English rules of thumb with grep

#1

Post by piedradura » Thu, Sep 22, 2016, 3:13 PM UTC

As a native spanish I was wondering about the words ending in tial or cial, in Spanish they end in cial, for example English tangential => tangencial versus English spacial => espacial

grep to the rescue:

grep -cE "[^aeiou]tial$" british-english => 40

grep -cE "tial$" british-english => 43,

conclusion: with 3 exceptions the rule is (no vowel) + tial

grep -Ec "[aeiou]cial$" british-english => 21

grep -Ec "cial$" british-english => 26, so with 5 exceptions (vowel)+cial.

There must be many low hanging fruit to collect rules of thumb using grep to help you use words correctly. Perhaps someone can give a hint about some of them.

Edit: It seems this rule is well known: https://howtospell.co.uk/cial-and-tial-spelling-rules

Re: English rules of thumb with grep

#2

Post by theophrastus » Thu, Sep 22, 2016, 4:29 PM UTC

"help you use words correctly" how exactly? This is an interesting bit of etymology, to be sure; but is just one example of a whole library of similar relations. For example, there are entire books devoted to the historical transitions between Germanic languages ('d', 'v') to English ('th', 'f'). That is, you'll see even more impressive numbers with this approach: grep -c -i "^th" british-english

Re: English rules of thumb with grep

#3

Post by piedradura » Thu, Sep 22, 2016, 4:35 PM UTC

theophrastus wrote: post #2

"help you use words correctly" how exactly? This is an interesting bit of etymology, to be sure; but is just one example of a whole library of similar relations. For example, there are entire books devoted to the historical transitions between Germanic languages ('d', 'v') to English ('th', 'f'). That is, you'll see even more impressive numbers with this approach: grep -c -i "^th" british-english

I don't have a German dictionary, my point is that a german person can discover interesting relations between English and German using grep, for example the one you suggest about ('d','v') becoming ('th','f'). The use of gerl is not essential but is a handy tool.

Re: English rules of thumb with grep

#4

Post by dfsegoat » Thu, Sep 22, 2016, 6:58 PM UTC

This is cool. We have particular problems with English vs. British spelling for medical terminologies. We have a lookup table for these and other synonyms:

e.g.: "Haemorrhage" vs. "Hemorrhage" etc

Re: English rules of thumb with grep

#5

Post by geeio » Thu, Sep 22, 2016, 8:32 PM UTC

You should listen to the http://historyofenglishpodcast.com/.

He goes into great detail about how the Proto-Germanic languages evolved via sound changes (e.g. Grimm's law).

Also see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grimm%27s_law