
Pride, Prejudice - enkiv2
https://github.com/NaNoGenMo/2017/issues/130
======
jamesjyu
I applaud trying out cool techniques to transform text, but I think this would
work better for non-fiction books.

Fiction is like a serialization of senses for your inner director that paints
a world in your mind. By lopping off words, you are altering the pacing and
tone of the book. Now, maybe your intent is to create a book that has a
totally different character than the original, and if it is, then that's fine.
But if your intent is to maintain the character of the book, doing a few
replacements can do a lot of harm.

Also, most people want to read longer fiction work and be immersed for a
while. This is the reason it's generally harder to sell novellas.

PS. Using the 't' contraction instead of 'the' makes this really hard to
parse.

~~~
phillc73
> PS. Using the 't' contraction instead of 'the' makes this really hard to
> parse.

Only in some cases.

"...by a young man of large fortune from t'north of England;"[1]

This is just about the perfect edit.

[1]
[https://github.com/hugovk/NaNoGenMo-2017/blob/master/03-redu...](https://github.com/hugovk/NaNoGenMo-2017/blob/master/03-reducifier/output.txt#L35)

~~~
deckar01
I have never seen "the" abbreviated (or contracted?) into "t'" before. Is this
common in some dialects of English?

~~~
gerdesj
Yes it is. It is common in Yorkshire and Derbyshire at the least - so roughly
the north Midlands and up in England. Probably several other regions use it as
well. The North of England is often referred to as t'North by pretty much
everyone.

It is sometimes pronounced a bit like "tut" with the second t silent. The
following word is often affected as well. Actually its bloody hard to try and
describe. Your best bet is to find something on Youtube spoken with a
Yorkshire accent. Good luck trying to understand it!

------
schoen
Interestingly, American and British English disagree about the contraction of
possessive "have". In American English, "have" and "had" can be contracted
when they are used as an auxiliary (to have done something) but not when used
as an possessive (to have something).

I've seen that before.

I'd seen that before.

But not:

∗I've three bicycles.

∗He'd problems with spelling in elementary school.

However, British English does allow this contraction!

The text creates a contraction of "have had" to "have'd", where the first is
an auxiliary and the second is a possessive (following an adverb rather than
the subject, so that the auxiliary _can 't_ contract), which I think is
proscribed in both varieties of English:

?I certainly have'd my share of beauty

But I'm not positive about the British assessment of this.

~~~
gerdesj
Yes all of those are "allowed" in en_GB. However, the second example you give
would almost certainly be rendered as "He'd had problems ...". Yes, really!

Thinking about it, it depends, for your first example:

"Who on earth has three bicycles?" Tom asked, incredulously. "Well, I've got
three", replied Jim.

"I've three bicycles up for sale today" or "There're three bikes ..." or
"There are three bikes". Some people find there're (there are) a bit dodgy.

I don't think that en_GB or any other version really gets too hung up on
things like that anymore. That said, some constructions do seem more natural
than others.

I have never heard or seen anyone try to use "have'd" in any modern form of
English. You can get "I've had" from "I have had" or "I'd 've had" from "I
would have had" or if you really want to drop the aitches then I'd 've 'ad.
The last two are quite common in speech but not written.

~~~
cholantesh
What about "He'd'd problems with spelling..."? Theoretically it seems fine.

------
voidhorse
This is obviously a cheeky/fun project, but I'll just take a moment to be
pedantic and point out that literature is entirely the wrong domain for this
sort of tool. A litany of literary information is encoded in the superfluous:
authorial idiosyncrasies, period styles, the intended regional locale of the
characters, the anticipated reading level of the audience/familiarity with the
material, meaning at the linguistic level ('meta' narrative).

While I think this tool has a great deal of potential application in domains
like technical documents, texting (or other forms of communication that lend
themselves to brevity) etc. I don't think literature falls into that camp.

------
gt_
Congrats on the project! It's hilarious, probably useful somewhere, and it
made my day.

Something in the opposite direction would be interesting as well. As a
student, I was selective with where I invested my energy, according to my
level of interest in the topic. _Like many students, I developed an obnoxious
flair for elaboration where it was no longer necessarily required and, as I
thought, I actually became quite good at making sentences twice their original
word length and sentence length from what they were otherwise required by my
instructors to be._ I would have welcomed a more automated process for the
task.

------
nautilus12
Not being a downer, but really, is there any usefulness to this at all?

~~~
em3rgent0rdr
Presumably can read the book faster because there are fewer words, while still
basically retaining the same amount of information.

~~~
nautilus12
Id venture to say this almost completely contrary to the point of literature.
Literature is not about the information contained within, its about how the
information is presented.

------
em3rgent0rdr
When will the browser plugin come out? :)

~~~
Xeoncross
Here's what I have so far:

    
    
        var p=document.createElement('pre'); p.textContent=document.body.textContent.replace(/[ \t]+/ig, ' ').replace(/\n[\s\n]*/ig, "\n\n"); document.body.replaceWith(p);

------
supermdguy
Great to see a NaNoGenMo entry on HN! If you've never participated, it's a
competition (with no official winners) to see who can write a program that
generates a 50k word "novel" in one month. It happens each November, to
parallel NaNoWriMo. See
[https://nanogenmo.github.io/](https://nanogenmo.github.io/) for more details
and other entries.

------
QML
Hmm, a comment from someone who just learned about Huffman encoding and had a
project on text classification -- it seems that the majority of commonly-
written or spoken English words are terrible for conveying semantics; words
like "the", "a", "to" are mostly just filler words.

Is it possible then to create a vocabulary of English words dedicated towards
an emphasis on meaning?

------
ihaveajob
For added fun and compression, choose American spelling of words like "honour"
and "neighbour".

------
leafyape
Readability suffers and character reduction will be nowhere near the rate of
word reduction. But fun idea.

~~~
twic
Character reduction? Well, i suppose Pride and Prejudice could probably stand
to lose two or three Bennet sisters.

~~~
cholantesh
It absolutely cannot, sir.

------
sincerely
This is obviously just for fun, but it would be interesting to see if a
similar approach could be considered for, say, high-school level textbooks,
which are notoriously padded with useless content.

