Hacker News Reader

Comment by andreasvc | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

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.

I'll link to the famous poem ( http://www.i18nguy.com/chaos.html ) and let people decide whether English pronunciation has rules...

Look you can describe anything with rules as long as they are specific enough. In the pathological case each word is its own rule, but English clearly has way more regularity than that, which explains why there is a seminal academic work describing English phonology with a set of rules.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com