literature—also way back in the early fifties. I found sample vocabularies for cow, for dog, for crow, even for rabbit and duck. Some of the "words" were kind of interesting. For crow, a B-natural whole note, two staccato A-sharp quarter notes and a scattering of grace notes. Translation: Beat it, there's an eagle coming. Crow was one of the simpler vocabularies, only about fifty identified words; but it was astonishing what corvus could convey to his friends with a few simple caws. And some of the beasts, nearly mute, got considerable meaning across without any sound at all.
Take the Bombay duck's train-switching wiggle of the tail feathers, for instance. Translation: "I love you very much, honey, let's get married."
I suspected, at about that point, that some of the early researchers were carried away by their senses of humor. "Language?" I complained to Semyon in our quarters, while I was reading the briefing books and he was playing something he called a balalaika, "How can they call that language? If my mouth waters, that means I want to eat, but is mouth-watering a word? It's only a reflex action, Semyon!"
He didn't miss a chord. He fired at me: "Is better, Logan, that you consider the analogy of onomatopoeia!"
Well, that stopped me—until I looked it up; and then it stopped me in a different way. Onomatopoeia: the formation of words from instinctive or mimetic sounds, thought by some to be the essential origin of all language.
All right, grant Semyon's point. Assume that the supple English language was really nothing but a refined and codified collection of yelps and wheezes. Assume that animal grunts and posturings were language as well.
What did all that have to do with me?
Finding out took some time—and a lot of work, of which my own was about the smallest part. Remember Manhattan Project? It had a big, difficult, important job. The United States needed an isotope of radium—U 235 , as every schoolboy knows—and they needed lots of it. They even knew ways they might get it—had already got it, in fact, in microgram quantities. There was thermal diffusion—the endless flow of uranium salts through osmotic barriers. There was the mass spectrograph. There was the "breeder" reaction; and there were others. Manhattan Project had to make a decision.
So they decided to do them all.
That was the military mind at work, and who is to say they were wrong? Project Mako worked along the same lines. We had half a dozen paralleling projects going at once. Lineback's own group was tediously expanding their vocabulary of Cow. Semyon Timiyazev was bedeviling his little dogs with yes-no codes, persuading them to talk to him . A team of four full lieutenants was reading meaning into the elevation of a dog's tail, and translating it into flipper-positions for the seals they were given to work with. And more.
And I, with a fifty-year-old WAVE, a Barnard graduate with a degree in statistical mathematics, to help me, was assigned the programming of a computer series that would make sense out of what they were doing.
It wasn't easy. It was simple enough to assign conceptual values to the parts of language, and I couldn't complain about the equipment the Navy gave me. The basic unit was an old mercury-delay RAGNAROK; but some considerate genius in BuSup had added a self-checking circuit to flush triple voltage through the tubes to pick out the bad ones, between operations; so that the unit was pretty reliably good for 99-six-nines per cent effective operation. There were forty-eight memory tanks in the mercury-delay class, plus a batch of magnetic drums for instructions and a large electrostatic storage unit. With its card punch, reader and teleprinter, it pretty well filled my space. I looked at it and felt something like the midget who married the fat lady: It was a lot of computer to handle all by myself.
But the hard part wasn't running the computer, it was making sense out of what came out.
Semyon had told me so. He
Take the Bombay duck's train-switching wiggle of the tail feathers, for instance. Translation: "I love you very much, honey, let's get married."
I suspected, at about that point, that some of the early researchers were carried away by their senses of humor. "Language?" I complained to Semyon in our quarters, while I was reading the briefing books and he was playing something he called a balalaika, "How can they call that language? If my mouth waters, that means I want to eat, but is mouth-watering a word? It's only a reflex action, Semyon!"
He didn't miss a chord. He fired at me: "Is better, Logan, that you consider the analogy of onomatopoeia!"
Well, that stopped me—until I looked it up; and then it stopped me in a different way. Onomatopoeia: the formation of words from instinctive or mimetic sounds, thought by some to be the essential origin of all language.
All right, grant Semyon's point. Assume that the supple English language was really nothing but a refined and codified collection of yelps and wheezes. Assume that animal grunts and posturings were language as well.
What did all that have to do with me?
Finding out took some time—and a lot of work, of which my own was about the smallest part. Remember Manhattan Project? It had a big, difficult, important job. The United States needed an isotope of radium—U 235 , as every schoolboy knows—and they needed lots of it. They even knew ways they might get it—had already got it, in fact, in microgram quantities. There was thermal diffusion—the endless flow of uranium salts through osmotic barriers. There was the mass spectrograph. There was the "breeder" reaction; and there were others. Manhattan Project had to make a decision.
So they decided to do them all.
That was the military mind at work, and who is to say they were wrong? Project Mako worked along the same lines. We had half a dozen paralleling projects going at once. Lineback's own group was tediously expanding their vocabulary of Cow. Semyon Timiyazev was bedeviling his little dogs with yes-no codes, persuading them to talk to him . A team of four full lieutenants was reading meaning into the elevation of a dog's tail, and translating it into flipper-positions for the seals they were given to work with. And more.
And I, with a fifty-year-old WAVE, a Barnard graduate with a degree in statistical mathematics, to help me, was assigned the programming of a computer series that would make sense out of what they were doing.
It wasn't easy. It was simple enough to assign conceptual values to the parts of language, and I couldn't complain about the equipment the Navy gave me. The basic unit was an old mercury-delay RAGNAROK; but some considerate genius in BuSup had added a self-checking circuit to flush triple voltage through the tubes to pick out the bad ones, between operations; so that the unit was pretty reliably good for 99-six-nines per cent effective operation. There were forty-eight memory tanks in the mercury-delay class, plus a batch of magnetic drums for instructions and a large electrostatic storage unit. With its card punch, reader and teleprinter, it pretty well filled my space. I looked at it and felt something like the midget who married the fat lady: It was a lot of computer to handle all by myself.
But the hard part wasn't running the computer, it was making sense out of what came out.
Semyon had told me so. He
Similar Books
The Channel (The Gifted Book 2)
C. L. McCourt
UpAndComing
Christi Ann
For Lovers Only
Alex Hairston
Broken Heart 04 Wait till Your Vampire Gets Home
Michele Bardsley
Separate Roads
Tracie Peterson, Judith Pella
Eden's Hammer
Lloyd Tackitt
State of Grace
Joy Williams
Witch Hammer
M. J. Trow
The Book of Joe
Jonathan Tropper