"naively I certainly thought that all humans would have words for exact counting uh and the Paha don't okay so they don't have any words for even one there's not a word for one in their language and so..."

"Gibson when did you first become fascinated with human language as a kid in school when we had to structure sentences in English grammar I I I found that process interesting I found it confusing as to..."

"finished my undergraduate degree which was computer science and math and Canada and Queens University I decided to go to grad school it's like that's what I always thought I would do and I went to Cam..."

"seem like a real theory of things in any way and so I just thought this was this seemed like an interesting area where there wasn't enough good work did you ever come across like the the philosophy an..."

"so I thought at least figuring out the forms of human language which sounds really hard but is actually maybe more attractable so it's interesting you think there is a big divide there's a gap there's..."

"you find most beautiful about human language maybe the form of human language the expression of human language what I find beautiful about human language is the uh some of the generalizations that um ..."

"those as about maybe a little more than 40% maybe 45% of the world's languages or more I mean 50% of the world's languages are verb final those tend to be um post positions those markers the same we h..."

"correct verb final is still subject object verb that's correct yeah the subject is generally first that's so fascinating I ate an apple or I Apple at yes okay and this fascinating that there's a prett..."

"you know it turns out that having verbs initial and then having prepositions ends up making dependencies shorter and and having verbs final and having postpositions ends up making dependency shorter t..."

"ask you okay let me uh just sometimes Basics you you mentioned dependencies a few times yeah what do you mean by dependencies well what I mean is in um in language there's kind of three structures to ..."

"I'm talking to you you're talking to me we have a bunch of words and we're putting together in a sequence they it turns out they are connected so that every word is connected to just one other word in..."

"all sentences are trees at some level can I pause on that cuz it it's to me just as a Layman it uh it's surprising yeah that you can break down sentences in many most all languages all languages I int..."

"thing we can think of is that there's just connections between the words to make the the utterance and so just say I have like two dogs entered a room okay here's a sentence and so uh we're connecting..."

"noticing so there are verbs those are these things that typically Mark uh they refer to events and states in the world and they're nouns which typically refer to people places and things is what peopl..."

"there's multiple constraints that you want to like you want to usually convey multiple meanings is the idea and maybe you have like a rhythm or a rhyming structure as well and depending on so but you ..."

"from English poetry because the word order is much less constrained yeah there's a much more extensive uh culture of poetry throughout the history of the last 100 years in Russia and I I always wonder..."

"terminology of agent and patient and uh and the other ones you used those are sort of linguistic terms correct those are those are for like kind of meaning those are meaning and and subject and object..."

"think it's pretty automatable at this point people can figure out the words are they can figure out the morphemes which are the technically morphemes are the the minimal meaning units within a languag..."

"that's sticky mhm cuz you're breaking the rules and then everybody use it and doesn't follow the rules yeah and they they say screw it to the rules it's fascinating so you said it mores lots of questi..."

"will ask the same question over and over but uh how does a just sometimes to understand things like morphemes it's nice to just ask the question how does these kinds of things evolve so you uh have a ..."

"like a naive View and I don't I mean I I think it's probably right right it's naive and probably right well I don't know if it's naive I think it's simple simple yeah I think naive is naive is an indi..."

"other group and so any kind of contrast which you're talking about which I find useful I'm going to I'm going to start using as well so I I worked a little bit in um in in specific areas of words in i..."

"depending on your and but you go to different cultures um especially the non-industrialized cultures and there'll be many fewer so some cultures will have only two believe it or not that the Dan I and..."

"because they see the same colors as we see so it's not like they have they don't they have a a weak a low color palette and the things they're looking at they're looking at a lot of beautiful scenery ..."

"are but they just don't need to don't need to talk about them they don't have so probably color words is a good example of how language evolves from sort of function when you need to communicate the u..."

"of current languages yeah I you get an inkling of that from the rapid communication on certain platforms like on Reddit there's different communities and they'll come up with different slang usually f..."

"what you know how do I figure out what a dependency structure is I'd say the dependency structures aren't that hard to generally I think there's a lot of agreement of what they of what they are for al..."

"grammar as a way to sort of cover human languages and then he actually figured out that well depending on the formalization of those grammars you might get more complicated or less complicated languag..."

"okay and then phrase structure grammar is this idea that you can break down language into this s npvp it's a particular formalism for describing language okay so and chsky was the first one he's the o..."

"a little harder to see in phrase structure grammar you know the the place where Chomsky sort of devolved or went off from from from this is he also thought there was um something called M okay and so ..."

"mean the then then he ended up showing later so he proposed this theory of grammar which has movement there's other places where he thought there's movement not just auxiliary verbs but things like th..."

"and then we can copy it and so an advantage uh for there's multiple advantages of the lexical copying story it's not my story this is like um Ivan SG linguists a bunch of linguists have been proposing..."

"from is that it has to be built in and so what they're learning is uh that there there's some built-in movement is built in in his story is absolutely part of your language module and uh and then you ..."

"like fine under the lexical copying story it's like well you just learn the usage whatever the usage is is what you is what you do with this with with this word but um it doesn't it's a little bit har..."

"sentence so here we're going to get to that but I you know the formal language stuff is a little aside Chomsky wasn't proposing it for human languages even he was just pointing out that human language..."

"that there's all these like subtle ways in which things which which look like generalizations aren't generalizations and they you across the category they're they're word specific and and they have an..."

"FM R functional magnetic resonance imaging and that's a very good localization method so I can figure out where exactly these signals are coming from pretty you know down to you know millimeters you k..."

"that's the biggest difference between me and gnome uh is that I gather data from people I uh do experiments with people and I gather Corpus data whatever whatever Corpus data is available and we do qu..."

"differences about the movement Story versus the lexical copy story those are theories so the the like the theories are I but I think the the reason we differ in part is because of how we evaluate the ..."

"in English just clarify the distance of the dependencies is whenever the uh boy cried this um there's a dependence between words and then you counting the number of what morphemes between them that's ..."

"the the behavioral consequence there if you I mean we this is kind of methods like how do we get at this you could try to do experiments to get people to produce these things they're going to have a h..."

"okay what about the the completion of this with the central so if you give them a partial sentence say I say um the book which the author who and I ask you to now finish that off for me I mean either ..."

"that they tend not to cross dependencies very much like so the dependency structure they just they tend to keep things uh non-cross and there's a you know there's a technical term they call that proje..."

"right so I mean the the story here is just about communication it is just about production really it's about ease of production is the story when you say production can you can oh I just mean ease of ..."

"the way I talk to you is going to be different from how I talk to different people so I'm I'm definitely angling what I'm saying to who I'm saying right it's not like I'm is talking the same way to ev..."

"listener because otherwise if you're optimizing to for the ease of production then you're you're not going to have any of the interesting complexity of language like you're trying let's control for wh..."

"the thing that was entered was two dogs I mean there's I mean it's kind of awkward and weird and stuff but those are all similar messages with different forms but different ways I might frame and of c..."

"they're you know they don't understand what they're do we're going to talk about that later maybe but uh like we can distinguish in our forget about large language models like humans maybe you'll talk..."

"language Network so right now my language network is going like crazy when I'm talking and when I'm listening to you because we're both we're communicating and that's pretty stable yeah it's incredibl..."

"and so you know try to get you know your question is how and when are language developing you know how when how does this left lateralized system come to play where's it you know and it's really hard ..."

"English you speak Russian then both of them are hitting that same network if you if you're fluent in those languages so programming not at all isn't that amazing even if you're a really good programme..."

"but is it possible that this area of the brain is doing some kind of translation into a deeper set of almost like a Concepts that's it has to be doing so it's doing in communication right it is transl..."

"about an inner voice I always thought this was a metaphor and and uh they here I'm I know most of you whoever is listening to this thinks I'm crazy now because I'm I don't have an in your voice and I ..."

"appear to be separate from thinking MH so that's one set one set of data from feder Eno's group is that um no matter what task you do if it doesn't have words and combinations of words in it then it w..."

"bunch of patients who who she's shown this that they're just um so that that sort of combination suggests that language isn't necessary for thinking it it it doesn't mean you can't think in language y..."

"model in in predicting exactly what's good and what's bad in English you know you now you're saying is it a good theory well probably not you know because I I want a smaller Theory than that it's too ..."

"they're using that for meaning I mean probably but we don't know you right that the kinds of theories of language that llms are closest to are called construction based theories can you explain what c..."

"these examples from various groups showing that they can be tricked in all kinds of ways they really don't understand the the meaning of what's going on and so there's a lot of examples that he and ot..."

"the car is behind door number one so I'm going to choose door number one Monty Hall opens door number three and shows me nothing there should I trade for door number two even though I know the good pr..."

"seem to understand yeah it's easily fooled yes does not seem like a scientific um data driven like analysis of like how many places is a damn impressive in terms of meaning and understanding and how m..."

"error I'm just saying the error there is like if I explain to you there's 100% chance that the car is behind this case this door will do you want to trade people say no but this thing will say yes bec..."

"same way as humans they and that's not trained so they do exactly so there so that is a similarity so but then it's it's that's not meaning right this is form but when we get into meaning this is wher..."

"form that is generating it's mimicking true statements that's right that's right from the internet I guess I guess the underlying idea there is that on the internet truth is over represented versus fa..."

"reasoning capability yeah that's what this group argues so the the same group feder Enos group has a recent paper arguing exactly that there a guy called Kyle Mell who's here in Austin Texas actually ..."

"you should be able to complete Central embedded sentences right I mean that's the the mechanism is if it's modeling some I think it's kind of really interesting that it it's really interesting it's mo..."

"embeddings so what I like about dependency grammar is it makes the cognitive cost associated with long longer distance connections very transparent Bas there's some there turns out there is a cost ass..."

"a number I wonder if there's a beautiful equation connecting cognitive cost and length of dependency eal mc² kind of thing yeah it's it's complicated but probably it's doable I would I would guess it'..."

"my guess but because the reason it's probably an exponential is like it's it's not just the distance between two words because I can make a very very long subject verbal dependency by adding Lots and ..."

"feels like it's a deep I mean language is so fundamental to The Human Experience and this is a nice clean theory of language MH where yeah it's like wow okay so like we like our words close together t..."

"exception it's an exception uh that you say that most natural languages as we've been talking about have local dependencies with one exception legal e that's right so what is legal first of all oh wel..."

"Jud yeah yeah yeah pass drop the Judgment it's just like these are frequent these are things which happen in legal these texts then we can ask the dependent measure is like how well you understand tho..."

"Mak makes big differences in all the populations uncenter embedding how hard is that process by the way don't question but how hard is it to detect Center embedding oh easy easy to detect just looking..."

"throw your definitions you use a word a couple words and then you define it and then you continue the sentence like just don't write like that and and you ask so then we ask lawyers we thought oh mayb..."

"understand and everybody's eyes glaze over and they don't read I I'm suspicious as well I'm still suspicious and I I hear what you're saying it could be kind of you know no individual and even average..."

"next president of the United States can instead of saying generic things say exactly I ban uh cent center embeddings and make Ted the uh the language Zar of the Eric Martinez is the guy you should rea..."

"mathematical formulations you have when talking about languages communication is uh this idea of noisy channels what's a noisy channel so that's about communication and so this is going back to Shanno..."

"and then there's noise on the communication on the commun on the uh receiver side so that you have some problem maybe understanding me for stuff that's just internal to you in some way so you've got s..."

"and so he moved to bellhs and worked on communication uh from a mathematical point point of view and was you know uh did all kinds of amazing work and so he's just more on the signal side versus like ..."

"is somewhat optimized for that and and you know we have this one guess in that direct and these are kind of Just So Stories I have to be you know pretty Frank they're not like I can't show this is tru..."

"languages in the world's language none is right now we know is any better than any other with respect to sort of optimizing dependency lengths for example they're all kind of do it do it well they all..."

"then we're talking about learning it's like probably easier to learn regular regular things things which are very predictable and easy to so so that's that's probably about learning as my is our guest..."

"so to what degree is language this is returning to Chomsky a little bit is is innate you said that for chamski he used the idea that language is some aspects of language are innate to explain away cer..."

"large language models are learning so well is because I think you can learn the form the forms of human language from the input I think that's like it's likely to be true so that part of the brain tha..."

"you know there's these natural experiments which happen where people get these you know strange events in their brains at very young Ages which wipe out sections of their brain and and they behave tot..."

"but yeah what what would Chomsky say about the fact the thing you're saying now that the languages is seems to be happening separate from thought because as far as I understand maybe you can correct m..."

"so uh that term weird is from Joe Henrich he's at uh Harvard he's a Harvard evolutionary biologist and so he works on lots of different topics and uh he basically was pushing that observation that we ..."

"or in Papu Guinea and these these places where the world has sort of stayed still for long enough and they're have like so there there aren't earthquakes there aren't um ah well certainly no earthquak..."

"for a bunch of different people and and frankly it's a I I did this task this is f and it's a weird it's a little bit weird so you they say the word that they thought that we thought was one it's few ..."

"that numbers don't present themselves yeah so the words aren't there and then and so then we do these other things well if if they don't have the words can they do exact matching kinds of tasks can th..."

"chicken and egg thing there because if you don't have the words then maybe they'll limit you in the kind of like a little baby Einstein there won't be able to come up with a counting task you know wha..."

"hypothesis not m from Anthropologist is are guessing about where words for counting came from is from farming maybe any yeah uh do you have a sense why Universal languages like espiranto have not take..."

"fascinating there's less of a value uh economically it's like kind of what drives this it's not about it's not a you know it's not just for fun I mean there are these groups that do want to learn lang..."

"in an automated way from one language to another there's there's going to be cases where it's going to be really hard right so there are Concepts that are in one language and not in another like the m..."

"average per sentence uh dependency length for Hemingway is probably the shortest that's your sense huh it's simple sentences short short yeah yeah yeah yeah I mean that's when if you have really long ..."

"and so there probably a signal in there and it might very well be something complicated like human language I mean sure with a small brain in in in lower in lower species there's probably not a very g..."

"things on earth well I mean I think some of them are not going to have much interesting to say but some of them will we don't know we certainly don't know I think I I think if we were humble there cou..."

"instance like that's really fascinating let me ask you a wild outo sci-fi question if we make contact with an intelligent alien civilization and um you get to meet them MH how hard do you think it lik..."