[HN Gopher] A mathematician looks at the French verb (2015) [pdf]
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       A mathematician looks at the French verb (2015) [pdf]
        
       Author : hackandthink
       Score  : 26 points
       Date   : 2023-07-05 17:51 UTC (5 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.math.mcgill.ca)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.math.mcgill.ca)
        
       | jesuslop wrote:
       | While it downloads, speaking about Lambek, in Lambek-Scott they
       | prove the equivalence of CCC's and simply typed lambda calculus.
       | I suffered some functional programming exposure via Lisp, and
       | came later to see that in the core of lisp, the lambdas, were
       | formalized by (you guess it), lambda calculus. This idea migrates
       | also to Haskell, so if one is pressed to give a formal Haskell
       | semantics, that is a good bootstrap. But that is equivalent to
       | CCCs (cartesian closed categories) as per Lambek-Scott, where the
       | essential feature of CCCs is having functions of functions,
       | higher order functions. And that is not just self-pleasure, look
       | at Conal Elliot's "compiling to categories". Applications I think
       | I've heard of: probabilistic programming and automatic
       | differentiation.
       | 
       | Lambek-Scott: Introduction to Higher-Order Categorical Logic
       | 
       | http://conal.net/papers/compiling-to-categories
       | 
       | https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/automatic+differentiation
        
       | neonate wrote:
       | https://web.archive.org/web/20230705175212/https://www.math....
        
       | 082349872349872 wrote:
       | > _even though French is only a semigroup and not a ring ... and
       | addition has not been defined, it is possible to multiply two
       | matrices if ... each row of the first meets each column of the
       | second in at most one non-empty place_
       | 
       | excellente !
        
         | hackandthink wrote:
         | I understand now why I had a hard time with French.
        
           | beezlebroxxxxxx wrote:
           | What's interesting with French verb conjugation is that
           | _speaking_ them is far easier to learn than writing them.
           | Many French conjugations sound essentially identical to each
           | other when spoken. If all you focus on is speaking, you don
           | 't need to worry about the spelling aspect, which is where a
           | lot of the confusion arises from. When speaking, the meaning
           | is clear from the use of the verb rather than finding the
           | word on a list of conjugations. Once you understand how the
           | words are used, then you can focus on the spelling (and
           | always think of the conjugation with the pronoun as a joined
           | unit).
        
             | jfengel wrote:
             | Unfortunately, the same feature makes _listening_ to French
             | difficult. The phrases  "il parle" and "ils parlaient" (he
             | speaks/they speak) sound almost identical. The latter ends
             | in _five_ silent letters.
             | 
             | It's usually clear from context, and easily understood by a
             | native speaker. But a non-fluent speaker may be having
             | trouble following the context, and lacking the additional
             | clue of conjugation isn't helping.
             | 
             | I do a decent job at following written French, but spoken
             | French remains a challenge (unless specifically over-
             | emphasized for small children and stupid foreigners). I
             | watch French television with subtitles on.
        
               | switch007 wrote:
               | parlaient is like "par-lay" and therefore 3 silent
               | letters no?
        
               | williamdclt wrote:
               | << parle >> definitely does not sound like << parlaient
               | >>, only the 3 last letters are silent. The former sounds
               | sorta like an English speaker would pronounce << parhl
               | >>, the latter like << pahrleh >>. It also doesn't
               | translate to << they speak >> but << they were speaking
               | >>.
               | 
               | You might have gotten confused with << parle >> and <<
               | parlent >> which do sound the same (3 silent letters
               | again) and translate to what you said!
        
               | jfengel wrote:
               | Yeah, I blew it.
               | 
               | Still... You get the gist.
        
               | zoover2020 wrote:
               | Must be the lack of << >> ;-)
        
       | jjgreen wrote:
       | The referenced piece is an appendix at the end of the pdf.
       | Interesting analysis -- see also Sarrazin's verbiste:
       | http://perso.b2b2c.ca/~sarrazip/dev/verbiste.html
        
         | 082349872349872 wrote:
         | For those interested in the description of sentence structure
         | earlier in the pdf, I believe there are many more applications
         | under the name of
         | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Residuated_lattice
         | 
         | (for instance, "derivatives" of regexes are a simple special
         | case)
        
       | wenc wrote:
       | Fascinating.
       | 
       | Probably generalizable to the Portuguese conjugation system which
       | is the most complicated of big Latin derived languages in the
       | number for forms still in use. (Except for maybe Romanian)
        
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       (page generated 2023-07-05 23:02 UTC)