<html><head></head><body><div><span data-mailaddress="foozler83@gmail.com" data-contactname="William Flynn Wallace" class="clickable"><span title="foozler83@gmail.com">William Flynn Wallace</span><span class="detail"> <foozler83@gmail.com></span></span> , 21/7/2014 4:29 PM:<blockquote class="mori" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:2px blue solid;padding-left:1ex;"><div class="mcntgmail_extra"><br><div class="mcntgmail_quote"><blockquote class="mcntgmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">
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</div></div>The point of language is to communicate meaning. So words have to mean<br>
the same thing to other speakers of that language. So you look at<br>
context. That's how dead languages are eventually translated.<br>
Codes on the other hand are a jumble of meaningless letters until the<br>
key is applied.<br></blockquote><div><br><div class="mcntgmail_default" style="font-family:comic sans ms,sans-serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(0,0,0);display:inline;">I am not convinced. A completely new language, not akin to Indo European or anything else, is just a jumble of meaningless letters without a key.</div>
<div class="mcntgmail_default" style="font-family:comic sans ms,sans-serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(0,0,0);display:inline;">How could you figure out the context? It could be a car manual or poems on death for all you know. </div></div></div></div></blockquote></div><div><br></div>Have you looked at elementary cryptoanalysis, like cracking substitution cyphers? Once you see statistical regularities you can start deducing a lot of things if you are clever. And human languages do have a fairly complex statistical structure - Zipf laws, entropy distributions, recursion etc. You can of course invent something utterly dissimilar (just check out some of the really weird conlangs like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C4%93len), but then using it becomes extremely hard. If "The enemy is attacking by air on tuesday" has to be expressed as a superposition of emotion-states with no nouns and spelling looking like cartoon swearing, then usage will be weak. Even Klingon is just a lot of unusual options found in human languages strung together to make a kind of linguist-in-joke (and even linguists find it hard to learn to use), but still likely very decypherable to a motivated opponent. <div><div><br><br>Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University</div></div></body></html>