Monday, March 22, 2010

You know you're a geek when...

You know you're a geek when you catch yourself trying to explain to your 12 year old kid how the pig-latin transformation is not an isomorphism, but is a function (at least it seems so at first glance). And then things diverge into whether one is discussing typographical or aural pig-latin.

The anecdotal evidence is pretty clear: the English word "pay" becomes "ay-pay" while the English word "ape" becomes "ape-ay"*. Typographically they are quite distinct, but aurally they can be quite similar, even identical, depending on one's speech patterns. So, spoken pig-latin is not an isomorphism, relying on contextual clues to allow easy translation. But typographical pig-latin should be very straightforward, mechanical, to translate. I'm not even going to go into the occasional pig-latinized French that we have to bust out around here when the kids are eavesdropping.

Anyway, that's just a little food for thought ;)


* remember that words which begin with a vowel sound merely have the "ay" syllable appended to it.