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Comment by ntoshev | Hacker News Reader

Having monospaced / proportional font test as a sort of control would have been nice.

I've been wondering what is the analogue of syntax highlighting for natural languages. Still experimenting with it, but most promising is simple keyword highlighting. I've written a Chrome extension that does this:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/highlit/cooahmcpma...

Interestingly, keyword highlighting apparently helps some type of dyslexic people focus their attention on the text. With the web full of distractions, I've noticed similar effect myself. Keywords also seem to help skimming, when you're reading the text with a specific purpose in mind.

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> what is the analogue of syntax highlighting for natural languages

Nouns begin with a capital letter in German, and used to be in Dutch and English until a few hundred years ago. Perhaps it was because nouns are generally spoken with the greatest stress of all words in an English sentence. Perhaps such capitalization is an analogue of programming syntax highlighting.

I think of it as a space to explore. Punctuation is another preexisting visual aid in parsing. However, printed text is rather limited compared to the ways a computer can style text dynamically for you.

Edit: The fact that this capitalization disappeared suggest the returns from the effort of capitalization weren't so great. But now the investment per word is much lower because the process can be automated.

Sometimes long complex English sentences can be very confusing to me, especially in finding the verb in there. When two or three consecutive words have different grammatical meaning, and can be used in different grammatical meanings, it can become very confusing if English is not your mother tongue. In that case, color coding (or bold / italic / underscore) could help a lot. But for a word processor to do that, it has to understand grammar...

I've tried part-of-speech tagging and subjectively it doesn't seem to help much. POS taggers for English are a solved problem, so it can be done automatically, but for prototyping I tried marking up some text myself. Indeed what helped the most were the verbs (vs other parts of speech), but it still didn't seem to be worth doing.

Also marginally helpful was to delimit noun / verb phrases with 2 spaces instead of one.

> Nouns begin with a capital letter in German

Personally, I don't like that. I prefer if capitalization is a marker of names (e.g. the difference between apple and Apple).

My japanese is pretty elementary, but it's quite fun how most "conceptual" things like verbs, adjectives, and nouns are expressed via kanji, and they're related to each other via conjugation with hiragana, particle tagging also in hiragana. And on top of that, foreign words or emphasis are expressed in katakana.

So for example, 私の名前はロデリックです。The words for "I" and "name" are expressed in "complex" kanji (私、名前), connectors and grammatical stuff in hiragana (の、は、です). And my name, transliterated, in katakana (ロデリック).

I've read somewhere that, as a result, japanese is painful to write, but a pleasure to read. I'm not there yet but I can sort of see it.

   I've been wondering what is the analogue of syntax highlighting for natural languages.

Typography.

>I've been wondering what is the analogue of syntax highlighting for natural languages.

Well, we have bold and italics to emphasize important parts of a phrase (and underline, which is often used in handwriting for that purpose).

Since we don't work with different colors when reading/writing, we also use things such as punctuation, e.g. ? to denote that a statement is a question, ! that it intends to show wonder, etc.

I'm used to writing with ~3-8 different colours. My colleagues are amazed (and make a bit of fun) that when I lend them an essay, every colour has a meaning. I also use block letters and cursive to subtly alter the meaning of a phrase.

I've done this since highschool, because a full page with single coloured text seems incredibly boring to me, and it draws my attention away.

That sounds incredibly difficult to read for most people. How sure are you that it's an effective method to communicate with other people? (Or is it just something you do for your own stuff, and other people get plain text?)

It's an effective method to write for myself, most of this stuff is meant as drafts that only I (or few people) are meant to read.

But it still sounds worse than it actually is, I promise it's a lot clearer than it sounds. Most of this is technical stuff with formulas or code, so it helps a lot more than it seems from the description. And the "full 8 colours" are only used in special cases with a lot going around.

That's interesting! Can I see such an essay of yours?

Most of my writing is in spanish, does it bother? I may have a few things written in english though.

I would love to see it too!

English is better as I'd have to run Spanish through Google Translate. Email is in my profile if you don't want to post it here.

I've been wondering what is the analogue of syntax highlighting for natural languages

The Writer Pro app from iA has a "Syntax Control" feature: https://brooksreview.net/2014/02/does-syntax-highlighting-ac...

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