A couple of observations about Predictive Text on mobile phones.
As a lover of books and of home, I am pleased to see that ‘book’ is followed by ‘cool’ and that ‘home’ is followed by ‘good’.
As a father, I am pleased that ‘dad’ comes before ‘fad’, but am surprised to find that 686 defaults to ‘nun’, not ‘mum’. The order of words is not determined alphabetically, so maybe the phonemakers have research that shows people will be more likely to text about nuns than mums?
Anyone got any observations of their own?
UPDATE
The thought just occurred that maybe mum's deference to nun was a trans-Atlantic/Pacific-type thing, and that maybe Nokia, etc, use US English, but when I entered 'mom' I was given a firm 'non'! Well, merci Nokia. Now I’m confused again.
UPDATE 2
Ducking funny video here on the History of Predictive Text Swearing.
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1. I would imagine the prediction is based not just on what three-letter words the characters typed could represent, but also on what four-(or longer) letter words the use could be starting to type. So '686' could be 'Mum' or 'nun', but it could also be 'mung' or 'nunchucks'.
ReplyDelete2. 'Non' would suggest that it's not just UK and US English in the predictive text database, but some of them foreigner languages as well.
3. My Motorola says that '686' is Mum. So maybe Motorola is a more family-friendly company. (Or maybe my phone has 'learnt' from its previous owner; certainly my old Nokia remembered the substitutions I made and adjusted its predictions accordingly.)
I considered that it may have given me 'nun' because it was working towards a more common word than 'mum', but I couldn't come up with any likely candidates. I don't imagine it'd be 'nunchucks'. Pressing a fourth key got me 'numb', but that's no help.
ReplyDeleteWikipedia talks about Predictive Text deciding what's "most probable" based on what keys you've pressed, and I still think 'mum' is more likely to be what most people after.
My Sony Ericsson changes depending on which words are used more frequently... Something to consider.
ReplyDeleteA quick perusal of a site called Brainy Dictionary, which contains lists of words starting with each letter pair, does seem to confirm that not much starts with "nun-", so it's not that - at least not in English.
ReplyDeleteSo that's 1 disposed of. I think 2 and 3 have some weight, though.
Of course, the simplest answer is that even in US English 'non' and words beginning with it would be far more common than 'mom' and words beginning with that; no matter how common a word 'Mom' itself might be.
So my guess is your phone speaks English with an American accent. (Mine even has a Southern one: typing '4848' inspires it to suggest 'grits'.)
Are you trying to suggest that I go on about nuns perhaps more than I care to admit?
ReplyDeleteFunnily enough, my dad was a nun.
Maybe you have been doing a lot of texting to Kate about her nun outfit...
ReplyDeletei saw arj barker at the comedy festival and he did this UNREAL bit on this very topic. he said:
ReplyDelete"so, do you guys use predictive text? oh yeah, you do? that's book, that's book. and what about you madam? no? ok, well that's book too! you know what, i'm sick of these people going on and on about how bad predictive text is. they say to me, man, it's about time you wolf up! and i just have one thing to say to them: i AM cycle!"
of course, the beauty of it was that 85% of the crowd didn't get it. but oh, mercy, 'twas a beautiful thing :)
JJ - I haven't been able to work out if my phone is American or not. It knows both options for all ~ise and ~ize words, and it knows both 'diaper' and nappy'. However, it does know 'vomit', but not 'barf', though I'm not sure if that's much of a clue? If it is American I don't think it's from the South because 37433 defaults to 'dried' not 'fried'. :-)
ReplyDeleteIncidentally, I had grits for breakfast the other day and genuine Southern fried chicken for dinner the other night, both prepared by my friend Jasen who's from Rome, Georgia. Despite the name, grits weren't too bad, and the chicken was absolutely beautiful. If you have the means, I highly recommend picking some up.
Jess - That's funny. Looks like Arj is at the cutting edge of youth culture as Wikipedia tells me that teenagers have already started using 'book' to mean 'cool'. I think I'm comfortable with that because books are cool, man, but then there's always the chance it'll backfire when ultra-hip kids start using it to mean the opposite and 'book' suddenly means 'filth'?! :-)
ReplyDeleteThese words are apparently called 'textonyms', which I like.
Tobacco, Apostropher. Big industry south of the Mason-Dixon line, and drying out the leaves is a big part of that.
ReplyDeleteSo your phone still might be a redneck.
Ha, ha. Thanks for pointing that out. If my phone is a redneck, it won't know a thing about it: 7336325 gets you 'redneal' which alternates with 'seemeal'. Not sure where it's going with those...
ReplyDelete