Re: where do so many tenses come from?


Brian M. Scott wrote:
On Wed, 05 Apr 2006 20:50:47 +0100, António Marques
<m.ap@xxxxxxx> wrote in
<news:44341fa0$0$8184$a729d347@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> in sci.lang:

Lee Sau Dan wrote:

[...]

I have never used such software, and I won't. It's so
much faster to write than to speak. It's so much
tiring and slower to speak than to write. And computers
are so inept at recognizing speech.

You do, of course, realise, that this last reason is the
only one that's not plain nonsense.

Depends on how you interpret his first reason. It may well
be that the time required to read a paragraph aloud is
generally less than the time required to type it, but the
difference isn't all that large for many people, and other
factors may be more significant if you're *composing* the
text. I know several writers who have tried both and can
produce text faster with a keyboard than with either an
audio recorder or speech recognition software.

Yup. When I had tendonitis in my hands while in college, I had to use
a dictation program to type my essays and emails and things like that;
it was much slower and felt much more unnatural. Yes, the actual data
entry speed was faster - but that didn't matter as much, because
erasing and re-entering a piece of text was more cumbersome (i.e.
"erase word, erase word, erase word, erase word, backspace backspace" -
or something like that). I make lots of changes as I write - this is
why I prefer word processors to paper and pencil. It's unbelievably
inconvenient to make those changes with a voice-recognition program.
And that doesn't even factor in the innumerable times that the software
itself made mistakes that had to be corrected in a similarly cumbersome
fashion.

LM

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