The Green Word
Kopylenko, Combinability, and the Prehistory of Language AI
From the essay
There are conversations that begin almost accidentally and then, without warning, open a door into a much larger room. This one began on the way to Penn Station, after a visit to the Raphael exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum. I was walking with Professor Kopylenko’s daughter, an old friend. She gave me a simple example: take the word green. It is not the story of one man secretly inventing AI before AI existed. It is the story of a great linguist revealing one of the patterns that would later become indispensable to the age of language machines.