On 3/15/2016 5:00 PM, Don Y wrote:
On 3/15/2016 2:40 PM, Mark Lloyd wrote:
On 03/14/2016 10:33 PM, Don Y wrote:

[snip]
When working on my speech synthesizer, it was frustrating to see just
how
many exceptions there are to the "rules" we think we know -- but
actually have internalized and consciously forgotten!

E.g., think of the /w/ sound in:
women
what
which
one
quick

Yes there is a 'w' in quick. Right after the initial 'k'.

The 'w' in "one" is more interesting (esp when you are designing rules
to convert spellings to sounds).

Spend any amount of time (i.e., hundreds of hours) trying to understand
why certain combinations of letters are pronounced one way or another
and you end up pulling your hair out -- English is just chock full
of exceptions!

I found that "of" is one of the most commonly encountered exceptions
(there's no /f/ sound in the word!)

BTW, when I use NOT in mnemonic devices, it's usually the r's-1
(radix-1)
complement, so NOT 365 is 634 (note that each digit adds up to 9).

It's called the "nine's complement". The ten's complement is obtained
by adding one to the nine's complement. In much the same way that the
one's complement ant two's complements are related.

In this particular case, it IS nines'. R (for radix) makes is less
inappropriately specific, since the same idea applies to all radixes
(bases). I
suppose you don't know that r's-1 complement is involved in how computers

I most certainly do! Having had to design ALU's, you quickly learn that
you perform subtraction by putting a "programmable inverter" (XOR gate)
in front of each bit and force the carry-in to '1' on your ADDER. Voila!
A-B with the same hardware that performs A+B!

subtract numbers. I didn't know it yet, but I learned r's compliment
in second
grade.

Look at "casting out nines" and "casting out 11's".
Trachtenberg addition relies on the latter.

Try out being hearing impaired and you can't actually hear the "w" in
the word "one".

--
Maggie