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Subtle ways Microsoft Word has changed how we use language

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Re: Subtle ways Microsoft Word has changed how we use language

#161

Post by TeMPOraL »

cubefox wrote: post #154
AtlasBarfed wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure relative to Europe America has prudish standards. But what about the Arab sphere? China? India? You know, like 3-4 billion people? Yeah, I think America has pretty liberal standards.

Interestingly, the US seems fairly similar to Japan: Large tolerance for violence, small tolerance for nudity. Which is strange, given that US has much stronger connections to Europe. (Though I'm not a Japan expert.)

Didn't Japanese culture get pretty much rewritten after WWII to be US-compatible?

Re: Subtle ways Microsoft Word has changed how we use language

#162

Post by cpeterso »

ginko wrote: post #30
matsemann wrote: post #5

I'm a but wary in general about how US tech used around the world slowly erodes the nuances of different cultures. Often the software doesn't take into account how things work in other languages, different regions etc. I'm also not sure I'd blame the engineers in SV too much, of course they design software based on their own context. But with tech becoming global, it's a bit sad how it's not prioritized more. Example…

Another example I recently ran into is Google translate stripping gender from words even when translating between languages with grammatical gender. (German) die Banditin -> (Spanish) el bandido (Spanish) la bandida -> (German) der Bandit So it always turns a female bandit into a male one.

Based on this 2016 Google Brain article, “Zero-Shot Translation with Google’s Multilingual Neural Machine Translation System”, I assumed Google Translate directly translated languages:

https://blog.research.google/2016/11/zero-shot-translation-w...

But I just tested some end-to-end translations of some random simple sentences from German and Spanish Wikipedia. The translations are identical whether I translate them directly or via English as an intermediate step. This didn’t prove that Google Translate is using English (or some other interlingua), but at least demonstrates doesn’t not use one. :)

German example:

de = Wikipedia ist ein Projekt zum Aufbau einer Enzyklopädie aus freien Inhalten.

de:en = Wikipedia is a project to build an encyclopedia of free content.

en:es = Wikipedia es un proyecto para construir una enciclopedia de contenido gratuito.

de:es = Wikipedia es un proyecto para construir una enciclopedia de contenido gratuito.

Spanish example:

es = Wikipedia es una enciclopedia libre, políglota y editada de manera colaborativa.

es:en = Wikipedia is a free, polyglot and collaboratively edited encyclopedia.

en:de = Wikipedia ist eine freie, polyglotte und gemeinschaftlich bearbeitete Enzyklopädie.

es:de = Wikipedia ist eine freie, polyglotte und gemeinschaftlich bearbeitete Enzyklopädie.

Re: Subtle ways Microsoft Word has changed how we use language

#163

Post by cubefox »

smt88 wrote: post #64
unsupp0rted wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm a but wary in general about how US tech used around the world slowly erodes the nuances of different cultures This is a plus, not a minus. It doesn't matter what (reasonable) standard we go with, as long we go with one. I'm excited for a time when all humans speak (and read, if reading is still needed by then) the same easy-to-learn logical language from childhood. When English and Norwegian become special inte…

It would be cool to have a universal language, but English is the JavaScript of spoken languages – universal because of coincidence rather than good design.

English would be fine as a lingua franca if you could reasonably infer pronunciation from spelling and spelling from pronunciation, like e.g. in Spanish.

Re: Subtle ways Microsoft Word has changed how we use language

#164

Post by cubefox »

brookst wrote: post #78
matsemann wrote: post #5

I'm a but wary in general about how US tech used around the world slowly erodes the nuances of different cultures. Often the software doesn't take into account how things work in other languages, different regions etc. I'm also not sure I'd blame the engineers in SV too much, of course they design software based on their own context. But with tech becoming global, it's a bit sad how it's not prioritized more. Example…

Any information exchange erodes culture. Movies, music, academia, anything. But I think that’s a good thing. Other people feel differently and want to preserve small patches of “pure” cultures, but I think the world is better and richer when hugely diverse cultures are diffused widely.

Ideally we would want to spread the best parts of different cultures around the world, not indiscriminately everything from one specific culture. There are many things about US American culture that are great, others are not so great.

Re: Subtle ways Microsoft Word has changed how we use language

#165

Post by rkagerer »

I made good use of Word's built-in thesaurus while growing up, and I'm pretty sure it boosted my writing grades slightly as teachers were impressed by the expanded diction.

These days I find thesauruses a great aid to more precisely describe what I'm trying to convey, or help me find that word that's on the tip of my tongue.

Re: Subtle ways Microsoft Word has changed how we use language

#166

Post by cubefox »

JCharante wrote: post #77
matsemann wrote: post #5

I'm a but wary in general about how US tech used around the world slowly erodes the nuances of different cultures. Often the software doesn't take into account how things work in other languages, different regions etc. I'm also not sure I'd blame the engineers in SV too much, of course they design software based on their own context. But with tech becoming global, it's a bit sad how it's not prioritized more. Example…

> With global networks, we're now moderating to American "prudeness". We're moderating things to the most influential country that uses that language. If you don't use English then you'll see tons of content that would not fly in the English internet. Searching for "watch rick and morty free" gets you to paid services and malware sites, while searching for that same show in a less popular language gets you a very fas…

The point was probably that e.g. YouTube or Facebook have strict rules against nudity in all countries, because US American culture has a strong aversion against nudity. (Perhaps due to the influence of Puritan settlers on the early US, or something like that.)

Re: Subtle ways Microsoft Word has changed how we use language

#167

Post by olejorgenb »

teekert wrote: post #138

I’m Dutch, and the ways autocorrect changes my language, and I guess the German language as well, is not so subtle. We have a rule that when something is one “thing” like a “biophysics group”, we make it one word (Biofysicagroep). But almost any form of autocorrect will split these words. I’m really tired of correcting it all the time and I guess many others with me.

Same for norwegian

Re: Subtle ways Microsoft Word has changed how we use language

#168

Post by duskwuff »

cebert wrote: post #29

I was in middle school in the late 1990’s. Microsoft Word and Encarta were popular with some students, but the teachers weren’t necessarily tech savvy. If you copied text from an encyclopedia entry in Encarta to Word, the text would change to red burgundy. Students would copy content in their papers and wouldn’t even bother to change the color. I remember seeing examples of good papers in the hallways with the red te…

Modern version is text copied from Wikipedia[1][2].

[1]: Where the student forgot to delete the citation footnotes.

[2]: Or, if they're really not paying attention, maybe even a wild [citation needed].

Re: Subtle ways Microsoft Word has changed how we use language

#169

Post by Gibbon1 »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #161
cubefox wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interestingly, the US seems fairly similar to Japan: Large tolerance for violence, small tolerance for nudity. Which is strange, given that US has much stronger connections to Europe. (Though I'm not a Japan expert.)

Didn't Japanese culture get pretty much rewritten after WWII to be US-compatible?

The US forced the Japanese to rewrite their constitution with input from the US, the Japanese government and from non governmental groups. US demands were mostly to make it harder for militarists to seize power. Probably the biggest changes was press freedom and the legal rights of women.

My impression of the place is you have a modern industrial society replacing large parts of the preexisting feudal culture. Important, Japanese feudal culture is not the same as western Europe feudal culture. More face culture, less shame culture. And Japanese aren't as much prudish, as conservative and obsessed with decorum.

Re: Subtle ways Microsoft Word has changed how we use language

#170

Post by crazygringo »

WalterBright wrote: post #144
crazygringo wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> why German keyboards don't have the keys to write „ord“ I'm assuming for the same reason American/English keyboards don't have the keys to write “place”, just "place". Which is because American/English typewriters didn't -- they invented straight quotes to save extra keys. And looking up on Google Images, it looks like German typewriters were the same -- Shift+2 was a straight double quote. It's my personal opinion…

There's also ASCII. How many characters can you fit into 7 bits? Compromises get made.

Indeed. In hindsight, the tilde (~), backtick (`) and caret (^) turned out to be useless for their original purposes in ASCII -- they'd been used on typewriters to overprint accents, but you couldn't overprint on a computer screen. Same with the underscore (_) to underline. While the backslash (\) was a truly strange mark that IBM included for "reverse division", apparently to support ALGOL logical operations ("\/" and "/\").

In hindsight the underscore and backslash been useful in computing, so I'd say we'd have done better to use the tilde and backtick slots for completing pairs of curly quotes instead! Of course, hindsight being 20/20 and all that...

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