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Wolfram Alpha

by rlsinclair, May 19, 2009

Messages: 23

Language: English

rlsinclair (User's profile) May 19, 2009, 12:26:19 PM

I have just looked up “Esperanto” in the new “Wolfram Alpha”.
http://www.wolframalpha.com/

It says “place of Origin - France”

I am not impressed.

tommjames (User's profile) May 19, 2009, 12:29:29 PM

rlsinclair:I have just looked up “Esperanto” in the new “Wolfram Alpha”.
http://www.wolframalpha.com/

It says “place of Origin - France”

I am not impressed.
It also says 2000 speakers and 0 native speakers. Even less impressive!

jan aleksan (User's profile) May 19, 2009, 12:43:03 PM

No source provided. how can it be trusted?... it seems like a kind of propaganda...

nshepperd (User's profile) May 19, 2009, 1:08:06 PM

Hmmm a bit of an error there. I'm pretty sure Zamenhof wasn't French! But it's pretty cool seeing the character frequencies and average translation length...

Hmmm, estas ero de misaĵo tie! Mi pensas ke Zamenhof'o ne estis franca! Sed vidi la literajn frekvencojn kaj longecoj de tradukaĵojn estas iomete bone(?)...

ceigered (User's profile) May 19, 2009, 1:52:54 PM

Mi pensas ke la aŭtoro de tion estis TRE laca kiam li/ŝi skribis ĝin - I think the author of that was VERY tired when he wrote it.

jan aleksan (User's profile) May 19, 2009, 2:24:35 PM

well, if you type "ido", it find nothing, and "interlingua" is dead. So 2000 people is not so bad ... okulumo.gif

Ironchef (User's profile) May 19, 2009, 2:32:25 PM

rlsinclair:I have just looked up “Esperanto” in the new “Wolfram Alpha”.
http://www.wolframalpha.com/

It says “place of Origin - France”

I am not impressed.
I had exactly the same reaction last night when I entered it. Just proves again that you cannot believe everything you read online. I constantly remind my kids that Wikipedia is a great tool but should be used carefully. I've found errors in printed books too so nothing is perfect ridulo.gif I think this new tool has value though; so we'll see how it works out.

Rogir (User's profile) May 19, 2009, 3:04:26 PM

Native speakers of Dutch: 12.36 million in the Netherlands (2000 estimate). And we had a population of 16 million then, with less than a million immigrants. I don't think Wolfram should have released these figures if they are so cleary incorrect.

Matthieu (User's profile) May 19, 2009, 4:16:20 PM

Funny, the first thing I searched when I found out this site was Esperanto. lango.gif I sent a message to report the mistakes…

By the way, I'm pretty sure they're wrong about French too: 64.86 million speakers? There are 65 million people in France, and French is spoken in many more countries. (And according to them, 79% of France population speak it… This would be very surprising.)

andogigi (User's profile) May 19, 2009, 6:45:34 PM

Consider the source. Stephen Wolfram is known for having invented Mathematica, but he is a bit of an exhibitionist along the lines of P.T. Barnum. His book, "A New Kind of Science" was billed as being so revolutionary that it would rival Newton's Principia. When most mathematicians read it, they yawned. From what little I've seen of his search engine, it looks like another yawn.

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