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Funnily enough, I can still understand your message without white space, it is just harder to parse. Doesn't that undercut your statement?
by Zamiel_Snawley 3y ago
Funnily enough, I can still understand your message without white space, it is just harder to parse. Doesn't that undercut your statement?
- lisper 3y agoBeing harder to parse is not a trivial detail, it's the whole ballgame. Written language has a lot of redundancy. That's one of the things that makes it work. The redundancy makes it an error-correcting code so that the information doesn't get dstryed by miner errers. That is what allows you to glean the meaning of a message even without whitespace. Y cn d th sm trck by lmntng vwls (u o eiiai ooa). Just because you don't completely destroy the message by eliminating whitespace doesn't mean that the whitespace wasn't semantically significant. [UPDATE] Whitespace is actually a pretty modern innovation, and it is not universal. In old manuscripts the text is often allframmedtogetherlikethis. Also, even in modern German it is common to compose verylongcompoundwords.
- KMag 3y agoSee also: segmentation in many Asian languages. Back around 2006, there was an internal collection of quotes from senior Google engineers. There was one from a guy working on a particularly thorny issue with Russian search. He had just finished a project on Thai segmentation, and his response to how things were going with Russian was something like "Great! At least they have words!" (Obviously, he was being deliberately imprecise and understood that obviously Thai has words, just not whitespace-delimited.) On a side note, the Korean alphabet is well-designed. In particular, teaching children syllabification rules is trivial. Syllables are pre-arranged into squares. Unfortunately, the lack of distinction between r-l, and p-b-f, and restrictions on consonant clusters makes it unworkable as a replacement alphabet for English.
- Etherlord87 3y agoBTW ancient Egyptians didn't use vowels (hieroglyphs describe consonants)
- lisper 3y agoThat's true, but ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics are only phonetic when writing names. A better example would be modern Hebrew. It has vowels, but they are an optional annotation and often omitted as a matter of course.
- squirtlebonflow 3y agoivegottogivemyupmostrespecttotherapists Doesn't that undercut yours?
- lisper 3y agoThe real trick would be to come up with a string that is actually ambiguous without whitespace. That turns out to be surprisingly challenging.
- throwaway473453 3y agoIsit?
- lisper 3y agoNicely done!
- distcs 3y agoI have to say, that is not a great example. Your earlier point still holds good that there is enough redundancy in English to distinguish these things. Here "Isit?" means "Is it?" and that is obvious from the context.
- lisper 3y agoYes, that's true, but it's still ambiguous out of context, and the fact that it is also a direct response to what I said adds some unexpected humor so I give it bonus points for that. It inspired me to come up with: Fromwhereisitgoodideascome?
- Pannoniae 3y agoThat was ambiguous because I had to really double-guess whether it was "therapists" or "the rapists"....
- 3y ago
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]