grammatic speech

TRX
March 20, 2012
100:
"we don't think (or communicate) in formal grammatical sentences"

I do, at least since I learned to read. I've had a few people try to make fun of me for it over the years. I've also talked to people on the phone or in person after months or years of talking to them via email; several have shown surprise that I sound the same either way.

I read *much* more than I speak or listen. Though some people claim people naturally think in pictures, any "pictures" I deal with are text. If you say "tree", I think "t-r-e-e", not a picture of something with leaves.

Being partially deaf, I'm quite aware that most people don't speak in grammatic sentences. Not only that, many of them use incorrect words, randomly substitute vowels, leave words out, or just slur the whole mess together in an uninflected gabble.

Given the amount of trouble I have doing "speech recognition" in my everyday affairs, I'm more amazed than annoyed at how well speech recognition software works...

> Scottish

It takes a few moments for me to get tuned in, but it's easier than, say, Vermont English, or the hip-hop-gangsta TV dialect spoken in so many inner- city areas.

> speech fragments

The Nixon Oval Office tapes are extreme examples of that; there might be four or five people having a meeting, but it sounds like you're only hearing one side of more than one telephone conversation.

> dictating stories

What you hear on playback might be interesting. Asimov was astonished to hear himself shouting at the microphone when he thought he was merely emphasizing a passage.