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PostPosted: Fri May 01, 2015 11:31 pm    Post subject: portrefotos.com Reply with quote

http://www.portrefotos.com/


PostPosted: Sat May 02, 2015 2:13 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Looks very nice.
However, I am always amused about the automatic translation from Hungarian language. Obviously no one managed so far to develop an automatic translation program from Hungarian to any other language. A very complicated language. Wink


PostPosted: Sat May 02, 2015 2:57 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

tb_a wrote:
Looks very nice.
However, I am always amused about the automatic translation from Hungarian language. Obviously no one managed so far to develop an automatic translation program from Hungarian to any other language. A very complicated language. Wink


No doubt, but I've found these auto translations to fail equally with languages that have logically structured grammars. They are very much works in progress. They cannot handle one of the basic tenets of any language's grammar -- it is infinitely recursive.


PostPosted: Sat May 02, 2015 3:17 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Yes, but Hungarian to any other language is disastrous compared to i.e. any Roman language (Italian, French, Spanish) or English or any other Germanian language automatic translation. It simply does not make any sense neither Hungarian into English nor Hungarian into German. I know what I am talking about as I am married to a Hungarian wife. Wink


PostPosted: Sat May 02, 2015 6:24 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I'm sure you do, but I'm a linguist so I know a little bit about what I'm talking about too. Hungarian is a member language of a small language family called Finno-Ugric. It and Finnish are the only two extant (ie, living and not extinct) languages in the family. Now, it occurs to me, as a result of this little knowledge tidbit that a translation utility between Finnish and Hungarian might work better than one between Hungarian and any of the Indo-European languages that you mention.

I just tried translating a story from hvg.hu, using Google Translate. The grammar is very awkward, but I was able to understand most of the discussion. Far from perfect, but not as bad as I thought it would be.

When I was referring above how language translation utilities have trouble even with languages that have a logically structured grammar, I was thinking specifically about translations between English and Japanese. There is certainly no genetic relationship between English and Japanese, but Japanese benefits from a fairly logical grammatical structure, so you would think that a translation utility would be able to handle the task. But it usually does a very poor job. And the reason, as I mentioned before, is because any living language has an infinitely recursive grammar. A translation utility has trouble dealing with infinity.t But I gotta admit they're getting better. I just tried using Google Translate at the Tokyo Shimbun website (Tokyo Shimbun is Tokyo's largest daily newspaper) and it did a better job that I expected. I could actually understand most of what was written. Often the grammar is awkward or even nonsensical, but I was usually able to follow the gist of the discussions. However, I find that, with closely related languages like English and German (both are Germanic languages), translators like Google Translate actually do a very good job.


PostPosted: Sat May 02, 2015 6:55 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

cooltouch wrote:
as a result of this little knowledge tidbit that a translation utility between Finnish and Hungarian might work better than one between Hungarian and any of the Indo-European languages that you mention.


Maybe. However, I cannot proof because I speak neither language.
In principle you are right. The totally different structure of the languages is very hard to translate automatically.
I know more about Hungarian than about Japanese. To the best of my knowledge no other language with Latin letters is that complicated (except maybe the only living sister language Finnish as you mentioned and possibly the Basque (Euskara) language which is totally isolated).
Nevertheless, from my experience the translation of Japanese works far better than any automatic translation from Hungarian. That I know for sure. Indo-German languages work quite good. That's also true.
I think Hungarian could work a little better as Hungarian is a very precise and structured language. That's all what I am saying. Obviously the Hungarians do not dedicate more efforts into it. That's my assumption. Maybe the day will come that my Hungarian will be better than the German of my wife. Wink


PostPosted: Sat May 02, 2015 10:00 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Well, good luck. My wife is Chinese and I doubt my Chinese will ever be better than her English.

When you refer to Hungarian being the most complex (to your knowledge) language that uses the Roman alphabet, what are you referring to specifically? The frequent use of diacritics (accent marks and umlauts)? If so, have you tried reading any Vietnamese, lately? Here's a snippet for you, which appears to be a Vietnamese Catholic prayer:



Or how about Welsh? It uses few, if any diacritics, but its spelling is awfully peculiar:



I went back to hvg.hu and scanned a couple of articles. I then looked up the Hungarian phonetic alphabet, which gives pronunciations alongside the written letters. It seems to me that Hungarian's phonetic inventory is very similar to German or English, at least the consonants. It has no unvoiced velar fricative /ch/ common in German, but it has the flapped /r/ that I sometimes here in German, but more typically in Spanish. It also has the umlaut O and U, the umlaut /e/ would probably be difficult for me, though. And, whereas the accent marks denote stress in French and Spanish, in Hungarian, they indicate vowel quality, so it would take some memorization work before I'd be able to get close with my pronunciation. So, yeah, I can see where you say it's complicated. Much more complicated than English, that's for sure. But to me, it isn't all that bad. But then I'm a linguist, and I'm kinda used to seeing this sort of stuff. Try reading Romanized Chinese (aka Pinyin) for example. They don't have one accent mark, they have four, for the separate tones in their language. Plus they have their own rules for how certain vowels and consonants should be pronounced. So even though they're using the Roman alphabet, they don't conform to the international pronunciations that most everybody else does. E.g., /e/ sounds like "uh" and /x/ sounds like a palatalized "sh" and /z/ sounnds like "ts". It can get confusing:



I actually study this stuff. Hooboy.


PostPosted: Sat May 02, 2015 10:40 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

cooltouch wrote:

I actually study this stuff. Hooboy.


I didn't look into Welsch (Celtic languages) nor into any Asian language in particular.
However, did you realize, that the original Hungarian lettering consists of 36 letters? That's the reason why they also use letter combinations like gy, ny, ly, ty, etc... I will never be able to pronounce that correctly. No problems with the "umlauts". We have them also.
My other problem is the length of their words. Very hard to read. Also the grammar is totally different. He or she for example is absolutely unknown in this language, etc.....
I think you are right. I will most probably never learn that. Obviously I am already too old for that.
Have you ever looked into Basque? It is said, that this language is most probably the one and only original European language. It is also a very strange language. I was really stunned when I visited Bilbao some years ago...
I did never study any language in detail because with my (kind of) German (my mother language) and English knowledge I was always able to communicate all around the world so far and I travelled really a lot during my life (mainly for business reasons). Some basic Italian, Spanish and French knowledge helps also in addition.
Have fun with your study. Any answer concerning Basque would be nice.


PostPosted: Sun May 03, 2015 12:31 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

tb_a wrote:
However, did you realize, that the original Hungarian lettering consists of 36 letters? That's the reason why they also use letter combinations like gy, ny, ly, ty, etc... I will never be able to pronounce that correctly.


Actually, the current Hungarian alphabet consists of 44 letters, although some of the "letters" are actually letter combinations, such as dzs and gy. Cf:

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Hungarian_alphabet

I guess they are considered letters, somewhat the way we in English think of /sh/ and /ch/ and /qu/ as single letters because of the way they're pronounced. They just happen to be spelled as letter pairs.

Quote:
My other problem is the length of their words. Very hard to read. Also the grammar is totally different. He or she for example is absolutely unknown in this language, etc.....


Hungarian is what's called an agglutinative language, which means they tend to stack words together into one long string of syllables. But wait, I thought that's what you Germans do. Cool I haven't read up much on the grammar yet, but Hungarian uses SVO word order (Subject Verb Object), same as English. But then, like Japanese, they also have something called a Topic, which can appear first, depending on what it is and how much emphasis wants to be given. You Germans mix it up, kind of like the way the Chinese do. In main clauses German word order is SVO, but in subordinate clauses it's SOV.

Quote:
I think you are right. I will most probably never learn that. Obviously I am already too old for that.


Well, I'm no spring chicken anymore either and the way I see it, the day I stop learning something new is the day I die. My biggest problem is that my memory just doesn't seem to hang onto things as well as it used to.

Quote:
Have you ever looked into Basque? It is said, that this language is most probably the one and only original European language. It is also a very strange language. I was really stunned when I visited Bilbao some years ago...


No, I've never really taken a good look at it. All I know is it is a language isolate -- meaning it is not genetically related to any other known language. Which means, if you pay attention to the discoveries of Cavalli-Sforza, that the pure-blooded Basque people are also not genetically related to the other European populations. Here's Cavalli-Sforza's highly illuminating chart, which points undeniably to a tie-in between language and genetic origins, although he leaves out various isolates, like Basque. He doesn't even show Finnish or Hungarian, instead just showing Uralic (which is actually the more modern term for the Finno-Ugric family). The chart shows ethnic populations to the left and language families to the right:



His chart does contain some errors, though. For example, Japanese and Korean are NOT Altaic languages. They are sister languages that belong to their own separate language family. Which agrees quite readily with his "Populations" side of the chart.

Quote:
I did never study any language in detail because with my (kind of) German (my mother language) and English knowledge I was always able to communicate all around the world so far and I travelled really a lot during my life (mainly for business reasons). Some basic Italian, Spanish and French knowledge helps also in addition.


Well, that's not bad at all, really. Me, I'm really rusty with my Japanese because I haven't gotten to speak it in many years, and I studied German way, way back in high school. I live in an area that is heavily Hispanic -- Houston, Texas -- so I'm surrounded by Spanish. I don't really speak it but I have a fairly decent passive understanding of it. Especially written Spanish. All those Latin cognates it shares with English . . .

Quote:
Have fun with your study. Any answer concerning Basque would be nice.

Well, I told you what I knew. Which isn't much. But google's just a mouse-click away.


PostPosted: Sun May 03, 2015 5:18 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Michael,
Thanks for your very detailed answer. Obviously I mixed up something concerning hungarian lettering. I meant the old "runes" and there I'm counting 48 different letters. So neither 36 nor 44 seems to be correct. Even for numbering they had their own system.
However, I am far away of serious knowledge of the history of languages. Although the relationship between "genetic" origin and origin of languages maybe a little wrong due to present day findings of the historic evolution and mixture of our genes. Language has from my point of view nothing to do with our genes. Otherwise everybody would be able to speak an unlearned language compared to other genetic abilities which we do not necessarily have to learn from scratch but can do automatically. It's more connected to socializing as every human is able to learn any language more or less automatically depending on the environment of the first years of life.
Nevertheless, I do find it somehow spectacular that some isolated languages like Hungarian and Basque did find their way up to now and are still alive against all odds during the history of Europe. And I am more familiar with history than with languages. The main question for me is still why some cultures (related to languages) have been wiped out and others not. Obviously there is no simple answers to that question. An interesting topic is it anyway besides manual focus lenses. Wink
Regards, Thomas


PostPosted: Sun May 03, 2015 2:28 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Thomas,

Now you've broached a topic with which I have considerable experience. I wrote my master's thesis on the topic of human evolution and the biological evolution of language. It required that I do in-depth study of evolutionary biology, the evolution of humans, and the first appearances of vocal communication, which eventually became full-fledged language.

The famed linguist, Noam Chomsky made the rather sensational assertion that language was an organ -- back in the 1960s or so, I believe it was. That is an oversimplification, but it does point to the undeniable evidence that language is an instinct, contrary to your views on this. All developmentally normal children pass through a rather remarkable period called the Language Acquisition Stage during their second or third year of life. It is during this brief period that lasts only about six months or so when their language abilities transition from a simple vocabulary and communication system of almost randomly associating two or three words to get their point across to an organized grammatical system where recursiveness and unlimited expressive abilities begins to emerge. I was a linguistics student when my daughter passed through this stage and I was simply dumbfounded, watching her language abilities improve on an almost daily basis. But here's an important fact that must be understood about language acquisition: children don't learn language as much as they reinvent it through observation. It is through this imperfect system of acquisition the leads to language change. Which means children are responsible for language change, and that they're also responsible for languages having "living" status. When a language is no longer acquired by children as a first language, it no longer changes and becomes a dead language. There is a huge amount of data available that supports this point.

Language is the one single human trait that separates us from all other animal species. Yes, other animals have calls systems of varying degrees of sophistication, but humans are the only ones who have developed recursive grammars, which leads to infinite varieties of expression. This includes apes who have been taught sign language. They're capable of crude expression abilities which parallel those of children prior to their transition through the Language Acquisition Stage, but they've never been able to transition from advanced calls systems to true language with its infinite recursive capabilities the way children do during their second or third year of life (Cf, The Language Instinct, by Stephen Pinker).

But when I refer the the "genetic" relationship between languages, I'm referring to the way languages are related to each other. It's a convenient term that shouldn't be confused with genes, in the DNA sense. However, as that chart of Cavalli-Sforza points out, there is an undeniable relationship between ethnicities and languages. And it's really a simple relationship, when you think about it. A language develops within a given ethnic group and tends to stay with that ethnic group, slowly changing over time, largely independent of ethnic changes. Which is why, for example, here in the Americas, you will often see pure-blooded native Americans who no longer speak their native tongue, having given it up in favor of the dominant language of the area (typically English or Spanish) out of a sense of seeking economic improvement for self and family within the larger group. Obviously, this isn't a choice the child makes, but a choice the parents make, choosing which language they want to expose their children to during their Language Acquisition Stage. This is also a choice that was made many times by immigrants to this country, the parents choosing to speak the language of the area in the home so their children will learn it instead of the language from the old coutnry. Which is a pity, if you ask me. A child can learn two languages almost as easily as he or she learns one during the LAS.


PostPosted: Sun May 03, 2015 2:57 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Thomas,

Now you've broached a topic with which I have considerable experience. I wrote my master's thesis on the topic of human evolution and the biological evolution of language. It required that I do in-depth study of evolutionary biology, the evolution of humans, and the first appearances of vocal communication, which eventually became full-fledged language.

The famed linguist, Noam Chomsky made the rather sensational assertion that language was an organ -- back in the 1960s or so, I believe it was. That is an oversimplification, but it does point to the undeniable evidence that language is an instinct, contrary to your views on this. All developmentally normal children pass through a rather remarkable period called the Language Acquisition Stage during their second or third year of life. It is during this brief period that lasts only about six months or so when their language abilities transition from a simple vocabulary and communication system of almost randomly associating two or three words to get their point across to an organized grammatical system where recursiveness and unlimited expressive abilities begins to emerge. I was a linguistics student when my daughter passed through this stage and I was simply dumbfounded, watching her language abilities improve on an almost daily basis. But here's an important fact that must be understood about language acquisition: children don't learn language as much as they reinvent it through observation. It is through this imperfect system of acquisition the leads to language change. Which means children are responsible for language change, and that they're also responsible for languages having "living" status. When a language is no longer acquired by children as a first language, it no longer changes and becomes a dead language. There is a huge amount of data available that supports this point.

Language is the one single human trait that separates us from all other animal species. Yes, other animals have calls systems of varying degrees of sophistication, but humans are the only ones who have developed recursive grammars, which leads to infinite varieties of expression. This includes apes who have been taught sign language. They're capable of crude expression abilities which parallel those of children prior to their transition through the Language Acquisition Stage, but they've never been able to transition from advanced calls systems to true language with its infinite recursive capabilities the way children do during their second or third year of life (Cf, The Language Instinct, by Stephen Pinker).

But when I refer the the "genetic" relationship between languages, I'm referring to the way languages are related to each other. It's a convenient term that shouldn't be confused with genes, in the DNA sense. However, as that chart of Cavalli-Sforza points out, there is an undeniable relationship between ethnicities and languages. And it's really a simple relationship, when you think about it. A language develops within a given ethnic group and tends to stay with that ethnic group, slowly changing over time, largely independent of ethnic changes. Which is why, for example, here in the Americas, you will often see pure-blooded native Americans who no longer speak their native tongue, having given it up in favor of the dominant language of the area (typically English or Spanish) out of a sense of seeking economic improvement for self and family within the larger group. Obviously, this isn't a choice the child makes, but a choice the parents make, choosing which language they want to expose their children to during their Language Acquisition Stage. This is also a choice that was made many times by immigrants to this country, the parents choosing to speak the language of the area in the home so their children will learn it instead of the language from the old coutnry. Which is a pity, if you ask me. A child can learn two languages almost as easily as he or she learns one during the LAS.

My apologies for the tangent. I can't help it when this topic gets mentioned. Anyway, back to portrephotos.com


PostPosted: Sun May 03, 2015 3:12 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Michael,

I agree. You have expressed more scientifically what I tried to say in my poor English.
Although my focus was more on the selection and evolution of the language and not the ability itself.
So we can agree that the ability is genetic but the selection is not. I am totally with you and didn't want to express anything else.
I am not a scientist but very interested also in the detailed findings of the abilities and way of operation of the human brain. I am coming more from this side....

Far off topic, but still interesting.

Rgds, Thomas


PostPosted: Sun May 03, 2015 3:43 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

ehem, let me just say Attila, this site is excellently done, PRO work for sure and I'm sure it will catch attention!

Congrats to you and Kristztina!!


PostPosted: Sun May 10, 2015 2:47 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Very Happy Thank you Klaus!!