Re: Character description

On Thu, 25 Sep 2008 12:08:53 +1200, Zeborah wrote:

Dan Goodman <dsgood@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Catja Pafort wrote:

Dan Goodman <dsgood@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Irina Rempt wrote:

The kind of cabbage that makes a tightly closed head can stay
fresh enough to eat for months, if kept in a cool but frost-free
cellar.

US term: root cellar.

In German, I know it as 'Kartoffelkeller'.

Which isn't in any of the online dictionaries onelook.com searches. But
"Kartoffel" is; potato. I wonder if there was an older word.

When looking Germanic words up in a dictionary, you frequently need to
split them into two or more. So you find "Kartoffel" in the dictionary,
delete it from the original word, and look up the remainder, ie "Keller"
(if you haven't guessed already that it's a simple cognate of "cellar").

Many machine translation programs haven't caught on to this simple rule.

(Okay, it's not always that simple -- sometimes there's a random linking
letter or two between the parts -- but I'd have thought it simple enough
to teach a machine. <thinks> Though I guess pattern matching is more
processor intensive than whole-word matching.)

Zeborah

Also, since computers don't yet really understand human language, you are
likely to have a higher percentage of false matches, due to a compound
word being split incorrectly, than happens with a human translator.

--
John F. Eldredge -- john@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
PGP key available from http://pgp.mit.edu
"Reserve your right to think, for even to think wrongly is better
than not to think at all." -- Hypatia of Alexandria
.

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