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George breaks down a paper that discusses ChatGPT’s supposed ability to create languages. It is not impressive.
Citations
Diamond, Justin. “Genlangs and Zipf’s Law.” ArXiv Computer Science, 2023. https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2304/2304.12191.pdf
De Marzo, Giordano, Francesco Sylos Labini, and Luciano Pietronero. “Zipf’s Law for Cosmic Structures: How Large Are the Greatest Structures in the Universe?” Astronomy & Astrophysics 651 (July 2021): A114. https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/202141081.
Gabaix, X. “Zipf’s Law for Cities: An Explanation.” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 114, no. 3 (August 1, 1999): 739–67. https://doi.org/10.1162/003355399556133.
Li, Wentian. “Analyses of Baby Name Popularity Distribution in U.S. for the Last 131 Years.” Complexity 18, no. 1 (September 2012): 44–50. https://doi.org/10.1002/cplx.21409.
Wang, Ding, Haibo Cheng, Ping Wang, Xinyi Huang, and Gaopeng Jian. “Zipf’s Law in Passwords.” IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security 12, no. 11 (November 2017): 2776–91. https://doi.org/10.1109/TIFS.2017.2721359.
Links
The Tweet that stared this: https://twitter.com/JPSoucy/status/1638747703332175872?s=20 Genlangs and Zipf’s law data https://github.com/Justin-Diamond/genlangs-and-zipfs
Law brief article https://www.reuters.com/legal/new-york-lawyers-sanctioned-using-fake-chatgpt-cases-legal-brief-2023-06-22/
Sofia
A pendantic response to 9:37-10:00, but I think you might find this interesting.
In Finnish, verbs do inflect in case when they’re in one of the infinitives. For example:
Opiskelimme kuunnellen.
Opiskel-i-mme kuunnell-e-n.
study-past-1pl listen-2nd_infinitive-INESSIVE_CASE
“We studied by listenening.”
Menemme kotiin nukkumaan
Mene-mme koti-in nukku-ma-an
go-1pl home-illative_case sleep-3rd_infinitive-ILLATIVE-CASE
“We’re going home to sleep.”
Disclaimer: I’m a B1 speaker of Finnish at best. If you want to read more, check out these links:
https://uusikielemme.fi/finnish-grammar/verbs/infinitives/the-5-finnish-infinitives
http://www.thefinnishteacher.com/infinitiivit–the-infinitives.html
In one of my conlangs, you can also put cases on inflected verbs to create subordinate clauses. For example:
I saw, she went-accusative to the store.
“I saw her go to the store.”
She went-nominative to the store, brightens my day.
“It brightens my day that she went to the store.”
gacorley
That’s super interesting. I was aiming for broad statements, because just listing that verbs as inflecting for case just struck me as a model error. I think in the cases you describe, you could argue that the verb is first nominalized, then inflected for case, which is perfectly reasonable. Of course, language is incredibly diverse, so it’s dangerous to make general statements.