Stats for nerds
1recommend
12mentions
10people
2017–2026years
8% recommend92% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Also noteworthy, from Georges Perec: A Void (La Disparition), which was written entirely without using the letter "e" (and which the translation reproduces brilliantly well).
- LLM channeling Georges Perec and his novel A Void https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Void
- Or:
> [The novel] "A Void", translated from the original French La Disparition (lit. "The Disappearance"), is a 300-page French lipogrammatic novel, written in 1969 by Georges Perec, entirely without using the letter e, following Oulipo constraints. [0]
- Seems completely feasible.
Somewhat related: In the 30s Gilbert Adair wrote a novel in French without using the letter e. It was translated under the same constraint into English, in which it's called A Void.
He was part of a group of artists who reveled in putting strange constraints on their work. They have a name but I can't remember what.
- I find this inspiration. I do something similar. My book reviews also have quotes from the book which I tag for cross reference to other books ‘[r]’ and words I didn’t know ‘[t]’
So I found this syntax very interesting:
%T A Void %A Perec, Georges %M French %F Adair, Gilbert %I Harvill Press %D 1994 [1969] %O paperback %G ISBN 1860460984 - This is truly impressive.
The most impressive linguistic feat I've ever seen was on a Mastodon, which was named for the French writing group "Oulipo", whose members did work with constrained language. The work from this group you've most likely heard of (if you've heard of them at all) is George Perec's book "La Disparation", translated to English as "A Void", which does not (in either language) contain any word with the letter "E" in either case in it (so those of us who know at least a little French realize that means no "le" or "les"... wow...).
Anyway, this Mastodon was set up to implement the "no E" rule, and it was kind of a fun challenge to try to express yourself.
My posts (and most folks') was pretty tortured text.
The impressive bit was that there was a person there pursuing their Doctorate in Linguistics, and their posts... just read like ordinary English, with nothing tortured or strange about it. If you didn't know about the rule, you'd never guess it was in force. And they were fairly long, and covered a lot of ground... really amazing.
