ITT: We discuss how mathematical formulas are read out loud.

>>8717836
funnily enough there's a linguistics phd student at ohio state working on this

>>8717843
Explain a little further.

>>8717874
I guess people generally use pauses/prosodic structure in a certain way to indicate the structure of formulae like these. The guy's name is Mike Phelan. I don't think he's published anything comprehensive but I found this abstract
https://cwru.pure.elsevier.com/en/publications/hearing-the-structure-of-math-use-and-limits-of-prosodic-disambig-2
and this
http://isle.illinois.edu/sprosig/sp2012/uploadfiles/file/sp2012_submission_194.pdf

>>8717843
that's a good project. I'd love to know what he's got so far.

>>8717836

You lose the beauty of a poem, when you translate it from it's mother tongue.

Same for Math.

>>8717895
Great. This is exactly what I'm looking for. Do you think there is a precise way to read mathematical formulas/equations, or can they be spoken in more ways than one?

>>8717923
Probably to an extent. Like from what that guy says in that short paper it sounds like most people can tell apart simple things like (a+b)*c vs a+(b*c) by the length of the pauses between the terms. And from the abstract it sounds (not sure if I'm reading it right?) like the more math background you have, the easier it is to use that prosodic information to identify the syntax of a more complicated formula. But I'd guess that there's probably a limit to how many levels of structure you can distinguish that way. In normal speech we only use two levels of prosodic structure to correspond to sentence structure, which can have way more levels of structure than most math expressions. Maybe that's because it's hard to match up prosody and syntax precisely when the structure gets pretty deep.

>>8718018
Am I a brainlet for saying "the quantity of" for parenthesis

>>8717836
Anybody who says minus as a verb should be shot on fucking sight

>>8718031
I usually say "the quantity of." It's better to be clear than leave things up to interpretation. Although that still relies on a pause too, so fuck

>>8718044
If the "the quantity of" is at the end of the formula, I think you could get away with not using a pause. Like reading a+b*(c+d) as "a plus b times the quantity c plus d."