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Mathematicians prove the triviality of English

theguardian.com

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Re: Mathematicians prove the triviality of English

#41

Post by judk »

igravious wrote: post #20
johncolanduoni wrote: post #10

Click-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…

People taking this article way to seriously. It is a humorous story about a rigorous analysis of problem that makes false but naively intuitive assumptions to misprove a contradiction. The point is (1) the rigorous analysis is possible and (2) the assumptions are incorrect -- English does not have consistent pronunciation rules.

Re: Mathematicians prove the triviality of English

#42

Post by judk »

phkahler wrote: post #35

Proof 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.

The whole point of the article is to show that the premise is else, in every single case: there is no letter in English that always has unambiguous prononuciation.

Re: Mathematicians prove the triviality of English

#44

Post by dahart »

judk wrote: post #39

People 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.

Which people? The writers or the readers? 'Cause the context-free interpretation of the headline suggests the writers intended to make the content of an article that fits the definition of trivial sound profound and mathematical in a way that it isn't.

Re: Mathematicians prove the triviality of English

#45

Post by CJefferson »

johncolanduoni wrote: post #10

Click-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

With regards the 'semigroup with identity', depends what area of research you are in.

Semigroup researchers would naturally talk about many extensions to semigroups, such as 'with identity'.

Re: Mathematicians prove the triviality of English

#46

Post by moomin »

anon4 wrote: post #23
good_gnu wrote: post #13

This 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

"Queue is just Q followed by four silent vowels"

They're waiting in line...

Re: Mathematicians prove the triviality of English

#48

Post by eru »

wodenokoto wrote: post #15
eru wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This wouldn't work in eg German, where there's no way to cancel out pronunciation like that.

Can you give an example of how this wouldn't work out? I can't even figure out how to make one up, and would like to see how it would look.

Oh, you can only give concrete examples where it would work out. To show that it doesn't work out, you'd have to show that there are no ways to make it work.

Re: Mathematicians prove the triviality of English

#49

Post by nkrisc »

jameshart wrote: post #24

Seems to prove the decided non -triviality of English, really. In fact, it could read as part of a proof that English words can't be read, or written, at all, because essentially it shows that English orthography has basically no rules - all sequences of letters can be pronounced in any way.

Oh, there are rules. There's just little relating them. You must learn them all separately.

Re: Mathematicians prove the triviality of English

#50

Post by Scarblac »

andreasvc wrote: post #30
jameshart wrote: post #24

Seems to prove the decided non -triviality of English, really. In fact, it could read as part of a proof that English words can't be read, or written, at all, because essentially it shows that English orthography has basically no rules - all sequences of letters can be pronounced in any way.

Uh that doesn't follow at all. Just means that the rules are a bit more complicated than "this letter is always pronounced that way". Neither does it mean that "all sequences of letters can be pronounced in any way". Look up Chomsky & HalLe's the sound pattern of English for an attempt at completely describing English phonology with rules.

I'll link to the famous poem ( http://www.i18nguy.com/chaos.html ) and let people decide whether English pronunciation has rules...
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