
Show HN: Language Evolution Simulation - fatiherikli
https://github.com/fatiherikli/language-evolution-simulation
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DanielStraight
Can you explain a little more about what you're trying to simulate and why you
chose the model that you did?

Also... did you consider using known sound change processes?
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_change](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_change)

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fatiherikli
Hi, Sorry for the lack of explanation. it was a fun project. I wanted to
simulate agents who talking and learning new words from themselves. Each
island has 12 agents, and there are gates of islands for travelling between of
them. In this way, the agents can spread their words to other islands.

Edit: I'm just replacing a vowel or const on a word for sound change. It may
be better with natural sound change processes. I'll work on that. Thank you!

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wazari972
It would be interesting if the words from the different islands came from
existing languages, for instance (and for myself) I would put French,
Portuguese and English, to have the ability to understand how they get mixed

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fatiherikli
Thank you four your feedback. I'll work on that. Maybe I should remove Turkish
specific characters.

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DeusExMachina
You can pick words from the most common in a given language:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_common_words_in_English](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_common_words_in_English)

[http://french.languagedaily.com/wordsandphrases/most-
common-...](http://french.languagedaily.com/wordsandphrases/most-common-words)

Although languages like English and French are very close and have a lot of
cognates already. Maybe it's better to take languages more far apart from each
other.

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DonaldFisk
English and French are only distantly related. There _are_ cognates, but
they're hard to recognize: hound - chien, foot - pied, four - quatre. Words
you might be thinking are cognates - such as restaurant, police, etc. - are
actually loan words. Some are recent, others go back to the Norman Conquest.

English is closely related to these languages (in order of closeness): Scots;
Frisian; Dutch and German; Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, and Icelandic.

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mdup
Nice demo! Feature request: I'd like to see the people talking, like display
sentence of a random pair of agents, every 10 sec e.g. That way I would feel
immersed into users discussions :)

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eevilspock
It would be more understandable and educational if your simulation had the
following:

\- A way of visually indicating the divergence between languages. Minimal
differences are just "accents", but more make them dialects, and yet more make
them distinct languages. Perhaps use color.

\- A slider to change the frequency of exchange across islands. This would
show that if interchanges were high, there would be little divergence (none if
the interchanges were high enough). If interchanges were rare, divergence to
distinct languages becomes inevitable. At some middle rate you get dialects
but not languages.

\- Perhaps another slider to change the mutation rate.

\- Perhaps start with a small subset of a real language. This way people could
click on an island and see the actual evolution, or the divergence between any
two pairs. Instead showing the most used word, I'd show a sample of the same
words (those with the same meaning) for each language, along with the original
real language, so we could see, for example, how "tree" changed and diverged
over time.

\- I'm not a linguist, but I'd think divergence ends up negatively impacting
interchanges -- i.e even if you had a bridge connecting the islands, fewer
people would cross it if they can't speak the local language. If this is true,
divergence would accelerate over time.

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gus_massa
> _I 'm not a linguist, but I'd think divergence ends up negatively impacting
> interchanges_

I think this is true if there is a meaningful iteration between the persons.

For example, some of them get some food and some water, and they have to
interchange a some of it because both need food and water. And they only can
interchange it if they can talk a little (only a greeting? a minimal barter?)
Else they die and are somehow replaced with new agents.

But IIUC in simulations is more simpler and the agents only bounce against
each other, and the words are somewhat contagious.

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loisaidasam
Feature request for Etymology:

[https://github.com/fatiherikli/language-evolution-
simulation...](https://github.com/fatiherikli/language-evolution-
simulation/issues/2)

Someone have a few free minutes to hack this together today? Could be cool.

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eevilspock
Does anyone know of a good open-source Agent-based model simulation platform?

I want to create some educational simulations to help people understand
various emergent "natural" phenomenon, such as evolution, the invisible hand
of the free market, and the Matthew Effect. I want the simulations to be
interactive so users can see how changing a parameters effects the outcome.

I could custom code each of these, but I'd rather us a platform, especially
one in which the agent model and logic were easy to understand without being a
hardcore coder, so that anyone could look under the hood if they didn't trust
the accuracy of the simulation.

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iwannayoyo
There's netlogo, a multi-agent modeling language. It's not quite what you're
asking for, and it's not too stable, but it comes pre-loaded with at least
starter code for almost every model you listed, and it's syntax is very
readable.

[https://github.com/NetLogo/NetLogo](https://github.com/NetLogo/NetLogo)

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CWuestefeld
This is really cool. I wonder if there were a way to show variances of
individual agents - perhaps by calculating the difference of their current
vocabulary from their native vocabulary - and altering their color as a
marker.

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loisaidasam
NSFW version, hehehe: [https://loisaidasam.github.io/language-evolution-
simulation/](https://loisaidasam.github.io/language-evolution-simulation/)

~~~
pierrec
Understandably, the results are less convincing when the original corpus is
made of monosyllabic words. Maybe slightly longer swear words...

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okonomiyaki3000
What happens if you start with "fuddruckers"?

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jtwaleson
I was about to write my thesis on a simulation like this, agents would need to
evolve a syntax to survive (not just words like in the simulation above). It
truly is a fascinating subject! Never got around to building it, but still
very high on my list of things I want to when I have a couple of months to
spare.

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jvanloov
This fits within the scientific field of evolutionary linguistics
([https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_linguistics](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_linguistics)).

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instakill
This is really cool.

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zet2
cool

