But is conlangery useful?? [Linguists and Conlangers, part 2]

Yes, it's been quite a while since the first installment of this series. I wrote a whole big long draft of this post and then realized it was mostly wrong, and it took a while to get back on track.

First off, I am not saying that conlangers are oppressed or shunned or anything by academic linguists. Far from it. It's often said that conlangers have a "persecution complex" in this arena -- i.e. we're whiny little geeks. If anything, conlangers get more friendship from linguists than from the general public. That said, most linguists don't exactly brim over with warmth and welcome for practitioners of the secret vice. Conlanging is typically regarded as a kind of silly little hobby or diversion: nobody cares that much as long as you don't let it interfere with your work.

I will admit that there is one anti-conlanging argument that stings me and makes me feel guilty: "Why aren't you out in the field, saving dying languages? You're squandering your talent, skills, interest, and time!"

This argument seems a lot more valid than its generalized counterpart, "Why aren't you working against Great World Evil #42373?" Linguistics interest and expertise are relatively thin on the ground, so it's harder for the cause of saving dying languages to get enough resources/people behind it. Conlangers are often so interested in linguistics that they pursue their interest even when it harms other aspects of their life. Not for nothing do people call it addictive.

But seriously? Firstly, most conlangers just don't have as much spare time as people seem to imagine. Secondly, and more important, most conlangers don't have the expertise to do linguistic fieldwork. A goodly number pursue linguistics in college, but you need a lot more than a bachelor's to do fieldwork. I only know of two conlangers who are linguistics grad students (undoubtedly there are more, but not many more). Most of us have day jobs. We're hobbyists. Would you want model-airplane hobbyists fixing fighter jets?

The other main arguments against conlanging are that it's frivolous, pointless, a waste of time, etc. And for this I can't do better than to point you to The Conlanger's Manifesto, by David Peterson, which eloquently defends conlangery as an art form:

...Looking only at the utilitarian end of it, if the creator isn't going to use his/her language for communication, and since language can be viewed only as a means of communication, language creation is pretty useless.
But is this all language is: A method of communication? If so, what is poetry? what is literature? What possible use could James Joyce's Ulysses have? I suppose if you were on a desert island and needed to smash crabs, it would do the trick—it's pretty thick, after all. But beyond that? According to them, it would have no use. And why stop there? What good do paintings do anyone?...Pretty soon what you're left with is a world without art.
At this point, the argument should come to an end. The rigor and usefulness of art is an argument that has been argued many times by many people much more articulate than I, and by now (I certainly hope), the whole world should have figured out that art really does pull its weight on Earth.

Amen, brother. Conlangery is the art of linguistics, and it should need no more defense than that.

Occasionally, you'll run across linguists actually using conlangs. If you're teaching a linguistics course, occasionally you may want to illustrate some particular concept by using a conlang. That way, you can design the conlang to show off the feature to its best advantage, and avoid all the irrelevant noise/irregularities that you'd get if you used a natlang. It's the same principle as medical illustration: realistic, but with all the fat trimmed away. Just try and find an illustration that shows the pancreas without trimming away a whole load of other viscera! It's damn near impossible. Conlang examples serve the same purpose in a linguistics class. The goal is transmission of key information, not pinpoint-accurate naturalism.

Another, less-used, possibility is to have students create a miniature conlang that exemplifies a particular feature. I've seen a worksheet that taught the basics of ergativity very effectively this way. Unfortunately, it wasn't from an actual linguistics class. It was from a presentation at the 2nd Language Creation Conference. Er, I mean, a presentation that never took place (it was sacrificed in favor of another panel discussion due to time constraints): "Applications of Conlanging in Pedagogy". You can see the worksheet on page 13 of the PDF of the program. I can't genuinely speak from the perspective of a student, because I already knew what ergativity was at the time, but I really think it would have been very effective as a homework assignment, because it gets you actually working with an ergative system.

But the most interesting intersection of conlangs and linguistics, in my opinion, is in the domain of research. A lot of studies have come out recently, where people are exposed to a small conlang and then their learning success is tested and studied. This is a really exciting paradigm, because you can engineer your language to have certain traits in the area you're interested in, and to be `normal' or `easy' in all other areas. If you're testing acquisition of (say) verb-subject-object word order (English is subject-verb-object), you can make your language have perfect consistent VSO order and be completely unremarkable in everything else. Good luck finding a natlang that fits that bill. It's the same cutting-out-the-noise principle we saw earlier.

Or, if you want to put in noise and study how people will deal with it, you can manipulate the type and amount of noise to a very high resolution. Likewise with (say) syllable-transition probabilities in a word-segmentation study (if ba is always followed by ka, but ka is followed by a whole lot of different things, you can deduce that fooBAKAbar is the words fooBAKA and bar, not fooBA and KAbar.)

I'm currently involved in a research project using this paradigm, and I think it's an incredible tool. Look out for a lit review in the near future!

There are some conlangers who would like to see descriptive research done on fully-fleshed-out conlangs. And I hate to say this, especially because I'm good friends with this crowd, but I disagree. I don't think that investigating and describing conlangs can tell you much about the range and properties of human natural language. (Most academic linguists, I think, would agree with me.) To find out anything about human natural language, you ought to study human languages that have evolved naturally, instead of ones that were consciously invented. You can make a conlang with any conceivable twisted logical structure; the structure may be possible, but that doesn't mean it would ever evolve naturally, or that it's reflective of anything in natural language.

But since conlangery is the art form associated with linguistics, you could do the same sort of humanistic or aesthetic studies that you do on paintings (the art form associated with vision science). What do people find elegant or appealing? What conlang properties elicit what subjective reactions? What bizarre structures have what bizarre effects on people trying to use the language (the linguistic analogue of optical illusions)? And this could have implications in the study of natlangs.

Next up: the learn-a-conlang paradigm in language acquisition research.

My Erdős number is 5

Back in high school, when we got around to it (about once a year) the Neighborhood would publish an issue of the Menlo Math Magazine. It was sort of a random collection of real-world-relatedness, whimsy, and interesting problems. Not an academic publication by any standard. But that didn't stop us all from facetiously claiming an Erdős number of 6, when we heard that Mr. T's was 5.

I just found out that mine is actually 5, and this time it's damn near official, not tenuously based on a high school pamphlet. Over the summer of 2005 I worked on the Stanford ALL project. Mostly as unpaid labor, admittedly, but I did sit in on the meetings and I did point us to a couple of valuable data sources. This meant I got to interact with some big names, however briefly.

According to Language Log, the lowest Erdős number known for a linguist is 2, and Geoff Pullum's is 3. A quick Google Scholaring shows that Arnold Zwicky and Thomas Wasow, therefore, have Erdős numbers not greater than 4. And they were both involved in the ALL project, as was I, which makes my Erdős number not greater than 5.

...All right, none of us are actually authors of the paper in question. I appear in the acknowledgement footer on the first page, along with the other students involved in the project. But Zwicky and Wasow appear in the same footer, as does John Rickford (who doesn't have any papers coauthored with Pullum, at least on Google Scholar). (Well, OK, all those big names appear in the references, which I don't.) Their contributions to the project were certainly substantive enough to qualify criteria for what counts as `collaboration'. My contributions were far less substantive, but I still think they counted for something, and if I appear in the same acknowledgements (the same parenthesis in the acknowledgements, even), that's got to be worth something.

(Naturally, this all comes with the caveat that we've been counting non-strictly-mathematical publications, but that has plenty of precedent.)

It makes a fella proud to be a scientist

Pharyngula linked to this amazing video that "compares creationism and science". Really, it's no comparison. [3:54]



You could watch it without the music -- none of the strictly visual beauty would be lost -- but instead, I highly recommend turning your speakers up to eleven, putting the video on fullscreen, and inviting all your officemates to come watch. Better yet, invade a conference room or a lecture hall for five minutes. It'll be worth it.

I found it incredibly affecting. Some parts had me cheering and yelling "SCIENCE: IT WORKS, BITCHES!". And some had me tearing up. I felt like a little kid again, all "when I grow up I wanna be a scientist!" I'm damn proud to be a part of it (or at least to be on track to become part of it).

Math lagging (or leading) physics

Senior year of high school, I took AP Physics C and AP Calculus BC concurrently: allowable, but not advisable, the admins said. For a good part of the year, I struggled with physics because I hadn't `really' learned the math yet. Reading the textbook, I'd just skip over derivations that I didn't understand, and hope that the end result was something I could memorize, if not comprehend. Mr. T held a session or two of `physics math', which helped a little, but didn't make me feel less intimidated.

Last semester, I was in pretty much the same situation, only with line and surface integrals instead of all integrals. Oh, we never had to evaluate any -- they were always of the simple kind that reduce to multiplication problems -- but it took several tries to be able to recognize those situations, and remember how to reduce them to multiplication problems. Didn't solve the intimidation problem, either. On the final exam, even though I knew what to do and how the problems worked, I still felt like a trespasser for writing down those fancy-schmancy closed-surface double integral signs, knowing I didn't really know how they worked.

At one point Prof. Hudson said something (can't recall the exact words) that gave the impression this math-lagging-physics business was a dreadful intractable plague, oh me oh my, whatever shall we do. And at the time, struggling to understand everything, I was rather inclined to agree with him. But since then I've somewhat reversed position, or at least become neutral.

Back in high school, after I'd learned to fudge my way through integration, I had a much, much easier time with it when we `officially' learned it in math class. This was especially noticeable in the case of integrating (still in a single variable, though!) over 3D objects. We'd been doing this routinely in physics, to find the moments of inertia of various shapes. So while the rest of the calculus class was struggling to put together the relatively new concept of integration with the relatively new concept of bizarre-shaped objects in 3-space, I could relax.

Recently (within the past two weeks), the same thing happened for me in multivariable calculus. I'm in 18.01A/18.02A, which is a blend of two courses: a quick six-week review of single-variable, and then the regular multivariable curriculum, finishing over the January term. Because of the way things are timed, I never saw a line integral in 18.02A until just now, well after the end of my physics class. And the same thing happened: I'd learned to fudge my way through easy line integrals, and that gave me a leg up on people who'd never seen them before. I had a well-developed intuition about what line integrals meant in terms of the real world, which kept me from getting confused. That in turn allowed me to focus on the complicated aspects that we hadn't worked with in physics.

Given these experiences, I don't think it's a very bad thing at all that math education tends to lag physics education. It can often be a good thing: physics is leading math, to frame it positively. When you tackle something complicated and abstract, having `live-fire' experience with simple cases and workarounds can hardly do anything but help.

This comes with some caveats. It's a classic example of delayed gratification: I sure didn't feel happy about math lagging physics when I was actually struggling with the physics, and it was only a month later that I was able to grin to myself in calculus recitation, watching the people around me struggle with a problem I'd found obvious. (Schadenfreude, too, is not necessarily a good thing. In my defense, I do help my peers if I can, and if they're not already being helped.) And naturally, it's a tradeoff; who can say if knowing the math beforehand would have brought my physics grade up a little?

But most importantly, if physics is going to lead math, physics has to be taught right. I approve very strongly of Prof. Hudson's philosophy here: conceptually difficult problems with easy math = win. If you absolutely must be bashing your head against the wall at midnight the night before the problem set is due, it shouldn't be because you can't solve a differential equation. It should be because you can't figure out which way the induced current goes. Physics can be taught adequately without using too much complicated math (though of course the definition of `complicated' will vary with the physics). You learn just as much integrating (read: multiplying) over a sphere as you do integrating (read: flailing) over the surface of some crazy-shaped thing.

You wouldn't expect it, but knowing too much math can be a problem. Last semester's physics class was taught in a rather unusual format, about which more later. The relevant thing is that I spent the whole time in a group of three. There was me, there was S, and there was L. S had excellent intuition, and tended to approach problems by thinking them through qualitatively first, and then seeing if the math bore him out. This was really a very effective strategy -- a lot of the time the math looked right, but his intuition cried foul, and then we found the sign error twenty steps back. L, on the other hand, was advanced in math, and already pretty far beyond what the physics course used. She approached problems very mathematically, instead of with intuition like S. Even when something made complete physical sense, she wasn't satisfied until she justified it mathematically -- even if it was a qualitative problem and didn't have any equations in it to begin with. and because of how every other thing is backwards in E&M, she tied herself into an awful lot of knots. (Not that she wasn't brilliant; I think she outscored both S and me on every test.) L and S complemented each other, and they were a great group to work with. But I have to say that S's intuitive method was the more effective. To the same question, S might answer "because the charge is over here so the potential is higher here, and then this happens"; L might answer "because the potential is [insert equation here] and the electric field is the negative gradient of the potential."

I admit that this is based on my own experience, and what's better for different students will vary. I said that it's easier to learn complicated abstract math if you've first grounded it in physics; you could just as well say that it's easier to learn physics if you're well practiced with the mathematical tools already. But I think the first argument is more valid than the second. It's easier to abstract from the concrete than it is to learn the abstract first and only then get concrete examples. You see the same thing in computer science classes: pick up a copy of the blue wizard book and on every other page you'll find a discussion of how to abstract some instance, not how to instantiate some abstraction. Even though physics was made genuinely more difficult by not knowing the math, I'd still rather have done it this way around.

Briefly on Sitemeter and privacy

For the sake of full disclosure: yes, I have a Sitemeter on this blog. It's the free version, which means I can't see anyone's full IP address (just the first three numbers). I can, however, see your location, your ISP, a crappy estimate of your latitude & longitude, what page you came from, and what page you exited to (sometimes; this last one seems to be borked).

I have it on the "medium" privacy settings, which means that all those details are not visible to members of the public, but that certain stats may be given out to indexing sites -- the textbook example is giving out the hit count to a service that ranks sites by number of visits.

I'm not all that interested in most of the information that Sitemeter collects. I mostly have it as a hit counter, not anything fancier. I do get a kick out of seeing what random cities people are visiting from, or what random Google search terms bring me up in the results. It's rather annoying that Sitemeter's privacy options are pretty much all-or-nothing: I can't allow members of the public to see, e.g., just the Google search terms or just the geographic locations, without giving them everything, including partial IP addresses. Grr.

But at some point I think I'll compile a list of the more interesting Google search terms that bring this blog up. Might be amusing.

Feeling a teacher's love

In high school, we had a teacher, Mr. T, who taught computer science and some of the advanced math courses. And he was wonderful. Everybody loved him. I've never encountered so much infectious enthusiasm, even at the ungodly hour of 8am on a Monday morning. He could light us on fire by drawing box-and-pointer diagrams. We had a party the day we learned the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus. Mr. T was a mentor, a friend, a father, a rock; his room was a haven for geeklings. Everybody loved him, and he loved us too.

I understood his love in a rather abstract sense back then, and up until this morning. But this afternoon, I understood it from the inside.

The research I'm doing at the moment involves teaching pairs of people a constructed language by immersion, and then having them take a test. (More details on this (very interesting) paradigm in an upcoming post!) Today was only the second time this experiment has ever been run, so I'm also happy just because it worked. We ran two pairs of people.

I had an awfully hard time teaching the first pair. They just seemed to fundamentally not get a lot of the grammar. It was very difficult to keep myself from grabbing one guy and telling him, loudly and in English, that "the way to turn a sentence into a question is NOT just to say the sentence with a rising intonation at the end!!!". And so on, and so on. Teaching them was frustrating, occasionally painful.

And then the second pair came in, a pair of undergrads, and they more than made up for the first pair. It only took them twenty minutes to get to more than adequate proficiency, where it had taken the first pair almost an hour to get to less than adequate proficiency. They seemed to pick everything up right away. It was like watching a rose bloom in time-lapse. My favorite moment was when I taught the question form, using only one verb in my examples. When I prompted one of the participants, she immediately came up with several correct question-form sentences, and she generalized to all the verbs we'd learned, not just the one I demonstrated with. If we hadn't been in an experiment, I might have proposed to her on the spot.

I graded the four tests just now. The first pair had decidedly mediocre scores, no surprise there. But the second pair did extremely well, and they both did just about perfectly on the part we're most interested in. I was overjoyed to see them using linguistic terminology correctly to explain their answers (even though their knowledge of terms had nothing to do with how well they acquired the language). When I was done grading, I spontaneously picked up the last test and kissed it.

Tonight, I think I experienced a little of what made Mr. T such a good teacher, what made him love his students and his work. It's not an easy feeling to articulate. Pride and joy in students, enthusiasm for the subject, and a little bit of self-satisfaction that, yeah, I taught them that. The feeling was very powerful, even though the teaching I did today wasn't very real. What if I were teaching material that was beautiful and meaningful, instead of an arbitrary constructed language? What if I could teach for an entire semester and witness long-term progress and synthesis, instead of bidding goodbye after an hour? What if I were teaching students who learned for love of the material, not because they were paid to be subjects in a study?

For the record, this is not the first time I've taught, nor the first time I've found it satisfying. For a couple of years I tutored 6th graders in math and Japanese, and it was always great when they'd get a flash of insight after a long hard slog. (They were remedial students, so it wasn't often.) And in the Karate club, it's traditional that you help teach the people who rank below you. I was co- leading brown belt my senior year, so that meant I taught just about everybody. I always enjoyed seeing some yellow-belts perform a technique really well, and thinking "Yay, they remembered X subtle point I taught them about!". But I've never felt a teacher's love as strongly as I did today; certainly not strongly enough to merit using the word `love'.

If I follow the track I'm planning to follow, I'll end up a professor. I understand that teaching is mostly tedious, frustrating, and difficult, not full of brilliant-student-love. But it's the possibility, the hope that springs eternal, and when it's fulfilled it makes up for everything else.

Problems with the LJ feed

I recently made some minor edits to "my experience with lab mice", and everything seemed normal. But for some reason the LiveJournal feed saw fit to repost the entire post, clogging up people's friends pages. Meep, sorry!

Funny thing is, this didn't happen anywhere else. The native feed is normal, the blog itself is normal. Only on LJ did the post show up again. And apparently there's no way to go into an admin panel and fix this; it's fully automated. Grr.