Re: Metrical Stress, Feet, Syllables, Genders, Email Servers etc.

Quoting Philippe Caquant <herodote92@...>:

> As to translating a written text into phonetic, I also
> made a program doing it for French, and I also came to
> a 'right' conversion in about 85-90% of the cases. Now
> the very problem hides in those 10-15%: if you want to
> handle them, you have to write numerous ad hoc rules,
> and it makes the program (or let's say better, the
> file of rules) terribly more complex.
> The 85% can be handled rather easily, the REAL
> problems arise with the 15% left.
I'm told French spelling is noticeably more phonetic than English (I can't
form an opinion of my own, since my knowledge of French is very limited), so I
might have expected a higher success rate.

Hm, it might be interesting to try something similar for Swedish. How much
damage does the 'o' bug cause, exactly, for instance?

> OK, I forgot that there are 3 genders in English and
> that a computer should be referred to as neutral. But
> is this really justified ?
It somehow strikes me as ironic that a Frenchman should question English
gender assignment. Now, as a native speaker of a language with, pretty much,
two neuter genders, it would be the farthest thought from my mind to suggest
that's there something wrong with the arbitrariness inherent in the French
system.

                                                Andreas