Mathematicians prove there own triviality.
Oops. s/there/their/
Mathematicians prove the triviality of English
21–30 of 64 posts
Re: Mathematicians prove the triviality of English
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, and photon is not native english, but greek. But what's native english? All the -gh are old constructs and new english word never follow that pattern, is that modern english? Or a barbarism taken from another, old english language? What about french words, like garage, are that english?
Does it maybe have to do with how long a loan-word has been in use, or how commonly it's used?
Sure.
dvh was commenting the variety of ways the f phoneme can be written down in different english words, and for the purposes of the discussion, elthran's conservative line on where does the english language end is not really super useful. Having 5 or 6 different symbols for a single sound is irrelevant; the point is that the article is considering letters as whole symbols for a sound, when they might be part of a symbol, not the whole symbol, for a sound. If gh is /f/ in a particular word, then using that word as part of the g cancellation is wrong.
Re: Mathematicians prove the triviality of English
#23This 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"
Re: Mathematicians prove the triviality of English
#24Seems 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.
Re: Mathematicians prove the triviality of English
#25Click-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…
They're not even wrong. [tm]
Some other words: lambda, lambada, lambaste, lambent.
Even if you argue some of those words are foreign loan words, they're still found in English dictionaries. Limiting yourself to very ancient words of Saxon origin won't leave you with much to work on.
The people who build speech synthesizers have already researched this. If pronunciation dictionaries mapping letter patterns to spoken phonemes really were trivial, they'd be very happy.
Unfortunately they aren't.
Re: Mathematicians prove the triviality of English
#26Re: Mathematicians prove the triviality of English
#27Re: Mathematicians prove the triviality of English
#28This wouldn't happen with lojban ;)
No but then again there's barely anyone to talk Lojban with.
Re: Mathematicians prove the triviality of English
#29That English is trivial is nothing new. That the average US-ian doesn't even know their own language should be more surprising (but isn't). Mark Twain still has the best rant about it, and he knew English.
Re: Mathematicians prove the triviality of English
#30Seems 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.