Further evidence of the decline of English

[Wilson Gray]

My bad. I said that the author of this thesis knows English better
than I do. I should have phrased it differently, perhaps as:

"... far better acquainted with the English jargon relevant to his
field of endeavor than I am."

I have no doubt that, were I to turn my guns around and fire on him,
it would be a trivial matter for me to gun his natural ass out of the
saddle, when it comes to the ability to blow the magic language.

In like manner, I certainly didn't mean to imply that, because a given
word is not part of *my* active lexicon, I therefore regard said word
as, in some sense, *not* common, ordinary English, easily understood
by those for whom the word *is" a much-used part of *their* daily
conversation.

If meaningless to Wilson Gray, then universally meaningless? To quote
an old R&B tune:

"What kind of fool do you think I am?"

However, I grant that, as other such examples that I have posted, this
example likewise spoke for itself and no additional, random commentary
on my part was required.

To those whose intelligence I insulted, know that such was not my
intention. Please accept my apologies.

-Wilson



On Sun, Apr 25, 2010 at 8:10 PM, Mark Mandel <thnidu at gmail.com> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Mark Mandel <thnidu at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: Further evidence of the decline of English
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> You funnin' us, man? That's shoptalk for you. Just the other day our Senior
> Programmer asked me if I had any experience writing or using finite-state
> transducers for text (I didn't). Adding "stochastic" to that doesn't strike
> me as odd in the least.
>
> Nor Google. A bit from the top of the first page of *141,000* rgh for *"fin=
> ite
> state transducers" stochastic"*:
>
> #
> Machine Translation with Inferred Stochastic Finite-State Transducers
> www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/089120104323093294
> #
> LNCS 4478 - Inference of Stochastic Finite-State Transducers Using ...
> by V Alabau - Cited by 1 - Related articles
> www.springerlink.com/index/f876267680271612.pdf
> #
> A Statistical-Estimation Method for Stochastic Finite-State ...
> Keywords Machine translation, stochastic finite-state transducers, prob-
> abilistic estimation. 1 Introduction. A translation is a process that maps
> strings ...
> www.springerlink.com/index/G52E1H7BN3T75FJR.pdf
> #
> Some Statistical-Estimation Methods for Stochastic Finite-State ...
> Jes=C3=BAs Andr=C3=A9s-Ferrer , Francisco Casacuberta-Nolla , Alfons Juan-C=
> =C3=ADscar, ON
> THE STATISTICAL ESTIMATION OF STOCHASTIC FINITE-STATE TRANSDUCERS IN MACHIN=
> E
> ...
> portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3D599650 - Similar
> #
> Machine Translation with Inferred Stochastic Finite-State Transducers
> Jes=C3=BAs Andr=C3=A9s-Ferrer , Francisco Casacuberta-Nolla , Alfons Juan-C=
> =C3=ADscar, ON
> THE STATISTICAL ESTIMATION OF STOCHASTIC FINITE-STATE TRANSDUCERS IN MACHIN=
> E
> ...
> portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3D1105714
> # [PDF]
> Stochastic Finite-State models for Spoken Language Machine Translation
> by S Bangalore - 2000 - Cited by 57 - Related articles
> www.aclweb.org/anthology/W/W00/W00-0508.pdf
> # [PDF]
> A Stochastic Finite-State Morphological Parser for Turkish
> by H Sak - Related articles
> www.aclweb.org/anthology/P/P09/P09-2069.pdf
> Show more results from www.aclweb.org
> # [PDF]
> A Stochastic Finite-State Word-Segmentation Algorithm for Chinese
> by R Sproat - 1996 - Cited by 273 - Related articles
> www.ldc.upenn.edu/acl/J/J96/J96-3004.pdf - Similar
>
>
> On Sun, Apr 25, 2010 at 4:34 PM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> La tesis ... se ley=C3=B3 en ingl=C3=A9s ... bajo el t=C3=ADtulo, "Speech=
>  and text
>> translation involving the Basque language: an application of
>> stochastic, finite-state transduction."
>>
>> He knows English better than I do! "Stochastic, finite-state
>> transduction"?! WTF is that?! I recall a serial in F&SF called "The
>> Stochastic Man" and I recall "finite state" from Robert Eugene Wall's
>> magnificent work, Introduction to Mathematical Linguistics (now,
>> sadly, out of print, but available used for $198.14), and I've come
>> across "transduction" here and there, in a variety of contexts. But,
>> as used, these strings mean nothing to me.
>>
>
>
> m a m
>
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> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>



--
-Wilson
–––
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"––a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
–Mark Twain

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