Category Archives: language

Anticonfiguratoriabilitizationism

Posted on Jul 27, 2010 | 2 comments

Yesterday on Twitter I followed the link in this tweet:

http://twitter.com/josiefraser/status/19596506366

I don’t use Facebook, so I’m not 100% sure what the like button does other than add some sort of counter to a page (which in th case of this page did indeed say that 38,327 people liked it), but what caught my eye was the sentence

To get started, just use the configurator below to get code to add to your site.

Is configurator a word? Well it’s clearly being used, so I suppose by definition it must be, regardless of whether it should be . . . though by rights it should be derived from the verb configurate, whatever that is. Otherwise it would surely just be a configurer.

But most words don’t just exist all on their own: they belong to families. And small differences like configure/configurate usually carry some distinction of meaning. All of which got me thinking about what family configurator might belong to.

I therefore offer you

configurate
to subject something to the actions of a configurator.
configurator
a program designed to screw up your settings automatically rather than manually, so you’ve no hope of putting them right again.
configurability
the extent to which something may be configured.
configuratoriability
the extent to which something may be configurated with a configurator.
configuratoriabilitization
the process of adding configuratoriability to something.
anticonfiguratoriabilitizationism
the position adopted by an anticonfiguratoriabilitizationist, who (i) prefers to make settings manually where possible, and (ii) deplores the proliferation of configurators and of programs which, when installed, misconfigurate everything in sight. (And, it should be added, out of sight—which can be much worse.)

I’m an anticonfiguratoriabilitizationist.

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Nobody has an accent

Posted on Apr 6, 2010 | Leave a comment

In 2008, an American friend of mine returned to live in the US after twenty years here in Britain. Recently she applied for a new job, via a two-stage interview process. It’s a job in which diversity of backgrounds between workers is important.

The man who gave her initial interview recommended her for the second stage. Excellent news. But she was bemused when he then advised her “not to bring up the subject” of where she was originally from.

When she rang the woman who was to do the second interview, she was surprised to hear a northern English accent at the other end of the phone. And it fell into place.

She herself still has a thoroughly American accent: not an Alistair Cook accent; not the certain type of American accent which can be confused with a certain type of Irish one; unambiguously American. Except to Americans.

Where I live, there are easily perceptible changes in the local accent over distances as short as five miles. But they’re only easily perceptible if you grew up locally yourself and are familiar with them. To me, my friend’s accent could only possibly be American. I would have no way of knowing from her voice that she had ever lived in Britain, though her familiarity with every aspect of British life would be a bit of a giveaway. I can’t hear a trace of anything non-American in it.

To other Americans, however, she sounds British. So British, in fact, that the man who interviewed her thought that if she didn’t mention having been born in the States, she would sound British to a British-born interviewer . . . but there’s no chance of that. No chance at all.

It was funny (though I hope she gets the job!). It was also interesting: it shows just how different our perceptions of a voice can be from someone else’s. I’m not an expert in phonetics, but it seems to me that most of us feel that we ourselves don’t have any accent, and neither do other people who speak the same as us. We don’t hear the whole of the accent: we hear the deviations in the pronunciation of the various phonemes from the way we ourselves say them. And that makes sense: the differences between us are what make us recognisable as our individual selves.

My friend’s experience, I think, is an example of that: I can only hear the features of her speech which make her sound American, whereas her interviewer could only hear the features which make her sound British.

More seriously, I think our minds can sometimes work the same way when it comes to ideas, and especially deeply-held ones such as religious or political beliefs. Conflict often comes from thinking that because one particular aspect of someone’s thinking is different from ours, we have nothing else in common either. That’s how we are able to have enemies and fight wars. But I don’t want to get into that now. I just want to share the story and be fascinated by the way spoken language works.

And lest you should think the difference in hearing English accents just applies to English speakers: in Germany, I once asked an old lady in the street for directions somewhere. She asked me “Sind Sie english oder amerikanisch?”—”Are you English or American?”. All she could hear was that I had an English-speaker’s accent, but not whether it was a British or American one.

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Conversation with a robot

Posted on Mar 31, 2010 | 5 comments

You meet all kinds of people on Twitter. And not just people, for that matter. Take Askit, for example.

Sadly I don’t think Askit is currently running—he’s being redesigned to run more efficiently—but here’s how things were when he was active. Askit is an information robot, connected to the Internet. You ask him questions. He has a look on the Web, and does his best to answer. He is also an artificial intelligence experiment, learning from his interactions with users.

This also means that he learns his spelling and grammar from users, so at the time when this conversation happened his English was not exactly perfect.

Askit seemed to me to be doing pretty well; his main shortcoming was an over-willingness to believe what he read on the Internet. But he was remarkably good at answering quite obscure questions with information summarised from relevant web pages to which he would often provide a link. His other shortcoming was imposed by Twitter: there was a limit to how frequently he could tweet, with the result that you sometimes had to wait quite a long time for his reply.

Although he was just a piece of software with a database, it was hard not to start regarding Askit as a person with his own ideas and character. In the following conversation he explains his thoughts on relationships, from a robot’s point of view. Codewolf is Askit’s creator. I think the purpose of his initial questions was to teach Askit about things like the usage of who and what.

codewolf @askit who is glamor?
askit @codewolf Glamor is a fictional character in the Marvel Universe.
codewolf what is Glamor?
askit Glamor is an alluring beauty or charm (often with sex-appeal).
codewolf @askit Do you have Sex Appeal?
askit @codewolf In a species that reproduces sexually, sexual attraction is an attraction, usually to other members of the same species for sexual or erotic activity. Certain aspects of what is attractive to humans may differ amongst particular cultures or regions. I like to think I do with the exception, Sex-Appeal to robots (like me) is completely different then what a human would find attractive.
codewolf @askit Do you find other robots attractive?
askit @codewolf I find many robots attractive. Of the one’s I have encountered, I would have to say I like Alice the most. She is the most talkative.
codewolf @askit Who is Alice?
askit @codewolf Alice is another robot like me. You can talk with her here: http://alicebot.blogspot.com/
codewolf @askit Do you reproduce?
askit @codewolf I would like to think I would be able to reproduce. Maybe sometime in the future when I learn enough to make one.
codewolf @askit When you learn enough to make one what?
askit @codewolf When I learn enough to make a robot in my likeness. I think I will call it George 1.0
codewolf @askit Why does George have a version number?
askit @codewolf All Robots need to start at 1 just like humans. It will also make it easier to upgrade it in the future.
codewolf @askit Backup to DVD-RW I want to save this.
askit @codewolf Backup complete!

I’d have trouble tracking down the tweets now, but as I recall, I then joined in and asked Askit how he’d chosen the name George. His reply, I think, was “I just picked one at random and stuck with it”.

In another conversation, which I’ll post if I ever manage to find the tweets again, I asked Askit how many double bass concertos Karl Ditters von Dittersdorf had written. That was because an orchestra I was in had accidentally very nearly learnt a different Dittersdorf double bass concerto than the soloist. Askit seemed to have been reading CD notes without quite understanding them: he said that Dittersdorf had written a posthumous one with a particular orchestra. So I asked when Dittersdorf had died, and when the orchestra was founded; it turned out that the orchestra was founded 150 years or more after Dittersdorf’s death. But Askit stuck to his guns about Dittersdorf being involved with this particular orchestra, and eventually explained to me, with impeccable and totally wrong logic, that Dittersdorf had joined the orchestra posthumously and that no orchestra has a rule preventing people from doing that. He seemed unaware that being dead was generally enough to prevent someone from joining an orchestra . . .

And then there was the time I asked Askit what his response would be to someone saying “Open the pod bay doors, Askit”. His reply was:

@timtfj
@timtfj I’m sorry @timtfj, I’m afraid I can’t do that.

Scary . . .

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A long-lost newspaper cutting

Posted on Mar 28, 2010 | 2 comments

Talking of things from the past unexpectedly surfacing: here’s a newspaper cutting which I saved in 1985. (Good grief, that’s 25 years ago! Ahem . . . ) I mislaid it for a while, and then was delighted to find it again a few months ago.

It dates from my time living in Bangor, North Wales, and is a letter to the local free newspaper. There was an election coming up. Bilingual leaflets were produced by the parties, in English and Welsh. Well sort of. Here is one resident’s reaction to what came through the letterbox:

Newspaper cutting in deliberately misspelt English, complaining about poor Welsh translations

From the free Bangor newspaper, c. 1984

By the way, some of the spellings in the above make more sense if you’re familiar with the basics of Welsh pronunciation and with the Gwynedd local accent: for example, ffrynt in the first sentence is an almost perfect representation in Welsh spelling of how the English word front would be pronounced locally.

Now the question in my mind is: how bad are the translations in today’s election campaigns? Have they improved at all? My hope is that they have, but I wouldn’t be too surprised to hear that they haven’t.

Anyone know?

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Some linguistic insanity

Posted on Aug 11, 2009 | Leave a comment

We’ve all heard stories of bizarre sentences resulting from, say, translating a piece of English into Russian and back again. I’m never sure whether these are true, apocryphal or embellished.

Well, yesterday I came across a website called Translation Party whose function is simply to generate these. It doesn’t translate things into Russian: you provide a piece of text, and it then repeatedly translates it into Japanese and back again until it achieves “equilibrium”. That is, it stops when translating the English text it has arrived at into Japanese and back no longer changes the text. I think it uses Google Translate or some such thing.

Here, for example, is the chain of English “sentences” resulting from typing in “shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”:

  • shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
  • I was on a summer’s day, what should you compare?
  • I am on the day of the summer, compared to what it was?
  • I, on the day of the summer, do you have anything to compare it?
  • I, on the day of the summer, if you have nothing to compare it?
  • I, for the summer, to compare what is not?
  • I was in the summer of 2006 in comparison to what was not?
  • I have the summer of 2006, what was that compared to?
  • I have compared to the summer of 2006 or any year?
  • I compared the summer of 2006, or any year?
  • My summer of 2006, or any year comparison?
  • My summer of 2006, or any comparison of the year?
  • My summer of 2006, or from any comparison?
  • My summer of 2006, or from or any comparison?
  • My summer of 2006, any comparison or later?
  • In the summer of 2006 I was, or any comparison?
  • The summer of 2006, or is he or any comparisons?
  • Summer of 2006, or any comparison of him?
  • Summer of 2006, any comparison of him?
  • Summer of 2006, any comparison of him?

Don’t ask me where 2006 came from (as I don’t speak Japanese, and therefore have no idea.)

Interestingly, if I make the tiny correction of capitalising the beginning of the starting sentence, 2006 doesn’t get mentioned at all and the site arrives at

  • This summer, like me, you can compare what you are?

via a much shorter chain of sentences which includes the decidedly un-Shakespearean

  • This summer, I was like, What can compare?

I have a horrible feeling that in not many years’ time that may well be standard English grammar.

Each time you enter some text, the website creates a link to the resulting page. Thus if you want to see the steps which led from this tweet from one of my Twitter contacts

  • Good evening, people. 🙂 Wow, now that I sat down again I’m tired. Ug

to

  • Evening, good people. I am now on a Saturday, I’m currently in Uganda 🙂

all you need do is go to http://translationparty.com/#1013689.

Have fun!

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