B. I’ve been watching TV, old TV, recent TV and new TV and my experience has been to reinforce what we have said several times: that changes in language have, of late, been to militate against clarity.

A. That’s true but I think that it’s important to realise that clarity in language is cyclical. Latin is a very structured language with a small vocabulary. French is highly structured but with a massive vocabulary that makes it difficult for foreigners to learn. English is far less structured than French but rules of grammar were, literally, beaten into British schoolboys (for some reason girls didn’t get the same treatment, at least in relation to grammar) as recently as the 1960s.

C. It’s also got a lot to do with standards of education, ambition – one’s own and that of one’s parents – and of the line of work you go into.  And let’s not forget that English was remarkably fluid in most fields until the late 19th Century. There is very little consistency even within the works of single authors: Chaucer, Shakespeare, Walpole and Pepys come to mind even though their command of language was excellent, it lacked structure and form.

D. I’ve always been fascinated by the fact that a writer of prose, a poet, an academic and a technical author are subject to wildly different approaches to the use of English.

B. Shakespeare’s quote about killing all the lawyers is a case in point: here we are long after it was written with people still arguing  over how to interpret it. No one seems to think it’s just a statement.  Some say that it means one should kill those who are inventive, who adapt the words of the law to make the law do their bidding and others say that it means one should kill those who think that the word of the law should be interpreted strictly.

But, and I’m not going to sit and recite the whole scene, the saying comes from something a bit like us, sitting around a fireside, having a chat. In that case, they were being funny (and it is funny). They are making up more and more ridiculous cases including the creation of laws under which, for example, seven half-penny loaves should be sold for one penny and, ultimately, ″I will make it felony to drink small beer: all the realm shall be in common; and in Cheapside shall my palfrey go to grass: and when I am king,- as king I will be there shall be no money; all shall eat and drink on my score; and I will apparel them all in one livery, that they may agree like brothers, and worship me their lord. ″ That’s when the line is spoken.  And today, sitting here before our fireside, I still can’t decide exactly what it is intended to convey. Except the bit about the whole realm being in common: that’s bordering on treason when in the UK all land is, ultimately, in the ownership of the Crown.

C. OK. Last time we finished up saying that context is everything but here Shakespeare created context and yet five hundred and five years after his death, it’s still being argued over. So context isn’t helping.

D. That’s because the context isn’t clear. The interpretation of that sentence depends on the interpretation of the context. We have to dig ever deeper until we reach the contextual equivalent of bed rock.

B. So a designer of an interpretative system cannot take anything at face value?

A. I don’t think so. We’ve always had to interpret. Law is all about interpretation: codified systems try to remove as much room for interpretation as possible but Common Law is all about interpretation. And if we look at the USA, which aims to be codified, cases that go to the Supreme Court are often matters of interpretation of the Constitution, a document which has been amended 27 times.

B. If we are going to look at American literature, let’s take a look at The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Today we English would look at it and say his grasp on grammar was tenuous at least: ″whenever I got uncommon tired [at school] I played hookey and the hiding I got next day done me good...″

That was published in 1884. 35 years earlier, Charles Dickens, a frequent visitor to America, wrote, in ″American Notes″  ″He always chews and always spits, and never encumbers himself with a pocket-handkerchief.  The consequences to the box passenger, especially when the wind blows towards him, are not agreeable.″ 

C. But modern literature is characterised by those – often award winning – authors who abandon, ignore or are ignorant of structure and, even, vocabulary.

A. That is true: ″The Navigation Log″ is regarded as a novelty because it is written in a highly structured form which, if I’m being honest, is entertaining because its style is novel but actually not particularly easy to read. The reason that it is interesting in terms of style is that it is reportage, written as unembellished facts in a documentary approach and it is, therefore, episodic. Each episode stands on its own, without reference to prior or later episodes, leaving the readers to cross-refer between episodes to develop an impression. Within the episodes, characters are free to express themselves and to interpret but the reader is left with very little room for manœuvre in the absence of a narrative, ideally one with adjectives.  But the style of the writing, including of the speech of the characters, is highly structured.

D. OK, so, this is what I hear: we cannot, in the real world, assume that there is a common structure to the written or spoken word and that, overlaid with the lack of clarity in vocabulary that we discussed previously, means that anything that relies on interpretation of language, in particular English, is almost doomed to fail.

A. If we expect them to be analytical, then yes, that does seem to be the end result. But not everything that looks analytical is in fact analytical. Here’s where so-called AI is over-sold. There’s some hosted software: I’m not going to name it because in my view its data collection policies are excessive . It’s a fantastic tool for fun that, over time, will become useful. Or risky. With that tool, I can instruct it to create an image using plain text. So I can type ″create a pink unicorn riding over a rainbow″ and it will do it. But someone has told it what a unicorn looks like, changing its colour isn’t complicated and someone has also told the system what a rainbow looks like. So the only interpretative part is putting it on top of the rainbow and even that requires a relatively small number of instructional phrases. So, in performing these functions it is, largely, simple data-matching. True, some cleverness is needed to adjust the sizes of the unicorn and the rainbow to make the whole thing fit within the frame but even that can be reduced to a series of algorithms, albeit potentially quite complex. 

D. So, again, a summary: in its present state of development software can recognise words and phrases that are stored in its database and cross-reference them to other data and process it. Am I being dim? Isn’t that what we’ve been doing with databases for 70 years or more? Where’s the clever part?

A. The marketing. If we go right back to basics, as we did in our first discussion, everything is if-then-else loops. Salesmen convince us to focus on the result and not to look at the tech. Mutton dressed as lamb, lipstick on a pig, a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. 

Look, I don’t want to denigrate the results: they can be extraordinarily impressive but they are the results that the machine has been told to generate, it’s not thinking, it’s not learning and it’s not interpreting. Why? Because it’s not a brain and those, as well as consciousness, empathy, sympathy are functions of the brain, of personality, of a psyche. 

B. We’ve got a bit off-topic: we haven’t considered inflection and that’s where computers are going to have another layer of difficulty even if they can cope with grammar and vocabulary.

We’ve mentioned grammar in the sense that grammatical rules are being widely ignored and vocabulary is being mauled in many ways but they all come down, essentially, to the same issue: is it possible to teach a computer all the variables, be they right or wrong, in the written word, and tell it what they all mean?

But when we move to audio, we’re in much more troubled waters. We’ve talked about accents and dialects in the past but the big problem, as I see it, is inflection. This is because inflection is how we point the listener towards the important part of what we are saying or how we tell the listener that something is a point of difference. 

A. I noticed the reduction of effective inflection in the 1990s: radio presenters began to emphasise every third word. Then it spread to TV and suddenly even news broadcasts stopped making sense. Today, we have the narrator on TV programmes who uses inflection but in all the wrong places: an example, but by no means the only example, is the chap who narrates the Oak Island series. It’s almost as if he is determined to direct us away from the important word in his sentences. The one that I find the most irritating is when he places full emphasis on ″core″ and swallows ″samples″ when ″core samples″ is one thing and both words should have equal emphasis. 

D. My pet peeve is absolutely commonplace and it’s been developing for about 20 years: it’s diminishing ″your″ and emphasising ″fault″ in ″it’s not your fault.″ In some cases, this is correct: ″it’s not your FAULT″ is correct if the purpose is to say that it’s not wrong. But if it’s saying that it is wrong but that the person is not responsible, then it should be ″It’s not YOUR fault″ i.e. if anyone is to blame, it’s not you.

A. I want to throw something through the TV every time I hear ″frEquent″ when it should be ″freQUENt″. They are not even the same parts of speech. 

C. I think we mentioned before the recent development of ″emergent″ the script actually intends to mean ″emergency″ or ″urgent.″ And then there’s the annoying bring/take mess. The earliest example of this error I have found was in an I Love Lucy programme – it’s one of the black and white episodes so it’s close to 1951. That particular mistake really took off with the books and films of books of Nicholas Sparks, decades later. But those are vocabulary issues. In terms of inflection, I think we have a global problem because it’s not taught in schools. I had elocution lessons, I had lessons that combined written and spoken English so that we understood where to put the power in a sentence. I have to say that I never learned grammar as I should and I know I twist and turn it all the time but when I do, it’s usually so that I can put the emphasis where I want it if someone is reading and imagining someone speaking as they do.

We’ve been at this longer than usual. Do we have a summary? 

A. People say that language is evolving but really it’s just changing. People say language should be precise but historically it’s never been as precise as we want to imagine it to have been. But we do have a problem with people saying the opposite of what they mean and with the use of the wrong words. 

B. We take sense and meaning from how we interpret what we hear and/or read. And we get that from a range of influences including the order of words, the use of punctuation, the way emphasis is placed on what is said to aid interpretation.

C. The meaning of what we read is affected by its form: is it prose, poetry, technical or academic for example?

D. We haven’t considered how the spoken word can be imbued with emotion: anger, sadness, frustration. Those are like inflection in some ways but interpretation of them is very difficult and requires some kind of emotional interpretation. Also, we haven’t considered ″terms of art.″ 

A. Is the conclusion that there is no technical bar to recognising language and acting on it: the barrier is that the amount and variability of data is so great that we can’t expect people to be able to adequately program it?

B, C, D. Pretty much. 

And that this is not an ″intelligent″ function?

B, C, D. Yes. 

Further Reading: 

William Shakepeare: Henry VI, Part 2, Act IV, Scene 2

″It’s a lawyer joke″ https://www.spectacle.org/797/finkel.html

Huck Finn – Twain: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/76/76-h/76-h.htm

The Navigation Log: Martin Corrick, 

DALL-E : https://openai.com/dall-e-2/

An edited version of this article appeared in The-Yuan.com in 2022
 

Imaginary Friends 1 - Yes, No, Maybe 

Imaginary Friends 2 - Of Cogs and Golfballs 

Imaginary Friends 3: ″Capital Punishment? 

Imaginary Friends 4 - An Uncommon Language 

Imaginary Friends 5 - ″The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers" 

Imaginary Friends: 6. The circles of an imaginary mind…...