Guy Steele's _Growing a Language+ is a much better model than "1000 most common words" https://www.google.com/?#q=growing+a+language
Cleartext: A text editor that only allows the 1,000 most common words in English
81–90 of 230 posts
Re: Cleartext: A text editor that only allows the 1,000 most common words in English
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could be handy for non native English speakers though - less to learn.
I seriously doubt it, who wants to sound like a very stupid child? This is more of an XKCD fan boy project. So let's look at a famous XKCD comic using this, "US Space Team's Up Goer Five". "US Space Team" barely makes sense, does more to obscure than illuminate, and "Up Goer Five" makes no sense at all.
This is the problem with intelligentsia, they want to sound intelligent, using "heavy hitter" words. What about the intelligent person who is non-native speaker? This association of English fluency with Intelligence has ruined untold number of careers in the world, esp. in countries where English is official but non-native language.
I welcome simplified English in every shape or form, from limiting words to changing spellings and streamline it. Its no more language of people from England, every one in the world has stake in it. English reformation is long over due.
Re: Cleartext: A text editor that only allows the 1,000 most common words in English
#83Oooo I would like to apply this as a filter, for various thresholds, to various favorite works of e.g. fiction. Not with and replace; just a hard filter... very Oulipo...
The resultant word count plots would I am guessing cluster by author, maybe other things (genre?)...
Re: Cleartext: A text editor that only allows the 1,000 most common words in English
#84A similar editor was made for the book Thing Explainer[1] by Randal Munroe from XKCD. A book that explains all kinds of different things, from space shuttles to microwaves using the top 1000 common English words. [1] https://xkcd.com/thing-explainer/
Yeah it's called "thing explainer", but it's more like a "thing convoluter". It's a work humour, not a book of science.
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Re: Cleartext: A text editor that only allows the 1,000 most common words in English
#85Attempting to type the Gettysburg Address, which is how I usually experiment with word processors and keyboards, is an exercise in futility. > Eight times ten and seven years ago our fathers brought into the world a new country, born of free thoughts and doings, and completely sold on the idea that all men are created the same.
If you made a special case for numbers and fudge the clause structure, it's not that bad.
> Eighty-seven years ago our fathers brought into the world a new country, born of free thoughts and doings and the idea that all men are created the same.
Re: Cleartext: A text editor that only allows the 1,000 most common words in English
#86To provide some context, Wikipedia has a version that's written using "Plain English" that's based on limited set of common English words:
https://simple.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
Haven't had the chance to use the tool, but sounds like a good first step to making English text easier to read.
Re: Cleartext: A text editor that only allows the 1,000 most common words in English
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just a small nit: The words sound alike but they mean different things. You should have read everything, then you would have seen the reference. Source: grammer.
This is just a phonetic misspelling of the contraction "should've" which really is pronounced "should of"
Or "should a" ;)
Re: Cleartext: A text editor that only allows the 1,000 most common words in English
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
With just the words "zero" and "one" strung together in some combination, we can describe a JPEG image, which can be a picture of anything. (For instance, a black and white scan of the word "deoxyribonucleic" in a Times Roman font).
The ability to describe anything says nothing about the clarity of the description
While playing the devil's advocate, I could argue that the description using only 0 and 1 is more precise than the phrase "It's a picture of a white cliff on the shore of the sea, possibly in the south of England, in the foreground there's the silhouette of a man or woman to small to distinguish clearly at the bottom of the cliff, the sky above the cliff is bright blue with a few trailing clouds etc etc etc etc etc".
But we're not really talking about the description of a picture, we're in fact talking about political discourse.
Re: Cleartext: A text editor that only allows the 1,000 most common words in English
#89There is a web version of this which I made a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11424197
And this was submitted before as well. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11367972
Re: Cleartext: A text editor that only allows the 1,000 most common words in English
#90Joke aside, there are ways to compute a "readability score" for any block of text. This is useful for document writers that need to target particular grade-levels for their docs (eg driving manual is "8th grade"). https://readability-score.com/
The readability score is based only on the lengths of words, which I guess is something, but it's not a very good proxy for when you learn the word. The frequency of the word is a much better thing to measure.