Note to recruiters

Note to recruiters: We are quite aware that recruiters, interviewers, VCs and other professionals generally perform a Google Search before they interview someone, take a pitch from someone, et cetera. Please keep in mind that not everything put on the Internet must align directly to one's future career and/or one's future product portfolio. Sometimes, people do put things on the Internet just because. Just because. It may be out of their personal interests, which may have nothing to do with their professional interests. Or it may be for some other reason. Recruiters seem to have this wrong-headed notion that if somebody is not signalling their interests in a certain area online, then that means that they are not interested in that area at all. It is worth pointing out that economics pretty much underlies the areas of marketing, strategy, operations and finance. And this blog is about economics. With metta, let us. by all means, be reflective about this whole business of business. Also, see our post on "The Multi-faceted Identity Problem".

Thursday, November 29, 2012

Serendipity in languages

The three posts ( one , two , three ) below form a set of posts on the topic of serendipity in languages. Please do send me a note if you have thoughts or comments on this.

I really do prefer to use the terms 'pseudoreduplication'/'pseudoreduplicates' although I am proposing the (somewhat less elegant) terminology of 'serendreduplication'/'serendreduplicates'. Also, I would prefer to use the terms 'pseudohomophones'/'psuedohomophony' where I am using the (somewhat less elegant) terminology of 'serendhomophones'/'serendhomophony'. I will be using these terms interchangeably. The use of 'serend-' terminology is there to disambiguate matters if any confusion should arise.

Update: Thanks to my friend Krishna Kunchithapadam for his suggestions, including and particularly the point on retaining the use of the terms 'pseudoreduplication' and 'pseudohomophony'.

Second Update: Note that 'pseudohomophony/'serendhomophony' is a statistical concept. If a significant fraction of speakers of language B think that word XB in language B is a homophone of the word XA in language A, then XB and XA are 'pseudohomophones'/'serendhomophones'.

Third Update (Nov 30, 4:34 pm): Note that my definition of 'serendhomophony' is general enough to cover the case where word XB in language B is a homophone of the word XA in language A for a particular performance, for instance, for a single Youtube video of a song. A different Youtube video of the same song could lead to a different word XB-1A in language B to being a homophone of the word XA in language A.

You could think of the performance of a song performance you listen to on Youtube as a process. It is a process (cf. stochastic process) producing words XA1, XA2, .. XAn in language A. Simultaneously, it is also a process producing the words XB1, XB2, ..., XBn in language B for speakers of language B serendhomophonous with XA1, XA2, ..., XAn. And equally simultaneously, it is also a  process producing the words XC1, XC2, ..., XCn in language C (again serendhomophonously). And so on. (You could cover every language and dialect on earth).

A different performance of the same song on Youtube will be a process  producing words XA1, XA2, .. XAn in language A. But simultaneously, it will also be a process producing the words XB-1A, XB-2A, ..., XB-nA in language B for speakers of language B (serendhomophonously). And equally simultaneously, it is also a  process producing the words XC-1A, XC-2A, ..., XC-nA in language C (again serendhomophonously). And so on.

Note that there are two levels of homophonousness here : per performance and per language.