From: spike66 (spike66@attbi.com)
Date: Fri Mar 07 2003 - 21:05:31 MST
In this forum I have decried the practice of
nonstandard language use for the reason that
soon now machines will be advanced enough to
do realtime translations using speech recognition
and a simple sort of table-lookup style
substitution. The overuse of obscure allusions
and verbing, among other language bad habits,
will delay practical machine translation, as
well as interfere with machines' ability to
understand humans.
A good speech recognition program would be
able to identify parts of speech and make
educated guesses as to what the human meant
in those cases where phrases sound alike.
Example: "recognize speech" sounds a lot like
"wreck a nice beach."
A good translator program would need to have
an extensive slang library, but of course some
words come into use that would confuse any
software, such as the word synergy.
Today I heard a manager say "I am trying to
create synergism." Since the program under-
stands slang, it would translate into another
language as "I am trying to create the
seminal fluid of a person who commits moral
or ethical transgressions."
We need newspeak. Before it's too late.
spike
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Mar 07 2003 - 21:10:49 MST