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Comment by igravious | Hacker News Reader

Not click-baity but seriously lacking in information. The work relates to the relationship of orthography to pronunciation in English. From the title I was expecting some syntactical or grammatical result. At the very least the title should read, "Mathematicians prove the triviality of English pronunciation" but even then that misses the mark, doesn't it?

Not only that, but I think the conclusions are frankly incorrect. I would not say that because LAM=LAMB (when spoken) that B=1. I would say that LA=LA and M=MB. B is not silent elsewhere, only in combination with M so it is false to discount the B (setting it to 1) without contextualising that B as being alongside an M when this happens, if you see what I mean. This to me seems so obvious that I fear I am missing something huge here because I can't think how otherwise they can assert what they are asserting.

Don't like to be harsh or snarky on HN but in this instance...?

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"Not only that, but I think the conclusions are frankly incorrect."

They can't really be "incorrect", because they made up the rules. It would be more accurate to observe something like this definition of trivial is itself rather trivial and useless.

It's a fun word game, and nothing more. As this appears to be a recreational math column in the Guardian, there's nothing wrong with that. It's no Martin Gardner, but it's not being put forth as some sort of major result or anything either.

A lot of people here seem to be taking it a great deal more seriously than any of the relevant authors.

>A lot of people here seem to be taking it a great deal more seriously than any of the relevant authors.

Lack of context, probably. I fetched the text from my RSS reader - I didnt know where it came from. From the title, I had a false expectation, as other HN readers seemed to have.

They're not even wrong. [tm]

Some other words: lambda, lambada, lambaste, lambent.

Even if you argue some of those words are foreign loan words, they're still found in English dictionaries. Limiting yourself to very ancient words of Saxon origin won't leave you with much to work on.

The people who build speech synthesizers have already researched this. If pronunciation dictionaries mapping letter patterns to spoken phonemes really were trivial, they'd be very happy.

Unfortunately they aren't.

The entire study is a pun. The joke is that since in most mathematical notations AB is a shorthand for A * B, then all words are actually products of their component letters; based on this assumption it can be proven algebraically that the value of every letter is 1. I don't think there's supposed to be any serious meaning to it at all.

Also, aside from listing the names of the alleged authors, the article doesn't actually cite the study it's based on. This is another indication that it's just trolling.

People taking this article way to seriously. It is a humorous story about a rigorous analysis of problem that makes false but naively intuitive assumptions to misprove a contradiction. The point is (1) the rigorous analysis is possible and (2) the assumptions are incorrect -- English does not have consistent pronunciation rules.

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