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Papers We Love NYC with Stony Brook linguistics PhD student Abed Qaddoumi (Scholar) on what math can tell us about language. The talk runs from Cashinahua kinship as the symmetries of a square, through finite-state phonology, to Gold's Language Identification in the Limit (1967) and Kleinberg & Mullainathan's Language Generation in the Limit (2024), which explains why generating valid language can succeed where identifying it can't. Host approval required. Paired with Morten Christiansen and Nick Chater's The Language Game (2022). Gold's result was long used to argue grammar must be innate; this book argues language is learnable improvised charades instead. That makes it a sharp counterpoint for the Q&A.

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