Re: THEORY: Unknown Language Confuser!

On Tue, 30 Jan 2001 02:27:04 -0000, Lars Henrik Mathiesen <thorinn@...>
wrote:

>People,
>
>will you PLEASE read just a little of the explanatory text on that web
>site?
>
>Unless the highest language is at least twice as good as the next
>language (that isn't closely related to it), it is a negative result.
>
>'A negative result' means, IT DOESN'T MEAN ANYTHING AT ALL!
>Statistically speaking, it's noise. Nonsense. Gibberish. It may look
>suggestive, but that just means it's suggestive gibberish.
That's only a negative result IF what you're trying to do is identify a
text in an unknown language, and then only if you're confident the language
is one of the ones the database is capable of identifying! On the other
hand, we KNOW what languages our texts are in, and that they aren't in the
database. We should EXPECT to get the low-scoring results that we're
getting. (I was surprised to get scores as high as 0.1267 for Eklektu.)

There are a number of ways this so-called noise might be useful to an
artlanger. If nothing else, it suggests which languages might be productive
for inspiring new words and new sound combinations. As far as the rest of
the world is concerned, pretty much all of our conlanging efforts are
gibberish and nonsense anyway. Why not have a little fun with it?

--
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