Spelling is ruining the English language

[Kingswood]

Originally Posted by Shawnee123

These questions make no sense. OK, I'll play. Show me an example, one word on a piece of paper, with no context whatsover, where you would be completely confused as to the meaning of that word and that knowing the meaning of that word is essential for any purpose. I contend that if no context exists (and this is your argument, I think there is always context) then the meaning of the word is irrelevant. It is, then, only an arrangement of letters.

If I'm wrong, I'll eat a smilie.

Time for you to eat a smilie, Shawnee123. (Please don't eat this one: it looks like it's spoilt and might make you ill.)

Here are ten words, each put into grammatically-complete sentences (so an adequate amount of syntactic context is present). Each word is either a noun or a verb with two meanings and each meaning has a different pronunciation. The sentences do not have any semantic context supplied. Each sentence has a short question associated with it. If the sentences were spoken to you, you would be able to answer all the questions correctly. However, the sentences are written, not spoken. This makes the meaning ambiguous; you cannot answer the questions because as written both answers are plausible.

He is putting on the first.

• Is he playing golf or doing something else?

She showed her mother a tear.

• Did she show her mother a rip or some liquid from someone's eye?

He has been promoted to lieutenant.

• Does he serve in the British Navy or the US Army?

They read the newspaper every day.

• Present or past tense?

He resigned yesterday.

• Did he terminate his contract or extend it?

When they entered the hall, the musicians were bowing.

• Were they still performing or acknowledging the applause afterward?

She placed the lead on the table.

• Did she place on the table a cable or a lump of dense metal?

She bought a rare viola.

• Did she buy a plant or a musical instrument?

Bob hit a skier.

• Did Bob hit a ball into the air or did he hit someone on skis?

Our teacher drew some axes on the whiteboard.

• Does the teacher teach mathematics or woodworking?

To gain some insight into how the ambiguity can cause difficulty, it is instructive to experiment with text-to-speech engines. Text-to-speech engines can use syntactic context to disambiguate, but they cannot make use of semantic context because it is very difficult - if not impossible - to program computers to understand semantic context with 100% accuracy, and certainly not possible with the current state-of-the-art in desktop operating systems.

If you have Windows XP or Windows Vista, you can access the built-in text-to-speech engine in this way: Control Panel, then Speech. There is a prompt there that says: "Use the following text to preview the voice." If you paste the sentences into this prompt, and then click the button that says: "Preview Voice", it will read it out.

However, the sentences I provided do demonstrate the limitations of the technology. For example, the first sentence I gave reads as follows: "He is putting on the first." The text-to-speech engine assumes that the verb is "put", not "putt". Even if you add the word "green" to the end of the sentence (which provides some semantic context for golf that you can disambiguate as a human), the text-to-speech engine still says it as if the verb was "put". This shows that computers (or, to be more precise, Microsoft's text-to-speech engine) cannot understand semantic context very well.

Syntactic context is different. Computers understand this relatively easily. If you have it read the text: "We estimate to make an estimate." (a little contrived but it demonstrates the point adequately), the text-to-speech engine reads both occurrences of the word "estimate" correctly even though the two instances are pronounced differently (the last syllable of the verb has a clearly-pronounced vowel and the last syllable of the noun has a reduced vowel).