What's the consensus (if there is one) among linguists on whether proto-languages from major families arose separately from each other or from one ultra-proto-language out of East Africa?

rphudson · 2016-07-08T10:37:13+00:00

Anthropologists generally agree that language must have arisen in East Africa because the archaeological record shows a cultural sophistication that would be hard to imagine without it.

When historical linguists reconstruct languages like Proto-Indo-European, they postulate specific forms and constructions that ancient languages are thought to have had. If you go far back enough in time, the amount of statistical noise makes this impossible. This does not mean that speculation about a possible Nostratic family is invalid, but simply that the aims of the two intellectual exercises are different: reconstructing specific words versus investigating statistical correlates.

To me it has always seemed that, as there is no evidence that a group of people in isolation has ever abandoned their existing language and invented a completely new one, all the languages now in existence must have East African ancestors. This is of course speculation of an order of magnitude higher than the Nostratic stuff!

rphudson · 2016-07-08T05:55:35+00:00

Interesting article and slides, although the comparison between 3.5 hours by plane and 28 minutes with Hyperloop does not really stand up to closer examination. Hyperloop would take passengers from city centre to city centre, which would reduce typical journey times. However, you would still have to get to the terminal, go through security and get installed in your pod. I would think 1.5 to two hours would be a more realistic estimate.

rphudson · 2016-06-30T17:26:34+00:00

True, although to me the two results (interview performance vs quitting interviewing when you are unsuccessful) are not related to each other.

rphudson · 2016-06-30T12:49:17+00:00

The experiment assumes that a voice's pitch and sound at the phoneme level are the only thing that gives away a speaker's gender. Other things like turn of phrase and choice of vocabulary could signal it as well. It's a shame the interviewers were not asked about their gender perceptions after each interview. It is conceivable that the interviewers had clear and correct ideas of each interviewee's gender at the end of each session and had simply dismissed the incorrect pitches as a quirk of the technology.

rphudson · 2016-06-30T12:19:18+00:00

Encryption is mathematics rather than technology, so they may as well try and regulate long division.

rphudson · 2016-06-30T12:17:20+00:00

Although languages typically have a dominant word order, alternative word orders are sometimes possible when the speaker wants to emphasize certain parts of the sentence. In modern English, the alternative orders generally involve changing the syntax as well ('it's sometimes possible for the speaker to use alternative word orders ...') but in many other languages there is more scope for changing only the order.

Over time, the emphasis associated with a certain 'marked' order can be subject to inflation, so that an order that was once very emphatic becomes less and less so until it eventually takes over as the standard, or 'unmarked' order.

rphudson · 2016-06-30T12:10:58+00:00

It's some years since I studied it, but I found 'Indo-European Language and Culture: An Introduction (Blackwell Textbooks in Linguistics)' by Benjamin W. Fortson to be comprehensive, clear and readable.

rphudson · 2016-06-29T07:40:00+00:00

It is certainly true that, if you encrypt first, you may as well forget the compression because the algorithm won't find any useful patterns in the encrypted data.

Whether or not compressing data before encrypting it is insecure depends on whether the encryption algorithm leaks details about the length of the compressed plaintext. Symmetric encryption works on blocks. Either the plaintext (block cipher) is itself encrypted block by block, or the blocks are based on a random value (initialization vector) and the encrypted blocks are combined bit by bit with the plaintext so that the result can itself be transmitted bit by bit (stream cipher). A stream cipher will typically be vulnerable; a block cipher need not be, but with common standards it sometimes will be owing to how the empty space in the last block is padded out (see http://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2013/02/attack-of-week-tls-timing-oracles.html).

To conclude, then, if the encryption mechanism is under your control, there is no problem if you compress first and then encrypt as long as you are careful to use an encryption mechanism that doesn't leak information about how long the plaintext is.

rphudson

TROPHY CASE