Comment by altairprime | Hacker News Reader

Comment by altairprime | Hacker News Reader

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You know how in Disney movies they shift smoothly from talking to singing? It’s just like that, only instead of the bass beat to the character’s song starting to play, her ‘prose’ (think ‘non-poetry words’, aka what most people consider books to be full of) shifts smoothly into Shakespeare-like syllable emphasis patterns. Listen for the percussion notes starting about ten seconds into https://youtu.be/79DijItQXMM and imagine that instead of him bursting into musical song, he burst into chanting a limerick:

There once was a demi-god, Maui / Amazing and awesome: I’m Maui // Who stole you your fire / and made your days lighter // Yes, thank you, you’re welcome! Love: Maui

It’s a bit odd of an analogy, but limericks and “Iambic pentameter” are specific instances of an underlying language architectural thing, so it should be just enough to convey the basics of that “prose to Iambic” sentence. And: if you’ve ever watched “Much Ado About Nothing” from the mid-90s, that’s 100% Iambic.

(If you’re an English major, yes, I know, this is all wrong; it’s just a one-off popsicle-sticks context-unique mindset-conveyance analogy-bridge, not step-by-step directions to lit/ling coordinates in your field.)

English major here, and your post is great. It's not complete, of course, but you've hit everything a beginner needs to know to get over the first hump of understanding, in a way that "expert" knowledge sometimes gets in the way of communicating. I doubt the reply I was writing in my head would have been better, and probably would have been worse, so thank you for jumping in.

But (because I have to go there - and I promise getting to this paragraph wasn't the point of the compliments above), Much Ado isn't entirely in verse: the clowns - lower class, all of them (Dogberry, et al) - speak in prose. So, the next layer of the onion, for anyone who wants to pick at it, is noticing in what circumstances writers use different registers, and why. Austin does the same thing: Mr Collins speaks in flat, prosy sentences, except (if I recall correctly) when he talks about his patron, Lady Catherine de Bourgh. I think that has a subconscious effect, even on people who couldn't name an iamb, but once you pick up on it, it's one of those "ooh!" sorts of moments where you get a glimpse behind the authorial curtain.

Thank you :)

and, yes, what you said! I vaguely recognize that from studying the written form but certainly I didn't remember it here beyond “I bet this needs a conditional or something”.

ps. I am especially proud of the unplanned field pun!

>prosy

prosaic.

Negative, ghost rider:

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/prosy

This is a great example, and not odd as an analogy at all. It surfaces something subtle.

Language architecture is really interesting, I think, for programmers who have bought into the LLM hype in any meaningful way. It's an important field to have a sense of.

Tokenizers, for example, generally have multi-syllabic tokens as their base-level, indivisible unit.

You rarely see this mentioned when LLM capability against non-coding tasks is discussed, despite it being deeply important for prose construction.

Not to mention, putting language models aside, that the vast majority of code is written in language with a logical grammar. The disciplines are highly linked.

The Judoon have such a lovely language, though!

The AI generated front page of HN posted yesterday had some generated comments in at least one of the threads that scanned and rhymed. It's clearly there in whatever model that was, and while it might just have been a confluence of having seen a specific word pair a certain distance apart in the learning data to account for the rhyming, I'm having a hard time explaining away the construction of a coherent meter.

Your desire to share knowledge and the pleasure of what you’re describing really shows; thank you for using your time so generously.

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