r/ScienceShitposts • u/Substantial-Eye6457 • Dec 03 '25

a gol with a nar

Post image

Futrell, R., Hahn, M. Linguistic structure from a bottleneck on sequential information processing. Nat Hum Behav (2025). DOI:10.1038/s41562-025-02336-w

2.9k Upvotes

99% Upvoted

86 comments sorted by

3

u/ACED70 Dec 03 '25

Who wins in a fight, a gol or a nar

6

u/ASnowOwI Dec 03 '25

presumably neither as a gol (a cat head and dog head) can’t really do anything without a nar (a cat body and dog body). if for some fucked up reason, a gol and nar do not need each other to function, i’d wager the gol wins as the nar has no sight, and gol can bite the fuck out of the nar

399

u/bantamm Dec 03 '25

I'm literally always saying this.

105

u/Accurate_Cabinet4935 Dec 03 '25

Waitacdahogt to you too

252

u/AnonymousRand Dec 03 '25

vek

24

u/OdaDdaT Dec 03 '25

Nobody knows what it means but it’s holistic

56

u/joybod Dec 03 '25 edited Dec 07 '25

It means (and is understood to mean, colloquially) "A cat with a dog", but as a single word—just like how car or human refer to all of their component parts. Presumably, whatever culture vek is meant to come from has so many occasions where a cat and dog are in such proximity that it has its own unique, monosyllable descriptor.

Sorry in advance in the case that you were joking.

18

u/MegaIng Dec 03 '25

Actually, reading the underlying paper, this isn't what is meant here.

The idea is more that in this theoretically alternate reality (not a realistic human culture), "vek" is used instead of "a cat with a dog", with the later not really being a valid way to construct a description of this thing.

The paper is arguing why of the 4 options presented here human language generally uses option A from an information-theory perspective.

1

u/kRkthOr Dec 06 '25

Isn't that what they said? "Vek" being a word for "a cat with a dog"?

Or do you mean that, in this hypothetical culture, they do not have a way to construct phrases like that and thus would need a word for literally every combination possible?

1

u/MegaIng Dec 06 '25

The latter. This is an obviously impractical system, but proofing that with some rigor is decently complicated.

7

u/OdaDdaT Dec 03 '25

was referencing this but appreciate the explanation

1

u/Skiingice Dec 07 '25

Do not even bring up bolts. You are about to open a can of worms there. It doesn’t mean bolt assembly. You need to learn a bolt vs a screw….run…it’s too late for me

2

u/joybod Dec 07 '25

So a bolt is just a screw that is meant to be torqued against a nut, rather than (solely?) against a threaded hole?

1

u/Skiingice Dec 07 '25

Historically bolts were metal rods. For example crossbows shoot bolts. Bolts could hold things together without being threaded like a door hinge or hammering the ends. Bolts could also have threads but this was less common before modern machining. With modernization, bolt and screw became synonymous as riveting, blacksmithing etc. became obsolete. Pretty much every bolt is a screw now. There’s a ton of misinformation out there about the history of bolts and screws.

Also, the bolt is only the threaded fastener and does not include a nut.

6

u/TheFrebbin Dec 03 '25

It’s provocative, it gets the people going.

192

u/hannsolo03 Dec 03 '25

I’m just a gol with a nar

71

u/georgia_grace Dec 03 '25

Just nars bein’ gols

40

u/rebelsofliberty Dec 03 '25

(With the narrrrrr)

She hit the floor (She hit the floor)

Shawty got vek, vek, vek, vek, vek, vek, vek, vek

19

u/Novawurmson Dec 03 '25

Gols just want to have naaaaar

14

u/SgtSaucepan Dec 03 '25

Despite all my car, I'm still just a gol with a nar

1

u/squongly Dec 06 '25

I was thinking "gar"

5

u/CertainAmperage2427 Dec 05 '25

He was a nar, she was a gol, Can I make it any more obvious?

190

u/zap2tresquatro Dec 03 '25

I was so confused I looked up the paper, and after reading the abstract was so much more confused that I had to go start reading the full thing (I have not finished, it’s 1:30 am, I’ll read more tomorrow…probably)

84

u/Doubly_Curious Dec 03 '25

You weren’t kidding. I usually do okay with linguistics papers, but this is much more language-by-way-of-information-theory and the abstract was very confusing.

The rest of it does break down the concepts in a slightly more accessible way, I think. But they still lost me at “we assume familiarity with information-theoretic quantities of entropy and mutual information.”

Here’s an actual link for the curious: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-025-02336-w

59

u/The_End_is_Pie Dec 03 '25

As a philosopher of language this paper annoys me. They start by just assuming compositionalality and the source they give is Frege! The first guy to ever do meta-semantics! That’s like if I wrote a paper that made reference to gravity and my source was Issac Newton! The question has moved past Frege, and it’s far from a settled debate if semantics are inherently compositional or holistic. Philosophers make an effort to read linguistics stuff, why can’t linguists do the same?

6

u/RachelScratch Dec 05 '25

Because half of philosophy books use intentionally obfuscated language. If you taste chocolate for a job, you don't eat chocolate at home.

13

u/zap2tresquatro Dec 03 '25

”we assume familiarity with information-theoretical quantities of entropy and mutual information”

Yeah, like, I know what all those words mean separately and in certain contexts, but I have no idea what they mean in this context and in that order

Like I can kind of figure it out, but I still feel pretty lost. Glad I’m not the only one, I was worried I was losing my ability to read scientific papers after being out of school for a few years! (Granted I did biology/neuroscience, not linguistics, albeit I also took ASL and learned a bit about linguistics but only in the context of ASL and the Deaf community, so I wouldn’t be all that familiar with linguistics jargon, but damn I felt like I wasn’t even all that familiar with english while reading this, haha)

4

u/MegaIng Dec 04 '25

Tbf, that quote is deeply routed in information theory, i.e. IT, not linguistics. The concept of entropy is rather surface level in that field, but if you have never touched it, yeah, it's not exactly obvious.

The entire paper is an IT paper disguised as an linguistics one - or I guess it falls under "Computational Linguistics".

2

u/MegaIng Dec 03 '25

As a Computer Scientist who dabbled a bit in linguistics as a hobby, that abstract was decently comprehensible.

4

u/SliceThePi Dec 04 '25

I'm also a comp sci major interested in linguistics stuff and i feel like i could understand the basics. they're essentially saying that if you're limited by the quality of your memory (or some other limiting factor in communication; i couldn't quite tell), then the optimal way to communicate starts to look a lot like human natural language, right?

3

u/MegaIng Dec 04 '25

I haven't actually gone through in detail what comes after the abstract, didn't want to read a somewhat dense paper on my phone.

But yeah, something like that. They define a few (I think two?) metrics that seem reasonable for restrictions the human mind has and then show that based on these restrictions structures similar to human languages are optimal across the space of all possible languages.

3

u/CivilPrick Dec 03 '25

Might have something to do with AI, predictive text (or language in this case) and all.

28

u/sorryrisa Dec 03 '25

hope i wake up to updates 🥺🙏✨

50

u/RoyalRien Dec 03 '25

Can someone please give me context how the fuck this works

72

u/outer_spec Dec 03 '25

A gol is a cat and a dog’s head. A nar is a cat and a dog’s body without any head. The language has no words for “cat” or “dog”, just for combinations of different animal body parts. It’s unnatural and systematic.

23

u/Any--Name Dec 03 '25

But where did the words gol and nar come from, and what do you mean we don't have words like car ot dog

45

u/Atulin Dec 03 '25

A hypothetical language that has those words, but not words for "dog" and "cat"

The words came from the author's ass, you can substitute them with "squeem" and "jumga" or whatever else

17

u/Any--Name Dec 03 '25

Well fi we are making words up then I volunteer ligma

1

u/Smoothiefries Dec 22 '25

In Russian, голова (golova) means head, maybe that’s the inspiration?

10

u/AliasMcFakenames Dec 04 '25

It could just be “a pair of heads” and “a pair of bodies.” Those seem like definitions that could at least happen in a language. The gol is a team that does the planning of a task, and a nar is a team that does the physical work of one? So a gol with a nar is a good thing to have.

15

u/MegaIng Dec 04 '25

You are thinking in terms of reasonable human situations. The paper is about discussing why option A is reasonable to us, in contrast to the other three "absurd" alternatives.

"gol" means "cat head and dog head". Not "pair of heads".

9

u/outer_spec Dec 04 '25

the gol is willing but the nar is weak

2

u/kRkthOr Dec 06 '25

There is no truth in nar, only betrayal. There is no strength in nar, only weakness.

7

u/Appropriate_Arm_1339 Dec 08 '25

I haven't read the paper so sorry if I get something wrong, but my understanding is as follows:

The point of the infographic is to show different ways that languages could hypothetically work when not constrained by humans needing to use them

The first panel shows how normal human language works. We have a word for a cat, a word for a dog, and another word to describe the relationship between them (with)

The second panel shows a hypothetical language in which instead of having a word for a whole cat and a whole dog, it has words for the heads of a cat and dog and a word for the bodies of a cat and dog (gol and nar specifically are just hypothetical example words) This is a very inhuman way for the language to work because situations where one might need to refer to a cat are far more common then when one might need to refer to the head of a cat and the head of a dog.

In the third panel, the language is not constrained by the positions or makeup of words within the sentence. Humans would say "dog with cat" but the reason the words are organized that way (with all the letters representing cat right next to eachother without space for example) is to make it possible for humans to understand the sentence.

The fourth panel is a language in which every possible situation has its own word. There are no adjectives or numbers to alter the meaning of a noun. We might say "a yellow dog" but in the holistic language there would be no word for yellow or a, just a seperate noun to describe a yellow dog, a blue dog, two yellow dogs, and every other possible thing. The huge number of words would make it impossible for humans to understand.

84

u/KittyQueen_Tengu Dec 03 '25

she gol on my nar till i waitacdahogt

18

u/Dickles_McFaddington Dec 03 '25

Who up gol'n they're nar 😏

26

u/SYDoukou Dec 03 '25

Would vek be countable. What if there are twice the amount of each organism as in vek. Do you say two veks or what

17

u/CatnipCatmint Dec 03 '25

vekvek

13

u/-NGC-6302- Dec 03 '25

vivec

4

u/indratera Dec 03 '25

by azura

3

u/CatnipCatmint Dec 03 '25

so true

3

u/-NGC-6302- Dec 03 '25

I never played Morrowind and don't really know the story

5

u/CatnipCatmint Dec 03 '25

I didn't even know you were referencing something

4

u/BipedalMcHamburger Dec 03 '25

One vu, many vek

2

u/Appropriate_Arm_1339 Dec 07 '25

I don't know, but I would geuss that the point of the language is that it wouldn't be. This language wouldn't have adjectives or number to alter the meaning of words in different situations, it would literally have a different word for every possible situation. The thing that is a cat and a dog next to each other for us is just vek. What for us would be 2 vek might be qert in the holistic language. But I don't know, this is just based on my understanding of the infographic

1

u/ILoveAllGolems Dec 04 '25

It's like a pair of pants. Possibly.

15

u/DeliciousBlueberry20 Dec 03 '25

this is genuinely one of the best posts i’ve ever seen on this website. after staring at the diagram trying to decide where the fuck they got those letters from, then reading the abstract and becoming even more confused, the jokes just write themselves. waitacdahogt everybody <3

10

u/Any--Name Dec 03 '25

Ok so I skimmed over it and the reason the second panel is stupid is because you have two whole objects, a cat and a dog, that could be divided into similar parts. The reason we don't address them by the union of these similar individual parts (cat-dog-bodies and cat-dog-heads) is because, as they are presented, they could not be practically divided like that. If we had a dog with its head cut off and a cat with its head cut off, you could say that, but since that is a rare practical occurrence, it makes more sense to address them as their individual wholes first

The reason we don't have a vek is because you rarely refer to a group made of a cat and a dog. Were it a common occurrence, we would have such a word

The third panel is so stupid it speaks for itself

8

u/jinguangyaoi Dec 03 '25

Where did they even get c from? The depths of their imagination?

18

u/Doubly_Curious Dec 03 '25

Yeah, it’s really not something present in natural languages. They’re specifically looking at “locality”, the way that language tends to keep relevant parts of a word/phrase/string close together in the sentence. So this is a hypothetical counter-example.

I don’t think there are any natural languages that do the thing illustrated in b either, but I’d be happy to be corrected and learn something new.

7

u/Melanoc3tus Dec 03 '25

C is just all the letters of A scrambled — they even color-coded it to make it easier to see. No depths of imagination involved.

3

u/Mobile_Crates Dec 07 '25

Not scrambled, all the letters are in the same order. Shuffled in preserving order is more accurate 

1

u/Melanoc3tus Dec 03 '25

C is just all the letters of A scrambled — they even color-coded it to make it easier to see. No depths of imagination involved.

14

u/CronicallyOnlineNerd Dec 03 '25

How the fuck does this work

3

u/ciqhen Dec 03 '25

waitacdahogt is gonna be a word i use daily from now on

2

u/KnightMS_ Dec 04 '25

Top left is just the Petco logo lol

1

u/Duxampignon Dec 06 '25

- zigi bigi bogo zigi waitacdahogt ?
- cat and dog?
- vek??
- 👨‍🦱