We have people that assign numerical values to peoples ability to read and write every day. They are english teachers. They test all kinds of stuff like vocabulary, reading comprehension and grammar and in the end they assign grades to those skills. I don't even need tiny professors in my pocket, they are just out there being teachers to children of all ages.

One of the task I have chatGPT was to name and describe 10 dwarven characters. Their names have to be adjectives like grumpy but the description can not be based on him being grumpy. He has to be something other than grumpy.

ChatGPT wrote 5 dwarves that followed the instructions and then defaulted to describing each dwarf based on their name. Sneezy was sickly, yawny was lazy and so on. This gives a score of 5/10 on the task I gave it.

There is a tapestry of clever tests you can give it with language in focus to test the ability of a natural language model without giving it a bunch of numbers.