6 ms·
The combination of the ambiguous word "is" and the mixed capitalization styles in the title is interesting. When I first read the title, I saw it as: Readin
by jpadvo 15y ago
The combination of the ambiguous word "is" and the mixed capitalization styles in the title is interesting. When I first read the title, I saw it as:
ReadingHackerNews.is_going_to_launch? # false
And wondered who the Reading Hacker News team was, and why they decided to scrap their launch. After a couple seconds I saw the forest for the trees and realized it said:
ReadingHackerNews !== Launching # true
Now, what's interesting is the interplay between:
- capitalization conventions in human language
- capitalization conventions in programming languages
- the author's specification of [Reading Hacker News]
in the article, that indicates that he is referring
to it as an object in itself
- the requirement for him to use brackets instead of
merely case to indicate this, because he needed to
capitalize "Reading", and "Hacker News" to be proper
english anyway.
- the way the brackets were left of in the submission
title
- the fact that programmers often use things like
CamelCase in english to communicate concepts
analogous to those found in programming, like
object-ness.
- the existence of a lot of third party HN tools, such
that one of them could conceivably be called "Reading
Hacker News"
There is a lot of stuff going on in this title for the brain to process. I wouldn't have noticed it at all except that my brain glitched and produced the wrong answer for a second or so.
It's crazy to think about (1) how many difficult background questions our minds silently get right, and (2) how many of these questions our minds silently get wrong.
- gosub 15y agoIt's a garden path sentence, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_path_sentence http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_path_sentence
- jpadvo 15y ago"Garden path sentences are less common in spoken communication because the prosodic qualities of speech (such as the stress and the tone of voice) often serve to resolve ambiguities in the written text." Another random and crazy thought: people have experimented with textual and graphical programming languages -- I wonder what an aural programming language would be like? It's almost certainly impractical, but the idea is intriguing nonetheless. Maybe slightly more practical would be some kind of aural complement to conventional sight-based programming systems...
- StavrosK 15y agoNot really, it's just ambiguous...
- StavrosK 15y agoThat's really only because English is hard to parse, in other languages this is unambiguous.
- jpadvo 15y agoThe word "is" is overloaded pretty hard...
- StavrosK 15y agoReading it again, it sounds like I meant "in all other languages", when I meant "in some".
- muratmutlu 15y agoThis comment thread about language is awesome by the way, enjoyed reading it more than the post!
- Cushman 15y ago"Other languages" cover a vast range of possible and required levels of ambiguity. Distilling that to "English is hard to parse" is pretty inaccurate.
- StavrosK 15y agoGreek, for example, is quite a bit less ambiguous than English. We don't have anything close to the number of homographs in English, and parts of speech are very distinct (a word can almost never be both a verb and a noun). In English, "right" can mean any number of things, it can be an adjective, a noun, an adverb or a verb. In Greek, that would almost never happen.
- Cushman 15y agoI think you might be running into native speakers' bias. (I'll grant you I know nothing about Greek, just going off Wikipedia here, so forgive me.) Greek is classified as a fusional language, essentially meaning that it's an agglutinating language with a more complex inflectional scheme that's harder for linguists to figure out. Naturally there's going to be less lexical ambiguity than in an isolating analytic language like English, since grammatical information we're used to inferring from context or marking lexically you're encoding as an affix. By contrast, we find your system of affixes complex and difficult. The important thing to understand here is that a native English speaker treats words the way a native Greek speaker treats affixes. When we read a sentence, we automatically filter the words on the basis of the context, just the same way when you read a Greek sentence, you're automatically filtering affixes on the basis of context. The "ambiguities" you perceive — "right" can be an adjective, noun, or verb — are effectively the same as, say, an ambiguous -o suffix which marks a tense on verbs, but a case on nouns. For native speakers, they simply never notice. (Of course speakers of all stripes make mistakes and need to clarify ambiguities— no matter how they're encoding information.) And it goes the other way too. Take a native Californian language like Eastern Pomo, in which verb stems describe relationships of energy and motion which are difficult to describe in English. Copying from notes here: For example, the stem pa-qá-t(-ki-) has the root meaning "to apply pressure", the instrumental prefix implying from kinetic energy, and an intensifier, semelfactive and stative suffix. This stem means both "to pry abalones loose from rocks with an iron bar" and "for high flood water to come down a creek and wash something away." Remember, this is a polysynthetic language— nearly every word has this sort of variance in meaning. We perceive that as horrifically ambiguous, and nigh impossible to parse without concerted effort, but a native Pomoan would never mistake them. So, you know... Cut English some slack :)
- beaumartinez 15y agoReading "Hacker News" is not launching—ambiguity solved.
- Mathnerd314 15y agoThe convention is to quote article titles and emphasize site titles, so I'd recommend: "Reading Hacker News is not launching" Perhaps this is a good reason to use formatting in submission titles?
- rphlx 15y agoCome on, "Reading HN != Launching" is clearly the optimal solution here.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]