Comment by perihelions | Hacker News Reader

Comment by perihelions | Hacker News Reader

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- "Someone’s done a lot of find and replaces -- NEVER a good idea in galleys. Dave Langford put something in Ansible recently about how on the galleys of my novel Neverwhere someone Found-and-Replaced all the flats to apartments. People said things apartmently, and believed the world was apartment."

- "None of these were quite that bad – they were subtler..."

- "F’rinstance: All instances of the word round have become around. Fine for walking around the lake, less helpful for the around glasses, the around holes in the ice; blonde has uniformely become blond, and so blonder has become blondr; for ever has become, universally, forever, and for everything thus became foreverything, and we also got foreveryone, forevery time and so on. Each had to be found and caught."

- "Little things – the icelandic þú became bú, which won’t bother anyone who isn’t Icelandic. Blowjob had inexplicably become blow job again. (I think a blowjob is a unit of sexual currency, whereas a blow job is something you can get -- or indeed, give --instead of a wrist job, a sleeve job or a window job.) And once again every damn comma gets scrutinised. And I changed an Advertise to an advertize which was nice of me."

https://journal.neilgaiman.com/2001/03/ ("American Gods Blog, Post 24" [2001])

My dad had a work anecdote about a company invite to an "African-American tie event".

It was a British company.

Oh God I hope people showed up in some outrageously... I don't even know what, but just some outrageous (not black bow) ties. That's brilliant.

I could see how some ties could upset everyone.

Alternatively, that's how you end up with an accidental cakewalk.

My South African sister in-law who recently immigrated to America said that her black peers in grade school would sometimes refer to themselves as African American.

Cultural hegemony complete.

I'm a little confused - are you talking about Black South Africans? Hmm.

I foolishly expected that people like Elon Musk could be truthfully called "African-American", but I did a survey of the definitions, and most all of them agreed that an African-American must be Black (and I'm not sure how that is recursively defined, or whether it has to do with race, ethnicity, or simply color of skin: it must be the latter if it has any meaning separate from "African"!)

Typically, African-American means black AND, unintuitively, American for generations IME. Maybe it shouldn't mean that but that's kind of assumed where I live at least. For first or second generation Americans you might use the country (eg Nigerian-American). For other races from Africa you'd also rarely hear them referred to as African American.

Of course, part of the issue here is that there isn't really a good shorthand term for "the group of American Black people of diverse African origin whose cultures were oppressed and destroyed by the white majority for centuries, leading to a mélange culture intentionally constructed out of the remaining scraps".

But "Caucasian" is (was?) used for people who for many generations weren't anywhere near Caucasus Mountains.

It's a bit weird from the outside tho cause if you're a white south-african and you hear the phrase used in America you'd be like "oh, I should refer to myself as an African-American" although unlike Americans, people generally only refer to themselves as being from the place once they have citizenship (and would therefore have learnt the intricacies of the American phrase) and even then many people choose not to.

American: "I'm Irish" Me: "No, you're not"

It's not too surprising in America, but I know a person who would refer to any Black person as African American in Europe. In most cases, neither party would have had set their foot in America in their lives.

For good or bad, in many underdeveloped places where black people are rare, they are intuitively perceived as Americans (which stereotypically means rich, cool, free and capable of teaching you great English) and treated with additional respect because of this.

I think parent talks about people in South Africa referring to themselves as ‘African American’.

Yes, this was happening in classrooms in South Africa.

I had a South African friend in middle and high school. They fled the country when it became popular to put a tire around a white person's neck, full it with gasoline, and light it. Mandela's wife promoted doing this.

They gained American citizenship. She became my African American friend. Everyone told me I was terrible for talking that way.

Heard my daughter using the n-word for her school mates (they ain't black) - they all listened to rap music and obviously our schooling system don't cover American history i.r.o slavery.

Had to explain to her why it would not be good idea to do that in the US.

I never believed in the idea of embracing an offensive word and somehow "taking out the sting" like rappers did.

We have a similiar word - the k word for blacks - it is fortunaly banned and if you used it on social media you clearly identify as a racist.

It gets an even more politically incorrect meaning when you read "tie" as a verb.

> It gets an even more politically incorrect meaning when you read "tie" as a verb.

The change from "black tie" to "african-american tie" seems much less like a goofy 'find and replace' fail when you read it that way.

The Scunthorpe problem

In my experience Americans are shocked that it's perfectly fine to say that someone's black in the UK.

Those of us who follow usage guidelines more closely know that it's OK to use the 'b-word'. Case in point, https://apnews.com/article/race-and-ethnicity-us-news-busine...

I once worked on a project where we had the concept of a "case" and we had to change it to a "task"..

Suddenly, we had a lot of "switch/task" statements that somewhat perplexed the compiler.

An SEO bot stole my blog post about Old Street in London, it was now about Ancient Road instead.

You should check out the TV show Old Aliens.

Don't you mean Senior Citizen Foreigners?

Re>> "Someone’s done a lot of find and replaces -- NEVER a good idea in galleys.

Ah, the Scunthorpe problem. [0] It's never a good idea, but the immature 12 y/o in my always giggles at the examples.

One of my favorites is the word "ass" being replaced by "butt", resulting in this gem [1]...

"'Prohibition on buttbuttination' states, 'No employee of the United States government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, political buttbuttination.'"

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem#cite_note-b...

[1]

> In February 2004 in Scotland, Craig Cockburn reported that he was unable to use his surname ... In 2010, he had a similar problem registering on the BBC website

So the BBC was allowed to register their domain without issue, but Craig couldn't register his account with the BBC. That's Dick.

This was great, thank you.

One positive outcome though is the invention of a collection of excellent words: foreverything, foreveryone and forevery. I don't know what they mean, but I like them.

Some of those could be avoided by using a search regex such as "\bblonde\b". I believe a sophisticated enough regex could solve all of these, if it were a central library used and maintained by many.

Maybe people can just deal with books having regional differences in the same way authors do. Is it so scary for F. Scott Fitzgerald to write about the color of the light, but Rowling to talk about the colours of the school houses?

As someone who reads fantasy fiction a lot, honestly I'd prefer if I read everything in American English. The biggest thing that gets me is e.g. "defence" instead of "defense" and other places where British English uses a 'c' instead of an 's'. It seriously diminishes the immersion for me, even if I've read probably 50+ books with the version I'm not used to by now.

It's never stopped me from reading a book before, but it does diminish my enjoyment quite a bit. For nonfiction, I don't care, I'm reading actively regardless. But when reading passively for enjoyment, it's noticeable and irritating.

...what? Why would this make a difference?

A differense, please, GP's reading.

I've found this jarring only in one case: the dub of Mary and the Witch's Flower, where the setting was an emphatically English-style public school, the lead character's VA had (or was using) a strong Home Counties accent, but the lines were full of US-only terms like "Somophore". It just felt horribly fake (even in a fantasy story!) because you'd never see those things together in real life.

> but the lines were full of US-only terms like "Somophore"

“Sophomore”, maybe?

Oh probably, I don't really speak American and it was a while ago.

Somophore is the same thing but they carry flags with them everywhere.

For fantaſy, eſpecially, I diſagree. When I'm in charge, the long-ſ will be mandatory in any ſtory involving magick, to better ſhew the hiſtorical baſis of the mythology (unleſs, of courſe, a ſkinwalker were to be involved, in which caſe American ſpellings are indeed preferred)

Фор бетер іммерсіон, ол тектс ін сторіес И ред шѵд бе урітен уіþ олд сирілік летерс, регардлес ов þе лангѵадж.

𐡅𐡉 𐡍𐡕 𐡀𐡓𐡌𐡉𐡊

ᚳᚫᚾ᛫ᛁ᛫ᚫᛞᛞ᛫ᚫ᛫ᛒᛁᛏ᛫ᚩᚠ᛫ᚱᚢᚾᛖᛋ᛫ᛏᚩ᛫ᛏᚻᛖ᛫ᛗᛁᛉ?

פור טקסטס סט ין אנשיאנט טיימס, אונלי עברית וילל דו.

Incredible. I sent that to Google translate and it translated fairly well.

(For those who can't read it - the text is English transliterated into Hebrew script, not actually Hebrew. I'm impressed that Google managed to make sense of it)

I think you’re on to something

> уіþ Was the thorn really a part of old Cyrillic? Would make some sense given the shared history, but still.

> И I struggled for a bit with this one, but I don't know of a better way to represent it other then "ai" in Cyrillic I guess.

The "ѵ" is interesting too, never seen that before since you can make do with the sorta B-looking letter instead.

> Was the thorn really a part of old Cyrillic?

No, never was a thing. Early Cyrillic had a bunch of unique letters that are long gone, but it never had "þ" in there.

> The "ѵ" is interesting too

It's from Greek "Y" (upsilon) and it - depending on the place - could've meant either /i/ or /v/ sound (and /u/ when in "оѵ" digraph, so parent comment has it wrong): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Izhitsa

There're several mistakes:

- instead þ could be used ѳ;

- с in тектс is missed, it should be текстс or better теѯтс;

- ѵ is basically Greek upsilon which appeared in English mostly as u [auto] or y [system], therefore шѵд would be better written as шоѵд where /oѵ/ in old Cyrillic pronounsed as /u/ as in Greek, or just шꙋд;

- дж in лангѵадж could be writtend as џ;

And so on.

Thanks, these are good. I took inspiration from this horrible PDF: https://drive.google.com/file/d/14YgpdJ-k5M-GiwRDblvnEtsFvok...

Sadly I still read the s as f so I keep got stumped. "fantafy?"

Reminds me of a Just William story where he copied a letter from a letter-writing guide book, studiously converting all the "f"s into "s"s.

I read someone saying that reading text with the long s is like hearing someone speak with a lisp, and that is SO true. I love it.

I have to say that the long-s looks quite horrible in Verdana, and probably most other sans-serif font. That makes sense, since most Sans Serif typefaces significantly postdate the abandonment of the long-s.

If you want to see how it should look in context, here's a typical 17th century example: https://www.raptisrarebooks.com/images/86066/paradise-lost-a...

The prints from the 18th century are even nicer with better quality and consistency in general. The Caslon typefaces are pretty exemplary here: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/45/A_Specim...

Roman typefaces with a long-s are a very 17th-18th century thing. A blackletter (gothic) typeface gets you closer, but all of that is still not very much medieval. What you really want is a meticulously manuscript in Carolingian Miniscule[1] or Uncial script[2], complete with killer rabbits[3] and knights fighting snails[4].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carolingian_minuscule

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncial_script

[3] https://blogs.bl.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2021/06/killer-rabb...

[4] https://blogs.bl.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2013/09/knight-v-sn...

> seriously diminishes the immersion for me

Upvoting because this is seriously interesting. I can see old or Tolkien English being a hurdle, so I relate to what you’re saying. But small changes in diction tend to draw me into the world, by othering it from the familiar.

I think it might be partially because I've done & currently do some copyediting work. So I'm pretty trained to see any grammar or spelling mistake. To be clear, it's not the difference in language that bothers me, just words that are spelled differently from American English. I literally can't not see them.

For me, it's reading words like 'centre' and 'colour' or 'practise' because I can't help but read them as 'sen-trey', 'col-ore' and 'prac-tize'

That example isn't scary, of course. The -or/-our spelling difference is only the simplest example of what's different between American and British English. I think it's pretty clear to someone who's never even encountered the other spelling to infer what the word means.

But there are difficult examples, even in Rowling. She uses "revision" in a way that American readers don't know ("studying") and might have a hard time piecing together from context. It's not like the reader will be prompted to open a dictionary, since "revision" is a common word in AE. It just makes for a poor reader experience.

That's the most ridiculous thing I've come across in a while. It absolutely doesn't make for a poor reader experience, and that's some US Defaultism if I've ever heard it. And I'm neither British nor American! US writing is basically never localised to Australian English, why in the world must the converse be true?

If this is what the level of education has become in the US, well, I guess it kind of explains a lot

Doesn't quite have the same ring to it:

> Righto, mate, gimme a shout as Ishmael. Few donkey's years ago—don't get your knickers in a twist 'bout when exactly—findin' me wallet as dry as a dead dingo's donger, and not a bloody thing worth a squiz on the land, reckon I'd chuck a U-ey on life, put a bit of water under me bridge. Wanted a stickybeak at the wet half of this great wide world, didn't I?

(With ChatGPT assist!)

Donkeys years ago means a long time. You don't prefix it with a few.

Do you imagine people without any dialect of English as a native language read books and articles on the internet with a dictionary at hand or do you think they somehow cope with the unknown and manage with context alone?

I think the sort of people who read books can probably cope. It sounds like the publishers are making allowances for the sort of people who don’t do much reading anyway.

Uhh... People who count listening to the audio book as "reading."

At least it is the full book, unlike movie adaptations, also a nice way to "read" while driving.

Well people listening to the audio book:

- can’t hear the differences in spelling between American and British English

- are listening to someone read. That person probably is able to read either American or British English.

That said, some words really are different and could cause confusion/disconnect so probably are potential candidates for being changed even in audio books.

- the one he gave “apartment” vs “flat” is a good example. I think British people would all be fine with “apartment” whereas I think “flat” might confuse some Americans who hadn’t heard that usage.

- “pavement” means the road surface in the US vs it means the pedestrian path on the side of the road in the UK (that in the US you would call a “sidewalk”). “Sidewalk” wouldn’t confuse a British person but it’s not a word a British person would use. “Pavement” meaning the road surface does confuse British people.

- “jumper” in the UK vs “sweater” in the US

- Don’t even ask about “pants”

- etc

I'm not having that though - it's all one way in favour of keeping Americanisms because we're familiar enough with them to understand them. No thanks.

On the flipside, I was delighted to hear stories of US kids confusing their parents with British English because they'd watched so much Peppa Pig during lockdown. Very good.

> might confuse some Americans who hadn’t heard that usage.

Imagine learning something about the world after reading (or hearing) a book!

This! One of the things that used to happen is you'd pick up a book, and encounter a word or phrase you don't know or understand, and you'd go look it up. This is easier than ever with the internet.

Don't know why someone would "rent a flat?" You go look the phrase up and discover that it's British usage. Confusion over... because you learned. Reading Moby Dick and don't know what "scraggy scoria" is? You look the words up and learn they're the perfect fit for the landscape Melville is painting.

https://webstersdictionary1828.com/Dictionary/scraggy

https://webstersdictionary1828.com/Dictionary/scoria

I basically agree and wouldn't want things to be changed in general. That being said, the choice of words in a novel should generally be governed by the artistic intent of the author rather than the desire to teach people stuff.

But here's an example that's worth thinking through. This movie https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0110428/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1 was called "The Madness of King George". It's based on a play called "The Madness of George III". They changed the name when producing the movie because of the difference between Britain and the US.

In Britain pretty much everyone would know that George III refers to King George III. However when they first started discussing this project in the US, a common reaction was "I haven't seen "The Madness of George 1 and 2". Now the differences between the titles wasn't that important and clearly this was just an impediment to understanding with no benefit.

Now you could say "Well the people could go on wikipedia and find out that there was a King George and a King George II and then this guy, George III" and that's true but the problem is negative self-selection. People who don't know that don't realise that's what's at play here and so won't do that search so nobody learns anything.

It's not particularly reassuring that "George III" (spoken aloud as "George the Third" ), and "George 3" (spoken aloud as "George Three" ) are apparently thought to be interchangeable in the US.

My favourite anecdote is when an english bloke goes to the U.S. and asks if he can "bum a fag" from someone, meaning "ask for a free cigarette" in British.

This. Stop dumbing things down (like my browser's dictionary that apparently doesn't know the word "dumbing"). Let the readers find and delight in the differences of diction and usage.

It's a shame that part-of-speech analysis tools aren't more widely available or widely used. That could at least reduce the damage done on "flat" -> "apartment", even when only considering entire words.

This is not going to save you completely unfortunately. You still need to know if a flat is a flat tyre, a flatbed, or an apartment.

Surely, an LLM could handle this, if it were to get fed the entire book in chunks. "Change all mentions of the word 'flat' in its connotation as the British word for 'apartment', to say 'apartment'. Make no other changes to the manuscript." Then have it double-check its work afterwards. "Does every instance of the word 'apartment' in this text make sense? Does every instance of the word 'flat' in this text make sense in American English?"

and then run this prompt on each pair of words that you want it to do. When it's done, run a quick diffcheck on it & check its work to learn of any gotchas.

Why the hell does it have to be AI? A regex would be faster to run, test, and diff check. Even better,instead of paying a programmer to waste your time just pay an actual editor to proof read it

It doesn't. It perhaps shouldn't.

That said, I found myself doing little text mangling tasks with GPT-4 instead of appropriate command line tools, because fuck if I remember the flags to sort and unique, and it's much faster to just describe what I want and have the LLM take a crack at it.

This is why, I think, you'll see a lot of simple(ish) tasks being done by LLMs, at couple orders of magnitude more compute cost - it's just that much more convenient.

EDIT: nevermind. That was about just doing regex replace.

But if you want to do it correctly in an automated way, LLMs are indeed the best tool for the job in the general case, because they understand how language work, in a way that you can't really formalize in code. No, feeding the complete definition of English grammar to the computer won't help, because a) it probably doesn't exist, and b) even if it does, it's merely a suggestion - natural language is a living thing, and is not bound by fixed rulesets.

Typing out the instructions, copying and pasting the data, then analyzing the output for correctness is faster than running `sort -h` ?

It can be less mental effort, not necessarily faster.

Faster than recalling or finding out again that it's `sort -h`, and not `sort -n` or `xargs -wtf -- sort -xkcd {}` or whatever.

But the LLM already "understands" the changes that need to be made. A regex to figure out if "flat" means "apartment" or not? Consider the text (which I just made up & I'm really not a fiction writer so I apologize for it being terrible):

"Oh, I live near there too! House or flat?"

Stanley hesitated. These questions were getting more and more personal. Was this her idea of casual conversation? Or was she trying to get to know him personally? Well, he thought, what could go wrong if I treat this like a conversation. "Flat," he said. And then asked a question of his own. "What kind of pop do you like?"

How are you going to decide if "flat" is talking about non-fizzy pop/soda, or a dwelling space with a regex? It's a lot closer to the word "pop."

Of course, GPT handles this perfectly https://chat.openai.com/share/fb6a56a2-749c-4e71-9506-541bb8...

Some places in America do say "pop" instead of "soda," so I'm hesitant to call it perfect...

But I'll admit I agree that this is well beyond the scope of regex.

Because replacing all appearances of apartment with apartment just apartment out isn’t going to work?

instead of feeding it into a black box and hoping it does the right thing, how about just paying someone to manually find each instance and only replace it if appropriate. it's tedious and grueling but assuming every other word isn't "flat" should only take a few hours.

Surely the effort to manage LLMs is wasted on keeping a publisher from having to do the job they’re paid for.

Are we really going to let big corp automate away their role in the social contract? Ostensibly Random House needs to provide real output not just be a brand that farms out all the work to AI, and thus captures value on the fiat ledger.

The number of rent seeker non-contributors is too damn high. We cannot base society off dying peoples hallucinations about how the world works anymore. This is bonkers.

I never asked to exist. Why am I constrained to beliefs like Bill Gates and the like are divine in contemporary ways?

If you're going to use an ML model, you might as well use an existing language translation model rather than asking ChatGPT or the like to convert words one by one. You'd probably get better results treating American English and British English as entirely different languages rather than assuming one is the same as the other but with a handful of different words.

People knowing enough about regex replace to use word boundaries are most likely aware just how dangerous bulk replacing is, and will either be super careful, or just won't do it like that.

Troublingly, "blonde" isn't even a British vs. American English thing -- it's a gendered descriptor, of which we have relatively few remaining in English. Blonde is the feminine form, blond is the masculine/neuter form. Whether you want to preserve gendered adjectives is a different question entirely, but the definitions are rather clear, having carried over from French.

You must be american if you think it's that easy. I think american don't realise how brits end up learning both our versions of words and theirs too because so much TV is american.

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