English 2.0

Contraction: half an afternoon

English 1.x: half an afternoon
English 2.0: halfternoon

Example: “My boss is giving me a halfternoon per week off so I can go ride my bike.”

Contraction: drawing opportunities

English 1.x: drawing opportunities
English 2.0: drawpportunities

Example: “I brought my pad and pencils to the meeting because I thought there might be some drawpportunities.”

Waelcom!

Over the next several months we are going to be announcing a series of sponsorship and consulting partnerships with major national and international organizations. These partnerships provide an amazing opportunity for us to do real-world AES research while generating much-needed funding for the Institute.

We’re thrilled to announce our first of these partnerships, with pen computing pioneer Wacom. We’ve been working with them for several months on their Penabled® (“pen enabled”) campaign, and we’re finally able to talk about it here. We’re excited to have them on board, and we look forward to a long and fruitful partnership.

Wacom Penabled® Technology

Contraction: Compelling Television

English 1.0: Compelling Television
English 1.9 SP1: Compellivision
English 2.0: Compel-o-vision

Example: Man… Battlestar, The Wire, Rome, The Shield… this is the golden age of compel-o-vision.

Many or One, Continued: More Cars

We got a lot of letters about our Lexus entry the other day - there seem to be a lot of car buffs out there in the AES world!

Most people were curious about the plural of their particular make of car. I’m sorry to say that we don’t have an exhaustive list yet - we hope to publish one this fall as a joint effort with our friends at Consumer Reports for their fall auto issue. I can tell you that most of them use fairly standard English 2.0 technology, so they’re not unusual (Toyotas = Toysota, Chevrolets = Chevroslet, etc.) However, there were two special ones I wanted to mention that relate directly to yesterday’s “Many or One” post.

We have long been interested in singularization, it being a mathematical reduction of our work on pluralization. But it’s not as easy as it looks, and we didn’t make any great strides in that area until we started exploring car plurals. When we turned our pluralization instruments on two popular brands of car - Audi and Honda - our researchers were astonished to find that they were already plural!

At first we were sure that we had the instruments calibrated wrong; we even sent a few back to the factory for tuning. But the numbers don’t lie, as they say. We don’t know how it developed, but these two plural nouns put out the signature of a singular noun. This discovery required us to develop new techniques for identifying these “faux plurals” (or “fplursauxl” as we refer to them in Advanced E2 notation), and it led to many of the English 2.0 singularization advancements that we talked about yesterday.

For the record, here are the details on “Audi” and “Honda”. As you can imagine, these are now our two favorite kinds of car!

English 1.x Plural: Audis
English 1.x Singular: Audi
English 2.0 Plural: Audi
English 2.0 Singular: Aud (or “Audon” - still under review)

Example: Bill just bought a new Aud A3 to go with his wife’s Aud S4. Now they have two Audi.

English 1.x Plural: Hondas
English 1.x Singular: Honda
English 2.0 Plural: Honda
English 2.0 Singular: Hond

Example: I love my HondAccord*, so I’m not surprised that five of the Consumer Reports Top Ten cars are Honda.

We don’t have the final numbers, but we think that similar improvements can be made on Acura, Hond’s sister brand in the US (e.g., “I have an Acur.”/”He has two Acura.”)

* Note the contraction opportunities with this new singularization technique.

Many or One?

English 1.x is filled with words that fail to convey their form as either singular or plural: Milk, scissors, rice, and many others. This leads to confusion and suffering. Sure, you have milk, but how many? One? Four million? We just don’t know.

Fortunately, advances here at the institute will finally put an end to this problem.

English 1.x: milk
English 2.0 Plural: milkken
English 2.0 Singular: milk
(see also: silk)

English 1.x: rice
English 2.0 Plural: rice
English 2.0 Singular: rouse
(see also: ice)

English 1.x: scissors
English 2.0 Plural: scissorii
English 2.0 Singular: scissors
(see also: trousers, britches)

English 1.x: smithereens
English 2.0 Plural: smitheren
English 2.0 Singular: smithereen
(see also: dungarees)

Contraction: "Female Bee"

English 1.x: female bee
English 2.0: beemale

Example: “Beemales also collect the pollen to feed to their larvae.” (Wikipedia)

Note: The International Bee Research Association has filed Form 571G/A to put this entry under review, citing the fact that many scientists refer to male bees as “bee males”. When females are referred to as “beemales”, there could be confusion, as the only effective difference would be the length and quality of the pause between words. A hearing on the matter has been scheduled. This term will go out in the initial English 2.0 release and will be corrected, if necessary, in a subsequent service pack.

See also: “Bee research”/”beesearch”.

Plural: "Lexus"

English 1.x: Lexuses
English 2.0: Lexesus

Example: I don’t know about you, but I like the look of the new Lexesus.

Plural: "Mashup"

English 1.x: mashups
English 2.0: mashes up

Example: Have you seen Bus Monster? That’s one of my favorite mashes up!”
Example: I am down with the following mashes: up, monster, and 4077th.