Initial Stress-Derived Noun | Hacker News Reader

Initial Stress-Derived Noun

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215 pointsrichardw160 comments

One thing that is a bit amazing to me is that there are all sorts of absolutely bonkers rules to English that 99% of people can’t describe, but do subconsciously anyways. Things like the order of adjectives (“big red ball” sounds right, “red big ball” sounds wrong) are surprisingly complicated [1], but we passively learn them at a young age.

[1] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/grammar/british-grammar/adj...

Thats seems more like a arbitrary cultural distinction versus a rule. It sounds odd, but a half second of thought should make it obvious it makes perfect sense.

What's the difference between 'arbitrary cultural distinction' and 'rule of a language'?

RADAR vs radar.

Acronyms should be all upper case. But no one really cares for words that have entered common languge

The dictionaries we have (Oxford, Merriam-Webster etc.) are all descriptive rather than prescriptive.

I mean true but this is like pointing out that no one plays baseball with a golf club. One is ubiquitous because it's useful and the other isn't.

Prescriptive dictionaries do exist but they're mostly used by specialists to understand specific usages within a time-limited context like "what did 'gay' mean in 1920s california" etc.

Similarly there might possibly be some training reason to try to hit a baseball with a golf club. But if that applies to you you're probably aware of it.

> understand specific usages within a time-limited context

That sounds descriptive to me.

Yeah you're right. I guess a style guide or a usage guide would be a prescriptivist dictionary?

I'd always heard "prescriptivist dictionary" is a thing that exists but now that I'm thinking about it I'm kind of doubting it.

I suppose the only thing where that might actually make sense is if you're a lawyer, where slightly different wordings have big impacts on what a contract or ruling actually means.

This differs among languages, e.g. NATO vs Nato, and even dialects.

Acronyms look weird to me when not written in all caps, yet when they turn into commonplace proper nouns (e.g. when people an acronym without even knowing the expansion) such spelling is essentially vestigial.

Luckily English spelling has a fondness for vestigial forms, unlike languages like German that undergo periodic spelling "reform"

Not sure German undergoes periodic spelling reform?

There was one attempt recently, but it didn't change much.

The Turkish switch to Latin script about 100 years ago was a much bigger deal. And they went completely phonetic.

There was an initial effort to set up some rules in the 19th century, a highly confusing back-and-forth during the Drittes Reich period between Antiqua and Fraktur-style writing, and the utter clusterfuck of a spelling reform you mentioned, which eerily reminds me of the Python 2/3 debacle.

Going completely phonetic is also possible, but fraught with severe problems:

- major convincing of all literate speakers required.

- there might be more than one way to spell certain words if phonetic features of the language make it difficult. For example consonant clusters or vowel modifications by tones, such as in Vietnamese. Representing just the tones is also already quite tricky.

- definite FU to the dialects since the spelling is going to be aligned to the prestige variant or to a compromise variant nobody speaks.

- all existing literature would become difficult to understand within a generation or two.

- A phonetic writing system, together with pronunciation rules a linguist would still understand in a few hundred years, makes it possible to fix pronunciation. We humans are surprisingly good at coming up with such systems. But languages still change, and the writing system will therefore accumulate artifacts. Cue the ğ in Turkish, which changed its role to a vowel lengthener.

Going phonetic is still the rational choice when introducing an alphabet for a language that didn't have one before, or one of a different kind. You have to alphabetize people anyways, and there is not much literature yet.

Clearly languages that adopt a written form (still happening today) or change alphabets (Mongolian was discussed on HN in the past couple of weeks) undergo linguistic shock.

Austria and Prussia officialized spelling in he 19th century (Prussia simply said “whatever Duden says”). The German government reformed the language in the early 20th century. Apparently there was an attempt in 44 but I haven’t heard much about it — there was a lot of other stuff going on at the same time.

I don’t know if you were around for the one in 96 — it was significant enough to be quite controversial even at the international level. When my kid entered school in 2004 there was a furious argument among the parents as to whether the new spelling rules should be adopted (foolish, as the new rules were the law).

I believe the 1902 reform was when ß was defined to be „ss“ rather than „sz“ as it is drawn and named (I always thought it would have been cute Salzgitter’s symbol to have been ß rather than SZ’.

Of course there are less formal changes as well: the adoption of Latin letterforms pretty much killed some Fraktur letters like tz (I inherited some books from a friend whose own schoolbooks from the 1930s still used and taught these letters)

One style guide I've seen (forget where) tells you to lowercase acronyms and capitalize initialisms. (But initial letter still uppercases when it's a proper noun)

So Covid, Nasa, and radar/laser; but FBI, CIA, and UPS.

I do this in my own writing, except for “NASA”. Just feels wrong to lowercase that one.

And of course, laser and radar are just words at this point. Their origins may be acronymic, but like you said: common language mints new words.

Honestly it's grim but the social power of the group that uses it.

If you speak a prestige dialect your patterns are "rules" and if you don't your patterns are "errors." But in both cases it has nothing to do with the language per se, just social and political relationships.

All linguistic rules are arbitrary cultural distinction. They're used for error correction and conveying subtly different meanings.

In the "big red ball" vs. "red big ball" case it can be deliberately used to change the way the term parses. The "normal" one means a ball that is both red and big. The abnormal one implies that "big ball" is lexically a single object, perhaps a proper noun, and that the "red" modifier is being applied to it.

I dont really think thats a valid distinction. Is there a false/different final "thing" that is being described?

To make this more apparent, “that big yellow bird” just means any old ordinary bird, whereas people would probably take “that yellow big bird” to refer to Big Bird the Sesame Street character. So that can totally be a valid parsing of the sentence.

I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "false," but "different," definitely. Hyphens have fallen somewhat out of fashion in modern English but they can provide clarity in these cases.

Let's change the noun. If a native speaker says, "big red hands," you can normally assume they're speaking of large hands which are colored red.

However, if they say "red big hands," this parses to "red big-hands," meaning "big-hands" is treated as a title, or perhaps a brand. You might see this title capitalized: "red Big-Hands".

Going back to the first example, if you mean "red hands" as a title, you could write "big Red Hands" or better yet, "big Red-Hands," meaning something big with the title Red-Hands. Since the adjective order is the same as grammatically conventional English, the hyphen helps distinguish the writer's meaning. But nowadays I find writers often leave it out when the adjective order implies the multi-word title.

big brown hairy foot.

hairy brown bigfoot. :-)

At least when I was growing up, it was taught to avoid hyphens because the standards at the time (or at least the teachers teaching them) strongly disliked hyphens because they were associated with mid-word line breaking.

Or distinguishing between two big-balls, one of which is red.

I'm not sure if you mean "big-ball" as a special object distinct from any "big ball." If not, I would still say "the big red ball, not the big green ball."

If we're already talking about a "big ball" and someone wanted clarification about "the red one or the blue one", it's been promoted to a special object and for that context "the red big ball" sounds more correct to me. To show the promotion of "big ball" in text, I'd type it like "the red big ball" or "the red big-ball" (though the latter still looks odd), even though the emphasis of the former might be slight enough not to be obvious when spoken.

As a very concrete example of this, in games like Diablo, you might have an item literally called "Big Ball" that can have a color attribute. You would (and I have) absolutely refer to a particular colored item as a "red Big Ball".

This is the exception that proves the rule, though, as "big" is now in fact part of the ball's identity, rather than something merely describing the ball.

> This is the exception that proves the rule, though,

Seeing this phrase (or "Begs the question") used appropriately is always a pleasant surprise.

Um, no. We (British-English speakers) say "big _red_ ball" just adding emphasis to the vocalisation of "red".

You hear an example in Boris Johnson PM talking about "new _blue_ passport", people getting a "new passport" is a thing, but if you say a 'blue "new passport"' then people will find that a foreign turn off phrase and assume you're a non-native speaker or you're having a stroke (ie a medical problem with your brain).

I mean, yeah, if it's a noun phrase it might work, but even if we're taking about a red zorb, it's not going to be "red big ball" unless Big Ball is a trade mark or brand name or whatever.

Everything you say makes logical sense, but I wonder if you're overthinking this?

I can't imagine any editor would let you get away with something like "the red big-ball."

"Rule" in this context means a regular distinction which speakers know and follow implicitly. Not a prescriptive rule that you learn in school, like "always put periods inside quotes."

I'm curious to see how this goes for you because in my experience this site is HARDCORE prescriptivist almost like it's a religion it's a bit scary sometimes.

Most people are. I'm used to it.

About the 'red big ball': you can use that, but the weirdness itself suggests that you better mean something different than an ordinary big red ball with that phrase.

Also interesting and surprisingly rule-bound: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expletive_infixation

> Although most speakers are not exposed to these formations until after childhood,[citation needed]

Lol at “citation needed”

“Give me one of the big balls.”

“Wait, I actually need a red big ball.”

Gave giant balls two pink to kids.

One was slightly larger then the other. Life Lesson, either both must be identical, or don’t get.

it works but even then, “no sorry, I decided I need the big red ball” feels more natural to me.

Or if a "Big Ball" is a thing, like a brand name lol.

Exactly. My personal hunch is that the supposed "required ordering" of adjectives isn't real, and the real "rule" is related to the tightness by which the adjectives are bound to the noun -- least separable go last. It's just that, in practice the semantic tightness corresponds to that rule.

In the extreme case (like you gave) where "BigBall(tm)" is an irreducible thing it itself, then of course "big" goes last.

Yeah; I first heard about this from a German speaker who was complaining about it. He said that you could mangle 99% of English Grammar — no problem. But! you get the order-of-adjectives slightly wrong, and a native English speaker will look at you like you're from Mars. His second complaint is that the rule is rarely taught to native English speakers, such that they (we) don't even know how hard of a rule it is.

German has more as less exactly the same order in which adjectives are sorted (unless you want to put stress on any particular adjective).

That's a problem itself already.

On a lot of languages, the order of the words can change a lot depending on what you want to stress, but English gives you very little leeway. Thus if you try to apply your skill of ordering the words right to express yourself, you will fail almost every time.

All languages have either exactly the same adjective order as English, or exactly reversed.

> All languages

This would amaze me. How sure you are about this? Or do you mean something like "all languages I speak"?

Stacked adjectival modification and the structure of nominal phrases

Gary-John Scott (2002)

Speaking as a linguist, Cartography, the theory espoused by this work, is a highly controversial approach. The claim needs to be taken with a grain of salt. It isn't a statement of fact but an argument for a hypothesis that has not been thoroughly tested using a rigorous empirical methodology.

I am a linguist who works in the field, performing basic research on languages that have very little documentation. I am aware of how tentative initial grammars of many of the world's languages are because I am involved in writing them myself. These works are the primary data that most linguistic theorists tend to use when making broad typological claims, i.e. claims about all languages. Theoretical works like Gary-John Scott are essentially meta-studies, secondary reinterpretations of primary research. This is fine for generating hypotheses but it is not valid to claim that a grammar, itself, is truth. Grammars, themselves, are essentially theories. They may be very preliminary. My point is that there is a telephone game aspect to these types of works at any point in the chain from native speaker to typologist errors, biases and misrepresentations may have occurred.

Additionally, it is important to realize that the methods used in primary linguistic research are underdeveloped. The following paper, which is still in press, outlines some of the empirical issues faced by linguists researching understudied languages:

Empirical evidence in research on meaning, Tonhauser and Matthewson:

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.730...

One thing that someone with a science background may find surprising is that the methodological suggestions made by the authors are so modest. They include the notion that one should control the context in which a stimulus is provided, that one should have a clearly stated hypothesis when eliciting linguistic judgments and also clearly state what question was put to the speaker. Sadly, these are controversial in linguistic research, indicating just how underdeveloped many areas of our discipline are.

Gary-John Scott might happen to be right (I doubt it) but if so, it is not because they have made their case scientifically. They have only provided sufficient evidence to motivate a hypothesis.

Does the hypothesis in question seem to hold for, say, the world's top 10 languages (by, say, # of living fluent speakers globally)? Top 30?

I'm genuinely curious. And also trying to discern whether your point is that many-- but not necessarily _all_-- current languages seem to conform to this hypothesis, or that actually very few seem to.

This is known as Universal 20 of Greenberg 1963. Not so universal, but you have to get down to languages way out of the top 30 like Chechen to find one that don't obey the typical rule. Of 576 languages catalogued in Dryer 2018, 113 are English-like, 182 are English-reversed, and the rest somewhat varied.

Thats fascinating

I've been speaking Japanese for years and while I've been told my Japanese is messed up in many different ways, adjective order has never been one of them. As far as I'm aware, the ordering is much more based on what you wish to emphasize than any set order.

On the flip side, German is (in my limited experience) super picky about pronunciation in general. You ask directions to ‘Kaiserslauten’ and they’ll look at you like you’re bonkers. Ask for KaiserslautERn and they’ll say “aaah, KaiserslautERn!” That slight destressing of the fourth syllable is enough to completely fox them.

> super picky about pronunciation

No I don't think so, we have to deal with a lot of annoying dialects ;-)

In that example it's not the pronunciation, "Kaiserslauten" is just wrong. It's like saying "New Yok" or "Hong Kog".

That's precisely what I mean, though. If you're in the U.S. and someone asks you "where is New Yok?" you would have no issue knowing what they're talking about. The English languages gets so mangled so frequently by so many different nationalities that we're used to dealing with that sort of thing.

yes, I guess someone has just been very pedantic. Normally "Kaiserslauten" should be understood too.

Ironically, if someone says "New Yok", it's more likely that they're from New York!

(this is usually spelled "New Yawk" when writing dialect)

I've recently been listening to the "History of English Podcast". It's a deep dive into the evolution of the English language starting from its PIE roots onward. He does a great job explaining how many of the the odd rules of English came about. Highly recommended if you're into that kind of thing.

"History of English Podcast" is fantastic look at both language and the historic and cultural events that impact the language.

“Lexicon Valley” is another language focused podcast that looks at how our use of language has changed over time.

Both are excellent podcasts. I personally prefer the early Lexicon Valley episodes with the original hosts, although I hear the new host has more credentials.

This is true of every language.

I took 4+ years of Japanese and was once nearly fluent; I never came across an equivalent there; the closest I can think of is an emphasis rule, which is not at all what's going on in English. Spanish (several years) seems very loose compared to english, but I agree it shows up there in a way that I never quite nailed (e.g., "el frio hielo").

I am curious if you can point to some article about this being a universal.

I didn't mean the stress issue (stress in Japanese is a completely different matter anyway) but the general principle of complex-to-write-down "rules" that are not taught explicitly to native speakers but which people automatically adopt.

Classifiers are a common example; words are often taught with classifiers (in most IE languages, gender) but you pick up words in reading or speech and automatically absorb the appropriate classifier even if not used, from other syntactic agreements. Japanese of course has a richer set than gender.

In another case: German, how you compose compound words (and far more interesting to me, how you read unfamiliar ones at a glance rather than parsing them as a student would) uses rules that just "feel obvious" after a while.

You a fast learner. It usually takes me several years of daily, primary use of a language before these kinds of things are intuitive.

The basic order seems similar in Japanese as well though, although it's a lot more loose. A big red ball would default to ookina akai booru. Akakute ookii booru isn't wrong, but it shifts the emphasis to "red" over "big".

Then again, Japanese adjectives don't behave very much English adjectives, keiyoushi (-i) conjugate much like verbs while keiyoudoushi (-na) are basically nouns with syntactic glue tacked on.

FYI 大きい (ookii) is an い adjective, not a な, so 大きな赤いボール is incorrect. I suspect you know this though since you got it right for the second example, but what you wanted is 大きくて赤いボール (ookikute akai booru) I believe. And additionally, for な "adjectives" (so to speak, since it's not a direct analog and have characteristics of nouns), you wouldn't just string な with the next adjective, but replace it with で. like, 静かで可愛い人。

But as you mentioned, as far as I understand, the ordering is much more about emphasis than some set rule - to put it with some contrived conversations:

A: I saw a big blue ball B: Eh? It was a big RED ball!

A: I saw a big red ball B: Eh? It was a SMALL red ball!

then either ordering could sound natural in context. But I'm not Japanese so I can ask my wife later if that's really the case.

Please do ask your wife: 大きな is a variant of 大きい and the correct form to use here.

https://ja.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E3%81%8A%E3%81%8A%E3%81%8D%E...

Basically, there is a short list of common adjectives including ookii and chiisai that have special 連体詞 forms ending in -na.

I didn't know that! But it also seems like all the descriptions on the web about 大きな refer to it as predominantly corresponding to abstract concepts, not physical items like a ball; and connecting multiple adjectives still typically doesn't attach the な.

Sanskrit has free word order. For example, "krishnam naro'shvam prashyati sundaram" -- the man sees the beautiful black horse. Here Krishnam == black, sundaram == beautiful. naro'sham is the combined form (sandhi) of narah (man) + ashvam (horse) and prashyati == sees.

Though Indian languages derived from Sanskrit have simpler rules and the adjectives are roughly in the same order as English (but the endings have to match the noun).

I believe Latin has the same property as well, however I’d assume when spoken within communities, both had preferred offerings. As in, folks weren’t arbitrarily ordering their words. But it does create really expressive options for prose and poetry.

Yes Latin and Greek both have this property though in practice it has some de facto conventions, as discussed.

I always felt Marathi was more “French” than “English”

I don't know what you mean.

> there are all sorts of absolutely bonkers rules to English that 99% of people can’t describe

It’s especially annoying when English natives arrogantly deride other languages for being too complicated or ambiguous. Like, buddy, do you even know how many different ways are to just pronounce one letter in English?? (e.g. “Pacific Ocean” or “ghoti” = “fish”)

> Like, buddy, do you even know how many different ways are to just pronounce one letter in English?? (e.g. “Pacific Ocean” or “ghoti” = “fish”)

That's hardly unique to English. Heck, even in German, there are at least four ways to pronounce the letter "s".

That’s pretty much the point.

Well, evolutionary-hierarchy perspective wise colour would be the best/simplest identifier and ideal to be first.

I'll bet a lot of them aren't even rules, just conventions. I mean, there might not be a governing intelligent abstraction there. Just inertia.

Every grammar rule is a convention by definition.

Pedantically put.

Its true though, language is "open-source", and the conventions/rules change over time

Reposting a comment I wrote a couple days which surprisingly is on-topic once again!

Multiple adjectives always have to be in the order: opinion, size, age, shape, color, origin, material, purpose.

You can have a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife, or a beautiful big new oval blue nylon sleeping bag. Those sound completely natural and intuitive, but any tweak to the order just sounds "wrong" to a native speaker. Try it!

If you have a "cardboard brown box", it sounds like the box is the color "cardboard-brown"! If you have an old little knife, it sounds like "little knife" is the kind of knife it is! Other tweaks change the implied meaning in a way that is completely opaque to a non-native speaker.

Why can't you have a "green rectangular French old silver little whittling lovely knife"?

"lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife"

These are the groupings of those adjectives that make soundly sense to me:

lovely, little, old rectangular, green, French silver, whittling knife (final noun)

You can mix up all the adjectives and still get the meaning but it does sound wrong. The example you give causes me to try to create the word "Frenchly" (an adverb) to fix it up.

I think that we would not normally try to describe an object in one stream of adjectives like that. I think we have a series of sets of adjectives that are deployed as required. Attempting to come up with a final rule that covers all eventualities is unlikely to work.

I've got a lovely little old French whittling knife. It's made of silver yet green in colour due to [something]. It is rectangular which is a right old pain when cutting [something].

There is a set of rules here somewhere but it isn't quite as simple as all English adjectives can be deployed as: "opinion, size, age, shape, color, origin, material, purpose."

normally Turkish grammar is a world apart from the English grammar but somehow this one fits 100%.

büyük kırmızı top ("big red ball") sounds right, kırmızı büyük top ("red big ball") sounds wrong (feels like "red" is describing the word "big", nor sure why).

The number of things we take for granted in languages, without really noticing them as a native or familiar speaker, is astounding.

I remember being asked by someone who was speaking my native language as his second language. I believe the words he chose were correct, maybe even in the correct form and all, but I simply couldn't understand him due to slight differences in pronunciation and intonation.

Now, I sometimes get asked to explain concepts of my native language (e.g. which endings to choose for a word) and more often than not, my response is "wow, thanks for making me realize what an impossible mess that is - even understanding the grammatical concepts behind this, I have no idea how to reasonably explain this. This is a mess, and nobody should have to learn that language, ever."

> The number of things we take for granted in languages, without really noticing them as a native or familiar speaker, is astounding.

And this is just the parsing and cognition of language, now imagine what goes on in the perception of reality itself (of which language processing is but one component), which is far more complex and less understood than language. And yet, we literally run our world upon this flawed (to a degree which we haven't the slightest idea) system, and seem to think nothing of it, if not worse.

> And yet, we literally run our world upon this flawed (to a degree which we haven't the slightest idea) system, and seem to think nothing of it, if not worse.

Can you elaborate? Do you think there should be another "system" replacing it? A uniformization? In what ways?

I believe there should, or at the very least that it is an idea worth spending some "collective compute" upon.

Have you ever noticed this pattern in reality where the same ideas get discussed (here and elsewhere) repeatedly, and each iteration of the discussion of a topic has large similarities across many dimensions? For example, many of the same facts, ideas, perspectives (with all their historic imperfections) can be found within each iteration of a discussion, perhaps with some new variations here and there depending on some event that has occurred. Some of these conversations have been going on for decades, if not centuries!

As a thought experiment, imagine the existence of a system where there is only one "thread" per topic, and a "critical mass" of sufficiently intelligent, knowledgeable, and diverse (etc, etc) users exist who discuss the topic on an ongoing basis within this thread, such that knowledge accumulates over time, and repetition/etc is largely eliminated. Also imagine that when and where you identify architectural flaws in this general idea, the system is such that it recognizes these shortcomings, and addresses them (to an acceptable degree), an example of which might be that distinct threads are in some way merged with, or inherit from other threads (overriding certain aspects of them where it is optimal, etc), and improvements over time in one thread are automatically realized by other threads.

Expanding this thought experiment to some obvious(?) end state design nearing "perfection", including similar ~cultural/behavioural design and enforcement aspects, as well as fundamental changes to things like the very structure of how we communicate with each other (and therefore contemplate) about ideas....if such a system was to physically exist within reality, is it possible that it may have a noteworthy effect on the future state of reality? (Another angle to think of it from is: did the development and widespread adoption of the scientific method and other advancements within humanity have an affect on the future state of reality?)

Hopefully this gets the general idea across...despite being a fairly simple idea, it can be difficult to communicate it accurately (within the communication mediums we currently have access to).

A very rudimentary example (but the best I've been able to find) of such a system is this: https://www.kialo.com, but there are 5 to 10 different approaches I know of that are out there that come at the same general problem in unique ways. Kialo is currently far from perfect, but I think it brings a genuinely new form of thinking to the table in the way it structures and visualizes discussions...and think about how hilariously simplistic initial iterations of today's highly sophisticated products were when they were first introduced, and how back then very few of us could imagine with any sort of accuracy what would be achieved a few decades hence. Man's capabilities for imagination are hilariously flawed and inconsistent, and we seem to accept this shortcoming (and many others) as if it is immutable, without any concern for whether this belief (or, absence of belief) is actually true.

Thank you for developing your thought! I totally agree that the "thread" system seems to be the best way to go to accumulate knowledge on a particular subject. Taking as an example my own experience, I've been jotting down my thoughts on several social, political and personal topics, dedicating myself to it entirely so that I can gather the thoughts of each side, but also read articles about it, to develop my own opinion with all that I've found. I also try to update them regularly to see if they're still in line with my current opinion, or if the latter changed.

Now, as far as a collective knowledge accumulation system is concerned, this makes things far more complicated as you justly pointed out. I didn't know Kialo (thanks for the discovery), and I truly like the concept even though there are many flaws. The thing I disagree with the most is the pros/cons system, which incites one to have a radical opinion on every subject and prevents from having a nuanced view, something which I find particularly damaging these days as most people will tend to view everything as black or white and just put the gray part in the trash can. Sure, one can assert that a nuanced view is only made of some pros and some cons, but I would find it far more valuable if they were not separated. Still, I think Kialo benefits from great bases, and hopefully it might be used to build something even better. Regarding the user base, this is also something essential to take into consideration. If such a selective system ever exists, I still think it would be beneficial for the discussions to be viewable by everyone (without necessarily allowing anybody to post) just to avoid the "gatekeeping" effect and enable everyone to enrich their minds.

With regard to this, though:

> For example, many of the same facts, ideas, perspectives (with all their historic imperfections) can be found within each iteration of a discussion, perhaps with some new variations here and there depending on some event that has occurred. Some of these conversations have been going on for decades, if not centuries!

Don't you think that for some topics, especially those which have been discussed for centuries, repetition can be useful to prove that the subject being discussed is still relevant in today's world, in spite of all that happened in that timespan? What I mean is that there are particular subjects, especially philosophical ones, that may need to be iterated again and again until we find credible answers and as we continue to evolve as a species and gain knowledge. I also think that talking continuously about a particular subject may help to raise new solutions, questions or thinking paths that would otherwise never have been discovered. (I think there are some parallels to be made with science here; there are several discoveries that were only found by long-drawn-out research done by intellectual geniuses, and without them, we would probably still not be aware of the theory of relativity to cite the most common example.)

> Taking as an example my own experience, I've been jotting down my thoughts on several social, political and personal topics, dedicating myself to it entirely so that I can gather the thoughts of each side, but also read articles about it, to develop my own opinion with all that I've found. I also try to update them regularly to see if they're still in line with my current opinion, or if the latter changed.

I assume after some time you start to assemble a fairly high dimensional model of reality on these various topics. During this journey, has it ever caught your attention that the articles you read assert that reality is(!) a certain way, but due to your greater depth of knowledge, you know that the article is not actually true? (essentially: https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/) It's easy to overlook this because it's basically the norm, it's "just" "how it is", it's "just" standard bias, "everyone does it", etc. But objectively, what is happening is that a false model of reality is continuously pushed into people's minds. Sometimes the falsities are obvious and egregious, and other times they are benign (or at least, seem to be benign). Regardless, the process continues, and hardly anyone realizes that this is how it (the manufacturing of reality) works - people just perceive it as "reading/watching the news".

> I didn't know Kialo (thanks for the discovery), and I truly like the concept even though there are many flaws. The thing I disagree with the most is the pros/cons system, which incites one to have a radical opinion on every subject and prevents from having a nuanced view, something which I find particularly damaging these days as most people will tend to view everything as black or white and just put the gray part in the trash can. Sure, one can assert that a nuanced view is only made of some pros and some cons, but I would find it far more valuable if they were not separated. Still, I think Kialo benefits from great bases, and hopefully it might be used to build something even better.

Agreed, very good point...and this point has many, many siblings. There is a surprising amount of complexity within reality, designing a system to reconcile the millions of perspectives of it (people perceive reality via perspectives, but typically believe they are seeing reality itself) is no small feat. My intuition of how to go about it is to generally speaking store massive amounts of "facts" (ideas?), and then communicate bundles of those facts in numerous different forms, explicitly stating the ~techniques/perspectives that are being used in the communication, and explicitly stating that what is being communicated is not reality itself, but a carefully and intentionally constructed perspective (slice, subset) of reality.

To my style of thinking, this could be plausibly very impactful - if you combine this with the Gel Mann idea above, I feel like it would make it rather difficult for people to avoid putting two and two together, in turn increasing the popularity of the platform (one would hope).

This amount of complexity can seem a bit daunting, but keep in mind: there is no requirement for perfection, the system only needs to be as good as it needs to be (a level which is unknown, of course).

> Regarding the user base, this is also something essential to take into consideration. If such a selective system ever exists, I still think it would be beneficial for the discussions to be viewable by everyone (without necessarily allowing anybody to post) just to avoid the "gatekeeping" effect and enable everyone to enrich their minds.

This is how I think about it too. Well, some I think would be private (depending on how far you want to take this idea), but the overwhelming majority would be public read-only visibility.

As for users who have write access to the system, I think this is an extremely complex issue (but due to this complexity, it is also filled with opportunity). My intuition is that you'd want to be very restrictive with who gets on (and stays on), and you'd need to have multiple levels of permissions. For people to ascend to higher levels, they would (among other things) first be required to develop the ability to think in certain ways. I find this idea very appealing, because poor thinking skills are a fundamental root cause of everything....so, having a system where quality (near perfect) thinking is not just a goal, but is mandatory....this would be something the world has never seen before.

> Don't you think that for some topics, especially those which have been discussed for centuries, repetition can be useful to prove that the subject being discussed is still relevant in today's world, in spite of all that happened in that timespan?

Most definitely. There are many ideas out there that are so important, I consider it an absolute travesty that we discuss them in the low-dimensional, deceitful ways we do. No wonder things only get better slowly, and mostly only for a subset of the global population - expecting otherwise under the current system is silly.

> I also think that talking continuously about a particular subject may help to raise new solutions, questions or thinking paths that would otherwise never have been discovered. (I think there are some parallels to be made with science here; there are several discoveries that were only found by long-drawn-out research done by intellectual geniuses, and without them, we would probably still not be aware of the theory of relativity to cite the most common example.)

"Talking continuously" (extreme and deliberate pedantry) is a feature, not a bug. But the current way we go about this...disorganized, dishonest/inaccurate, distributed & non-cumulative, etc is absolute madness in my mind. Like, I can't wrap my head around how intelligent people can work in highly organized corporations and roles, seeing and living how things can be designed intelligently....and then look at the way we run ~"the world" and not have any "wtf is going on here?" alarms going off in their head.

> I assume after some time you start to assemble a fairly high dimensional model of reality on these various topics. During this journey, has it ever caught your attention that the articles you read assert that reality is(!) a certain way, but due to your greater depth of knowledge, you know that the article is not actually true?

To be honest, I think there's still quite a long way to go before I can reach this point. I've only started this process a few months ago, and it takes many, many hours to discuss all the ins and outs of every subject. I wish I could spend my days doing this, but unfortunately I also have social obligations such as work and studies :-). Perhaps in a few years from now I'll be able to truly feel this for a variety of subjects, but that's far from being the case right now and the only articles which might make me experience this feeling generally are articles from mainstream media talking about stuff I've known in detail for a long period of time (most particularly video games and computer science); in these particular cases, the Gell-Mann amnesia effect is definitely real. Now, when there is a topic I know absolutely nothing about, I'll still read many news articles and assume that all of them are true to begin with, just so that I can compare data and opinions. Only then will I try to read more specialized works, such as books, in order to see to what extent what I've found corresponds to what whizzes have to say on this subject. Talking about newspaper articles, I also try to read fewer "breaking news" articles, but rather try to take a more distant approach which consists in reading articles several months after events occurred in order to get a clearer view of what has happened and the impact of the event in question. The main drawback is that I'm not necessarily fully aware of what's going on in the world 24/7, but at least I find it generates way less anxiety and enables to take a step back on what's happening.

> My intuition is that you'd want to be very restrictive with who gets on (and stays on), and you'd need to have multiple levels of permissions. For people to ascend to higher levels, they would (among other things) first be required to develop the ability to think in certain ways. I find this idea very appealing, because poor thinking skills are a fundamental root cause of everything....so, having a system where quality (near perfect) thinking is not just a goal, but is mandatory....this would be something the world has never seen before.

Absolutely agreed! You perfectly summarized what I had in mind.

Everything else that you said is very interesting; by the bye, it is the very first time I have such an in-depth discussion with someone on HN and it's really great to see where it can lead and all the ideas it may generate. Thank you!

Reminds me of the time a native French speaker asked me if I had ever tried ... and here he said a word that I'll transcribe as "balling"; the first syllable was quite short and the vowel only slightly rounded. Anyway, I didn't recognize it. After a little back-and-forth I finally got what he was talking about, and said, "Oh, BOWLing."

If you sampled a population of English speakers, I wonder how many would know that vowel length is really important to sound correct?

  Loose, lose
  Rack, rag
  Can’t, cunt
  Safe, save
  Ride, write

Have a go a shortening the vowel when it is long in the examples above and feel how wrong it sounds.

I like this discussion because it shows how regional the problem is: https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/4h7w4o/phonemi...

I also like that vowel length is actually variable:

  see 317ms
  seed 252
  seen 199
  seat 124
  seating 87

  leave 300, live 186
  lead 285, lid 147
  lean 195, limb 110
  leaf 130, tiff 83
  leap 123, lip 75

I'm British and only learnt this after studying Japanese which encodes vowel length in its writing system, eg, uncle: おじさん, grandfather: おじいさん. I refused to believe that English had vowel length, and was shocked to learn that my ears are actually very capable of hearing it. The other classic example in English is "merry" versus "Mary", but I couldn't find a whole sentence that is distinguished merely by a vowel length, so I made one (at least for my non-rhotic British accent):

    Look how many clothes he shared!
    Look how many clothes he shed!

It really depends on your dialect (idiolect?). If you are ocker*, kiwi, or yarpie then vowel length may matter because there can be words with the same vowel sound where only the vowel length changes the meaning. English in Northern England also has vowel length rules (although presumably not often confusing since most speakers are very familiar with English as spoken in the rest of the country).

In New Zealand, can’t and cunt have the same vowel sound, and foreigners can make embarrassing or hilarious errors!

Shed and shared have different vowel sounds in my accent (shared rhymes with ear or air - a diphthong?).

Yes. I have learned that r following a vowel in British English tends to vanish. I remember reading about the pun in the title of Waugh in Africa when I was in my twenties and wondering what the pun was since in my Midwestern American English, Waugh and war are very different sounding words. I encountered a similar one later where a writer friend from England had a scene where a character expressed confusion about pawn shop vs porn shop.

>pawn shop vs porn shop

That one has happened to me IRL.

As a NZer I got thrown when going to California, by asking the front desk staff to do something and then waiting patiently when they said "I can't do that". Turns out when you come from a place where there's a vowel difference between "can" and "can't", that's what you listen for. I didn't at all pick up on the "t" sound at the end.

Here's an American saying and explaining the spoken difference between can and can't:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=o_GHV6RTy9c

I agree, it certainly sounds queer to my ear. She says can't has a short vowel, whereas in NZ English it is important that the vowel length is spoken long.

Huh, most of the words pairs you listed have extremely distinct consonant differences, but not very distinct vowel length to my ear (which is pretty influenced by southern appalachian english). Ie, "loose" is a "s" sound, and "lose" is a "z" sound, "ck" is much harder than "g", same with "f" vs "v" and "d" vs "t". None of those words sound awkward when shortened to me, they just sounded like they were being spoken faster for some reason (for emphasis or pacing reasons). So I wouldn't consider those different due to simple vowel length differences, but due to core phoneme differences. I do see that the people in that thread who combine "muck" and "mug" are from New England, so maybe those are specific to that accent.

There are words which I do pronounce the "same" as each other - but do actually vary them on on length alone. These are mostly for "merged" words.

Ie:

"Mary" - longer sound on the "a" vowel than the "ry" sound

"Merry" - longer sound is the "ry" sound

"Marry" - is said like "Mary" except the "a" sound is even longer. "ry" sound is same length.

Part of me also wonders if the southern "drawl", where vowel sounds are extended, is actually a weird way of standardizing vowel length times across distinct phonemes. Though I wouldn't be surprised if there's still variation there too, but it would certainly be interesting to compare.

Do pronounce ‘riding’ and ‘writing’ the same, or is the first longer?

The only difference I have with those two is in the consonant (/d/ vs /t/).

I think there's an extremely subtle difference in length, plus in American english you might pronounce "writing" with either /d/ or /t/ (probably /d/ in casual speech).

I think if you said "I am riding a book" almost every native english speaker would hear "I am writing a book."

A non-native speaker once asked me why we say "Going overseas" instead of "Going to overseas". I couldn't give them an answer at the time(even though I'm a native speaker).

Later I asked a very smart friend of mine who studied english as a second language (and was quite proficient at that point) and he was immediately able to recognize that it was because "overseas" is an adverb. It seems obvious in retrospect, but you just don't think about those things as a native speaker.

Today I learnt: "Overseas" is also apparently an adjective! As in, "overseas trips"

Going underground or underneath would other examples.

Underneath is a bit different. I don't think it's ever an adjective. It can be a preposition or an adjective.

When I was in Australia I enjoyed the difference in how they used “overseas” there. It was used in a general sense to mean outside the country —- naturally since Australia is an island. In the US, there’s a slight distinction, since there are certain countries you can get to via land borders, so “overseas” tends to imply places that are farther away.

That explanation sounds circular to me - by definition any word you'd use in that way is an adverb.

A more intuitive explanation is perhaps that "overseas" came from the combination of two words, "over" (a preposition), and "seas" (a noun). And when you write it out as three words "going over seas" it makes perfect grammatical sense.

Disclaimer, I have no idea if my explanation is rooted in facts about the English language or how it actually developed. But that's how I'd answer the question if someone asked me for an intuitive explanation about why we don't use "to". Because there's already a preposition ("over")! You wouldn't write "going to over seas", would you?

>A non-native speaker once asked me why we say "Going overseas" instead of "Going to overseas". I couldn't give them an answer at the time(even though I'm a native speaker).

>Later I asked a very smart friend of mine who studied english as a second language (and was quite proficient at that point) and he was immediately able to recognize that it was because "overseas" is an adverb. It seems obvious in retrospect, but you just don't think about those things as a native speaker.

What about 'Going bananas' -- is that still an adverb?

Different use of "going" meaning "becoming", as in "going mad" or "going stale"

I caught myself yesterday typing that "that's been the established procedure since years."

Which is not standard English, but it's a construction a lot of my German/ESL coworkers use, and apparently it's soaking in. I'm fine with this; I've happily added "do the needful" to my lexicon because it perfectly fills a gap. Sometimes a construction that works elsewhere _works for a reason_ and it's worth borrowing back.

My wife's native language is Spanish and she hates when I use ungrammatical constructs because she trusts me to model correct grammar for her. I, on the other hand, have superlative grammar but enjoy applying other language's grammatical constructs to English. I just workshopped a story with my writing group which is written in a synthetic pidgin that I created for the Burkinabe characters in the piece. There was some admiration for the technical achievement, but concerns that it might be offensive having come from a white author, a concern that I had as well.

It sounds strange when my colleagues refer to a class in Python having an a-TRIB-ute rather than an ATT-tri-bute. I'm familiar with the verb form stressing the middle syllable and the noun form stressing the first.

Yes. They're doing it wrong according to this rule.

I hear this pronunciation every now and then from gamers too. I suspect this happens when people learn the word from reading instead of from listening to the speech of their peers. If it becomes common enough then it spreads via speech patterns too.

The outro on MC Frontalot's Charisma Potion covers this! https://open.spotify.com/track/21HeW6fxCl02b3gcvf1TIC?si=9fb...

Speaking of python, how do you pronounce "import"? I pronounce it as IM-port. According to the rule that makes it a noun, but shouldn't it be a verb? I wonder if I'm pronouncing it correctly.

British English speaker:

    import foo

"im-PORT foo"

"foo is an IM-port"

"this code im-PORTs foo"

When you use it as a verb it should have the stress on the second syllable, /imˈpôrt/ as a verb, /ˈimˌpôrt/ as a noun. It's probably one of the more common mispronunciations. The number one mispronunciation, though, has to be “often” (look it up). With forte, meaning strength, as number two.

Non-native speaker here, but I pronounce both the verb and the noun as IM-port

I (native English speaker) somehow learned the verb "attribute" first, and went on to play Dungeons and Dragons for years referring to aTTRIButes, which normalized it throughout the neighborhood.

It took me rather a long time to shake it, in fact. These things happen!

As a native English speaker, I had no idea about this rule. It’s good to learn something new about the language I speak everyday.

I recognized this was a thing, but didn't have a name for it. So putting a name to it is neat.

If you find this sort of thing interesting, I can highly recommend Steven Pinker's Words and Rules.

I remember working this out in sixth grade while I was bored out of my skull in language arts class. I brought it up to the teacher and she had apparently never noticed it.

Stress is very hard for me as a native Hungarian speaker. In Hungarian stress can never fall in the middle or end of a word, if a word is stressed, it's always on the first syllable. Conversely, many English speakers learning Hungarian struggle with the vowel lengths (which can create differences in meaning) as this works very differently in the "stress-timed" English.

Some of the examples in the list seem dubious to me. Absent? Cushion? Recap? I don't think I've ever heard the stress on the latter syllable even when used as a verb.

I absent myself from this discussion

Yes, that is indeed the verb, but I hear it as "I absent myself" and I can't remember ever hearing it otherwise. Maybe in the USA it's already entered this category and then gone even further and influenced the pronunciation of the verb.

I’m UK-based (English, specifically) and definitely hear it on the second syllable in that usage

American English speaker here, born and raised in Dallas, Tx. The stress goes on the second syllable for the verb for me ("I absent myself").

I've certainly heard "abSENT" in British English. The other two, not so much.

I was going to comment the same thing. While many on the list follow the rule many other words listed I've heard only one pronunciation regardless noun and verb form. Maybe it's a regional thing. I speak American English, maybe these pronunciations are different elsewhere.

The stress difference on cushion is there, but it's very faint. Absent and recap aren't really ever used as direct verbs that I've heard.

E.g. "I am going to be absent" and "I am going to recap you on this" (or really the more natural "I'll give you a recap" where it is not used as a verb at all) is the most common form I hear in the US

“Let’s recap”?

It honestly sounds weird because it's not a word I use. I can't tell if 'rihcap' would sound right or not. "Review" is more in my purview.

"After this commercial break, we will recap the games from today, and discuss what we can expect going into tomorrow"

You can find more examples on ludwig.guru, for example.

The version of recap that has verb stress means to cap again. The shortened version of recapitulate ordinarily takes the stress on the first syllable. As for absent as a verb, it's rarely used in the present tense, though absented isn't all that uncommon ("I absented myself.").

Invalid though two distinct nouns and not noun verb, isn’t listed here. I know there are others, just don’t recall at the moment.

recap vs recap is definitely a distinction that shows up in my western canadian speech patterns. Absent is a pretty subtle difference.

I suspect a lot of these vary with regional accents.

Not for cushion, but I've heard the other two.

"Cushion" is a particularly bizarre example, because even if speakers were to stress the second syllable when using it as a verb, it still wouldn't demonstrate initial-stress derivation. The noun "cushion" is not derived from the verb "cushion." It's the other way round. (Source: the Oxford English Dictionary, unfortunately behind a paywall.)

Odd, I speak bog-standard American English and if I abSENT myself from class I will be marked ABsent.

Though I would CUSHion a blow with a CUSHion, I would also say "to reCAP, I was just telling Bob that you missed the REcap".

I was doing research in a huge Texas oil company, amazed at some pronunciations. Schlumberger -> Slumber-jay, etc. There was a cute young female petroleum engineer (very rare back then), and I asked her to pronounce "c-e-m-e-n-t". She fired right back: "As a noun or a verb?" And that was my day as one in 10,000 to learn this rule... I wanted to ask her to have my baby.

Cement doesn't feel like it obeys this rule though.

Speaking of words ... here's a fun one: "founder" vs. "flounder". Both words can be nouns and verbs:

• founder [noun] – one who establishes

• founder [verb] – to sink / to collapse / to fail

• flounder [noun] – flatfish

• flounder [verb] – to struggle to move / to proceed clumsily

Apparently[1], you cannot say "a ship flounders", but that "a ship founders", as jarring as it sounds. The Merriam-Webster has an excellent article on it here[1]. It begins this way:

"The English language does not care if you are happy or sad. It is oblivious to your shrill entreaties for an orderly and sensible vocabulary. As proof of this supreme indifference we need look no further than the words 'founder' and 'flounder', for no language that cares about its speakers would ever allow this kind of semantic cruelty to exist."

[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/can-a-ship-flo... — "Can a Ship 'Flounder'?"

That reminds me of my favorite auto-antonym - a word where the noun and verb forms have completely opposite meanings.

The lawmaker sanctioned(v) the sanction(n)

Where the verb form is to permit, and the noun form is to restrict!

English is weird.

It's very common for writers, especially journalists, to use to sanction to mean to impose sanctions. I've given up on correcting them and in their defense, the OED has the verb to sanction meaning to impose punishment dating back to the early 19th century in legal contexts.

Here's another one that uses the same word in opposing contexts:

After he left out the left door, there was no one left.

So many people use flounder when they mean founder.

Type 'How to speak English' into YouTube and you'll get absolute deluged with insanely complicated diagrams and flowcharts about stress-timing and vowel reduction -- so many rules that non-native speakers practice and explicitly learn but that you didn't even realize existed. Stress-timing alone must be really tricky coming from a language without it.

Random example: How do you pronounce the word 'for' 80% of the time? Like the word 'her' with an f. fer.

Random example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qvba0DREM-s

If any non-British wonder why we Brits don’t know the rules, well back when I was at school, studying GCSE English in the 90s (qualifications we get age 16), they explicitly didn’t teach us grammar rules, at all, just made us write stories. It was a bit of an experiment that I think they have since reversed.

This meant that I knew rules of French grammar more explicitly than English. Which is nuts.

Why is it nuts? Being fluent is all about implicit knowledge.

> we Brits don’t know the rules

Every native speaker of English in Britain knows the rules - implicitly. Which should be good enough for non-linguists.

This is true for native speakers of most languages, in my experience. I remember many years ago traveling Spanish-speaking countries and trying to talk to locals about some grammatical point, like use of the subjunctive mood, and getting very puzzled looks. This despite the fact that even three-year old children correctly navigate verb moods without knowing the rules.

This and other experiences convinced me that learning the formal rules of a language is perhaps not the best way to approach learning. Especially not if your intention is to speak to locals, rather than say, become a TV news announcer. I think the most critical skill of language learning is to get the "muscle memory" of the language, the reflex of subconsciously mapping concepts to words in your internal lookup table. This skill is even precedes IMO listening comprehension: naturally, when you're listening to someone speak, you'll miss words. But if your mastery of the language is sufficient to allow you to quickly guess what you would have said in the gap if you were speaking, then the error is survivable. I find that this seems to be how the brain works when listening to speech in your native language.

To correlate with Dan Ariely's "Thinking, Fast and Slow" it's the fast mode that's needed, whereas as a grammatical approach tends to emphasize and develop slow mode skills. Sometimes you need to go slow before you go fast, but given that children jump I without knowing the rules, I don't think it's necessary for language. (I also think too much is made about the supposed inelasticity of the adult brain re languages) I hope/expect with AI, there is a really interesting possibility around the corner for learning language in a simulated immersion environment. The Google and Amazon translation APIs seem, on paper, to provide at least 50% of what that would take.

You were lucky. In my day, we were still being taught that the grammar of Latin somehow applied to English. There is a species of English usage that can make a certain sense as English, but which more or less follows rules that can be applied when learning Latin or Greek. That set of rules was taught in schools for a couple of centuries because the aim was to teach the student Latin at least, and perhaps Greek. Somewhere along the way, people who had been taught that system began to believe that this Latinised English represented proper English grammar. It's only recently that the educational consensus has become, "well, that's a load of old bollocks." The first comprehensive descriptive grammar of the actual English language wasn't published until 2002 (The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language).

I don’t know if this is related but my in-laws put a different stress on the store name “Best Buy” than I do. They say BEST buy, having more stress on Best. Whereas my family says “best BUY”. What’s really weird is that I even notice it at all, it’s really subtle and I’m not sure why it even bothers me.

This is a great example of why if you’re learning a language, once you pass the beginner stage you should be spending the majority of your time reading and listening, some time speaking and writing, and almost no time trying to learn grammar and other things. Even if you could somehow learn all the little rules like this, your brain won’t integrate them in a way you can use naturally. Unfortunately a lot of formal language courses and schools still focus on learning grammar, word usage etc in a top down way.

First time I hear of this as a non-native speaker. I'll pay more attention to notice it in real life.

No wonder it irritates me when some Americans say "duhtail" rather than "deetail" as a noun. They're doing the stress backwards according to this rule.

And on the other hand, now I understand why Americans say "address" rather than "uhdress" for the noun. I should probably do the same.

American here. I feel like I’ve heard both ways about equally. I’ve lived all over, so maybe it’s regional.

The British pronunciation could be influenced by the French word adresse.

Hmm. Massage as a noun makes more sense as "massahzh" than "muhssahzh".

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