Mathematical linguistics

Autumn is overall a tough time. It gets cold, it gets dark, and trees suddenly get all brown & grey, it’s actually sad to look outside. Do you know what else is tough? Foreign languages. No matter what language you learn whether related to yours or not, you will find some elements that may seem illogical at worst and pointless at best. But I’d say that this toughness makes them what they are, makes them beautiful.

I treat foreign languages as a hobby, but I’ve recently tried my hand in mathematical linguistics. What is it? Well, you could say it’s a field of scientific linguistic inquiry applying mathematical methods and concepts to linguistic systems, but that sounds pretty scary. I have a more casual name for this – deciphering foreign languages. Now that sounds way cooler, doesn’t it?

Basically you’re applying logic to a text in a language you have no idea about (that is, no idea about its grammar and vocabulary), and then you are able to connect the dots together! You can learn how features of a certain language work by yourself, and yourself only. Let’s look at this problem in Swedish:

• Trunk of a birch                      stammen på björken

• Case for glasses                      etuiet till glasögonen

• Sound of an explosion            ljudet från explosionen

• Page of a newspaper              sidan i tidningen

• Head of a dog                         huvudet på hunden

• Anchor of a ship                     ankaret till skippet

• Smoke of a cigarette              röken från cigarette

• Member of a government      medlemmen i regeringen

• Receiver battery                     batteriet till transistor

• Seat backrest                          ryggstödet på länstolen

• Shoe lace                                snören till skon

• Smell of a flower                    doften från blomman

• soldier from a battalion         soldaten i bataljonen

Given this information, try to fill in:

1. Light of a lamp                       skenet ......... lampan

2. Roof of a building                  taket ......... byggnaden

3. Saucepan lid                           locket ......... kastrullen

4. Provision of law                     paragrafen ......... lagen

5. Conspiracy participant         deltagaren ......... sammansvärjningen

I actually want you to spend at least 5 minutes on this task. With the right approach you won’t need more than that to solve it.

Here is how I solved it:

1. So, light of a lamp, I thought that light is something you can’t catch, something you can see but that’s about it. Anything like that in our examples? Look at the smoke of a cigarette or smell of a flower. That logic applies to those as well, so I guess light of a lamp in Swedish is skenet från lampan!

2. Roof of a building? Alright, roof is something that belongs to an object and it’s something that you can’t really remove or disconnect from the body. What about trunk of a birch or head of a dog? You can’t really remove a dog’s head unless you have, uhm, tools. Thus I think the answer is taket på byggnaden.

3. Saucepan lid? Well a lid belongs to a saucepan, but it’s not physically connected to it, same with an anchor and a ship or a case for glasses. The answer is locket till kastrullen.

4. Provision of law? That wasn’t obvious for me so I just skipped it.

5. Conspiracy participant must be deltagaren i sammansvärjningen. It’s easy to connect the dots between that and a soldier from a battalion.

6. Okay, so the provision of law time. For some reason I felt that it’s kinda similar to page of a newspaper and my brain kind of felt that it’s similar to the conspiracy participant (the only difference being that there are no humans here, but I think that is why the example with a newspaper was given). So my final answer is paragrafen i lagen.

Now let’s look at the answers:

1. skenet från lampan

2.  taket på byggnaden

3.  locket till kastrullen

4.  paragrafen i lagen

5.  deltagaren i sammansvärjningen
   

Wasn’t so difficult, was it?

What I love about the mathematical linguistics is that all you need is some good intuition and logical thinking. Knowledge of how languages work is also necessary when it comes to more difficult tasks. I do adore this Swedish problem, it is a fun experience of making a hypothesis and just checking out if it works. I also think it is a great method of learning certain language’s features, I guarantee you that if you started learning Swedish as a native English speaker, this system would be very confusing for you. Don’t you basically say of in most of cases? It relates to what I mentioned at the beginning about some features being illogical or pointless for us. But I think this proves that those differences can be pleasant to learn about. Also, if someone here started learning Swedish recently – don’t thank me. Actually, you can share this newsletter with others!

What can you use mathematical linguistics for?

Well, I’d say it could help education a lot. It is basically a pretty damn good workout for your brain. It helps you remember things faster and for a longer time. I recall one problem abour the Dutch diminutives. Having completed it one week ago, I still have the intuition on how to create diminutives in Dutch, and I don’t even speak it. I’m pretty sure however, that following a textbook guideline it would take me much more time and much more practice, with mathematical linguistics it was less than 30 minutes. It is like that because YOU find out why thigns are the way they are, you solve everything by YOURSELF, you learn through experiments. It is much more efficient than reading “if the noun ends with a consonant…”.

Future content

I will be posting mostly about foreign languages, their features, sometimes history, what distinguishes them from others etc. If you are a linguaphile too, please share this post.