• Deebster
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    4 days ago

    Fascinating stuff, and it makes sense that a more rigid, rules-based version of English would be both taught in ESL schools and learnt by an LLM.

    If I start a sentence, “The cat sat on the…”,

    Me: “mat”

    your brain, and the AI, will predict the word “floor.”

    Oh. I’m not sure that’s the best example, as that particular phrase is something many children encounter when learning to read.

    Also, British English would close the quotes before the full stop (aka period) finishes the sentence - is that something he’s picked up since school or is that something that’s changed since the Kenyan model of perfect English was set?

    • Flamekebab@piefed.social
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      4 days ago

      [British] I’m fairly sure I was taught to put the full stop before the closing quote, but that’s perhaps only for dialogue?

      • Deebster
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        2 days ago

        It was that you could use quoted punctuation to punctuate a sentence, but you shouldn’t quote anything that’s not part of the quote. For example, you wouldn’t say

        The first word of that popular birthday song is “happy.”

        This would suggest that the first line goes “Happy. Birthday to you” whereas you could just finish after the quote: first word is “happy”.

        Also, compare

        He said “hello”?
        He said “hello?”
        He said “hello?”?

        All mean different things, although that last one does look very odd.