Computerra article

The Speed of Thought

Author: Stanislav Koslovsky
Published in the journal Computerra Nº 26-27 (20 July 2004)
http://offline.computerra.ru/2004/550/34762/

Quick index:

• Summary of the article
• Translated excerpts in English

Summary of the Article

(by certified translator John Woodsworth)

The article tackles the question of increasing the speed of human thinking.  First it looks at the three standard methods of increasing a computer’s speed: upgrade, acceleration and optimisation.  The first is impracticable for the human mind.  The second has echoes in the use of psychopharmacological drugs.  The third is the focus of this article.

The author examines the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that people organise their thinking patterns along the lines laid down by their native languages.¹  He points to the success of Navaho American navy radio operators using their native language to transmit coded military messages in the WW2 Pacific theatre — because it was linked to Navaho culture and so different from English terminology, the Japanese could not break the code.²

Such knowledge can be put to manipulative use with the aim of narrowing a population’s focus of thinking — for example, in George Orwell’s 1984³ and, to a lesser degree, in the ‘politically correct’ phrases of some media writers (such as price optimisation for price hikes).  But its manipulative properties can also be employed toward positive goals, such as providing a universal language in the form of Toki Pona, a language designed by [Canadian linguist] Sonja Elen Kisa to express a variety of meanings using no more than 118 words (see translated excerpt).⁴

Language can also be used to broaden human thinking, as suggested by American science-fiction writer Samuel Delany in his novel Babel-17,⁵ or to increase its logical facility, as in the artificial language Loglan, first developed in the 1950s by James Cooke Brown not only for this purpose but also as an interface between human beings and computers.⁶ (It later spawned an offshoot known as Lojban.⁷)

Finally, the article examines the role of language in increasing thinking speed.  Such a notion was first proposed in the 1950s by Robert Heinlein in his science-fiction story “Gulf” (included in his collection Assignment in eternity), which featured a highly compacted language known as Speedtalk, in which each word was reduced to a single biphonemic syllable.⁸  Heinlein’s fictional ideas eventually found embodiment in an actual artficial language known as Ithkuil, published in 2004 by American linguist John Quijada, for which he has invented a complex system of grammar, phonology and orthography, along with a 4,000-word vocabulary.⁹

The article concludes with two points: (a) an anecdotal story concerning the American victories in the WW2 Pacific War being attributable at least in part to the comparative brevity of English sentences vis-à-vis Japanese,¹⁰ and (b) a study (including a sample text) which demonstrates the legibility of texts in which letter-order within words are scrambled, as long as the first and last letters of each word are correct.¹¹

References by the compiler of the summary:

¹ see (for example): http://www.cultsock.ndirect.co.uk/MUHome/cshtml/introductory/sapirw.html
² see (for example): http://www.history.navy.mil/faqs/faq61-2.htm
³ see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak
⁴ see: http://www.tokipona.org/
⁵ see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babel-17
⁶ see: http://www.loglan.org/
⁷ see: http://www.lojban.org/
⁸ see: http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=620
⁹ see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ithkuil   According to this Wikipedia entry, the mention of Ithkuil in the Computerra article (summarised here) prompted a number of Russian-speakers to contact Quijada with a view to making a more learner-friendly version.  Quijada responded with a revised variant of his invention which he called Ilaksh.
¹⁰ for a brief discussion of how Japanese speakers approach the notion of brevity today, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_language#Sentence_structure
¹¹ see (for example): http://www.trinitychurchdundee.org/poems.htm

Translated Excerpts in English

(by certified translator John Woodsworth)

Is there a way to increase the speed of human thinking?  Is it at all possible to make the human brain think faster? [...]

Language and thinking

[...] The most interesting aspect of this account [of Navaho radio operators using their native language to encode American naval communications during World War II in the Pacific] is that Navaho simply does not possess a multitude of technical military terms — there was no way it could.  However, they thought up a very clever scheme to get around this — namely, using combinations of existing words to stand in for terms missing in their language (much as in the language Toki Pona).

Language and the narrowing of consciousness

[...] It may seem as though language which narrows mental horizons is applicable only to totalitarian purposes, but this is by no means true.  In 2001 Sonja Kisa, on the basis of Taoist philosophy, worked out a language called Toki Pona, whose name translates as ‘good language’.  As in Orwellian Newspeak, the vocabulary of Toki Pona is limited.  However, in contrast to Newspeak, whose goal was subjugation and control, Toki Pona has set itself a different task.  It follows the philosophy Less is more.  Its goals include the breaking down of concepts into their component parts, excluding superfluous synonyms, an emphasis on the ‘good’, a sound pleasant to the ear.  This rather primitive language is called upon to liberate thinking from unnecessary words, make humanity wiser and teach it a simpler approach to life.

It hasn’t taken long for Toki Pona to achieve extraordinary popularity.  Literary works are being translated into it, and poetry is being written in it.  There is even a variant of the universal encyclopedia Wikipedia in Toki Pona (tokipona.wikipedia.org).

Ellochka Shchukina [a.k.a. Ellochka the Cannibal, a character in Ilja Ilf and Evgenij Petrov’s 1928 novel The Twelve Chairs] easily got by in life knowing only thirty words.  Well, Toki Pona has no more than 118 (you can find a list of these on the language’s official site at www.tokipona.org/nimi.html).  As this is only four times larger than Ellochka the Cannibal’s vocabulary, some ambiguity is unavoidable.  This isn’t always a bad thing, however.  When speaking Toni Pona, a person concentrates just on the basic features of things, not getting involved in unnecessary details.  Toki Pona is a ‘contextual language’ — i.e., in any given specific situation it distinguishes only those things which are critically important to understanding.  For example, a duck in Toki Pona is literally translated as water bird, but if there is a critical need to show exactly what water bird is being talked about, one can refer to a duck, for example, as a stupid water bird.

Just as one can reduce the fraction 37/148 to 1/4, so in Toki Pona one has to break down semantic constructions to simple and indivisible units of meaning.  Instead of saying, for example, I’m hungry, you say I want to eat.  Instead of teach it’s give knowledge; instead of health — a good body; instead of happiness — feeling good and so on.

Toki Pona enthusiasts maintain that in speaking this language, we discover for ourselves the deep meaning of things otherwise hidden behind the intricate constructions of traditional language.  You can learn Toki Pona in four hours, but once it is learnt, you can never forget it your whole life.  Speakers of the language maintain that learning it has given them a whole new outlook on the world — a more philosophical outlook.

I must admit that I did not take the time to learn Toki Pona myself, and so it’s hard for me to say whether it actually changes one’s consciousness or not.  It is safe to say, however, that the author of Toki Pona, Sonja Kisa, is a real free-thinking person, free from any kind of prejudice. [...]