Tag: languages

Words are conspiracies

Dear XXXX:

The dictionary search engine is a small program whose sole job is to analyze an input into a field and search our database for an exact or near match to the inputted word. “Democratic” is given in the suggested entries list when you entered “democrasy” because it is orthographically similar to the word you entered. We can assure you that the dictionary search engine was not written by Bolsheviks, nor is it programmed only to return Socialist or “unAmerican” words, as you suggest.

Literacy means condensing

a stunning essay on what literacy means: condensing. an art we have lost when words became cheap. even artificial constraints like 140 characters seem to primarily bring out the moronic, not the profound.

Many hours of thought went into this 11-word candidate for eternal quotability. When I was done, I was tempted to immediately unpack it in a longer essay, but then I realized that that would defeat the purpose. Maxims and aphorisms are about more than terseness in the face of expensive writing technology. They are about basic training in literacy. The aphorism above is possibly the most literate thing I have ever written. By stronger criteria I’ll get to, it might even be the only literate thing I’ve ever written, which means I’ve been illiterate until now.

Dolphin Language

the first identified word was jerks.

Researchers in the United States and Great Britain have made a significant breakthrough in deciphering dolphin language in which a series of 8 objects have been sonically identified by dolphins. Team leader, Jack Kassewitz of SpeakDolphin.com, ‘spoke’ to dolphins with the dolphin’s own sound picture words. Dolphins in 2 separate research centers understood the words, presenting convincing evidence that dolphins employ a universal “sono-pictorial” language of communication.

see also

Marine biologists have connected 2 dolphin research habitats with underwater microphones and speakers. They hope the chat line will enable a dolphin calf to learn to “talk” by communicating with dolphins in the other facility.

Uplift Universe is required context for this talk. in particular: Neo-Dolphins

If the dolphins engaged in meaningful communication with near-human complexity, the frequency of these sounds would yield a logarithmic slope of -1—just like most human languages. Dolphin recordings had a gradient of -.95. This suggests that “dolphinese” may exhibit syntax. In comparison, the squirrel monkeys’ Zipf slope was never lower than -0.6, meaning the signals were too random to exhibit syntax. The cotton plant, which communicates through chemical emissions, had a signal distribution slope closer to -1.6, meaning the signals were too redundant.

Grammar improves sales

Zappois noticed that products with high-quality reviews are selling well. They used Amazon Mechanical Turk to improve the quality of the reviews posted on its own website. Given that Zappos spent at least 10 cents per review, and that they examined 5m reviews, the expected revenue improvement should have been at least a few million dollars for this exercise to make sense.

fixing grammar / spelling led to increased revenue for zappos.