Hacklog: Blogamundo — poking holes in the language barrier since approximately 1 month from now

This is a bit off-topic, I suppose, nothing to do with translation, but here’s an article about some rather amazing research:

“Uniquely human” component of language found in gregarious birds

To assess the birds’ syntactical skills, the research team exploited the diverse sounds in starling songs. They recorded eight different ‘rattles’ and eight ‘warbles’ from a single male starling and combined them to construct a total of 16 artificial songs. These songs followed two different grammars, or patterning rules.

Eight songs followed the “finite-state” rule, the simplest sort, thought to account for all non-human communication. A finite-state grammar allows for sounds to be appended only at the beginning or end of a string. These songs were built up from a rattle-warble base by adding rattle-warble pairs at the end. The simplest song (ab) was one rattle followed by one warble. The next simplest a rattle, then a warble, followed by a different Rattle and Warble (abAB).

The other eight songs followed the “context-free” rule, which allows for sounds to be inserted in the middle of an acoustic string, the simplest form of recursive center-embedding. So a context-free sequence also began with rattle-warble base (ab) but built up by inserting new sounds in the middle, such as rattle-Rattle-Warble-warble (aABb).

It’s funny, I’ve recently been thinking a lot about finite state machines while working on a little article on transliteration for text input in Amharic ( currently extremely incomplete).

Actually, my current system doesn’t require a context-free grammar.

If it turns out I need one, I’ll stick my head out the window and ask a starling.