{"id":20957,"date":"2018-05-19T09:22:23","date_gmt":"2018-05-19T08:22:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jurnsearch.wordpress.com\/?p=20957"},"modified":"2018-05-19T09:22:23","modified_gmt":"2018-05-19T08:22:23","slug":"googles-talk-to-books","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/jurnsearch\/index.php\/2018\/05\/19\/googles-talk-to-books\/","title":{"rendered":"Google’s Talk to Books"},"content":{"rendered":"

Talk to Books<\/a> is a new Google service that tries to show book snippets directly relevant to your well-formulated query question.<\/p>\n

I rather unfairly tried it with a fiendish question: When did J.R.R. Tolkien discover the word earendel?<\/em> (without quote marks). None of the results were accurate, in contrast to Google Books where the top three results were accurate \/ useful \/ authoritative, as was the seventh result. Not only that, but the snippets were also more or less spot on. <\/p>\n

It’s a tricky question, not only because lower-case earendel<\/em> is Anglo-Saxon. There’s that use, and then there’s also the capitalised name E\u00e4rendil. Which is the name of the character Tolkien developed, after being inspired by the Anglo-Saxon word and its very complex clusters of meanings and associations. The other problem is that no-one knows exactly when in the first half of 1913 he found the word, and exactly where he found it — in a dictionary, a commentary or a footnote, or was he told about it by a tutor at Exeter College (he was having personal tuition with some of the great names in word-lore), or was his first encounter with the word while actually reading Crist<\/em> in Old English? The word is the key root-hole for his work, from which the seed of his great legendarium later arose.<\/p>\n

So, kudos to Google Books for getting it right in a useful way. Google’s Talk to Books on the other hand seems to have semantically smushed the words and ignored earendel<\/em>. The name-authority was accurate, but it seemed to assume I just wanted something about Tolkien and his use of words in general, and tried a scattergun approach…<\/p>\n

1. His fictional use of dwarf-names in the Icelandic Dvergatal<\/em> (‘Dwarf table’), found in the Voluspa<\/em>.
\n2. His early work on writing entries for the Oxford English Dictionary<\/em>.
\n2. His mid-career attitude to the Celtic languages.
\n4. His entry for “Walrus” in the Oxford English Dictionary<\/em>.
\n5. His early and reluctant abandonment of the worn-out word ‘fairy’ in his early poetry and invented-languages, in favour of ‘elf’.<\/p>\n

There was no connection made between earendel<\/em> and E\u00e4rendil, which suggests that perhaps Talk to Books might usefully add a semantic sub-system devoted to character-names, and their variants and mis-spellings?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Talk to Books is a new Google service that tries to show book snippets directly relevant to your well-formulated query …<\/p>\n

Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20957","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academic-search"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/jurnsearch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20957","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/jurnsearch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/jurnsearch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/jurnsearch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/jurnsearch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20957"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/jurnsearch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20957\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/jurnsearch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20957"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/jurnsearch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20957"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/jurnsearch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20957"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}