Language – A Geek's View

In a search and marketing environment the conversation regarding good spelling and grammar is constantly in my life. Being a pure maths/computer geek means language isn't my strong point; i'm more likely to be worrying about whether my numbers add up. But I think it is right to share my view on language being an evolutionary process.

Interpretation of Language by a Search Engine

Google has repeatedly pointed out the use of Artificial Intelligence to understand language positioning (grammar) and synonyms.  The search engines understand the need for language to evolve because new words are created all the time; an impossible task for anything other than artificial intelligence.

N-Gram

Both Google and Bing have n-gram services and most probably use these so that their engines can analyse how sentences should be constructed.  N-Gram is the algorithm that helps to understand positioning (grammar) and how likely one word should be followed by another. 

http://web-ngram.research.microsoft.com/info/

http://ngrams.googlelabs.com

Relational Learning

Relational learning algorithms is a geek's answer to synonyms.  It helps understand what a word might also mean based on analysing the structure of languages. Search GM in google and the results are General Motors or General Manager.  There are no pigeons involved here, and a sweatshop of copywriters would not be able to create this level of understanding with constant evolution.  We as bloggers, content editors and writers produce the language that Google understands and this post is just another page added to the dataset of analysis.

Language is Neural

The beauty about language is that it doesn’t need to be a word to make sense; it just needs your brain to interpret it correctly.  The word just needs to sound right as can be seen in popular culture.  The word 'clunge' jumped its way into vocabulary by the writers of the Inbetweeners, however, the word made sense immediately to the viewers.

Great writers understand language above that of the dictionary, the word Dementor hit the world from Harry Potter, however automatically you can associate the word to mean something nasty.  If it was called a 'black ghost' would Harry Potter ever been a film, or even worse a fridlipee?

Evolve with your Audience

Eventually language will push out words with more popular words; it’s your audience or consumer that matters. Don’t be like your grandparents, and say use the word courting to your kids as it would be much worse than a grammatical error.

In modern times with language evolving so rapidly due to adoption of colloquialisms, media channels and the web (“tweet” just got added to the Oxford dictionary) it becomes less important to focus on the specified rules of formal language, and creates a trend towards choosing words based on the target audience and the context of the literature being composed.  The moral is: choose your words wisely.