I was actually just toying with a similar thing myself. I'm experimenting with a system that generates abilities for a game within certain design parameters, then tests the games' balance by running lots of example games. I figured compiling a DSL via macro compiled down would be worth the upfront cost given how much testing I planned on giving each generated variant. Thanks for laying some groundwork in this part!
That would only be useful if everyone were outside, and you wanted a split second of many different people's conversations. Satellites move rather quickly relative to the Earth's surface.
Ok I was coming to say "spy satellites at 40,000 km up - I doubt they can see anything. And if the linked article is correct the Chinese satellites up there have a resolution of 50m - good luck finding a crisp packet.
But the new generation "might" have a resolution of 1m. which is insane.
Then again, good luck knowing which square meter of the 1/3 of the earths surface you can see, has the crisp packet in.
I still think there will be a place for good old bribery corruption and sex spy techniques for a while yet.
Recent Chinese optical satellites are thought to have 10cm resolution. All these are low earth orbit. Depends on cloud cover, atmospheric turbulence and look angle.
Still impractical to get sound vibrations from that. But a drone with a laser would work for windows. Think listening in on a conversation in a car.
It's also daaaamn slow. And when you paste formatted content into it (at least from vim on a mac), lol, have fun cleaning up your newly-unformatted content.
I'm wondering how possible it would be to have garbage trucks identify valuable materials in trash as they enter the truck, so the city can fine someone who doesn't separate.
Good luck enforcing these kinds of things. States like Washington have constitutional privacy protections that extend to curb side garbage collection. The state, or an actor working on behalf of the state, can't look through your garbage. I know a number of lawyers here who are waiting with baited breath for the wrong person to get fined based on what's in/not in their garbage in Seattle.
Privacy, other people putting things in your can, previous tenants and perhaps other flaws exist. That's why I think it best it be automated and take more than one offense.
I rinse foil and reuse it, or rinse it before recycling if it's torn. But what I wonder is how dirty is too dirty to recycle in the case of aluminum? I'm not leaving large chunks of food on it, but I'm also not operating a chemistry lab here. I'm just curious what kind of process goes into repurification.
> how dirty is too dirty to recycle in the case of aluminum
I doubt they care about anything on the aluminum at all. If you watch videos of people melting down soda cans into aluminum ingots [0], there is a lot of dross or non-aluminum material that needs to be removed. Since there is already a process in place to eliminate non-aluminum material, I wouldn't worry about a bit of food.
Not necessarily. A kitchen sink might spend 3min cleaning one bottle where an industrial recycling facility won't have more than a 10s budget per bottle before that bottle be deemed either clean or meltable.
Some of the worst offenders are logging webservices. We've replaced a simple text file with a bloated site that requires mousing around, does not support grepping, etc.
Yep, and in a lot of other Indo-European languages as well. However, it's not a constant trend across languages as Finnish and Estonian both have more cases than their ancestor language did. It's likely that English will circle back around and start becoming less analytic as time goes on due to various things such as grammaticalization.
In my experience (English natively, Chinese, Japanese & Spanish conversationally, and an interest in the subject with knowledge of about a diversity of other languages), English and Chinese can tolerate a lot of "error" and still maintain strong communication. You can mix up the order of words, you can use the "wrong" vowel for a given word, and there are a lot of different words that mean similar things, but are close enough. All of these aspects make the language understandable, even when the language skills of the speaker or listener are poor. Many different dialects of Chinese use tones very differently, have slightly different word meanings, and have different word orders - and communication in the language persists fairly well even when one speaker has a very different syntax, emphasis, and even vocabulary.
This idea is not really true for languages like Japanese, where mixing up a vowel can render the entire sentence confusing to a listener. And word order is fairly strict (if still expressively diverse). You can't just smash together some ideas and expect someone to really understand you. Similar is true for other more strict romantic languages (Latin is like that as well).
And so both English and Chinese seem to make be amenable to trying out and playing with not just new vocabulary, but new syntax, grammars, and phenomes.
For 'proper' language, maybe, but for intelligibility, not so much. Especially when spoken.
"I want food", "Food, I want it.", "I am wanting food.", "Food for me; hungry.", "Want food.", "Me want food." Are all completely intelligible to most speakers, if many are not proper grammar. You can drop or add all sorts of articles and pronouns in there without really affecting basic intelligibility either.
The first three are grammatical, not so much the last three. I agree most speakers of English (native or otherwise) could figure out what someone saying the last three intends. But you're saying that this is a special fact about English. That if I attempt to speak in 'broken Spanish' or 'broken Japanese' and produce the equivalent of 'me want food' in Spanish or Japanese, that Spanish and Japanese speaker would just shrug their shoulders and say 'who knows what he means'?
It's a general property of natural language that speakers can produce ungrammatical sentences and yet be understood by other (perhaps more fluent) speakers. English isn't special that way.
I can't comment on Japanese, but broken Spanish can be confusing (to me) due to verb conjugations. Conjugations are also a major sticking point for new learners of the language since they have a big impact on meaning but can be hard to remember.
For example, changing a single letter in "quiero" ("I want") can have a big impact on its meaning by becoming "quiere" ("He/she wants") and "quieres" ("you want").
But you can't say "Food want me". Whereas in Old English, the grammar had so many markings that poets could weave distinct phrases together and still convey their meaning. In practice, that would still be awkward for typical speech, but it's cool all the same.
"Man chased the woman" and "woman chased the man" have completely different meanings in English. In many languages, switching around the two nouns like that wouldn't necessarily change the meaning, and in others you'd at least be able to pick out that something had gone wrong.
The original statement was playing off of "lossy compression" as in computer science. The concrete meaning here is that Chinese and English both have enough redundancy to convey meaning even if some information is lost. So, in a noisy room you could still understand someone, for example.
I don't agree or disagree with that statement, because I speak 1.5 languages and the other is closely related to English. It's an interesting thought though.
I understand that. But I don't know what the linguistic equivalence of 'lossy compression' is.
All natural languages use a good bit of 'lossy compression' in a sense: we use a lot of shared world knowledge and context to 'get' meaning of things people say/write.
I would agree that English is more redundant than Japanese. Knowing both, a mispronunciation is a much bigger deal in Japanese than in English.
Japanese has significant vowel length, which English doesn't. In Japanese, "un" means "yes", and "uun" means "no". Imagine if "yes" and "yesssss" meant opposite things in English.
Vowel sounds in general are also more approximate in English, and differences are often chalked up to different accents.
Words commonly misinterpreted due to mispronunciation by non-native speakers include "kawaii" (cute) and "kowai" (scary), as well as "sawatte" (touch it) and "suwatte" (sit down).
It's _much_ more common for people to stare at you in confusion when you slightly mess up a pronunciation in Japan than in the US.
> Japanese has significant vowel length, which English doesn't. In Japanese, "un" means "yes", and "uun" means "no". Imagine if "yes" and "yesssss" meant opposite things in English.
That's sort of true, but you also have to realise that English underwent a sound change that changed the purely quantitative (vowel length) distinction into a qualitative one, changing Middle English long vowels into diphthongs. [And for things that sound very similar but where one means 'yes' and one means 'no', think about English 'un-huh' ( https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/uh-huh#English ) and 'unh-uh' ( https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/uh-uh#English ). See the links for both audio files and IPA transcription.]
"Zwischenspeicher" is a magnificent word! Betweensaver. I love the Germanic way of nouncompounding.
As an American who learned German in high school and have since only admired German from afar, that word sounds great and I love the way the meaning is derived.
Sadly auto-correct makes people write very Un-German these days, because "the computer says its wrong". The computer is stupid and doesn't understand compounds. Smartphone keyboards similarly can't complete compounds. Either developers don't care about non-English-but-latin languages, or leaving the dashes out in compounds makes parsing them for computers way more difficult (for humans, not so much).
The English bias in phone keyboards and autocorrect systems is awful. There are lots of issues with verbal forms and diacritics. And if you dare to write in more than one language at a time, all bets are off.
I think this is one of the places where some public funds could make for good, useful research. Microsoft, Apple, and Google aren't interested in creating the perfect keyboard and autocorrect system for non-English languages, they will do the bare minimum and won't improve until someone shows them there's a better way (and it starts hurting sales).
German just has a real knack for clarity and simplicity because of this composibility. Some examples I like:
- Satzbau = Syntax: I always found it hard to remember what syntax meant. The German word, being the combination of "sentence" and "construction" requires no memorization
- Teilchen = Particle: In German, "part" + domunitive ending
- Jahrhundert, Jahrzehnt = century, decade: literally "year" + "hundred"/"ten"
- Neugier = curiousity: "new" + "greed"
I do wonder if this "composibility" is actually the norm for languages and English is just the odd one out. Having a large vocabulary from other languages (e.g. Latin) obscures the meaning of some word roots (e.g. particula - pars + diminutive, just like in German) so you have to just memorize it as one chunk. So perhaps the benefit of other languages like German is just their purity/consistency.
I believe it's just that the etymologies in English are more obscure. They're still fascinating, but they come from foreign roots a lot of the time, so they're not as immediately obvious.
Although, tangentially, even constructions that are just compounds of 2 English words or so slip past my notice. I can't think of any examples on the spot, but I've definitely gone decades without really parsing apart common English idioms or compound nouns until one day, when I finally notice "oh that's why we say that".
The English etymology is more indirect, but essentially means the same thing, by way of Latin and Greek:
c. 1600, from French syntaxe (16c.) and directly from Late Latin syntaxis, from Greek syntaxis "a putting together or in order, arrangement, a grammatical construction," from stem of syntassein "put in order," from syn- "together" (see syn-) + tassein "arrange" (see tactics).
> The English etymology is more indirect, but essentially means the same thing, by way of Latin and Greek:
... meaning you can't understand many terms if you only know English, because they are actually french/latin/greek. "Cache" is actually an example of this.
Strictly on a UI/UX basis, it beats most other online dictionaries for not being annoying A.F.
I haven't done a close evaluation, but itcompares favourably generally.
I also use dict (Debian), which is mostly Foldoc and 1913 Webster. As well as several dead-tree dictionaaries & etymological dictionaries. Those stand up surprisingly poorly to online references in several cases, though the OED still proves useful.
It is just a question of orthography. In German, compound nouns are written without space, as a single word. In English, they are usually (but not always) written with space. So "Christmas tree" is "Weinachtsbaum". This is sometimes made out to be much more mysterious than it is, as if German is more "composable" or something, but the only difference is the typographical space.
English is just more difficult to spell because there no simple rule for when a compound is written with or without space (or with a dash, as is sometimes the case). E.g. Christmas is Christ + mass, but is written in a single word.
It's not just orthography. English has been influenced by Romance languages and gained a tendency to write "of"s instead of compounds. This reverses the word order (order of words) and adds extra words in between.
There is some bit of composability that German has over English though. It's just easier to pick apart words that have been concatenated. Maybe it's because often the first word is in genitive (roughly means possessive) form?
In your example, "Weinachtsbaum", we have "Weinnacht" (itself a compound wine-night) meaning Christmas, and we have "Baum", tree. But the word gets and extra "s" in the middle which is serving roughly the same purpose as "'s" in English.
Winenight'stree. Tree of night of wine. I prefer the Germanic construction.
While you are correct to some extent, I do find German to be much more consistent in this regard.
In many cases this may just be due to English's distance from it's root (i.e. Latin, French). As it was pointed out below, "syntax" is also a composition of two simpler words - they just aren't words we know. In German, there are also loan words from Latin and French, but I do have the impression it is not to the same extent, and the German language is quite consistent.
As a German native speaker I find German much more confusing in this regard.
Maybe this is because I don't know the rules in English well enough[1] but for German I can give you a few examples of the complications we have to deal with:
From grandparent:
> In German, compound nouns are written without space, as a single word.
This is true, but the difficulty is to know when two or more nouns are considered a compound noun (Zusammensetzung) or just a group of words (Wortgruppe).
For example consider the following (real) street names:
- Schleißheimer Straße
- Hohenzollernstraße
- Leuchtenbergerstraße
Straße is simply street. Schleißheim is the name of a place.
Schleißheimer Straße is written as two separate words because the rule [2]
says that combinations with geographic names ending in -er that signify a place
(and not the people living in that place, for example) are usually not
considered compounds. A simple counterexample would be Hohenzollernstraße with Hohenzollern referring to the House of Hohenzollern.
Now consider a case like Leuchtenbergerstraße. Leuchtenberger can refer to the place called Leuchtenberg or the Duke of Leuchtenberg. It would be written Leuchtenberger Straße if it had
to do anything with the city of Leuchtenberg, maybe leading to that place. If it is named in the honor of the Duke it would be written Leuchtenbergerstraße.
Another problem is that often nouns are not simply slapped together.
Adding an additional s (Fugen-s[3]) between the words is very common.
For example:
traffic is Verkehr, sign is Zeichen, traffic sign is not Verkehrzeichen but Verkehrszeichen.
On the other hand: tax is Steuer and transfer tax is Verkehrsteuer, but not Verkehrsssteuer.
dog is Hund and leash is Leine. A dog leash is a Hundeleine, addding an additional e in this case.
Sometimes nothing is added but something removed: crown is Krone, prince is Prinz and a crown prince is a Kronprinz, leaving out the final e in Krone.
Compounding in German is complicated and weird.
[1] The only rule i know is: "It's written as two words, except for a few well known exceptions." I suspect that there is more to it and I'd be happy for any enlightenment.
Laptop and notebook comes to mind. Maybe English does have this mechanism but to a less extent?
Interesting enough, Portuguese also does compounding to some extent (Bear in mind it's a romance language).
My favorite English feature is how you can pick a substantive and use it as a verb. Mostly makes sense, specially if there's evident connotation behind the substantive.
Interesting with zwischenspeicher... In Finnish terminology "cache" is "välimuisti" which seems to be the same kind of word-construction.
I have wondered how people came up with translations to computer terminology. In retrospect, borrow from the German language, of course - as the saying goes, they have a word for everything!
It just occurred to me that there are two very different kinds of caches which aren't really distinguished by terms:
- Cache, as in processor cache: total access mediation, i.e. all operations go through the cache. Cache bypass might be possible but rare in practice.
- Cache, as in application cache (e.g. redis/memcached/@lru_cache): thing were you put some result to recall later conditionally. Exactly the opposite of total access mediation: application needs to explicitly use cache.
The first one I'd call Zwischenspeicher. The second I'd call Ergebnisabrufspeicher.
Also, this is an old issue, Google in China.
I'm sure they won't start caring what a few outspoken individuals think by this point.