Negrek

I talked to pathos, and because of him leaving, that still leaves the battle with Mawile open. Now, since I've already been approved as a ref, I could just end the battle as it is with a DQ, but I also thought, since it was originally your battle, you may want to finish it off for the money and experience. It's up to you.

Thank you!

Thank you!

Please don't forget to post in this battle.

Huh, in that case, why is -ly getting chopped off to begin with? That always makes a different-but-related word, as far as I can tell.

There are not really any good rules to distinguish whether a word is a noun, adjective or whatever, no - not without an actual dictionary that knows what words exist and which ones are what. Closest I can think of is that very long words are probably compound nouns, but that's not too helpful. It's all sort of a logic knot - if you know some information you can deduce some more with some sensible rules, but you need that initial information to come from somewhere. You're always going to end up needing some sort of dictionary.

The word with the y is always the real root word in English, though, isn't it? There's no need to continue to distinguish between "bodily" and "body"; the point of this whole exercise was to identify them as derived from the same stem, unless I'm gravely misunderstanding something. Once you have that stem as "bodi", you can recognize that actually it's supposed to be "body" and output it that way rather than trying to complete it with something that has an actual i in it.

Some source I found counts about 43,000 Icelandic "base" words, which gets inflated up to something like 610,000 when you count compound words and words with pre/suffixes, but that's from a survey of written documents since the 1500s, so it probably includes quite a few obsolete words. Theoretically you could go on making compound words forever in Icelandic, since we use compounds for a lot of cases where English would use multiple words and people spontaneously make up compound words for the purposes of a single conversation all the time; about 519,000 of those 610,000 were compounds, and about half of the compounds only appeared once across all those documents. The same source's list of words in spoken Icelandic includes about 50,000 words, but I don't know how the methodology for that number works.

So, yeah, a considerably smaller language than English if you drop the spontaneous compounds.

Probably most problematically for this particular sort of thing, Icelandic has a lot of vowel shifts in the stems of even regular words between forms, so forms of one word may actually look like a completely different word, and two different vowels can be shifted into the same vowel so that you can't tell what the original word is just from seeing a form of it, even if you do have a list of what vowel shifts are possible. Meanwhile vowel shifts can also distinguish between completely different words that are completely different in meaning, and there are about a bazillion different inflection classes of everything that have different endings in different cases, such that the total number of things that might be inflection endings is pretty massive, and of course a lot of the time those same endings just happen to be part of the root word and not actually inflection endings.

So, like, the "Önnu" in my name is the genitive case of the name "Anna". But there is also a word "önn" (semester), and a word "önnur" (another, feminine), and both -u and -ur are common inflection endings, so if you chopped them off, you'd end up with all those being lumped together. And then if you want to be able to group "Önnu" with "Anna" and try to account for some other inflection patterns where n's can get doubled up, you might end up with stuff like "andi" (genie) in there as well (-di is a past tense verb ending), plus the verb "ana" (rush). And lest you try to use the endings to deduce word classes and only lump things together if you deduce them to be in the same class, of course most endings are used in a bunch of different contexts for different classes of words, e.g. -ur can be a nominative ending for some masculine nouns, or a nominative ending for some neuter nouns, or a nominative and genitive ending for some feminine nouns, or a masculine ending for some adjectives, or a third-person singular present tense ending for some verbs.

Ahh, that makes a lot more sense on "bodily". Doesn't seem like it'd be too hard to keep track of what -y words have been manipulated and just change them back, though.

Heh, when I saw your description about LINOONE IN A BIPLANE I just had to draw it! It's actually also the reason I was running late :p I ran into some technical difficultues while trying to draw the fanart...

Hah, so it actually just chops off regular endings from everything and assumes that mostly covers it? Oh, English. My dad's coincidentally been working on some natural language processing for Icelandic, and that outright requires an actual massive database of (just about) every Icelandic word in common modern usage that maps forms to root words.

It's weird these things can't handle contractions - maybe they're all made for analyzing formal text that doesn't use them.

I'm baffled by how "bodily" is apparently a prominent word in TQftL.

Don't forget to post commands here.

Awesome! Bwahaha at the bottom graph; "fucking fuck clone" sums up Salvage better than it has any right to.

How does the color coding work? In the previous clouds it looked like it was just a gradient from the frequency of the word, but the new QftL/Salvage clouds at least are a lot more colorful.

TQftL may be ranking Pokémon/Pokéball so high because of Pokémon vs pokemon, maybe? Salvage also has "pokémon" pretty prominently there even though I really don't think it uses the actual word that much. If a lot of the sample fics are using it without the accent, it'd probably register as a rare word.

I'd definitely wager the prominence of "you're" in Salvage is because of the narration - even if it does come up somewhat more than usual in dialogue (which wouldn't surprise me, given how much Nate and the child snipe at each other whenever they share a scene), that has to be dwarfed by the fact that it comes up a lot in the narration where in other stories it generally never would. Presumably "you" itself is filtered out, and I'd imagine "you're" is just the most common you-contraction in general.

It'd be interesting to try this with something that does take into account different word forms (and perhaps counts contractions as their component words). Is there a publicly available database of English word forms? I know there is one for Icelandic.

Bwahaha, nice work! I'm actually surprised the "workhorse" words aren't bigger; I seem to recall doing some sort of word frequency thing with my writing at some point where all the top picks were just the obvious ones (I'm assuming you filtered out pronouns/articles here, at least?). But then again that might have been analyzing my LJ or something like that.

Wow, I didn't know I overused "looked" quite that much.

Out of curiosity, did you try making one for Salvage? (I suspect it would have a lot of swear words on it.)

Hey, I just wanted to make sure you were aware that I picked up your battle against Byrus. There's presumably no need to actually enforce DQ times there, but you technically do have only about 48 hours left.

Hmm, alright. I always thought of toxic poison as being "more severe" than regular poison, so it should deal more damage - hence the starting at 3%, so it always outdamages regular poison and does at least 1 damage per action so you can't just Heal Bell on the last action of a round and take no damage. But I see your point in that it's much easier to inflict, so I'll alter the stats for that round.

that page is so beautiful I am at a loss for puns

By the way, are you up for taking one of the sky battles on the late bracket instead of one of the hat battles on the regular bracket? I was initially assuming I'd be taking on all three of those but there have been enough volunteers that I can assign one to each battle on the regular bracket and still have one left, so I'm figuring I'll just take two, but since a sky battle has good chances of bringing about some complicated situations to make sense of flavorwise, I figure I should ask before assigning anyone other than myself to those. (That, and, well, if you were more excited for doing a hat battle than a sky battle, that'd also be a factor)

Yeah, so I've gathered. So many books to read, so little time. :(

No, although I've vaguely meant to for a long time.

Cool! I'll see about getting the battle revived.

Hey, Negrek, are you interested in finishing that old tournament battle of ours, or do you just want to end it in a draw?