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Mathematicians prove the triviality of English

theguardian.com

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Re: Mathematicians prove the triviality of English

#51

Post by gohrt »

dahart wrote: post #44
judk wrote: post #39

People are misunderstanding "trivial". Here what they proved is that there is no way to encode any of the English pronunciation rules as a function purely of context-free spelling of phonemes in a way that is consistent across the language. The data shows that all spellings must yield identical pronunciations, unless English JS inconsistent and/or context senstive. Obviously, the latter is true.

Which people? The writers or the readers? 'Cause the context-free interpretation of the headline suggests the writers intended to make the content of an article that fits the definition of trivial sound profound and mathematical in a way that it isn't.

The headline is gimmicky wordplay, like most headlines.

"trivial" is mathematical. The headline makes "trivial" sound non-mathematical. Profundity is nowhere to be be found; the article is about triviality.

Re: Mathematicians prove the triviality of English

#52

Post by valine »

All it really proves is that English spelling rules is ridiculously inconsistent. It almost seems like an strange cousin of numerology. Where numerology applies significance to to arbitrary numbers, this applies significance to arbitrarily spelled English words.

Re: Mathematicians prove the triviality of English

#53

Post by kwhitefoot »

raverbashing wrote: post #9
eru wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This wouldn't work in eg German, where there's no way to cancel out pronunciation like that.

Yes, because German pronunciation is very close to the written form of words

No dialects in German then?

Re: Mathematicians prove the triviality of English

#54

Post by kalsk »

igravious wrote: post #20
johncolanduoni wrote: post #10

Click-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…

The entire study is a pun. The joke is that since in most mathematical notations AB is a shorthand for A * B, then all words are actually products of their component letters; based on this assumption it can be proven algebraically that the value of every letter is 1. I don't think there's supposed to be any serious meaning to it at all.

Also, aside from listing the names of the alleged authors, the article doesn't actually cite the study it's based on. This is another indication that it's just trolling.

Re: Mathematicians prove the triviality of English

#56

Post by nickpsecurity »

The title is ironic for me given that I've seen mathematical types push formal specification of software (eg Z, VDM) for over a decade straight with a consistent, English-related justification. They say that English is too imprecise and ambiguous to be sure you can understand what specs mean. It was true in practice enough that a combined formal (math) and informal (English) specification became a requirement for any correctness and security argument for highly assured systems.

And now some are saying English is trivial. Haha.

Re: Mathematicians prove the triviality of English

#58

Post by andreasvc »

Scarblac wrote: post #50
andreasvc wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'll link to the famous poem ( http://www.i18nguy.com/chaos.html ) and let people decide whether English pronunciation has rules...

Look you can describe anything with rules as long as they are specific enough. In the pathological case each word is its own rule, but English clearly has way more regularity than that, which explains why there is a seminal academic work describing English phonology with a set of rules.

Re: Mathematicians prove the triviality of English

#59

Post by pnt12 »

jerf wrote: post #32
igravious wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"Not only that, but I think the conclusions are frankly incorrect." They can't really be "incorrect", because they made up the rules. It would be more accurate to observe something like this definition of trivial is itself rather trivial and useless. It's a fun word game, and nothing more. As this appears to be a recreational math column in the Guardian, there's nothing wrong with that. It's no Martin Gardner, but it…

>A lot of people here seem to be taking it a great deal more seriously than any of the relevant authors.

Lack of context, probably. I fetched the text from my RSS reader - I didnt know where it came from. From the title, I had a false expectation, as other HN readers seemed to have.

Re: Mathematicians prove the triviality of English

#60

Post by poelzi »

gleki wrote: post #36
andreasvc wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No but then again there's barely anyone to talk Lojban with.

Well, at least more fluent speakers of Lojban than fluent speakers of Ithkuil.

I would so love to think/speak ithkuil, but knowing that nobody seems smart enough made me learn lojban instead ^^

.xu do tavla fo la lojban

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