Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Controlled Natural Language of Randall Munroe's Thing Explainer [pdf]

arxiv.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 94 posts

Re: The Controlled Natural Language of Randall Munroe's Thing Explainer [pdf]

#11

Post by seanmcdirmid »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #8
adrianratnapala wrote: post #5

Thing explainer is fun -- but I don't think the descriptions in it are particularly clear. It's just fun to see how he solves the problem of describing them given his self-imposed limitation. Even more fun is Poul Andersons "uncleftish beholding": http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/complexity/people/st...

I'm a fan of Guy Steele's Growing a Language , a talk about programming language design where he limited himself to using mostly only single-syllable words: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ahvzDzKdB0

Not to mentioned hand crayon drawn transparencies.

Re: The Controlled Natural Language of Randall Munroe's Thing Explainer [pdf]

#12

Post by paol »

jgrahamc wrote: post #9
adrianratnapala wrote: post #5

Thing explainer is fun -- but I don't think the descriptions in it are particularly clear. It's just fun to see how he solves the problem of describing them given his self-imposed limitation. Even more fun is Poul Andersons "uncleftish beholding": http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/complexity/people/st...

Agreed. Often you have to already know what he's talking about to get meaning from his words. For example, his description of the Saturn V Rocket (he replaced rocket with 'up goer') has this description of hydrogen: "The kind of air that once burned a big sky bag and people died (And someone said "Oh the [humans]!") I guess that's amusing if you already know about the Hindenburg, or something. Also, speaking of the p…

Kerosene lamps were ubiquitous before electric lighting. Look at the pictures in the wikipedia page[0], you'll recognize them for sure.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerosene_lamp

Re: The Controlled Natural Language of Randall Munroe's Thing Explainer [pdf]

#13

Post by Pitarou »

paol wrote: post #12
jgrahamc wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. Often you have to already know what he's talking about to get meaning from his words. For example, his description of the Saturn V Rocket (he replaced rocket with 'up goer') has this description of hydrogen: "The kind of air that once burned a big sky bag and people died (And someone said "Oh the [humans]!") I guess that's amusing if you already know about the Hindenburg, or something. Also, speaking of the p…

Kerosene lamps were ubiquitous before electric lighting. Look at the pictures in the wikipedia page[0], you'll recognize them for sure. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerosene_lamp

It seems that, in trying to make a second point, jgrahamc accidentally proved his first.

Re: The Controlled Natural Language of Randall Munroe's Thing Explainer [pdf]

#14

Post by Pitarou »

GolDDranks wrote: post #3

I thought Thing Explainer is a fun experiment and a delightful book, but as an attempt (and it isn't a serious attempt) to use only simple and super-commonly-used language, it doesn't hit the home base. As I speak English as my second language I'm acutely aware of this. Thing explainer uses the 1000 most commonly used lemmas, but words have multiple senses, and some of them are commonly used and some are not. From a…

This is also a common complaint about Simple English books written for English learners. The books claim to have a restricted vocabulary, but they cheat by using phrasal verbs.

Their vocabulary includes verbs like put and set along with prepositions like up, with and upon. You can combine these to generate an enormous number of phrasal verbs like put up with, set upon and so on, which are normally considered to be separate vocabulary items.

Re: The Controlled Natural Language of Randall Munroe's Thing Explainer [pdf]

#15

Post by jgrahamc »

Pitarou wrote: post #13
paol wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kerosene lamps were ubiquitous before electric lighting. Look at the pictures in the wikipedia page[0], you'll recognize them for sure. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerosene_lamp

It seems that, in trying to make a second point, jgrahamc accidentally proved his first.

It wasn't an accident. I was showing that the ambiguity introduced by his language means that it's hard to understand what's really going on.

Re: The Controlled Natural Language of Randall Munroe's Thing Explainer [pdf]

#16

Post by JorgeGT »

Pitarou wrote: post #14
GolDDranks wrote: post #3

I thought Thing Explainer is a fun experiment and a delightful book, but as an attempt (and it isn't a serious attempt) to use only simple and super-commonly-used language, it doesn't hit the home base. As I speak English as my second language I'm acutely aware of this. Thing explainer uses the 1000 most commonly used lemmas, but words have multiple senses, and some of them are commonly used and some are not. From a…

This is also a common complaint about Simple English books written for English learners. The books claim to have a restricted vocabulary, but they cheat by using phrasal verbs. Their vocabulary includes verbs like put and set along with prepositions like up , with and upon . You can combine these to generate an enormous number of phrasal verbs like put up with , set upon and so on, which are normally considered to be…

As a person whose first language is not English, I find phrasal verbs one of the most challenging parts of the language. In fact I just searched set upon and was greatly surprised that it means attacking violently! I would have never guessed that from the words alone.

Re: The Controlled Natural Language of Randall Munroe's Thing Explainer [pdf]

#17

Post by eutectic »

GolDDranks wrote: post #3

I thought Thing Explainer is a fun experiment and a delightful book, but as an attempt (and it isn't a serious attempt) to use only simple and super-commonly-used language, it doesn't hit the home base. As I speak English as my second language I'm acutely aware of this. Thing explainer uses the 1000 most commonly used lemmas, but words have multiple senses, and some of them are commonly used and some are not. From a…

You could train a language model from a corpus of writing by e.g. ESL students or young children, and then disallow any words with p<p(thousandth_word) given the preceding context. :)

Re: The Controlled Natural Language of Randall Munroe's Thing Explainer [pdf]

#18

Post by emartinelli »

Pitarou wrote: post #14
GolDDranks wrote: post #3

I thought Thing Explainer is a fun experiment and a delightful book, but as an attempt (and it isn't a serious attempt) to use only simple and super-commonly-used language, it doesn't hit the home base. As I speak English as my second language I'm acutely aware of this. Thing explainer uses the 1000 most commonly used lemmas, but words have multiple senses, and some of them are commonly used and some are not. From a…

This is also a common complaint about Simple English books written for English learners. The books claim to have a restricted vocabulary, but they cheat by using phrasal verbs. Their vocabulary includes verbs like put and set along with prepositions like up , with and upon . You can combine these to generate an enormous number of phrasal verbs like put up with , set upon and so on, which are normally considered to be…

I remember when I was studying English in the U.S. with other foreign students some years ago, when the topic was phrasal verbs the grades decreased for entire class. I am Brazilian, the class was composed most of South Koreans and Saudi Arabians.

Re: The Controlled Natural Language of Randall Munroe's Thing Explainer [pdf]

#19

Post by alanfalcon »

JorgeGT wrote: post #16
Pitarou wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is also a common complaint about Simple English books written for English learners. The books claim to have a restricted vocabulary, but they cheat by using phrasal verbs. Their vocabulary includes verbs like put and set along with prepositions like up , with and upon . You can combine these to generate an enormous number of phrasal verbs like put up with , set upon and so on, which are normally considered to be…

As a person whose first language is not English, I find phrasal verbs one of the most challenging parts of the language. In fact I just searched set upon and was greatly surprised that it means attacking violently! I would have never guessed that from the words alone.

Context helps: "His foe set upon him with such vigor that he knew he was hopelessly outmatched. He began to silently pray for assistance."

Re: The Controlled Natural Language of Randall Munroe's Thing Explainer [pdf]

#20

Post by Angostura »

JorgeGT wrote: post #16
Pitarou wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is also a common complaint about Simple English books written for English learners. The books claim to have a restricted vocabulary, but they cheat by using phrasal verbs. Their vocabulary includes verbs like put and set along with prepositions like up , with and upon . You can combine these to generate an enormous number of phrasal verbs like put up with , set upon and so on, which are normally considered to be…

As a person whose first language is not English, I find phrasal verbs one of the most challenging parts of the language. In fact I just searched set upon and was greatly surprised that it means attacking violently! I would have never guessed that from the words alone.

From what I recall, 'set' is the word in the English language which has most meanings - over 50.
Post reply on HN