http://blog.plover.com/lang/finnpar.html

I've never actually seen any text written in Finnish, so... does this 
look even remotely plausible?

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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Orchid XP v8 <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> http://blog.plover.com/lang/finnpar.html

> I've never actually seen any text written in Finnish, so... does this 
> look even remotely plausible?

  Any random text will pass as any random language if, as the article says,
"if the reader wasn't paying much attention".

  If you know even the least bit of Finnish, you'll start noticing oddities.
For example, in Finnish no word starts with two consonants (except for some
loan words, which usually tend to be fairly lengthy, such as for example
"traktori" or "professori", but certainly nothing like "tk?").

  Also no word will ever end in a "j" nor in a double consonant (I really
can't think of any exception to this, except maybe some obscure literal
loan words).

  Even if you knew nothing about Finnish, from a linguistic point of view
it could be a bit suspicious that there's absolutely no repeated words in
that piece of text. This is very rare in any language.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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"Orchid XP v8" <voi### [at] devnull> wrote in message 
news:4846ff28$1@news.povray.org...
> http://blog.plover.com/lang/finnpar.html
>
> I've never actually seen any text written in Finnish, so... does this look 
> even remotely plausible?

Looks reasonable to me, producing some random words
from a phoneme distribution is one of the first programming
things I ever did, only got as far as guessing at the bigraph
distributions, but there were real english words coming up
in the lists. The trigraph statistics can be reduced in storage
size by not covering the impossible combinations...

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Warp wrote:

>   Any random text will pass as any random language if, as the article says,
> "if the reader wasn't paying much attention".
> 
>   If you know even the least bit of Finnish, you'll start noticing oddities.
> 
>   Even if you knew nothing about Finnish, from a linguistic point of view
> it could be a bit suspicious that there's absolutely no repeated words in
> that piece of text. This is very rare in any language.

Just for amusement... does the text even vaguely look "Finnish"? As in, 
are most of the words remotely pronouncible?

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> Just for amusement... does the text even vaguely look "Finnish"? As in, 
> are most of the words remotely pronouncible?

  Perhaps I'm not the best one to judge because Finnish is my native
language and thus I can tell in a microsecond that it's not Finnish.

  Actually my very first intuition (before examining it too closely) is
that it might be Estonian because it "looks a bit like Finnish but isn't",
exactly like Estonian. So maybe that's a sign that it might pass as
Finnish (or Estonian) to someone who is only vaguely familiar with the
language.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> http://blog.plover.com/lang/finnpar.html
> 
> I've never actually seen any text written in Finnish, so... does this 
> look even remotely plausible?
> 
Scientific American had an article on this in the late 1980's.  The 
author first tried making random text by selecting letters, based on 
their frequency in the English language.  The longest English word found 
in the entire result set was the word "rare".

The author then tried to generate text based on letter pairs; the 
algorithm, having one letter, searched for that letter and randomly 
selected the letter to follow based on the frequency of letters that 
followed in the source text.  This produced results that looked a lot 
like English.

He then tried using longer strings of letters, by matching pairs of 
letters and choosing the next letter based on the letters following the 
pair to be matched.  The results were much better this time; many of the 
resulting words were actual English words, and the ones that weren't 
could be taken for words with which the reader was not unfamiliar.

Setting the match string to a longer length made it more likely that the 
  random text would consists of lengthy passages from the source text.

He then tried a different tack; instead of matching letters, he decided 
to match whole words.  A word to follow the current word was randomly 
chosen from all of the words that follow the current word.  This 
produced interesting results as well.

I had fun using AmigaBASIC to test out these ideas.

Regards,
John

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> The longest English word found 
> in the entire result set was the word "rare".

Ooohhhh the irony! ;-)

> The author then tried to generate text based on letter pairs; the 
> algorithm, having one letter, searched for that letter and randomly 
> selected the letter to follow based on the frequency of letters that 
> followed in the source text.  This produced results that looked a lot 
> like English.
> 
> He then tried using longer strings of letters, by matching pairs of 
> letters and choosing the next letter based on the letters following the 
> pair to be matched.  The results were much better this time; many of the 
> resulting words were actual English words, and the ones that weren't 
> could be taken for words with which the reader was not unfamiliar.
> 
> Setting the match string to a longer length made it more likely that the 
>  random text would consists of lengthy passages from the source text.
> 
> He then tried a different tack; instead of matching letters, he decided 
> to match whole words.  A word to follow the current word was randomly 
> chosen from all of the words that follow the current word.  This 
> produced interesting results as well.
> 
> I had fun using AmigaBASIC to test out these ideas.

I'm probably going to have fun trying this with Haskell a bit later. 
[But first I'd need to obtain some English text from somewhere...]

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> > The longest English word found 
> > in the entire result set was the word "rare".

> Ooohhhh the irony! ;-)

  I have sometimes noticed that people use the word "irony" in situations
where it doesn't match the definition of the word. I think this is one
such case.

  The definition of "irony" is always related to opposites: Something is
implied, but the exact opposite is meant, for example. Two definitions
given by a dictionary, which would mostly apply to this situation, are:

  "An outcome of events contrary to what was, or might have been, expected."

  "An expression or utterance marked by a deliberate contrast between
apparent and intended meaning."

  I'm not sure that a randomly generated word by chance being a real word
and describing the very nature of the event itself could be called "irony"
because there are no opposites.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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Warp wrote:
> Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
>>> The longest English word found 
>>> in the entire result set was the word "rare".
> 
>> Ooohhhh the irony! ;-)
> 
>   I have sometimes noticed that people use the word "irony" in situations
> where it doesn't match the definition of the word. I think this is one
> such case.
Could that be because many of us are native English speakers and
therefore understand the subtleties of the Eng. Lang. more intuitively?
BTW Not meant offensively

John

-- 
I will be brief but not nearly so brief as Salvador Dali, who gave the
world's shortest speech. He said, "I will be so brief I am already
finished," then he sat down.

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On Thu, 05 Jun 2008 16:42:36 +0100, Doctor John <doc### [at] gmailcom>
wrote:

>Warp wrote:
>> Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
>>>> The longest English word found 
>>>> in the entire result set was the word "rare".
>> 
>>> Ooohhhh the irony! ;-)
>> 
>>   I have sometimes noticed that people use the word "irony" in situations
>> where it doesn't match the definition of the word. I think this is one
>> such case.
>Could that be because many of us are native English speakers and
>therefore understand the subtleties of the Eng. Lang. more intuitively?
>BTW Not meant offensively
>

Was that rionic? :p

-- 

Regards
     Stephen

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