Intellectual$ingh3141592: Good afternoon, Sudo-Ji.
SudoSecularSAsian: Greetings, my good fellow. How goes it? I trust all is well on your end?
Intellectual$ingh3141592: Today I am, I must confess, a tad jealous of our colleague over at MIT.
SudoSecularSAsian: Please elaborate, if you would be so kind. I am, as they say, all “ears” — though what precisely that means in the context of Internet Messaging is an open question.
Intellectual$ingh3141592: It appears that Professor Deb Roy, of MIT’s Cognitive Machines Group, is pursuing a gargantuan project oriented to the study of language acquisition in human infants. What is most impressive is, he is using his own son as the source of the data!
SudoSecularSAsian: His partner must be outraged — I know my own spouse places strict rules on the degree to which I can allow my academic projects to interfere with our personal lives. In my occasional forays into the world of “weblogs” — with which you are well-acquainted — I have been asked to delineate a fairly sharp line between matters of public discussion and our own private affairs.
Intellectual$ingh3141592: I completely understand. However, in this case, the baby’s name is being shielded from participants in the study (he is merely referred to as “Dwayne,” after a character in a popular Ridley Scott film). Moreover, Roy’s partner, the eminent speech pathologist Rupal Patel (Northwestern), is apparently fully on board with the project.
SudoSecularSAsian: Singh-saab, I just checked the link you forwarded and I have to ask you… Do you really think this type of grandiose, pie-in-the-sky study is really a worthwhile usage of resources? Is it really likely that the scattered attempted phonemes of an infant in the earliest stages of language acquisition will offer significant new data? Isn’t it possible — or I daresay, probable, given Chomsky’s universal grammar — that the real root of language is to be found not in the “babble” of a child attempting to mimic adult sounds but in the neural-cognitive framework on which the linguistic capacity is built?
Intellectual$ingh3141592: I must concede I am not qualified to respond to your conjectures, though I should perhaps remind you that Chomsky’s thesis has been widely discredited in the field of linguistics. However, one thing you say does ring true — the sheer expenditure of electricity required to support the massive arrays of hard disks (1.4 petabytes!) is deeply irresponsible in this era of imminent global warming. Did you have the chance to peruse the latest tidbit in the Times about the responsibility the wealthier countries have to the global south?
SudoSecularSAsian: Yes, and it’s quite distressing. I’m afraid our beloved South Asia may bear the brunt of the developed world’s resource profligacy. The Himalayan glaciers are in trouble, and a “brown cloud” of pollutants is steadily building up over the Indian Ocean, with results on the climate-scenario that are extremely difficult to foretell, though the consequences are unlikely to be pleasant.
Intellectual$ingh3141592: :-(. (Please forgive the emoticon — it’s a childish expedient, but sometimes an eloquent one.) Well, I must be off, I’m afraid.
SudoSecularSAsian: 😉 All is forgiven. This is the brave new world of lexico-typographical expressivity! Au revoir!
dear sudo
“enter intefere” error is noted.
unless of course your embryoniclinguistic template dictates such
mr verbal economy
Chomsky’s thesis has been widely discredited in the field of linguistics
It has? As a lay reader, thought it had gained even more credence recently…
Katouee-ji, your corrective note is most appreciated. Merci, gentle sir!
AAAAAAA! And Amardeep catches Anna’s pass and runs into the endzone. . .touch down! The Crowd goes wild!
I am dying of laughter here. Someone needs to come and slap my back.
This just totally made my day. IWSBYEHMGF (I Was Slayed By Your Eloquent Humor My Good Fellow)
Dear Skeptical Desi,
Perhaps I overstated the case somewhat when I indicated that the theory of Universal Grammar is widely dismissed. It is, however, fair to say that it has been critiqued and complicated by recent scholarship, not always of the neo-Skinnerian variety. A salient discussion, apropos of the current discourse, may be found here.
That said, I would kindly request your own reference in support of the theory, as I am a firm believer in point-counterpoint argumentation (the contrapuntal, as they say in music). And it appears that my colleague Sudo, who is a firm believer in UG and all things Chomskian (he is also a regular reader of the “Gene Expression” blog, as well as “3 Quarks Daily,” though that should be of no surprise to you), has abandoned ship for the evening.
Thanks, Amardeep, for a conversation that we older SM readers can understand. (Not that I minded the other one.)
Ditto what Saheli said.
Poor guy, he had to eat his humble pi!
omfg that waz sooo hard 2 rd. n y wd u if it waznt 4 skool??? 😛
Like, I almost literally fell out of my chair.
I know all the Amardeep-fans will emerge in a swarm to insult me, and I might even get banned from the site, but I’ve got to say, this would have been ten times funnier if the character was called Intellectual$ingh3.1415926 instead of Intellectual$ingh3.141592.
This is getting very boring.
And that too coming from someone who is 32.
Or has Sepia doing some market research – and found that majority of site visitors are ivory-tower dwelling effete, pointy-headed reification-fetishists – hence the degradation to suit the “target audience”?
my favorite part. mostly because 🙂 and 🙁 probably sum up the sum total of my internetese and i’m often afraid and embarassed to ask what all those acronyms people litter their posts with mean.
🙂
ANNA you have a good point. I think sepia mutiny’s target audience should be college students and young graduate students who use too much jargon.
I guess that people who work don’t read stuff like this.
ah. it’s like coming home, this post.
let me soak it in for a while.
mmmm. good.
dude, you called singh a swedish car.
Thanks for blogging this, Amardeep.
Based on a v quick read through his paper on the project (link), it seems Deb Roy has his own model for language acquisition in humans. The basic idea seems to be that children learn by mapping objects and routine actions to different parts of speech. He has built mathematical models which have been able to learn nouns and verbs from videos of infants playing with their mothers. He now wants more complete data to conclusively prove his hypotheses.
One of the byproducts of the project might be evidence to disprove Chomsky’s hypothesis(though it cannot prove it). If he can get a program to learn a language based simply on statistical models, without using an inbuilt grammatical model, it is a setback to the idea that language needs to be inbuilt. From the paper:
First class, Amardeep, first class!
wah wah waha. Laajwaab. Loving IM conversation post.
great post!
True intellectuals are concise. Sometimes a thesaurus is NOT your best friend.
back in my post-colonial heyday (don’t we all have one?) I was always struck by the very sincere belief, from the writers whose talks I attended, that their writing style (the more obtuse it was the more magnificent it became)needed to be as indigestible to the modern consumer as possible. This IM convo is not quite to that Homi Babha or even Ashis Nandy level–to the point where the reader feels some sort of calculus needs to be performed in order to truly understand the sentence.
I always wondered why University of Melbourne didn’t pony up the cash to keep Dipesh Chakrabarty or even why my alma mater couldn’t hold on to to it’s most brilliant profs (but that’s a different story. properly titled, “Why UR chose aesthetically pleasing architecture and painfully perfect shrubberies over scholarly substance and exciting research.)
very enjoyable anyhow.