SC Voice – the road to v1

This is tricky, since the blind won’t be able to search blurbs with SCV even though SC does:

Is that OK?

1 results for “the lay follower dhammadinna”

## With Dhammadinna
SN 55.53 — Bhikkhu Sujato

in the deer park at Isipatana. Then the lay follower Dhammadinna , together with five hundred lay followers

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I don’t quite see what you mean: That person is searching for “the lay follower Dhammadinna”, and they get “the lay follower Dhammadinna”… what would be missing in this case? :thinking:

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Oops. Bad example. Sorry.

Now, hilariously, I find that you are right. SC does NOT search the blurb and will not find “to study deep discourses”. However SCV does indeed find DN55.53. So we would be removing the Abidhamma feature of SCV to match the non-Abidhamma search of SC.

:rofl:

OK. I think I shall lobotomize SCV tomorrow unless @Aminah objects. It might be possible that SC would in the future want to support Abidhamma search.

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… sounds quite drastic! :astonished:

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Is it normal that numbers in English are spoken like “one [pause] two hundred fifty”, for 1,250? I had expected “one thousand two hundred fifty”, or “thousand two hundred fifty”—but I’m not a native speaker. I found it somewhat confusing to hear Amy pronounce it in this way.

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Added as a bug for v0.9.2.. :white_check_mark: Thank you!

Normally it’s so much work to put in a feature that we are horrified to remove one. In any event I think we need Aminah’s larger perspective. She has insight on what is wanted for SC and can help us decide the right way.

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There are more numbers like this. I found them in DN 2—will have to go through this sutta more thoroughly, but it’s a long one…

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I had naively assumed that numbers were less than a thousand in the suttas. I hope to catch them all by search for numbers with commas embedded.

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I’m 100% pro getting rid of my brain so why not extend the party.

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Lol. Just to be clear. We are eliminating blurb search from SCV entirely and restricting SCV search to the pli/en text segment strings. At a later date we can revisit this if SC ends up supporting blurb search.

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A few names (Amy)

  • Ajātasattu Vedehiputta: The two e’s in Vedehiputta could maybe do with the same dipthong as Jeta’s Grove—DN 2 section 2 segment 3
  • Pūraṇa Kassapa: The u in Pūraṇa is spoken short; can we make it longer? By contrast the end-a is spoken long and should be short—DN 2 section 2 segment 8
  • Makkhali Gosāla: The o in Gosāla could be treated the same way as in Gotama—DN 2 section 2 segment 13
  • Ajita Kesakambala: For the e in Kesakambala as above—DN 2 section 2 segment 18

Up to you to decide whether it’s important enough to go still into V092, or if it will be addressed later!

:anjal:

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Added as bugs to v0.9.2:white_check_mark: Thank you.

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Proposal for search phrase: Fruit of giving

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Added.

And also, thanks. :anjal:

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Oh wow, how cool! @Aminah, I don’t know how you got there, but I just copied your link into a new browser tab, changed the sutta reference (e.g.dn2 instead of mn57)—and now I have an MP3 of DN 2 to listen to while walking!

:+1: :clap: :tada: :balloon: :white_check_mark:

Bye bye, I’m on my way now…

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Right, this is really good to know, I think there are maybe some cool things already in SCV that aren’t obvious. Just a little while ago I was thinking that it would be great to be able to watch how users actually use SCV so as to better understand if there are any design tweaks that can be made to make things easier.

With regards to the download it’s in there in the “other resources” option in the individual sutta dropdowns:

image

It was because of this (and my ignorance) that I was kind of hoping it would be pretty straightforward to produce a downloadable playlist, but I very well trust Karl’s explanation that it is much more complicated than that.

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Rather than making Jeta and the above all exceptions, I’ve decided to make the dipthong the standard Amy mapping for “e”. This means that ALL e’s will now be dipthongs. This will introduce a new, hopefully less frequent problem, which is the short e required before conjuct consonants.

|e|is long in open syllables as in age, but before a conjunct consonant it is short as in end. –The Pronunciation of Pali

This means the exceptions will now be combinations such as jenta and each exception will need to be coded as such (e.g., “end”, “ent”). I will make a pass through the SCV Pali word list for such exceptions. Basically, when v0.9.2 comes out, all non-english e’s will be affected.

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OK. I am totally going to do a face-palm here => :see_no_evil:

Why?

Well I just searched for “bodhisattva”. And I did it to answer Javier. And it was important to be found. So where did SCV find “bodhisattva?”

SCV found bodhisattva in the blurb. :see_no_evil:

So no. I no longer feel comfortable lobotomizing SCV to not search blurbs. Indeed, the bodhisattva query is pretty critically informational about how a Buddhist word (bodhisattva) was never used by the Buddha. Based on this recent experience, I would recommend that we document the oddity of search results finding things in blurbs. It’s not a bug. It’s a…feature.

What say y’all?


The current implementation of downloads is very expensive (literally as in $$$). It is expensive because large sound files are retained and we have to pay for them. The fix is to throw them away. And we all know how hard it is to throw away some things…

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Sorry, I must have missed the original query skimming or something, but wouldn’t you sooner search for “bodhisatta” (Pali with 513 SC results) Rather than “bodhisattva” (Sanskrit)? If this has already been covered, apologies again.

I don’t know, I just threw away 20+ years worth of crap, it was great and not as hard as I would have thought. :smiley:

As to the main point though; yikes! That really is one figure out. Thanks for explaining. :anjal:

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Wowzers. And SCV shows 23 suttas with bodhisatta!

Hmm. Y’know? All those folk out there searching will search for bodhisattva. Just like I did. It is the well-known search phrase.

We may have discovered a new underlying requirement. The requirement to search for non-Pali Buddhist terminology. Perhaps the desired result is to recognize “bodhisattva” and understand it as a search for “bodhisattva or bodhisatta?” This is a simple feature (0.5d) and would just be a list that we can add to just as we do for search examples. This would be search synonyms.

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