3 ms·

Natural languages evolve so slowly that writing and editing rules for them is easily achievable even this way. Think years versus minutes.

qwery 1y ago
Please share your reasoning that led you to this conclusion -- that natural language "evolves slowly". You also seem to be making an assumption that natural languages (English, I'm assuming) can be well defined by a simple set of rigid patterns/rules?
- phoe-krk 1y ago
  > Please share your reasoning that led you to this conclusion -- that natural language "evolves slowly". Languages are used to successfully communicate. To achieve this, all parties involved in the communication must know the language well enough to send and receive messages. This obviously includes messages that transmit changes in the language, for instance, if you tried to explain to your parents the meaning of the current short-lived meme and fad nouns/adjectives like "skibidi ohio gyatt rizz". It takes time for a language feature to become widespread and de-facto standardized among a population. This is because people need to asynchronously learn it, start using it themselves, and gain critical mass so that even people who do not like using that feature need to start respecting its presence. This inertia is the main source of slowness that I mention, and also and a requirement for any kind of grammar-checking software. From the point of such software, a language feature that (almost) nobody understands is not a language feature, but an error. > You also seem to be making an assumption that natural languages (English, I'm assuming) can be well defined by a simple set of rigid patterns/rules? Yes, that set of patterns is called a language grammar. Even dialects and slangs have grammars of their own, even if they're different, less popular, have less formal materials describing them, and/or aren't taught in schools.
  - qwery 1y ago
    Fair enough, thanks for replying. I don't see the task of specifying a grammar as straightforward as you do, perhaps. I guess I just didn't understand the chain of comments. I find that clear-cut, rigid rules tend to be the least helpful ones in writing. Obviously this class of rule is also easy/easier to represent in software, so it also tends to be the source of false positives and frustration that lead me to disable such features altogether.
    - phoe-krk 1y ago
      When you do writing as a form of art, rules are meant to be bent or broken; it's useful to have the ability to explicitly write new ones and make new forms of the language legal, rather than wrestle with hallucinating LLMs. When writing for utility and communication, though, English grammar is simple and standard enough. Browsing Harper sources, https://github.com/Automattic/harper/blob/0c04291bfec25d0e934eaeb057d0f54af8e14a78/harper-core/src/word_metadata.rs https://github.com/Automattic/harper/blob/0c04291bfec25d0e93... seems to have a lot of the basics already nailed down. Natural language grammar can often be represented as "what is allowed to, should, or should not, appear where, when, and in which context" - IIUC, Harper seems to tackle the problem the same way.
      - qwery 1y ago
        I'm certainly not disputing the existence of grammar nor do I think an LLM is a good way to implement/check/enforce one. And now I realise how my first comment landed. Thanks again!
        fl0id 1y ago
        Your first point would be more fitting if a language checker would need a complete, computable grammar that can be parsed and understood. That would be problematic for natural languages.
      - tolerance 1y ago
        You get it!!
    - 1y ago
fakedang 1y ago
Aight you win fam, I was trippin fr. You're absolutely bussin, no cap. Harvard should be taking notes. (^^ alien language that was developed in less than a decade)
- dmoy 1y ago
  Pedantically, aight, trippin, fr (at least the spoken version), and fam were all very common in the 1990s (which was the last decade I was able to speak like that without getting jeered at by peers).
- phoe-krk 1y ago
  Yes, precisely. This "less than a decade" is magnitudes above the hours or days that it would take to manually add those words and idioms to proper dictionaries and/or write new grammar rules to accomodate aspects like skipping "g" in continuous verbs to get "bussin" or "bussin'" instead of "bussing". Thank you for illustrating my point. Also, it takes at most few developers to write those rules into a grammar checking system, compared to millions and more that need to learn a given piece of "evolved" language as it becomes impossible to avoid learning it. It's not only fast enough to do this manually, it also takes much less work-intensive and more scalable.
  - efitz 1y ago
    I’m glad we have people at HN who could have eliminated decades of effort by tens of thousands of people, had they only been consulted first on the problem.
    - phoe-krk 1y ago
      Which effort? Learning a language is something that can't be eliminated. Everyone needs to do it on their own. Writing grammar checking software, though, can be done few times and then copied.
  - fakedang 1y ago
    Not exactly. It takes time for those words to become mainstream for a generation. While you'd have to manually add those words in dictionaries, LLMs can learn these words on the fly, based on frequency of usage.

qwery 1y ago

Please share your reasoning that led you to this conclusion -- that natural language "evolves slowly". You also seem to be making an assumption that natural languages (English, I'm assuming) can be well defined by a simple set of rigid patterns/rules?

phoe-krk 1y ago
> Please share your reasoning that led you to this conclusion -- that natural language "evolves slowly". Languages are used to successfully communicate. To achieve this, all parties involved in the communication must know the language well enough to send and receive messages. This obviously includes messages that transmit changes in the language, for instance, if you tried to explain to your parents the meaning of the current short-lived meme and fad nouns/adjectives like "skibidi ohio gyatt rizz". It takes time for a language feature to become widespread and de-facto standardized among a population. This is because people need to asynchronously learn it, start using it themselves, and gain critical mass so that even people who do not like using that feature need to start respecting its presence. This inertia is the main source of slowness that I mention, and also and a requirement for any kind of grammar-checking software. From the point of such software, a language feature that (almost) nobody understands is not a language feature, but an error. > You also seem to be making an assumption that natural languages (English, I'm assuming) can be well defined by a simple set of rigid patterns/rules? Yes, that set of patterns is called a language grammar. Even dialects and slangs have grammars of their own, even if they're different, less popular, have less formal materials describing them, and/or aren't taught in schools.
- qwery 1y ago
  Fair enough, thanks for replying. I don't see the task of specifying a grammar as straightforward as you do, perhaps. I guess I just didn't understand the chain of comments. I find that clear-cut, rigid rules tend to be the least helpful ones in writing. Obviously this class of rule is also easy/easier to represent in software, so it also tends to be the source of false positives and frustration that lead me to disable such features altogether.
  - phoe-krk 1y ago
    When you do writing as a form of art, rules are meant to be bent or broken; it's useful to have the ability to explicitly write new ones and make new forms of the language legal, rather than wrestle with hallucinating LLMs. When writing for utility and communication, though, English grammar is simple and standard enough. Browsing Harper sources, https://github.com/Automattic/harper/blob/0c04291bfec25d0e934eaeb057d0f54af8e14a78/harper-core/src/word_metadata.rs https://github.com/Automattic/harper/blob/0c04291bfec25d0e93... seems to have a lot of the basics already nailed down. Natural language grammar can often be represented as "what is allowed to, should, or should not, appear where, when, and in which context" - IIUC, Harper seems to tackle the problem the same way.
    - qwery 1y ago
      I'm certainly not disputing the existence of grammar nor do I think an LLM is a good way to implement/check/enforce one. And now I realise how my first comment landed. Thanks again!
      - fl0id 1y ago
        Your first point would be more fitting if a language checker would need a complete, computable grammar that can be parsed and understood. That would be problematic for natural languages.
    - tolerance 1y ago
      You get it!!
  - 1y ago

fakedang 1y ago

Aight you win fam, I was trippin fr. You're absolutely bussin, no cap. Harvard should be taking notes. (^^ alien language that was developed in less than a decade)

dmoy 1y ago
Pedantically, aight, trippin, fr (at least the spoken version), and fam were all very common in the 1990s (which was the last decade I was able to speak like that without getting jeered at by peers).
phoe-krk 1y ago
Yes, precisely. This "less than a decade" is magnitudes above the hours or days that it would take to manually add those words and idioms to proper dictionaries and/or write new grammar rules to accomodate aspects like skipping "g" in continuous verbs to get "bussin" or "bussin'" instead of "bussing". Thank you for illustrating my point. Also, it takes at most few developers to write those rules into a grammar checking system, compared to millions and more that need to learn a given piece of "evolved" language as it becomes impossible to avoid learning it. It's not only fast enough to do this manually, it also takes much less work-intensive and more scalable.
- efitz 1y ago
  I’m glad we have people at HN who could have eliminated decades of effort by tens of thousands of people, had they only been consulted first on the problem.
  - phoe-krk 1y ago
    Which effort? Learning a language is something that can't be eliminated. Everyone needs to do it on their own. Writing grammar checking software, though, can be done few times and then copied.
- fakedang 1y ago
  Not exactly. It takes time for those words to become mainstream for a generation. While you'd have to manually add those words in dictionaries, LLMs can learn these words on the fly, based on frequency of usage.