Comments on: Language is a fluid (Part 1)

By: modeling homogenous relaxation | Reflexivity

modeling homogenous relaxation | Reflexivity — Sat, 25 Dec 2010 21:26:26 +0000

[...] dissertation topic, which I distorted metaphorically in a previous blogentry: Language is a Fluid. A big thanks, btw, to Dr Blair Perot, who read and questioned the two-way utility of my analogy: [...]

By: Blair Perot

Blair Perot — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 21:58:51 +0000

Steph,

I found your thoughts quite interesting, and your understanding of Shiva’s thesis quite impressive. You have absorbed quite a bit from those fluids/thermo? classes.

All analogies are useful for helping bridge one discipline to another. Since I understand the fluids, this analogy certainly helps me understand what is important to linguists. I am less sure about if it will help the other way around. Does it really help linguists understand/describe linguistics better to think in terms of fluids?

I see your translation problem as far closer to the computer science problem of data compression and expansion. How is
music compressed into an MP3 file, and then regenerated. An
idea is compressed into words (with some loss of info). Words
are then translated into different words (mp3 to .wav) with some more loss of info, and then the new words are translated back into the idea by the final person. The computer scientists have very precise measures and terminology for each of these processes. They can predict on average how much info is lost. And they can even predict how much energy is required. Given a perfect ideal machine – it still takes finite energy to compress and decompress data. Data compression is closely related to entropy production, and decompression is entropy reduction (which always requires energy).

Good luck with this.

By: steph

steph — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 15:09:13 +0000

Well thanks m’dear. You’re in economics? Finance? So you know about circulation in monetary terms, eh? Notice any overlaps, connections? I’m hoping some of the engineer and interpreter types will confirm that I’m not too far off base. (The delay in posting after Shiva’s defense, however, may have removed it too far from immediate interest…..keeping my fingers crossed though – one of the beauties of the internet is the conversation is “here” ready to be picked up if someone gets inspired.)

By: michelle

michelle — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 21:07:44 +0000

Wow Steph, you’ve displayed so many different facets of understanding of this piece. I think this may be the closest that i’ve ever been to understanding both injector flows and communication flows. I’m impressed!