
Mathematicians prove the triviality of English - tokenadult
http://www.theguardian.com/science/alexs-adventures-in-numberland/2015/oct/29/mathematicians-prove-the-triviality-of-english
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johncolanduoni
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_problem_for_groups)

~~~
igravious
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 incorrect. I would not
say that because LAM=LAMB (when spoken) that B=1. I would say that LA=LA and
M=MB. B is not silent elsewhere, only in combination with M so it is false to
discount the B (setting it to 1) without contextualising that B as being
alongside an M when this happens, if you see what I mean. This to me seems so
obvious that I fear I am missing something huge here because I can't think how
otherwise they can assert what they are asserting.

Don't like to be harsh or snarky on HN but in this instance...?

~~~
jerf
"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's not being put forth as some sort of major result or anything
either.

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

~~~
pnt12
>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.

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good_gnu
This 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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_English_alphabet)

~~~
anon4
"Queue is just Q followed by four silent vowels"

~~~
moomin
They're waiting in line...

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jameshart
Seems 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.

~~~
andreasvc
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.

~~~
jameshart
It should be obvious that, since English clearly IS capable of being reliably
serialized to and from text, that any proof that it can't be is obviously
based on a flawed assumption, and so functions as a proof by contradiction of
its assumption's falsity. In this case, it would be the semigroup model for
orthography/phonology which is the flawed assuption.

~~~
andreasvc
While I agree, it should be noted that there has been serious controversy
about the question whether language and language use can and should be
characterized by rules, or whether it is based on some kind of emergent
phenomenon or dynamical system (connectionism). The controversy is still not
really over. Personally I don't think it's an either/or question, but about
levels of description.

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phkahler
Proof by contradiction. They are using pronunciation to define algebraic
equality. So the minute B=1 and C=1, we can write B=C which is not true under
the pronunciation rule. We have a contradiction which indicates the premise
being false. In other words, using English pronunciation in that way is wrong.
That's good because it seemed pretty stupid on first reading it. Glad my
intuition on that was right.

~~~
judk
The whole point of the article is to show that the premise is else, in every
single case: there is no letter in English that always has unambiguous
prononuciation.

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grabcocque
I think this is why you don't let linguists do maths.

~~~
andreasvc
Why is that? This was actually mathematicians doing "linguistics".

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anunderachiever
That's a joke ... maybe to show how uncritically journalists will publish
anything that comes across as "mathematical".

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judk
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.

~~~
dahart
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.

~~~
gohrt
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.

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laotzu
>"By phonemic transformation into visual terms, the alphabet became a
universal, abstract, static container of meaningless sounds"

-McLuhan

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dvh
But there are at least 6 ways to write "f" in english (for, off, photon,
enough, wife, mazeltov);

~~~
elthran
I don't think you can include the mazeltov type there - I cannot think of a
native english word that uses that pronunciation. Happy to be proven wrong
though.

~~~
harperlee
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?

~~~
hrnnnnnn
Does it maybe have to do with how long a loan-word has been in use, or how
commonly it's used?

~~~
harperlee
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.

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pessimizer
My favorite page on the internet about the regularity (or lack thereof) of
English orthography; oldie but a goodie: _Hou tu pranownse Inglish._

[http://zompist.com/spell.html](http://zompist.com/spell.html)

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wodenokoto
Well, if we set all letters to equal 1, then what is stopping this from
working out?

Haven't they just shown that the product of any combination of 1's is equal to
the product of any other combination of ones?

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

~~~
wodenokoto
Can you give an example of how this wouldn't work out? I can't even figure out
how to make one up, and would like to see how it would look.

~~~
MatthewWilkes
I'm sure the poster was intending that it wouldn't be complete, like English.
There certainly are some letters that obey this property:

DASS/DAS; S=1

BUND=BUNT; D=T

MANN/MAN; N=1

VIEL=FIEL; V=F

VERBEN=WERBEN; V=W

SIEH/SIE; H=1

GANZ=GANS; Z=S

POPP/POP; P=1

That only gives five letters as the identity (H,N,P,S,Z), but that's how you'd
attack it.

The equivalence of D/T, for example, is unsurprising as it's an example of
voicing changing; these words are in the process of changing.

If you can do more complex work with bigrams, more are possible, e.g.:

JAHR/JA; HR=1; HR/H; R=1

~~~
eru
I'd say that S is idempotent in `dass' vs `das'. Not that s is the identity.

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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.

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poelzi
This wouldn't happen with lojban ;)

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

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

~~~
poelzi
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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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.

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kefka
Wow. And here I thought they were going to discuss vectorization of the
English language, akin to how Word2Vec does it.

Instead it's first grader style writing with fake subtraction of letters such.
That's a tremendous let down.

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tempodox
That 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.

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r-w
Seems kind of obvious. When you can set so many products equal to each other,
what could each of the terms equal but one?

Misleading title. Someone ought to flag this.

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transfire
Mathematicians prove there own triviality.

~~~
transfire
Oops. s/there/their/

~~~
thomasahle
there = their => re = ir

~~~
transfire
LOL

