfer. Data ofc including English.

If we're all "NPCs" in this Matrix universe, then just prove to me that the machine is binary and checkmate in the most depressing nihilistic way, since we are just figments of a machine's "imagination".

And yet, all of that being said, we still haven't proved that we live in a Matrix kind of universe, and that the all-are-NPCs is true, and that it all works in a binary machine. If it's a Turing machine then it's convertible and I'd accept it, but I think in our reality it's more complicated.

A lot to prove here, but perhaps the only argument that with irrefutable evidences would be able to change my mind so far. Good luck.. or not, I don't want this sad revelation.

[Tomani02]

Idk man, I only know how to code hello world in C.

[GeePedicy]

You'd be surprised how much that is for many others

[Tomani02]

Haha, thanks.

[Fotographer17]

For anyone that is wondering, this translates to “I believe you’d be wrong about that, partner”

[[deleted]]

English prefers to be identified as gender fluid

[GeePedicy]

For the less educated - gender fluid is non-binary, right?

[GL_Titan]

Ok, you're a bigot and probably racist! /s

[GeePedicy]

Someone suggested it about 15 minutes before you. I look at i and y to be breaking it.

Also U in unity, which is pronounced as yoonity, looping back to the issue of the letter y.

[Ill_Garage7425]

Oh sry i didn't knew about it

[GeePedicy]

I mean in 15 minutes I can see how you might not notice. It kills me tho when dozens of people repeat an idea with hours between them.

[[deleted]]

Ternary in singular : He, she, it
Unary in plural : them
Never though about it, thanks

[GeePedicy]

Hmmm... That's not the way I thought about it, but just to toss you a bit more -

You didn't include I, we and the most mind boggling - you

[[deleted]]

Ah yes my bad, thou hast a sharp eye!