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Comment by trekkie1024 | Hacker News Reader

So you're saying something like the Universal Translator from Star Trek might be possible?

For humans yes, I am not saying one-shot learning would be possible for undocumented indigenous languages but few shot language acquisition in cases of a single surviving speaker is something that I would consider highly probable. This hypothesis relies heavily on the nature of variational learning in latent space and observations about human languages. It is of course possible that some ethnicity would have a language that's so different from other languages that it is effectively alien (and the assumption homo sapiens common brain structure and physiology have no influence on our languages and/or the human neural structure cannot be statistically modeled by latent variables, at least not with the current variational learning techniques). This is possible but very, very unlikely.

In encryption it's generally impossible to decrypt a 1 to many hash. You can do some clever things (correlating and combining other data) but if you're just looking at some hash that could be an infinite number of other things, you're just out of luck.

I'll take the extreme position that language translation is an unsolvable problem because of this exact phenomena. There was a recent case where a politician was accused of making a racist remark. He said something like "You are a donkey." or "You all are donkeys." to another [minority background] politician. Which was it? Well in many languages the second person plural and the second person singular formal are identical. And there are no articles. So the two statements are literally identical. Which did he mean? Nobody will ever know, besides him.

And outside of inherent language ambiguities, start piling on the endless (and ever/rapidly changing) euphemisms, idioms, colloquialisms, metaphors, just plain old ambiguous sarcasm, and all the other things that make language fun (and more expressive). And these sort of things aren't really the exceptions so much as the rule. And it only becomes more common the more distant languages get. Translations from various Asian languages to English often look just hilarious. Now imagine going back to languages exponentially more detached from any modern language, using one can only imagine what sort of expressions, and trying to convert it.

Especially using a neural network type system you'll probably be able to get something. And, even worse, it might well even make sense. That's a problem because, kind of like ChatGPT, it being coherent is zero indication of it being right.

I don’t think the pigeonhole principle applies to human languages though

> we can trace the roots of modern languages back to the Phoenician script

That's modern European languages ... and post ~1100 BCE if I recall correctly.

So, indigenous languages from people settled in Australia [1] for 50,000+ years can be a little different, some don't have "left" | "right" as relative to PoV directions and stick with East V. West as absolutes for example.

We're down to maybe 20-30 from pre colonial 100's though [2].

[1] https://mgnsw.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/map_col_high...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwSXFvDDjYE

> That's modern European languages ... and post ~1100 BCE if I recall correctly.

That's Indo-European (as in descended from PIE/Yanmaya). Basque is older than all of them and it's a living European language.

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