it appeared you were reinforcing the laymans misunderstanding by
stating that their perception was correct.
Right. I wasn't. Glad you understand that now.
In fact, most of what you think I said you made up in your head, as we
shall see.
As far as linquistic evolution having any relation to the incorrect
assumption that IE == Internet there are none.
This is a very strong statement, made in a remarkably confident
tone. It's also probably quite wrong.
Even if it were right, I never said that there was a direct causative
relationship between diachronic linguistic semantics and that
assumption. I was windbagging more generally about an interesting way
that language works.
So, this is straw-man 1 in your reply.
Internet Explorer did not become synonmyous with the Internet the
same way Kleenex became synonymous with tissue.
I don't wish to assert that it did. Lexical etymologies are notoriously
difficult to discover, and semantic shifts in lexemes are nearly
impossible to predict except in a few general aspects.
This is straw-man 2 in your reply.
there was no mention of attitudes until your last post.
Just because you missed an implication doesn't mean it wasn't there.
It also seems from that last post that you are suggesting I
have a low opinion of people who have the misconception that IE ==
Internet.
Nope. I said that such low opinions are normally silly or hypocritical,
or else they make their expresser look stupid. For the purposes of this
conversation, I could care less what you think of anyone: ad hominem
attacks are not useful in most rational discussions, so I don't use
em.
This is straw-man 3 in your reply.
I have no idea where you are headed with the specialized
society
Yes, you've made that quite obvious.
and attacks on my grammer
sigh...
This phrase indicates that you've completely misunderstood everything
I've said so far.
I didn't make an attack on your grammar. My whole point was that such
attacks are silly and usually hypocritical! The careful reader will
notice that I cast the "mistakes" you made in an extremely positive
light: they were used to illustrate the larger point.
As it turns out, I'm a descriptionist: I'm much more interested in how
people actually write and speak than in how anyone says they're
"supposed" to write and speak.
Ad hominem attacks are, like I said, usually unproductive. So I don't
use them.
This is straw-man 4 in your reply.
And I still stand by my arguement. You can analyze why there is
the confusion, the affects of society on confusion, the importance
of the confusion, and my bad grammar, but it will not change the fact
that: 1) IE != Internet 2) Laymen who believe that IE == Internet are
wrong 3) Naming software with simple names related to their purpose
is no guarantee that users will understand what it is and how to use
it.
Agreed. Hopefully you'll notice by now (may God grant) that our points
were never mutually contradictory. Just because I quote you and write
something in response doesn't mean I'm saying you were wrong.
To pull the discussion back on track examine the root of the discussion
This is a stunningly cocky phrase, by the way. When you adopt such a
tone, you should make damn sure you know exactly what's going on first.
No, they are confused and no level of logical perturbations are going
to change that fact.
You missed the point, but that may be because its expressor is not a rhetorical genius.
I didn't say they weren't confused; I said their
confusion can be understood through an evolutionary and/or linguistic
lens, and to look down on such users is unwise.
The point is that Alice the uber-geek shouldn't sneer at Bob the typical
IE user, because Alice is probably similarly confused about some other
aspect of her world. Usually the deeper workings of a particular complex entity in Alice's
world are not salient in her day-to-day existence, or even in her
interactions with that entity. Hence the brief thoughts on evolution
and language.
However, while the Television is an excellent abstraction which is
designed and marketed in a way that a lay person can move from virtually
any make and model of television to another with little difficulty
Internet Explorer is not, perhaps only due to the name accompanied with
a complete misunderstanding of what the internet is.
This conversation is about attitudes towards how some people actually perceive IE and its
semantic connection to the internet. How IE was designed and marketed
is irrelevant.
When that same lay person moves from their desktop to another
and does not see the big blue e on the desktop they don't know what
to do because they have a false perception of what is necessary
to recieve the internet. Of course once someone points out
FireFox/Opera/Safari/Konquere/etc and they open it up the familiar
controls and the internet are all there.
True. Heh, I actually studied bgp for a living a while back: I knew a
lot about how the internet "really works". But a few months ago, I got
on a Mac for the first time in a couple years, and I didn't know what
to do either. Cause I didn't know what Safari was. All my knowledge
of gui design principles, of bgp and windows and unix, and that the
internet is a set of computers connected pseudo-hierarchically by
protocols layered on physical media, was basically useless.
So, knowledge of the nature of the internet is neither a necessary nor a
sufficient condition for the ability to surf the web.
Since the lay person can understand that a Sony/Zenith/RCA/Samsung
TV are all televisions its not unreasonable to have them associate
IE/FireFox/Opera/Safari Browsers as web browsers.
Yeah, and my point is that they'll pick up that knowledge as it becomes
important to them. If it never becomes important to them, they'll never
learn it. If it does, they can ask an expert.
Take me. I have no idea how the property tax code works. It's completely
unimportant to my existence, because I have no house or car. If it ever
*does* become important, there are plenty of people out there I can ask
for help.
Take you. You don't use it's versus its correctly, from a
prescriptive grammarian's standpoint.
This has likely not caused you serious harm in the past. If it ever does
preclude your progress in life, you'll probably take the time to learn
the difference. In the mean time, there's grammar checker.
This is a specialized society. We can't all be experts on every complex
system we have to interact with. That's why they're called "experts":
they're experienced.
You don't want people looking down on you cause you don't do the it's/its
thing right. I don't want people looking down on me cause I have no idea how
to change the oil in a car. Joe Schmo IE user doesn't want people looking down
on him cause he doesn't know that IE and Firefox do the same thing.
How many people think Internet Explorer IS the internet?
You're right, a lot of people think that. And the ones who think that are correct, in many important respects.
That is, their only exposure to the net is through that single interface. IE == the internet in the same way that Outlook == my email.
The means by which human beings categorize their world linguistically is mainly through their understanding of what their five senses tell them. For instance, scientists now tell us that time is relative, that there's no such thing as simultaneity. And most of us believe them, even though this is a thoroughly unintuitive concept. But no language encodes relativistic notions into its grammar.
Why is that? There are two reasons: 1) I can't see, with my own two eyeballs governed by my own primate cerebellum, that light travels the same speed in any inertial reference frame; and 2) such knowledge is not primally important to a human: usually the knowledge won't help me get laid or avoid being killed.
Now apply the last paragraph to its analog in this thread. First, your typical Aunt Tilla IE user can't see the inner workings of the internet; in fact, the web was designed so that, for the most part, she wouldn't have to. The only part of it she can see is what IE shows her. Second, that knowledge is usually unimportant to her. If something goes wrong, she can call tech support or her 13-year-old grandchild to help her out.
Why should she spend the time to learn about the tcp/ip suite, bgp, autonomous systems, the difference between cat-5 and cat-6 cable? She uses her television set quite successfully without understanding the physics of radio-wave transmission, the inner politics of NBC, or cathode ray tubes. It's the beauty of abstraction, baby!
1 out of 14,800 lawsuits. Gosh that sounds like organized crime....RIAA shaking down 14,800 people for money.
Even if RIAA is evil, that doesn't mean that they're wrong.
Does it suck that normal citizens have tons of trouble going head-to-head with huge evil corporations? Of course. Is RIAA really evil? I honestly don't know.
But I'd be unsurprised if 99% of the people they threaten with litigation actually did download music illegally.
Of course it also sucks that those who have not done anything wrong are better off settling. This is a problem we should definitely be talking about.
But again, I'm not sure this woman didn't do anything wrong. If you don't want to get dragged into some big dramatic legal thing, make absolutely sure that no illegal bits ever come close to your IP address. That includes not letting Dennis The Menace touch your computer if you don't know how to prevent him from downloading crap onto it.
Yes, this means "they won". You have to be responsible for the bits on your computer, and you have to pay for music you listen to. Did you think this free music thing was gonna last forever?
Once we've all come to grips with that reality, then we can turn our thoughts to Fixing The Legal System. Lemme know what yall come up with -- I'm gonna go watch TV.
if a one-time-use credit card number is compromised, you know exactly which retailer was responsible for the breach, because each retailer will have a different credit card number of yours on file.
No. Just because the number was stolen while you were engaging in a transaction with (who you think is) foo.com doesn't mean the actual humans at the actual company backing foo.com were responsible for the breach. You just have a smaller list of potential culprits.
It's completely possible that you've been man-in-the-middle attacked, browser-spoofed, or any number of other things. It could be that Thawte (or your favorite Trusty Third Party) has mismanaged their keys or revocation lists. It could be that your browser wasn't encrypting any of the traffic (due to some bug or another), even though it promised you that it was. It could be that foo.com forgot to renew their DNS entry, and their site is now being spoofed by some malicious party. It could be that you have a keyboard logger running on your machine. It could be that someone has figured out how to factor products of large primes and is immune to your puny attempts at encrypted communications. (I know, I know -- the last one is less likely than the others, but you get the point.)
Of course, the most likely thing is that *you* did something wrong. You picked a bad password, you ignored your browser's warnings about hostname mismatches, you allowed other people to have physical access to your computer.
These assertions can lead quickly to a philosophical discussion over who's to blame for internet fraud; I don't want to go there. The point is just that you can't assume that, just because the fake card number you used at amazon.com got ripped off, amazon.com did something "wrong".
(Disclaimer: I am not a security expert. I am not a financial expert. I am not any kind of expert. Don't blame me if sh?t hits your fan.)
Let's say you want to purchase something online with credit. But you don't want your credit card number floating around in various databases on the internet. And you don't like entering it multiple times into multiple websites; this increases the chances that someone will attack you successfully.
So you go to your credit card's website (which you trust). You tell them you want to make an online purchase of no more than $500 (let's say), and you want to do it this month. They give you a fake credit card number X and tie it to your real credit account.
When you go to pay for your item from company foo.com, you give them credit card number X. Now foo.com alerts your credit card company you've used X to make a purchase of (let's say) $400.
The credit card company notes this transaction, and from now on, X can only be used to make purchases from foo.com. So if Mallory was sniffing your traffic and decides to make a porn site purchase two hours later, he will be unsuccessful. Or if the folks at foo.com try to cheat you and charge you twice for your $400 purchase, they too will be unsuccessful (because that would put X over the $500 limit you set).
Also, after that one month time limit, the X itself expires so that even foo.com can't use it anymore.
You can make a separate fake credit card number for every company you intend to buy something from online. If any one of them is sniffed, the damage is minimal. I know for a fact that CitiBank offers this service -- I'm sure plenty of others do as well.
Also wrapped up in your argument is an ad hominem attack on said "hack".
Schmidt's status as a hack does not affect the truth or falsity of his arguments about whom should be considered responsible for security flaws in software.
Now reread the last sentence, replacing "Schmidt" with "Schneier" and "hack" with "security expert".
people talk about how something "runs the full gambit of possibilities."
Yeah, I was just thinking about gamut the other day actually. Notice that it is clearly quite phonologically similar to gambit; indeed, they are homophones in some dialects.
Notice second that almost no one uses gamut anymore unless
it's used in the phrase run the gamut or similar.
Notice third that gambit usually evokes some sense of quick motion: tripping or similar.
Notice finally that run the gauntlet is also a phrase in common usage, that it also evokes some sense of motion, and that gauntlet shares some phonological features with gambit.
These four factors have caused a phono-semantic collision in the language.
> People do not "mispronounce" and misspell words
> because they are stupid, lazy, poor, or young.
No?
No.:)
First of all, all of your points are valid. Yes, being uneducated probably gives someone less access to the prestige dialect. (I say "probably" because I haven't actually ever seen any numbers to that effect, but that's probably because I've
never read anything not authored by JRR Tolkien.)
To be fair, the sentence of mine that you quote was probably unclear or ambiguous. No matter how much time ya spend proofreading...:-/
I was specifically arguing against the validity of the following logic:
Alice pronounces ask the same way she pronounces axe. Therefore, Alice is lazier, less intelligent, less educated, or less wealthy than Bob, who does not pronounce ask that way.
In other words, I wish to refute the sentence, the use of a dialect other than the prestige dialect implies reduced cognitive abilities, education, or so on.
This line of reasoning does not hold up under experimentation, at least based on our (admittedly limited) sociolinguistic knowledge. It is, however, an extremely common line of reasoning.
Notice that our respective assertions are not
mutually exclusive, other than the part where you called me silly.:)
[That's honestly my only point. I typed the rest of this cause I'm a jack*ss who loves hearing himself ramble, and, seriously, I love this stuff. So take it as you will.]
But we can think of reasons right here why someone wouldn't want to use the prestige dialect.
Maybe they want to identify themselves as being part of a group, for instance. (A guy named Labov
has made a significant impact on the linguistic
community as a proponent of this line of thought.) People, as it turns out, are excellent at using linguistic markers to identify members of their in-group and out-group, regardless of their educational or socioeconomic background.
And you can see how this would be useful in an evolutionary sense. If I can quickly assign out-group status to you ("Hey! You're not in my pre-industrial tribe of farmers or hunter-gatherers!"), I can immediately start doing threat-assessment on you. Are you a threat to my territory, could I outrun you or withstand an attack from you, etc. Some would argue that this is The One Reason why stereotypes exist. The latter point is, of course, arguable.
So Bob the New York Barber has just as hard a time convincing Charles the California Surfer that he "hangs ten" on a regular basis as George Bush has
of convincing the slashdot crowd that he's an intelligent human being.
I mean, the man says "nukular" instead of "nuclear", so he must be an idiot, right? Actually, I know *exactly* why he pronounces it the way he does. Because he, along with a huge swath of English speakers, is under the influence of hundreds of other scientific-sounding, Latin-derived words that end with [kjul.r]
or [gjul.r] (that is, the "kular" of "nukular" or the "gular" of "angular"). Words like circular, angular
(and its partners: triangular, rectangular, etc),
singular, regular, jugular, secular, ocular, perpendicular, muscular, and so on.
By contrast, I think nuclear pronounced
as [nukli.r] (that is, the "normal" way in the US) is the only word out there (other than a couple very similar words, like thermonuclear)
that ends with the sounds [kli.r]. The only similar word endings are in words like clear, blear, and so on; but I think we can toss them out because
the [r] is not syllabic in those words (other than in a few dialects
in the southeastern US, where the vowel/i/ is realized long and
there is almost an approximant between/i/ and/r/, as
in clear [kli
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:
Millward, C.M. A Biography of the English
Language. Boston: Wadsworth, 1996.
Downloading an mp3, even if it's from a known musician is NOT stealing. I don't give a hoot what you think the law says, or what it actually says for that matter. The law in this regard is supposed to reflect the feelings of the composers and performers... now, take this scenerio...
Heh. If only the world worked that way. The law "reflects the feelings" of whichever player(s) had the most political power at the time when the law was created.
Every other day on/. we hear about *AA, and how stupid they are not to embrace file sharing. My guess is that they know darn well where their money comes from, and they know that file sharing threatens that income stream.
I went to a talk once called "The Heavy Tail", which I paraphrase for (most of) the rest of this post. Basically, the mass market's artistic preferences look like an exponential decay function: on the x-axis are artists, rank-ordered by popularity; on the y-axis is popularity. Closer to the left of the graph are Britney Spears, Shawshank Redemption, and Harry Potter. Farther to the right are more obscure artists, art-forms, and products. There are very few artists on the left-hand side, but they are immensely popular.
Traditional, big sellers of art (like *AA) only target the part of the curve on the left. Why? Because it maximizes sales and minimizes production costs. They have also, as much as possible, manipulated the curve to make sure that their chunk of the x-axis has as many people in it as possible. If you're gonna sell Britney Spears records, make sure that a whole shitload of people hear her name and want to buy her stuff.
It would take a lot of money for them to get at the heavy tail of that exponential function, because the overhead associated with selling all those different flavors of artist would start to outweigh the income gained from said marketing.
Amazon.com (among others), by the way, makes its living by having a business model which allows it to widen its stance on the x-axis, to target part of the heavy tail.
So what happens if some technology pops up that changes the shape of the curve, or allows people to obtain art from your chunk of the curve in a way that doesn't involve paying you? You're a big friggin corporation, not very flexible, and you have a crapload of monetary and political capital at your disposal. Well, you can do two things:
Change your business model to accomodate the new technology, or
Use some of your power to limit the negative impact of the new technology on your revenue streams.
My guess is that *AA are trying to do as much of both as possible. From (1) we get things like iTunes. From (2) we get things like the DMCA.
So I dunno, it seems to me like *AA are acting totally rationally. Of course iana economist, so I could very easily be wrong.
I've done translation work before (Slovak -> English), and there's
much more going on than differences in words and grammar. There are
whole conceptual frameworks in languages that just don't translate, and
this is frustrating for anyone learning a language, let alone trying to
translate.
Yes! I'd have thrown a mod point at you just for this paragraph if I
could.
English is very precise (when used as directed) in matters of time and
sequence -- we have more than 20 verb tenses where most languages get away
with three.
Not really. Firstly, English
only has two or three tenses. (Depending upon which linguist you ask,
English either has a past/non-past distinction or past/present/future
distinctions. See [1], [2]. The general consensus seems to be
in favor of the former, although I humbly disagree with the general consensus.) It maintains a variety of aspect
distinctions (perfective vs imperfective, habitual vs continuous,
nonprogressive vs progressive). See [3]. Its verbs also interact
with
modality, albeit slightly less strongly.
It's a very common mistake to count the combinations of tense, aspect,
and modality in a language and arrive at some astronomical number of
"tenses". It's an even more common mistake (for native English speakers,
anyway) to think that English
is special or different or strange compared to other languages. In
most cases, it's not -- especially when compared with other
Indo-European languages.
Secondly, and more interestingly IMHO, most languages do not have
three distinct tenses. The most common cases are either to have a
future/non-future distinction or a past/non-past distinction.
In any case, the future tense, if it exists, is
normally derived from modal or aspectual markers and is diachronically
weak (which is linguist-babble meaning "future tenses forms don't stick
around for very long"). See [3].
English is a perfect example: will, of course, used to refer to
the agent's desire (his or her will) to do something.
Only recently has it shifted to have a more temporal sense, and it still
maintains some of its modal flavor. In fact, the least marked way
of making the future (in the US, at least) is to use either gonna
or a present progressive form: I'm having dinner with my boss tonight.
I'm gonna ask him for a raise. See Comrie [1] again.
So as not to be anglo-centric, I'll give another example. Spanish
has three widespread means of forming the future tense. Two of these
are periphrastic and are exemplified by he de cantar 'I've
gotta sing' and voy a cantar 'I'm gonna sing'. The last is the
synthetic form, cantaré 'I'll sing'.
Most high school or college Spanish teachers would tell you that the
"pure" future is cantaré. Actually, it's historically derived
from the phrase cantar he 'I have to sing' (from Latin
cantáre habeo), and is being
displaced by the other two forms all across the Spanish-speaking world.
I'm told, for example, that cantaré has been largely lost in in
Argentina and southern Chile (see [4]).
In any case, the parent's main point still holds. It's a b?tch to deal
with cross-linguistic differences in major semantic systems
computationally. But good lord, it's fun to try.:)
References:
Comrie, Bernard. Tense. Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press, 1985.
Davidsen-Nielsen, Niels.
"Has English a Future?" Acta Linguistica Hafniensia 21 (1987):
5-20.
Well I guess they really are out to do no evil, as this idea is completely counter-productive to the current way they make money, which is by essentially getting people to click paid for search results. If the answer i'm looking for is told to me right at the top, random people will be less likely to click "Find more Jane Fonda at Ebay.com"
Actually, it seems like the kinds of full-sentence queries that trigger the new behavior don't come with ads at all! What is maize, for example, yields no ads, while
maize does. IIRC this was the behavior before, too.
Okay, I've got about four interesting (IMHO) things to say regarding points you made. I've numbered em, so if you get bored with one you can skip to the others.:) If you don't want to read it all, I'll just tell you the thesis: languages and language change are extraordinarily complicated, and reducing the latter to laziness is misleading (if not plain wrong).
1. The reality of phonological change, and linguistic change in general
Not really. The biggest hurdle in mastering English is laziness.
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.
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.
This does not imply that the speakers are/were lazy. In fact, this is a ridiculously common kind of phonological change. The same thing happened, for instance, when Latin amicus (pronounced [amikus]) changed to Modern Spanish amigo. That [k] sound turned to a [g] because it was between two vowels.
2. Registers
The second biggest barrier is proper grammar. Again, it take quite a bit of practice to state, "My apologies, I was unavoidably detained." instead of "Sorry I'm late." The former conveys far more elequance of speech than the later, thus setting the stage for productive communication.
People use different means of encoding meanings depending upon the register. That is, you speak differently depending on the social context. If you're late for a job interview, you probably wouldn't say my bad, the fuckin freeway's a mess by way of apology. Similarly, if you're late arriving to a keg party, you probably wouldn't say my apologies, I was unavoidably detained, unless you mean to be mildly humorous. (One probably wouldn't say that last sentence to one's spouse, either. The sentence is pretty strongly restricted to formal contexts.)
3. The reality of syntactic change
Regarding grammar, that's always in flux too. Consider the sentence, I'm going to buy a car next week. This is a future tense construction in Modern English, even though it doesn't much look like one to an educated reader. The word going in this kind of sentence no longer implies any kind of movement, as evidenced by the sentence, I'm going to sit here in my chair for three hours. (This construction, by the way, is being heavily phonologically reduced these days, to I'm gonna do or even I'munna do. This is something that happens very frequently to grammatical markers.)
What is going on here? Well, English speakers used to only use the verb go to mean movement. They then began using it for movement associated with proximal futures (with modal and aspectual meaning tied in), as in
Hal: Hang on a second, Bob -- where are you going? Bob: I'm going to buy some fruit.
Of course we're wandering dangerously close to the realm of Offtopic-ness; nonetheless, the parent was modded up Informative, so I feel justified in responding...
The if...were is a hypothetical subjunctive; the writer is making a statement contrary to fact. The company's products are not available for free; the case is being postulated where they are.
Maybe, but I think there's something else going on here. In the clause, How can a company make money, the semantic entity denoted by company is nonspecific. That is, there is no actual, individuated company the speaker is thinking of. Rather, I think the OP meant to say, How can any old company whose products really are available for free, make money?.
Thus the if in the original sentence is not used to encode irrealis
semantics (that is, in this case, to denote
hypotheticality); rather, it is used to do restrict what kind of companies are allowed to be instantiated for the nonspecific a company.
(Linguists call this phenomenon "delimitation of the domain". It's something normally done with adjectives. For example, in the sentence Mary kicked a ball, any ball may be instantiated. OTOH, in Mary kicked a red ball, only an element of the subset of the set of all balls will do.)
So the way I would say the sentence is, How can a company make money if its products are available for free?. That is, I would not use the subjunctive -- the subjunctive is used to encode irrealis
modality, which (according to my own native-speaker intuition) is not warranted here.
Of course, I'm a descriptive type (not prescriptive), so no matter how a speaker chooses to say it, I probably won't be offended.:)
People who are more interested in this stuff should check out Linguistic Semantics by William Frawley. No, I am not William Frawley.
The article mentions English-Spanish translation. When one language is ambiguous (from a bit of Spanish I had in HS I'm guessing English is far more ambiguous), there is no hope of easy translation.
Every language has "ambiguity", but ambiguity can come in different flavors (phonological, morphological, syntactic, semantic, pragmatic). Some of the chief instigators of language change can be thought of as ambiguity on these levels. So firstly, it's hard to imagine the existence of a function mapping languages to "ambiguity levels".
The motivation for your comment about English versus Spanish probably comes from the fact that you know of more English homophones than Spanish ones. Indeed, most literate people think of their language in terms of written words, so your take on the matter is common.
(As a slight digression, your example of right the direction versus right as in 'correct, just' is pretty interesting. We can understand the semantic similarity between the two when we notice that most humans are right-handed. Thus it is extraordinarily common, cross-linguistically and cross-culturally, for the word meaning the direction 'right' to have similar meanings as dextrous, just, well-guided and so on, whereas the word meaning the direction 'left' also has meanings such as worthless, stupid. (In fact, the word dextrous was borrowed through French from the Latin word dexter meaning 'right, dexterous' or dextra meaning 'right hand'.) So the given
example is one where, historically, a word had
no ambiguity, but gained ambiguity because speakers started using it differently.)
Getting back to the main topic, more problematic about Section 7 of TFA is the implicit assertion that, at some point in the future, their techniques can be applied to create a function mapping words in a particular language to words in another language. Anybody who has studied more than one language has seen cases where this is difficult to do on the word-level. For instance, the French equivalent of English river is often given as riviere or fleuve. But riviere is only used by French speakers to mean 'river or stream that runs into another river or stream' whereas fleuve means 'river or stream that runs into the sea'. English breaks up river-like things by size: rivers are bigger than streams. So, in the strictest sense, there is no English word for fleuve, just as there's no French word for stream (unless there has been a recent borrowing I don't know about). This certainly
does not imply that French people can't tell the difference between big rivers and small rivers; their lexicon just breaks things up differently.
These little problems can be remedied lexically, as I've just done. So fleuve is denotationally equivalent to river or stream that runs into the sea, although the latter is obviously much bulkier than its French equivalent. The real problem is that there are words in some languages whose meanings are not encoded at all in other languages. English, for example, has a lexical past-progressive tense marker, was, used in the first person singular (e.g. I was running to the store). Some languages have no notion of tense. What, then, does was mean in the context of such a language?
It's pretty well-known that Slashdotters' general policy is to tear apart every article we read, and half of those we don't. This is certainly not my intent here. Languages are complicated beasties, and everyone seems to understand that, including the writers of the article. So, we should interpret their result in Section 7 as them saying, "Well, maybe this has gotten us a baby-step closer to creating the hypothetical Perfect Natural Language Translator, but someone's gonna have to do a lot more work to see where this thing goes".
Slashdot Mirror
Right. I wasn't. Glad you understand that now.
In fact, most of what you think I said you made up in your head, as we shall see.
As far as linquistic evolution having any relation to the incorrect assumption that IE == Internet there are none.
This is a very strong statement, made in a remarkably confident tone. It's also probably quite wrong.
Even if it were right, I never said that there was a direct causative relationship between diachronic linguistic semantics and that assumption. I was windbagging more generally about an interesting way that language works.
So, this is straw-man 1 in your reply.
Internet Explorer did not become synonmyous with the Internet the same way Kleenex became synonymous with tissue.
I don't wish to assert that it did. Lexical etymologies are notoriously difficult to discover, and semantic shifts in lexemes are nearly impossible to predict except in a few general aspects.
This is straw-man 2 in your reply.
there was no mention of attitudes until your last post.
Just because you missed an implication doesn't mean it wasn't there.
It also seems from that last post that you are suggesting I have a low opinion of people who have the misconception that IE == Internet.
Nope. I said that such low opinions are normally silly or hypocritical, or else they make their expresser look stupid. For the purposes of this conversation, I could care less what you think of anyone: ad hominem attacks are not useful in most rational discussions, so I don't use em.
This is straw-man 3 in your reply.
I have no idea where you are headed with the specialized society
Yes, you've made that quite obvious.
and attacks on my grammer
sigh...
This phrase indicates that you've completely misunderstood everything I've said so far.
I didn't make an attack on your grammar. My whole point was that such attacks are silly and usually hypocritical! The careful reader will notice that I cast the "mistakes" you made in an extremely positive light: they were used to illustrate the larger point.
As it turns out, I'm a descriptionist: I'm much more interested in how people actually write and speak than in how anyone says they're "supposed" to write and speak.
Ad hominem attacks are, like I said, usually unproductive. So I don't use them.
This is straw-man 4 in your reply.
And I still stand by my arguement. You can analyze why there is the confusion, the affects of society on confusion, the importance of the confusion, and my bad grammar, but it will not change the fact that: 1) IE != Internet 2) Laymen who believe that IE == Internet are wrong 3) Naming software with simple names related to their purpose is no guarantee that users will understand what it is and how to use it.
Agreed. Hopefully you'll notice by now (may God grant) that our points were never mutually contradictory. Just because I quote you and write something in response doesn't mean I'm saying you were wrong.
To pull the discussion back on track examine the root of the discussion
This is a stunningly cocky phrase, by the way. When you adopt such a tone, you should make damn sure you know exactly what's going on first.
You missed the point, but that may be because its expressor is not a rhetorical genius.
I didn't say they weren't confused; I said their confusion can be understood through an evolutionary and/or linguistic lens, and to look down on such users is unwise.
The point is that Alice the uber-geek shouldn't sneer at Bob the typical IE user, because Alice is probably similarly confused about some other aspect of her world. Usually the deeper workings of a particular complex entity in Alice's world are not salient in her day-to-day existence, or even in her interactions with that entity. Hence the brief thoughts on evolution and language.
However, while the Television is an excellent abstraction which is designed and marketed in a way that a lay person can move from virtually any make and model of television to another with little difficulty Internet Explorer is not, perhaps only due to the name accompanied with a complete misunderstanding of what the internet is.
This conversation is about attitudes towards how some people actually perceive IE and its semantic connection to the internet. How IE was designed and marketed is irrelevant.
When that same lay person moves from their desktop to another and does not see the big blue e on the desktop they don't know what to do because they have a false perception of what is necessary to recieve the internet. Of course once someone points out FireFox/Opera/Safari/Konquere/etc and they open it up the familiar controls and the internet are all there.
True. Heh, I actually studied bgp for a living a while back: I knew a lot about how the internet "really works". But a few months ago, I got on a Mac for the first time in a couple years, and I didn't know what to do either. Cause I didn't know what Safari was. All my knowledge of gui design principles, of bgp and windows and unix, and that the internet is a set of computers connected pseudo-hierarchically by protocols layered on physical media, was basically useless.
So, knowledge of the nature of the internet is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for the ability to surf the web.
Since the lay person can understand that a Sony/Zenith/RCA/Samsung TV are all televisions its not unreasonable to have them associate IE/FireFox/Opera/Safari Browsers as web browsers.
Yeah, and my point is that they'll pick up that knowledge as it becomes important to them. If it never becomes important to them, they'll never learn it. If it does, they can ask an expert.
Take me. I have no idea how the property tax code works. It's completely unimportant to my existence, because I have no house or car. If it ever *does* become important, there are plenty of people out there I can ask for help.
Take you. You don't use it's versus its correctly, from a prescriptive grammarian's standpoint. This has likely not caused you serious harm in the past. If it ever does preclude your progress in life, you'll probably take the time to learn the difference. In the mean time, there's grammar checker.
This is a specialized society. We can't all be experts on every complex system we have to interact with. That's why they're called "experts": they're experienced.
You don't want people looking down on you cause you don't do the it's/its thing right. I don't want people looking down on me cause I have no idea how to change the oil in a car. Joe Schmo IE user doesn't want people looking down on him cause he doesn't know that IE and Firefox do the same thing.
You're right, a lot of people think that. And the ones who think that are correct, in many important respects.
That is, their only exposure to the net is through that single interface. IE == the internet in the same way that Outlook == my email.
The means by which human beings categorize their world linguistically is mainly through their understanding of what their five senses tell them. For instance, scientists now tell us that time is relative, that there's no such thing as simultaneity. And most of us believe them, even though this is a thoroughly unintuitive concept. But no language encodes relativistic notions into its grammar.
Why is that? There are two reasons: 1) I can't see, with my own two eyeballs governed by my own primate cerebellum, that light travels the same speed in any inertial reference frame; and 2) such knowledge is not primally important to a human: usually the knowledge won't help me get laid or avoid being killed.
Now apply the last paragraph to its analog in this thread. First, your typical Aunt Tilla IE user can't see the inner workings of the internet; in fact, the web was designed so that, for the most part, she wouldn't have to. The only part of it she can see is what IE shows her. Second, that knowledge is usually unimportant to her. If something goes wrong, she can call tech support or her 13-year-old grandchild to help her out.
Why should she spend the time to learn about the tcp/ip suite, bgp, autonomous systems, the difference between cat-5 and cat-6 cable? She uses her television set quite successfully without understanding the physics of radio-wave transmission, the inner politics of NBC, or cathode ray tubes. It's the beauty of abstraction, baby!
Even if RIAA is evil, that doesn't mean that they're wrong.
Does it suck that normal citizens have tons of trouble going head-to-head with huge evil corporations? Of course. Is RIAA really evil? I honestly don't know.
But I'd be unsurprised if 99% of the people they threaten with litigation actually did download music illegally.
Of course it also sucks that those who have not done anything wrong are better off settling. This is a problem we should definitely be talking about.
But again, I'm not sure this woman didn't do anything wrong. If you don't want to get dragged into some big dramatic legal thing, make absolutely sure that no illegal bits ever come close to your IP address. That includes not letting Dennis The Menace touch your computer if you don't know how to prevent him from downloading crap onto it.
Yes, this means "they won". You have to be responsible for the bits on your computer, and you have to pay for music you listen to. Did you think this free music thing was gonna last forever?
Once we've all come to grips with that reality, then we can turn our thoughts to Fixing The Legal System. Lemme know what yall come up with -- I'm gonna go watch TV.
No. Just because the number was stolen while you were engaging in a transaction with (who you think is) foo.com doesn't mean the actual humans at the actual company backing foo.com were responsible for the breach. You just have a smaller list of potential culprits.
It's completely possible that you've been man-in-the-middle attacked, browser-spoofed, or any number of other things. It could be that Thawte (or your favorite Trusty Third Party) has mismanaged their keys or revocation lists. It could be that your browser wasn't encrypting any of the traffic (due to some bug or another), even though it promised you that it was. It could be that foo.com forgot to renew their DNS entry, and their site is now being spoofed by some malicious party. It could be that you have a keyboard logger running on your machine. It could be that someone has figured out how to factor products of large primes and is immune to your puny attempts at encrypted communications. (I know, I know -- the last one is less likely than the others, but you get the point.)
Of course, the most likely thing is that *you* did something wrong. You picked a bad password, you ignored your browser's warnings about hostname mismatches, you allowed other people to have physical access to your computer.
These assertions can lead quickly to a philosophical discussion over who's to blame for internet fraud; I don't want to go there. The point is just that you can't assume that, just because the fake card number you used at amazon.com got ripped off, amazon.com did something "wrong".
(Disclaimer: I am not a security expert. I am not a financial expert. I am not any kind of expert. Don't blame me if sh?t hits your fan.)
Let's say you want to purchase something online with credit. But you don't want your credit card number floating around in various databases on the internet. And you don't like entering it multiple times into multiple websites; this increases the chances that someone will attack you successfully.
So you go to your credit card's website (which you trust). You tell them you want to make an online purchase of no more than $500 (let's say), and you want to do it this month. They give you a fake credit card number X and tie it to your real credit account.
When you go to pay for your item from company foo.com, you give them credit card number X. Now foo.com alerts your credit card company you've used X to make a purchase of (let's say) $400.
The credit card company notes this transaction, and from now on, X can only be used to make purchases from foo.com. So if Mallory was sniffing your traffic and decides to make a porn site purchase two hours later, he will be unsuccessful. Or if the folks at foo.com try to cheat you and charge you twice for your $400 purchase, they too will be unsuccessful (because that would put X over the $500 limit you set).
Also, after that one month time limit, the X itself expires so that even foo.com can't use it anymore.
You can make a separate fake credit card number for every company you intend to buy something from online. If any one of them is sniffed, the damage is minimal. I know for a fact that CitiBank offers this service -- I'm sure plenty of others do as well.
But arguing a point by merely appealing to an authority is still a fallacy.
Also wrapped up in your argument is an ad hominem attack on said "hack".
Schmidt's status as a hack does not affect the truth or falsity of his arguments about whom should be considered responsible for security flaws in software.
Now reread the last sentence, replacing "Schmidt" with "Schneier" and "hack" with "security expert".
Yeah, I was just thinking about gamut the other day actually. Notice that it is clearly quite phonologically similar to gambit; indeed, they are homophones in some dialects.
Notice second that almost no one uses gamut anymore unless it's used in the phrase run the gamut or similar.
Notice third that gambit usually evokes some sense of quick motion: tripping or similar.
Notice finally that run the gauntlet is also a phrase in common usage, that it also evokes some sense of motion, and that gauntlet shares some phonological features with gambit.
These four factors have caused a phono-semantic collision in the language.
> because they are stupid, lazy, poor, or young.
No?
No. :)
First of all, all of your points are valid. Yes, being uneducated probably gives someone less access to the prestige dialect. (I say "probably" because I haven't actually ever seen any numbers to that effect, but that's probably because I've never read anything not authored by JRR Tolkien.)
To be fair, the sentence of mine that you quote was probably unclear or ambiguous. No matter how much time ya spend proofreading... :-/
I was specifically arguing against the validity of the following logic:
Alice pronounces ask the same way she pronounces axe. Therefore, Alice is lazier, less intelligent, less educated, or less wealthy than Bob, who does not pronounce ask that way.
In other words, I wish to refute the sentence, the use of a dialect other than the prestige dialect implies reduced cognitive abilities, education, or so on.
This line of reasoning does not hold up under experimentation, at least based on our (admittedly limited) sociolinguistic knowledge. It is, however, an extremely common line of reasoning.
Notice that our respective assertions are not mutually exclusive, other than the part where you called me silly. :)
[That's honestly my only point. I typed the rest of this cause I'm a jack*ss who loves hearing himself ramble, and, seriously, I love this stuff. So take it as you will.]
But we can think of reasons right here why someone wouldn't want to use the prestige dialect.
Maybe they want to identify themselves as being part of a group, for instance. (A guy named Labov has made a significant impact on the linguistic community as a proponent of this line of thought.) People, as it turns out, are excellent at using linguistic markers to identify members of their in-group and out-group, regardless of their educational or socioeconomic background.
And you can see how this would be useful in an evolutionary sense. If I can quickly assign out-group status to you ("Hey! You're not in my pre-industrial tribe of farmers or hunter-gatherers!"), I can immediately start doing threat-assessment on you. Are you a threat to my territory, could I outrun you or withstand an attack from you, etc. Some would argue that this is The One Reason why stereotypes exist. The latter point is, of course, arguable.
So Bob the New York Barber has just as hard a time convincing Charles the California Surfer that he "hangs ten" on a regular basis as George Bush has of convincing the slashdot crowd that he's an intelligent human being.
I mean, the man says "nukular" instead of "nuclear", so he must be an idiot, right? Actually, I know *exactly* why he pronounces it the way he does. Because he, along with a huge swath of English speakers, is under the influence of hundreds of other scientific-sounding, Latin-derived words that end with [kjul.r] or [gjul.r] (that is, the "kular" of "nukular" or the "gular" of "angular"). Words like circular, angular (and its partners: triangular, rectangular, etc), singular, regular, jugular, secular, ocular, perpendicular, muscular, and so on.
By contrast, I think nuclear pronounced as [nukli.r] (that is, the "normal" way in the US) is the only word out there (other than a couple very similar words, like thermonuclear) that ends with the sounds [kli.r]. The only similar word endings are in words like clear, blear, and so on; but I think we can toss them out because
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:
Heh. If only the world worked that way. The law "reflects the feelings" of whichever player(s) had the most political power at the time when the law was created.
Every other day on /. we hear about *AA, and how stupid they are not to embrace file sharing. My guess is that they know darn well where their money comes from, and they know that file sharing threatens that income stream.
I went to a talk once called "The Heavy Tail", which I paraphrase for (most of) the rest of this post. Basically, the mass market's artistic preferences look like an exponential decay function: on the x-axis are artists, rank-ordered by popularity; on the y-axis is popularity. Closer to the left of the graph are Britney Spears, Shawshank Redemption, and Harry Potter. Farther to the right are more obscure artists, art-forms, and products. There are very few artists on the left-hand side, but they are immensely popular.
Traditional, big sellers of art (like *AA) only target the part of the curve on the left. Why? Because it maximizes sales and minimizes production costs. They have also, as much as possible, manipulated the curve to make sure that their chunk of the x-axis has as many people in it as possible. If you're gonna sell Britney Spears records, make sure that a whole shitload of people hear her name and want to buy her stuff.
It would take a lot of money for them to get at the heavy tail of that exponential function, because the overhead associated with selling all those different flavors of artist would start to outweigh the income gained from said marketing.
Amazon.com (among others), by the way, makes its living by having a business model which allows it to widen its stance on the x-axis, to target part of the heavy tail.
So what happens if some technology pops up that changes the shape of the curve, or allows people to obtain art from your chunk of the curve in a way that doesn't involve paying you? You're a big friggin corporation, not very flexible, and you have a crapload of monetary and political capital at your disposal. Well, you can do two things:
- Change your business model to accomodate the new technology, or
- Use some of your power to limit the negative impact of the new technology on your revenue streams.
My guess is that *AA are trying to do as much of both as possible. From (1) we get things like iTunes. From (2) we get things like the DMCA.So I dunno, it seems to me like *AA are acting totally rationally. Of course iana economist, so I could very easily be wrong.
Yes! I'd have thrown a mod point at you just for this paragraph if I could.
English is very precise (when used as directed) in matters of time and sequence -- we have more than 20 verb tenses where most languages get away with three.
Not really. Firstly, English only has two or three tenses. (Depending upon which linguist you ask, English either has a past/non-past distinction or past/present/future distinctions. See [1], [2]. The general consensus seems to be in favor of the former, although I humbly disagree with the general consensus.) It maintains a variety of aspect distinctions (perfective vs imperfective, habitual vs continuous, nonprogressive vs progressive). See [3]. Its verbs also interact with modality, albeit slightly less strongly.
It's a very common mistake to count the combinations of tense, aspect, and modality in a language and arrive at some astronomical number of "tenses". It's an even more common mistake (for native English speakers, anyway) to think that English is special or different or strange compared to other languages. In most cases, it's not -- especially when compared with other Indo-European languages.
Secondly, and more interestingly IMHO, most languages do not have three distinct tenses. The most common cases are either to have a future/non-future distinction or a past/non-past distinction. In any case, the future tense, if it exists, is normally derived from modal or aspectual markers and is diachronically weak (which is linguist-babble meaning "future tenses forms don't stick around for very long"). See [3].
English is a perfect example: will, of course, used to refer to the agent's desire (his or her will) to do something. Only recently has it shifted to have a more temporal sense, and it still maintains some of its modal flavor. In fact, the least marked way of making the future (in the US, at least) is to use either gonna or a present progressive form: I'm having dinner with my boss tonight. I'm gonna ask him for a raise. See Comrie [1] again.
So as not to be anglo-centric, I'll give another example. Spanish has three widespread means of forming the future tense. Two of these are periphrastic and are exemplified by he de cantar 'I've gotta sing' and voy a cantar 'I'm gonna sing'. The last is the synthetic form, cantaré 'I'll sing'.
Most high school or college Spanish teachers would tell you that the "pure" future is cantaré. Actually, it's historically derived from the phrase cantar he 'I have to sing' (from Latin cantáre habeo), and is being displaced by the other two forms all across the Spanish-speaking world. I'm told, for example, that cantaré has been largely lost in in Argentina and southern Chile (see [4]).
In any case, the parent's main point still holds. It's a b?tch to deal with cross-linguistic differences in major semantic systems computationally. But good lord, it's fun to try. :)
References:
Actually, it seems like the kinds of full-sentence queries that trigger the new behavior don't come with ads at all! What is maize , for example, yields no ads, while maize does. IIRC this was the behavior before, too.
1. The reality of phonological change, and linguistic change in general
Not really. The biggest hurdle in mastering English is laziness.
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.
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.
This does not imply that the speakers are/were lazy. In fact, this is a ridiculously common kind of phonological change. The same thing happened, for instance, when Latin amicus (pronounced [amikus]) changed to Modern Spanish amigo. That [k] sound turned to a [g] because it was between two vowels.
2. Registers
The second biggest barrier is proper grammar. Again, it take quite a bit of practice to state, "My apologies, I was unavoidably detained." instead of "Sorry I'm late." The former conveys far more elequance of speech than the later, thus setting the stage for productive communication.
People use different means of encoding meanings depending upon the register. That is, you speak differently depending on the social context. If you're late for a job interview, you probably wouldn't say my bad, the fuckin freeway's a mess by way of apology. Similarly, if you're late arriving to a keg party, you probably wouldn't say my apologies, I was unavoidably detained, unless you mean to be mildly humorous. (One probably wouldn't say that last sentence to one's spouse, either. The sentence is pretty strongly restricted to formal contexts.)
3. The reality of syntactic change
Regarding grammar, that's always in flux too. Consider the sentence, I'm going to buy a car next week. This is a future tense construction in Modern English, even though it doesn't much look like one to an educated reader. The word going in this kind of sentence no longer implies any kind of movement, as evidenced by the sentence, I'm going to sit here in my chair for three hours. (This construction, by the way, is being heavily phonologically reduced these days, to I'm gonna do or even I'munna do. This is something that happens very frequently to grammatical markers.)
What is going on here? Well, English speakers used to only use the verb go to mean movement. They then began using it for movement associated with proximal futures (with modal and aspectual meaning tied in), as in
Ev
A quick google yielded this bio.
The if...were is a hypothetical subjunctive; the writer is making a statement contrary to fact. The company's products are not available for free; the case is being postulated where they are.
Maybe, but I think there's something else going on here. In the clause, How can a company make money, the semantic entity denoted by company is nonspecific. That is, there is no actual, individuated company the speaker is thinking of. Rather, I think the OP meant to say, How can any old company whose products really are available for free, make money?.
Thus the if in the original sentence is not used to encode irrealis semantics (that is, in this case, to denote hypotheticality); rather, it is used to do restrict what kind of companies are allowed to be instantiated for the nonspecific a company.
(Linguists call this phenomenon "delimitation of the domain". It's something normally done with adjectives. For example, in the sentence Mary kicked a ball, any ball may be instantiated. OTOH, in Mary kicked a red ball, only an element of the subset of the set of all balls will do.)
So the way I would say the sentence is, How can a company make money if its products are available for free?. That is, I would not use the subjunctive -- the subjunctive is used to encode irrealis modality, which (according to my own native-speaker intuition) is not warranted here.
Of course, I'm a descriptive type (not prescriptive), so no matter how a speaker chooses to say it, I probably won't be offended. :)
People who are more interested in this stuff should check out Linguistic Semantics by William Frawley. No, I am not William Frawley.
Every language has "ambiguity", but ambiguity can come in different flavors (phonological, morphological, syntactic, semantic, pragmatic). Some of the chief instigators of language change can be thought of as ambiguity on these levels. So firstly, it's hard to imagine the existence of a function mapping languages to "ambiguity levels".
The motivation for your comment about English versus Spanish probably comes from the fact that you know of more English homophones than Spanish ones. Indeed, most literate people think of their language in terms of written words, so your take on the matter is common.
(As a slight digression, your example of right the direction versus right as in 'correct, just' is pretty interesting. We can understand the semantic similarity between the two when we notice that most humans are right-handed. Thus it is extraordinarily common, cross-linguistically and cross-culturally, for the word meaning the direction 'right' to have similar meanings as dextrous, just, well-guided and so on, whereas the word meaning the direction 'left' also has meanings such as worthless, stupid. (In fact, the word dextrous was borrowed through French from the Latin word dexter meaning 'right, dexterous' or dextra meaning 'right hand'.) So the given example is one where, historically, a word had no ambiguity, but gained ambiguity because speakers started using it differently.)
Getting back to the main topic, more problematic about Section 7 of TFA is the implicit assertion that, at some point in the future, their techniques can be applied to create a function mapping words in a particular language to words in another language. Anybody who has studied more than one language has seen cases where this is difficult to do on the word-level. For instance, the French equivalent of English river is often given as riviere or fleuve. But riviere is only used by French speakers to mean 'river or stream that runs into another river or stream' whereas fleuve means 'river or stream that runs into the sea'. English breaks up river-like things by size: rivers are bigger than streams. So, in the strictest sense, there is no English word for fleuve, just as there's no French word for stream (unless there has been a recent borrowing I don't know about). This certainly does not imply that French people can't tell the difference between big rivers and small rivers; their lexicon just breaks things up differently.
These little problems can be remedied lexically, as I've just done. So fleuve is denotationally equivalent to river or stream that runs into the sea, although the latter is obviously much bulkier than its French equivalent. The real problem is that there are words in some languages whose meanings are not encoded at all in other languages. English, for example, has a lexical past-progressive tense marker, was, used in the first person singular (e.g. I was running to the store). Some languages have no notion of tense. What, then, does was mean in the context of such a language?
It's pretty well-known that Slashdotters' general policy is to tear apart every article we read, and half of those we don't. This is certainly not my intent here. Languages are complicated beasties, and everyone seems to understand that, including the writers of the article. So, we should interpret their result in Section 7 as them saying, "Well, maybe this has gotten us a baby-step closer to creating the hypothetical Perfect Natural Language Translator, but someone's gonna have to do a lot more work to see where this thing goes".
Now wouldn't it be nice to see a definition of "sustained"?