Glish: A version of English where every word is only one syllable | Hacker News Reader

Glish: A version of English where every word is only one syllable

github.com

70 pointsluu46 comments

An online demo and a link to an informative video are here:

Input: South Korea has said it will resume propaganda broadcasts against North Korea for the first time in six years in response to Pyongyang's campaign of sending rubbish-filled balloons across the border.

Glish output: South kawrshk has said it will zoordz pran byerkstz genst North kawrshk for the first time in six years in spahns to yangz kayktn of sning brish-filled noorz skruh the derr.

Not very practical but a lot of fun.

More than a century ago, “words of one syllable” was a trend in publishing:

Robinson Crusoe in words of one syllable

https://archive.org/details/robinsoncrusoeindefo/page/8/mode...

Aesop's fables in words of one syllable

https://archive.org/details/aesopsfablesinwo00aeso/page/6/mo...

History of Japan in words of one syllable

https://archive.org/details/historyofjapanin00smit/page/n9/m...

> More than a century ago, “words of one syllable” was a trend in publishing:

In a similar but much-more-approachable vein, XKCD's focus on simple words for Up Goer Five [0] which also spawned a book Thing Explainer [1].

[0] https://xkcd.com/1133/

[1] https://blog.xkcd.com/2015/05/13/new-book-thing-explainer/

Not related to Glish at all, but this sentence stroke me:

> South Korea has said it will resume propaganda broadcasts against North Korea for the first time in six years in response to Pyongyang's campaign of sending rubbish-filled balloons across the border

Isn't that the opposite that's happening? Rubbish-filled balloons being sent by NK as a response to propaganda leaflets sent from SK?

I just copied that sentence at random to get some text to feed into Glish. Here’s the original story:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1rr92dwqnyo

> kayktn

I cannot figure out how to pronounce this in one syllable. It looks like it should be pronounced "caked in".

I also don't get "byerkstz", I see it as "byer-kistz"

without the z it’s entirely within the realm of English sounds.

Practice slow and I think it works.

But is it a single syllable?

I see it more as a modifier on the T sound at that point. Instead of letting your tongue go at the end of the T, you hold it in place because of the N.

Sounds Dutch not English.

Back in the '90s I published educational software to help kids learn to read. We specialized in making public domain texts accessible by adding the ability to hear the words by clicking them as needed, with texts ranging from "See Spot Run" level material up to things like The Wizard of Oz. During this time I collected as many books in words of one syllable as I could. Robinson Crusoe was a bit much, but we definitely published Aesop's Fables.

Conclusion from the video:

"""

Meed for 30 like WTF is

that well I guess it technically matched

my requirements so I'll give it a B

minus and call it a a it does generally

reduce the number of syllables in a

paragraph by 30%

I suppose it even has some kind of pro

to it I was kind of hoping it would be

mostly intelligible for English speakers

without having to learn a bunch of new

words but that's not exactly the case

there's just too many words to make a

mapping that's immediately obvious and

unambiguous at least with my simple

method most individual word mapping seem

"""

If the goal was to be intelligible, you could probably adapt the method to be more successful. For one, I would drop the requirement to not create more homophones. Since you're hoping people will guess what the word means based on what it sounds like, you can afford to have it sound like several things and let them distinguish based on context. Besides that, according to the established rules, you could turn a single multisyllabic word into multiple monosyllabic words. Suppose you turned "better" into "more good". This is technically monosyllabic, and immediately obvious in meaning to any english speaker. You might also squeeze multiple synonyms into a single word, for example "attempt" could be turned into "try", rather than attempting to come up with a legible one syllable variant of it. Doing these things wouldn't be as faithful to the seeming goals of the project, but the result might be more interesting in terms of semi-comprehensible english.

This reminds me of efforts like Esperanto. Which I hate. There's something very technocratic about constructing/reconstructing languages which feels like the following fallacy informs them:

* The language has redundancy in it

* I notice the redundancy and don't think it's useful

* Let's remove it without any sense that it may have had a purpose

It's a contemporary of eugenics as a concept, and Esperanto (and possibly things like Glish) have the same mouth-feel to me.

Different languages have evolved for different reasons/needs/purposes; the main thing about English to me is its vocabulary: the precision available in English due to our million+ words is the gift (and hell) of English. Getting rid of it feels wrong, and wrong-headed.

That said, Glish doesn't have a 'building a eugenically purer language' manifesto, instead the explainer video vibes more like 'nerd deep dive'. On those terms, building a directed graph of possible unused single syllables to automatically build out a full dictionary qualifies a 'sweet hack' to me. But, I won't stop hating the existence of this -- the risk of it taking off is small, but the impact on the world would be terrible.

You are stating that languages must evolve "naturally" without explaining why that would be necessary or better. Esperanto was created to erase communication barriers between different groups of people. How is such a goal wrong or "terrible" and how is that not a actual, natural need for people? Also, people find community in Esperanto-speaking groups all across the world, so are these people in the wrong for daring to speak this "terrible" and "technocratic" language?

Not all evolutions of languages are natural and thousands of words were just invented. Shakespeare straight up invented hundreds of words, and some of them, like "lonely" and "lackluster" are still used to this day, because those words are cool! If it was okay for Shakespeare to invent words (considering that you probably use the words that he invented), why is it wrong for the creator of Glish to do so and why does Glish deserve to be "hated"?

Esperanto is definitely a failure in its goals, which included replacing English —- it is not a rapidly growing communications medium.

I think you may have gotten my point backward - I love the creation of new words that English affords; it’s the best part of the language.

Glish is removing words for “simplicity” — IMO this is bad because blind removal is losing information that has been proven to be valuable over the course of the evolution of the language, like many of Shakespeare’s invented words. And tens of thousands of our borrowed words.

Glish is also cool because it’s using somewhat modern technology to mess with semantics, but taken as a serious endeavor, I hate the direction it’s going. Like I said in my comment, taken as a sweet hack, I like it.

Overall you would not find me hating on something that was adding interesting new words to English - it’s the technocratic removal I object to. If there were a project that was finding maximally far apart spaces in word2vec embedding space and trying to name them based on definitions from the surrounding words, I would love it.

>Esperanto is definitely a failure in its goals, which included replacing English —- it is not a rapidly growing communications medium.

I don't think anyone involved with any conlangs assumes, or even has the goal, that they'll catch on widely enough to displace native languages.

I don't know if this is buggy or if the approach is just flawed, but there are a lot of missed opportunities for clearer mappings here. Another comment showed an example where 'response' maps to 'spahns' which is a correct USian pronunciation of the second syllable. But nowhere in the corpus is the word 'sponse' used - that would have been the natural choice here, surely? Nor is 'spons' used for 'sponsor' or anything else. So it seems like the random walk of the graph is being over-used here, even though the video talks of using substrings as a default. I think focusing purely on phonetics versus edit distance is a mistake and makes this less accessible than it could be.

Computationally a very interesting problem though, optimising for minimal edit distance (in both text and sound) weighted by frequency. Coming soon to a coding interview near you, no doubt.

Fantastic explanatory video by the author: https://youtu.be/sRbcw2sGkJw?si=USBnDyShTJNAeKVj

It’s a shame that the repo docs are so sparse in comparison.

This reminds me of a project a friend of mine worked on, where he wrote a dictionary of all the English one syllable words, but defined only in terms of other one syllable words. For example "day" would be something like "time in which the sun goes round the earth". Sadly I don't think it's posted online anywhere.

I feel like this really stretches the definition of "syllable".

For example, "interesting" becomes "snirnktstsk". That feels like at least 2 syllables, if not 3, for the same reason "pspsps" (think the sound you make when trying to beckon a cat) should be considered 3 syllables.

i immediatly tried to find "glish" in the outputs; for those not wanting to git clone

  glish]$  git grep -A4  -B4 -n '"glish"' outputs/
  outputs/monosyllabic.json-336287-  [
  outputs/monosyllabic.json-336288-    "english",
  outputs/monosyllabic.json-336289-    {
  outputs/monosyllabic.json-336290-      "mono": "ɡlɪʃ",
  outputs/monosyllabic.json:336291:      "respelled": "glish",
  outputs/monosyllabic.json-336292-      "method": "direct",
  outputs/monosyllabic.json-336293-      "numSyllables": 2
  outputs/monosyllabic.json-336294-    }
  outputs/monosyllabic.json-336295-  ],

you can use -C4 which is the same as -B4 and -A4. After, Before, Context.

Vietnmese is almost all mono syllabic. However it encodes extra information in tones.

So you could have bây, bảy, etc all meaning totally different things.

> Vietnmese is almost all mono syllabic

Not at all. Take a look at https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:Vietnamese_lemmas

The majority of words of polysyllabic. Syllables within a word are just usually written with spaces between them, so they superficially appear to be different words.

This is like arguing phrasal verbs are actually one word.

No it's not. Phrasal verbs in English are literally multiple words joined together, with a new meaning derived from those constituent words. Granted, the Wiktionary page I linked is not direct evidence because that is a list of terms, not words, but you can find many polysyllabic words in it if you look.

Many Vietnamese words are indivisible. E.g. "chuẩn bị", which comes from Chinese "zhǔnbèi". It was borrowed as a complete 2-syllable word. Any further division would cause it to lose all meaning.

Consider the inverse: if you decided to create a new spelling convention where every syllable in English were written spaced apart, then a word like "tomorrow" would become "to mo rrow". Does that mean that "mo" is now a separate word? What does it mean? If I looked up "mo" in a dictionary, what would I find?

If you're still unconvinced, the second paragraph on the Wikipedia page for Vietnamese directly addresses this: "Although it is often mistakenly thought as being an monosyllabic language, Vietnamese words typically consist of from one to many as ten morphemes or syllables; the majority of Vietnamese vocabulary are disyllabic and trisyllabic words."

Disagree. I live in Vietnam and speak it daily. Not sure why you are throwing Wikipedia at me :)

But I'll throw it back at you:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_morphology#:~:tex....

"Vietnamese is often considered to be monosyllabic as its morphemes are considered to be monosyllabic e.g. "tim" meaning "heart". However, some Vietnamese words may consist of one or more syllables, composed of monosyllabic morphemes that form together to create another word. An instance of a compound word "mạnh mẽ" is derived from morphemes mạnh meaning "strong", mẽ meaning "dramatic", fused together to create the word mạnh mẽ to mean "powerful".

There is a general tendency for words to have one or two syllables. Words with two syllables are often of Sino-Vietnamese origin. A few words are three or four syllables. A few polysyllabic words are formed from reduplicative derivation."

Basically - monosyllabic.

Is it a beautiful day where you are? You should go outside and enjoy it:)

That section you quoted doesn't disagree with me. It says that morphemes are monosyllabic, which they are. I'm talking about words, not morphemes. The second paragraph literally says that, "There is a general tendency for words to have one or two syllables". What do you mean "basically - monosyllabic".

I know other Vietnamese speakers who also believe the language is monosyllabic. Honestly, speaking the language is a disadvantage for you here. It's like how most Chinese speakers think that other Chinese languages are dialects and not languages. Or how native English speakers will confidently say that "upward" is a preposition. Speaking a language does not give you insight into its linguistics, only a false sense of confidence about it.

Maybe create a Google translate language that is only the monosyllabic words in English so output would be monosyllabic but understandable. So propaganda might become lies. The demo text from the Glish explorer page:

Type a sentence or paragraph in here in English to see its translation.

This is some additional example text to demonstrate.

might be translated as

Type UK text here to see its sense.

This is more test text to show.

In neyetstst neyetnt eight, the nurkt threw kweyermd off Hell In A Cell and tulmp frawkst feet through an nownstsk blustst.

It's kind of beautiful how largely unreadable this is, yet how the critical part is completely unchanged.

The amount of syllables in a word does not always, and in the case of this language a considerable amount of time, correspond to how long it takes to say a word nor to how difficult the word is to pronounce.

I really hope the language was intended as nothing more than a curiosity.

As per the translation example shown ... the word "English" translates to "glish"?

Seems like a flaw.

INPUT "I understand English better than glish."

OUTPUT "I sadt glish begt than glish"

Meaning is fully lost in translation.

Agreed, I dont understand why some words are replaced by new words instead of using one-syllable synonyms - "understand" to "get" or "better" for "more" for example

"I get glish more than glish"

You might as well play with the way words sound and use "in glish" for English instead of "glish"

Reminds me only slightly of Votgil and this entertaining video:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=12bT6wGXESc

Damn how many syllables emerged? Let's get anglochinese cracking

https://youtu.be/_ahvzDzKdB0?si=gBeFVZypCDLUoMNf

I wonder how they defined a syllable. One example from the home page I saw was "shlayr", which seems like two syllables - of course depends on pronunciation. On a quick look, it seems they used a version of CMU pronunciation dictionary split into syllables, so I supposed that appeared somewhere in there.

‘lair’ is one syllable, just add a ‘sh’ sound to the beginning.

I pronounce "lair" with two syllables.

Anyone remember Mad Ape Den[1] where you can only use words of three letters or less?

[1] https://www.metafilter.com/159399/May-Ten-is-Mad-Ape-Den-Day

How many homophones could emerge from this?

Interesting (snirnktstsk)

Few words do trick

Australian?

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