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PreBabel - The True Universal Language

bradford

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laflooey arogma!!
ditrippitik rappitatash.
fluently.
 

Sparhawk

One of those men your mother warned you about...
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I've never doubted it, Brad... :D
 

bradford

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I got the alphabet figured out
http://www.hermetica.info/SimpleIPA.jpg
There's a third dimension to it that shows all the consonant
initial and final combinations, also geometrical.
With the vowels we have more than thirty million distinct
syllables that we can pronounce.
 

fkegan

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Question -- from "Trailsend" -- ... that since all Chinese logograms can be broken into a root set, and you have used this same root set as the basis for PreBabel, then all Chinese logograms can be broken down into PreBabel root words.

Answer -- Yes, exactly.

Hi All,

PreBabel is a computer based version of extending the Mandarin Chinese (the language of the Imperial bureaucrats to be read throughout the Empire even though the spoken Chinese was so different every 300 li) to all the world.

Ultimately, it is an extension of the notion of using conceptual ideograms (the root set) to express basic ideas. The same concept could be pronounced differently in each country or language although it would have the same image or ideogram or root.
He can't use picture or drawn images, so he is working hard to find an equivalent in alphabet letters. However in his conclusion he comes to:
On the contrary, the U (mother proper) is a silent language. All its root words are ideographs and are silent. Any b-word of U (English) will be pronounced the same as the b-word of English. In fact, the b-word of U (Arabic), identical to the b-word of U (English) in word form, will be pronounced the same as the b-word of Arabic. That is, learning the U (mother proper) and U (English) needs not putting up an effort of learning a new spoken language.

Seems to jump the shark when he slips himself from ideograms to alphabet letters while hoping to maintain the same universality.

Frank
 

elvis

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Looks interesting. From the same Tienzen Gong guy Bradford mentioned earlier.

IDM covers pre-babel in that the focus in on a form of communication across the species and not grounded in one sensory system. The moment ANY specialist bias develops so we move AWAY from pre-babel. (the differences detected in east/east culture communications DO NOT EXIST pre-babel, only their POTENTIAL exists due to pressures of local context development. We can REMOVE all Chinese from the IC symbolisms and get the SAME classes of meanings across ALL cultures and so show and underlying, mythic thinking, sameness behind the differences)

BTW the IDM book will be out in few weeks - focus on extending the summary coverage of the 'upper ontology' focus - http://www.emotionaliching.com/AbstractD.html
 

fkegan

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This article from Newsweek 3/1/10 sheds light upon fundamental problems with both PreBabel universal language and Chris Lofting notions of neuroscience and I Ching:

http://www.newsweek.com/id/233778

To take one recent example, a region behind the forehead called the medial prefrontal cortex supposedly represents the self: it is active when we ("we" being the Americans in the study) think of our own identity and traits. But with Chinese volunteers, the results were strikingly different. The "me" circuit hummed not only when they thought whether a particular adjective described themselves, but also when they considered whether it described their mother. The Westerners showed no such overlap between self and mom. Depending whether one lives in a culture that views the self as autonomous and unique or as connected to and part of a larger whole, this neural circuit takes on quite different functions.

"Cultural neuroscience," as this new field is called, is about discovering such differences. Some of the findings, as with the "me/mom" circuit, buttress longstanding notions of cultural differences. For instance, it is a cultural cliché that Westerners focus on individual objects while East Asians pay attention to context and background (another manifestation of the individualism-collectivism split). Sure enough, when shown complex, busy scenes, Asian-Americans and non-Asian--Americans recruited different brain regions. The Asians showed more activity in areas that process figure-ground relations—holistic context—while the Americans showed more activity in regions that recognize objects.

Cultural neuroscience wouldn't be making waves if it found neurobiological bases only for well-known cultural differences. It is also uncovering the unexpected. For instance, a 2006 study found that native Chinese speakers use a different region of the brain to do simple arithmetic (3 + 4) or decide which number is larger than native English speakers do, even though both use Arabic numerals. The Chinese use the circuits that process visual and spatial information and plan movements (the latter may be related to the use of the abacus). But English speakers use language circuits. It is as if the West conceives numbers as just words, but the East imbues them with symbolic, spatial freight. (Insert cliché about Asian math geniuses.) "One would think that neural processes involving basic mathematical computations are universal," says Ambady, but they "seem to be culture-specific."

The Chinese based set of root words in PreBabel would also involve a Chinese mindset as the Yin background to the Yang focus of this universal language. Western languages and Western thinkers would understand the entire system different than Chinese.

Similarly, this more sophisticated cultural neuroscience highlights Chris Lofting's confusion of the philosophy of dichotomy with the philosophy of the mathematics of number base systems. Binary math is based upon decimal math with the number of digits reduced from 10 to 2 to allow math computations by machines with electrical or electronic circuits that can only be ON/OFF.

Chinese Yang/Yin mathematics is not simple binary of zero and One. Rather it is a symbol system based upon the magnitude unit of 1 and gestalt figure and ground elements of 2 and 3.

Fascinating article!

Frank
 

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