right to speak language of choice (Re: DTI Policy Response)

[Jeffrey Goldberg]

It is rare when discussion on this list (which I find very useful and
interesting), turns up something that I can actually make a contribution
to. 

If the law wanted to make a distinctions between natural language (or
psuedo-natural languages, like Esperanto) and encrypted material it could
do so fairly easily on formal as opposed to behavioural/cultural grounds.

If I decided to communicate with someone in Dyirbal (an almost dead
language of northern Queensland) I could do so (well, actually I know
only a couple of sentences, and those are not very useful anyway, but
let's pretend).  Also, there is something very interesting about
Dyirbal and this discussion which I will come back to.

First of all, no matter how obscure or private the language is, it is not
cryptography if we consider the art of encryption as replacing big secrets
(messages) with little secrets (keys).  It would take a lot of message
before the size of the messages approaches the size of the secret
(knowledge of Dyirbal).  It would be difficult to get a linguist to give
you a size estimate of knowledge of a language and it is obviously small
enough to fit inside a brain (specially designed for the purpose).
I think that this question about the size of the key compared to the
size of the message is going to be the overriding distinction.

Human languagues have a large number of abstract but identifiable
characteristics, nouns, verbs, and adjectives for example (claims about
Kwakutil notwithstandingd).  And there are plenty of other things that
can be used to say that something is or isn't a natural language like
thing.

On Wed, 29 Apr 1998, James Backhouse wrote:

> The origins of the now almost defunct Cockney dialect [...]

I suspect, but don't know, that this particular account is a myth
(similalry to many Eskimo words for 'snow', an Appelacian dialect similar
to Elizibethian English, etc).  But whether the account is true or not
doesn't really change the point.

> By contrast what eCommerce requires is formal, and hence protocol-driven
> virtual interaction and what law enforcement is looking for is a formal and
> predictable way of decoding.

Most linguists would argue that natural languages are formal systems, just
very very complicated ones, whose rules are extremely difficult to
articulate.  If fact, the formal linguist would typically argue that there
is no alternative to thinking of natural languages as formal systems.
There are strings that are in the language, strings that are not in the
language, and the ability to determ that is encoded in a finite entity
(a brain).  So, there is a finite decision procedure that among other
things, determins whether a string is in a language or not.  Just
because no one is able to specify the formal description doesn't
mean there isn't one.  So formal language is is not the distinction
to go on.

I did say there was something else interesting about Dyirbal in this
context.  The Dyirbal culture and a number of others have built in secret
languages (often called "mother-in-law languages" or "avoidence
languages").  In the Dyirbal culture, a man is not supposed to speak
Dyirbal in front of his mother-in-law (among others, including female
cross cousin), nor should he ever speak to them.  There is a secret
language that boys get taught in pre-teen years for when they have to
speak in front of their mother-in-laws.  The language has a different (and
more limited) vocabulary than the standard languages, and also has
different affixes. It is altogether simplier, and more vague (for example,
it will use words for categories of things like "utensil" or "reptile"
where in ordinary language one would use a more specific word).

It is doubtful that these avoidence languages are actually used to
maintain secrets, but instead are used as a very big display of avoidence
behaviour.

-j
--
Jeffrey Goldberg                +44 (0)1234 750 111 x 2826
 Cranfield Computer Centre      FAX         751 814
 J.Goldberg@Cranfield.ac.uk     http://WWW.Cranfield.ac.uk/public/cc/cc047/
Relativism is the triumph of authority over truth, convention over justice.