Language is beautifully various
It is ironic that English has become the working language of technology, because it is so prone to variation.
This variation is unlocalizable and encodes a certain way of looking at the world.
“The residents of the Trobriand Islands of Papua New Guinea have a hundred words for yams, while the Maoris of New Zealand have thirty-five words for dung. In the OED, round alone (that is without variants like rounded and roundup) takes 7 pages to define or about 15,000 words of text. English retains probably the richest vocabulary, and most diverse shading of meanings, of any language…. No other language has so many words all saying the same thing.” - Bill Bryson, The Mother Tongue
Notes mentioning this note
Controlled vocabularies are required for communication, both between people and between systems.
Precision measures how well a system retrieves only the relevant documents. Recall measures how well a system retrieves all the relevant documents. The relative...