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A Useful Grammar Checker?
burtdub asks: "With the amount of raw text data available, there seems to be no shortage of ambitious language projects on the horizon, from Universal Language Translators to Junk Email Filtering. However, the mess that is the English language still seems to elude commercial attempts while being relatively ignored by the open source community. What would it take to make a useful, functional grammar checker?"
Back when WordPerfect was actually giving MS Word a fight, grammatik was a great grammar checking program for DOS, Windows, Macintosh and Unix & years ahead of anything which made it into MS Word. It was developed by Reference Software, before WordPerfect acquired them. I assume Corel still has this & uses it in their WordPerfect Office Suite.
Not perfect (our language is eccentric & computers are stupid), but the best I've seen.
Speaking of The Elements of Style, the full text of the book can be found here. It's online now. Use it.
If the /. community provides any indication, good grammar checkers wouldn't be used even if they existed. Spell checkers work very well and no one seems to pay them any heed.
Chance 'em.
A couple of nitpicks here:
> Remember... English is the bastard child of Celtic, Latin, and various other Germanic languages.
English isn't really related to the Celtic languages. There are a few Celtic loan words, but that's about it. Also, Celtic languages and Latin aren't Germanic. You can see the relationships here.
> Try reading "Canterbury Tales" aloud - once you get past the spelling it is surprisingly similar to the english we speak nearly 800 years on.
Well, yes and no. True, Chaucer-era Middle English had lost most of the inflections of Old English (vestiges of which linger in things like pronoun cases to this day) and picked up a lot of vocabulary from the Norman invaders, but it didn't really sound like modern English. That wouldn't happen until the Great Vowel Shift around the 15th and 16th centuries.
fewer
Heard any good sigs lately?
While I am one to appreciate good grammer and spelling, I hardly think that people English will become more difficult for native speakers to understand or use. As long as everyone screws it up in a consensual manner, we'll know what others mean.
Q.E.D.
I learned it as T-BANGS, with T standing for truth.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
What makes English such a pain in the backside is that the language has been so utterly simplified over the millenia that we have lots of words with identical spellings, but different parts of speech. This makes the word order critical.
Firstly, don't say it's been "simplified". Say rather that it has gained complexity in some areas and lost complexity in others.
Your point will help me illustrate:
<expound>
English used to have a larger set of grammatical suffixes (known as inflectional morphology), kind of like Latin. You put a particular suffix on a noun to mark it as the direct object; you put a particular suffix on a verb to mark its tense, number, or whatever. English has largely lost these endings, mostly due to some heavy phonological reduction of lots of its vowels during the late Old English and early Middle English periods, starting around 1000 CE and ending around 1200 CE. Basically, vowels in unstressed syllables turned to schwa (which is the first vowel in the word under, as pronounced by a typical American newscaster). Because of this, inflectional suffixes became ambiguous; because they were ambiguous, people stopped using them.
So English lost all that inflectional morphology. So what? Well, before this happened, English word-order was relatively free. Afterward, people could no longer disambiguate syntactic categories by the endings. So word-order took up that role, and English word-order became more fixed.
For more details, see [1].
</expound>
So just like a big game of whack-a-mole, a loss of complexity in one area led, in a rather straightforward manner, to an increase in complexity in another.
If we don't, in a matter of just a few years, we'll get to the point where nobody can understand anything.
This is patently untrue, but I forgive you. From an earlier post of mine:
<windbag>
This is a very common sentiment among educated people, cross-linguistically and cross-culturally. In basically every culture around the world, there is a group of people, usually middle-aged, that believes that people spoke their language "correctly" about a generation or two ago. They lament the eminent doom of their language. They blame the young, the uneducated, and the poor.
The fact is that languages change constantly, and lots of these changes can be pretty well understood as natural processes. For instance, if you're from the US, you probably pronounce the word butter with a d-like sound in normal speech (linguists call the sound a "voiced alveolar tap"). So it sounds just like "budder". When people started using that pronunciation, their elders probably thought them "lazy" as well. I can almost hear them saying, "Pronounce your t's properly!"
But think about it. In order to pronounce the word with a proper tt in the middle, you'd have to turn your voice on to say the b and the u, then turn it off to say tt, and then turn it back on to say er. It's much easier to just leave your voice on! And that's what people started doing. If you say the word with a "hard" t sound in America today, people will probably consider it strange.
</windbag>
People do not "mispronounce" and misspell words because they are stupid, lazy, poor, or young. (I realize the parent was not asserting that such is the case; however, the sentiment is common enough to warrant mentioning here.) The true reasons for these phenomena are remarkably subtle. Linguists have made great strides in understanding them, but there is still a very long way to go.
In any case, people have been misspelling words for a good healthy number of centuries now. Yet here we are, writing in English back and forth to each other. I'm not too worried.
References:
Man, I wish I had better karma, because I've got useful things to say here.
You can check grammar using a well-trained Hidden Markov Model and the Viterbi Algorithm. If I were to design such a program, I would have the part-of-speech tagger have a go at a sentence, and if it came back with a confidence below, say, x, then the sentence's grammar is probably not good.
This is nice because it also helps sentences keep from being awkward.