I think this is why you don't let linguists do maths.
Why is that? This was actually mathematicians doing "linguistics".
Mathematicians prove the triviality of English
31–40 of 64 posts
Re: Mathematicians prove the triviality of English
#32Click-bait title much? I don't know about anyone else, but when I read that title I thought it would have something to do with syntax or semantics, not as a monoid word problem[1]. Also, why did they call it "semigroup with identity" instead of monoid? [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_problem_for_groups
Not click-baity but seriously lacking in information. The work relates to the relationship of orthography to pronunciation in English. From the title I was expecting some syntactical or grammatical result. At the very least the title should read, "Mathematicians prove the triviality of English pronunciation" but even then that misses the mark, doesn't it? Not only that, but I think the conclusions are frankly incorre…
"Not only that, but I think the conclusions are frankly incorrect."
They can't really be "incorrect", because they made up the rules. It would be more accurate to observe something like this definition of trivial is itself rather trivial and useless.
It's a fun word game, and nothing more. As this appears to be a recreational math column in the Guardian, there's nothing wrong with that. It's no Martin Gardner, but it's not being put forth as some sort of major result or anything either.
A lot of people here seem to be taking it a great deal more seriously than any of the relevant authors.
Re: Mathematicians prove the triviality of English
#33Re: Mathematicians prove the triviality of English
#34Wow. And here I thought they were going to discuss vectorization of the English language, akin to how Word2Vec does it.
Instead it's first grader style writing with fake subtraction of letters such. That's a tremendous let down.
Re: Mathematicians prove the triviality of English
#35Proof by contradiction. They are using pronunciation to define algebraic equality. So the minute B=1 and C=1, we can write B=C which is not true under the pronunciation rule. We have a contradiction which indicates the premise being false. In other words, using English pronunciation in that way is wrong. That's good because it seemed pretty stupid on first reading it. Glad my intuition on that was right.
Re: Mathematicians prove the triviality of English
#36Re: Mathematicians prove the triviality of English
#37>"By phonemic transformation into visual terms, the alphabet became a universal, abstract, static container of meaningless sounds"
-McLuhan
Re: Mathematicians prove the triviality of English
#38This is merely a different version of the old linguist joke that "In English, all letters are silent". Leaving this here for the interested: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_English_alphabet
Thanks for the link. One of the examples is the 'e' in 'like'. In this case, though it is silent, it affects the pronunciation of the word - of the 'i', specifically.
Re: Mathematicians prove the triviality of English
#39People are misunderstanding "trivial". Here what they proved is that there is no way to encode any of the English pronunciation rules as a function purely of context-free spelling of phonemes in a way that is consistent across the language. The data shows that all spellings must yield identical pronunciations, unless English JS inconsistent and/or context senstive. Obviously, the latter is true.
Re: Mathematicians prove the triviality of English
#40But there are at least 6 ways to write "f" in english (for, off, photon, enough, wife, mazeltov);
I don't see the difference between 'for' and 'wife' unless you are considering the 'fe' in the latter to be equivalent to the 'f' in the former. If so, then I wonder if the difference might alternatively be attributed to a silent and possibly 'magic' e (something I just learned about via good_gnu's post: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_e )