This question must be accompanied by provisos. One particular proviso simplifies the task. Assume that the problem solving used throughout the development of language was of the same kind that has at all times occurred since. In other words, assume that it is valid to use averages over time, at least for the time period under consideration. In 2009 I used ideas relating to statistical mechanics to estimate, on certain assumptions (a language-like call `lexicon' of about 100 calls), that language began between about 141,000 to 154,000 years ago in a couple of articles, Article Lexical growth, entropy and the benefits of networking
andArticle A theory of intelligence: networked problem solving in anima...
). at p. 74. The work in those articles is over 10 years old and there have been developments since. One involves dispersion of phonemic diversity (Atkinson 2011). Are there other approaches?
Mister Shour, do you agree that I use my interpretation (translated into Dutch) of your articles in my personal blogpost?
Imme Roerdinkholder
Your question might raise legal issues more interesting than some of the physics questions I have posed. My guess is that arrangements for translations involve signed contracts of some well thought out legal terms.
You did not specify which articles might be of interest to you. Can you let me know?
Do you mean to translate whole articles? Or just excerpts. I have some experience with translation (albeit a paper in the public domain) since I translated an 1838 paper on Sarrus and Rameaux in 2017 from French to English, and found it to be a more demanding job than I expected.
An agreement sometimes has unanticipated consequences. Several years ago some awkward copyright issues arose in connection with an internet mathematics encyclopedia blog, and that led to litigation! The litigation was resolved by the kind intervention of Wolfram. Now that mathematics blog is Wolfram MathWorld.
So, for reasons of my ignorance about the legal issues and what such an agreement entails, issues of copyright, and my inability to anticipate what might happen in the future to my articles, I regret to say no I do not agree.
If your interest in translating parts of my articles indicated your positive appraisal, please know that I appreciate your interest, and would also appreciate wider circulation of my articles.
Might you consider just linking to my arxiv and RG articles instead?
Can you let RG and me know where to find your blogpost? Learning from others is always important for me, so I would like to see what you say.
Best wishes on your blogpost.
Robert Shour
I did not literally translate the whole of your articles (from 2008 and 2009, as linked to above), but I have provided references, have constructed my own interpretation, with explicitly citing your article/or a page or paragraph and used footnotes, where that was needed. I don't know how much a translation needs to be altered to be legal, but I can say some parts are more or less literally translated. It will take me a lot of time to back-translate this to English, but here is the link: nieuwbegin.fandom.com/nl/wiki/Gebruikersblog:Iscool/NBt_4-11-0:_De_evolutie_van_de_taal_en_de_samenleving. I have omitted theories and calculations -that were in the article (from 2009)- and given a worded reinterpretation of the information that these represented. I have referenced to the articles, but by sake of simplicity (I don't expect that all my public could follow/rightly understand your theoretical frameworks, as they appear in the articles) I have given summaries per paragraph, some longer, some shorter. It is a lot worse legally when I used all the information of your articles, and wouldn't have used references and citations. I declare that I have provided all the information thruthfully and have not gone is so far detail that I copied whole passages, in those instances, I have referenced my readers to your articles (from 2008 and 2009). I would like to know what you think about it, and I hope I don't have to omit half the information that is in my blog right now.
Kind regards,
Imme Roerdinkholder
Imme Roerdinkholder
Thank you for the link to your blog.
I have no objection to your academic, referenced, recapitulation, translated from English to Dutch, of the 2008 article on lexical growth and the 2009 article on networked intelligence.
On the contrary, I am delighted that you have made the works available in Dutch. Please accept my appreciative admiration and thanks for your immense effort. I can only hope that the ideas in the articles are worthy of your attention. My only caveat is that I do not surrender, assign or otherwise release any of the legal rights, whatever they may be, in such works.
Incidentally, the mathematical treatment in the 2008 and 2009 articles arose out of ideas summarized in a book The Intelligence of Language I made available on amazon.
With best wishes to you in this and your future work,
Bob Shour
I read the 2011 paper by Atkinson on phonemic diversity in May 2019. It had not occurred to me in 2008 or since that there might be a way to find a rate of phonemic change. So the Atkinson paper is very interesting. Unfortunately, I could not find a way to align Atkinson's ideas with those in the 2008 lexical growth paper and in the 2009 intelligence paper, mentioned in the question above. But I did find a 2015 paper, Detecting Regular Sound Changes in Linguistics as Events of Concerted Evolution (Hruschka et al) and was pretty amazed at some of their data. I have thus added a paper on phonemic and lexical change which might be of interest.
Robert Shour
Thank you for the recommendations about some additional papers, I will read these and maybe provide them also as additional reading material in the blogpost.
Kind regards,
Imme Roerdinkholder
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