Posted by volemo 7 days ago
Screen reader user here. Don't actually do this, this is bad advice.
Just like a lecturer won't suddenly switch to a German accent when saying words like "schadenfreude" or names like "Friedrich Nietzsche", neither should a screen reader. Having your voice constantly change under you for no apparent reason is distracting more than anything else.
What you should do this for are longer pieces of text in a foreign language, like a multi-paragraph piece of text to analyze in a foreign language textbook.
So, I am with you. We shouldn't learn the pronunciation of 200 different languages. If Kirchhoff's laws sound like Captain Kirk, who the fuck cares. Different languages pronounce stuff differently.
That... isn't the normal English pronunciation. The English pronunciation would rhyme with "joyed", if "joy" were a verb.
/'sɪg.mənd fɹɔɪd/
There are some other big names where the same vowel sequence isn't recognized: Euler (usually pronounced with /ɔɪ/) and von Neumann (not so much).
Euler suffers from beginning with the "eu", which makes it look more Greek.
I always have trouble finding a reference for the sounds corresponding to IPA symbols, so I'm not sure what you're claiming for the pronunciation of either of those. But, at least among the mostly American mathematicians I know, the 'eu' in 'Euler' and 'von Neumann' are usually pronounced the same way we pronounce the same way we pronounce the 'eu' in 'Freud' (which I agree is essentially how I'd pronounce the 'oy' in 'joyed').
however I have never heard of someone pronouncing Freud as Frood, outside of "Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure".
there is an S in Paris because the French used to pronounce it that way and it got written down that way in French... and that is also when that word got added to the English lexicon. Paris is a word in English that is pronounced as it is spelled. There is a French word spelled the same way that is pronounced differently. Something similar is true with Moskva/Moscow (btw, people in Moscow, Idaho pronounce it "mosko")
these type of historical borrowings don't offer useful guidance to how Freud should be pronounced in English.
There is no official lexicon. When speaking English, the pronunciation of “Paris” has become well-established, but for countless other words, it has not.
it has become over common to over point out that linguistics is descriptive, as if anything goes; anything does not go, and that is what linguists study. Stray from the lexicon, and people will ask what you are talking about. When they stop asking, it's in the lexicon.
Eh-oo-leh-r that is how it should be read if it were an Spanish word.
Oh-ee-leh-r that is the proper German pronunciation
Russian friends taught me that there is no "o" (as the letter is pronounced in Spanish or German) to pronounce in Москва since the о is unstressed. Rather pronounce it as "Maskwa" ("a" letter as in Spanish or German). :-)
The English word Moscow, meanwhile, is itself very interesting: it’s not actually a derivative of the Russian Москва, but rather a cognate, as both of them are derived[2] from different cases (accusative vs. locative or genitive) of the original Old East Slavic (aka Old Russian, aka Old Ukrainian, etc.) name.
[1] https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented#shadow...
Is there a middle ground? Whenever I check my content with a screen reader, uncommon foreign names are often mispronounced in ways that are sometimes almost irrecognisable. Even my name comes out wrong, although it would be understandable (typically, the stress ends up on the wrong syllable).
Aside, I'd be happy to pay for great classic math textbooks in a well typeset edition.
Finite Dimensional Vector Spaces is one such example. The text is fantastic, but everything is too cramped and hard to read compared to a modern book from the 1970s onward.
A newer edition typeset in LaTeX would be great.
It's probably not hard to use an LLM to do the bulk of the conversion to TeX work cheaply, and then some human input to polish the final document and fix errors.
“It’s probably not hard…” - how many such wishful thinking statements were uttered by humanity.
I've done this for a 30-page manuscript with no sources, and I was able to recreate the entire document with minimal manual intervention to get a correct PDF.
This is not programming, it's OCR and translation to a very simple markup language. It's a very easy mechanical task.
"Despite its name, TeXmacs is not a front-end to TeX or LaTeX.[mHowever, TeXmacs documents can be converted to either TeX or LaTeX. LaTeX also can be imported (to some extent), and both import from and export to HTML, Scheme, Verbatim, and XML is provided; the HTML export is stylable with CSS (since version 1.99.14). There is a converter for MathML as well, and TeXmacs can output PDF and PostScript for printing."
[2] GNU TeXmacs:
Why would anyone switch from LaTeX to this other than the speed?
Surely both of these characterizations depend on the person? I can believe that integral_t^oo is idiomatic if that's what you're used to, and maybe it's easier to pick up from scratch, but, for someone long used to TeX, it just makes me wonder what other unpleasant surprises someone else will have decided are actually pleasant.
Looks like you can already play with it (though it's still "very incomplete") https://typst.app/docs/reference/html/
[0]: https://github.com/wcshds/typst-math-to-mathml-converter
A post-Processor transform the proof into lean (with any official lib loaded). It is automatically verified. If something is missing, the post processor ask to write in English the missing parts. Iterate like this.
The lean proof is hidden in the final document, and can be displayed if needed. Or even, we get an English version that can be easily retransformed into lean at will.
Bonus point: we can query the document to give more details on part of the proof and it outputs (expanded) lean formatted as nice English.
Note: there is no need to have all the math self contained in the document, he can say to assume some theorem true to do his proof. And this would be reflected in English.
Turns out from a technical documentation consumer perspective it’s easier to save a PDF than feck around with web pages and try and save them.
They all seem to assume you're still at school rather than it being decades since you last had to read them. Even using Greek symbols - WRITE THEM OUT. Jeez, it's so elitist.
P.S.: Greek alphabet is not that bad (it’s only 24 letters, and a third of them isn’t used on behalf of being the same as some Latin ones), just look it up. It’s much worse when some mathematician in the 19th century invents his own squiggly to refer to a pretty useful function.
Not to discourage experimentation, but I would like to see some behavoral reserve and healthy skepticism before adding another layer to the mathematical expression enterprise. There's also this issue to consider: https://xkcd.com/927/ .
a) typing the text of math papers and writing in the formulae by hand.
b) word processing which was fixed width and line based, where there would be three characters for 'top of an integral sign', middle and bottom, and you would have to align your three characters at the same horizontal point on three successive lines to make the integral sign, and also position all subscripts, exponents yourself.
The fact that LaTeX had an important mission and was successful in it doesn't mean that another thing is not needed now. Things have moved on. Replacing things which solved a problem doesn't mean going back to the situation before they existed.
That's why there is nothing healthy behind this thought-terminating comic cliche, just a generic conservative discouragement of any experiments.