A cool way to use natural language in JavaScript
github.com
github.com
nlp.statement('She sells seashells').negate().text()
// She doesn't sell seashells
nlp.sentence('I fed the dog').replace('the [Noun]', 'the cat').text()
// I fed the cat
nlp.text("Tony Hawk did a kickflip").people();
// [ Person { text: 'Tony Hawk' ..} ]https://github.com/nlp-compromise/nlp_compromise/blob/master...
Stanford nlp won't recognise "I want to go to sydney" with a location because it expects proper nouns to be capitalised for places (and other similar named entities I believe). I tried to make their case less models work but a lack of time and patience resulted in a more specific fix for what we needed.
> nlp.text('i want to go to sydney.').places()[0].city
'Sydney'
> nlp.text('tony hawk did a kickflip.').people()[0].text
'tony'
nlp.value("I married April for the 2nd time on June 5th 1998 ").date()
// [Date object] d.toLocaleString() -> "04/2/1998"
2nd = 2
nlp-compromise definitely does way more, but in NLP, it helps to be domain-specific.
nlp.text('No one knows.').people()[0].text
'No one' nlp.person("Tony Hawk").pronoun();
// 'he'
Not picking on the library, since this would be an impossible task even for a human, but it seems odd to have used pronoun identification as one of the headline examples.
Anyway, awesome library overall. This could pair well with a dedicated date parsing library like Sherlock[1] to create some pretty cool conversational UI elements.
Way to misgender and insult a number of your users. As you said it is an impossible task and the result is telling "for gender neutral names (ie "Alex" or "Taylor"),"
The best way is to not care, it almost never matters, and when it does, ask.
I think this issue on the nlp-compromise project sums it up nicely: https://github.com/nlp-compromise/nlp_compromise/issues/117
Whether or not someone is male or female may be irrelevant to how they perform in certain tasks, ie, don't judge someone by their race/gender obviously. However, purposely crippling a natural language processor by removing its ability to use language to determine gender is insanity.
Now, I might accept an API in which machine learning was involved and tons of historical data was included as input before predicting the value. Even then, it would of course have a decent potential of being wrong, but at least the result would be a more realistic claim.
The current API feels a lot like this sort of thing:
boolean isHappySentence(String sentence) { return sentence.contains(":)"); }
Sure, it might get it right some of the time, but it's not effective enough to be useful.
If you'd like to improve the capability of the algorithm, put in some PRs to help out the accuracy.
Its a typical mistake non-native, and even native speakers, make in Spanish. Definitely one of the things I still regularly get wrong after 9 years of speaking the language daily.
Which makes it potentially very important to trying to machine process a language.
In Lithuanian, both first and last names have feminine and masculine forms.
For women names almost always end in 'a' or 'e', and for men names usually end in 's' and rarely 'a'. There is also a different suffix on the surname for married and unmarried women.
Top Female names Sophia. Emma. Olivia. Ava. Isabella. Mia. Zoe. Lily.
Top Male names Jackson Aiden Liam Lucas Noah Mason Ethan Caden Jacob Logan Jayden Elijah Jack Luke Michael Benjamin
This is changing, thankfully; check out e.g. the European Language Resources Association's catalogues, http://catalog.elra.info/ or any of the very incomplete list on wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_text_corpora or in fact the various international Wikipediae themselves!
As for this particular project being English only ... itch to scratch probably ;-)
Part-of-speech and syntax-annotated corpora have been available for a long time for many other languages than English. E.g. for German:
http://www.ims.uni-stuttgart.de/forschung/ressourcen/korpora... http://www.sfs.uni-tuebingen.de/ascl/ressourcen/corpora/tueb...
Dutch:
https://www.let.rug.nl/vannoord/Lassy/ http://lands.let.ru.nl/cgn/ https://www.let.rug.nl/vannoord/trees/
French:
http://www.llf.cnrs.fr/en/Gens/Abeille/French-Treebank-fr.ph...
I think that one of the problems is that NLP research of English typically has a higher chance of getting accepted at conferences.
The language of the Internet is English for the most part, and since the Internet is the greatest facilitator of communication in human history, that standard language might as well be English.
I firmly believe the world would be a much better place if people from everywhere could communicate with each other without being inhibited by the language barrier.
I understand that this is not something that can be done overnight, but a lot of people learn English as a second langue today, so maybe a switch could be made in a generation or two, as people who don't speak English as a first or second language slowly die out.
The language of _your_ internet is English. Personally it always bothers me to think of how the largest parts of the internet are essentially walled off by language.
China has essentially its own version of everything we use day to day, so does Japan, Russia, LATAM ...
Instead of having a bunch of barely connected Internets walled off by language, why not standardize language and have one global venue of communication, where everyone can work together?
I am German and I often come across this with my friends, all of whom speak English as a second language. Yet they consume mostly the German parts of the Internet out of habit and convenience. But as far as I can tell, they are worse off for it, since they don't have access to a lot of the stuff the Internet has to offer.
That is especially obvious when searching for IT/tech/science topics, but also relevant in other contexts.
Just the other day, we had to look up something for our school and I simply sumerized the first few lines of the English Wikipedia article and my teacher was amazed how quickly I got those information.
Furthermore, English allows you to see topics from many different views – people from all over the world express their opinions which is much more then most German Jornalist find relevant/agree with.
Because I don't want a huge monoculture, and the end goal is not to have "everyone work together in one way" (which sounds like something from the Third Reich), but to let a thousand flowers bloom.
Ease of doing business is not the be all end all criterion...
Personally I don't care that much about the ease of doing business. Rather, I think standardizing on a language would have a real benefit for humanity as a whole.
Apart from practical considerations, think about how often people from other countries are somewhat dehumanized as an "other" or "the enemy" without you being able to get a view of the situation from the other side of the fence because of the language barrier. I'm wondering for instance if the Cold War could have happened in a world where both parties share a language while being connected over the Internet.
Also, congrats on the unnecessary Nazi comparison.
Any discussion of "standardizing" the world on a language has to take into account how often attempts to do so have been employed as cultural genocide by colonizing powers, explicitly to separate native people from their culture.
To attempt to answer your original question, "why are we putting up with other languages anyway," we don't "put up with" them, because languages other than English are not a burden. Other languages persist because no one has forced their extinction yet.
And even if you "preserve" other languages, having a lingua franca means that eventually native languages will die out because they're simply no longer useful. How many Irish people actually speak Irish? How useful is Japanese outside of Japan? When those languages do die out, as they probably will, what will be lost when all of their literature and cultural referents are translated into English?
I'm not saying having a global common language wouldn't be good for a number of reasons, only that that commonality necessarily comes with a price not everyone is willing to pay.
Not meant to offend (didn't even knew the parent was German at the time, thought I was an American), but it wasn't an gratuitous reference either. It's not like someone in an internet forum calling someone a "nazi" because they disagree with them or anything.
I legitimately believe that there are plenty of legitimate lessons to be learned (to avoid, of course) from the Nazis, as WWII and the Holocaust is the single most deadly and morally disastrous event of the modern era.
And these kind of schemes for "one global government" / "one common language" etc, do have parallels and historical precedents on ideas such that of the Third Reich. An occupied, German speaking Europe, if not world, was indeed one of their stated goals.
The comment you took your quote from already mentioned that I'm German.
That's alright though. I'm not "offended" by the Nazi comparison because of my German heritage. I just wanted to highlight what I perceived to be needless hyperbole that inevitably derails the discussion about the idea at hand by way of Godwin's Law.
> I legitimately believe that there are plenty of legitimate lessons to be learned (to avoid, of course) from the Nazis, as WWII and the Holocaust is the single most deadly and morally disastrous event of the modern era.
Agreed.
> And these kind of schemes for "one global government" / "one common language" etc, do have parallels and historical precedents on ideas such that of the Third Reich. An occupied, German speaking Europe, if not world, was indeed one of their stated goals.
Your argument is basically: "The Nazis did X, hence we should never do X - for all X". I think this is a fallacy. There has to be difference between subduing Europe/the world and proposing to standardize language as a tool of communication for greater peace and more collaboration. I don't think choosing a standard language is any more sinister than choosing standard units of measurement or base 10 numbers.
Hmm, you're right, kind of read past that! I was still thinking I'm replying to an American as in my first comment.
>Your argument is basically: "The Nazis did X, hence we should never do X - for all X". I think this is a fallacy.
That would a fallacy indeed, as the Nazis also did some good stuff (cheap cars, some good welfare laws IIRC, etc), and also neutral stuff.
But I didn't say that for "all X" -- only for specific X which I, for one, think are of the Nazi's bad heritage -- "one global monoculture" I'd say is one of these, even if the culture is the English one.
>I don't think choosing a standard language is any more sinister than choosing standard units of measurement or base 10 numbers.
I guess our difference is mostly in how important we see language as part of culture and/or how sensitive we are to mightier cultures/languages taking over others.
For me losing a language would be as bad as losing a country's literary corpus -- that is, a huge part of the culture (where another might consider the whole literary corpus as something to be dispersed with, or not a big deal if it just survives translated or even forgotten).
On the other hand, something like "units of measurement" I agree are inconsequential -- and could be unified without much impact.
I think you are absolutely right, in that this is the key difference between our respective opinions. I nonetheless enjoyed the surrounding discussion.
It was a racist ideology (in the real, actual sense of racism, not the conspiracy theory academia is being haunted by in the US at the moment). Untermenschen you teach German are still Untermenschen -- they just make better servants because they understand your language.
Saying the idea of one global language is reminiscent of Nazi Germany is either gratuitous or belies a fundamental lack of understanding of just how dangerous the Nazi mindset was.
I too believe there is much to learn about our history to avoid making the same mistakes again but if you want something to worry about with regard to re-creating a Third Reich situation consider these two things happening in the US right now:
1. A resurgence of jingoism and ultra-nationalism (from dehumanizing civilian casualties in drone strikes all the way to Trump's treatment of Muslims).
2. Racism and sexism becoming socially acceptable under the guise of "intersectionality" (partially as a reaction to actual historic injustice and religous fundamentalist attitudes to gender roles).
Yeah, I know -- there have been other historical breakdowns of the phrase in HN.
That said (and to be the usual pedant I am):
1) Even if it was used to flush out dissidents, it would be the abuse of the phrase for a sinister purpose that would be the bad thing, not the phrase itself.
2)It's not that clear cut that Mao meant it in a cunning way. Even the link alludes to that: "Whether or not it was a deliberate trap isn't clear".
3) It's not even that clear cut that Mao was in the wrong in the first place -- revolutions and changes to whole empires are frequently bloody and rarely judged like normal historical periods, especially when they involve civil war et al. If one man killed 2.000 men, women and children we'd consider them a batshit crazy serial killer. Someone like Truman though can order to kill 200.000 people in two Japanese towns and still be considered a legitimate leader, not even a war criminal by many.
Instead, (borrowing a popular internet meme) we use the computing power to throw birds at pigs.
I think you're misguided in looking at the Internet as "one global venue of communication." Users of the Internet don't need a network for global cooperation. They don't need a better world. They need a tool where you can talk to your friends and send them funny cat video (or the latest kernel patch, or whatever they feel like to share at that moment).
People should stop wasting their efforts to maintain versions of the internet in other languages.
You see how discriminatory that sounds? That's the reason there's not a single global language for the internet or otherwise.
Currently the world language is English though.
Learning other languages is not difficult. There is no reason to not learn a new a language.
English is the global language (for now), like it or not.
Do you have any evidence to back that claim?
There are lots of native Chinese speakers, but remember that English is the most popular second language in the world.
I know people that work in some indigenous areas in an other country and sometimes from one village to the next, they'll have trouble understanding. There is no benefit to them, just loss. Same reason when intl orgs come in and push teaching children in their indigenous language (for e.g. math), some push back because they know there's little value in using a language no one else does.
1: Wiki says: Some 54% of speakers of Mandarin dialects could understand the standard language in the early 1950s, rising to 91% in 1984. Nationally, the proportion understanding the standard rose from 41% to 90% over the same period.
In my opinion, having a standardized language is very important. There are a number of different groups online that I'm interested in, but due to language barriers, I can't be part of them. Could I learn all those different languages? Yes, but in my opinion it wouldn't be worth the effort.
If we were to standardise language it would only make sense to standardise to the one spoken by most people in the world and last I checked it was Chinese and Spanish.
I disagree that the language of choice should be Chinese or Spanish, because as far as I can tell more relevant content exists in English.
If however a standard language would be chosen and it was Spanish or Chinese, I would still be in favor of it.
I think that a language is just a tool and I would evaluate it only by it's effectiveneness for sharing ideas.
Why not using an artificial language specifically built for simplicity, such as Esperanto?
There are barely any users and there is only a small amount of content available.
I do agree that it's probably one of the easiest languages to pick up, since it is so regular (largely one suffix per word class, regular inflection, etc.).
Indonesians are all bi or trilingual.
Indonesian is the worlds simplest language. It should be the official world language!
Esperanto or Ido may be the ideal languages. Still many people are attached to their languages and cultures, and I think the only chance for a standarized world-language to be successful would require coordinated efforts and willingness by various governments, which is extremely unlikely to happen.
If I only spoke Chinese, I would be able to make the exact same claim; that more relevant content is in Chinese. It would be all the content I would see (since I would never be searching for english content, and couldn't read the stuff i did find)
Most of these statistics are always the primary language of the people. But I don't think that's a clear indication on how many can actually speak with each different language.
> For example, English has about 340 million native speakers but, depending on the criterion chosen, can be said to have as many as 2 billion speakers.
This statistic is based on research[1] from 2008 which summarizes it's abstract with this sentence:;
> In short, we have moved in 25 years from a fifth to a quarter to a third of the world's population being speakers of English.
So, not quite the majority.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_num... [1] http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPag...
Since I am not a native speaker of German, I sometimes try to start a conversation in English. For the far majority speaking English is difficult or they don't speak English at all, including people with a higher education (e.g. GPs).
I can fully understand, since I had five years of German in high school, but since I had rarely practiced since, I had similar difficulties speaking German.
English is the global language. A Korean pilot working for a German carrier landing a plane in Costa Rica will be speaking English.
Are you counting by native speakers only? Because I don't think this is true, both by intuition and by what Wikipedia seems to say.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_n...
Besides the kind-of evolutionary argument (which might be downplayed on a globalised world), you'd have to consider the history and culture which languages carry. There are e.g. many recipes in my mother tongue which are named from historical and social context; all this would be somewhat lost in translation.
Obviously you have a point and there would be a lot of advantages on standardising on a language. The great issue is then on weighting pros & cons. Or greatest, even: being able to even begin to consider the cons. Can we really have an objective measure of how much we, mankind, would lose by turning all languages except English in dead languages?
Anyway, it doesn't matter much as the biggest obstacle is obviously political, not cultural.
[1] which was said to be a hoax, but after all not so much: https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/there...
However, my point is that I think the pros outweigh the cons in this instance and that humanity would be better off if everyone could communicate with everyone else.
No lingua franca anymore...
All languages can't express as easily the same set of ideas.
There is this Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that says that language shapes what we think. It sounds terrible to me that we could sacrifice so much diversity, so many ways of thinking.
No. If it's true that a group of people come up with words for different types of snow, they'll do it in whatever language they speak. It's not like these words just showed up in their language out of nowhere. Likewise, someone learning Inuit but living in Jamaica probably wouldn't learn all those snow words.
_if_ you didn't realize, _do_ think about it _for_ a _while_.
The medievals had Latin. We have English, and people do have incentive to learn English (while still keeping their regional languages) because almost all knowledge is available in English on the internet.
But we see everywhere efforts to "localize" everything from English to other languages, and this is ridiculous. Wikipedia in languages other than English is awful for almost all topics, websites I visit for the first time keep showing me badly-translated versions of their primary English content and I can't get MDN documentation to be shown to be in English, instead of the horrible translations made by voluntary people they automatically show to me.
More generally, there are plenty of very high quality websites in other languages than English on the Internet.
Because we value our languages and cultures, thank you very much?
Especially if you happened to be born a native English speaking, and you propose this from that vantage point, it comes as borderline racist, and reminds me of this except from Bernard Shaw's Julius Caesar:
"Pardon him, Theodotus: he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature."
English the language of the internet? It is perhaps the language of YOUR internet. The Chinese internet is as big -- and there's the Indian internet, the Spanish speaking internet, and tons more besides.
Why not just get rid of other cultures too, and just keep anglo-saxon culture?
Imagine how easier things could be then, not only we'll have one language, but we could all relate to the same stuff...
Oh, and about those English -- it's dominance in the last centuries is just a historical accident, caused by British and then US power. Even the very term used to describe such a phenomenon, "lingua franca" is not English. The main language used to be Greek, then Latin, then French and English, etc. And that's mostly on the Western part of the world (Europe, US etc) -- that westerners tend to think it's the whole world, but it's hardly 10-20% of the global population. The "lingua franca" could be again very different in 1 or 2 centuries...
I think it is much more of an insult to keep things as they are, where developers everywhere try to translate software and websites to my regional language, and the result is catastrophic. The level of the translations from English to Portuguese I'm forced to read on the internet is a terrible insult to Portuguese, a última flor do Lácio, inculta e bela, it is the horror, the horror.
I still think that there should be a standard language.
I really don't like that language is often conflated with having a distinct culture. I acknowledge that there is some connection between language and culture, but I don't think having a distinct culture necessitates a distinct language. There are many distinct cultures that share a language already. Even if that was the case, what would be wrong with cultivating a world wide culture? Also, some languages like Latin died out, while we still benefit from its speakers cultural achievements.
Having a distinct culture doesn't necessitate having a distinct language, but having an existing distinct culture in a specific language necessitates preserving the language for preserving it -- even just the tons of literature, poetry, song, etc, in that culture, not to mention worldviews and philosophical outlooks expressed in words, etymology, proverbs, shared expressions, etc.
(Also cultures with distinct languages are also more distinct than cultures with shared languages -- except of course if the languages are close cousins of the same family and the cultures have been co-existing for centuries already. An english speaking China will be a very different culture).
And we haven't even mentioned the Shapir/Worf hypothesis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity
>Even if that was the case, what would be wrong with cultivating a world wide culture?
You mean besides obliterating every existing culture and using it for parts?
Everything that's wrong with monocultures of all kinds and singular ways of thinking and doing things (less evolutionary adaptable, less competition among different viewpoints, poorer breadth of experiences and outlooks, etc)
I'm not saying other languages shouldn't be preserved. I'm saying there should be a standard language. I don't think that one precludes the other.
> An english speaking China will be a very different culture
Maybe, but why would that be worse (or better for that matter)?
> And we haven't even mentioned the Shapir/Worf hypothesis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity
That's an interesting point, but on the other hand I'm still not convinced that this means that having a lot of distinct languages is "better". While on the other hand, there would be clear benefits to everyone speaking the same language or having at least one common language.
> You mean besides obliterating every existing culture and using it for parts?
Isn't that what always happens with all culture as it evolves?
> Everything that's wrong with monocultures of all kinds and singular ways of thinking and doing things [...]
This is where I strongly disagree. I think that some things are tools for a specific purpose and should be standardized. Language is a tool to convey facts and ideas.
I recognize that culture should not be standardized, of course.
weltschmerz. schadenfreude. schmetterling.
you simply can not say this word in english without explaining it. if you do not understand german you will also have a very hard time getting the emotion that is embedded into all of us german speakers when we hear those words. there are tons of examples like this in every language.
i also personally think that learning german, english and russian was an enormous benefit to myself, some thoughts i think in english, some in german and very seldomly i even think in russian. the fact that i also think javascript, php, python and lots of other programming languages helps me even more to better be able to transpile my thoughts into words and actions.
you can not articulate thoughts that you do not have words for. if society has less words, society has less variety of thought. it follows that, if you have less words, you have less variety of thought.
in the end i think that instead of declaring a standard language or creating a new standard language (https://xkcd.com/927/ anyone?) what will happen is that our currently used languages will merge into one language that is influenced heavily by all currently spoken languages.
the situation will stay the same, most people will not be able to communicate efficiently, this is not the fault of language though.
but you are right, schmetter does not originate from "smasher" (as i and probably most german speakers assumed), but instead from "Schmetten", which means butter or cream.
this also means that this word is translated perfectly, but the german word has a whole different meaning nowadays, i personally have never heard the word schmette.
thanks for the motivation to look at this, feeling a bit smarter now and finally know why the schmetterling is called butterfly. :)
Would the computer world be "better" if anyone standardize on one single programming language (e.g. java) or is it "better" that different languages are there, ( dartmouth basic , javascript, python, lisp, haskell or perl) so you can code differently ?
As for the universal language, Esperanto tried: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto a nice documentary about it: http://esperantodocumentary.com/en/about-the-film
(previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11001695 )
It's not clear that language is inseparable from culture; there are arguments to be made that language shapes thought (see "1984" for an extreme thought experiment!), and culture might well be shaped by the network effects of such frameworks.
As for cultivating a world wide culture, perhaps we can already see it happening! And perhaps global language would follow. A few years back there were great claims made that in a century we'd all be speaking so-called "Panglish", the sort of global pidgin that would emerge from mashing lots of languages into English. Maybe ... maybe not. If there were a "standard language", chances are it would be at least partially based on English, and supplement local languages. But it depends entirely on whether everyone really cares about understanding each other, to the extent of learning a common tongue.
but humans are not so logical!
I don't believe there is anything illogical about the diversity of languages. No different from the existence of multiple,types of programming languages.
There are many ideas which are impossible to express in english because it's not only lacking the words but the culture itself. Calling for standardization on a language is calling for the death of cultures you do not understand.
And while that's not "racist" as it's not about race, it's quite literally xenophobic. You're afraid of something because it's alien to you.
For example Hawaiian Pidgin uses many words that don't have a clear English equivalent. This seems like it is a common occurrence in other places.
American English will keep evolving thanks to immigrants and cultural progress.
Ugh, don't make stuff up like this to try to prove some point. This discussion is about getting rid of language barriers and has nothing to do with fear of a language. I want standardized language as well and I wouldn't care if it meant I had to learn a new language. So it's not xenophobic at all.
Not understanding different cultures, thinking their very existence is "annoying and useless" and thus wanting them gone? Yeah, that's being afraid of something alien. And "afraid" is a nice way to put it.
I speak 4 languages fluently and learn more because it's fun, it's beautiful, it teaches you a lot about people and culture and it even improves your understanding of languages you already speak. It's also a wonderful way to immerse yourself into a country you're moving into for the first time. This thread is filled with people who lack that perspective and think their opinion is informed and considerate because "I know I might have to learn a new language and that's fine". Let me remind you how this thread started: "why are we putting up with other languages anyway?".
We already have a lingua franca in the western world and it is English. It's as good as it can get. But the replies here, unhappy with that, boil down to "let's make it official and declare every other language as dead, then let's force that onto the non-english-speaking world".
I used to think like this, btw. I wondered why we bother with different languages. Why going to another country had such a high artificial barrier of entry. Why we didn't just agree on one and left languages to "hobbyists". But I was 8 years old and didn't know any better. I expect more from HN.
Would you call the creation of the Euro or even bitcoin xenophobic? They both were designed to eliminate barriers imposed by differences between countries as well.
This makes me really curious: do you have an example of this or would the explanation of an example in English lose the essence of the explanation?
I'm not sure if these are examples of things that cannot be translated or explained in a foreign language, but they are a few things that came to mind:
You can't really translate Japanese haiku to English, only approximate them (well, some of them). The Samic language (and probably others, at least I'd expect some native American/First Nation languages to have a similar term), has a word for the state between being awake and being asleep/dreaming: adjagas. In Maori, the ideas of boiled food is tightly connected to the physical world, so much so that boiled fish/food is considered anti-magic (or so I've been informed by a linguist). The Norwegian word "koselig"/"å kose seg" is hard to translate to English. It's related to "cozy"[k], but carries a deeper meaning that is deeply connected to Norwegian culture (or so a lot of foreigners seem to think).
In martial arts, the concept of distance can be represented by the Japanese term "maai"[m]. Is this really so different from similar concepts from fencing? I'm not sure, but the meaning is certainly deeply connected to the culture and concepts of martial arts.
You'll note that I've not listed any English concepts that I see as hard to translate or explain in other languages. This is partly because thanks to Hollywood (and other cultural exports, like books), many ideas from (American) English is already part of many cultures of the world - at least those with which I'm mostly familiar: Norway and Japan. I suppose the custom of asking how someone is doing, while not actually wanting to know how they're doing, could be one such example.
[k] http://www.lifeinnorway.net/2015/02/a-visual-guide-to-koseli...
Because it's not just that a word exists in some language X that doesn't exist in language Y (you can always explain the word's general meaning with a complete phrase or two).
The most important part is rather having that notion in the language X as a handy thing to use -- and thus being able to shape concepts and phrases around it, and sharing an instant common recognition for that notion with others.
That said, there are several very good books on the subtleties of translation and language concepts in general, but one I suggest for the HN crowd would be "Le Ton Beau De Marot: In Praise Of The Music Of Language" by Douglas R. Hofstadter (of "Godel, Escher, Bach" fame).
http://www.amazon.com/Ton-Beau-Marot-Praise-Language/dp/0465...
(or (disagrees-with person thing)
(disinterested-in person thing)
(dislikes person thing)) => t
(equal (or (disagrees-with person thing)
(disinterested-in person thing)
(dislikes person thing))
(afraid-of person thing)) => nil
"You dislike x? So you're xphobic."
"You disagree with x? So you're an xphobe."
"You don't support x? So you're against x rights."
It's hollow and transparent, but sadly, many people fall for it.
I see you complaining elsewhere in the thread about the use of the term "racist". Yes, I'm with you, it's not racist. I said it was xenophobic in answer to that. People confuse the terms a lot because often enough they can be used interchangeably. But the very etymology of xenophobia is "fear of what is alien".
This thread is a very, very clear example of that. You don't like it maybe because you don't see it, or you don't understand how inconsiderate it is to take somebody's language - an essential tool of communication, built over thousands of years with immense and incredibly diverse legacies - call it "useless" and wanting it gone.
I would love to discuss the practicality and side effects of "standardizing on a single language". Why it's not that simple. Why it won't have the effects you'd be looking for. Why languages even exist in the first place. But this thread started rotten and got worse - nothing good can come of it anymore.
There is a lot of culture tied to languages. English happens to be a melting pot of many other languages and cultures so perhaps,you don't see it as much with English.
But there is a lot of fascinating history and context tied to other languages.
Speak for yourself. Learning foreign languages has enriched my life very much.
Somehow in the minds of the world's population, while they are sleeping, you replace their language with a variant of English with cultural-specific loan words and extensions (for the closest approximation, think of French/Portugeuse? schooling in the colonies, or in France for that matter).
And let's propose we rather brainwash ourselves with 'their' language rather than the other way round, to avoid various accusations.
And let's propose we construct great internet firewalls, employ sharp-eyed border guards and have strict controls over the movement of people into and out of the country to maintain cultural homogeneity (look to history for precedents).
Practically almost any phrase can be translated into another language with absolute equivalence. A great army of translators translates all significant works of literature and media into the new language.
Culture is preserved yet we can now communicate between ourselves better? Any observations? (I'll think about it too.)
I think languages serve as natural barriers to cultural homogenization, which otherwise tends to occur.
*English with its ambiguous spelling
On the other hand, Mandarin is hardly an improvement when it comes to avoiding ambiguity. Any other language would likely not be big enough to make it to lingua franca status anytime soon.
Again, English winning out so far is already a point for the good-enough, and exterminating other languages would mean giving up on better designs in favo(u)r of standardization on a suboptimal thing.
Is it cool that I can code JavaScript / Browser API almost everywhere these days? Hell yeah! Do I want to give up things that other languages offer (types, concurrency, non-web sockets, manual memory management where it makes sense) so we can all speak the same language? Maybe not.
I think efforts should go towards getting better at supporting diversity, rather than trying to water down everything to the lowest common denominator. Sure it's more effort, but it's not like you don't get anything for it in return.
These other internets that you have mentioned are not much significant outside their own little spheres. But English internet is the original one and the most important internet out there. English has become the de-facto standard language of modern communication.
I am all for making English as "the" standard language for the world. History is full with countless cultures/languages getting destroyed at the hands of "time". I am very happy that unofficially English has already become "the" standard language for the world.
Disclaimer: I am an Asian with English as a second (actually earlier as a third language). But due to English and due to English internet alone I could educate myself to a large extent and could come out of the clutches of the barbaric and irrational religious preachings/scriptures.
Those "little spheres" can be 2-3 times the US market. And the rest of the English internet is of not much use to most people in their day to day lives, outside businessmen and techies exchanging business communications and technical information.
>Disclaimer: I am an Asian with English as a second (actually earlier as a third language). But due to English and due to English internet alone I could educate myself to a large extent and could come out of the clutches of the barbaric and irrational religious preachings/scriptures.
Well, not really representative of Asians at large then. There are always people that adopt a new culture and frown upon their old culture -- there's also whole thing called "internalized racism" -- feeling your ways are inferior to those of the dominant culture.
I didn't tell that I am representative of Asians. I did tell that thing to emphasize the fact that I am NOT a westerner English speaker.
>>There are always people that adopt a new culture and frown upon their old culture -- there's also whole thing called "internalized racism" -- feeling your ways are inferior to those of the dominant culture.
Then I'd say that there are people who like to cling to their cultures/ways however rotten/backward their cultures/ways/customs might be just because they become emotionally attached to it.
Meaningful progress can be made only if we look at our ways (cultures/customs) critically and if require throw part/whole of it away. Today there is so much knowledge available in English that if a person (or better any sizable group of people) adopts English language, he/she gets huge benefits out of it.
>>outside businessmen and techies exchanging business communications and technical information.
Most of the societal progress happens due to technical innovation/progress and business communications. Here also English dominates the world. Take for example the Wikipedia. The English one dwarfs any other language wikis.
The British empire was the largest spanning empire in world history.
English is the world language, like it or not.
The country with the highest number of English speakers is not even in the Western hemisphere!
Thus far.
> Especially if you happened to be born a native English speaking, and you propose this from that vantage point
This is slightly racist to me.
Aside, this "vantage point" logic seems to be similar to the logic that only some people (white people, for example) can be racist.
In fact, today it doesn't mean anything, because it means whatever the speaker wants it to mean. It's used simply to denigrate whoever the speaker dislikes or disagrees with, without making a rational counter-argument.
Speaking a language != being a member of a race
Preferring a language != being prejudiced against members of a race
"That's racist!" != it being racistBut language shapes thought. It actually limits it. If you can't express something in your language then you are unlikely to even think it. People who speak different languages actually see the world in different ways, with different nuances and details.
And the internet is highly interactive, collaborative and social. You don't have to look beyond HN to see great examples of this.
This means that limiting the internet through a single language means we would be also limiting our ability to form, spread and implement new ideas.
Creativity often comes from finding a curious analogy that crosses domains. If one of those domains has only a poor English representation then it's unlikely that the brainsinvolved in an English-only conversation would discover the novel analogy.
So no, that would not be good for the internet as canvas of collaboration and communication of ideas and thoughts.
This is a fairly strong statement of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which is not widely believed.
You can state the hypothesis in various ways, ranging from the strong hypothesis ("you can't think things that aren't in your language", which is clearly false because you can learn new things about language) to weak ("language kinda influences your thoughts").
There is evidence in favor of what I'd call the "extremely weak Sapir-Whorf hypothesis": that language can influence the way you judge things that are established by convention such as colors and directions, in experiments that are specifically designed to emphasize these distinctions, sometimes.
For everything else? Politics, literature, journalism, and of course everyday usage? It couldn't possibly work. Let's say you held the whole world population at gun point, forced everybody to learn English and and use it for then year. I'm sure that as soon as you relaxed your iron fist, the various locally used dialects would diverge in a few generations and you would be back to what we are now. The world is not as connected as we like to think.
It would be an incredibly boring world where communication could only be expressed in some lowest common denominator.
I don't think English is a good "standard" language. Despite widespread usage, there are a lot of problems I see with it when compared to other languages.
For example, the word read. Which read did I mean? If I spoke it, and meant the other read, was I talking about the colour red? I know, context and all that, but the inconsistent, broad rules often based on context alone isn't that great. I imagine computers would have a bit easier a time with a language with a more consistent structure.
I think a good parallel lies in programming languages. PHP is widespread on the web. Should we make it the standard? If I called for that, I'd be served a link to how PHP is a fractal of bad design or similar with a resounding no and perhaps a bit of shame to finish things off nicely.
That and in England the whole "St George's day hurkadurr" crap is pretty tedious. I don't want to see memes like "English is the world standard language. Why do we need a polish shop in ENGLAND?!"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto
People have been pushing for years to make it the standard worldwide language.
Incidentally, you can use reddit in Esperanto: https://eo.reddit.com
While that puts it in the same boat as English - it strikes me as slanted heavily towards the "European dialects", rather than say, Farsi.
I actually think Japanese might make as good a "universal" language: it's an old language - and has few sounds. I think (but am not certain), that one would be hard pressed to find anyone that wouldn't be able to distinguish all the phonemes of Japanese (while many have issues distinguishing between "tap" and "flap" ("r" and "l" - right vs light)).
A big caveat is that I'm completely unfamiliar with African languages in general, as well as "old" American ones (both things like Navaho and Tupic or Macro Je). For use as a "universal" language, one would probably want to limit the vocabulary and reform the writing system in some way though. Perhaps choosing a subset of the existing Kanji and updating them to be more classic iconographic again.
Unfortunately what I needed to process was likely to be in either English or Indonesian, without forewarning which it was, so we had to use an api (we used Google in the end , but the Microsoft one worked too) to detect + translate the text to English, which has some interesting side affects when dealing with numbers with suffixes, and dates, due to limitatioms of what Stanford nlp recognised (1 million is recognised as 1000000, 1M is not)
Also, handling informal text can be a nightmare - I'm still wondering if a mechanical Turk solution wouldn't have been better.
"this library is great." into "all other libraries aren't great." ?
https://tonicdev.com/5716bedc1dd0391100f67570/57372d9625c9be...
Imagine integrating this into Anki: "Please negate this sentence", "Please turn this sentence into past tense", "What's the direct object", and so on.
Perhaps "this sentence" could refer to some interesting sentence from an article that you read in Pocket last week, for example!
Do you know if there's something similar for OSX ?
Available in OS X v10.7 and later
However, it's very hard to allow abstraction without ambiguity. It might be best to think of ambiguity as a form of lossy compression, since it allows us to skip a bunch of thinking and words to say what we want to. Supposedly the creator of Ithkuil has to think for half an hour to get exactly the right word.
On top of that, we also use ambiguity for humor and colour. A new humor culture had to grow in Lojban, because typical puns and the like didn't translate.
I've grown more interested recently in languages that embrace ambiguity, such as toki pona. With a language like that, you can shrink the necessary vocabulary down to a tiny number of words meaning that nonspecialists can learn the language in a short period of time. Aiming for ease of acquisition seems like the right approach for a constructed language that aims to be practically useful.
Any good reason this is on the front page, other that:
Google made JS faster > Google made their NLP library SyntaxNet open-source > NLP_compromise is a NLP JS library so it has to be top news
?
How this library can even appear to be anything new?
Have you never explored the NLP field? I guess downvoters never did, I have to other way to understand it.
Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think a story is spam or off-topic, flag it by clicking on its "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.) If you think a comment is egregious, click on its timestamp to go to its page, then click "flag" at the top.
Please resist commenting about being downvoted. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
I never did. I was just questioning on the popularity it got on HN, not on it being inappropriate.
> Please resist commenting about being downvoted.
Ok, I apologize for that. My mistake. But hey, may I know the reasons why do you think that my opinion is wrong, anyone, and specifically you @cskau, if you do? Eagerly waiting for it but I fear I'll receive no on-context answers :(
1. JavaScript is widely known and used. Thus, anything JavaScript attracts more attention than similar projects in other languages, especially if it's outside the box of the usual webby stuff.
2. The API on this library looks very intuitive and utilitarian. It doesn't get much easier than .people(), .topics(), etc. People can see themselves actually using this.