Notes from a Linguistic Mystic

What exactly does a linguist do?

2013-05-19T00:00:00-04:00

So, I recently got an email from a reader (which I’ve edited into a single question for today’s post):

I’m currently in grade 11, and am trying to decide what I want to do with my life as far as education and jobs go. I absolutely adore writing, and it is certainly my dream career. However, I’d be fooling myself if I believed that I could rely on that as a sturdy job. So instead, for the time being, I will continue to write as a hobby.

I was reading a (fictional) book a little while ago, and one of the characters was someone who had devoted their life to living with the Navajo and learning their language and customs. That sparked some interest, and I began to look up things such as Global Studies. While I was searching, I came across Linguistics. So, here’s my question:

What exactly do you do? Sure, I’ve looked it up online. When I was doing that, I found basic definitions and found your site. When reading some of the things on there, I found a few very interesting and would love to hear your explanation of what linguistics is, if you wouldn’t mind taking the time to describe it. I think that as I look into it more, linguistics is one of those things that will become increasingly interesting to me.

This is an excellent question! Linguistics is one of those fields that most people have heard of, yet few can explain what it actually IS.

What don’t linguists do?

There are two really popular misconceptions about what linguists do which we should address first.

To start, linguists aren’t translators. Although there are many linguists who actually look into translation theory as a part of their research, that’s not what we are.

The other common misconception is that linguists sit around all day learning lots of different languages. This misconception leads people to, upon first meeting, immediately ask any linguist “How many languages do you speak?” This question is discussed extensively here, but in short, there’s more linguistics than speaking lots of languages.

Of course, there are many linguists who do part of their work by learning many languages, and it’s rare to find a linguist who speaks only his or her native language, one can be a very competent linguist and still spend most of their career working only with one or two languages. This is especially true in the realm of computational linguistics, where the problem isn’t so much the difference between languages, but getting a computer to understand human language at all.

What do linguists do?

This is actually really complicated question, but few people outside of the field know that. Linguistics is a very big field, with lots of different people doing lots of different things, because Language (with a big L, the whole idea of it) is wonderfully complicated with lots to study and research. So, I’m a linguist, yet I know people who are equally linguists who do things entirely different from what I do.

That said, we all have one thing in common: no matter what speciality or research area you look at, all linguists are trying to find and understand patterns in Language.

That sounds really abstract, but it seems to be the best common thread tying together all of the various sub-disciplines within the field.

Field linguists doing langauge documentation may be looking for patterns which help them understand and then write a grammar for a language that nobody has ever described.
Academic linguists are searching for patterns in whatever part of Language they feel is most interesting, and then generating models and theories based on those patterns.
People doing natural language processing are looking for specific patterns in text that have specific meanings, so that they can then teach a computer to find those patterns without human help. Often, the first step in this process is to find patterns of meaning and then annotate a text with those patterns so that a computer can use them. (Incidentally, for the last few years, I’ve been getting paid to generate these types of annotation schemas for medical records, so that’s one very concrete thing that a linguist does.)
People doing computer speech recognition (or studying human speech perception, like me) are trying to find the acoustical patterns which correspond to the sounds and words that somebody is saying, and people working on production are trying to find the patterns of mouth motion that correspond to certain sounds.
People in applied linguistics are often trying to find patterns in language and language learning that they use to improve the teaching of foreign languages.

… and the list goes on! There are thousands of tasks that a linguist might be suited for, because Language is really complex, and we interact with language in so many different ways on a regular basis.

I wish I could give you are really concrete answer, a list of 20 things that linguists do, and be done with it. But, much like asking what doctors do, what lawyers do, or even what you can use a rope for, there are thousands of possible answers, only loosely tied together.

Ultimately, though, linguists find patterns in Language. That’s what we’re trained to do, and, for most of us, that’s what we love doing. Every different linguist might find a different set of patterns that they are interested in, or might go about looking for them in a different way, but that’s what unites us all.

And the most beautiful part of it all is that there are plenty of patterns left for you in your future linguistic career.

Please drop the weapon!

2013-04-18T00:00:00-04:00

In light of the recent American push for gun control, I’ve been curious about the mindset and reasoning of the pro-gun, concealed-carry crowd, and reading posts on their forums.

One particular post on Reddit’s /r/ccw concealed weapons board jumped out at me. Unfortunately, I didn’t think to save a link and haven’t been able to find it, but it said something along these lines:

My concealed weapons instructor told us that if we’re ever in a situation where we have to draw our weapons, we should shout “Police drop your weapon!”. I know that it’s illegal to impersonate a police officer, but here’s the kicker: If you’re ever on trial, you can claim that what you actually said was “Please drop your weapon!”, which is totally OK, and the other witnesses won’t be able to contradict it.

The person who proposed this was immediately jumped on by other members of the board and it was almost universally agreed to be a bad idea, but it is phonetically fascinating.

Police, Please

At the core of the suggestion is the phonetic similarity between “police” and “please”, but interestingly, they’re not always similar. The slow-speech forms, in my dialect of American English, would be transcribed into the IPA as below:

Please - /ˈpliz/

Police - /pəˈlis/ (“puh-LEESE”)

In this phrasing, “Please” and “Police” aren’t terribly similar. But if you speed up the pronunciation of “Police” just a bit, merging the two syllables into one, you can get, narrowly:

Police (fast speech form) - [ˈpʰl̥is] (Sounds like “Pleese”)

Please (fast speech form) - [ˈpʰl̥iz] (Doesn’t change)

Although there’s often just the tiniest hint of schwa following the /p/ in fast speech forms of “police”, with this pronunciation, the only difference between the two is the voicing of the final fricative (/s/ vs. /z/). Given that English word-final voiced fricatives are often pretty voiceless (think how often you hear “Expensif” instead of “Expensive” in casual speech), the police/please ambiguity in quick speech is very real.

Mind you there’s also a very strong alternate pronunciation (often used by actual police officers, and prominently featured on “The Wire”) which uses initial stress on the word “PO-lice”, giving us /ˈpowlis/. If you live in an area where that’s common, or if you’re dumb enough to shout “PO-lice, drop the weapon”, the ambiguity is gone and you’re just impersonating an officer. And of course, the whole thing still does hinge on a jury believing that while somebody was threatening your life, you were still polite enough to preface your command with a “Please”.

So, the ambiguity is real in some cases, and anything is possible with an expensive enough lawyer, but from a linguistic standpoint, well, I wouldn’t bet my freedom on this cute little trick.

Of Google Translate and Rugged Anatomy

2013-04-07T00:00:00-04:00

I happened upon a thread over at Reddit, featuring the below picture of a popular knife manufacturer’s website, put through Google Translate (click to expand):

Here’s the text:

A sharp blade with a distinct tip, an integrated ignition steel and a diamond sharpener makes Bushcraft Survival the ultimate knife to force Bush enthusiasts. On the rugged vagina is a well lit place for the steel and with the diamond it becomes easy to sharpen the blade. It’s easy to swap two supplied bältesclipsen that lets you choose how you want to carry your knife.

This is, of course, absolutely wonderful. As several in the thread pointed out, in Swedish, French, Danish, German (and likely others), the word “sheath” (through some pretty straightforward analogy) is also is used to refer to a woman’s vagina, and indeed, the original site is in Swedish.

It appears that when the original poster used Google Translate, it saw “slidan” and chose “vagina” instead of “sheath”, resulting in comedy gold. You can see it also stumbled on bältesclipsen (‘belt clips’) later in the note, refusing to translate the term at all. Of course, if you visit the manufacturer’s official English version of that page, the “rugged vagina” becomes a “robust sheath), and oddly enough, the belt clips disappear entirely.

An illustrative example

However amusing, this is actually a wonderful example of one of machine translation’s key shortcomings: computers have no understanding of the real world.

Any human who was trying to translate that passage (and who was aware of both meanings of ‘slidan’) would likely use ‘sheath’ without a second thought. It’s an article about a knife, they’re referring to the sheath of a knife, and there are no women mentioned anywhere in the article, so the choice is clear.

To a computer, it’s all just words. The machine was processing along, then came to a point where a word could mean either ‘sheath’ or ‘vagina’. It has no understanding of knives, sheathes, vaginas, or tabooed subjects. It had likely been programmed to choose the more frequently used of the two words, and vagina (84,900,000 results) shows up almost three times as often in Google’s results than sheath (24,800,000 results). So, unaware of the meaning, the taboo, or the humor, the translation was made.

Machine translation is hard, and although we laugh at these occasional funny results¹, we should be amazed at how good it already is. More importantly, though, it’s crucial that we understand the shortcomings of these programs, because your company’s website is only a word-frequency-based decision away from selling rugged vaginas.

Speaking of funny, you owe it to yourself to watch The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air Theme, Google Translated and performed
↩

An Eggcorn in the Wild

2013-02-27T00:00:00-05:00

This morning, a young woman was hit while crossing the street by a hit-and-run driver. It’s a pretty terrible story, and as such, the local news networks have been covering it extensively all day.

There was one linguistically interesting occurrence related to this unfortunate bit of news: As one of the reporters from 9news.com live-tweeted the press conference, she made a very interesting error in one particular tweet:

East HS student was walking in the crosswalk w/the right away when she was hit. Student has head injury, again in critical condition. #9NEWS

This is a textbook ”eggcorn”, where an obscure, unusual, or otherwise opaque word or phrase is replaced with a similar sounding, more common one. I’ve discussed these before, but this particular one, substituting “right away” for “right-of-way” was particularly delicious.

After a reader pointed out the issue, to her credit, the reporter issued a followup tweet, thanking the reader and saying that she “was paying too much attention to the news conference”. Nonetheless, it was a linguistically fascinating error, and a beautiful example of the fact that eggcorns can still occur in some situations even when a person is familiar with the actual phrase or word.

Fast-scene-eight-ing, no? (OK, that was pushing it)

App.net - Human Social Networking

2013-02-26T00:00:00-05:00

As I’ve mentioned briefly in the past, I was an early backer of app.net, a for-pay social networking site. On the heels of their decision to offer a by-invitation free tier, I figured I would talk a bit about my experience there, and why I’m growing more and more fond of it over time.

A different paradigm

In practice, the biggest failings of Facebook and Twitter come from the simple fact that users are product to be delivered, rather than clients. Facebook’s privacy snafus (discussed extensively in my post about leaving Facebook) have primarily stemmed from their desire to make your data open to more marketers and advertisers. Twitter’s recent API changes and 3rd-party-client killing are largely to ensure that advertisers’ (annoying) messages are viewed as they want, when they want you to see them. In short, Facebook and Twitter make their money by selling me to marketers and advertisers, and by presenting me with things I don’t want to see.

This is why app.net is revolutionary and different. The initial idea behind the service was that a social network supported by its users would be able to put 100% of its efforts towards the users, rather than to advertisers, data miners, or marketers. They promised that you would own all your data, that the API would be open, and that the terms would be open to public comment. This is a brilliant idea, and is what led me to back the service immediately, even at the relatively steep $50/year (now down to $36/year).

Implementing the idea

App.net was backed, and opened its doors in August 2012. At first, they simply had alpha, a 256-character microblogging service. Then they launched annotations, a behind-the-scenes markup which allowed app.net posts to carry much more information than a 256-char post. This led to the development of services like patter, an IRC equivalent using ADN, and blog, which allows for long-form writing. Now, they’ve launched file uploads (10GB per paid user), and at this point, app.net is able to serve as the core of nearly any social-network-related app or site.

Most importantly, they’ve done all of the above well. The ADN staff has shown an abundance of caution, and aside from yesterday (during the launch of free accounts), the site has seldom been slow, and I’ve never once run into a bug or major error while using the site (or a 3rd party client).

Speaking of 3rd party clients, the developer community has stepped up nicely. Mac OS X has a great new app.net client called Kiwi, and there are great clients for iPhone (Riposte is my choice) and for iPad (NetBot wins). So, it’s well-adopted in the dev community, and there’s no shortage of good solutions for posting and interacting with the service, although the permanence of 3rd party services is always worth questioning.

The most important question, though, is what the experience is is like for users. Well, having spent 6 months or so on the service, I’d like to speak to that. We’ll start with the problem, then move to the joys.

App.net’s biggest problem

App.net is already better than Twitter and Facebook for many things. The problem facing app.net is the same problem facing any other nascent social networking site: your friends aren’t on it.

Right now, as many people have rightly pointed out, App.net is a magnificent place to talk about new technology, programming, and other “techie” kind of interests. This is not to say that there are not other “normal” people on the site, but they’re vastly outnumbered, and early in its lifetime, ADN certainly had more than its fair share of “brogrammers” (a wonderful term in its own right), although that too is changing.

Unfortunately, at the moment, there is only one person that I have met in real life who is on App.net. The majority of people that I know are on Facebook, simply because the majority of people that they know are on Facebook. It’s a tough sell to get anybody on a new social network, even tougher to be the first of their group of friends on it. App.net’s welcoming community dulls that pain, and has allowed me to meet very interesting people who I never would’ve interacted with otherwise. Ultimately, though, when you meet people that way, you end up with that strange, modern sort of friend who is your friend because you’ve learned about them online, rather than people who you learn about online because they’re already a friend.

This is not just a question of your local network. On Twitter, nearly every news agency, university, organization, and company has a Twitter feed that you can follow for updates, but right now, there are relatively few of these institutions on App.net, and because I rely on their Twitter feeds for sources of news and information, I’m forced to also use Twitter. This is a different subset of people who are not on the service who I wish were, and I badly wish that the ADN folks would track down news services, celebrities, and prominent bloggers and simply offer them a free verified accounts.

In order for App.net to take off, enough people have to see enough use for the service that it gains a critical mass of friends. You use Facebook because of the people on it, despite the service. ADN doesn’t have the people, so they badly need to show off how good that service can be. If I worked for App.net, my highest priority right now would be giving a top-of-the-line, reference implementation of the protocol available from the web which shows off not only how app.net is different, but why you need to be using it instead of your existing network. Something that I can show a friend and say “Look at what $36 a year can get you beyond Facebook or Twitter!”, and something with a bit more flash than what Alpha (the current reference implementation) provides.

Nevertheless, the current lack of people is something that I hope will change. App.net’s new “freemium” Model will lower the barrier of entry for many, and the invitation-based system will help people bring the people they care about onto the system. But the fact of the matter is that right now, ADN is a little too subtle about what it offers that existing solutions do not, and although an open API is a great lure for techie types, it means absolutely nothing to my aunt, my colleagues, or my next-door neighbor.

But there is a reason to love it, even without everybody you know.

A Fundamentally Human Social Network

App.net right now is fundamentally human. Right now, you can be reasonably sure that every person posting is an actual human, using their account for actual human purposes. Because a person had to pay to set up an account, you get fewer accounts which simply serve to notify about a given product, project, or service. In addition, spam is more-or-less absent (microspam excepted), and there’s a greater feeling of ownership of content and niceness, simply because, I think, people are paying to write it.

So, unlike with Twitter, where the vast majority of feeds are for publicity, notification, spamming (and other forms of marketing), or special-purpose secondary accounts, the signal-to-noise ratio is much much higher. It’s safe to say that the majority of App.net posts are by humans, for humans. You can, of course, carefully curate your twitter stream to only include human posts, but even still, advertising spam (even the officially endorsed versions) is impossible to avoid.

In addition, although it seems like a silly difference, the ability to write up to 256 characters makes for a surprising improvement in conversation and post quality. There are a great many things that can’t really be adequately said in 140 that can be in 256, and this, coupled with most clients’ robust support for conversation views, makes for a great medium someplace in between IRC-style chat and blog post conversations.

The idea of this strong social API is a brilliant one, and is already starting to work. I already mentioned patter, which provides IRC style chat using your ADN account. The true strength of app.net was shown to me the day that Felix Baumgartner made his supersonic jump, and by clicking a single link, I was frictionless-ly logged into a chat room to discuss it live as it happened, using the same credentials, friends, and service that I was already used to. With the advent of more services along these lines, having an app.net login, I hope, will be the key to a kingdom of interrelated apps.

Give it a try

Right now, App.net offers a wonderful microblogging experience with a number of great clients, great third-party apps, and a pleasant community and vibe. The biggest problem (really, the only major one) is that it’s new and hasn’t been widely adopted outside the techie world. But the best way to change that is to sign up.

Now that free accounts are available by invitation, there’s no good reason not to sign up and poke around a bit. If you’re interested in giving it a try, email me or leave a comment with your email address and I’ll shoot you an invite.

Once you’re there, look me up. Just look for nerdy, language-related posts from @vowels.

A Series of Ergonomic Reviews - Keyboard Ergnomics and Kinesis Freestyle Solo Mac Review

2013-02-21T00:00:00-05:00

This is the third of a small series of posts on computer ergonomics and how I’ve banished computer-use-related pain. As always, I have no affiliate links, kickbacks, nor relation to the companies whose products I’m reviewing, and these reviews are simply posted as a service to the internet in general. For full background, read the first post in the series here and the second post here.

Between the Rollermouse and adjustable-height desk, I was 90% pain free. But there was one more area which still needed some help.

Keyboard Ergonomics

Although many people are selling many different approaches to typing, there were a few ergonomic facts that nearly every resource I found agreed on:

Your arms should be perpendicular to front of the keyboard
Your wrists should not be horizontally bent as your hands sit on the homerow
Your keyboard should be at a height where your forearms are roughly level typing on it.
Your wrists and hand should be in roughly a straight line, vertically speaking
Your mouse should be as near to the keyboard as possible.

Here’s a cute little graphic (source) which demonstrates 1-4 in use:

I’ve used (for many years) an Apple Wireless Keyboard, which is a great little unit, and its compactness helps keep the mouse at hand (addressing issue #5). However, even once at the proper height, it has some flaws. First, its’ upward angle encourages vertical wrist-bending (like in the lower right of the diagram above) (Issue #4). Also, and more problematically, its’ (extremely) compact size forces people with broad shoulders (like myself) to angle the arms together approaching the keyboard, then splay the wrists back out to reach the proper key positioning (Issues #1 and 2). This is a major ergonomic issue for most laptops, as well.

I realized that this arm angle issue was perhaps the biggest remaining ergonomic problem I had, so I set out to find a way to fix it.

The Kinesis Freestyle Solo for Mac

The biggest problem I had was finding a keyboard that was friendly to a broad shouldered person like myself. The majority of ergonomic keyboards address this problem by being very contoured (the exemplar of this class being the Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard line). This is great for 1-4 above, allowing the wrists and arms to be in a more natural position while typing, but unfortunately, because these tend to be very large keyboards, they tend to to force your mouse to migrate well across the desk, and the contour on the front makes using a Rollermouse nearly impossible.

Luckily, it appears that fate wants me to have good ergonomics. As I was searching around on Craigslist, I happen to find somebody selling a Kinesis Freestyle Solo keyboard for Mac for $40 nearby, so, of course, I jumped on it.

Although it was the first generation version of the Kinesis Freestyle line (they’ve since moved to the Freestyle 2), it offered exactly what I needed: a keyboard which allows me to type with my arms more separated, allowing my wrists to remain straight even while typing. Mine even came with their “VIP” kit, which allows you to tent the two halves of the keyboard up a little bit more as you type, but because I use the roller mouse, I really haven’t found this necessary. Apparently, they also sell a kit which allows you to mount the two halves vertically, although I can’t possibly imagine using that on any regular basis. My final setup, as you can see below, is relatively straightforward (the white box at the top is an iPod/iPhone dock):

On the whole, I very much like this keyboard. The split design allows me to spread the two halves apart and type with my arms at the proper angle, it has more keys than my Apple wireless keyboard did (although it’s very easy to hit the “home” key instead of “delete”, and it’s just a little bit thicker than the roller mouse, allowing me to rest my palms on the mouse’s pads as I type. also, I’ve had no problems at all with the Apple specific button assignments for the function keys, and although it’s a little frustrating that they’re not the same positions here that they are on most modern Apple keyboards, I’ve never had a problem with them being recognized.

My one complaint with it is that the key feel isn’t at all satisfying, and the unit itself just feels cheaper than the Apple Keyboard, or even modern Razer devices. The key switches are certainly not mechanical, and although the pressure required to activate the rubber-dome switches is pleasantly light, it still feels rather mushy and noncommittal, and it’s hard to tell whether you hit a key or not. This may be something they’ve addressed in the Freestyle 2, but the moment they sell a version of this with mechanical switches, I’ll be on the pre-order list.

Pickiness about switch type aside, I would highly recommend this keyboard to anybody having arm angle issues, or simply looking for ergonomic keyboard that gives you plenty of options and ability to move around your typing position. Although I got an incredible deal on it, if I had to replace it tomorrow, I would gladly pay full retail ($129) for the new version.

Hitting the ‘End’ Key

So, between the adjustable height desk, the roller mouse, and the Kinesis Freestyle Solo keyboard, I’m now in a place where I’m largely pain-free, and I can do a full day of work at the computer, alternating between standing and sitting, with relatively little physical consequence.

As you can imagine, I’m absolutely overjoyed by this, and even though it cost me a fair amount of money to acquire the gear I needed to get there, I really do feel like it’s money well spent.

In my last post, I want to talk about some of the other steps that you can take to improve your computer usage and reduce pain without opening your wallet.

Until next time.

A Series of Ergonomic Reviews - Contour Design Rollermouse Free 2 and Evoluent Vertical Mouse 4 Reviews

2013-02-19T00:00:00-05:00

This is the second of a small series of posts on computer ergonomics and how I’ve banished computer-use-related pain. As always, I have no affiliate links, kickbacks, nor relation to the companies whose products I’m reviewing, and these reviews are simply posted as a service to the internet in general. For full background, read the first post in the series here, and the third post here.

As I mentioned last time, moving to an adjustable height desk was a major help for my neck and shoulders, and finally put me in a situation where my mouse and keyboard were at the proper height. But even with that, after any mousing-intensive task (data annotation, document editing, or click-heavy gaming), I’d still find myself with considerable wrist pain. So, my next step was to find a better mousing solution.

Finding a better mouse

For many many years, I’ve used a Logitech VX Revolution travel mouse for all of my computing. It’s accurate, fast, and considering I’ve been using the same one since it came out, reliable. But one of the things I realized was that my using such a mouse, and specifically one smaller than my hand, was a major source of my pain.

The first (and cheapest) step I took was to pick up a gel wrist rest. This was helpful in reducing some of the arm pain, but the tension in my hand was still very much there, and even with the wrist rest, I was limited to around 20 minutes of heavy mousing.

I spent a great deal of time trying (and ultimately returning) different mice, ranging from a larger full-size mouse, to a Logitech Thumb Trackball, to a Kensington Slimblade full-size Trackball, but still, my wrist pain stuck around (although varying slightly by solution). So, one after another, the competition got returned.

The Contour Design Rollermouse Free 2

Then, I read about the Contour Design Rollermouse line of input devices. They offered a 30 day in-home trial, so I took it, and ordered a Contour Design Rollermouse Free 2.

This is a completely different approach to input than anything else. Rather than moving a mouse or trackball, you slide a tube on a cylinder, moving it side to side to move the cursor side to side and spinning it forward or backwards to move the cursor up and down. You can press the bar down to single click, or use any of the other buttons for double-clicking or right clicking.

(Image Credit)

This means it’s not only very low friction, but it works great with either hand, and it’s thin enough that it can sit in front of your keyboard on the desk. Ergonomically speaking, this means that you’re no longer reaching for a mouse, just moving your hands back towards you an inch or two from the keyboard. The Free 2 includes its own wrist-rest for the keyboard. In my experience, it’s been very accurate and great for clickfest games like Starcraft or Diablo, and the adjustment period was only a couple of hours, a bit more to click-and-drag while holding the bar down. You can control the cursor speed on the unit itself, which is really helpful for the initial learning curve, and changing mouse-speed at the system level helps more later.

The unit has only two disadvantages. The first is the Copy/Paste buttons. The problem is that to work at all, they require you to use Contour’s bespoke version of USB Overdrive. The regular version of USB Overdrive (which I use and love) doesn’t recognize those buttons at all, and conflicts with their version, so you can’t install both at once. So, for whatever reason, I have two buttons on the mouse which my Mac just doesn’t see. Frustrating, but minor.

The biggest weakness is that it’s fundamentally not good for twitchy First-Person-Shooter gaming, where you often need to keep mousing in one direction well after you’ve hit the edge of the screen. The Rollermouse has two buttons at either end of the track that, when hit with the roller, simply continue to advance the cursor towards the side of the screen at a set rate. This works intuitively for desktop computing, but in an FPS, when you’re trying to turn your view or do a 360º turn, the set rate is just too slow (and cannot be adjusted).

Rollermice are pricy ($200+), but for me, it’s been totally worth it, and 30+ days later, I wouldn’t dream of sending it back. Using a regular mouse at a desk now just feels silly, and I’m now to the point where I’m scanning Craigslist for used versions so I can have one at work, too. Most importantly, though, I’m mouse-pain free, and 5 hours of data annotation (very mouse-heavy) simply isn’t an ergonomic problem.

So the Rollermouse left me 99% covered, with FPS gaming as my sole unfulfilled mousing need. Luckily, fate intervened to bring me and Call of Duty back together.

The Evoluent VerticalMouse 4

A few days after falling for the Rollermouse, I happened to be perusing Craigslist looking for keyboards (more on that next time), and stumbled upon an ad for another ergonomic mouse, the Evoluent VerticalMouse 4 Wired selling for $40. Considering that this was a $60+ discount, and I needed an FPS mouse, I went for it, and picked it up.

(Image Credit)

This is a conventional slide-it-on-the-table optical mouse, but it’s designed to be held as if you were shaking its hand, in a much more neutral position. It’s quite nice, with 6 programmable (using USB Overdrive) buttons, and I’ve found it quite accurate. The LED “Evoluent” logo is excessively bright, and can be annoying in an otherwise dark room, but the mouse is otherwise well designed.

Most importantly, although I still do get some pain using it for a few hours (with breaks) for gaming, it really is more comfortable than any slide-it-on-the-table mouse I’ve ever used, especially with a gel pad for the wrist, and it has quite neatly filled the niche of a somewhat ergonomic FPS gaming mouse for those occasional FPS sessions. Although I’m not sure I’d spend the full $100 MSRP, for the $40 I paid, the VM4 is an excellent ergonomic mouse, and is really useful in the one niche that the Rollermouse falls down.

That said, I spent a week or so with both the Rollermouse and the VerticalMouse on my desk, and outside of the First-Person gaming niche, seldom reached for the VerticalMouse. Using the Rollermouse, now that I’m used to it, really is that much quicker, more comfortable, and more ergonomic than any mouse, even one so consciously designed as the VM4.

Mousing Wrap-up

So, after trying a variety of input devices, I’ve come to use (and love) the Rollermouse for 95% of tasks, and I like the VerticalMouse for the specific niche of FPS gaming. If you’re experiencing wrist or finger pain from mousing, try the Rollermouse free trial. They’ll cover everything if you don’t like it, and, well, this little rollermouse has been a lifesaver for me.

So, mouse needs met, I went on to rectify the last of my ergonomic sins: the keyboard.

To be continued…

How to ‘shit a brick’ in Russian

2013-02-18T00:00:00-05:00

This article extensively discusses a profane English idiom and its Russian translation. If you don’t care for linguistic discussions of naughty words, you might be more interested in a different post from the archive.

I just happened upon an excellent (although brutal) article talking about the cultural significance of dashboard-mounted cameras in cars in Russia.

Although the whole article was fascinating, as a linguist, I absolutely loved the author’s brief foray into the language of the websites used to share accident videos (about halfway through the article). My favorite, particularly beautiful example is below:

кирпичи – “Bricks” (as in “shitting bricks.”) The audio track often features the driver panting or shouting the entire Russian vocabulary of swears at the top of their lungs. Used for videos with near misses or close shaves.

“кирпичи” (pronounced ‘keer-PI-chi’, /kirpitʃi/), is quite literally just the Russian word for a brick you’d build a house with. As the author suggests, this second meaning comes about because Russian speakers seem to have adopted the English phrase “to shit a brick” into their language.

When you read it, you’ll borrow idioms

This beautiful English idiom, alternately “to shit bricks” or “to shit a brick”, roughly means “to become panicked, scared or angry”, is attested all the way back to 1961 in the Unabridged Oxford English Dictionary (although a few uses were shown prior to that in Google Ngram Viewer). In my experience, is most often used with reference to somebody else’s future or past reaction. A few examples:

“When she sees that dent in her car, she’s going to shit a brick”

“Kerri shat a brick when John jumped out at her from the bushes”.

The equivalent Russian phrase, cрать кирпичами, literally means “to shit with bricks” (cрать ‘to shit/defecate’ + кирпич-ами ‘brick.instrumental-case’). cрать кирпичами (pronounced “Srat Keer-pi-cha-mi”, /sratʲ kirpitʃami/) is defined on the Russian meme and slang site Lurkmore as, roughly translated, “designating an extreme degree of fright”, roughly equivalent to the English expression, and very much in line with the dashcam video site usage. The site then goes on to mention the common uses of the term on the internet, in greater culture, and in medicine (mocking the logo and packaging of a hemhorroid cream which appears to show the unorthodox production of a кирпич).

Entertainingly, Lurkmore.to also associates the Russian phrase with “Майндфак”, a Russian transliteration of the English slang term “mindfuck”, and give the Russian translation of the common English phrase associated with “Mindfuck” surprise images, “When you see it, you’ll shit bricks”. Considering that the association between these images and the phrase is so strong that the main site devoted to collecting these images is shitbrix.com (NSFW), I’m glad to see that the Russian equivalent shares this association.

Putting all the bricks together

So, in conclusion, I absolutely love that this English idiom was borrowed into Russian, and all the more so, I love that the phrase was borrowed through translation (using the Russian word for “shit” and “bricks”), rather than “шит брикс” or a similar transliteration. I’ve also enjoyed looking into the history of the English idiom, although it has been surprisingly difficult, because relatively few sources examine profane idioms in detail.

Regardless, this is just another example of the power of the internet and the language change that’s happening around the world, and it shows that no language is immune. So, next time I see a similar idiom borrowing, I should be better able to hold on to my кирпичи.

A Series of Ergonomic Reviews - GeekDesk Max Adjustable Height Desk Review

2013-02-17T00:00:00-05:00

This is the first of a small series of posts on computer ergonomics and how I’ve banished computer-use-related pain. As always, I have no affiliate links, kickbacks, nor relation to the companies whose products I’m reviewing, and these reviews are simply posted as a service to the internet in general. You might also be interested in the second and third posts in the series.

As a graduate student, annotation supervisor, and computer geek, I’m sitting in front of a screen for most of my average day, and aside from investing in a comfortable desk chair several years ago, I never really put mind to how my body was positioned, used, and stressed as I did so.

This hasn’t been a problem in the past, but recently, after one acute injury (and, as I get older), I found myself plummeting into the depths of RSI (“repetitive stress injury”) hell. My wrists were killing me, fingers were going numb, my neck and shoulders were tense, and it got to the point where after about 20 minutes of typing at my desk, I would literally have to stop. Even using a wrist brace wasn’t helping, and it was getting worse, not better. Given that I write papers, code, and emails for a living, if I couldn’t safely do so, my very livelihood was at risk. I had to do something.

“Ergonomics”

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the earliest attested usage of the term ergonomics was in 1949, and interestingly, the term seems to have been formed based on the existing word “economics”, simply substituting eco- for “ergo-“, the Greek word for ‘work’. Simply put though, the field of ergonomics is focused on studying how it is that people do work, and how to more efficiently and safely allow that to happen.

When I started experiencing this pain, I went to see my doctor, who recommended I start looking into ergonomics. So I did. After reading some online resources on computer Ergonomics (as well as talking to ergonomics geeks), my problems quickly became clear.

So, I decided to do an ergonomic overhaul of my workspace. I’m going to make a few posts discussing some of the solutions that I’ve found in that process, and reviewing the projects that have really made a difference.

The search for a better desk

I quickly realized that my biggest issue was that the desk I was using simply didn’t fit me. Based on my body geometry (and my strangely long upper arms), when sitting, I need a desk that’s around 26” high. I was limping along using a 30” desk with a keyboard tray, which lowered the keyboard down a little bit, but this left my mouse on the desktop, and left my wrist at an unhealthy angle when mousing. My monitor was also far too low, and the relatively small desktop didn’t give me a place to more stably raise it up.

On top of all that, I realized that I was spending way too much time sitting, and wasn’t changing my position nearly often enough to allow my body to stay healthy. So, in the name of experimentation, I built a $22 IKEA standing desk. It allowed me to pick the proper height for my body geometry (which I then knew for later) and felt great, but ultimately, as I typed, the desk-on-a-desk shook around more than I was comfortable with, and it was quite a production to move back to sitting. Perhaps most importantly, it was ugly as sin.

But it was still $22 well spent. Having built and used one, I knew I could use a standing desk, that I liked the idea, and most importantly, how high I needed it to be. So, I started searching for an adjustable height desk.

The GeekDesk Max

Unfortunately, the few stores selling adjustable height desks in my area wanted $1500+ and had non-existent return policies, so I looked online and found GeekDesk. After reading an absurd number of reviews, almost all positive, I ordered a small frame-only GeekDesk Max, to save money (shipping the top was pricy) and get a faster ship time. It cost around $810 to get it to my doorstep, and I was amazed at their shipping speed, I ordered on a Sunday afternoon and got it on Friday.

I picked up a desktop from IKEA, around $38, a LACK shelf ($14), and four 4x4x5 chunks of scrap wood from Home Depot ($0.98), and assembled the whole thing in about an hour and a half. I mounted the desktop to the desk itself, put the shelf on the four blocks, and put my monitor and laptop on the shelf. I also mounted a vented plastic bin to the bottom of the table with a power strip and USB hubs, for cable management. Now my monitor’s at the proper height, my desk can be at whatever height I need, and the whole thing actually even looks attractive.

In short, even costing almost as much as a month of rent, I absolutely love the GeekDesk Max. It’s been reliable, relatively quiet, has had no problems lifting everything I put on it, and it’s fairly stable even at standing height (although you can still feel a bit of wobble if you lean on it more than a bit). Although I thought it was silly at first, the four programmable height settings are a brilliant thing: I use one for my sitting height, one for my standing height, one as low as the desk will go (for a better window view when I’m not using it), and one at handwriting height while standing. If you’re interested in an adjustable height desk, I would highly recommend GeekDesk to anybody.

Life with an adjustable height desk

Most importantly, moving to an adjustable height desk helped a lot with the pain. The most beautiful thing about it, is that I was able to get my mouse and keyboard (along with the rest of the desktop) at the right height all the time, which immediately cut down on a lot of the pain I was feeling.

I also find myself doing most of my actual work standing up, sitting down only to take a break every so often or at the end of a long day. It’s odd, but when I stand, I find I’m less likely to get into a “holding pattern”, surfing the same few websites over and over, and I’m more likely to actually get something done, and it’s infinitely easier to break off from the computer to go check the boiling water in the kitchen, etc.

So, although your mileage may vary, the GeekDesk Max (and adjustable height desks in general) get my seal of approval.

But even with the better desk, mousing and keyboarding still hurt. So, in the next part of my series on ergonomics), we’ll talk about mice, and how I managed to cut that pain out.

Small Change, Huge Difference

2013-01-25T00:00:00-05:00

One of the things I enjoy most about language is that even a tiny change in phrasing or word choice can have a profound effect on what’s understood. I recently happened across a perfect example of this in one of my favorite linguistic areas, talking about time.

Consider the below two questions asking about two famous bands, one active and one not:

Did you ever see the Beatles live in concert?

Have you ever seen the Rolling Stones live in concert?

They’re both asking for roughly the same information, and both make perfect sense. Now, let’s swap the phrasing around:

Have you ever seen the Beatles live in concert?

Did you ever see the Rolling Stones live in concert?

Suddenly, to a native speaker, something’s off. Both the English present perfect tense (“Have you seen”) and the simple past tense (“Did you see”) indicate that the seeing would have happened before the conversation.

However, in swapping the two tenses, we’ve changed the implication of the sentence. In the first set of sentences, using the present perfect (“have you seen”) implies, through whatever linguistic wonder, that you still could go see the Rolling Stones if you wanted to. On the other hand, using the simple past acknowledges that, if you hadn’t seen them while you had a chance (before the deaths of John Lennon and George Harrison), you never will.

This difference isn’t just to trip us up. We can use this implication productively, to clarify exactly what we’re talking about. Imagine being asked both of the below questions:

Did you ever visit the World Trade Center?

Have you ever visited the World Trade Center?

The first question, to most Native English speakers’ ears, is asking whether you had a chance to visit the World Trade Center towers before their destruction on 9/11. If somebody has visited the newly rebuilt World Trade Center complex, or perhaps the memorial garden, they should answer “Yes” to the second question, but not to the first. Similarly, if you asked a friend (about a mutual acquaintence) “Did John ever show you his scar?”, your friend’s reponse might start with “When did John die?!”

This difference in implication, a change in what linguists refer to as aspect, is very subtle, and may take many years for a non-native speaker to fully master. But at the same time, it’s very real, and it’s an important part of language which humans (and, in my research, computers) must be able to understand.

I just hope that you can understand it before somebody could ask me if you ever did.

Redefining Wellness - The language of Colorado Marijuana dispensary names

2013-01-16T00:00:00-05:00

After my non-linguistic post a few days ago on some of the unintended consequences of legalization, I figured I would follow up with a linguistic post, looking at one really interesting aspect of Colorado’s recent love affair with Marijuana: Marijuana dispensary naming language.

Background

A bit of background for those not familiar with my (rather crazy) state: Colorado, some time back, made “medical marijuana” legal, allowing any resident of the state who purchases a card from a specialized doctor (after a nominal “examination”) to purchase marijuana. Once you have a “red card”, you’re able to walk into any one of the specialized marijuana stores (called “dispensaries”) in the state of Colorado, present your card, and purchase any variety of products containing THC.

Upon the passage of Medical Marijuana in CO, dispensaries popped up everywhere. As of October 2012, there are 266 licensed dispensaries in the state of Colorado, with many more having open applications. These dispensaries popped up everywhere, filling empty lots (and, to be fair, bringing tax dollars to their communities), and in some areas, you could find 5 dispensaries in as many blocks.

Doctor or Dispensary?

As a linguist, I’ve always been impressed by the uniqueness (and in some cases humor) of the dispensary names, but the true extent to which they’ve influenced the local language was brought home to me this Christmas.

On Christmas, while opening presents with friends and family, I opened a small envelope from my lovely girlfriend. Inside were three gift cards labeled only with the name of the store, “The Wellness Center”. My first reaction, upon seeing those cards, was utter confusion. I looked over at her and asked “Did you get me a gift card to a dispensary?”.

She quickly explained that, in fact, the gift cards were for therapeutic massage from The Wellness Center in Denver (an excellent gift, and excellent place, by the way). The interesting thing is that everybody in my family, upon hearing the name of the place, all thought “dispensary” too.

So, why did 6 different people immediately think “The Wellness Center” was a dispensary, rather than a massage/acupuncture/chiropractor center?

To answer this, I did what any good linguist would do: I did an experiment to find out why this might be.

An Experiment!

First, I found two lists of Medical Marijuana Dispensaries, one standalone list and the list provided by Westword (a local counter-culture paper). I pulled the HTML of these pages down, and wrote a short python script to isolate the dispensary names into a single plaintext file. There was some duplication, both due to dispensaries having the same names and due to duplication across the two lists (although the first site seemed to be out of date and represent the initial crop, if you will, of dispensaries, many now closed).

This created The Corpus of Colorado Medical Marijuana Dispensary Names (freely available at that link for whatever use you’d like). This plaintext file then allowed me to do whatever I’d like with the dispensary names.

Once I had this data, I used WriteWords’ Word Frequency Calculator to generate a list of words in these names by frequency of occurrence, and from there, we can proceed to analysis.

Frequency explains it all

It turns out that my family wasn’t crazy after all (at least, not in that way). Looking at the word frequency listing, we see these are the top five most common words (with their number of uses in parentheses):

wellness (65 times (out of 424))
the (51 times)
center (47 times)
medical (30 times)
dispensary (25 times)

Given that the word “wellness” appears in 15% of all dispensary names, and is the most frequent word by far (even surpassing “the”!), it’s no shock at all that we made that mental leap to “dispensary” given that “The Wellness Center” uses the top three most common dispensary name components.

This use is absolutely fascinating. “Wellness” (meaning ‘The state of being in good health’ for most of its 400+ year life) is now linked strongly to smoking and marijuana use. It’s a wonderful example of meaning change that this frequency of use in this context is so strong that I was left double-checking with a massage therapy provider to make sure they don’t also sell marijuana, based on name alone.

As impressive as this example is, “wellness” is not universal among dispensary names, and there are several other trends worth highlighting.

Other trends

Although you can always look at the frequency list yourself, because this is a website and it’s the cool thing to do, I generated a word-cloud for the data (using WordItOut) to help visualize other common terms:

Looking at the frequency of different words in the dispensary name list, aside from the obviously-pot-related names (“CannaMart”), a few other trends jump out.

First, the terms “medical” or “medicine” appear in 11% of all names, along with other variations on the “it’s medicine, we swear” theme (“meds”, “medicals”, “Rx”, Health”, “clinic”, “pharmacy”). These names are mirrored with a trend towards using a Green Cross (think Red Cross, but green) to represent dispensaries. This is to be expected given how defensive these stores have had to be of the “medicinal” status of their product.

There’s also, as one might expect, a number of nature-related terms used in these names. “Green”, “organic”, “herbs”, “natural”, “nature”, “harvest”, and so forth all figure prominently in the naming convention. And, as you might expect in Denver (the Mile-high city), there is no shortage of “mile HIGH” jokes.

Of course, there are also discreet names. Places like “Physician Preferred Products” or “Colorado Alternative Medicine” could easily pass for actual medical facilities on a tax application, and other places (“The Station”) are revealed as dispensaries only by the smell.

My personal favorite naming convention is the use of a three word name which, taken as an acronym, is “THC” (the name of the active drug in marijuana). Places like “The Herbal Center”, “The Health Center”, “Timberline Herbal Clinic”, “Tender Healing Care”, “Total Health Concepts” all play off of this acronym, and often their signs emphasize the first three letters typographically, usually coupled with the Green Cross or a Pot leaf.

A fascinating linguistic era

With the creation of medical pot laws in the state of Colorado, a previously tabooed act (dealing pot) suddenly became (semi-)legal, and an entire underground industry was pushed into the light and asked to find an image (and a marketing message). Some went the “natural” route, aiming for the organic crowd. Some, had (more than a bit of) fun with it, indulging in cheeky plays on words (Mountain High Club, The Herbal Center, Kind Pain Management), a subtle wink towards people in the know about these things. And, of course, some proprietors (likely the more cautious of the bunch) kept close to their “medical” mandate, using clinical language (and symbolism) to distance themselves from the recreational market (and perhaps in their minds, from federal prosecution).

If I find the time, it will be fascinating to follow-up in a few years to see how these names change now that Colorado has simply legalized it for all adults. All indications are that our current “medical” marijuana distribution system will be converted to recreational stores, finally able to legally sell to those recreational users who haven’t yet bought medical cards. With that elimination of the “medical” pretense, I wouldn’t be surprised to find the naming landscape change again, with the “medical” names falling off in favor of the more cutesy and “natural” names (likely with a smattering of discreet dispensaries for those whose credit card statements need be cleaner than their urine tests). Who knows, maybe future generations will someday know the word “Wellness” to mean “health” rather than “marijuana sales”.

Regardless, this is a fascinating time to be a linguist in the state of Colorado, and as we engage in this experiment with legalization, it will be fascinating to watch the evolution (and unleashing) of marijuana-related language, officially and unofficially.

Don’t worry, though, I’ll watch from a good, safe distance.

The Smell of Fear

2013-01-12T00:00:00-05:00

This is a little more personal, but it’s something I feel like needs to be out there.

An experiment in empathy

Imagine you were bitten by a snake. Upon being bitten, your lungs tighten up and it gets hard to breathe. Your vocal folds start swelling, which produces a measurable drop in the pitch of your voice, and your nose starts running, your eyes start burning, and your body goes into overdrive with mucus production, leaving you coughing, clearing your throat, and occasionally choking. Now imagine that you knew that every bite that you got increases the chances that your next reaction could go from supremely unpleasant to life threatening.

Now, imagine you were bitten by that same snake over and over again. You’re walking across campus, and get bit by the snake. Sitting in your apartment, and one sneaks into your house and bites you. You walk into a party, you get bitten. And if you’re bitten more than once in the same week, each one is much worse than the last.

Finally, imagine that every time you get bitten, moments before, you hear the same hissing from the snake.

Can you imagine how that hissing would make you feel? Can you imagine how, even if you didn’t get bitten that time, even the sound would scare you, would send your heart racing and your blood pressure pounding, and make you want to run away? How, after enough exposures, the sound itself would become the sound of fear.

The Smell of Fear

Oddly enough, I’m allergic to Marijuana. Quite severely so. Every one of the symptoms I described above as coming from a hypothetical snake bite, I get when exposed to marijuana smoke, even in the kinds of small doses that seep in from a neighbor’s apartment, or from walking past somebody smoking up on campus. And my reactions have been getting more powerful over time, which is led my allergist to prescribe me a portable epinephrine injector in case a reaction does get life-threatening. Unfortunately, even if I leave the area quickly, these symptoms, especially the swelling of my vocal folds, can persist for 48 to 72 hours after a heavy exposure, leading me to cancel voice lessons, and making me lose my voice partway through lectures.

As you know, Marijuana has a very pungent odor, one that can travel long distances, and make its way through apartment blocks quite easily. If you’re smoking in your car, I smell it as I drive by, and if you smoked before coming to my class, I smell it as I hand you back your homework. Living in Colorado, I cross the street rather than walking by a dispensary (a store which sells “medical” marijuana to anybody who’s purchased a medical card from a specialized doctor).

Because of this allergy and years of exposure, each time I smell it, I react. Not always my lungs, but my pulse quickens. My blood pressure spikes, and just like if you saw a snake or heard the hissing, I go, even if just for a second, into fight-or-flight mode. In short, an odor that many people just tolerate, and that pot smokers usually don’t notice, to me, is the smell of fear.

I’m also not alone in this. Studies have been done which show the existence, as well as the commonness, of marijuana allergy. (I’ve compiled a list here, along with some other resources). Most allergists, police departments, and even some landlords, are aware of people with this condition, and acknowledge it to be relatively common (though seldom this strong).

Unfortunately, although many people know about it, nobody really knows how to deal with it. But really, dealing with it is easy.

Be considerate

Colorado just legalized marijuana. My own health aside, this is almost certainly an improvement to our handling of crime and drug laws, but unfortunately, now our legislative systems have gotten ahead of our social ones, and marijuana is now “OK” before our society has a chance to figure out how it needs to be handled responsibly, and we’ve signed off on a new smoked drug as we’re still trying to deal with the health effects of the last one.

Unlike alcohol (or any other non-smoked drug), smoked or vaporized marijuana is an area of effect drug. Somebody could drink themselves into oblivion in one corner of the room and affect nobody but themselves, but one person cannot smoke marijuana in a bar, apartment, or park, without exposing everybody else in the area to it. For most people, it’s just an annoying smell, but for people like me (as well as asthmatics or people with COPD), it’s a legitimate danger. And, as I’ve been dealing with, even a neighbor in an apartment complex smoking can be a danger.

This area-of-effect something we need to consider strongly, this is something that legislators and landlords need to think about and write into housing contracts, and this is that something that you, if you decide to use marijuana, need to consider.

You, of course, have the right to do whatever you’d like with your body and your home, and to enjoy whatever pastimes you care to. That said, if you’re going to use any kind of product with THC in it, it’s quite easy to find one that doesn’t require smoking, and one that you can use privately. At least in Colorado, you can’t walk 2 miles without finding a dispensary, which sells a number of THC infused items, ranging from lollipops to truffles to sodas. If you’re gonna bring pot to a party, bring a 12 pack, bring a box of truffles. Be creative, and bake your grandma’s special brownies extra special. And if you need to smoke or use a vaporizer, there’s no place like upwind of a beautiful, empty field, or at least out in a sealed garage rather than in the living room. And in Colorado, cannabis clubs are popping up where you know you’ll be among friends, and where people like me know better than to approach. You have the freedom to smoke in your house or apartment, but don’t forget, your neighbors have a right to breathe safely in theirs.

All I ask is that you be considerate when you’re thinking about smoking marijuana in public, at a concert, or in a shared apartment building. Although it may just be part of the party for you, you may be endangering your neighbor’s preferences, lungs, or even lives.

It’s not that people like me have moral objections, hate your freedom, or want to be “narcs”. It’s simply that when you smoke in public or in a shared space, no matter your intentions (or ignorance of the issue), you’re filling my life, my world, and sometimes even my home, with the smell of fear. And nobody deserves that.

Edit: My city newspaper, the Boulder Daily Camera, has accepted an abridged version of this as a guest commentary.

Coming Full Circle: Articulatory Setting and Point of resonance

2012-12-23T00:00:00-05:00

When I was young, long before I knew what a linguist was, I remember wandering through the Tattered Cover (a multi-story bookstore then near the Cherry Creek Mall in Denver, CO) and stumbling upon a strange finding for a bookstore: a small baggie containing a booklet and a cassette tape, David Alan Stern’s ”Acting with an Accent: Standard British”.

My family had a history of goofy home movies and different voice “characters”, so the idea of “speaking British” had an immediate usefulness in my young mind. My father indulged my curiousity, and quickly (more quickly than they anticipated), I learned a British accent. Then, after a later trip to the same bookstore, a Russian accent. A special-order later, Southern. Before I left high school, I could switch into (and stay in, for hours, if needed) no fewer than 6 different dialacts, ranging from comical to convincing.

“Point of Resonance”

Although it played a huge role in my phonetic life, one aspect of David Alan Stern’s method of accent teaching never quite sat well with me as a phonetician.

The first step in every one of his tapes/CDs is to find and develop the “point of resonance” for a given dialect. He always begins by explaining that for General American English (GA) speakers, this point is, quoting Dr. Stern from memory, “at the place above your tongue where your fingers would meet if you pressed two fingers into your cheeks and they were flexible enough to come together”. He would then go on to explain the “point of resonance” for the dialect in question, moving closer to your teeth for Standard British, further back in the mouth and throat for Russian, high, near the velum, for Australian (as memory serves).

He would then go on to encourage you to mimic this point of resonance, to visualize it, and to “use” this point of resonance while speaking, even before applying any of the consonant or vowel changes which were characteristic of the dialect in question.

This was, unquestionably, a powerful teaching technique. Using this approach the sounds themselves simply “got out of my way”, and I was able to mimic something important about a dialect without even thinking about the individual sound changes. And although the sound-by-sound descriptions were useful and helped improve the authenticity of the accent, for me, only when I “found” this point was I able to not only produce an accent, but to stay in it.

Unfortunately, as a phonetician, trained in the classical approach of sounds as independent entities, this idea was far from conventional. I was taught that we describe dialects by describing their sound transformations, giving rules such as “in Russian-accented English, all instances of /ɪ/ (as in “bit”) are replaced with [i] (as in “beet”)”. We can also describe things like prosody (how stress and pitch are assigned), and we can describe word-specific substitutions.

But nobody ever talked, in my experience, about a grander “point of resonance” characteristic of a given dialect, and the few times I (poorly) described such an idea around the phonetically knowledgable, I was met mostly with blank stares. Until last night.

“Articulatory Setting”

As I’m planning to look into voicing type (“breathy” vs. “creaky” vs. “normal” or “modal” voice, another post coming soon) as a part of my dissertation, my advisor recently recommended John Laver’s 1980 book The Phonetic Description of Voice Quality¹.

There, as I was reading, I happened upon this passage, quoting another author, discussing the idea of “articulatory setting” (“articulatory” here, as in most of phonetics, referring to the movements of the tongue, lips, mouth, and other parts of the vocal apparatus):

Broadly, it is the fundamental groundwork which pervades and, to an extent, determines the phonetic character and specific timbre of a language. It is immanent in all that the organs do. Articulatory setting does not imply simply the particular articulations of the individual speech sounds of a language, but is rather the nexus of these isolated facts and their assemblage, based on their common, rather than their distinguishing, components. (Quote from Laver 1980 pp. 12, in turn quoting Honikman 1964 ²).

When I read this, I couldn’t help but smile, eagerly reading and cross-referencing with my copy of Netter’s Anatomy. This, and the subsequent chapter, went on to describe quite neatly the phonetic realities of Dr. Stern’s “point of resonance”, and gave examples of all of the various articulatory parameters which help to make it up.

Coming Full Circle

Anybody paying attention can easily draw a solid line from that moment when I picked up that weird tape-and-booklet-in-a-baggie to a month or two ago, when I recommended that same accent learning kit to a student in the Phonetics and Phonology class I was teaching. These kits were the first time I though about dialect, the first time I saw the IPA, and the first time I ever considered sounds independent of letters.

It may seem silly that finding a scientific description of the phenomenon of “point of resonance” meant so much to me. But that little paragraph, knowing that term, gave me something I’d long missed. It brought my first meaningful (and at the time, amazing) phonetic experimentations into focus. It validated an approach to speech that I’d long believed in, but seldom discussed.

Most importantly, though, it gave me a way to use the language of my current world to relate to the very first moments of my phonetic life. A Christmas gift, it seems, from the most unexpected of sources.

Laver, J. (1980). The phonetic description of voice quality. Cambridge Eng.: Cambridge University Press.
↩
In Abercrombie, D., & Jones, D. (1964). In honour of Daniel Jones: Papers contributed on the occasion of his eightieth birthday, 12 September 1961. London: Longmans.
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On the pronunciation of beloved, and giving thanks

2012-11-22T00:00:00-05:00

Yesterday, my girlfriend and I got to talking about the word “beloved”, and it’s been on my mind ever since. For those unfamilar, “beloved” has the strange property of having two different acceptable pronunciations: /bi’lʌvd/ (two syllables, pronounced like “bi-loved”) and /bi’lʌvɨd/ (three syllables, pronounced like “bi-love-id”).

This is rather interesting in and of itself, because there are relatively few words with multiple acceptable (to the grammarians) pronunciations. Notable examples are words like “caramel” (/’kɛɹəmɛl/ or /kɑɹml̩/), “Either” (/’iðə˞/ or /’ajðə˞/), “Tomato” (/tə’mejtow/ or /tə’mɑtow/), and of course, the rest of the song. These words, in most dialects, can be freely exchanged without giving the impression of leaving one’s dialect.

However, “beloved” is stranger still, because the variation is not free at all. Let’s do a little experiment. Say the below sentences:

The mayor was much beloved by his people

I wrote a letter to my beloved

It turns out that, among the American English speakers I’ve asked about this, people were most comfortable using the two-syllable /bi’lʌvd/ in the first case, and the three-syllable /bi’lʌvɨd/ in the second. In fact, this pattern held more generally: every speaker I’ve talked with prefers using the two-syllable /bi’lʌvd/ form as an adjective (technically a participle), and the three-syllable /bi’lʌvɨd/ form as a noun (again, technically a participle used as a noun).

Turns out, that parts of the internet agree with the noun/adjective breakdown. However, in the same thread, “yankee” also points out an odd (yet very common) case:

I would only use pronunciation #2 [/bə’lʌvɨd/] here, for example: “Dearly Beloved, we are gathered here today…”. The use of pronunciation #1 would sound distinctly odd to me in the quote above. So, yes, I would consider pronunciation #1 wrong there.

In the set phrase “Dearly beloved”, there’s some ambiguity about the part of speech of “beloved”. You could read it as shorthand for “dearly beloved people”, in which case the “beloved” is acting as an adjective. However, if we wanted to let the pronunciation label the part of speech, you could also read it as “dearly beloved” where “dearly” is an intensifier enhancing the noun “beloved”, which is, admittedly, a bit strange (think “He was incredibly plumber”).

Syntax aside, the pronunciation is clear: in “dearly beloved”, the two-syllable version sounds as wrong as wrong gets in pronunciation.

The “beloved” pronunciation difference here is, as far as I can find, unique. There’s no ambiguity along these lines with any other English verb which I can think of. “Loved” is always /’lʌvd/, “laughed” is never /’læfɨd/, and “relived” (which should be similar in terms of structure) will always be /ɹi’lɪvd/, even in different contexts (“Traumatic events are often relived in dreams, and the relived are often as disturbing as the original”).

That said, even after a few hours of research, I still have no idea why these dual pronunciations exist here and nowhere else. Any reader suggestions are more than welcome, and if I happen to find out, I’ll update this post. But this one may be one of those great mysteries of language change that are infinitely easier to see than to explain.

Giving thanks

But that’s not what I came to tell you about. I came to talk about Thanksgiving.

This year, I’m particularly grateful that my friends and family are willing to not only tolerate my linguistic obsessions, but are willing to egg me on (by mentioning the word “beloved” in my presence), and that most of them will actually stick around until I’m done thinking about whatever they brought up. I’m grateful that I get to spend my days off writing posts like this, and I get to spend my work week sharing my passion for language with students. And I’m grateful, incredibly so, for the support, feedback, and compliments that I get back from my students.

I’m grateful that language is complex, confusing, fascinating, and always unexpected. I’m grateful that “Dearly beloved” is ambiguous, and that trying to parse those two words in a sentence was 5 minutes of interesting contemplation. I’m grateful that, as I stare into a future career in Linguistics, I see too many good options at the grand buffet of interesting phenomena, not too few.

Most of all, though, I’m grateful that, as I approach a decade of intense linguistic study, langauge keeps getting more complex and interesting, rather than less, and that no matter how deep into language I go, I never seem to hit bottom.

If that’s not worth some gratitude, what is?

Going back to iOS

2012-11-11T00:00:00-05:00

I’ve recently come to an odd conclusion. After leaving iOS and spending more than a year and a half using Android phones and tablets, I’ve decided that my next phone (in August when my contract runs out) will likely be an iOS device, and that I’m heading back to iOS in the tablet world. Here’s why:

Most of the key advantages that Android phones had have been borrowed/stolen into iOS. The iPhone 5 now has larger screen, Siri competes with Android’s voice recognition, Apple shamelessly stole the Android notification interface, and now, the iPhone 5 has LTE.
Many of the key advantages that Android had have now disappeared from the Nexus line of devices (which, because of the software openness, are the only ones I’d buy). In the most recent Nexus 4, they’ve done away with replaceable/upgradeable batteries, SD cards (allowing storage upgrades), USB mass storage mode (since Android 3.0), and even LTE is gone.
DRM measures are increasingly implemented which tie programs, games, etc to single accounts, meaning that to pass on apps (say, when you give a phone to a family member), you have to give somebody your whole account, leaving you back in the same trap iOS puts you in.
The Android phone ecosystem is becoming more closed, not more open. Newer phones have longer and longer delays between software versions, slower source releases, and locked bootloaders, preventing the installation of 3rd party software even on an “open source” device.

This last bit is the part that hurts most. I moved to Android because I believe in open source software. Unfortuantely, manufacturers of Android devices don’t share that belief, and many are actively trying to keep their devices closed, even while they’re technically open. This phenomenon is discussed quite astutely in this post on the Techcraft blog. With the openness closing and the phone hardware nearly matched, Android loses in one key arena: Software and User Experience (UX) design.

Don’t get me wrong, Android 4.X is beautiful. The designers at Google have put a great deal of effort in, and it shows. When you’re working on a stock, un-skinned phone (a Nexus), and are using the built-in Apps, Android is gorgeous, and it does still have advantages. The sharing system is wonderful, still. The ability to choose different keyboards is great, as is the update interface. But that’s all built-in, Google work. 3rd party apps are a different story.

3rd party apps, even those for basic functions (non-Gmail IMAP) are seldom well-designed, and although many apps are unquestionably powerful, many have obviously been designed with little eye to form or UX. Android, much like linux, is a hacker’s OS. It’s an exploration of what is possible, and in my experience, most programs are primarily focused on functionality. The very best Android programs, the ones that I couldn’t live without, tend to be the most powerful, written by the nerdiest. Design, where applied, tends to be range from Spartan to afterthought, and the best designed apps are often by large companies porting from iOS. This will, I hope, change with time, as many developers haven’t yet updated their apps using the new design guidelines introduced with 4.0 (“Ice Cream Sandwich”), but compared with the iOS world, where good typography and UX design are the norm, the bar for Android is set far lower than it needs to be.

Poor aesthetics aside, there are still other fundamental failings. To backup the settings and data for applications on your phone, you need to first root the phone, then install software to do it (Titanium Backup, usually). This copies the data into a user-accessible folder, which you can then (sometimes) copy down using MTP. If you get a new phone, you need to root it, install Titanium backup, copy those files over, and then restore. Compare this to iOS, where you just plug the phone in to sync and backup, and if you plug a new phone in, it’ll restore.

This is just one example, but it’s telling. The reason an iPhone (or a Mac, for that matter) costs so damned much is that Apple spent weeks fixing it for you before you noticed it’s broken. With Android, you have the power to fix it yourself. This is the fundamental tradeoff: Android lets you do nearly anything you want, Apple makes sure that everything you can do works, and blocks the rest.

At some level, I don’t miss iOS. I don’t miss the lock-in, the clunky settings interface, and the relatively un-customizable and boring home screen. I don’t miss opaque settings, lack of access to the file system, and the inability to open an attachment from an email in different program. I dislike needing iTunes and a laptop to add a ringtone, dislike the inability to block ads, and dislike the fact that the OS is a black box. iOS does what it does, well, and stops you from doing anything else.

Ultimately, the freedom of Android is like the like the freedom of moving to a cabin in Alaska 50 miles from your closest neighbor. You can do anything you’d like. You can build a cabin where you want, scream at the top of your lungs every night from 1-2am, walk around naked, and go/drive wherever you need. This freedom to do what you will is exhilirating at first. But ultimately, you’re still in the middle of Alaska, so there’s not all that much you can do, and if something goes wrong, you’re largely on your own.

The problem is that this freedom is largely symbolic. Given all that freedom, once my initial tweaking and ROM-flashing experiments subsided, all I really wanted was to be productive and to do the same things I used to do on my 1st Gen iPad. Ultimately, I realized that, more than a year in, nearly everything I was doing on my Android devices was permitted in iOS, many functions and apps that I had in iOS simply weren’t available in Android, and I was paying (with stability issues and poor software choices) for freedom that I simply didn’t need.

I went to Android to have the power to be able to make my phone be whatever I want it to be. Unfortunately, due to a combination of poor software design, poor hardware design, and poor choices by manufacturers, the only thing that I can’t make my phone be is reliable, functional, and boring¹.

And I think that, after all this, that’s really what I want.

Edit: I’ve revised this post with some further thoughts, and to reflect my further consideration that it’s not just the iPhone, but iOS devices in general, to which I’m switching back.

For a wonderful essay on the virtues of “boring”, see this wonderful post by Minimal Mac
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The R Word and the Euphemism Treadmill

2012-11-02T00:00:00-04:00

Today, I stumbled upon a very graceful response to Ann Coulter’s recent use of the word “retard”. It’s worth reading, partly just because it’s very well done and quite earnest, but what caught my eye as a linguist was the use of the term “the R-word” throughout.

I was aware that there is a growing backlash against the use of “retard” or “retarded” as a put-down or with reference to somebody with a mental or developmental disability (rather than in the “slow somebody’s progress” verb sense), but this was the first time I’d ever heard “retard” referred to as “the R-Word”. In fact, when I first read the article, I struggled for a few moments to figure out what exactly that “R-word” was (the rest of the letter made that clear).

Although I’d never heard of it, apparently it’s in common use. A cursory google revealed r-word.org, a campaign to make people stop using the term, and their online store. Also, the related rwordcounter.org, which counts the number of uses of the R word (they don’t specify which version(s)) on Google. In addition, a few different news articles popped up, all using the term to refer to the movement to get rid of “retard”.

What’s interesting to me is that “retarded” was once an accepted and professional term for a person with mental or developmental disabilities, which has now fallen victim to a phenomenon called pejoration or the “Euphemism treadmill” (a term coined by Steven Pinker). This is the process by which words for taboo or negatively associated subjects (bodily functions, disabilities, death) are born as euphemisms (more polite ways of talking about a subject) and then, gradually, start to aquire negativity from negative use, and eventually are shunned and replaced by a new euphemism.

There’s really no better way to see this than to look at usage over time, which, delightfully, we can do using Google’s NGram viewer. This is a wonderful tool that searches all the books in Google’s Book library for the frequency-of-usefor a given word or phrase, giving us an idea of word usage (in Non-Fiction and Fiction books) over time.

First, let’s look at the frequency, from 1900 to today, of the word “retarded” (click to enlarge):

So, the term “retarded” was born as a euphemism, seeming to take off around 1950, replacing the recently-shunned “slow”. It was used as the accepted term for the concept for many years, until people started using it negatively (“That movie was so retarded!”) and it started to pick up a negative connotation.

Once negative use started to set in (~1980, it appears) like so many euphemisms, it fell slowly out of use, and new euphemisms were selected. Here’s an NGram, same date scale, of two of those euphemisms, “mentally handicapped” and “developmentally disabled”:

Based on their curves, perhaps these terms too have been replaced (either by specific description of the person’s situation or by a term I’m not aware of), but regardless, once alternatives were firmly in place, “retarded” became enough of a swear to warrant being referred to as “the R-word” (shown in three different spellings):

It is worth noting, though, that the heights of these three plots are on different scales, and that “the R-word” (and all the variations) are much less common than the others. It’s also worth pointing out that this is just looking for the term, not context, so “The antibiotics significantly retarded bacterial growth” would count as a use of the term here.

Nonetheless, by looking at these three NGrams, we see the life and death of a once proud euphemism. From welcome replacement for the old, to stagnant euphemism, to utter shunning and “the R word”.

Please don’t misinterpret this post. I am quite sympathetic to the campaign’s aims, because everybody has the right to be referred to using positive, non-stigmatized language. Unfortunately, though, forcing language change seldom works, and ultimately, all they’re really doing is ushering us onto the next euphemism. They may banish “the R-word”, but soon enough, you’ll walk by a middle school playground and overhear “That movie was so developmentally disabled”.

Then, we’re right back onto the treadmill again.

Edit: I’ve just found another excellent post on this subject giving a bit more on-the-ground history of the term and its tabooing. Check it out at the English Cowpath.

FLICK BAD KERNING

2012-11-01T00:00:00-04:00

I’ve recently been reading Mastering Type: The Essential Guide to Typography for Print and Web Design, which is an amazingly engaging book on the interesting subject of typography and graphic design.

Well, last night, I was reading the section about kerning, the subtle adjustment of the spacing between individual pairs of letters, I found this gem stashed away in a picture caption:

In the comic book world, the word flick was banned from use for fear that when set in all uppercase letters, the L and I would run together and form an unacceptable word. (Batman Unmasked, Will Brooker, Continuum International Publishing Group, 2001, p. 63) Take care that any word being kerned does not kern so tightly that it forms another word. ¹

Put more visually:

This prohibition makes more sense in the comic world than elsewhere, given that comic captions are often both hand-written and set in all caps, but still, this is the first instance I’ve heard of a word being banned outright based not on meaning or usage, but based solely on the potential for visual confusability with another naughty word. The lengths that we’ll go to to avoid taboos is absolutely fascinating.

Although this particular overlap may seem isolated or unlikely, poor kerning (“keming”²) resulting in unintentionally dirty (or hilarious) words is not all that uncommon (to be fair, some of these are spacing and tracking issues instead, but they’re still quite funny).

So, we must all band together, space our letters properly, and with a thunderous shout cry “FLICK BAD KERNING”!

Excerpt from caption of Ch. 4, Fig. 12 of Bosler, D. (2012). Mastering type: The essential guide to typography for print and web design. Cincinnati, Ohio: How Books.
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Coined by David Friedman in 2008, ”keming” is defined as “the result of improper kerning”, a playful visual pun on the fact that a lowercase rn combo, when poorly kerned, looks like a lowercase “m”, and one of my absolute favorite words.
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Dragon Dictate 3 Review Followup

2012-10-25T00:00:00-04:00

So, it’s now been about a month since I started using Dragon Dictate 3, and I thought I’d give a bit more discussion based on long-term use following my original review. I won’t bother commenting on the things that haven’t changed at all with additional usage, but some things have really jumped out at me as I used the software more.

Use a headset mic

The biggest single thing that I did to improve my experience with Dragon Dictate was to order a real microphone. I had been using a very old headset microphone which came with a copy of IBM Via Voice around 2000, or, when I was away from home, just using the built-in microphones on my computer. This worked well, especially the built-in mics, but I found myself growing a bit annoyed by having to disconnect my computer from the external monitor and open it up in order to do any kind of dictation, so I went online and ordered an Andrea NC-185VM Headset Microphone, which is on Nuance’s recommended hardware list.

In a word, wow. I was getting relatively good accuracy with the built-in microphone on my computer, but moving to an actual headset mic, and to a modern one, really improved the accuracy I’m getting. More importantly, it also gives me the ability to stand up and walk around a little bit as I dictate. This is a small luxury, but an appreciated one. So, if you don’t have a headset microphone, it may actually be worth ordering the software as a physical copy with an actual headset, and if you did the digital download, this may be a good time to upgrade your headset. Even as a speech geek, I’m impressed with how much this was helpful.

Training and vocabulary

One thing that I’m very impressed with is the effectiveness of the training process. I use Dragon to dictate relatively intense linguistic documents, using obscure words like phonology, vowel, monophthong, nasality, and assimilation. I dictated that whole sentence, and didn’t have to correct Dragon at all. I’m very impressed with its ability to learn new vocabulary, especially technical vocabulary, and implement it very quickly.

Also, I really do feel like this software is learning effectively. Unless there’s a major increase in background noise or something along those lines, I feel like every dictation session is subtly better than the last, and there are relatively few errors, especially with the headset mic, that occur over and over again.

Phonetically Predictable Troubles

As a phonetician, it’s always interesting to examine the kinds of errors that you see over and over again in this software. for me, the most consistent error is the substitution of the vowel /æ/ (as in “pat”) from /ɛ/ (as in “pet”). Acoustically, for me, those vowels are very similar, so it’s not shocking that Dragon struggles with differentiating them. Similarly, it has trouble distinguishing “Will” from “Well”, especially frustrating because both are high-frequency words, and one of them’s my name. However, as somebody who studies vowel perception, I understand that there is no good way to automatically make that distinction, and that most of the time when humans do so, we’re simply using context to guess the best candidate.

Stupid text entry errors

My biggest complaint about Dragon Dictate has nothing at all to do with speech recognition. For whatever reason, when dictating into the Mac, every so often, Dragon will omit letters. In the penultimate sentence, Dragon ended it with “with speech recognitio.”, completely dropping the N. This happens very frequently at the ends of sentences, not always with N, but often with the letters T and I. similarly, it can get itself into a mode where adding new text overwrites the last word of the prior sentence, which is incredibly frustrating because for every sense of dictation that you do, you end up handwriting five or six words.

Perhaps the most frustrating part of it is that there is no place that it reliably works. Even in Dragon’s own notepad software, it loses track of where it is, which then prevents correction, and leaves you with the same missing letter errors seen elsewhere. I understand Dragon not being able to control how other people’s programs handle text, but not being able to make text entry work even in their own software is ridiculous.

These errors, I have no sympathy for. As I said last time, speech recognition errors are understandable because it’s a very hard task. Errors with putting text into a text box are not forgivable, and Dragon really should be working hard (and I hope they already are) to fix this, as this is not acceptable from production, $200 software.

For what it’s worth, when it gets mired in misalignments and other text errors, I found that sometimes, quitting and then reopening Dragon can be a little bit helpful. It doesn’t always fix the problem, but it’s certainly something to do if you’re partway through an email and Dragon starts to degrade on you.

Still the best out there

I still highly recommend this software to anybody who is looking to do dictation, it’s the best solution, and in many ways, the only solution. It’s still expensive, still requires a specialized microphone, and you still have the frustration stemming from stupid bugs that have nothing at all to do with speech recognition. That said, for getting a whole bunch of text down on paper very quickly, it’s still the best thing out there, and with a little bit more tender loving care from Nuance, it could be something truly astounding.

Why Notes from a Linguistic Mystic?

2012-10-23T00:00:00-04:00

Given the (relatively) scientific and academic nature of most of my more recent posts, and, for those who know me personally, my somewhat skeptical nature, people often ask me why my blog is titled “Notes from a Linguistic Mystic”.

The pseudonym “The Linguistic Mystic” arose during a conversation while I was taking one of my first graduate classes in Linguistics, ~2005 (well before the Shpongle track came out). I was chatting with a few of my colleagues about an interesting construction in the language we were examining (I don’t recall the specific structure, but the language was Ewe, pronounced [eβe]). During the course of the discussion, I mentioned something about “I wonder what effect that way of speaking has on speakers’ perceptions of the world”, a common question given my affinity for the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis at the time.

This, for whatever reason, set one of my colleagues into a small anti-linguistic-relativity tirade, eventually culminating in something like “Sometimes a language’s structure is just a structure, nothing more! You know what you are? You’re a damned linguistic mystic!”

At the time, it was just a cool sounding name which I happened to use on this blog, but as I’ve gotten deeper into linguistics, it’s made more and more sense. Language, despite our best efforts, is almost never cut-and-dry. It’s easy to come up with explanations that make sense, but when you look more closely, it’s almost always more complicated than your initial explanation can handle, and you can always go deeper. Speech perception, especially working with vowels, interests me so much because when you look at it with enough detail, it seems like magic that it ever works at all.

So, I may not hum incantations in front of IPA vowel charts, cast circles before working on text analysis, or sacrifice vowels to the gods of Speech Perception. But I do think that the reason I love my work so much is that I get to see, embrace, and explore the magic that’s already present in speech, language, and communication.

I think that’s enough to earn the title. And if you disagree, I’ll turn you into somebody who can transcribe the word “Toad”.

Scary, huh?

What's the difference between Schwa (/ə/) and Wedge (/ʌ/)?

2012-10-17T00:00:00-04:00

Today, I’d like to discuss a question which troubles many people when they’re first learning to use the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA): What is the difference between the Schwa (/ə/) and Wedge/Carat/Caret (/ʌ/) symbols, and how can you tell which is which in transcription?

The basic idea of the IPA is that every sound used contrastively in language should have one symbol associated with it. This makes sense and is quite true until we come upon a phonetics textbook which has something like the following for descriptions of the different English vowels:

/ʌ/: Used in words like “cut”, “mutt”, “butter”, “nun” or “luck”
/ə/: Used in words like “sofa”, “photograph”, or ”adore”

For every other English vowel, we choose the proper symbol based on how the vowel sounds. The vowel in “look” sounds a lot like the vowel in “put” (/pʊt/), so it too must be an /ʊ/. The vowel in “free” sounds like the vowel in “me” (/mi/), so clearly, that’s an /i/ vowel. But what do you do with the vowel in “trust”, which sounds like both the “uh” in “cut” (/ʌ/) and the final “uh” in “sofa” (/ə/)?

The very first step is to stop trying to hear a difference between /ə/ and /ʌ/. Acoustically, for speakers of General American English, there’s little to no difference between the two, and trying to listen to one will only bring you pain.

In fact, /ə/ is a vowel unlike any other in the English vowel inventory. It’s not described (and differentiated from /ʌ/) phonetically, based on its sound or production, but instead, /ə/ is a phonological beast, arising from the sound structure of the word, the type of speech, and the speaker’s desire to minimize time spent on unimportant sounds.

Vocalic Identity Crises

To examine this idea, let’s do a little experiment: Say the word “photograph” as slowly and carefully as you possibly can, paying attention to that middle vowel (before the “graph”).

Some of you likely still pronounced the middle vowel as an “uh” (/ə/, giving you /ˈfoʊtəgɹæf/ or /ˈfoʊɾəgɹæf/), even when speaking very slowly and carefully. However, I bet there is a large number of you who drew out that middle vowel and said “foe-toe-graph” (/ˈfoʊtoʊgɹæf/) even though in actual speech, you’d be very unlikely to say it that way. Either way, you likely didn’t feel very confident about what that middle vowel was and how it was pronounced. The vowel in question here is a Schwa (/ˈfoʊɾəgɹæf/).

Now a similar experiment: Say the word “fluctuate” as slowly and carefully as you possibly can, paying attention to that first vowel (before the “tuate”).

Here, if you’re a native English speaker, it’s unlikely that you said anything other than “fluck-chu-ate” (/ˈflʌktʃueɪt/), the first vowel matching that in “duck”. There’s no “other” pronunciation that comes to mind, and where you might have paused for a second with “photograph” to ponder that middle vowel, you likely had no such concern here. The first “uh” vowel in “fluctuate” is a great example of wedge (/ʌ/).¹

So, somehow, the identity of that first vowel in “fluctuate” is beyond question, but the “proper” vowel in the middle of “photograph” is more open to interpretation, even though in connected speech they may sound the same. This ambiguity, one vowel which seems to be able to have two different identities, is why we need schwa.

Vowel Reduction 101

The difference between /ə/ and /ʌ/, at a fundamental level, is that /ə/ is a reduced vowel, whereas /ʌ/ is a full vowel. Vowel reduction is a phenomenon that happens around the world, according to different rules for each language, but the basic idea is that we simply don’t need to fully articulate which aren’t stressed in the word, so we do something there which requires less effort. Put differently, If we have a choice between fully articulating an unimportant vowel and just producing something which requires relatively little articulatory targeting but gets the job done, we’re going to take the easy way, and that easy way is /ə/.

We don’t particularly care what each /ə/ sounds like, and as such, we just make something vaguely in the center of the mouth, sometimes a bit higher², sometimes a bit lower. A schwa is a vowel that we produce just to have produced a vowel, the vowel we produce so we can move on to a part of the word which is more important to establishing and communicating the identity of the word. We make a /ə/ because we’ve got better things to do than pronounce the middle vowel in “photograph”.

Compare this to /ʌ/. In words like “cut”, “nun”, “functional” or “sputter”, the “uh” vowels are full vowels, living in stressed syllables, and their identity is integral to the word itself. Fast speech, slow speech, really slow speech, that vowel is still just an “uh”. In General American English, there is simply no way to say the word “cut” without an /ʌ/ (still having it recognizable to listeners as “cut”).

The /ʌ/ is absolutely essential to the word’s identity, whereas /ə/ is the surface result of a phonological phenomenon which reduces some vowels in unstressed syllables. That, right there, is the fundamental difference between these two sounds. It’s not the sound, but the origin of the sound.

Differentiating /ə/ vs. /ʌ/ in transcription

We’ve already established that these two sounds both sound alike. But chances are, if you’ve googled your way to this post, you’re doing an IPA transcription of a word, you’ve heard a vowel that sounds like “uh”, and you’re trying to figure out if it’s a schwa or a wedge. Here’s how:

First, you have to find the stress in the word. The stressed syllable in a word is the syllable which is most emphasized and least reduced. Think of the sentence “the musician wants to record a record”. In the act of recording (re-CORD), the second syllable is stressed, whereas in “REcord” (the physical item), the first syllable is stressed. Here, the primary difference is stress, and the vowels in the unstressed syllable of each are reduced.

Every word has at least one primary stress (which we mark in the IPA using /ˈ/), and finding it is relatively easy once you get the hang of it. We know that every word has a stressed syllable, so for a monosyllabic word (a word with only one syllable), we know that the only syllable has to be stressed. For multisyllabic words, you have more options. One easy way to find the stress of a multisyllabic (containing more than one syllable) word is to try every possible stress pattern. Let’s take the word “mahogany” (/məhɑgəni/). First, put the stress on the first syllable, really emphasizing it, ”MAhogany”. Then try the second, “maHOGany”, then “mahogAny”, then finally “mahogaNY”. Only stressing the second syllable (/məˈhɑgəni/) sounds acceptable, everything else sounds strange or somehow “wrong”, so we know that the primary stress is on the second syllable.

Once you’ve figured out where the stress is, figuring out whether the vowel is /ə/ or /ʌ/ is easy.

In English, vowel reduction only occurs in unstressed syllables. So, if your “uh” sound is occurring in a stressed syllable, it can’t be a reduced vowel, so it’s /ʌ/. If your “uh” sound is in an unstressed syllable, it’s likely a result of vowel reduction, so it’s a /ə/.

Case closed.

Sentence-level reduction

So far, we’ve been talking about this at the word level, but if you pay attention to connected speech, you’ll notice that lots of vowels (and sometimes whole words) get reduced to schwa, even if they’re just one syllable. These words tend to be grammatical words rather than content words, words like “the”, “a”, “of”, and “to”. These words (and some others) get reduced because they’re very easily predictable, and frankly, we don’t want to take the time to fully articulate them.

For instance, in the phrase “I want to go to the park”, we don’t need to fully articulate either “to” or “the”, we just want to get something out there that lets listeners know that those words are there. So rather than the full version:

/aɪ wɑnt tu goʊ tu ði pɑɹk/

We reduce the grammatical words with schwas:

/aɪ wɑnə goʊ tə ðə pɑɹk/

These reduced grammatical words can be a little bit confusing for people who are thinking about the “stressed/unstressed” idea above. They’re single syllables and thus, the only syllable is stressed. However, compared to the rest of the vowels in the sentence, the “uh” vowels in them are definitely reduced, and thus, they’re definitely /ə/.

/ɜ˞/ and /ə˞/: A similarly stressful distinction

In General American English, we have two rhotic vowels, /ɜ˞/ and /ə˞/ (“right hook reversed epsilon” and “schwar”). /ɜ˞/ is found in words like “word” (/wɜ˞d/), “birch” (/bɜ˞tʃ/), “squirrel” (/skwɜ˞l̩/), or “merchant” (/ˈmɜ˞tʃn̩t/), whereas the /ə˞/ is found in words like “butter” (/ˈbʌɾə˞/), “later” (/leɪɾə˞/), or “scatter” (/skæɾə˞/). Both of these vowels sound like “er”, and again, like /ə/ and /ʌ/, they can’t be distinguished by sound.

The beautiful thing about the /ɜ˞/ vs. /ə˞/ distinction is that it’s exactly the same as the /ə/ vs. /ʌ/ distinction. In stressed syllables, an “er” vowel is going to be /ɜ˞/, whereas in unstressed syllables, you get /ə˞/. By learning to differentiate /ə/ vs. /ʌ/, you’ve also learned to differentiate their rhotic counterparts, /ɜ˞/ and /ə˞/. Wondə˞ful!

Conclusion

Of course, this post is primarily discussing General American English. Although schwa around the world is generally an unstressed and reduced vowel, the rules for vowel reduction vary in different languages (and dialects!), and other languages have different established transcription conventions where some of the above may not apply. I just figured this information might be useful for the many English-speaking people just being introduced to the IPA and trying to figure out why they can’t hear this one contrast.

At the end of the day, my goal as a linguistic mystic is to point out not just the linguistic facts, but the greater philosophical meaning behind them. For that, I’ll leave you with my favorite internet meme, the Linguist Llama, who has some very important words of wisdom:

It’s worth noting that phonetically, the vowel in “cut” is usually something realized as closer to an [ɜ], a centralized vowel (rather than a back vowel, as is specified for /ʌ/). However, there’s a longstanding tradition that the English vowel in “cut” or “strut” should be transcribed using a /ʌ/ symbol in the IPA. Further detail on the usage of the /ʌ/ symbol is given on page 18 of Pullum and Ladusaw’s extraordinarily useful Phonetic Symbol Guide, a great resource for such matters.
↩
Some people use /ɨ/ to refer to a higher reduced vowel, to differentiate, for instance, “rosa’s” /ɹoʊzəz/ from “roses” /ɹoʊzɨz/, but this is not universal (many transcribe the final reduced vowel in “roses” as /ɪ/ or /ə/.
↩

Updated Linguistic Link List, Site Tweaks

2012-10-13T00:00:00-04:00

One of the casualties of moving this site over to Jekyll was that my Wordpress blogroll (which contained many interesting links) went away.

Well, this weekend, I remade my personal homepage (again using Jekyll), and as a part of that, I rebuilt my Linguistic Resources link list there, now available from the sidebar. I’ve done my best to include a variety of sites (some of which are linklists themselves) which I find useful, interesting, funny, or informative from a Linguistic (and mostly Phonetic) perspective.

This supplants the del.icio.us account I had been using to share links (which has now been deleted). If you’d like a link or have one to recommend (and you aren’t a spammy SEO person), please let me know.

Also, as an aside, I’ve also enabled pagination for this site, such that you should be able to use the links way at the bottom of the page to read through my whole posting history, if for whatever reason, you wanted to.

Slow progress is still progress. Let’s hope my dissertation advisor agrees.

I'll see you then then then, then

2012-10-08T00:00:00-04:00

Imagine you’re sending an email to a colleague confirming two separate appointments with that person. It is completely plausible and understandable to end this email with:

I’ll see you then then then, then!

Better still, if you’re saying that you’d rather have one appointment at a different time than two separate ones, you could say:

Then I’d rather see you then than then then then.

I love language.

Spam, Microspam, and Social Problems

2012-10-07T00:00:00-04:00

I just watched a really interesting situation unfold on app.net, the nascent social networking site. For those of you unfamiliar with it, app.net is a very interesting experiment in social networking, designed to be more of a framework, than a networking site itself, set apart by the fact that users have to pay $36 a year for their account.

This pay wall (to post, not to read) has had the side effect of largely keeping out spammers, because paying $36 for an account that will soon be banned or universally muted simply doesn’t pay off. Compared to a place like twitter, or any mention of a keyword like “iPhone” or “mortgage” gets you spammy mentions from five or 10 different robot accounts, this lack of spammers is a wonderful change, and it’s something that people are jealously guarding.

However, today, a very small firestorm (“App.net’s first spam post?!?”) erupted when an account posted the below message advertising some sort of app.net aggregating service that he’s developing (links removed):

VIEW’s have grown to 1000+/day
Contact me to build VIEW’s into your app
-link- German @view5
-link- Japanese日本语 @view6
-link- Arabic العربية @view14
[This part is a list of @ mentions of 10 prominent app.net develops,and by mentioning them, that message made its way into all of their streams whether or not they follow that particular individual.]

What is spam?

Most of the people we would consider spammers operate in a very distinct way. Their messages are not targeted, but broadcasted. Their identities are hidden, not shared. Their goal is not quality, but passing through the filter systems out there. They take over other people’s computers to improve the number of messages they send, with the hope that if they send enough messages, some of them will get through filters, and some small subset of those messages will result in a favorable outcome (a purchase, or perhaps a click on a link).

I don’t think that’s what happened here, with this individual message. This person clearly is a person, who paid for an account and uses that account for other purposes. He made no effort to conceal his identity, nor the origin of the message. It would appear to be human composed, if not copy pasted, and in this person’s mind, he is targeting these individuals because of their clout on the service. Perhaps most importantly, this person does not consider himself a spammer, and defended himself against that accusation:

It’s not spam Paul.
I’m a serious data structures engineer. Not everyone is building apps … nor should all the engineers be building the same Twitter-clone apps.
A non-redundant approach to building structure of the ecosystem.

Yet, upon reading that first message, my first instinct was to check his profile to see if he was sending that same message to everybody else, and to confirm my suspicions that he was really a spambot who’d gotten onto ADN. His message looked like spam, was formatted like spam, was addressed like spam, but somehow, knowing that information about the author, his intent, and the small scale of distribution, I could no longer call it such

Microspam

Who hasn’t signed up for a local businesses’ mailing list, only to find yourself getting two messages a day advertising every new product put on the shelf? Similarly, everybody knows somebody who’s gotten involved with some kind of marketing scheme (e.g Mary Kay, Amway, Tupperware) and who, to protect their bottom line, simply won’t shut up about it. And everybody’s got that family member who is heavily involved in some campaign or another, and is constantly forwarding you emails about some political candidate, some refugees, or some local issue that you never asked for.

All of these things, if conducted by some random Romanian, would assuredly be considered spam, but coming from somebody in your community, it’s more forgivable, and we’re reluctant to use the s-word in classifying it. Knowing the person, knowing their intent, and having some idea as to why you were targeted, all somehow make something not spam.

This is a fundamentally different problem, this is an issue of person-to-person interaction and conversational norms which has been around for a long time. The difference is that over email, or over app.net, the social means of enforcement aren’t present. At the dinner table, you can politely ask your Tupperware saleswoman aunt to leave business for another occasion, and there’s a general understanding that there’s a limited time and place for such advocacy in social settings.

This kind of micro-scale spam (microspam?) is a social and behavioral problem, and is one that all social networks have to deal with, whether it’s app.net or your neighborhood book club. In the book club, it’s easier for one person to pull another aside for a quick chat, and usually there’s some person in a leadership position who will naturally do just that. Online, that’s usually not the case, and there’s not the same decorum that prevents a large number of users from jumping on our unfortunate microspammer, throwing wild accusations and writing lengthy blog posts about it (guilty as charged).

Microspam is fundamentally different than Capital-S Spam as it exists on the Internet. Spam can be addressed technologically. It can be filtered, it can be shut down, and simply disconnecting the spammers from the Internet would likely cause a net improvement for everybody involved. Microspam has to be handled socially and culturally, because simply kicking your aunt off of the Internet will have undesirable consequences, and you run the risk of silencing a productive member of the discussion who has otherwise interesting things to say, in between bouts of microspamming. Painting this micro-level with the same brush as your large-scale spammers won’t help in the battle against either phenomenon.

Unless, of course, your Tupperware selling aunt also happens to be a Ukrainian spam kingpin. Then you can solve both problems at once.

Doing Terrible things to Speech Recognition Software

2012-10-03T00:00:00-04:00

Yesterday, I wrote a huge review of Dragon Dictate 3, in which I talked about accuracy in use a great deal, and discussed some of the errors that frequently come up in everyday usage.

Today, we’re going to look at the other side of the coin: accuracy when you’re not trying to cooperate, and instead, are trying quite hard to break speech recognition. These sentences and phrases are worst-case scenarios that specifically target some of the strategies that modern speech recognition uses to improve accuracy, and each one removes some advantage that the software naturally has. I’ve been collecting these same sentences for a few years, using different services, and using them as examples in my various presentations on speech recognition for undergraduates. Here are my results using Nuance’s Dragon Dictate 3 (trained on my voice), Nuance’s “FlexT9” app (which uses Nuance’s server-side solution, untrained), and Google’s Voice Search Interface (the same one you get by clicking the microphone in Google’s search bar).

We’ll start with a very basic sentence, said quickly and without context. First, the phrase, and then the Dragon output:
- “These slides are for a phonetics class”
  - Google Voice Search: the slicer for the next class
  - FlexT9: The slides are for phonetics class
  - Dragon: These slides are for phonetics class
No major surprises here, although I’m shocked that FlexT9 (a network based service) had “Phonetics”, a very uncommon word.
Here’s a sentence which amuses me, from 2001: A Space Odyssey:
- “Open the pod bay doors, HAL”
  - Google Voice Search: open the pod bay doors hal
  - FlexT9: Open the pod bay doors Hal
  - Dragon: Open the pod bay doors HAL
Dragon got the capitalization! Somebody must’ve trained it specifically to do that. Cute.
How about some untrained medical vocabulary?
- “She’s got Thrombocytopenia”
  - Google Voice Search: she's got from beside a pina
  - FlexT9: She’s got thrombocytopenia
  - Dragon: She’s got thrombocytopenia
Swing-and-a-miss for Google, but Nuance seems to have hidden some odd vocab even in their non-medical versions.
An unusual expression paired with an unusual name:
- “For shizzle, Bashira”
  - Google Voice Search: for shizzle the shear ice
  - FlexT9: For chisel The Shira
  - Dragon: Forces a this year i
I love that Google Voice Search knows “For shizzle” as an expression, and this is the first total strikeout for Dragon so far.
How about a semantically unpredictable sentence, where the words are rather completely unrelated and can’t be guessed by how often they occur together?
- “Tall hamburgers fly sexily under a sultan’s flamingo”
  - Google Voice Search: call hamburgers fly sexually and result in flamingo
  - FlexT9: Call hamburgers fly sexily hunder his sultan’s flamingo
  - Dragon: Tall hamburgers fly sexily under assault’s flamingo
This is particularly interesting. Note that Google changed “under a sultan’s” into “and result in”, a much more common phrase in speech, betraying Google’s “large corpus, find common phrases” bias. It’s also strange that FlexT9 spat out “hunder”, which I’ve been unable to find a definition of.
Now, a sentence made up entirely of homophones (words which sound the same as another word) for more common words:
- “I’m gun a wok ewe two classe four Xer size”
  - Google Voice Search: I'm gonna walk you to class for exercise
  - FlexT9: I’m been walking to class for exercise
  - Dragon: I’m going to walk you to class for exercise
Nuance uses similar modeling (I suspect) for both Dragon and FlexT9 (their local and server-based solutions), and both struggle with reduction in sentences like “gonna” or “wanna”. It’s interesting that Dragon corrects to the more canonical “going to”, whereas FlexT9 fails outright. Google, the most casual of them all, tolerates reduction quite well.

Also, of course, all of them fail to pick up the homophony, but that’s to be expected. “two” and “to” really are pronounced identically in many cases, “walk” and “wok” the same. Only by context and our knowledge of the language’s grammar can we disambiguate these as speakers, let alone as computer programs.
Now, a homophone with understandable context:
- “I’m gonna take a wok from the chinese restaurant”
  - Google Voice Search: I'm gonna take a walk from the chinese restaurant
  - FlexT9: I get a take a walk from the Chinese Restaurant
  - Dragon: I’m good to take a walk from the Chinese restaurant
Once again, Nuance stumbles on “Gonna”, and none of the services pick up on “wok” given the Chinese restaurant context. To be expected, but quite amusing still.
This is a sentence which is tough for many undergrads to write correctly, let alone a computer.
- “They’re going there to check their mail”
  - Google Voice Search: they're going there to check your mail
  - FlexT9: They are going there to check their mail
  - Dragon: They are going there to check their mail
Nuance really hates reduced forms, likely because of their business heritage. Nonetheless, all three services are able to use basic grammatical knowledge to use the proper forms in the proper places (although Google, as always, is reading your mail).
How about speech recognition on dangerous ground? (If you don’t get it, say it quickly aloud)
- “Their deals are Sofa King good”
  - Google Voice Search: their deals are so f****** good (censorship as given)
  - FlexT9: Their deals are so f*cking good (censorship as given)
  - Dragon: Their deals are so fighting good
This is another rough homophone to handle, and our first two contestants fall right into the trap. Dragon 3 will never say the word “fucking”, even though I’ve tried to train it, but for whatever reason, it’s happy to say “ass”.
Now, “Don’t you want to go to the park?”, reduced almost beyond recognition (as in this sound file):
- “[ʊ̃tʃə wɑɾ̃ə kʌɾ̃əðə pɑɹk̚]”
  - Google Voice Search: which wanna come apart
  - FlexT9: But you want on the part
  - Dragon: One of the park
We shouldn’t really expect speech recognition software to deal with this kind of reduction, because, well, humans can hardly deal with it. I am impressed, though, that Dragon caught the “park” at the end.
How about the funny sound we make when we don’t know something (as in this sound file)?
- “[That weird sound we make when we don’t know]”
  - Google Voice Search: ass
  - FlexT9: Hey
  - Dragon: [Dragon didn't acknowledge this as speech, printed nothing]
I think Google is taking this test a bit personally. Well, if it’s going to call me an ass, I’ll do something really mean…
And, finally, my absolute favorite horrible thing to do to speech recognition: The opening of the rap from Sugar Hill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight”, pronounced at regular speed, by me, according to the transcription below:
- “[ɑsɛdə hɪp hap ðəhɪbi ðe hɪbi təðə hɪp hɪp hɑpʰɑjɨ doʊn stɑp ðə ɹɑkɪn tʰəðə bejŋ bejŋ bʊɡi seɪ ʔʌp dʒʌmp ðə bʊɡi tʰəðə ɹɪðm ʌ ðʌ bʊɡidə bit]”
  - Google Voice Search: hip hoppity hippity hip hop you don't stop rockin the bang bang boogie chapter 8
  - FlexT9: Is that hip hop baby baby to get it off you don’t stop rocking the bang bang boogie say up jumped over the rhythm of the Bebi
  - Dragon: Is it hip hop debut his populist operon of angling receptor and rhythm of the validity
Lol.

Conclusion of a silly experiment

Failures here shouldn’t be considered a failure of the speech recognition software at all. These are sentences which I’ve written and designed to break speech recognition software, and as you can see, many of them succeeded. However, unless you often discuss Sultan’s flamingoes or often recite rap lyrics into your papers, most of these issues won’t show up for you.

I just figured I’d share my amusement, and hopefully you’ve learned just a little bit about what speech recognition is struggling with in this world. Eye hope ewe end joyed!

A Speech Geek's Review of Dragon Dictate 3

2012-10-02T00:00:00-04:00

Before I go any further, I want to point out that this isn’t a paid review, nor do I have any horses in the speech recognition race. I’m just a nerd who’s followed speech recognition for a long time and wants to share a really good experience I’ve had.

So, I mentioned last week that I recently started using Dragon Dictate 3, the Mac OS version of Nuance’s Dragon suite. So far, I’ve been very impressed with it, partly because I’ve been following speech recognition on the Mac platform for a long time (Starting with IBM ViaVoice around 1999 or 2000), and partly because I’m a phonetics geek, who understands just how difficult this task is. Given the price ($199), I know that this software isn’t a small investment, so I figured that putting my thoughts out there might be useful for somebody else who’s on the fence.

Setup and Microphones

Purchase and download were relatively easy, as I opted for a digital edition, and setup was quite simple as well. The price is very high, but for somebody who writes as much as I do, and was already starting to get a little bit of repetitive strain injury from constant typing, this is worth it. The initial set up took around five minutes, and reading it the very first text to calibrate the microphone took another five minutes or so on top of that. At that point, I was dictating my first emails.

It’s worth noting that at this point, nearly all the dictation I’ve done using the software has been using the built-in microphone on my computer, which, apparently, has some noise canceling ability built in. Generally, I’ve worked in relatively quiet rooms, and the best results I’ve gotten were sitting in the soundproof booth in our phonetics lab, so I’m tempted to say that background noise is the biggest limitation of that microphone. I also used an older USB headset microphone which came with a much earlier generation of the same software, but the results I’ve gotten using that microphone and the built-in microphone, in a quiet environment, have been about the same.

Accuracy

Clearly, the most important factor with any speech recognition software is its accuracy, and Dragon 3 is the best performer I’ve dealt with in terms of accuracy. This doesn’t mean to say it’s perfect, and in fact, in writing this review so far entirely by dictation, I probably had to correct the output at least 15 times (to this point). However, one thing that this version has gotten right is the correction interface. Rather than having to manually type in the corrections, it allows you to edit everything entirely by voice, even spelling out words that are quite difficult to get across to the software otherwise. More importantly still, it really does seem to be learning from the corrections. Low-frequency words which I use commonly (things like “schwa”, “vowels”, “phoneme”, and the name of the building my office is in) are missed the first few times, but after a few correctons they’re reliably recognized. Similarly, there are few “repeat issues” that I’ve had, and usually correcting something once or twice through the program fixes the issue for good. It’s also able to learn vocabulary from any plaintext document, which is also quite handy for improving recognition of odd words. The best kind of error is the kind that occurs only once, and the robust learning features made that a more frequent experience than I’ve ever had in the past.

One area that Nuance can definitely improve on is their handling of reduced forms in speech. “Want to” is reliably captured, but “wanna” is not reliably captured. Same thing with “gonna”, and even other contractions like “we’re” or “which’re” are reliably missed or misidentified by the software. This means that in all likelihood, there will always be an element of unnaturalness to your speech, a degree of abstraction between how you talk to humans and how you talk to the computer, which leaves the process a little bit unsatisfying. Similarly, their handling of grammatical words (like “of”, “to”, or “from”) which are phonetically reduced in speech (made much shorter and less distinct) leaves something to be desired, as these things are often missed altogether. Given where we’re at with the technology and the speed with which the recognition happens, this is quite forgivable.

Paradoxically though, I found the recognition accuracy tends to go up when I speak in longer, more connected sentences, rather tan saying something relatively quickly, waiting for it to finish, and then proceeding on with the next chunk of the sentence. I understand that their models are likely trained on connected text, but given the remaining inaccuracies, I think it’s a very natural tendency to want to talk in small chunks, and correct little errors as they come along, rather than going for a large sentence and hoping everything will work out for the best. This is counterintuitive, and requires you to think a little more consciously about what you’re about to say before you say it. I’m still getting the hang of this, but as I use longer sentences, my accuracy is going up.

One other victory is that Dragon’s non-speech noise (often called “biological sounds”) detection is much improved. I can cough or clear my throat with Dragon on and recording, and it remains silent and ready, whereas prior incarnations (MacSpeech Dictate, IBM ViaVoice) recorded coughs or throat-clears as “a”, or “we”, or something small like that. This seems like a small thing, but every correction can severely impact the flow of your thoughts.

Unfortunately, I’m becoming increasingly convinced that perfectly accurate speech recognition will likely require artificial intelligence, as it requires a great deal of knowledge of context and possibility. Distinguishing ”I’m gonna take a walk from the Chinese restaurant” from ”I’m gonna take a wok from the Chinese restaurant” is not a question of better recognizing speech, but better understanding language. As such, homophones like “who’s” and “whose”, “wont” and “want”, “there” and “they’re” will often be missed by Dragon. However, once again, the effort they put into the correction interface really shows, as the majority of the time, you can simply say “correct that” and pick whatever number corresponds to the proper version of the word. So, if your dream is uninterrupted dictation with absolute perfect accuracy, keep waiting, but they’re definitely getting better.

Practical use

The majority of dictation I do is actually responding to emails, related to a variety of projects and answering student questions regarding my class. As such, The majority of my dictation happens in various windows spread around the operating system, and for the most part, that works fine. However, if you’re doing any editing using the voice interface, whether that be using corrections in their tool, or their commands to move around through the text, not infrequently, the software will lose its place in the text. Next time you try to correct something, or to move your cursor, it’ll go someplace you don’t expect, or worse still, it’ll overwrite a previous chunk of text with your newest correction.

There are also a variety of other strange bugs that are still going on with text entry. When you’re working outside of the built-in notepad program, it’ll often add extra characters, and even, on occasion, print whatever you just said without using the letter “I”, which makes very little sense. So, if I’m going to be doing any kind of longform dictation, I’ve got in the habit of doing it inside the editor window of the dictation program itself, and copying things back in to whatever other window I was working in an as needed. This is frustrating and feels more like a bug than a technical limitation. As such, in many ways, it’s much more difficult to forgive. Speech recognition is hard, making words appear in a window is easy. I wish that Nuance would’ve squished a few more of those bugs before release, but I hope that’ll be repaired in future versions.

However, these little issues aside, this is still the best speech recognition program I’ve used. It’s locally done, see you don’t have to wait for results to come back from the Internet, and you don’t have to send things off in chunks, you can talk continuously. This makes a major difference, both in the mindset of the dictator, and in the usability of the software. If it tells you anything, I find myself keeping Dragon open, and in any situation where there’s nobody nearby who I would disturb by talking aloud, I’m more likely to dictate an email than I am to type it out.

Not perfect, but remarkably good

The biggest failing of this software is the price. $199 is very steep, and is only something I considered because it’s both a personal interest of mine and because I don’t want my hands to fall off because of the amount of typing I do. If you have any kind of RSI, or if you do a whole bunch of writing, this may be a price worth paying. But I still think that Nuance could do a whole lot better on the price, especially given that their products are showing up for free in so many other venues (Siri, among others).

The other major issue is that, this, like all dictation software, is designed for prose dictation in the general domain. It’s likely prohibitively time consuming to use it for computer programming (with lots of symbols and non-English-word terms), and if you work with specialized vocabulary (like medicine or law), you may need to either buy a different version of the software or spend a long time training it. That said, I’ve had little trouble adapting it to the vocabulary of phonetics and phonology by giving it large papers I’ve written to train on.

Speech recognition is an incredibly hard task, and as a phonetics geek, I’m constantly amazed at how good modern software has gotten at it. I’m quite happy with Dragon Dictate 3, and if you need it (and are willing to pay the price, you might be happy too). Nuance has some work to do yet on the implementation, but if this is the state of the art now, I can’t wait to see what speech recognition software will look like in 10 more years.

That’s the serious part of this review. Tomorrow, I’ll talk about the kinds of awesome you can find when you’re not playing along. Arr ewe red E 4 sum fun?

Edit: See my Dragon Dictate 3 Followup Review which details my continued feelings after using the software for almost a month

Conclusions from my Dvorak Experiment

2012-10-01T00:00:00-04:00

A few posts ago, I mentioned my efforts to move to a Dvorak keyboard layout. Well, after a few weeks of working with Dvorak, I’ve stopped using it, and figured I’d discuss that choice here.

My reasons for moving to Dvorak were twofold. First, I type a great deal, and as such, any improvement in my typing efficiency would definitely have been welcome. I’ve never actually been able to touch type in QWERTY, and instead type with both wrists hovering aboard the keyboard, so I figured this would be a good time to learn to touch type as well. So, I gave it a shot, and taught myself to type using the Dvorak keyboard layout.

Why Dvorak?

After about two weeks of only using Dvorak to type (on my built-in QWERTY keyboard and an Apple Wireless, both still QWERTY), I got my speed up to about 30 words per minute (about half of my QWERTY typing speed). With a little chart hanging from my monitor, I was able to type comfortably in most contexts. Even with that little time, I found a few major advantages to Dvorak:

Dvorak is just plain more comfortable than how I was typing in QWERTY. Even though I typed more slowly, touch typing with Dvorak felt much, much better on my hands and wrists than my old QWERTY method did.
Dvorak makes sense. As a linguist, I appreciate when things are done with an understanding of how language works. Dvorak puts the sounds you need often within close reach.
Switching your computer is easy On a Mac, it’s as easy as picking a new keyboard layout, and on both my phone and tablet, I was able to use Swiftkey 3’s Dvorak keyboard, so it was universal across my devices.
Comma and period belong at “W” and “E”. This seemed silly when I first saw it, but man, moving comma and period up there is much more natural and quick than having them down by the arrow keys.

All of these things are wonderful, and make Dvorak a compelling option, which should likely be the default Roman keyboard around the world. But, I’m writing this message, so all was not ergonomic and wonderful.

Why not Dvorak?

I’m typing this from QWERTY, and have effectively shelved two weeks worth of hard work. Why? Well, I’ll focus not on the obvious reasons (switching keyboards, relearning), but on the ones that were the biggest factors for me personally.

Two weeks is just getting started. Two weeks seems like a long time, and felt like an eternity, but I was still only at half of my original QWERTY speed, and my computer-based productivity was still severely diminished. I’m sure I could’ve stuck with it and gotten my speed back, but the prospect of further months of work was a tough one to stomach, especially given the other concerns below. I found that, even two weeks in, the switch made using my computer a chore, not a
Muscle Memory is hard to break. I use mutt relatively frequently for sending and receiving email. As a part of mutt, you learn a great many keybindings, many of which make sense based on the letters they’re assigned to, and many of which I have muscle memory for. When I moved to Dvorak, my muscle memory for things like “Close vim and send the email” went away. Similarly, what little muscle memory I have for Vim disappeared, and things like Ctrl+C for “Kill a terminal process” went away. I used a “Dvorak + Cmd QWERTY” layout to try to minimize the loss of muscle memory for OS-level commands, but that only got me so far. I know that this, too, can be retrained over months (years?), but my existing facility with existing keystrokes made those two weeks a rough process, and really hurt my productivity.
Passwords Password fields (at least, the good ones) give you no feedback about what you’re entering, and when you’re entering your passwords, you can’t watch your keys (unless you change your keycaps around) to make sure you’re hitting the right letters. So, you’re forced to stare at the keyboard diagram and go symbol by symbol, and even then, you’re still going to mess up. This is less of an issue if you can rearrange your keycaps or use a Dvorak keyboard, but if you’re given a 20 character alphanumeric with symbols password to input, and 5 wrong answers lock you out, Dvorak (as a learner) is an awful place to be.
My IPA keyboard layout is not Dvorak Friendly. I use IPA fonts in OS X nearly every day, using the SIL Unicode Keyboard. This keyboard uses deadkey combinations to add IPA symbols, on top of a QWERTY keyboard. This is so that you can type your paper, homework or test normally, and then just add IPA symbols where needed using hotkeys and deadkeys. Using Dvorak removes that ability, so you’re forced to either type in QWERTY when using IPA, or to switch layouts every few words. This is a productivity drag that I have that few would, but a major factor in my decision.
Speech Recognition is getting very good. I’ve been using Dragon Dictate 3 for Mac since it came out a week or so back, and even using the built in mic on my Macbook Pro, it’s absolutely excellent. It’s not perfect (no system is), but I’m getting the best results I’ve ever gotten. This significantly reduces some of the long stretch typing that I’ve had to do, and speaking is more ergonomic than Dvorak or QWERTY.
I can do QWERTY better than I was doing. Most importantly of all, learning to touch type with Dvorak and use proper hand posture pointed out how bad my QWERTY typing posture was. I’ve spent some time since working on my QWERTY posture, and already, I’m able to type much more comfortably than I was before, with none of the other issues mentioned above.

So, you’re considering trying Dvorak? Here are my final thoughts!

The Takeaway

I’m glad I tried Dvorak, even now. It was a fascinating mental experiment, and made me think about typing in a way I never have before. My decision not to stick with it shouldn’t be viewed as a knock on the format itself, but just in my particular use case. If I hadn’t been using QWERTY for nearly 20 years, if I didn’t have so much muscle-memory built into it, if I had a few months of vacation for the transition, and if I didn’t use the IPA, I’d likely still be using it. I’m not sticking with QWERTY because it’s better, I’m sticking with QWERTY because the energy it would take to change my life to Dvorak would be greater than the savings I’d get from it.

If you’re just learning to type, use Dvorak. It can’t hurt, and it’ll definitely be easier in the long run. Similarly, if you do a lot of long-form typing without as much hotkeying, use Dvorak. But if you’re already set with QWERTY, already have a battery of hotkeys and muscle memory encoded in your brain, or if you use non-English or Modified-English keyboards often (which are often based on QWERTY), the change may not be worthwhile.

Ultimately, though, if you’ve got the time and the interest, it’s worth a try, even if just as a fun experiment in reprogramming your brain.

A working Carbon Monoxide detector just saved my parents' lives

2012-09-27T00:00:00-04:00

Two days ago, my parents’ lives were saved by a $20 carbon monoxide detector.

We now know that sometime during the course of the summer, the two water heaters in the basement of the house failed, burning natural gas incompletely and venting a huge amount of Carbon Monoxide and soot into the house and flue. They never noticed because the water stayed hot, and because all throughout the summer, they keep most of their windows open, living in a rural area with great views and fresh air, venting the lethal gas before it collected in sufficient amounts to be detected.

Tuesday night, it was cold and rainy. And as such, for the first time since May or June, they closed up all the windows and they turned on the central fan to keep air circulating. This allowed the gas to start building up, and turning on the central fan, due to improper plumbing, began to pull more of the gas from the shared flue and circulate it through the entire house. The closed windows just allowed the gas to build up and displace oxygen throughout the whole building, starting in the basement and moving upstairs.

By the evening, enough of the heavier-than-air gas had build up to set off the downstairs detectors, which my parents couldn’t hear from their living room and bedroom upstairs. By around 11 PM, the bedroom detectors started going off, the whole downstairs having already filled up. Enough gas had built up that the pilot light on their fireplace was six inches high, rising up above the CO to the oxygen above, and every houseplant there had wilted and dropped flowers.

When the detectors upstairs went off, they called the fire department, who walked in with a meter, measured the extent of the buildup, and immediately ran back to the truck for respirators. They ordered my parents to evacuate the house, offering to go back in (wearing oxygen tanks) to get anything they would need while evacuated. The fire department then spent several hours trying to vent the gas and isolate the source, and eventually, around 2am, once the levels were back to normal and the source was found and disabled, let them back in.

Carbon Monoxide is an odorless, heavier-than-air gas, and when it overcomes you, you don’t choke, or gasp, or wake up screaming. You just die. There were no signs, no obvious clues overlooked. The heating and plumbing had been inspected just a year before. This is just a freak occurrence that, without a $20 detector plugged into their bedroom wall, likely would’ve killed my parents as they slept.

So, please, take 5 minutes to test your CO detectors, and if you don’t have one on every floor and in every bedroom, go buy more. At $20, that bedroom detector is the best investment they ever made. I’m sure you and your families are worth it.

Transcribe one thing every day that scares you

2012-09-17T00:00:00-04:00

Eleanor Roosevelt once said “Do one thing every day that scares you”.

This morning, on my drive to campus, I had my music library on shuffle and ”Scatman (Ski Ba Bop Ba Dop Bop)” (by the late Scatman John) came on.

Around 35 seconds in (YouTube link to that timepoint), he bursts into an incredible line of articulatory gymnastics which, although frightening, I badly wanted to transcribe into the International Phonetic Alphabet, if for no other reason, to show my undergraduate phonetics class that with the IPA, anything is possible.

So, although it took around 30 minutes with a (rather creepy sounding) version of that section that I slowed down using Praat, I did it:

/skɑpəɾɑbadubiliduɾɛbɑpn̩duɾiuɾəbapn̩ũndɛvʌmvətevɛteɡəɾə(???)veŋuəbəveŋuəbəveŋuəbəveŋgəʔuɡɛɾiɾudo/

(Here’s an image version if the IPA isn’t rendering properly)

I’m not 100% confident about the whole passage, and during the section marked with (???), I believe he’s flicking his lips rapidly with his fingers (a labiodactyl trill?) which I can’t represent in the IPA.

However, the fact that this string of sounds can be broken down, analyzed and transcribed at all shows both the power of the IPA and the dangers of otherwise unoccupied linguists.

Slowing Down

2012-09-15T00:00:00-04:00

As I mentioned yesterday, I’m in the process of switching my brain to a Dvorak keyboard. With only a few days practice, what I could once type quickly is currently an ordeal.

This has been oddly good for my locquacious self. Something that’s worth saying in seconds, I’m finding, isn’t worth saying in minutes, and when every word feels like work, words must be willfully chosen. Slowing down has made me savor language for the first time in years.

An unanticipated consequence, but a pleasant one.

Of Dvoraks and Pine Thugs

2012-09-14T00:00:00-04:00

After a recent chance discussion with a social psychologist who has studied alternative keyboard adoption, and in the face of recent hints at an RSI from my wrists, I’ve decided to learn to touchtype using the Dvorak keyboard layout. Although the layout itself is fascinating, as it’s taking into account the relative frequency of different letters (poorly representing sounds) in the English language, I’ve also been taken with another interesting phenomenon which seems to go on in typing tutor websites.

Sometime back, I wrote about “pine thugs”, improbable word combinations forced by attempts to create good example s of two sounds together in phonology classes (like “pine thugs” or “squirrel thrills”). It would appear that the designers of typing courses have a similar phenomenon, stemming from their search for words and phrases which are made up of only the letters that they’re drilling. A few examples from the typing tutor website that I’m currently using:

Note the teen not the tutu

Tess Sutton notates the tenuous state that southeast Houston has seen

Dennis Hudson is hidden in a distant Tunisian hashish hideout

Auntie Edith tends to hint that Edna heeds the ideas due to Satan

Frankly, the fact that the examples can as much sense as they do using only the homerow probably says a great deal about the efficiency of the layout, but these entertaining word sequences (“Dvoraks”, perhaps?) have made this learning process much more entertaining than it could have been.

And, 20 minutes into typing even this short post (on two days of practice with the layout), entertainment is a wonderful thing.

Anonymity and Orthonymity

2012-09-03T00:00:00-04:00

I regularly read and very much enjoy John Wells’ Phonetic Blog, a blog run, as you might imagine, by British Phonetician John Wells. Well, today he made a post which inspired a whirlwind of thinking within me about orthonymity (using one’s actual name), and rather neatly crystallized further progress in a debate I’ve been having in my own mind for several months. From his post:

You may have noticed that this blog is neither anonymous nor pseudonymous. It bears my true name at the top. If you are for some reason curious about me or my life, googling my name will quickly reveal to you more information about me than you could reasonably want to know. You will find links to my home page, my personal history, and my (unauthorized by me) Wikipedia entry. On my home page you will see my email address and even my home phone number. (I have never hesitated to make these contact details available on the web. It helps journalists and others who might wish to contact me to do so.)

But many of those who leave comments on this blog hide behind nicknames or pseudonyms, sometimes fantastical. We don’t know who they really are. (There are some exceptions here. I know that “Ed” is Ed Aveyard, and that ”clinicallinguistics” is Martin Ball, while “wjarek” is Jarek Weckwerth. And of course there are several commentators who, I assume, use their real names.)

I ask that from now on everyone who comments on postings on this blog should use their true name. I refer you to a recent article in the Guardian by Jonathan Myerson.

The right to be anonymous is the right to be forgotten

Of course, the internet has a great many people discussing the merits of available anonymity, and I suspect that Dr. Wells would likely agree that for some situations, anonymity is simply required. However, blogging about language (or commenting on a blog about language) is unlikely to step on the toes of world governments, put you in a whistleblower position against powerful organziations, or even inspire scorn among family and friends, some of the usual cases highlighting the need of anonymity.

However, up until a few months ago, I’d have posted either as “WS” (my real life initials), or more likely, as “The Linguistic Mystic”, my well established psuedonym, and posting with my real name would have been rather out of the question. This is not so much because I’m afraid of blowback or retribution, but because I don’t entirely trust my (still young) self. I know that posting on a comments page or even creating a blog are public acts, and I also consider myself a great deal more saavy than I once was regarding the public/private line.

However, with the continual improvement of search algorithms and the internet’s ability to keep things around for the forseeable future, on the internet, we have no right to be forgotten. As such, online, I’ve taken to avoiding using my real name entirely in most situations where I don’t need to, and I’ve even gone about googling and removing my real name from any sites I might still have access to.

The Guardian article to which Dr. Wells links is a good one, and neatly examines the idea that anonymity discourages care in discussion. However, I’d like to present the counterpoint: Even well-intentioned, well-reasoned and non-“trollish” remarks can come back to haunt you when circumstances change. When such remarks are made anonymously or psuedonymously and they become unpopular, people attack your words. When those same remarks are made orthonymously, people attack you.

Orthonymity is forever

That’s not to say that I will never use my real name. There are times when I explicitly want something to be publicized and associated with me in the future, something I’d want future friends, parterns, and even faculty selection communities to Google and find. In effect, for me, using my real name is more than just “introducing myself” in a conversation, as Dr. Wells suggests. Using my real name is branding my words and saying “I not only say this, but I endorse and am ready to defend it now and for the forseeable future”.

One of the biggest changes in this site’s recent reworking was one I hardly mentioned at all. For the first 6 years of this site’s life, I made conscious effort to separate “The Linguistic Mystic” from me, Will Styler. At early stages in the site’s existence, I’d even taken conscious steps to ensure that the site would be difficult to link back to me except with extensive googling or through the people I’d shared that link with.

However, that policy has been weakening. I’ve not done anything terribly controversial nor terribly presumptuous, and my name had already been revealed in a few places (both in citation requests and in the news). When I recently went through a full redesign of the site (which required me to review every post), I realized that, well, the site was actually something that I should be proud of. Some of my old posts were, perhaps, a bit shrill in places, but on the whole, I had created a sizable chunk of work which I should actually take credit for.

So, with little ceremony, I added the “About the Author” link to the “Site Information” in the upper right corner, linking directly to my personal homepage at the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Vowels, and added a symmetrical link pointing back here from there. And today, two paragraphs up, I posted my full name for the first time ever on this website.

A role for anonymity and orthonymity

Sure, there will be people people making low-quality posts with fake names, but there are people making them with real names. In fact, what little hate mail this blog has gotten me has been from people using their real names and information. I don’t take personally somebody trying to avoid linking their random comment of the morning to their entire career, but I do appreciate knowing something about the people who I’m talking with.

Ultimately, though, I don’t care whether people, when commenting, use a psuedonym or their real name. At this point, to be honest, I’m just grateful to inspire any discussion at all.

Weather and The Cloud

2012-08-29T00:00:00-04:00

Some time back, I posted about my disdain for the term “The Cloud” when discussing distributed or offsite computing. There, discussing the term “in the Cloud”, I said:

This phenomenon itself isn’t noteworthy from a linguistic standpoint (”Web 2.0” seems to have been the same sort of trendy buzzword at some point), but it occurred to me today that for many less-tech-saavy users, this “in the cloud” phrasing might actually be affecting how people view these services, and I think that might be why companies have latched onto this term so strongly.

Well, I just got some delightful confirmation in the form of this study (found via Slashdot), offers the following not-as-shocking-as-they-should-be results:

A new national survey by Wakefield Research, commissioned by Citrix, showed that most respondents believe the cloud is related to weather, while some referred to pillows, drugs and toilet paper.

In addition to the revelation that The Cloud is affected by weather patterns, the study’s press release also tells us that 25% of respondents thought that the cloud was useful for “keeping embarrassing videos off of their personal hard drive”, which I doubt most people would do if they fully understood what The Cloud is.

All head-shaking aside, this is further proof that the language used to describe a concept is critical in people’s understanding of it, and a bad metaphor (like this one) can seriously and negatively affect people’s comprehension of the concepts at play. Remember, ladies and gentlemen, “in the cloud” is just a fancy way of saying “on somebody else’s computer”, and if you put anything “in the cloud” that you wouldn’t want on somebody else’s computer, well, there’s a storm brewing. Better grab an umbrella.

'Fuck you Money'

2012-08-29T00:00:00-04:00

This morning, I was linked to an article about a $290 designer paper lunch bag. The most disturbing part of this article was not the mere existence of such a product, because anybody can offer anything for any price they’d like. The truly frightening part of this story is that apparently, the manufacturer has already sold out of them. Who on Earth buys these things? Well, people with “fuck you money”, of course.

What is “Fuck you money”, anyways?

Although the OED was quite unhelpful in the matter, a Metafilter thread (discussed again below) offered Neal Stephenson’s “Cryptonomicon” as an early source of the word, offering the below, publicly available excerpt as an early example of the term’s use:

“We look for places where the math is right. Meaning what? Meaning that pop. is about to explode—we can predict that just by looking at age histogram—and per capita income is about to take off the way it did in Nippon, Taiwan, Singapore. Multiply those two things together and you get the kind of exponential growth that should get us all into fuck-you money before we turn forty.”

However, that offers usage, but not definition. To me, saying that a person has “fuck you money” does not just mean that they’re wealthy, or even that they’re extremely wealthy. For me, “Fuck you money” implies somebody so rich that they’ve lost all perspective on money. Their spending, then, to the less-wealthy world, seems like a big “fuck you”. For example, I might say something like:

“John spent $3500 on bottle service last night? That’s insane!”
“He probably didn’t even notice, he’s got fuck you money.”

This “extreme degree of wealth” definition seems to be shared by many on the internet, and, in fact, is the first definition given by UrbanDictionary:

Any amount of money allowing infinite perpetuation of wealth necessary to maintain a desired lifestyle without needing employment or assistance from anyone.

However, in my mind, not every super-rich person, at least in my mind, has “fuck you money”, as it’s as much an attitude as a bank balance. This is why UrbanDictionary’s second definition really resonated with me:

Enough money to be able to say fuck you to anybody on the planet.

This definition seems to be shared by many. This post on Quora offers a similar “money do be able to do anything” definition for the term, as does this straight dope thread, this blog post, and this anecdote from the Naked Entrepreneur. But a few more threads is not a consensus.

Rich in definitions

So, clearly, there’s a debate as to the true definition. A bit more googling linked me to a Metafilter thread from 2006 which attempts to quantify the amount of money needed to have “fuck you money”, in which people spend considerable time going back and forth between the “permanent comfort” and “ability to do what one wishes” definitions:

This is terribly subjective, as the definition of fuck-you money is variable from person-to-person. “Wealth necessary to maintain a desired lifestyle.” That’s two totally different amounts to, say, Gordon Gekko and an Amish farmer.

… the concept of “fuck-you money” is less about having enough money to get by for the rest of your life comfortably, but more about having enough money to do what you want, when you want, with no worries.

I guess everybody’s definition of “fuck you money” is much different. I calculated mine to be under $20,000 and I saved it in about five months. Then I quit my job and started this.

Unfortunately, the one place I know of where you might expect people with fuck you money to chime in, the EnronSent Database of Enron Corporate Emails offers 19 instances of “fuck you”, but no usage of “fuck you money”.

So, it appears that there’s considerable debate about the “true” meaning of the term, and that there’s no easy answer as to what “fuck you money” really means. If you have an opinion (or another definition), please feel free to share it in the comments section, because, unfortunately, as an academic, a few google searches is likely as close as I’ll ever get to “fuck you money”.

Another IPA Keyboard Solution

2012-08-27T00:00:00-04:00

One of the most popular posts on this site is my guide to using IPA fonts with OS X, which offers deep, system-level integration for the IPA with OS X. This still works (wonderfully), but there are some situations where that won’t work, either when you’re on somebody else’s machine, or, worse still, on Windows.

For those situations, I highly recommend i2speak, an online keyboard which allows you to use all the various IPA characters with extreme ease. In fact, you’ll find that some characters are actually easier to type quickly. It then actually saves the output as a .doc or .png files. Unfortunately, I can’t manage to get copy/paste working in Chrome, but it’s still definitely better than hunting around in a character palette when you’re away from home.

Remembrance and Redesign

2012-08-26T00:00:00-04:00

So, I’m delighted to announce that I’ve just completed a complete re-write of the site. I figured I’d talk a bit about the redesign, about the backend, and about the future of Notes from a Linguistic Mystic in general. First, a little story.

The Times are a’changin

As some of you may know, a long time ago, I invested twice in TextDrive, which was later bought out by Joyent, a major player in the cloud computing game. All early investors were promised “lifetime” hosting, “as long as Joyent exists”, and as such, Linguistic Mystic (as well as several other sites I maintain for myself, friends, and family) had reasonable hosting for the forseeable future.

Well, all good things must end, and, much to the shock of all of us early investors, Joyent recently informed us that our “lifetime” ends in October. The TextDrive/Joyent community erupted into turmoil and strife, with people feeling equal parts shocked and betrayed, with Jason Hoffman (the current head of Joyent and old head of TextDrive) taking the worst of it. And, to be fair, Jason actually waded into the melee, offering refunds to customers, offering sympathy to the displaced, and being as compassionate as the initial announcement felt heartless. I suspect that in hindsight looking back at all this, we lifetimers will be looking at Jason not as the antagonist here, but as one of our best allies. But I’m just guessing at this point.

Ultimately, though, the future of us lifetimers is still unclear, and although there are some very interesting ideas on the horizon (including a possible resurrection of TextDrive under the old leadership), practically speaking, this meant I had to find some new hosting, quickly, before the semester starts (tomorrow!).

Migration via Ambulance

Before all this happened, Notes from a Linguistic Mystic hadn’t had much love in the last few years. I had applied critical updates, approved new comments, and even added a post here and there, but behind the scenes, the blog was sick. The site had been running on the same (heavily patched) install of Wordpress since 2006, the theme (although pretty) was something I’d cobbled together poorly, and it still relied on plugins which were antique at best, abandoned at worst. Even the “New Post” box didn’t work properly, and constantly forced a mix of WYSIWYG editing and HTML, so posting itself was a frustrating process.

So, given that the site was limping along at home, when I moved the site over to my new hosting company (Dreamhost), I expected trouble, and trouble I found. Upon migrating the data using Wordpress’s Export and Import functions, many posts had new formatting issues, I lost all of my Blogroll Links (although that issue is fixable), and for whatever reason, every single image link through all 141 posts suddenly had an “11” appended to the filename.

I fixed it. Well, more accurately, I duct-taped it. I decided to abandon my blogroll (which was largely duplicated here and here), I went through most of the posts to fix the issues, and rather than fixing the link’s in Wordpress’ editor, I created copies of every uploaded file which had an “11” at the end of the filename. I felt particularly dirty about that last one. But I got it working.

Unfortunately, though, nothing was improved, I’d just succeeded it moving a sick patient to a different hospital.

Inspiration at a Wake

The strangest things can provide inspiration. For me, it was the re-emergence of Dean, the original founder of TextDrive, in the whole End-of-Lifetime discussion, and the mention, however fleeting, of a new TextDrive incarnation. The community that Dean founded seemed to attract not just people who needed hosting, but people who gave a damn about web design, writing, and blogging. There was a forum where you could post your designs and people would comment, good and bad, and where you’d see really inspired stuff on a regular basis. I’m a linguist first, but hanging out around there made me want to keep up my web-design game, just so I could run at the heels of the big boys there. This is the thing I miss most about Textdrive’s fading away, and is the reason I’d invest again in a heartbeat if it came back up.

For a long time, there had been a diaspora from TextDrive. I still kept up with some people on Twitter, but the forums were dead. The community was scattered. The people who inspired me off chasing the four winds. But the unraveling of the hosting, the last thread that kept us all together, brought us back. The forum thread discussing the End-of-Lifetime was like the funeral of a much-loved matriarch. Everybody’s grateful to be in the same room with so many friends, but everybody wishes it was for another reason. But still, seeing these familiar faces brought old memories, and brought new inspiration to make this site (particularly) something that didn’t just limp, but something I was proud of.

So I did.

Moving to Jekyll

Wordpress is wonderful software, and for many years, it was exactly what I needed. It makes publishing on the web easy. Installing it is easy. Managing comments is easy (if you’re using Akismet). Wordpress takes care of everything for you. But the flawed transition and aging install reminded me of the other side of that coin: If you’re wholly dependent on anything, when it starts fading, you fade with it. So, I knew I could either start over from scratch with Wordpress, clean all the cruft out, write a new theme, and move my posts back in, or I could try something crazy.

I’d heard of Jekyll before, but never seriously considered it until one of my Textdrive friends mentioned he’d been toying around with it. It’s not so much a blogging engine as a site generator, and it runs only on your computer, never on the server. Basically, Jekyll takes specially formatted files on your local machine and turns those files into a static website, which you then copy onto the server. So, on the server, you just have HTML files, stylesheets, and images. No fancy PHP, no databases, and, as a result, no real security issues. Most attractively of all, to somebody who recently fought through a server migration gone wrong, migrating your site to a new server is just a question of generating the site files again and putting them on the new server. But Jekyll’s not for the faint of heart, as you’re making everything from scratch. It’s just a program, your site is your own. Wordpress holds your hand through the entire process, but Jekyll just claps you on the back and says “Godspeed”.

Hyde is in the details

I initially thought I might just try Jekyll for a smaller blog, a personal blog, but after experimenting, I decided that I really liked the idea behind it, and I figured that migrating a 141 post Wordpress blog to Jekyll, while swearing to keep it both pretty and functional, is just the kind of crazy that I could be proud of, and that could bring this blog back to a new health. So, I did.

I used my original export of my Wordpress blog (from the old server, pre-migration) and plugged it into exitwp, which did the heavy lifting of converting posts to files, maintaining categories for those posts, and even doing a first-pass markdown conversion. I also used Jekyll Bootstrap to save myself some time in formatting and getting comments up. Finally, I exported all my comments from the old site into Disqus, hoping I’d be able to link them to my new blog eventually, but fully aware that I might lose them forever (and, in fact, as I write this, I’m still waiting for the migration to complete so I can find out).

After setting up the base site, I moved into the grind. In order to make this transition, I had to go through and manually check and repair the markdown syntax for every single post. Given that formatting was among the many problems the old blog had, this was a necessary evil, and an exceptionally evil one. While I did that, I repaired old links, changed image paths, and pruned here and there. Then I fired up CSSEdit (which I still have a license to) and went to town on the base Jekyll-bootstrap theme. Then I tweaked stuff. Then tweaked more stuff. Then more still. I added category views, Disqus integration, a sidebar, pages, a list-home page. All this, eventually leading to what you see now.

And I had a bunch of fun doing it.

What is this site?

The site is now up, running, and faster than ever on Jekyll. But more important than the backend is the writing, because a fast and pretty blog which is never used is little more than a year-old calendar. As I re-did everything on the technical end, I still felt something was lacking in the content, in the very soul of the site. And I wanted to fix that too.

In the last few years, I’d come to look at this site as a teaching site, as a place for pure linguistics instruction. I split off my non-language-related posts into another URL (non.linguisticmystic.com), and even then, wanted to bring them further away, and felt like even with a popular blog (still around 30,000 hits/month), I had no place to speak.

So, I looked around at the people whose blogs I’m grateful for, and whose work I admire. Sites like Bruce Schneier’s Schneier on Security, John Gruber’s DaringFireball, Arnold Zwicky’s Blog and John Wells’ Phonetic Blog are all wonderful to read, and well deserving of a spot in your RSS feed.

Looking at that list, I realized that none of those blogs are explicitly “instructional” or meant for teaching. Instead, they’re personal blogs maintained by interesting people who are so involved in their fields that, by reading their thoughts and musings, even about things which are “off topic” for the blog itself, you can’t help but learn something.

That’s what I want to do with this site.

Notes from a Linguistic Mystic

So, allow me to reintroduce myself. I’m Will, the Linguistic Mystic, a Ph.D student in Linguistics from Colorado, in the USA. I hope you’ve enjoyed what I’ve written in the past, and I hope you’ll continue to enjoy what I write in the future. This site will be my voice, both about language and about computers, technology, and the world in general. I’ve merged all my non-linguistic posts back in, so non.linguisticmystic.com is gone, and it’s all one big, happy site. You’re welcome to contact me if you have any questions, concerns, or comments, and as always, commenting is open.

So, thanks for reading, and welcome to Notes from a Linguistic Mystic.

OS X 10.8 "Mountain Lion" review

2012-07-26T06:52:29-04:00

Around this time last year, I reviewed OS X 10.7 “Lion”, and as you may recall, I wasn’t that enthusiastic about it. I felt like Lion broke more than it gave users, and was especially skewed against power users. I’m delighted to say that, although not everything wrong with Lion is fixed in Mountain Lion, it’s still a much better effort.

After installing it, I’ve managed to get nearly everything working, and there was MUCH less breakage than Lion’s release. In addition, frankly, there were a whole bunch of actual gains from upgrading, which quickly overshadowed the few troubles which did come up. I love the ability to text my iOS using friends from the messages app, and Airplay mirroring to modern AppleTVs is REALLY slick, to the degree that it’s tempting me to get an AppleTV of my own. Notification center looks promising, and Time Machine backups to multiple disks (for redundancy) finally works!

A few notes for installing, focused on the particularly nerdy people:

* Homebrew items may need to be removed and then installed again.

* SVN install via Homebrew breaks. Symlink fix here: https://github.com/mxcl/homebrew/issues/13586

* wxpython binary packages will say “This installer has been damaged”. That’s Apple for “This installer isn’t signed”. Go to Gatekeeper preferences and allow unsigned packages to install it. This is poor communication from

* GPGMail is broken, as expected with a major Mail.app rewrite. Give them time, but every other GPGTools program is working fine.

* Creating a bootable backup, especially for those of us who no longer have CD drives, just keeps getting easier

* TotalSpaces gets rid of the biggest annoyance from Lion, their destruction of real Spaces support, and also can remove the “Change space” animation entirely. Hallelujah!

* “Save as” is back, kind of.

So, in short, I’m actually recommending Mountain Lion to friends and family, the same ones I advised to skip Lion. Apple has finally sweetened the pot enough to merit taking the functionality losses and annoyances you’ll inherit from Lion, and enough 3rd party apps are around to stitch up some of the remaining wounds. You’ll need to make that call on your own, and it may not be a bad idea to wait for a point release, but as an early adopter of the new OS, I’m on board, and glad I am.

Foreshadowing

2012-07-14T10:57:17-04:00

Every person has a few moments in life which, when you look back, point clearly and firmly into the future. Here’s one of mine:

I was a very young child, maybe in 1st or 2nd grade (6-7 years old). I had been “put to bed”, but was laying in bed thinking. We had just been exposed to the idea of “how to say X in another language” in class for a “travel the world” week. Anyways, I was still amazed (and a bit scared) by the existence of other languages, and started wondering how deep it went. I thought and thought about that, until, unable to sleep, I stood up, in pajamas, and marched downstairs to my father’s study.

“Dad.” (I paraphrase) “How many languages are there?”

I don’t recall what his answer was, but he gave a large enough number to impress (and scare) me.

“But English was the first one, right?”

He told me “No”, and explained what he knew about language genesis (which, as an Anesthesiologist, was a bit out of his purview). After a minute or two more of discussion, I went back upstairs, thought for a while more about it, and eventually went to sleep.

It wasn’t until High School that my Dad publicly declared his prediction that I was probably going to be a Linguist, and that I would teach. I had no idea what a linguist was, and didn’t much care for school, so I dismissed the idea. “Studying languages for a living, but not translating?” I thought. “That’s silly!”

He SO called it.

Why is linguistic diversity a good thing?

2012-06-21T13:10:56-04:00

Today, in response to Google’s announcement of the Endangered languages project, the topic of linguistic diversity shot briefly to the forefront of the mind for people around the internet. After a post went live about this on Slashdot, a variety of commenters all asked the same question: Why is linguistic diversity a good thing?

Even though it’s not a question a trained linguist would really think to ask, it’s a fair question, answerable on several fronts.

First, you can think about linguistic diversity as being like biodiversity: More species, each with different adaptations and ways of life, provide more information for which to understand how life works. For a linguist interested in “Typology”, the comparison of different languages, examining the differences across many different, unrelated (or nearly so) languages gives better insight into Language (with a capital L) on the whole. It allows us to ask interesting questions like “Around the world, do people prefer to have lots of sounds at the start of a syllable, or at the end”, or “What’s the most common ordering of the Subject, Object and Verb in sentences in human language?”.

Sure, losing an individual language doesn’t destroy everything, but each language that’s lost is one less (incredibly rich) datapoint which can be used to better understand how people do language, and what other ways things can be done in language. In addition, individual languages have plenty to teach us as well.

For instance, in Wichita, a language which may or may not be dead based on the health of its last few speakers, one could express “the buffalo ran up and down the village several times while scaring people” using a single, very long, very complex word. There are other languages which act like this (“polysynthetic languages”), but Wichita is really, frighteningly good at it. Don’t you think that it’d be fascinating to do some MRI studies to see how Wichita people are parsing words, compared to speakers of, say, Mandarin Chinese, which isolate nearly every morpheme (“chunk of meaning”), grammatical or otherwise, into single words?

In addition, as other people have pointed out, when you lose the language, you lose the culture very easily (and vice versa). Even if you’re not interested in the specifics of how language works in the mind (or just in general), understanding different cultural approaches to the world provides more information on the human condition. If your culture doesn’t permit or believe in the idea of “selling land”, that’s interesting data, and food for thought for most other cultures.

Add to it the fact that most languages right now are being lost as a result of imperialist or assimilationist policies, either in the past or in the present, and preserving language (and the cultures that come with it) is an important means to preserving cultures which might otherwise be lost of past political mistakes.

In short, if you’re looking at things in a cold, detached way (in terms of trade or war or politics, say), there’s little reason to have a group of 50,000 people speaking three languages rather than one. But if you’re interested in how human language, culture, and cognition works. that diversity and those comparisons offer data that a homogenous group would not. And that, no matter how you slice it, is a good thing.

Converting Unicode IPA to TIPA for LaTeX documents, easily

2012-04-23T13:28:04-04:00

This is very esoteric, but I absolutely have to share this. So, the majority of people use Unicode IPA fonts and IPA entry to put IPA in documents, and that’s absolutely fine. However, those of us who often write homeworks, tests, or papers in LaTeX can’t do that, as LaTeX doesn’t natively support unicode IPA.

The solution, of course, is to use TIPA, which is an excellent system for typesetting IPA symbols (and in fact, the only reliable way I’ve found to ensure that diacritics are placed in the right places). Unfortunately, actually typing in TIPA is a terrible endeavor, as many of the symbols are represented with several characters, or with longer escape sequences (“Columbia” is [k@” l\textturnv mbi@] in TIPA), and although it makes sense at some level, it’s far from intuitive.

So, fed up with manually looking up TIPA symbols, I stumbled upon the magnificently wonderful E-linguistics Toolkit, and from that, have a solution which makes using TIPA tolerable, a simple terminal command which, when run, converts text from unicode IPA into TIPA markup, allowing me to type quickly and still use my IPA in LaTeX.

Here’s how to set it up on your Mac (or linux box), assuming you’ve got a bit of command-line knowledge:

Download and install the eltk from their website. You’ll download the zip file, then follow the directions in the readme.
Download this file, my tipafy script and unzip it. I’ll assume it’s on your desktop
Run these two commands in your terminal:
- sudo cp ~/Desktop/tipafy /usr/bin/tipafy
- sudo chmod +x /usr/bin/tipafy

Then, you’re done! (Sorry, Windows people, I don’t really know how python and creating/running executables works for you :()

Now, let’s say you’ve got a chunk of unicode IPA, like “fownɛˈtɪʃn”, and you need it in TIPA form. Just open a terminal window and type the below:

tipafy fownɛˈtɪʃn

… and it’ll output:

\textipa{fownE" tISn}

Which is ready to be dropped into a LaTeX document.

If you have multiple words, just put the whole thing in quotes:

tipafy "ðə 'sowldʒə˞ də'sajdɪd"

… and it’ll output everything as a TIPA command.

It’s not perfect, but it gets you a heck of a lot closer than just typing blindly, and in my experience, it’s been faster to type unicode and convert than to actually try and remember the TIPA commands for everything. And, of course, the real credit goes to Scott Farrar and the eltk people, who made it possible for this whole thing to work.

\textipa{EndZoj} Edit: Although this method works fine, as several commenters have pointed out, you’re better off using XeLaTeX and a regular Unicode IPA keyboard and font. It’s easier, looks nicer in preview, and is much less painful than TIPA.

The Acoustics of the Dubstep-as-a-series-of-records video

2012-04-10T19:20:11-04:00

So, this video has been making the rounds today, and it’s just incredible, you need to watch it. In short, a very clever producer of music videos has cut a series of records to match the waveform of a dubstep song, and arranged them on a pole in time with the music.

I sent this video to my undergraduate phonetics class today, and one student emailed me back, asking “How accurate would that representation of the waveform be? What would it sound like if you played it back?”. Well, I have a conference call to prepare for, and I don’t want to be doing that right now, so I decided to go full nerd and do a bit of analysis instead and answer that question.

Let’s assume that the records were cut extremely carefully, and that every record represents the amplitude at that moment perfectly. A stretch, but they seem to have done their homework. We’re also assuming (as seems to be the case) that the records are cut to a flat edge (rather than representing additional detail. Even with that assumption, does this represent the sound well? Let’s do the math.

The first record goes on at 27 seconds, the last at 1:52. That’s 85 seconds of audio. Those 85 seconds are represented by 960 vinyl records. This is a new record representing a slice of the waveform roughly every 0.088 seconds (the period). Using our frequency formula (f=1/0.066), that’s a record addition rate (sampling rate) of roughly 11 Hz. Bam.

So, we have a new amplitude sample 11 times per second. Now, we’re basically treating this as a digital audio file, which samples amplitude repeatedly at a given rate. The Nyquist theorem (which is awesome) states that the highest frequency captured accurately by a given sampling rate (the “Nyquist Frequency”) is 1/2 of the sampling rate.

For your average CD, your sampling rate is 44,100 Hz, which has a nyquist frequency of 22,050 Hz. This means that the highest frequency captured accurately in the recording is 22,050 Hz. Higher than humans can hear, but your pet dolphin isn’t impressed by your “Hi-Fi” stereo.

In this video, our sampling rate is only 11 Hz (11 records per second of audio). This means that the Nyquist frequency would be 5.5 Hz. Which means that if you were to “play back” the waveform here by pulsing the amplitude shown by the next record every 0.088 seconds, it’d be completely inaudible to humans (who can only hear 20Hz and above) as periodic sounds, and would just sound like a series of bursts of noise.

In effect, they’re representing a zoomed-out version of the waveform, which is incredibly awesome looking, but not a very good way to store audio information for playback. But that doesn’t take away from the fact that this is one of the more creative things done in a music video in a long time. So, I’d still chalk this one up as a victory for the producers of this video.

Alright, alright. I’ll go prepare for my conference call.

Crossing a line

2012-03-22T15:50:02-04:00

So, last night, I’m dreaming quietly in bed. In my dream, I’m sitting in my Linguistics department’s phonetics lab (although it’s bigger and better equipped, it is a dream, after all). In comes a group of undergrads with an adult speaker of some unnamed language, and a faculty member from the department who does fieldwork and who I respect greatly.

They all sit down around a big table and start doing field research with the speaker, asking grammar questions, trying to pick apart the phonology (sound patterns) of the language. After a while, I get sucked in, and the faculty member baits me into joining, hinting towards what I was already thinking was a phonemic initial glottal stop contrast. (For the less linguisty among you, that means that in this dream language, the sound in “Hawai’i” or “Uh-oh” can occur at the start of the word or not, and whether it’s there or not changes the meaning of the word).

So, at this point being unable to resist, I jump in. I quickly start trying to elicit the speaker to highlight the contrast by having him repeat words, partly for my own joy and partly to show the undergrads what’s going on. Then, as is always wise in a field methods class, I start trying to produce those contrasting words myself, something I’m quite comfortable doing having spent as much time in phonetics as I have.

Then, in my dream, I realize that I couldn’t. No matter how hard I try, I just couldn’t make that initial glottal stop, I just kept producing the words without it. I knew it was there, I knew how to make it, and I knew it SHOULD be working, but I couldn’t do it. And worse still, the speaker was getting frustrated, the faculty member was judging me, and the undergrads were all starting to mock me. Finally, scared, confused, and completely glottal-stop-less, I woke up.

I think I have a problem.

Having dreams about linguistics is nothing new to me. Heck, I’ve even analyzed dream languages for hours while sleeping. But this one, to my mind, crosses a line. I’ve heard that police officers sometimes can’t fire their guns to save themselves in their dreams, and maybe firefighters sometimes run out of water in their dreams.

Now, I know for sure I’m in the right field because apparently for me, in a nightmare, it’s not that I’ll be naked in class, that my gun won’t fire, or that my car won’t start. Instead, I’m up at night worried about laryngeal misfires. If that doesn’t make me a phonetician and a linguist, I don’t know what would.

In defense of simplicity: Why I keep coming back to mutt on OS X

2012-03-17T15:12:54-04:00

So, this past week, after a hard drive failure, I did something that many of my friends and colleagues find bizarre: I reinstalled mutt, an open-source command-line email client which runs entirely in your terminal window, and set it up for everyday use on my Mac.

In this post, I’ll explain briefly why I did that, how I went about it, and what programs I use along with it.

Why the heck would you use mutt in 2012?

The choice to go from a full-featured, gui-based mail client (like Apple’s Mail.app) to a command-line client is often confusing to people. Why use something so spartan, so foreign, with so many GUI mail applications out there. Open source and cross-platform benefits aside, there are many posts around touting the benefits of mutt specifically. In an effort to explain my personal choices, I’ll explain not what mutt does, but what using mutt gains me over using Apple’s Mail.app:

mutt is customizable. Don’t like a key-binding? Change it! Don’t like the color scheme? Change it! Want it to behave differently? Change it! You own your mutt config, and it lets you do whatever you want, without the tyranny of a preferences panel restricting what you can change.
mutt is quick. Opening a message is near-instant on a remote server, and even quicker if you’re hosting email locally.
mutt lets me sit down and write all the email I need without ever needing to use a mouse. That means that everything’s just a bit quicker, and just a bit more streamlined. When I’m using mutt to do something familiar, I become the bottleneck in my workflow, not the program or the input.
mutt lets me blast through emails absurdly quickly. I can clear my inbox in just a few keystrokes, if needed, and filing is just as quick.
mutt has full pgp integration built-in. Although gpgmail is great and getting better, mutt makes it all the quicker, and frankly, all the slicker.
mutt lets you use whatever editor you’d like (vim, for me). This means that even while you’re not coding, you’re still learning vim and getting better with the keystrokes.
Threading actually works in mutt, and doesn’t screw with everything like in mail.app
mutt lets you do magical things.

That last one is important. Let’s say you want to get rid of some cruft in your (8000+ message) trash mailbox, and thus, you want to delete any message from Twitter. In Mail.app (with Lion), you’d have to Select the Trash mailbox, type “Twitter” into the search bar, go up there, select “From” (so that you’re not deleting messages that mention twitter), Click “Trash” in the menu bar to limit the scope of the search, Select All, then click Erase and wait for Mail to actually do the erasing.

In mutt? Get into your trash mailbox, then type: T~f twitter [hit enter];d

… and you’re done. That’s it. ”T” for tag, “~f” for from, twitter and then [enter] makes the query”;” means “do this to tagged items”, and “d” means “delete”. If you then wanted to delete anything from John Smith, T~f John Smith [enter];d. Or to remove any trace of email from your brief membership in the society for the prevention of cruelty to vowels, T savethevowels.org[enter];d. Using this, I was able to intelligently cull 2000 messages from my trash last night in the span of around 10 minutes.

Another example is “l”, for “limit”. If I want to find every email I’ve sent to my friend Ian, I would open my sent folder and type l ian"[enter]. Then, I would be limited to seeing only posts to him, instantly. See? Magic.

As such, working with mutt is damned quick. With practice, I’ve found that everything I could do in mail.app I could do faster in mutt, and because there are always more optimizations to be done and keystrokes to be learned, I’m still getting faster. Whereas with Mail.app, I felt like the program was usually the bottleneck, using mutt, my brain and my typing speed is the bottleneck. Which is an oddly wonderful feeling.

So, uh, what’s the catch?

Well, a few things.

mutt isn’t pre-installed on OS X, and setting it up (the first time) is a bit of a pain, described below
mutt doesn’t “just work”, and you have to edit actual configuration files to get it working.
Be prepared to spend some quality time with manual pages and online sites to get everything up and running. There’s no friendly GUI, and to get everything working, expect to take an evening or two with your computer.
It’s a paradigm shift. Even once you’ve got it working, old habits die hard, and until the keystrokes are muscle-memoried, it’s a struggle at first.
Lots of things don’t work out of the box. AddressBook contact support requires lbdb, url viewing requires urlview, viewing html mail requires lynx and the creation of a mailcap file.
Inline images don’t show inline. You have to download and then view them manually. This is probably the biggest drawback.
You’ll need a separate mail notifier program to let you know when you’ve got new mail without looking at the terminal window, like the now-free Notify

In short, switching to mutt from Mail.app is like switching to vim from something like TextEdit or Notepad. There’s a learning curve, and it’s not working out of the box. But if you’re willing to do the learning and put the parts together, it’s a whole bunch faster, as you can tailor it exactly how you want it. Much like a good vim configuration or a Gentoo linux install, your mutt installation isn’t created, it’s crafted.

Uh… OK. How do I install it?

Well, first, it’s very possible that a server you love already has mutt installed, so you can try it there before you buy it. But I’m assuming you’ve started to fall in love and want to install it on your Mac (running 10.6 or 10.7). Here are the steps I took to get it set up:

Install XCode (from the Mac App Store, free).
Open Xcode preferences-> Downloads-> Components and click “Install” for “command line tools”
Install Homebrew, to make installing all the other tools easier
Open up a terminal once your homebrew install has finished and type:
- brew install slang lbdb urlview lynx
- brew install mutt –-sidebar-patch –-trash-patch -–with-slang
- (Note that the above command includes the ability to show a sidebar with all folders, has you actually use a trashcan rather than deleting messages instantly, and uses slang for better color handling)
Create a .muttrc file in your home directory and edit it to configure mutt (Here’s my .muttrc, for reference)
Create a .mailcap file in your home directory and edit it to configure how different attachments are opened (Here’s my (minimal) .mailcap, for reference, which could easily form the basis of yours)
Now you can just type mutt at a terminal, and mutt will open up!

The above steps will get you working with just homebrew, xcode, and a few text files. From there, what you do with mutt is your own choice, but I hope that you too, might enjoy the speed, efficiency, and frankly, the magic that mutt has to offer.

More complex configuration

Once you’ve got it working, start reading your mail, and when something doesn’t work quite like you want, start searching around. For instance, if you want autocomplete, you’ll set up lbdb using these instructions (although you already installed it above). If you want offline access, you can set upofflineimap (and gain a pretty signifcant speed improvement as well). urlview can be used to get you viewing URLs more quickly, and before long, you’ll find yourself with a wonderfully optimized .muttrc for you to cherish (and use) forever. Then, once you’ve installed gpg and configured everything there, you can sign, encrypt, decrypt and verify any email you want, any time you want, with just a few keystrokes.

Then, you might spend some time working on the OS X side. It’s useful to make a terminal pre-set just for mutt, which is at the proper size and coloration and which, when opened, automatically opens a mutt window. Then you might make an Applescript to open one of those mutt terminal windows automatically when clicked, which you can then save as an Application and keep in your dock. Then you can install Notify, and Growl, and get better notification of new mail than even Mail.app offers.

Or maybe you’ve got a server, and you can put your .muttrc directly onto said server and login to mutt any time you’d like using ssh, with your settings just how you like them.

Is mutt for me?

No, probably not. As the creators of mutt say, “every email client sucks, mutt just sucks less”, and that’s really only true if you’ve already got a good computing background. If you’re happy with your email client, by god, stick with it. If you only get a few emails a day, and send even fewer, mutt’s overkill. If you’re scared of the terminal, or of text editors like vim or pico, stay clear. But if you find yourself drifting from mail software to mail software, in search of that one program that will just get out of your way and let you send mail, well, maybe mutt is for you.

Pine Thugs: A useful neologism

2012-02-26T19:23:35-05:00

So, I’ve been teaching phonetics for a few years now, and each semester, I experience the joys of scrambling to find a word (or word-word pair) which exhibits a certain phonological trait or change. Because the examples you come up with on the spot are completely absurd, this brings me considerable joy.

For example, English has a phonological process called “Dental Assimilation”. In this process, an alveolar sound (like /t/, /n/ or /l/) becomes dentalized (made with the tongue behind the teeth) before dental sounds (/ð/ or /θ/). In order to demonstrate this (or better still, to test students), you need to come up with sets of words in which one word ends with an alveolar sound and the next starts with a dental sound.

Of course, there are a few common cases (“that thing”), but inevitably, in front of 66 people (or when asked to give an example on an exam), you can’t think of something reasonable like “can’t think”. So, you come up with something on the spot, and end up with something like “stupid thyroid” or “bell thief”.

To get these wonderful word pairs the recognition they deserve, I propose a neologism (a new word for an existing concept). I recommend that henceforth and forever more, a word combination which would be completely absurd in any context other than demonstrating phonology should be called a pine thug, in honor of the best/worst pair I’ve ever come up with in front of a classroom.

I know, I know, it’s tough to get a good neologism going. Most are gone within a few months (cf. “linsanity”), and barring political necessity (as has propelled ”santorum”, a neologism created explicitly to mock Rick Santorum’s anti-gay stances), making a neologism stick is very difficult. However, I’ve known enough phonetics instructors (and students!) who acknowledge the agonies and ecstasies of pine thugs that maybe, just maybe, this one will take root.

On Locked Bootloaders and Motorola's "Developer Razr"

2012-01-31T10:37:21-05:00

For those of you unfamiliar with Android phones, phones can have either “locked” or “unlocked” bootloaders. The bootloader is what tells the phone what software to start up when it runs, and phones with “locked” bootloaders will only run software which has been blessed by the manufacturer and carrier. So, even if you have a custom or improved version of the Android operating system which will run fine on your phone, a locked bootloader will prevent it from running because Motorola hasn’t given it a cryptographic “OK”.

This is touted as a means of preventing people from loading potentially buggy software, but in practice, it allows manufacturers to prevent devices being upgraded to newer operating systems, thus shortening their useful lives and encouraging people to buy new phones more often. This post, originally made on Google+, is on that subject, and won’t make a whole lot of sense unless you’re an Android person. I’ve posted it here for posterity and for Googleability.

So, Motorola just announced a new version of the Razr with an unlocked bootloader, allowing you to run custom kernels, ROMs, etc. Although it’s a nice gesture, the fact remains that many people need the bootloader unlocked _on the phone they have_, and this does absolutely nothing for them.

The reason many of us wanted an unlocked bootloader in the first place is that, for instance, the Motorola Droid Bionic’s software was incredibly buggy, bordering on unusable, despite excellent hardware. With an unlocked bootloader, the community of people stuck with the Bionic for two years could do for themselves what Motorola refused to: Improving the damned software to get a working phone.

Having moved (by Verizon’s graciousness) to the Galaxy Nexus (which has an unlocked bootloader) from the Bionic, I see the power of being able to run whatever software you please. Stock Android 4.0.2 has some bugs, which are already well fixed in most custom ROMs out there. Additional bugs are open to additional fixes by generous developers, and in many cases, these ROMs can actually be an improvement on stock units.

Locked bootloaders leave the end user, even when rooted, more or less helpless, no matter their technical skills. No matter what problems you can see in the code, you’re at the mercy of Moto and the Carrier as to when (and whether) your individual unit will see the upgrade (and they’re already focused on their next flagship device). This is why I feel that a phone with a locked bootloader isn’t really your phone, and why I will never buy a phone with a locked bootloader again.

So, it’s nice that a developer without an existing phone could have a Motorola now and be able to do something fun with it, but it’s the power-users stuck with a Bionic (or a similar combination of incredible hardware and awful software) who really need the bootloader unlocked. We don’t want our phones unlocked for fun, we want to be able to fix our damned phones when you, Motorola, can’t or won’t. And releasing one “Developer Phone” isn’t going to do that.

Considering the long game against SOPA, PIPA, and internet censorship

2012-01-17T18:14:21-05:00

Although much of the focus right now is on defeating the existing web censorship bills (SOPA and PIPA), I think the internet on the whole would be better off considering these things not as an “if”, but a “when”, and considering the long game, not just fighting for the short-term defeat of these bills.

In a sense, those who aim to take away internet freedom to suppress speech, prop up dying business models and make money have now shown us their “better mousetrap”, and we need to consider the current lag of support for these bills as our extra time to build better mice.

The fact that people around the world were forced to stop and consider the effect that the US Congress can have on the internet means not just that Washington is broken, but that the internet is too. This, then, should be a time when people around the world, where such work is still permitted, start focusing in on new ways of conducting the internet that are immune from such measures. Whether this comes by restructuring DNS, by implementing speedier and more widespread darknets, by mesh networking, we as geeks should now have one goal: to create an internet which is decreasingly vulnerable to censorship and exploitation by governments, private enterprise, or other censoring entities.

Opportunity to work constructively with Washington would be nice, to be sure, and I’d love to see the Free Internet considered as Free Speech. But I believe that although pressure should be applied to politicians and the political fight must be fought, only long term solution is to improve our technology to make sure that when purchased politicians push for censorship, overtly or silently, Team America: World Internet Police will find their methods even more futile than SOPA’s methods currently are, and democracy and free speech will have a chance to persist through whatever laws, blocks and shutdowns that special interests and lobbyists may purchase.

sndpeek updated for Mac OS X 10.7 "Lion"

2012-01-17T16:56:34-05:00

To install, download the tgz file (the below code assumes you’ve downloaded it to the desktop), double click it to expand, then open a terminal and type:

cd ~/Desktop/sndpeek-1.3-exe

(then hit “enter”)

sudo cp bin/sndpeek /bin/

Once you hit enter after typing the above command, OS X will then ask for your OS X administrator password (to copy the file deep into the filesystem), and once you’ve done that, at any point in the future, you’ll be able to just type “sndpeek” into a terminal and it’ll pop up a window displaying whatever sound source is selected in your Sound input preference pane. I usually give a more complex command to produce a prettier output, sndpeek --logfactor:0.5 --lissajous:OFF --features:OFF --depth:150

I encourage you to play with the software as there are few better tools to help understand what a spectral slice is, how it works, and how spectrograms can be made. Enjoy!

Facebook's final manipulation screen

2012-01-15T14:06:26-05:00

So I’ve finally fully deleted my Facebook account, and look at the bit of charming they included in the “Deactivate your account” window. Just a little bit of last minute emotional manipulation to keep you on board.

The best/worst part? One of the friends pictured died just over a month ago. Thanks, Facebook!

10 Reasonable pronunciations that make Primer Magazine sound like pedantic twits

2012-01-13T06:28:04-05:00

This morning, Consumerist linked to an article in Primer Magazine (for some reason), titled “10 Words You Mispronounce That Make People Think You’re an Idiot”.

With a name like that, it couldn’t be anything but judgmental pedantry, but even in an otherwise eyeroll-worthy article, I found that several of these words are actually completely reasonable pronunciations, and several of them demonstrate interesting phonological processes. So, I’m going to discuss them a little bit.

Athlete (pronounced with a schwa in the middle, “Ath-uh-leet” /æθəlit/)

This is a very reasonable and common pronunciation, which I noticed extensively in the speech of even experts on the subject (Michael Lewis, the author of Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game is a notable /æθəlit/ speaker. Here, the change likely comes from our dislike of having an interdental sound (/θ/) right next to a lateral (/l/). If you attempt to make the “correct” pronunciation, you’ll notice that your tongue is, in a sense, trapped between your front teeth, and to make a smooth gesture, you end up having to attempt to curve the sides of the middle and back of your tongue down. Which is unpleasant. So, it’s not shocking at all that speakers who use the word often may add the schwa.

(It’s also worth noting that there is no ‘H’ in Athlete, despite the author’s smug assertions that “there is no vowel between the ‘H’ and the ‘L’ in any of these words”. The English “TH” in this word is actually a single sound, a voiceless interdental fricative, which is nothing resembling an /h/. Once again, pedantry is seldom done well enough to be immune to further pedantry.)

Utmost (pronounced as “upmost”, /ʌpmowst/)

This is an awesome example of assimilation, two sounds becoming more like one another to make the speaker’s life easier, a phenomenon I’ve discussed before. Here, in the “correct” pronunciation, /ʌtmowst/, we have a /t/ sound, created at the alveolar ridge (just behind the teeth, try it) followed immediately by /m/, a bilabial sound created by pressing the two lips together.

When speakers are “mispronouncing” the word as /ʌpmowst/, they’re actually being more efficient, substituting in a /p/, also a bilabial sound, which allows them to simply close their lips (creating the /p/), then lower the velum (allowing nasal airflow) and start voicing to begin making the /m/. Going from /p/ to /m/ requires no additional tongue or lip movement, whereas going from /t/ to /m/ requires reconfiguration of the tongue and lips. Efficiency. Not quite the idiot pronunciation he’s claiming.

Sherbet (pronounced as “sher-bert”, /ʃɜɹbəɹt/)

Why does Primer Magazine hate assimilation? The first syllable has an “err” (/ɜɹ/) sound, why not the second syllable too? If we can keep the whole word vaguely “r-sounding” (“rhotic”, in phonetic terms), all the better. Speakers love regularity. Primer Magazine doesn’t.

“For all intensive Purposes”

This is really a horsed zebra. For further discussion of this, see a post I made last week.

Often (pronounced as “offen”, /ɑfɪn/)

How many Americans say “often” with the /t/, ever? This is textbook deletion of an unpleasant sound to simplify a cluster, and it’s one carried out by many, many people. Why bother with a /ft/ cluster when there’s no need to keep it around? It’s not like there’s another word, “Offen”, which this form of “often” could be confused with, and frankly, for speed, fluidity, and social reasons (in the US), the “offen” pronunciation is really a better choice.

Edit: OK, I misread this one completely in my anti-pedant rage. The author of the quoted article is actually in favor of “offen” as the “proper” form, and I responded assuming that he, like so many others have, was arguing that “often” (with a /t/) is the only proper form. So, I’ve culled some of the anger from the post, and kept the phonology. Thanks, commenter!

Awry (pronounced as “aw-ree”, /’ɑɹi/ instead of “uh-rye” /ə’ɹaj/)

This word is a textbook example of why our writing system needs to be taken out behind the barn and dispatched as humanely as possible. Although “wry” is used for the proper /ɹaj/ pronunciation in the word “wry” (and only there), usually the “aw” digraph represents /ɑ/ (as in “claw”, “maw”, “awful”, “awkward”) and the “ry” represents /ɹi/ (as in “fury”, “worry”, “scurry”). I can understand the author feeling the need to state the proper pronunciation of the word, but his indignation at the thought that anybody could EVER think “awry” is pronounced “aw-ree” is just silly.

So, there’s a bit of phonological goodness wrung out of an otherwise dry and pedantic bit of prescriptivism. Which I am going to pronounce as “per-scriptivism” for the remainder of the day. Just to anger Justin Brown.

Peer Review and the Web of Trust

2012-01-08T09:26:29-05:00

There’s quite a fracas brewing out there in the world of academic publication, as the world moves towards open access for journals. Despite the publishing industry realizing that they too can buy congressmen, it seems increasingly like the academic community is deciding not so much whether to keep the closed-journal model, but what to do in a post-closed-journal world.

This left me thinking about Peer Review, and what it really accomplishes. In my eyes, peer review (at least in the Linguistic world) accomplishes three things:

1) It weeds out papers which are clearly unfit for publication (due to bad science, missing data, or overall crank-ish-ness.

2) It improves the quality of papers by forcing needed revisions before papers can see the light of day.

3) Most importantly, it’s establishing a web of trust, in this case, between the journal and the reader, that the contents represent good scholarly work.

The third point is, to my mind, most interesting. When I read a paper from the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, I trust that it is reasonably likely to be describing sound (sorry, bad pun) research. I can assume that somebody with some expertise on the matter has read the paper, and that if it had major faults, it wouldn’t have gotten through the black-box review process. I then, as an academic, decide whether each individual journal is worthy of my trust. I may decide that although JASA is worthy of my trust, a trade journal for hearing aid companies may not necessarily be, and in doing so, I develop a web of trust.

Another prominent web of trust

This is somewhat analogous to the way that PGP’s Web of Trust is structured. Using PGP, let’s say I want to check whether a given cryptographically signed email really comes from John Q. Smith.

Well, if I know John personally and have exchanged (and signed) each other’s PGP keys in person, I can just check to see if the key I have directly from him matches the key which signed the email. If it matches, no problems.

However, you’ve not met everybody you might want to receive ID-confirmed email from. So, the Web of Trust comes into play. Imagine instead that John Smith is a good friend of Jane Doe, who is a good friend of yours. John and Jane, may have exchanged keys at some point, and in the process, Jane would have signed his key (a complex process which doesn’t merit full explanation here), asserting that that key really belongs to John. Jane and I, being friends, would have exchanged and signed keys as well.

When I get the email from “John”, my PGP software will look to see whether I’ve signed and trust John’s key. If not, it’ll see whether anybody I do trust has signed the key as actually belonging to John. In this case, because Jane says that it’s really him, and I trust Jane, I trust the key on the incoming email, and I can say (reasonably) that the email comes from who it says it does.

How do these ideas mix?

Right now, the journal system is oddly equivalent to the above web. I may have never met the author(s) of a given paper, and I have absolutely no idea whether their work merits discussion, examination, or citation. However, because JASA has, in effect, signed the work by publishing it, I choose to trust a given work as being of a better, citation-quality nature than the same paper floating around an author’s personal website. An author who publishes frequently in a journal I trust then earns trust for future publications.

Revocation of trust happens, too (see what happened with the (bogus) Wakefield Vaccine study and The Lancet), but by and large, academic journals serve as the foundation for the academic publishing Web of Trust.

That’s what people don’t want to lose

For many of us, raised in open-source culture and working on projects funded by government grants, it seems bizzarre to consider signing one’s work over to a journal which will make large amounts of money by restricting access to our work, not a dime of which will ever reach us. So, the idea of open-access and the elimination of paywall-based journals is an attractive one.

However, simply cutting these journals out of the loop would, overnight, destroy the web of trust around which we have so far built our academic community. Without a replacement we’re left only able to trust the work we’ve explicitly and carefully reviewed, or which comes from authors whose work we inherently trust.

The democratization of academic publishing isn’t just about open access or reducing journal bureaucracy. Instead, it also has to be based on the opening (and increased transparency) of the review process, a more efficient and open way of choosing which articles are worthy of note, citation, or derision.

A half-baked proposal

Imagine a system in which a paper is submitted to an online archive, and considered by anybody who cares to review it. If a paper is found to be sound by a given reader or reviewer, it can be signed (much like in the PGP sense above) by that person. Then, if I decide to search for a paper, I can find first papers trusted by people I know and trust. Then, if I find none, I can start the more arduous process of fully examining papers which are signed by people I don’t trust, or which aren’t signed at all. Then, if I find a paper reliable enough, I sign it, and so the web expands.

This, unfortunately, has many downsides. It does away with anonymous peer review, allowing tensions and malice to build quite easily between reviewers and authors. This, though, may not be a terrible thing, as the most picky, unpleasant, or theoretically-encumbered reviewers would easily fall to the side.

It also doesn’t allow for revisions as easily as the journal model, and doesn’t provide a mechanism to drop the lowest quality work outright. That said, potential, higher-profile signers could certainly request certain revisions before signing. This, in turn, could very easily lead to inequality among reviewers, with big names able to push for specific changes (to better support their own work, say) before signing.

Also, you would get people who sign for pay, for reciprocation, due to pressure from others, or who just don’t give a damn about the quality of the paper and sign for some other reason. These people, especially if prominent in the field, could very easily pull down the fabric of the system, and allow bad work through for their own theoretical, political or personal reasons. So, this system requires a degree of objectivity and sense of what’s best for the field which many humans may lack.

Finally, it requires more participation and thought about trust than most are willing to put in. You need to ask yourself uncomfortable questions about who you trust, whose papers really are well written, and how much you need to know about a person’s integrity and work before their research is beyond question.

But most of these are actually failings which are already in the existing system, but are masked by the journal process.

I’m not saying this is the way of the future, nor that it’s even a good idea, but I am saying that perhaps the academic community has a lot to learn from the world of cryptography, where trust is examined more closely and pondered more abstractly than it currently is in the world of academic and scientific publication. You’ll just have to trust me about that.

Facebook: The Tactless Voyeur

2011-12-31T07:14:15-05:00

So, recently I’ve been working to do something very difficult: I’ve been trying to get off of Facebook after more than 7 years. Mind you, the difficulty is not in cancelling the account. That’s a four or five step process. It’s the emotional divorce that’s been difficult, fighting the feeling (which they very much promote) that Facebook is your social life, and that by turning your back on FB, you’re really turning your back on your friends. Getting past that feeling of “Oh, I’ll never know what _____ is doing with his life”, or “How will _____ contact me?” has been oddly difficult, and has forced me to move past any number of irrationalities, and has drawn the ire of many on my facebook feed as well.

Rightly, I’ve been asked why I’m taking this drastic step at all, and even moreso, why I’ve chosen to remain on both Twitter and Google+ while eschewing Facebook. In a word, Privacy is why I’ve chosen to leave Facebook, but it’s a little more complex than that (as Twitter offers no privacy at all, and Google+ is owned by yet another data-mining collaborative), so let me explain.

The Expectation of Privacy vs. No Expectation of Privacy

My chief problem with facebook is that when Facebook started, it was pitched as something that happened between friends (and until it got big, it was). Posts were meant for consumption by the people you chose, and you had (limited) control over that. You can argue (rightly so) that Facebook is (and was) the internet, and you have no expectation of privacy on the internet, but given that I was much younger then, as was our ability to mine data, that was my feeling, my understanding, and how I treated the service. Although I was never so stupid as some, I was not nearly so cautious with my posting in 2004 as I would have been had I seen what Facebook had become.

Unfortunately, since 2004 (when I started there), FB has, much like a gropey frat boy, constantly pushed users to expose more, to make more of your information, posting, and life public. First, they changed the nature of the network, changing it from being a group of College students hanging out to a free-for-all, where your professors, parents and younger siblings were just as welcome. Then, they started selling us. First, with beacon, “Well, we’ve changed your security settings to allow your friends to view anything you rent from blockbuster. If you don’t want that, I guess we’ll let you disable it.” Then more and more was broadcast. “Oh, we made all your posts available to friends-of-friends. Did you not care for that? Sorry, luddite, go back and change it.” Then, they realized that they could sell your posts. ”Hey, we’ve made your posts visible to third party advertisers. That’s cool, right?”, which led into “Hey, you mentioned Starbucks, so we’re going to use you in an ad for Starbucks to show your friends. Don’t be lame, it’ll be awesome!”. In each case, the public found out about Facebook’s latest invasion of privacy shortly after it went live, leaving those of us who cared scrambling constantly to shut the windowshades after Facebook had again decided it was more profitable for them to be open.

Timeline, the next step in the endless march towards openness

The latest (and last) straw in this series is Facebook timeline. Timeline is a complex offering, but in short, it’s a completely different way of presenting information which makes one’s very first posts on Facebook just as easy to view and access as the posts last week. In short, it breaks down the difficulty (to other users) of dredging up the past, and offers one’s entire history on the site for easy examination and analysis. In principle, there’s nothing wrong with this, and it’s actually quite well designed, but, like the gropey frat boy that Facebook is, it was implemented with only the loosest user consent.

Rather than giving us the option to not switch to Timeline, we were told “Well, you can do it now and have a week to clean everything up, or we’re going to turn it on on the 22nd of December”. Once again, even this is not so horrible, except that Facebook has the utter hubris to allow people no control over what is shown in a practical way. What Facebook offers us is the chance to hide old posts, but only one at a time, and using a 3-4 click process for each, which is nominally a privacy solution, but in practice, is a disincentive for anything to be hidden.

Rather than allowing us to, for instance, hide all posts older than ____, Facebook has put a considerable penalty on people wanting to let bygones by bygones. You have the choice to either spend 12+ hours clicking through their UI to hide your prior posts, or to just put it all out there. Mind you, all of the content was already there, and a persistent enough friend could have found it, but because of the nature of the site, it wasn’t right there in your face. Associations you no longer care to keep, posts which, although not embarrassing or non-work-safe, are likely best kept in the past (think of every lovey-dovey thing you might have posted to an ex), all of these things are revealed to even the most casual mouse clicker, unless you spend your time repeatedly informing the tactless voyeur, Facebook, that “No, I’d really rather keep that particular piece of my past private”.

Finally, Timeline’s biggest sin, in my mind, is that it takes away the benefit of learning. Those of us who got involved with Facebook when it was still college students only got involved when we were 18 or 19, which, as I now understand, is not an age where we should be involved with anything which will affect the rest of our lives. Whereas most people now understand that Facebook is public (and constantly pushing you to be more so), data-mined, and that you’re the product, not the client, people took a while to learn that, and our posting habits changed as we did. Many, like myself, were quite happy with the past being difficult to access. By doing what they have with Timeline, posts which we now would think better of are thrust out front and center, and we’re no longer able to simply let the past be cloudy and do better in the present.

All things considered, I’m actually quite proud of 2004 me with respect to personal privacy on Facebook, but nonetheless, I dislike that I was even asked to worry about it, and the gropey and non-consentual way that Facebook went about it was the straw that broke this camel’s Facebook account.

There are other evils, mind you

Facebook is, in addition to being a gropey voyeur, a major corporation, and we’re not customers, clients or users any more than a cow walking into a slaughterhouse is an invited guest. As it comes out just how much information Facebook is keeping about us, who is funding them, how you’re being tracked as you move around the web and Zuckerberg’s feelings on Privacy, anybody who cares at all about personal privacy should be thinking twice about participating. But most people who are on Facebook are aware that it’s evil, gropey and against your privacy.

“But twitter is public! And Google’s just as evil”

Yes! I agree completely, on both counts.

Twitter is completely public, but the wonderful thing is that they’ve claimed that all along. Those of us posting there know that we’re posting to the world, and nothing is said which we would expect to be otherwise. You have no privacy on Twitter, but more importantly, you could have never expected any. There are no privacy settings to change, no (misplaced) trust to betray, as you know damned well that everything is minable. And, Twitter does allow mass deletion of old posts.

Google+ is Google’s baby, and Google has a very liberal definition of where Evil starts and ends, so those of us who have started with Google+ have known all along that everything is essentially public, but Google+ has a much nicer way of managing the privacy of your postings, and frankly, offers a more pleasant UI and better experience overall, except for the fact that, well, most people aren’t on it yet. In addition, the Circles concept (designating specific groups of people and tailoring the availability of your posts using those groups) is a powerful one (which facebook has already stolen), and does wonderful things for helping you maintain privacy (at least with people, everything is likely still available to Google and to advertisers).

I’ll also admit that using G+ is a calculated move. I have an Android phone, so much of my information can already be assumed to be compromised to Google (although I refuse to use GMail so that I have at least one psuedo-private means of communicaton). They’ve got it already, which is the price of admission (right now) for using what I feel to be a superior smartphone, so, while I’m being sold, I’d as might as well enjoy the full benefits offered to the cows by this particular slaughterhouse.

Finally, there is Diaspora, which I’m a member of, along with nearly 10 other people (more than that, but that’s how it feels). It’s a very-early prototype of a networking system run for the users, not for the advertisers, but it’s largely used for discussing Diaspora at the moment, and a total of two people I know are on it. If you’re on there, please, please email me so my feed will grow just a bit less depressingly sparse.

So, that’s why.

I’ve chosen to close my account on Facebook. It’s not so much that there are things in my past which I want to leave behind, or friends I don’t want to follow. Just the opposite, really. I wish I could tell Facebook to forget everything before 6 months ago, download it all for my own use, and move on with life. I’m going to miss seeing updates from people I care about, and I know that by leaving Facebook, I’ll lose touch with people who have brought me joy.

But I’m tired of being groped and exposed. I’m tired of seeing “Facebook” in headlines and having to immediately go over to my profile and tell them that no, it’s still not OK for them to expose more of my life. I’m tired of finding that they’re cutting me up and selling me in a novel way, and frankly, I’m tired of having these arguments with myself.

Although the temptation is there to delete my current account and create, in a few weeks, a completely psuedonymous account, which would accomplish some of my goals (effectively erasing my past and starting over fresh with absolutely no expectation of privacy), Facebook would still have my information, they’d still be tracking me, they’d likely be able to link me to who I was based on who I friended, and I’d still be feeding what amounts to a very ugly beast. But it’s a very tempting thought, I’ll be honest.

That temptation is telling, too. As I do all of this, and even as I write this, I still can’t believe how tough it has been even to wrap my mind around clicking a few buttons to close an online account. If nothing else, the fact that this moment, this simple act, can be so emotionally loaded, shows just how bizarre the human emotional experience can be in a digital age.

Edit: Apparently they know all about the emotional difficulty of leaving, and aren’t afraid to use it to try and keep you on board.

'Scuse me while I mix up voiced and voiceless-unaspirated stops

2011-12-31T00:57:30-05:00

Only yesterday, I briefly mentioned Mondegreens, where a song lyric is misheard as some other homophonous (identical-sounding) phrase (“killed him and laid him on the green” vs. “killed him and Lady Mondegreen”). This gave me cause to mention Jimi Hendrix’ “Purple Haze” and its famous Mondegreen. The original lyric is:

Purple haze all in my brain
Lately things just don’t seem the same
Actin’ funny, but I don’t know why
‘Scuse me while I kiss the sky

But many people hear the last line as “‘Scuse me while I kiss this guy”, and that misperception actually reveals something very interesting about how English consonants work.

What makes /k/ different from /g/?

Both /k/ and /g/ are what linguists refer to as “stops”, they’re consonants where the airstream out of the mouth is completely obstructed, and actually, both /k/ and /g/ are “velar” stops, made with the tongue up against the soft palate, or velum. Try it, making a /k/ as in “cap” and a /g/ as in “gap”, one after the other, and you’ll notice that your tongue isn’t changing position when you switch from /k/ to /g/ at all.

The simplistic explanation is that /k/ is a voiceless sound (meaning that our vocal folds/cords aren’t vibrating while we make the closure), and /g/ is a voiced sound, involving glottal vibration during the closure. Unfortunately, like most things in phonetics, it’s not quite that simple or easy.

Voice Onset Time

In reality, stop consonants are classified by their voice onset time, the amount of time that elapses between when the stop is released (when the tongue stops blocking airflow) and when the voicing starts (when the vocal folds start vibrating) for the following vowel. By looking at voice onset time (VOT), we can actually classify consonants in three different ways. (I’ve actually discussed voice onset time before, but now that I’ve already made nicer looking graphics for teaching, it seems worth doing again.)

First, [kʰ]. In English, any voiceless stop that’s at the start of a syllable (so the /k/ in “cap”, but not “pack”) is “aspirated”, meaning that there’s a considerable time gap with a burst of air between the opening of the stop and the start of voicing (it has a positive voice onset time). In the word “cap” /kæp/, we bring our tongue back to the velum to make a closure, we release that closure, and then, around 100 ms (milliseconds) later, we start voicing for the vowel /æ/. Viewed in terms of the acoustical waveform of speech, here’s what aspiration and VOT looks like in [kʰa]:

[g], on the other hand, is a voiced stop, where voicing actually starts during the closure. So, the tongue moves up to the velum, the vocal folds begin vibrating, and then, when the stop is released, the vowel begins immediately. The voice onset time is negative, as the voicing started before the closure. See yet another waveform diagram below, this time showing /ga/:

There’s a third option. Imagine that you started voicing at the exact moment that you released the stop, as shown below:

Then what you have is [k], what linguists refer to as a “voiceless unaspirated stop”, with a voice onset time of 0 (or close to it).

So, we have three stop choices: Voiced stops, voiceless unaspirated stops, and voiceless aspirated stops, which are all used differently in the different languages of the world. But how does this affect Jimi Hendrix?

English makes stops oddly

Our problems with Jimi Hendrix kissing guys (not that there’s anything wrong with that) come from three fundamental oddities in the way that English produces stops.

First, English only distinguishes between Aspirated and Voiced stops. “cap” starts with a /k/, which is produced with aspiration, and “gap” starts with /g/. We don’t have a three way contrast between voiced [g], voiceless unaspirated [k], and voiceless aspirated [kʰ]. Korean, as I’ve mentioned before, has that three way contrast.

Second, English word-initial (at the start of a word) voiced stops are actually produced as voiceless-unaspirated stops, with a VOT of ~0. This is because we, as English speakers, have really strong aspiration in our voiceless stops, so even if we produce something without much voicing during the closure, listeners will still be able to understand that it’s not aspirated, so clearly, the speaker must be intending to express voicing. Here’s a waveform of the word “guy”, to prove the point. Note that there’s a very little VOT here.

Finally, when following an /s/, English voiceless stops are not aspirated. So, in the word “sky”, we have an unaspirated stop, rather than the normal, aspirated [kʰ] which our writing system would lead us to expect. Here’s a waveform showing the very small VOT in “sky”:

So, in effect, the /g/ in “guy” and the /k/ in “sky” are the same sound! Still don’t believe me? Well, first listen to sky, then listen to guy, then listen to “sky” where I’ve digitally removed the /s/. Your writing system has been lying to you!

So what does Jimi Hendrix kissing men have to do with Stop Acoustics?

When we look at the acoustics of “guy” and “sky”, it’s very easy to see that the difference the two different perceptions of the lyric (“kiss the sky” and “kiss this guy”) are incredibly similar. When we realize that in English, [k] and [g] are functionally the same thing, the difference between our two choices:

… is seen to be only a question of where you put the /s/, and thus, really, no difference at all.

So, we see that not only are sounds in English not what our writing systems makes them out to be, but that this “error” of perception is not only understandable, but linguistically fascinating as well.

So, next time you find yourself listening to Purple Haze, Thank Jimi Hendrix for providing one of the best examples of the perceptual troubles which can come from our lack of a voiced/voiceless-unaspirated contrast in the English language. Or, curse me for linguistically corrupting an otherwise good song. Either or, really.

Re-analyzing Zebras into Horses

2011-12-30T22:19:06-05:00

One of my favorite expressions (stolen from House MD many years back) is “When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not Zebras”. The general idea here is that if you see something, and you’re not sure what it is, don’t anticipate something odd or rare when there’s a more common explanation. Well, I was reminded of that this afternoon when I stumbled upon this quote in a forum I frequent:

“Without further a due, you can get the latest nightly builds at [address]”

This is a form of phonological re-analysis. When we re-analyze a word or phrase, we’re usually replacing an uncommon or non-transparent word with something that’s phonologically similar (that sounds alike), but is much more common or makes more sense. These are also referred to as “eggcorns”, a term coined by Geoff Pullum.

So, the speaker stumbles with “Ado” is a Middle English word, according the New Oxford American Dictionary, “from northern Middle English at do ‘to do,’ from Old Norse at (used to mark an infinitive) and do”). Rather than using “further ado”, the speaker (typer?) replaces it with a phonologically identical pair of words (“ado” /ədu/ “a dye” /ə du/) which are much more common in the English language. In short, the speaker replaces the word “ado”, a certified Zebra, with a common set of English words, “a due”, and thus, thinks horses.

A whole herd of Zebras, all horsed

We really like, as speakers of language, to turn zerbras into This happens relatively frequently, with varying degrees of phonological similarity. I’ve seen “do process” for “due process” (homophones like above), “play it by year” instead of “play it by ear” (/plej ɪt baj iɹ/ vs. /plej ɪt baj jiɹ/), where word segmentation makes the difference. Google gives 216 hits for “Torn ass under”, a (creative!) re-analysis of “torn asunder” (/tɔɹn əsʌndəɹ/ vs the original /tɔɹn æs ʔʌndəɹ/) to get around the ambiguity of “asunder”, meaning “into various pieces”. Entertainingly, this same “sunder” root causes yet another Zebra reanalysis. Not infrequently, you’ll hear people talking about “various insundry goods” in case of “Various and Sundry Goods” (/vɛɹiəs ɪnsʌndɹi ɡʊds/ vs. /vɛɹiəs ən sʌndɹi ɡʊds/). “Sundry” is definitely a zebra if you’re not familiar with “sundries”, items of various kinds, although interestingly, here, it’s replaced with another zebra, “insundry”.

With a bit more phonological difference, we get the reanalysis that many love to hate: “all intensive purposes” can be swapped for “all intents and purposes” (/ɑl ɪntɛnsɪv pəɹpəsɪz/ vs. /ɑl ɪntɛns ən pəɹpəsɪz/). And if we do this at a whole-phrase level while listening to music, we can get Mondegreens, a term for misheard song lyrics (hearing Jimi Hendrix’ “‘Scuse me while I kiss the sky” as “‘Scuse me while I kiss this guy”).

So, this is a relatively common phenomenon, and gives us great information about how speakers are coping with the amount of homophony in our language. In closing, thanks for reading Lingua Stick Miss Tick, and more importantly, thanks for not spelling it that way.

Old Stereo, new iPod, new problems

2011-12-27T00:11:59-05:00

So, my Third-generation iPod (the very first with a dock connector!) finally died on me. It had been living in my car, hooked up to a older aftermarket stereo system via a dock connector cable, and served mostly to play podcasts and music in my car, controlled through the head unit (a Panasonic CQ-C700U). Its battery long dead (it had around 10 seconds of screen-on once the dock connector was disconnected, it was only a matter of time, and eventually, the hard drive itself died, leaving my iPod cooked for good.

Luckily, a friend had just switched cell carriers, and offered me a now EOLed, small capacity iPhone 3G (without a cellular service plan) to fill the void in my vehicle. Unfortunately, given that this is Apple Hardware which Apple firmly believes should be in a landfill and replaced with something shinier, it wasn’t easy. So, I’m writing this down somewhere with the hope that somebody will have an easier time with this than I did.

Not all docking cables are alike…

Unfortunately, although my Panasonic stereo unit happily charged my old iPod (which only charged by Firewire), it did not charge the iPhone at all, and hooking the iPhone up resulted in a “This accessory cannot charge this iPhone”. The workaround for this was a little adapter from Scosche (called the Scosche passPORT Charging Adapter) which I got from Amazon for $18. Once that was plugged onto the docking cable from the car stereo, and the iPhone was plugged into it, the iPhone charged happily and my music was freely accessible.

The Podcast Problem

However, Apple changed something in how the new iPhone, iPod Touch and iPod Classics handle Podcasts. Before, Podcasts were saved on the unit as part of the actual music library, so if you had a smart playlist which, say, automatically grouped all episodes of NPR’s Car Talk, then you could just select the “Car Talk” playlist and it would start playing the episodes.

In the newer units, though, Podcasts are kept separate, and stereos and accessories which are not blessed by Apple to see the Podcast directory cannot see the podcasts at all. So, I could hook the new iPhone up to my computer, sync all the podcasts I wanted onto it, but when I plugged the iPhone in and found the smart playlist for Car Talk (for instance), it was empty.

The internet was full of awkward suggestions for beating this (“Convert the podcast files to AAC, copy them onto the desktop, delete the old podcast files, and drag them back into your library”), but eventually, I stumbled upon a lone comment by Pedro Romero with a simple and graceful solution at the very bottom of this blog post:

I haven’t checked with iTunes 8 or former, but at least on iTunes 9 you can select the full podcast → Get Info → Options → Media Kind and change it to music… so it all goes to the library… viceversa from library to Podcast…

… and that did it! Once I did that, all of my podcasts were instantly placed back into my music library (so they’ll show up when shuffling, the only downside), and the smart playlists I’d created for each of my podcasts was once again filled with episode upon episode of podcastic goodness. Unfortunately, I’ve had to re-do the set Media Kind step again whenever I want to update the files with the latest episodes, but that’s a small price to pay for having it work.

So, one $18 adapter and many, many hours of googling to solve the podcast problem later, I now have a new iPhone working with an old iPod-equipped stereo. It’s a niche case, but if this post can save ANYBODY some time in fighting these same issues, then damnit, it was worth it.

Same instrument, different acoustical soul

2011-12-03T19:38:55-05:00

Recently, I’ve been reading about old Violins and how they are crafted, and this has made me think about the differences among modern Hammered Dulcimers, of which I’m an amateur player.

The first Hammered Dulcimer I ever owned (a Masterworks Russell Cook Edition) was very nice, and it had one characteristic odd note: E320 had an almost low-back-vowel-ey sound to it. Unfortunately, it also had a rattle inside the instrument which couldn’t be repaired, so it went back to their shop for diagnostics, and Russell (very generously) built me a new one, almost identical, save a few small changes.

That second dulcimer, my current dulcimer-love, is a beautiful instrument, but playing around this evening, I realized that that note doesn’t have that same quality (which I do now miss, ever-so-slightly), but I wasn’t sure what that quality was. Many of the rest of the notes sound nicer, so I don’t fault it, but it’s definitely different.

The Phonetics of Musical Instruments

This left me wondering, how do I determine that difference? Then, I remembered I’m a phonetics nerd, I do acoustical analysis of sounds for a living, so I decided to apply the same methodologies to my dulcimer(s).

First, I pulled up two recordings of the same song, one per dulcimer, new-and-old, in Praat. Then, I found the same timepoint of the same hit of that same note from both songs. I made a Fourier spectrum at that point for each of the two dulcimers for comparison (using the procedure described in Section 6.9 of Using Praat for Linguistic Research). This shows the amplitude (power) of all of the frequencies which make up the signal.

Below is the result:

(Also, for those interested, here’s the parts of the songs extracted with the odd note. The note in question is the third prominent note hit. Don’t mind the tempo change, my playing had improved in the two years between allowing me to play the song at faster speeds. Listen to the First Dulcimer and the Second Dulcimer.)

One can very clearly see how different these two notes are in terms of Timbre. The first dulcimer shows an almost vocalic set of strong resonances and weak ones. These resemble the resonances in vowel formants (see this spectrum of the vowel /ɔ/ for comparison), which explains why that note sounds so vowel-like to me. We can see that the second dulcimer shows a much more consistently tall set of harmonic peaks, with a much more consistent spectral tilt.

So, a little bit of phonetic analysis lets us see that although two instruments may be made by the same company, they may be the same instrument model, but they can have two fundamentally different voices.

OS X 10.7 "Lion" Review Followup: Don't

2011-09-28T00:38:05-04:00

So, around two months ago, I upgraded to Lion, and at the time, I penned a (somewhat mixed) review of OS X 10.7 “Lion”. Well, I’ve been using Lion for a little more than two months, and I figured it’s time for a followup. In a word, if you’re thinking about upgrading to OS X “Lion”, well, don’t.

Lion has many wonderful things. The scroll bars are much improved, and aesthetically, it’s just a prettier operating system than Snow Leopard. In addition, there are bits of polish present in Lion which make it a much nicer experience.

There are also some very useful features to be gained in going to Lion. Whole Disk Encryption works nicely (albeit slowly, and while breaking Linux dual-boot), and even more useful is the external drive encryption (useful for locking down backups stored off-site). In addition, there are lots of bits of polish which make life easier, like the fact that plugging your open laptop into an external monitor then shutting it now results in only the external monitor being on. Mail.app is head-and-shoulders above Snow Leopard’s version in Lion, and a number of my favorite apps have now leveraged Lion’s new technologies to create even cooler features. Looking at the list of features, upgrading to Lion seems like a no-brainer.

Unfortunately, Lion broke lots of things. In addition to breaking Rosetta (support for running PPC programs) as promised, Apple also deprecated lots of audio methods, leaving smaller, open-source apps like sndpeek flapping in the wind with bus errors and leaving you scrambling for non-PPC versions/replacements for your older applications. In addition, the hiding of the ~/Library folder has broken many tutorials around the internet, complicating font installs for Granny, and forcing even my IPA guide to send users to the Terminal. In addition, the OS itself is far less stable than SL, with no significant changes or updates since release. Force closes of Apple apps are way up since going to Lion, and I’ve had more forced shutdowns in the last two months than I’ve ever had.

In addition, many developers have taken Lion as a good chance to force a paid upgrade, such that your programs may work OK with Lion, but if you want them to really run well, you’ll need to shell out $__ for the upgrade license. This isn’t a problem with Lion per se, and developers have the right to charge what they want for what they write, but it’s definitely a hidden cost of upgrading.

In addition, Apple has fixed none of the issues mentioned in my first review. Spaces (“Mission Control”) transitions are still offensively slow, and the eye candy still makes the whole OS feel slower, even after disabling as much of it as the internet knows how to do. The Address book and Calendar apps are still ugly (although I’ve managed to re-skin them), and we still have far fewer customization and personalization options than in Snow Leopard, and we’ve still lost control of things as simple as mailbox list fonts. You’ll be glad to know, though, that Apple’s spending plenty of time implementing iCloud in 10.7.2, their newest way of helping users store their data on somebody else’s computer.

When you add in the Lion Passwords vulnerability (still unfixed, although there’s a workaround in that article), Apple’s slow response to fixing the DigiNotar issues, and the simple lack of communication with their users about some of these issues, one thing becomes clear: Lion (and the Mac as a whole) isn’t Apple’s priority anymore, and that’s a problem for you.

OS X: the disappointing elder child

You’re welcome to dismiss me as an alarmist or a “back in my day” luddite, but it doesn’t take a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. Apple is making money hand over fist with the iOS and the iPhone, iPad, and iTouch. There, they have a closed ecosystem, and the only way onto the hardware (by consumers or developers) is by giving Apple their cut. Apple has been working to implement that same ecosystem in OS X (the Mac App Store), but let’s face it, compared to iOS, the historically open Mac OS platform just can’t make the same kind of money that iOS can. In the long game, Apple can make more money by slowly locking down the Mac platform and making it more iOS-like, because then they get both hardware and software cuts, and can dull the pain of somebody keeping a laptop for four or five years by dinging the dev for 30% with each software sale.

But right now, as Android slowly gains market share and Apple faces the longest between-iPhone drought since the product’s introduction, it just doesn’t make financial sense for Apple to focus on the desktop. So, based on what I’ve read, instead of tweaking the desktop for a better experience or focusing on fixing the bugs introduced with Lion, they’re currently trying to get iCloud up and running on the Mac for when iOS 5 and the new iPhone hit. Maybe once that has calmed down and iOS is again optimally pumping dollar bills into Apple’s coffers, Apple will spend some additional time trying to get OS X back to stable and secure, but that’s unlikely to be anytime soon.

Don’t

So, in short, if you’re still on the fence about upgrading to Lion, get off the fence and back into Snow Leopard territory. Right now, Lion isn’t ready for use, and unless 10.7.2 brings fixes for at least a few of the issues mentioned above, I’m likely going to revert back to Snow Leopard myself.

I’m hoping that the next major upgrade to Lion (a “Snow Lion” release) will actually bring Lion into stability and use. Knowing Apple’s schedule, that’ll likely not occur for months, and it may well come with yet more user lockdowns which make the price of stability simply not worth it.

I love the Mac OS, and I really wanted Lion to help me fall in love with the platform again. There are still many wonderful things about the Mac OS, Lion included, and it’s still the best operating system available for 90% of users. But the fact is that right now, OS X 10.7 “Lion” is half-baked, and smells a bit funny. Whether you want to brave that is up to you.

"In the cloud", or on somebody else's computer?

2011-09-15T11:57:41-04:00

So, I’ve been noticing a strong uptick in the use of “the cloud” to refer to online, decentralized storage, computing and program-hosting lately. No shortage of companies are talking about their “cloud computing” services (including my hosting company, Joyent), and it’s become one of those “gotta have it” corporate buzzwords, and it seems like no company’s marketing people will let them release a website, product or service which isn’t in some way cloudy.

This phenomenon itself isn’t noteworthy from a linguistic standpoint (”Web 2.0” seems to have been the same sort of trendy buzzword at some point), but it occurred to me today that for many less-tech-saavy users, this “in the cloud” phrasing might actually be affecting how people view these services, and I think that might be why companies have latched onto this term so strongly.

Let’s take, for example, Apple’s coming “iCloud” information hosting service. Apple is increasingly targeting the non-tech-saavy crowd, and this service, like most of their recent developments, is meant to be largely transparent to the end user. Once you’ve signed up, iCloud will take your music, your photos, your documents, your books, your backups, your contacts, calendars and mail, and any additional information you add in through third party programs, and make it instantly available on all of your devices. As they put it on their own website: “Create a document, iCloud stores it, and pushes it to your devices”. Bam. Magic. You turn the service on and suddenly your data is on all of your devices. Who wouldn’t want that?

A rose by any other name…

They’re doing something linguistically fascinating, though: they make no mention of their machines, servers, databases or storage (at least on the user-facing sites). You create, something cloudy happens, it’s on all your machines. They’ve de-emphasized the middle step. Mind you, Apple’s not the only “cloud” provider to do this (Google Docs de-emphasizes the middle step too), but Apple is certainly the most flagrant. But why bother? Why de-emphasize?

Well, I’ve been toying around with a new hobby. Whenever somebody says “in the cloud”, I’ve found it entertaining to replace it with “on somebody else’s computer”. This simple replacement brings me much joy in the absurdity it creates and how oddly different it makes the act sound:

“Our main working copy of the paper is on somebody else’s computer for group editing, but it’s password protected so nobody but us can edit it”

“My data is safe, I store my address book, mail, passwords, documents and photos on somebody else’s computer.”

“Oh, don’t worry, all of our business information is backed up on somebody else’s computer.”

When put like that, we’re emphasizing the storage, the step that Apple and Google and most of the other cloud providers don’t really want you to think about too much. We’re emphasizing the fact that your data is sitting on a hard drive in another state, watched by a sysadmin who you don’t know. We’re emphasizing that when you put something on the cloud, it’s no longer just yours, and whereas naive users might not hesitate to put something into an amorphous cloud, actually transferring their data onto another computer might tickle enough of their sense of privacy to make them hesitate to upload those bank statements or that racy note from a lover.

In addition, we emphasize the fact that the data is there for the cloud provider to use per the TOS. How much do you think that the recording industry would pay to analyze en masse the music library of hundreds of thousands of iGadget users, even if just for market research? How valuable would it be for a website to figure out where to advertise by asking a company storing passwords “in the cloud” which sites are also visited by people who have stored passwords for their site?

Simply put, putting your data “in the cloud” is amorphous. It’s a mystery, but at the end of it, it just works. Putting your data on somebody else’s computer can get the same ends, but it forces you to think about your data in between your machine and your other devices.

Clouds aren’t necessarily bad

This may sound like a paranoid luddite’s rant, but I use the cloud. I currently use MobileMe, Apple’s current iCloud equivalent, for calendar and address book syncing. I use DropBox to keep my grocery list current across all my devices. I have an SFTP provider for storing backups of my data between at-home backups, and in case of emergency. The cloud can provide, in addition to convenience, a type of security against loss. As a friend of mine pointed out on Google+ (a cloud app):

Somebody else’s computer, with extensive redundancy and backup systems, which makes it much less likely to be lost if my house burns down. It is one kind of security. Not the “no one else will look at it” kind, but the “I won’t lose it in a domestic disaster” kind.

This is certainly true, and one of the best arguments for decentralized, cloud-like computing. Data on my computer in my backpack is fleeting. Data on a well-backed-up server in Dropbox’s massive datacenter is much less likely to be dropped, stolen, lit on fire or broken. These services have a use, whether convenience, ease-of-use for non-tech users, decentralization, or simply as an offsite backup of your data.

The techies who have read this far are doubtless thinking “Come on, I knew this already”. Of course data stored in the cloud is stored on somebody else’s computers. Heck, geeks like myself can likely picture server farms, maybe even imagining the mass storage required. They have a good idea of what sorts of things cloud providers can and can’t do across petabytes of data.

It’s not like I’m blowing the whistle on a massive conspiracy here. Anybody who has thought more than 20 minutes about the idea of a cloud knows that information has to go somewhere, and has deduced that presumably, it’s sitting on somebody else’s computer. Apple’s not choosing to skirt the issue so they can “pull a fast one” on the entire internet, they’re doing it because it’s less intimidating to new users. Google Docs is neglecting to mention their servers because they don’t need to. That’s not why you should be using the phrase “on somebody else’s computer”.

We should be talking about uploading your documents onto somebody else’s computer with grandma when she gets her new laptop and decides that that “iCloud” folder is just like her hard drive. We should be discussing storing information on somebody else’s computer for the clueless CFO who wants to upload the company’s records onto DropBox to be able to work on them from his new iPad.

We should be talking about “the cloud” as storing information on somebody else’s computer so that people will think, if only for a second, about whether they care that that picture, document, or file is something they would be OK with storing on somebody else’s computer.

Because TOSes, “privacy policies”, talking around the issue and other calming language aside, that’s what the cloud is. It’s a vast collection of other people’s computers, and in order to decide intelligently whether you want your data there, you need to know where “there” is.

Followup: It turns out people are just as confused about “the Cloud” as I suspected. See Weather and the Cloud for a discussion of a new study and some further analysis!

My linguistic Bookmarks list

2011-09-10T18:29:16-04:00

I’ve been incredibly busy of late with teaching, but I’ve got a pinboard.in account and have begun adding new linguistics-related bookmarks there, as both a resource for my students and for my own enjoyment.

If you’re interested, check out my Linguistic Bookmarks List

Thanks, and I hope you all are enjoying your linguistic lives!

OS X 10.7 "Lion" review

2011-07-26T06:54:16-04:00

Pardon my geeking, but I’ve had a number of requests for a review of sorts of Mac OS X 10.7 “Lion”, and now that I’ve been using it for nearly a week, I figure it’s time I write something up.

The Good

Whole Disk Encryption - Lion actually provides a much nicer security implementation than Snow Leopard did, in the form of Filevault whole disk encryption. Given the number of data leaks into unencrypted folders outside of your encrypted “Filevault” folder in SL, whole disk encryption is really the only way you can be sure that copies of your grades, medical records, etc won’t wind up on your drive in the clear. This also works well with Time Machine, allowing you to back up in real time, and in practice, I’ve had little-to-no performance hit for my applications. There are still some flaws with the implementation involving sleep, and you should assume that storing your master key with Apple leaves it open to subpoena, but if you’re as boring as I am (or if you too decide to forego storing the key with them), that’s not a worry.

Added bonus: When you enable whole disk encryption, you start your computer and almost immediately enter your password, then everything from the white-screen-gray-apple to your desktop happens on your own. Power, password, then go get a drink and you’ll find your desktop just as you left it, no intermediate login.

Time Machine Backup Encryption - This is a killer feature. The same whole-disk encryption described above can be applied to external hard drives, which can then be used for backup. This is massively important because encrypting your whole disk then backing it up in the clear to another drive is rather pointless except for physical machine protection when traveling. You can simply elect to encrypt an existing backup, or if you don’t mind losing your prior backups, you can reformat as HFS+ Encrypted and just start a new backup on the new drive. In the future, you’ll plug the drive in, but before it mounts, you’ll have to type a password.

Added bonus: Buy two small portable drives, encrypt them both, back up your machine onto both. Leave one with a trusted friend/parent/office (without giving him/her the password), and switch them out whenever you visit your friend (so that you’ve always got a semi-recent backup). Bam, instant secure offsite backup.

Mail.app 5 - I send and receive a LOT of emails, and Mail.app 5 is a welcome improvement in nearly every way. GPGMail is broken for the time being, though.

Terminal is tweaked - No major changes, but the Aerogel effect is cool, and going to 256 colors in Terminal is nice.

Full Screen Mode - I didn’t expect to like this, but I’m using it with Safari right now. It’s rather nice sometimes to be distraction free, and putting a terminal window in full-screen mode makes me nostalgic for my Gentoo installs of yore. It’s also nice if somebody asks to borrow a browser. it hides the bookmarks bar by default, and basically leaves them sandboxed (although they can exit at any time. Here, though, the animation is annoying.

Window changes - Windows can now be resized from any side and scroll bars have disappeared. I was skeptical, but I like it.

All the backend stuff - They’ve done a lot of backend work, described in the Ars Technica review. Which I appreciate, but isn’t immediately apparent to the end user.

Most linguisty programs work - IPA, Praat, Audacity, MacTeX, and all the other programs I use as a Linguist work just fine. That’s a wonderful thing.

The Bad

PowerPC programs don’t work - Moving to Lion meant that I could no longer run Diablo II, Starcraft (I), Duke Nukem 3D, and lots of small utilities (like “Shorten”, for opening .shn files) no longer work. No big loss for me, but check which of your programs are still PowerPC, and whether this will break anything important.

It feels slower, but I don’t think it is - This kills me, but all the eye candy added makes Lion feel slower. Animations which take a full second (switching between desktops, for instance) aren’t uncommon, and just make for a frustratingly slow experience. Apple fell on the wrong side of the pretty/performance continuum with Lion, but there are plenty of hacks online (and there will hopefully be more) which eliminate these “Amaze grandma” effects for those who want speed and efficiency. Edit: Many of these window effects can be disabled by putting the following into a terminal window: defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSAutomaticWindowAnimationsEnabled -bool NO

Mission Control is a step back - Mission Control, Apple’s replacement for Spaces/Exposé, isn’t as useful as either for power users. It’s nice to see all spaces at once, but the loss of flexibility (MC only allows one row of “spaces”, and its exposé clone doesn’t display windows as neatly. This is yet another feature that’s great for Grandma (much simpler to use), but disappointing for people who really use the machines on a daily basis.

Launchpad isn’t useful - But that’s OK, you really should be using Launchbar anyways.

Granny doesn’t need ~/Library/ - Apple has hidden the ~/Library folder by default. The command chflags nohidden ~/Library reverses that, but it’s another nod towards Granny because what’s in there will just confuse her, apparently.

Address Book and iCal - it’s cute that they’re trying, but the Address Book and iCal windows are now shaped like an address book and a desk calendar, just like Grandma remembers them! I hope this fad fades.

Apple keeps locking down settings - You can no longer adjust the font in the Mail.app Mailbox listing (although the size can be changed in System Preference -> General -> Sidebar Icon Size). Folders placed in the finder sidebar no longer display custom icons. Want two rows of spaces? No, no you don’t. Apple continues the arrogant policy of telling you how you want your computer to look/work/act, rather than allowing you to give your preferences. Apple is loving the control they have in iOS, and it seems like that same arrogance is moving into the OS X world, creating a bulletproof experience for grandma, but locking down people who can manage their own machines. All we ask are preferences, hidden or otherwise, to allow us to control our computer, but in 10.7, there’s no such luck.

There are bugs - Unlike Snow Leopard, Lion made a LOT of changes, so there are bugs. If you’re needing rock stability, wait for 10.7.1 or 10.7.2.

A mixed bag for power users

Imagine somebody worked on your car. They tuned the engine up, changed the tires, installed a car alarm, and made the seats a little more comfortable. However, they also swapped out your radio. Now it only lets your access your twelve favorite stations. And your ignition switch is replaced with a big “on” switch, which starts the car, but you can’t just listen to the radio with the engine off. Also, your windshield wipers now turn on with rain, but don’t turn on with just a little rain, and they took out that switch.

That’s OS X Lion. Right now, Apple has forced a sacrifice: performance for limitation. It’s actually a wonderful update under the hood. Encryption, improved backend speed, improved terminals, and all sorts of wonderful little tweaks make Lion a great upgrade, but to get in, you have to give up some control of your machine (but not, as far as I can tell, for a good programming reason)

For Grandma, OS X Lion is a slam dunk. It streamlines the experience, removes settings that will only scare her, and makes things pretty and more impressive. The same could be said for anybody who’s just an occasional user of their computers, or somebody not doing that much customization. Lion makes OS X much less threatening, and more like iOS in terms of ease of use.

However, for power users, or even for people who have been using OS X for a few years and are more comfortable with settings, Lion feels rather patronizing, at least, at the 10.7.0 version. I have no problem with Apple improving the default settings, or even making a very streamlined and uniform experience, but I do have a problem with their changing settings with no means for users to change them back. Similarly with animations: it’s wonderful that Apple is including cool new whizz-bang animations, but it’s frustrating that they don’t provide an easy way to disable them once they get old (and they do).

All that said, to be honest, ~~I'm still glad I've upgraded, and would still recommend that you all do the same~~. At the end of the day, I love the Encryption, the UI did get nicer, and enough of the built-in programs were improved that I feel like there’s a net gain of functionality and pleasure-of-use, despite the patronizing aspects.

~~Here's hoping, though, for a wonderful 10.7.1 upgrade.~~

Update: Two months (and a disappointing 10.7.1 release) later, I’ve finally come to decide that upgrading to Lion was not a good idea, and I’ve rescinded my recommendation that people upgrade. See my followup review for more information and comments..

(Also, no offense to the computationally proficient Grannies out there. I know you exist, but you’re not Apple’s target market any more than I am :))

Using IPA fonts with Mac OS X 10.7 "Lion" (it still works!)

2011-07-20T10:29:41-04:00

Just a quick note. For those of you who are early adopters moving over to OS X 10.7 “Lion”, the method described in my previous tutorial on using IPA fonts with Mac OS X still works and produces good results on Lion.

For what it’s worth, Praat (5.2.29) works just fine as well. :)

So, go forth and Lionize your Mac without phonetic phear.

EDIT: But Lion does hide the library folder. In order to install the keyboard layout, you’ll need to unhide the ~/Library folder or to access it using the Finder’s “Go to folder” option.

Using Festival TTS on OS X

2011-07-15T05:12:09-04:00

This is a quick guide on compiling and installing the Festival Text-to-Speech Package on OS X. This was somewhat of a gigantic pain, but eventually, seemed to work fine. The below is a collection

This tutorial assumes you have MacPorts installed from http://www.macports.org/ and can use the port command.

Festival and friends seem to work best on a Mac when compiled from the latest sources, obtained from SVN

1a. To install SVN: sudo port install subversion

1b. Make a directory in your home folder called “tts”: mkdir ~/tts

1c. Move into that folder: cd ~/tts

1d. Checkout the latest versions: svn checkout http://svn.berlios.de/svnroot/repos/festlang/trunk

1e. Copy the “festival”, “speech_tools” and “festvox” folders into the ~/tts folder, using the finder or otherwise.

According to this site, you’ll need to open speech_tools/include/EST_math.h and change:

From:

/* Apple OSX */  
#if defined(__APPLE__)  
#define isnanf(X) isnan(X)  
#define isnan(X) __isnan(X)  
#endif

to:

/* Apple OSX */  
#if defined(__APPLE__)  
#define isnanf(X) isnan(X)  
#if (__GNUC__ >= 4)  
#define isnan(X) __inline_isnan(X)  
#else  
#define isnan(X) __isnan(X)  
#endif  
#endif

Now compile speech tools:
cd ~/tts/speech_tools
./configure
make
make test
make install
Now compile Festival:
cd ~/tts/festival
./configure
make
make install
Now compile festvox
cd ~/tts/festvox
./configure
make
Now ready OS X’s audio for this. This next part is stolen (and updated slightly) from this site. First, open up Xcode (you do have the Developer Tools installed don’t you?):
File -> Open... /Developer/Examples/CoreAudio/Services/AudioFileTools/AudioFileTools.xcodeproj
Then build the project.

Open up a terminal:

sudo mv /Developer/Examples/CoreAudio/Services/AudioFileTools/build/Debug-Tiger/afplay /usr/bin/
sudo chown root:wheel /usr/bin/afplay

If you find yourself missing any of the above files, download a precompiled version of afplay and copy it to /usr/bin/afplay as described above.

Open ~/tts/festival/lib/siteinit.scm and add the following:

(Parameter.set ‘Audio_Required_Format ‘riff)
(Parameter.set ‘Audio_Command “afplay $FILE”)
(Parameter.set ‘Audio_Method ‘Audio_Command)

If the file doesn’t exist, create it as a plaintext file such that it contains only the above lines.

Go to this website and download:
festlex_CMU.tar.gz
festlex_OALD.tar.gz
festlex_POSLEX.tar.gz

Then drag the folder inside the festival/lib/dicts folder in that file into ~/tts/festival/lib/dict (create the folder if it doesn’t exist yet)

Also download:

festvox_kallpc16k.tar.gz

Then drag the festival/lib/voices into ~/tts/festival/lib/ on your machine.

Open ~/.profile and add the following lines:

export PATH=/Users/stylerw/tts/festival/bin:/Users/stylerw/tts/speech_tools/bin:$PATH
export ESTDIR=”/Users/stylerw/tts/speech_tools”
export FESTVOXDIR=”/Users/stylerw/tts/festvox”
Don’t bother with the “prompt them” script for recording. It’s a gigantic pain. Instead, do any recordings in Audacity. Then, for instance, if you’re recording files for a clock, split the recorded prompts into “time0001.wav”, “time0002.wav”, etc. If you want to attempt “prompt them”, you’ll need to install sox (sudo port install sox) then change any calls to na_play with play and the na_record line with rec wav/$f.wav trim 0 $duration (Thanks to this post).
From there, run whatever tutorial you’d like, you should be good to go. Also, sorry, but I can’t really support this method. Please don’t email me or comment looking for additional tech support information about this.

Enjoy! (and sorry for the exceptionally dry post, but this is a useful bit of information to have out there :))

Phonology is a lot like High School, really...

2011-04-09T06:59:10-04:00

So, I’ve been teaching an undergrad course on Phonetics and Phonology (hence my recent silence), and have been enjoying the constant search for awkward analogies to make the subject matter a bit more accessible. I find this is especially necessary for phonology, whose actions and motivations can be quite opaque to somebody just approaching the field.

Phonology, just to recap, is the study of how sounds pattern and interact within words and sentences in different languages. Phonology is language specific, in that every language has its own phonology, each having different sounds, and different preferences. This is why Russian allows the /x/ sound (as in Bach, Khrushchev, Chanukah, and Loch Ness) but English doesn’t. This is also why Japanese speakers, when borrowing the word “christmas”, will usually change it into something more like “kurisumasu”, because they simply don’t like having a syllable end with a consonant.

These language-specific preferences are often enforced with phonological rules, which, when an undesirable combination is made, will change one or more of the sounds in the word to make it more acceptable. So, for instance, the plural of “dish” /dɪʃ/ isn’t “dishs” */dɪʃs/, because that would make us put two strident fricatives (a special class of sound containing the sh sound (/ʃ/), /s/, /z/ and the “zh” sound in pleasure /ʒ/) together, and that’s just awkward for us as English speakers. So, a rule kicks in to add in a vowel /dɪʃs/-> /dɪʃəs/, and a second rule kicks in to prevent a voiced/voiceless pairing (Your larynx vibrates during the added vowel, but does not during the /s/) and changes the /s/ to a /z/, its voiced equivalent.

This is somewhat of a simplification, and there’s actually a lot of good evidence that /z/ is the plural (as in “dogs”) rather than /s/, but still, you can see how here, rules are interacting, and changing undesirable combinations into more desirable ones.

For my next class, I had to prepare a slideshow discussing common phonological processes (among other things), and I was having trouble finding a good hook, a good analogy to help the students understand the dynamics at play. So, I asked myself…

Where on earth do petty differences and subtle preferences constantly and violently change combinations according to a set of unpublished, unconscious laws?

Then it hit me: High School.

All the cool phonemes are doing it…

High school, for those of you unfamiliar, is a type of secondary education institution, attended by students in grades 8-12 (usually ages 13-19). Here, there’s no shortage of raging hormones, crazy dramas, and friendships form and dissolve capriciously, and as such, well, it rather nicely parallels the complex interrelationships between sounds.

So, with this analogy in hand, I set out to explain the four most common types of phonological rules/changes in Phonology using High School drama.

#1: Assimilation/Peer Pressure

Assimilation, in phonological terms, is where sounds change to become more similar to one another.

So, for instance, a nasal sound which is usually made with the tongue in the front of the mouth, at the alveolar ridge (like the “n” in “thin”) might move to the velum (at the back of the mouth) when it’s near a velar consonant. To test this for yourself, say the word “thin” a few times, noting the position of the tongue during the /n/, then say “thin kids” repeatedly, and note how your tongue is likely now positioned in the back of your mouth when making that /n/. In phonological terms, the /n/ has become an /ŋ/ before another velar sound. This is an example of “nasal place assimilation”, and is exceptionally common throughout the world.

Assimilation Complete.

In High School, assimilation is an incredibly common process, and is usually referred to as “peer pressure” or “trying to fit in”. If all the other kids in a social group smoke, chances are, new additions will start smoking too. Similarly, if all the sounds around a given segment are voiced, there’s a strong pressure for that segment to become voiced as well.

This analogy is really useful for phonological analysis, believe it or not. If a parent can’t figure out why her child is suddenly snorting lines of Vitamin C, chances are, if the parent examines the friends surrounding her child, she’ll find that they all are doing it too. Similarly, if you can’t figure out why this sound is being nasalized here, just look at its friends. Chances are, they’re all hanging out behind the gym and giving nasality a try.

#2: Dissimilation/Rebellion

Dissimilation is when sounds change to become LESS similar to one another, usually to heighten a contrast which otherwise might not be apparent.

A good example of this in English is the words “surprise” and “berserk”. Surprise, at least nominally, has two r-sounds, one before the /p/ and one after it. But in practice, and especially in fast speech, speakers don’t like that much rhoticity (r-like-ness) in a single word, so they’ll turn that first r-sound back into a schwa (meaning that /səɹpɹajz/ is usually realized as /səpɹajz/). The same goes with “berserk”. When was the last time you heard somebody make both r sounds in berserk?

You’re dissimilar. We get it. Calm down.

Dissimilation is, in my mind, the phonological process that creates rebellion in all its forms. If Mommy and Daddy are well-heeled and conservative, little Jimmy’s gonna be a Maoist. If all the other kids at the school are preppy and straight-laced, you know that Goth kids will emerge.

Just like in phonology, people just can’t stand too little contrast, so they will sometimes take on features only to differentiate themselves from the crowd. If your sound is suddenly velar when surrounded with alveolar sounds, chances are, it’s rebelling and wanting to be different. And sometimes, that desire alone is enough to make a sound change its way of life.

#3: Epenthesis/Showing up on other people’s dates

Epenthesis is a generic term for whenever a sound seems to pop up out of nowhere to help block an awkward or undesirable combination or situation. Often, it’s vowels which are epenthesizing, but consonants pop up too on occasion.

We’ve actually already discussed an example of this, where an epenthesis rule kicks in to add in a vowel when making the plural of “dish” or “wish” or “diss” (/dɪʃs/-> [dɪʃəz]), which serves to prevent awkward /sz/ and /ʃz/ combinations. Similarly, when Japanese speakers are adding in extra vowels when borrowing words like “Christmas” (which turns into “kurisumasu”), they’re doing it to prevent ending any syllables with consonants, which Japanese speakers just do not like doing.

ø -> me / [you]__[that jerk you’re dating] (Image Credit)

Epenthesis is a bit trickier, but imagine this scenario. So, Claire like totally likes Daniel. And he’s like, totally cute, and OMG they are TOTALLY meant to be. But then Daniel starts dating Kate. OMG!!

So, rather than just letting the two of them be happy together, Claire starts showing up. They go to the movies, Claire wants to come too. They’re going to grab lunch, and Claire’s totally there. If they’re all at a party, you know that Claire is all over Daniel, and sitting with them, and doing everything she can to pop up often enough, to come between them often enough, to let Daniel see what she has to offer and to stop him from dating that ^%$@$ Kate!

That, my friends, is epenthesis. When one person pops up to try and prevent a combination or situation which is undesirable. Mind you, it can also occur in other social situations. If you find out your blind date is rather creepy, you might arrange to meet up with a friend later in the evening, so that your date won’t get any ideas and so your friend can stop any really bad interactions from occurring. Or it can even be so simple as choosing to tag along when her creepy ex-boyfriend offers to walk your intoxicated friend home. Each of these is a situation where a person pops up, seemingly out of nowhere, to prevent an awkward combination.

In Phonology, if sounds suddenly pop up, that needs to be your cue to be on the lookout for awkward situations. If there’s suddenly a glottal stop between those two vowels, maybe it’s a sign that the language doesn’t want those vowels to be together. Or if you suddenly get a schwa between two sounds which with otherwise assimilate, you can bet that the language isn’t interested in that assimilation occurring. Put differently, “OMG that /t/ TOTALLY can’t turn into a nasal next to that /n/ or it will ruin THE WHOLE MORPHEME! I’m totally gonna epenthesize a schwa to break them up. Besides, that /t/ shouldn’t be hooking up with that skank /n/ anyways, he’s MINE!”

#4: Deletion/Uninviting

Deletion in Phonology is, as you might imagine, when a sound gets deleted from a word or morpheme to prevent an awkward or undesirable combination or situation.

A really good example of this is in the word “fifth”. Nominally, there are two /f/ sounds in there (/fɪfθ/), but if we leave that second /f/ in there, we end up with an /fθ/ combination, which is just pretty awkward to say. So, usually, especially in faster speech, we’ll delete that second /f/ altogether (leaving us with [fɪθ]).

Deletion also happens a lot in borrowings. In Russian, the city we call “Moscow” is Москва (pronounced “Mosk-va”, /moskvɑ/). But we English speakers just don’t care for that /skv/ cluster, so we’ve chosen to delete the /v/ altogether (as well as taping on a diphthong), giving us our pronunciation, /mɑskaw/.

It’s OK, Panda, there are always other parties.

Deletion happens all the time in High School Drama. If you’re planning this totally awesome party and you invited Kirk and Sally and Jenny and Ron and all the cool kids, then suddenly Kirk and Sally break up, well, you’re in a quandary. If you invite both Kirk and Sally, they’ll be fighting and bickering and awkward and just being an undesirable combination, so you don’t want to do that. But if you uninvite them both, then everybody’s going to miss them, and you’ll seem really uncool. So you have to carefully weigh who would bring more to the party, and eventually choose which of them will be missed less, and uninvite them.

Similarly, if it looks like a sound is being deleted, your first question should be “why”? Why would it be awkward or undesirable for that sound to show up there? Obviously, /k/ and /v/ didn’t just break up with each other, but clearly we have a motivation to not let them get together. So, remember, no phonological change is random, and languages tend not to like deleting things without good cause, so that little deletion may represent avoidance of a really nasty situation for speakers. Because nobody wants awkward morphemes.

There’s always more drama

Of course, these are just the four main types of phonological rules and changes which occur, and there is no shortage of other interesting, more specific types of changes. But, taking a broad view, many of the phonological changes you’ll deal with throughout your linguistic career are going to result in assimilation, dissimilation, epenthesis or deletion. And as you’re puzzling over why that /i/ just disappeared or why that /x/ suddenly became an /ʃ/, I encourage you to consider the more human side of phonology, and to think back to high school and all the crazy social alternations which happened there.

Because NOBODY puts lax vowels at the end of MY syllables!!!!1!

Reader Question: What advice would you give to somebody wanting to study linguistics?

2010-06-05T22:22:59-04:00

Another reader email answered here, this time from an enthusiastic young high-school student:

Hi, my name is [redacted] and I am a High School student. I want to major in Linguistics. I have always been interested in language, even as a child, and although I have only discovered linguistics recently, I have never had this strong sense of direction. Anyways I was wondering if there was any advice you could give me about studying linguistics.

Well, reader, thanks for sending me an email!

I’m delighted to hear that you’re interested in linguistics. As you point out here, for those for whom linguistics is truly a calling, it’s got quite a strong pull. Once you’ve found it and start looking more closely, it’s very easy to get sucked down the rabbit hole. If you’re anything like me, that pull might carry you through graduate school and beyond, so if you’re feeling that pull, well, hold on tight, you’re in for an awesome ride. Actually, though, that highlights what is the best advice I can give you at this point, both about studying linguistics and about life in general: Follow your passion.

Let’s face it, if you’re interested in studying linguistics, it’s not for money, power, fame, or prestige. It’s because you’re passionate about it, because you love the “work”, and because there’s some part of what it is that we do that appeals to you at a very deep level. My strongest advice is to take that appeal, that passion and harness it, and letting it guide you. As you start wading into the world of linguistics, you’ll realize that there are a great many subfields and areas of questioning, each of which has enough interesting questions for a hundred careers. Some of these fields will likely seem silly or boring to you. Some of them will feel pretty neutral. But sooner or later, you’re going to find a field within linguistics that you’re not only good at, but that you simply love. Although it’s good to know the basics of all the different subfields, and you’ll have to for most degree programs, it never hurts to put some extra time and energy into the fields you’re really passionate about.

So, if you find yourself fascinated by a topic, a sub-field, or even an individual question, take a related class and maybe write a paper about it. If you’re still fascinated by it after that, you may consider writing an honors thesis to explore the topic more deeply. If you’re still fascinated after all that, you’ve got yourself a Master’s Thesis. And if after all that, you’re still fascinated by the issue, well, that’s your dissertation topic right there. If that goes well, that might just be your niche, and maybe your career. All that, just for following your passion.

Pay attention as you’re reading for those questions that leap up and bite you. Pay attention when one particular topic puts you in your happy place. Know where you’re average, where you’re good, and where you’re incredible, and spend as much time as you can where you’re at your best.

People get into linguistics because they have a passion, and it’s vital that they keep a close eye on that passion and ride it for as long as they can. There are popular topics, lucrative topics, and interesting topics, but at the end of the day, you want to be studying something that you’re passionate about, something that keeps you up at night and wakes you up in the morning, and something that you can’t wait to find out more about.

So, reader, go forth, major in Linguistics and follow your passion from there, wherever it may lead you. You may not know where you’ll end up, but at the very least, you’ll know you’ll be enjoying yourself along the way.

Reader Question: What jobs can a linguist get?

2010-03-30T07:24:58-04:00

Hello all! I’ve just gotten a reader question, and rather than just sending her back an email, I figured I’d throw the answer up here instead so that more people can perhaps learn from it.

I am in my 3rd year of a bachelor degree in Linguistics, and I love it! I am just wondering what I could actually do with the skills I am learning… I mean for a living.

What you can do depends on what you enjoy doing, and how advanced a degree you want to (and can) get.

“I have a BA in Linguistics!”

If you want to start working after you get the BA, there are some possibilities for linguistics-specific sort of work. Lots of industries are using linguists for market research, especially doing things like data annotation and analysis on content and whatnot. You probably won’t be making many decisions at first, and you’re more likely to find jobs which just pay you hour-by-hour to do annotation. There is also the military/intelligence route, if that’s your style.

Mind you, with just the BA, linguistics-specific jobs will be scarce, you’ll be at a lower pay grade than an MA or Ph.D student, and the point of entry is going to be a bit lower on the totem pole, but of course, you can work up. If you’re going this route, I’d recommend trying to do an Honors Thesis, so you have an example of some research you’ve done in the field of Linguistics, and so you can show having some degree of specialization in the field.

“I got my MA too!”

If you’re able to get into an MA program and graduate, you’ve got many more options beyond the ones discussed above.

There are plenty of industry jobs out there for Linguistics MAs, especially if you’ve got a speech or computational bent. Google and big tech companies always want Natural Language Processing people, and places like Rosetta Stone are often hiring linguists for speech analysis, language analysis, and data collection. And every speech recognition place in the world wants more linguists and phoneticians.

The main disadvantage to industry jobs is that you end up having to deal with lawyers, NDAs, and non-compete clauses. Some companies are very draconian, preventing you from publishing on languages you’ve worked with while working for them, and some of them even claim as proprietary any insights you might have about the grammar or functioning of natural languages. As such, you may end up working for a company that actually claims as proprietary parts of the grammar of the language you’re working with. By going industry, you’re often going to have to sacrifice the openness and dedication to spreading knowledge that’s omnipresent in Academia, and you certainly won’t be able to take as much credit for your research. Instead, you’ll be studying language to improve your company’s profitability and product, with much of what you actually do and discover hidden behind the veils of corporate secrecy, under penalty of lawyer. All that said, the pay will be better than in academia, and I strongly suspect that not all industry players are as draconian and litigious as some of the subjects of the horror stories I’ve heard from friends in industry.

Some places, usually private language schools or companies, will hire Linguistics MA students to teach English as a second language, especially outside of English speaker countries. If you enjoy living abroad, that’s a very good option, as some of those places are willing to pay handsomely for your expertise. So, definitely keep that option in mind.

In academia, an MA degree can definitely get you a job as a research assistant or researcher, helping with experimental linguistics and working in labs to help faculty members. It’s also possible that you’ll get a TA job, especially if you’re in the MA program at the time. Unfortunately, though, you’d be extremely unlikely to end up in a tenure track position with just the MA.

Also, it’s worth noting that many schools will also hire MA-level research assistants for the long term, who have specialized in a given area and participate in projects where they’re necessary. Here, you have some job security, and the possibility of being paid well, but without having to go through the Ph.D process.

“Ph.D, here I come!”

If you’re accepted into a Ph.D program, many doors open. In many places, people admitted into a Ph.D program with support will automatically be given a job as a teaching assistant or a research assistant. This is wonderful because you get that experience, and you can earn enough to keep yourself afloat, at a part time basis, while you’re getting the degree. If you’re applying to Ph.D programs, apply to a bunch of them, and decide between the programs which offer you support, either as a stipend or as a TA/RA job. As my advisor told me during the Ph.D application process, “there are lots of places willing to pay you if you fit well, so you should never use your own money to get a Ph.D”. So, in academia, there are plenty of jobs for Ph.D students that an MA student would be less likely to.

Also, there are lots of industry companies that are happy to snatch Ph.D students away from academia, even if they’ve not finished the degree, and a few of my friends have taken this route. For them, they get most of the the benefits of somebody with Ph.D level education, but without having to pay the salary of somebody with a full on Doctoral degree. So, as silly as it sounds, even if you’re looking to go into industry after you get your MA, it might not hurt you to apply to Ph.D programs, and to accept an offer. You’ll likely get pulled in by other companies at a higher pay grade, and if you decide to return to academia later (and you kept publishing), you’ll have been accepted once.

Mind you, once you’re out of academia and a Ph.D program, it’s always tougher to get back in, and if the job you left for leaves you, especially if some time has passed, you risk having trouble there. So, unless you need the extra money right away, or you’re offered your dream job with great security, I’d highly recommend you work for the company as much as you can while still working on your Ph.D and dissertation, but keep working on that Ph.D and dissertation. They’ll pay you more when you graduate, and once you’ve got that magical piece of paper, everything will be just a bit easier in case you end up changing jobs down the road.

“That’s Doctor Linguist to you!”

Finally, if you fight through and get the Ph.D, you’ve got your pick. Nearly all of the opportunities mentioned above will be open to you, and new doors will open besides.

Industry will likely want you, especially if you’ve got the right specialization for their programs. You’ll also be paid more than MA and Ph.D student candidates, and will likely come in higher on the totem pole. You’ll be more likely to be able to guide events, not just annotate or work on problems.

There are also jobs for linguists in other places that aren’t industry, but aren’t quite academia either. For instance, many linguists, some who are faculty elsewhere, can become known as being good expert witnesses in trials and lawsuits which deal with matters of language and communication. Some people end up practicing forensic linguistics in law enforcement and intelligence, analyzing language to learn about speakers. Of course, there are also plenty of opportunities in intelligence, defense, and working for the military or military intelligence services.

In academia, you’ll have the opportunity to take a Post Doctoral appointment, doing research or teaching at a school for a few years before putting yourself on the market as a professor or researcher. This can be as part of a grant or a project, or simply as a member of a department who needs some help for a little while.

You can try for a research position, where you’ll have minimal teaching load, and instead, are used more to bring the department prestige, grant money, and publications. If research is your thing, then larger, research universities are where you’ll want to be, and these sorts of positions are definitely right up your alley.

You can also choose a lecturer or adjunct faculty position, where you’re not on track for tenure, and you’ll not have much in the way of job security beyond a few years, but it’s a job, and you’ll be at the helm of classes and getting paid for a few years. This is a great option if other factors in your life are preventing you from committing to a longer term stay in a given place, or if you’re simply not sure that you’re wanting to teach for the rest of your life.

Finally, some people, like me, eventually want to become full, tenured professors and pass on this knowledge in new and interesting ways to new and interesting people. To do this, you’ll likely start as an assistant professor, work your way up, and ideally, eventually win tenure. As a tenured professor, you’ll teach, do some research, publish, and participate in the workings of the university. You’ll be faculty, have the benefits and security of such, and be paid the salary of a full professor. It’s a pretty sweet gig, but winning such jobs can often be very competitive.

Disclaimer

Mind you, this is just my perspective. I’m just a little Doctoral student, I have my own particular biases, and there are likely a zillion opportunities that I’ve never been exposed to or even heard of. I’d recommend that you talk to your advisors in the department, talk to other linguists, and watch sites where linguistics jobs are posted (like LINGUIST list).

Most of all, though, follow your passion. If you want to do research, take jobs that offer you that chance. If you want to develop new and interesting products, and make a good deal of money doing it, look into industry jobs. If you’re like me and you just want to teach, well, keep pushing, keep collecting the necessary degrees, and eventually, you’ll be able to get there.

At least, I sure hope so.

Program note: I’ve been getting a lot of very good questions from readers, and although not all of them are this involved, I’m going to try and start posting some of my responses. I make no guarantees that I’ll be able to answer every question, but if you send me a good one, I’ll try and respond, and who knows, I might even post your response here. Let me know if you’d like to be credited for your questions, if I do end up responding publicly. Thanks for all the feedback and email, even in my relative absence. It always makes me smile.

Edit: I just got this email from a reader who wanted to contribute her story. You’re welcome to email your own story, and I’ll make sure it ends up here!

I’m a former linguistics student, hopeful future linguistics student, and forever in love with linguistics. I was reading your post on jobs and just wanted to say that having a BA in Linguistics has helped me get jobs as a private ESL tutor, but mainly as a tutor for high school level reading and writing skills, and also as a SAT Critical Reading/Writing tutor. Now, tutoring English for the SAT can be a somewhat tedious job, but it is related to language, I always find ways to sneak in excerpts from the Language Instinct by Steven Pinker, and I can often get kids thinking about language in general. Plus, I get to help them improve their scores and get into college, thereby furthering the education of a generation (while rhyming). I also get to tell them how wonderful linguistics is, if they’ll listen, and hopefully plant a seed in the minds of those who are unsure of what to study. So overall, I do find it a satisfying job, and one that required only a BA in Linguistics. Now, I do intend to go for a PhD in either Neurolinguistics or linguistic anthropology (endangered languages maybe, a la The Linguists), and one day teach at a higher level, but for right now tutoring is good work and is definitely a worthwhile job.

Notes from a Linguistic Mystic may be dormant, but it's far from dead

2009-09-26T19:59:03-04:00

Hello everybody!

As you can all doubtless tell, I’ve been quite busy. I’m delighted to report that I was accepted into a Ph.D Program in Linguistics, and am now continuing my studies of Phonetics and Speech Perception at the Doctoral level. Although this is a wonderful thing for 98% of my life, it does mean that I’ve little time left over to update this site, and that alone accounts for the more than one year that has passed since my last post.

However, even despite my prolonged absence, the site is still shockingly popular. In fact, it’s getting upwards of 2000 unique visits a week, and has attracted more than 150,000 visitors in the last year alone.

I’d like to thank all the readers who have emailed in to ask whether the site will be updated again soon, and all the people who continue to contribute interesting comments to existing articles. In addition, I’d like to make sure that people know that although I’ve not had the time to make new posts, I’m still accepting comments on all older posts, and in many cases, I’m responding to them as well.

Also, if you have any questions about anything you read on the site, about life in Linguistics, or about any housekeeping issues (broken links and whatnot), please always feel free to leave a comment or Contact me. I’m always happy to hear from readers, and usually am even happier to help answer questions people may have about the content here.

Is Notes from a Linguistic Mystic dead? Of course not! I hope to be able to start posting again once I’ve progressed a bit more within the Ph.D program. For now, it’s dormant, but rest assured, the heart of the site is still here and beating strong.

The Linguistic Mystic

PS: If you’re stumbling upon this site for the first time, here are some of my favorite posts that should give you a taste for the sorts of things discussed here. Take a look, and enjoy!

Note from a very quiet Linguistic Mystic

2008-03-23T16:32:25-04:00

As many of you have noticed, I’ve not posted for the better part of three months, and I feel that my readers deserve some sort of explanation.

The past few months have been a very exciting time in my life. In addition to classwork, I’ve been working on my Master’s Thesis, taking MA Comprehensive exams, and continuing the sorts of unrelated research that bring me joy. In addition, I’ve been going through the doctoral program application process, and, much to my delight, the process of formally accepting the offer that I received. Unfortunately, this has left little time for linguistics writing outside of class, and as such, this blog has been neglected in the process.

I’d like to apologize to my readers, to those interested in the Cryptorthography Contest (which I would still very much like to see happen), and to anybody who has left a comment without response. Much to my amazement, even in my relative absence, the site has consistently gotten upwards of two thousand hits per week, mostly from search engine recommendations, and the fact that my past writings are still useful to people brings me no small joy.

So, Notes from a Linguistic Mystic will stay up and functional for as long as I can maintain it, and I do hope to start posting more regularly again someday.

However, I can’t promise a return immediately. What I can promise, though, is a very bad Linguistics pun to hold you over:

So, the English definite article ‘the’ walks into a bar with his old friend, the English indefinite article ‘a’. They sit down, order some drinks, and then ‘a’ asks “so, what’re you up to now these days? Still marking noun phrases?”

‘the’ nods its head, taking a drink. “Definitely”

Thanks again for reading, and I hope to return to posting as soon as I can!

From car sales to prostitution: phonological fun in every day life

2007-11-11T07:14:50-05:00

Often, the sort of things you study in Linguistics can seem really theoretical and abstract. One of the most notoriously abstract fields in linguistics is Phonology, or the study of the sound systems of a language. However, if you’re looking for it, even the most abstract bits of phonological theory can pop up in everyday life, and sometimes, with a vastly humorous result.

Phonology rules!

Phonology is the study of the rules and systems which govern the use of sounds in a language. Some of these rules in English, for example, tell us that a velar nasal can’t start a word in English, that “in-possible” has become “impossible”, and that the /t/ sound is completely different after an /s/ than it is at the start of a word (it’s unaspirated). All these effects, although cool when studied closely, happen at a subconscious level, and really don’t have much effect on the lives of speakers.

However, Phonology can get really fascinating when a person is speaking a language not their own. Although anybody can memorize words and grammar in a second language, it’s a long process to be able to disregard the phonological rules of your own language and use the ones of the new language.

When a non-native speaker has an “accent”, what’s actually happening is that they’re speaking your language, but using some of the phonological rules from their native tongue. With time (and practice), an accent slowly goes away, but it’s often the last stage of language learning, and is the culmination of years of work.

Let’s look at a specific example. In Russian speech, you can never have more than one long /o/ sound in a word. Even if the word you’re pronouncing is written with several ‘o’ sounds (like молоко, ‘milk’), only the one of them in a stressed position (explained below) will be pronounced, and the rest will be reduced into an /a/ or /ə/ (the sounds in ‘p_o_t’ and ‘sof_a_’). So, молоко is pronounced ‘mahluhkoh’ (/malə’ko:/), never “mohlohkoh” (/mo:lo:’ko:/). For more detailed information on this rule, see the Wikipedia page on Vowel Reduction in Russian

From Car Sales to prostitution

So, we’re sitting in my High School Russian class one day and we’re discussing vocabulary related to buying and selling. Our teacher, a Russian woman who still has a very noticeable Russian accent, is explaining the scenario for the next dialogue she’d like to do in class:

“Alright. So, Nick, I would like you to pretend to come up to me on a car lot. We will talk, and then, I will ask you if you would like to buy my Volva…”

Now, at this point, around half of the class either broke out laughing or was a bit too shocked to say anything at all. It’s worth pointing out that in her speech, the /ʌ/ sound in ‘but’ or ‘putter’ was always expressed with an /o/ sound, so to us, it sounded exactly like she just asked a student to buy her vulva.

At this point, she was looking around the classroom, confused, and trying to figure out what she had said. Some brave soul asked her what exactly she was selling, and she repeated, ”I’m selling my volva!”. Another round of snickering coursed through the room.

At this point, she started to get frustrated. “No, it is a car. A volva!”. Slowly, the snickering began to calm, until finally, she went up to the board and wrote out “Volvo”, then pointed at it. “See! Volva!”

A chorus of groans of understanding rang out through the room, and she finally regained her composure. I’m not sure she ever understood what she actually said, but in a way, I think it’s better that way.

Although I didn’t really get it at the time, what my teacher was doing is actually perfectly understandable from a phonological standpoint. She was stressing only one of the O’s that she saw in the spelling, and the other vowel was reduced. Because she usually used a shorter /o/ sound for the /ʌ/ vowel, we understood her as saying “vulva”, not “volvo”.

Thus, directly because of a phonological rule, a normal day of class turned into a celebration of cross-linguistic hilarity. To this day, I can’t look at a Volvo without hearing my teacher saying “Would you like to buy my vulva?”, and it’s my favorite example of phonology gone wrong.

Cryptorthography: Hiding your writings in plain sight

2007-11-08T08:20:38-05:00

Writing is a wonderful thing. It allows us to get things off of our minds, to remind ourselves of something, or even to communicate across long distances without the benefit of voice. The beauty of an established writing system is that, if you write something down and leave it out in the open, any literate person that walks by will be able to understand it.

However, there are times when you’d rather your writings not necessarily be understandable to others. Sometimes, like if you’re keeping a journal and detailing the various angsts and dramas of your life, you’d rather that the relevant parties not be able to read the entries. Similarly, if you’re keeping a grimoire (book of recipes and incantations), a book of shadows (for spells or other magical writings), or even just the list of top secret spices in your world famous marinara sauce, you’ll have a strong motivation to make sure that nobody else gets to to the information. In this sort of a situation, there’s a variety of different ways of going about hiding or obscuring your writing, even though you’re using the same language that everybody around you speaks.

Writing without being read

Now, assuming that you’re writing a physical document, the first, and most simple, is by hiding it. You could write your marinara sauce recipe out in perfectly understandable english, but if it’s locked in a safe at the bottom of the Atlantic, nobody will be able to read it. Similarly, if you keep your diary in a locked box, or even just have a lock on the cover, it’ll be safe from prying eyes.

However, hiding the document can fail. It’s really easy to go and answer the door, leaving your journal in plain sight for any offendable parties to find. Not to mention the fact that all locks are breakable, and if the only thing between your neighbor and your marinara sauce recipe is a cloth and cardboard locking journal, your recipe is practically already stolen.

So, the next step is to somehow hide the writing itself. Things like disappearing invisible ink or ink that’s only exposed with certain light sources are wonderful at this sort of thing. Similarly, you could use some sort of steganography (hiding information within other information), maybe putting a microdot on the page, or making the first letter of every word spell out your real meaning.

These methods have their downfalls too, though. Invisible ink and microdots require specialized methods or technologies, and aren’t really practical to everyday use. Besides, sooner or later, people will notice the UV lamp on your desk and start to wonder why you keep so many blank journals. If you do a “the first letter of every word” sort of thing, then you’ll end up having to write whole paragraphs of gibberish to communicate even the smallest of concepts, and even then, it’ll betray that there’s something else going on.

You could certainly go all out and start using some sort of cipher. Switch z for a, y for b, and so on, until eventually you’ve replaced the whole alphabet with an alternative one. Perhaps you could even go deeper, using some of the more innovative sorts of cryptography out there. (For a great, understandable book on cryptography, check out Simon Singh’s The Code Book). But, encrypting your writing takes forever to encode and decode, and it’s very unlikely that you’ll ever be able to read and write in a cipher fluidly. Besides, those, too, are crackable.

Perhaps the most complex sort of cipher would be to just use the writing system (and even some vocabulary) from another language. If you’re, for instance, writing English using the Cyrillic alphabet from Russian, it’ll be pretty incomprehensible to your neighbor. However, if you come across somebody who speaks English and reads Russian, your system falls apart.

So, what option does this leave you?

Enter Cryptorthography

‘Cryptorthography’ is a word I’ve made up to describe the creation of secret writing systems. It’s a combination of cryptos (Greek for ‘hidden’), and then the linguistics term ‘orthography’, referring to the writing system and writing rules of a language. ‘orthography’ also comes from Greek, being a combination of orthos (‘correct’) and graphein (‘to write’)

So, how does one practice cryptorthography? It’s actually fairly simple. You just take a given language (or languages), and create a new writing system for it which only you (or a few select people) can understand. This way, you could leave even your most secret writings out on the kitchen table, but nobody would be able to understand them without a fair amount of contemplation or analysis.

By creating your own system, you’ll be able to write and read it without too much trouble, but it’ll be completely opaque to everybody else, no matter which language they speak. It’ll be far faster than coding or ciphers, and doesn’t need to be hidden or obscured to be secret, and since it’s all hand-written, it’ll be far less vulnerable to computer-based assaults because of the trouble of transcribing it into a computer.

Before you start writing all your personal secrets on your front door, it’s important to remember that, just like with the above systems of hiding your meaning, there are weaknesses and places where people could easily figure out what you mean. I’d like to discuss a few of these weaknesses that I’ve come up with, and offer some advice for how to harden your writing system against analysis.

Obscuring the obscure

The most simple way to do this would be just creating new letter forms for your language. If you just use a new symbol in the place of ‘a’, a new one in place of ‘b’, and so on, you’ll quickly have a text that’s unable to be read at first glance. The system would be easy to create, but I’d recommend against it. As soon as somebody started looking, they might well start noticing patterns. If they know (or suspect) that it’s English, they’ll start looking for certain patterns. If they see a single symbol alone, they’ll know, for instance, that it’s either ‘a’ or ‘I’. Similarly, two symbol words are far less common, and give them an inroads to further analysis.

If, on the other hand, you mix it up a bit, you’ll make their lives infinitely more difficult. For instance, if you were to use only the sounds of words and disregard how they’re written, it would instantly complicate analysis. So, instead of “rough”, you’d have ‘ruf’. “You” would become a two symbol sound (‘yu’), and ‘I’ would become two symbols (‘ay’). If you’d like to play it even safer, start marking all the different English vowels. With that step, you’ll confuse anybody who thinks that English only has a, e, i, o and u, and likely stop most casual inquiries.

Another good strategy is to include a few filler characters. If you include in your writing system a symbol or two that you know has no meaning, you can use it with single sound words (’a’) to throw off analysis. Similarly, just dropping a few of those into random words will force people to try and find a correspondence for something that, well, just doesn’t exist.

While we’re being evil to any potential analysis, one of the advantages to creating a phonetic symbol set is that you can use it to write in other languages as well. If you start including random words in other languages, or substituting say, some Hindi word for their English equivalents, it’ll throw off any attempts to figure out what is what based on the phonology (sound rules) of a language.

For instance, somebody analyzing your system might know that if there are three consonants together in English at the start of a word, the first consonant is always an /s/ sound. Always. So, if they’ve decided what constitute vowels, and then find three consonants before one, they’ll know what your /s/ symbol is. That is, unless you use the Russian word “vsyo” (all) someplace in your text. Then, they’ll have at least two three-consonant clusters, and can’t use the phonology to work their way through it.

Using similar symbols to the existing system can be a double-edged sword: it can both help and hurt you. If your symbols are too similar, your system is far too easy to crack. However, I highly recommend using one or two symbols that are at least close to an existing symbol, however, I’d recommend assigning them a different sound. For instance, one might use a ‘v’ to represent the /k/ sound.

This has the wonderful effect of creating a cognitive mismatch between the system they’re trying to analyze and the system they’re using. As any English-literate learner of Russian will tell you, at first, it’s very tough to see a ‘p’ and hear an ‘r’ sound, even though that’s what Cyrillic does. It won’t stop them, but it’ll certainly make analysis that much more of a pain.

There are other ways to make life difficult for anybody analyzing your writing. If you write from right to left, you’ll create a great many problems for them, just as if you were to write vertically. Along those lines, if you remove spaces and familiar punctuation, it’s even more difficult, both for you and for them.

Also, remember that you don’t need to create an alphabet per se. You might create a syllabary like in Japanese, where the symbols each represent a different syllable (‘ra’ might have one symbol, whereas ‘re’ would have a completely different one). Also, if you’re feeling ambitious, you could make a character set, where each word has a symbol. It’d be a great many symbols, but it’d be very difficult to crack.

Finally, as common sense dictates, throw away the key. Once you’ve created your system and learned it well, hide or destroy your handy reference guide, or else understanding your writing is as easy as looking up the symbols.

It has to make sense to somebody

However, if you spend all your time trying to make reading your system tough on other people, it’s easy to make it tough on you too. There are a few easy ways to avoid this.

Perhaps one of the toughest parts of the process is actually designing the symbols. For that, I highly recommend that you make a trip over to Omniglot, a wonderful website which discusses writing systems around the world and has lots of examples. It’s a great place to blow a few hours, and will show you all the variety of systems out there.

Once you’ve got symbols, make sure you’re combining them in a way that makes sense to you. For instance, I might use a system based on phonetics, where high vowels (like in b_ee_t and b_oo_t) are marked above the baseline, and low vowels (b_a_t and b_o_t) are the same symbol, but marked below the baseline. However, you can go much more personalized. If a symbol reminds you of the shape of Cape Cod, you might use it for a ‘kay’ sound. Basically, if it makes sense to you, go for it.

Finally, keep in mind the difficulty of writing the symbols you pick. Don’t use anything more complex than necessary, because it’ll only slow you down. Similarly, if you often write with a fountain pen, try to avoid symbols with right to left strokes (assuming you’re writing left-to-right). If you’re going to use this a lot, any corners you can cut now (without making it more difficult to read) will save you a massive amount of time in the future.

Your thirteen spices are safe

If you take the time to create your own writing system and take a few easy steps to harden it, you can sure that nobody will be able to casually peruse your secret recipes and writings.

However, as with all security measures, your secrets are never completely safe. All that locks, encryption, ciphers and even cryptorthography can buy you is time. If somebody has a sample of your writing system, it’s very likely that, given enough time, they’d be able to figure it out.

So, if the CIA wants to find out the secret thirteen spices, chances are, they’ll be able to. However, a little bit of cryptorthography will go a long way towards keeping your recipes mysteriously delicious.

(PS: If this sounds interesting, stay tuned. I might well be holding some sort of a contest where people create secret writing systems and then have other people try and crack them. I’ll announce more details later, but if you’re interested, leave a comment and we’ll be in touch!)

Pushing words off of the ivory tower's balcony

2007-10-06T18:31:37-04:00

Greetings all. I know it’s been a while since my last post, but I’m definitely still here. I’m not nearly back to a place where I can have a regular posting schedule (I’m working on an MA thesis and applying to doctoral programs), but I do intend to drop in new posts periodically when I get a chance. So, in that spirit, here’s a quick post both to share a random insight, and to prove that I’m still alive.

There are a great many words that are used all the time in Academia, but seldom outside of a scholastic context. Many of these words aren’t particularly useful outside of their specific academic context. An example of a word of this type from Linguistics might be fricativization, which is the process by which a stop consonant becomes a fricative over time (for instance, /t/ goes /s/). However, there are a few words which are definitely handy even outside of linguistics and academia, but really never seem to fall out of the ivory tower into everyday use.

Sadly, in an everyday social situation when one of these terms would really work best, you’re left with two bad options.

Your first option is to just use the term in whatever context you’re in, even if the people you’re talking to might not be familiar with the term. Unless you do this with an incredible degree of social grace, you’ll seem very much like an elitist, or like you’re trying to thrust your academic background in somebody’s face. Going on to explain the term is helpful, but even then, you’re still going to seem like you’re playing professor, not hanging out with friends. That’s just not cool.

Your other option is to circumlocute, or talk around, the word. Here, you’d just describe what the word means in context, without ever actually using it. So, for instance, rather than saying ”I’m a phonologist”, you might say “I study the sounds of language and the rules that go with them”. This is much more socially acceptable and doesn’t have the same air of “look at me, I’m an academic”, but it can get awkward if you want to use the word multiple times in a conversation.

So, today, I’d like to create a new option.

To Posit

One of these academic terms that I think is quite handy in everyday life is the verb “to posit”. This means, roughly, “to assume something for the basis of argument”, or in other situations, “to hypothesize”. In Linguistics, we use this term pretty frequently when trying to justify a certain analysis. Here’s an example of its usage from a recent assignment of mine on the history of Polish:

In order for this jeste—› ješcie change to have any sort of naturalness, I must first posit an isolated (at least, based on this data) vowel epenthesis (Epenthesis is the addition of a sound between two other sounds), whereby an /i/ was inserted between the the [t] and the [e] of the 2pl form (_jeste_ —› jestie).

Ignoring the rest of the specialized vocabulary and examples, I’m basically saying that for the rest of my argument to make any sense, I’m going to hypothesize (and to a certain extent, assume) that a vowel pops up between those two sounds at some point. Here, it’s in a very academic context, but there are definitely situations in everyday life where this word could come in handy.

For instance, you’re near campus and your football obsessed school is having a home game. You’re talking with a bunch of friends before heading off to have a tasty burrito, trying to plan your route through the pandemonium:

Friend: What’s gonna be the best route to take? Do you know which streets they’re gonna block off to let the drunken fans crawl home?

You: Not a clue, but based on the past few games, we can pretty safely posit roadblocks on Euclid and Regent. Friend: Yeah, good call, let’s try University… or… You know, let’s just order pizza.

Now, for me, “posit” really is the best verb for the job here. If you said “we can bet on roadblocks…”, it would imply a great deal more security in your guess. If you said “Let’s assume roadblocks…”, it would make it sound like there’s no other option. Finally, if you said “well, let’s hypothesize that they’ve set up roadblocks…”, you’d sound like you desperately needed to get off campus more, and further than just the burrito shop.

Let’s posit further usage by readers of this site

As many of you have already figured out, posting these obscure words on your blog isn’t really a better way to use these words in conversation. Unless your friends are all avid readers of your site (and mine aren’t, for the most part), you’ll still have to explain these words or work around them.

However, I have a wonderful dream. First, I’ll talk about “positing” on my site. Then, maybe you will, because it’s much less confrontational when you use an obscure word oline. Then, your friends friend might use it. People will start bumping into it, and more and more, it will enter the collective consciousness of society.

Eventually, this effect will cascade until my final dream is realized, and I can walk into a bar, sidle up next to a very attractive woman, and say that “given the fact that you’re talking to me, that you’re expressing interest, and most importantly, that I find you very attractive, I’m going to posit a wonderful end to this evening”.

Unfortunately, even if I use the perfect verb in the perfect context, in that situation, I still posit a quick, firm slap to the face. It’d SO be worth it.

Program Note: Due to a recent plague of comment spam, all comments are currently set to await my moderation. If you don’t see your comment there immediately, don’t despair, I’ll see it and approve it shortly.

On sabbatical...

2007-08-11T12:12:52-04:00

Greetings everybody!

I just wanted to let you all know that I’m going to be on sabbatical for a few weeks from making LingMystic posts. Between classes restarting and work, I’m not going to have much time, and I don’t like to just leave things silent.

As always, I’ll be available for emailing (contact link in the top right part of the page) and you’re still welcome to comment, but there just won’t be much new.

So, enjoy the end of your summer, and keep looking out for awesome language!

See you today... tomorrow... in 12 hours... look, I'll just see you.

2007-08-02T21:05:08-04:00

Recently, a reader pointed me to a post on The Repeal of Gravity Blog discussing the strangeness that can sometimes arise with expressions of relative dates (like “last Monday” or “last March”. He highlighted the troubles arising from using “last March” in April, which can often leave people wondering whether you mean the march that has just passed, or the previous one. Although I don’t have much to add to his discussion, it does remind me of an issue that often plagues my communication.

Nocturnolinguistics

I’m a bit of a night owl. It’s not at all unusual for me to be up and working, talking with friends online, or even posting on this site well after midnight, and often, that leaves me in an interesting situation linguistically.

Let’s say that it’s 1:30am on June 9th. I’m speaking with a friend online, and we decide that we’re going to make plans for 4:30pm on June 9th, the same day. Our plans are finalized, and finally, it’s time to say goodnight. So, not thinking, I say “OK, see you tomorrow at 4:30!”.

Often, my friend will just go along with it, confirm the time, and move on. However, I have some friends who are really tripped up by this. “Wait,” they’ll say, “We’ve got plans for 4:30pm today, right? We said the 9th, not the 10th.” After a bit of clarifying chat, all is well, but these minor miscommunications seem to highlight an interesting difference in perspective among different people.

For me (and some other people I talk with), “today” is defined by sleep. I think that “today”, means, roughly, “between now and when I go to sleep for the night”. As you would expect, “tomorrow” then refers to “after I’ve gone to sleep and gotten back up, but before I go back to sleep the next night”. Sounds a bit complicated, but it seems to work in practice.

Until I’ve woken up on the day of the event, it’s not “today” yet. Thus, if I’m still up at 3:30am and I’ve got a meeting at noon, that meeting is still “tomorrow” to me, as I’m planning to sleep before that meeting starts. However, if it’s 3:30am, and I’ve already slept for the night and just got up early, a noon meeting becomes “today”. This is a very relative sort of system, and although it works fine for me, it does seem to confuse some of my friends.

For other people, “tomorrow” is, quite literally, “the day that follows this one on the calendar”. So, the moment the clock strikes midnight, yesterday’s tomorrow becomes today, and today’s tomorrow is yesterday’s “day after tomorrow” (I love that sentence).

So, for these people, if a meeting happens in the same calendar day, it’s “today”. Even if they’re still awake from the prior day and it’s only 12:01am, a meeting at noon is “today”. These people will dutifully make the switch at midnight, and doing so seems perfectly natural.

With these two ways of looking at the usage of “today” and “tomorrow”, it can sometimes be difficult to bridge the gap, especially when you’re not sure what system the person you’re talking to prefers, but there are definitely ways around it.

As before, let’s say it’s 1:30am on Monday, June 9th, and I’m confirming an appointment at 4:30pm on Monday, June 9th. The absolute safest way to express it would be with a qualifying statement, for example, ”I’ll see you today, June 9th, at 4:30pm”. However, this can be a bit official or stodgy sounding. Another way to get around the ambiguity would be to say ”I’ll see you in 15 hours, at 4:30pm.” The most common phrasing I use is something like ”I’ll see you tomorrow/today at 4:30pm”.

A Call to Comments

Even though there are ways around this ambiguity, the fact that people seem to use “today” and “tomorrow” differently is very interesting to me. Calling on the wonderful interactive power of the internet, I’d really appreciate if some readers would let me know which usages of “tomorrow” and “today” they tend to use in the wee hours of the morning, and whether that’s the same in any other languages they might speak. It’s a fascinating phenomenon, and I’m wondering how widespread these usages are.

So, please, leave your comments. Although I’ll be off to bed shortly, rest assured, I’ll have a look at them tomorrow morning… err, today? In 9 hours? Oh, screw it, I’ll just look at them Saturday. It’s much clearer that way.

Ahh, the joys of Linguistically Justified procrastination.

The Interrobang: Stylistic Superfluity sans Sanity

2007-07-27T18:38:20-04:00

Recently, I’ve been listening to GrammarGirl’s “Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing”. I’ve generally found the episodes to be very interesting, and even though I thought I knew some of the subjects well, I’ve definitely learned something each time. I’d highly recommend giving it a listen.

However, in one of her recent episodes which discussed punctuating questions, she mentioned something that really mystified me: The Interrobang. I’ll quote her explanation below:

GrammarGirl said:

And finally, when you’re asking a question in surprise such as What? it isn’t appropriate to use multiple question marks or a question mark with an exclamation point. You’re supposed to pick the terminal punctuation mark that is most appropriate and use just one (1). Is your statement more of a question or more of an outburst?

I’ve always found that solution unsatisfactory, so I was thrilled to learn that there’s an obscure punctuation mark that was designed exclusively for asking questions in a surprised manner. It’s called an interrobang, and it looks like an exclamation point superimposed on a question mark.

You shouldn’t use the interrobang in formal writing, but I think it would be great if people started using it on blogs and in other informal communications. If you have the Wingdings 2 font in your word processing program, you can insert an interrobang as a special character, and there are unicode values that you can use to add the interrobang to your web site. I’ve put those in the transcript of this episode.

Although it’s a rather cool looking symbol, I think it’s a rather silly idea, and demonstrates one of the most frustrating aspects of prescriptive grammar.

So, the interrobang exists for a very distinct reason: Sometimes, you want to express that you’re surprised as you ask a given question, but you can’t use two punctuation marks at the end of a sentence.

My first thought when I read that was “How have I never heard of that rule?!”

…wait. Something’s wrong. I just used two punctuation marks at the end of a sentence. And… everything’s OK. The reader understood me, understood that the question carried a note of surprise, and most importantly, the English language didn’t collapse in on itself or explode in a blaze of punctuational pyrotechnics. That must mean that the inability to end a sentence with two punctuation marks isn’t a natural, grammatical rule (like “I have walked” versus “I have walk”), but instead, is an arbitrary, stylistic rule.

So, basically, the Interrobang was created because an arbitrary, stylistic rule has forbidden what most people normally do to indicate a surprised question, the “?!” cluster. They’ve broken the language by disallowing the existing punctuation system, then created this new mark to bandage the wound they created. Am I the only person who sees this whole process as more than a little ridiculous?

Keep in mind, though, I’m not against all attempts at expanding our system of punctuation. I think that the Irony Mark might come in handy from time to time, and a sarcasm mark would be very useful for online communications.

However, the Interrobang strikes me as a cute, interesting, but ultimately unnecessary bit of novel punctuation. The interrobang is only necessary if we accept one particular bit of nitpicky stylistic dogma. When you couple its questionable reason for existence with the relative difficulty of finding and inserting the symbol compared to the simple “?!” cluster, it’s no wonder to me that it hasn’t caught on.

That’s not to say, however, that the interrobang is without it’s fans, who need to be represented as well. After forwarding the article to a friend of mine online, she responded with excitement to the idea:

Make sure you talk about the convenience of only one dot. I know you may be against it, but you must talk about both sides and be fair. A dot may not seem like a lot of time to someone, especially if you are particularly crafty with a pen. BUT think about if you are hyperbole happy. All the time you will save over the years. It’s really staggering.

So, although the interrobang has a future amongst hyperbole-happy minimalists and time-savers, the fact of the matter is that for the majority of people, the interrobang is never going to fly. You’re welcome to interrobang your writing to your heart’s content, but just don’t be surprised when your proofreading friend hands you back your essay with a big red circle around your interrobang, and a small note, scribbled in the margins, reading “What the heck is this?!”.

Reflections on a year of Linguistic Mysticism

2007-07-18T21:17:00-04:00

One year and two days ago, Notes from a Linguistic Mystic first went online.

Now, 367 days and 44,000+ unique visitors later, LingMystic is celebrating its first birthday.

This year has been above and beyond any of my expectations. In addition to being interviewed by the Australian State Press, I’ve been linked on Wikipedia in several places, and I get 100+ hits from google each day for people looking for linguistics information. It seems that the word is definitely getting out, and that brings me happiness.

However, what brings me the most joy and amazement is the loyal and fascinating group of people who read my site frequently and comment on my articles. It’s wonderful to hear that other people find these ideas useful and interesting, and it’s a great motivation. All comments, positive and negative, help me improve the site and give me new perspectives. I really do appreciate the involvement of the readers, and it really makes writing here even more worthwhile.

Gazing down the road

So, what’s planned for the next year of Notes from a Linguistic Mystic?

Well, the simple answer is more of the same. I’m hoping to continue writing whenever I get the chance and get an interesting idea, and I’ve got some very interesting topics in mind. I’m hoping to build on my past work with some longer, more involved posts about subjects about which I’m really knowledgeable, and I’m hoping to continue being a resource for people searching about the internet. However, there are also changes I’m planning to make.

I’ve found myself posting more and more on subjects that I suspect mainstream readers will find interesting, but that I’m not as knowledgeable or interested in. Although it certainly does succeed in getting up the numbers of viewers, I’m realizing that it makes this site less enjoyable for me to write and less credible for you to read. So, I’m going to return to my earlier tradition, writing about what interests me, rather than what I think would interest you. This doesn’t mean that I’m going to try to be boring, and I’m going to do my damnedest to keep the postings readable and interesting to all readers. Please feel free to guide me along this path, letting me know what you think of the posts and letting me know if there was anything you didn’t understand.

Also, I’ll be diversifying a bit. I’ve been invited to Guest-Blog for an article at another site (I’ll announce it formally when I’ve finished the post), and I’m also planning some other sub-projects. Although the Linguistic Mystic blog will always be my main presence on the internet, I’m hoping that there might be some other ways of bringing interesting language to the masses.

So, that said, thanks for a year of reading, and here’s to another year of writing.

Finally, some Linguisticism

Since I do my best to include some linguistics in every post, and given today’s post’s theme, I’d like to talk for a moment about the Spanish word for “year”, año. Now, as most Spanish learners will find out, it’s very important that the tilde (~) be included over the “n” in this word, telling us that the word is pronounced pronounced “anyo” (/ɑɲjo/).

Why, you might ask? Well, without the tilde, we have ano, which is the Spanish word for “anus”.

Sometimes, one can get away without accents and diacritics, but you’re going to want to pay close attention to the tilde. That is, unless you’d actually like to wish your friends a happy new anus.

Of Official English sillyness, painful grammatical errors, and cooked circles of Freedom-Flour

2007-07-13T09:22:01-04:00

Today, I’d like to discuss a post made on a news forum that I stumbled across recently. I’ll reproduce it in its entirety below, and then discuss it. (Here’s the original source):

Speak English, Your In America Now

We, the Legal American workers of the USA, need to stand together NOW, to keep English as our only native language.
Foreigners are saturating the USA & are slowly trying to modify our national language to include Spanish, so it will be easier for them to live & work in this country.
Qualified US citizens who need to support their families are being refused employment in their own country because they don’t speak Spanish. This is happening on a daily basis. The unemployment rate is up and the government offices are making suggestions that we learn Spanish so we can get jobs.
This is wrong & something needs to be done. If we do nothing, in 10 years we will all need to know Spanish and have to push 2 to hear it in English! Please help stop the madness before it goes any farther.
We can not allow any modification of our national language.
We need stronger laws which require resident & citizen applicants to learn English in order to live & work in the USA. If not, than these companies that deal with non speaking English patrons, need to hire an interpreter and pay them what the average interpreter makes. To force the “legal” US citizen to speak a new language is Discrimination based on language.
We need new laws created to protect the English speaking citizens of the USA from any discrimination (like employment, housing, etc.)
Amnesty should only be given if the parties are willing to learn English and help change their family members coming over or who are already here.
Petition to NOT modify our native language to include any foreign language
Petition for stronger laws requiring all residents & citizens to learn & speak English in order to live & work in the USA.
Petition for new laws protecting US citizens who are refused employment in the USA simply because they do nospeak a foreign language.
Petition for new laws protecting the English speaking citizens of the USA from any form of discrimination (employment, housing, etc.).
We would like to thank Verizon Wireless for taking the first steps in realizing that we shouldn’t have to push one for English, it should be a given.
If you agree, take a stand & sign the petition.

Painful grammatical errors

Here at LinguisticMystic, I do my best never to mock people for grammatical mistakes. I’ll certainly comment on them, and when they’re particularly funny, I’ll share a laugh. However, in general, I think that one’s ability to adhere to an arbitrary set of “rules” set out for us by the richest group of language users shouldn’t be a category of judgment.

As many of you likely noticed, the author of this post mixed up the 2nd person possessive (your) and the identical-sounding yet differently spelled contraction of “you are” (you’re). This is often a problem because, as I said, they sound identical when spoken aloud, but in writing, there’s a very large difference between the possessive (“I saw your mom”) and the contraction (“You’re a mom”).

Now, I’m not pointing this out to attack the author as a person, or suggest that she’s uneducated. Instead, I’m pointing it out because this is a wonderful example of one of the few times when having impeccable grammar IS relevant and necessary. In some contexts, a badly placed grammatical error can significantly injure an argument, and the author’s your/you’re mixup here is one of these examples.

This error occurred only two words into a rather lengthy rant about how terrible it is that people aren’t using English and how English is going downhill. This particular error in this particular context is a lot like somebody standing up to give a speech on animal rights while wearing a fur coat. If you’re going to give this speech, you need to prove that you’re a good person to trust on matters of the English language, and this simple little grammatical error threw that all away.

However, this particular error isn’t the only thing of linguistic interest in this rant.

Official English sillyness

I couldn’t help but chuckle a bit when the author said that “in 10 years, we’ll all need to know Spanish and push 2 to hear it in English”. This is unrealistic for a number of reasons, but not the least of which is the assumption that the tide could turn in 10 years, in either direction.

I consider myself to be nearly fluent in Spanish. I suspect that, if dropped in the middle of Mexico City, I could likely survive quite well, albeit with the normal crop of grammatical errors. I’ve never lived abroad, although I’ve traveled to Spanish speaking countries on a few occasions and worked in a number of Spanish speaking environments. I’ve gotten this degree of language mastery the American way, by learning the language in isolation in classrooms from a young age. How long did this take? Roughly 8 years of Spanish through Middle school, High school, and College.

Now, keep in mind, I adore grammar. I love it. I truly enjoyed these classes, and didn’t particularly slack. It’s just that, well, getting good with a language takes time. Sure, it could be shortened with immersion classes and living abroad, but I’d like to think I’ve had a pretty average language education.

For me and my flexible young brain, it took me eight years. Just imagine if a monolingual fifty year old was “forced” to learn Spanish. According to Wikipedia, around 82% of people in the US speak English only at home. Even if an evil Spanish-speaking conspiracy literally forced everybody in the country to learn Spanish, it’d likely be at least 10 or 15 years before most people could use it as a primary language.

However, that’s not going to happen. An 82% majority doesn’t just drop their native language without a gun to their heads, especially when it would require years of expensive and difficult schooling. Not to mention that English is probably the fastest growing language in the world, and it’s a prestige-language for many.

So, I’m quite tempted to say that the author here is appealing to the “defend the fatherland” attack-when-threatened instincts of the masses, rather than to any sort of logic. These fear based arguments are (sadly) pretty common these days, but to a linguist, this one is just plain silly.

When it comes to sillyness, though, there’s one statement that takes the cake.

Enjoy your cooked circles of Freedom-Flour

In her little petition, the author proposes one of the most ridiculous ideas that I’ve heard in a while:

Petition to NOT modify our native language to include any foreign language

Whoa there, Mrs. Official English. This is a bit of a tall order, as forbidding any further borrowing of words from other languages is a bit ridiculous. As I’ve discussed before, English is ripe with borrowings from Spanish, French, Latin, Greek, and even Arabic.

So, to categorically forbid the borrowing of new words into English from other languages would be inconvenient and juvenile. We’d be forced to come up with new words for all the items we might absorb from other cultures. Thus, rather than being able to simply use the word “tortilla” (from Spanish), we’d have to come up with a new word for it. Perhaps we could just use a compound word (“Thin flour-bread”). Maybe we could just make a new, English-sounding word for it. Or, maybe we can take a page from the US House of Representatives’ playbook and come up with a nice, jingoistic name for them. I suggest “cooked circles of Freedom-Flour”.

However, even if we were to start creating English words for everything, it really wouldn’t help what she’s afraid of. As Shakespeare points out, a rose by any other name will smell just as sweet, and no matter what you call a new idea or item from another culture, it’ll still affect our own culture. Sure, you’ll avoid having any foreign words, but if you’re still importing foreign items into our society, I suspect she’d still think our culture was “in danger”.

So, sure, you could try and bind the language (impossible) in such a way that it won’t absorb foreign words (unfortunate), but really, all you’d be doing is halting the progress of English, and weakening the language. Really, if this author succeeded, she’d probably just end up hurting English and making other, less hogtied languages seem more attractive.

Relax, Breathe. Your English is safe

I’ve used this quote several times before, and I’ll use it again: A language user trying to prevent language change is like a gardener trying to prevent continental drift. Every time these official English people stand up and yell, it becomes more apparent that it’s completely futile. English is going to do precisely what it’s going to do, and all the ranting and cute little laws in the world aren’t going to change that.

Even disregarding that futility, the fact remains that English isn’t going anywhere. Sure, more and more, it’ll be beneficial to be bilingual. Barring major wars, though, I don’t think there are any Native English speakers alive right now in the US who will have to completely switch to another language to survive here within their lifetime. Sure, English will change, but it’s not going away any time soon.

So, why do they keep arguing these points? Well, as I’ve said before, when people say nasty things about another language, it’s generally because they want to say nasty things about the people who use it, but are afraid to do so. I suspect that this too is another little bit of anti-immigrant or even racist sentiment that’s been dressed up in a little suit and clip-on tie and paraded around as a linguistic issue. Luckily, there are people who oppose it (notably including Senator John McCain and the Mayor of Nashville), and the proponents of these ideas remain on the fringe.

Next time you hear one of these people pop up yelling about saving English from those mean, nasty other languages, take a second to realize that it’s a really a linguistic non-issue. Make up your own mind on the subject, but just make sure that you rip off the false linguistic premises. Only once you’ve done that will you be completely aware of exactly what this sort of argument and mindset is supporting.

The content-personality continuum of blogs (and a blog-meme)

2007-07-11T10:08:01-04:00

It seems to me that most blogs fall on a continuum in terms of their content.

The grand blog continuum

On one end, we have the most personal of blogs. Comprised of random thoughts, stories, goings-on, and pictures, these blogs are primarily designed as a means of social communication with one’s friends and family. You can usually tell these because reading them is boring (if not downright painful) if you’re not intimately acquainted with the author. Perhaps the epitome (best example) of these sorts of blogs are the ones kept by many random people on LiveJournal or MySpace.

On the complete opposite end, we have blogs that are so heavily focused on providing useful content to the world that the authors themselves are largely overlooked. Never will you find a post dedicated simply to the wonderful day that the author had, and seldom will you even find a reference to the author’s personal life. Sometimes, these are even run by several authors collaboratively, and unless you look at the name of the poster, you often can’t even tell who’s writing them. Examples of blogs like this would be Lifehacker, Treehugger, and MacRumors.

It seems that, in terms of readership and popularity, the most successful blogs seem to be the ones putting content before personal information, because they appeal to the widest audience. If you think about it, some of the more well known blogs on the internet tend to be the more pragmatic and content-based blogs which have a very distinct theme and focus. After a while, these sorts of blogs start to build a library of sorts, with lots of content that somebody who has never heard of the author might still be interested in (and find, via google).

That’s not to say that there aren’t popular blogs where the author’s voice is both present and strong. One good example of this is DaringFireball, which has a great deal of content, but is also quite clearly John Gruber’s personal blog. He’s found a good balance between Gruber-trivia and widely relevant information, and his success shows that. What Would Tyler Durden Do? (not work safe) has a different approach to this balance. Although the content is mostly just gossip about celebrities, in addition to the content, the author of the site has a strong and distinctive voice in the posts, and his commentaries on the stories are often downright hilarious. Here, the author is clearly present in the content, but nonetheless, the blog isn’t about him.

So, there’s a grand continuum in the blog world, ranging from the most personal livejournal to the most informative megablog, and everybody fits in somewhere.

Where am I?

The reason I’ve gotten to thinking about all this is that recently, I’ve been asked to participate in a blog-meme that involves sharing information about oneself. Basically, participating bloggers are asked to list eight random facts about themselves, and then to pass the meme onto eight more people, much like the chain emails of old. What’s surprising to me, and the reason for this post, is that I was conflicted as to whether or not to participate.

Obviously, participating in this meme would be very much out of character for a blog like Lifehacker or Gizmodo. It’s a clearly author-centric exercise, and for a site where the author is de-emphasized, it would be awkward at best. However, for a Livejournal sort of blog, this sort of thing is their lifeblood.

That led me to wonder where, exactly, this site falls on the grand continuum. Although there are clearly posts which concentrate on me as a person, I try to make the majority of my posts very content-centered, although they may include my voice and opinions. My primary means of getting the word out about this site is through links from other people and from google, and I do my best to make the posts here relevant to people who don’t even know what linguistics is, let alone who I am.

Finally, I do have the rather obsessive desire to incorporate some discussion of language and linguistics into all of my posts, even the most mundane of site news. This obsession, and the awkwardness of posting simply personal information, makes me think that when all is added up, Notes from a Linguistic Mystic tends to lean more towards the content-centered side of the blogosphere.

Passing on the meme

So, I’ve decided that to just fill in eight random facts would be a bit contrary to the site’s nature. However, I’ve come up with a compromise. Here are my eight facts:

The pitch of my voice is usually between 90hz and 120hz, although it got at a bit lower (~70hz) with laryngitis. When the vocal folds are inflamed (the main effect of laryngitis), they vibrate more slowly, and thus, people’s voices sound lower.
When I was young and first learning to read, I pronounced the L’s in “walk” and “talk” for a time, even in everyday speech. This is called a “spelling pronunciation”, and they’re not uncommon. Many people will pronounce “caulk” differently from “cock” for this precise reason.
For me, the vowels in “caught” and “cot” are pronounced identically. This is the case for many speakers in the US. For more information, visit the Wikipedia page on this merger.
I can hear the difference between aspirated, unaspirated and voiced stops, but I have trouble reliably making unaspirated stops.
After a fair amount of practice, I can make and hear Ejective stops.
Violating a number of sociolinguistic and cultural rules, I referred to my parents only by their first names until first or second grade. The school psychologist had to explain to me that generally, “Mom” and “Dad” is more acceptable in our society, and that it made them sad when I called them by any other name.
Because I’ve suffered from a number of ear infections in the past and had a somewhat mysterious hearing impairment through the high school and a part of college, I currently have a tympanostomy tube (ear tube) in my right ear drum. Thus, when I’m on planes or driving in the mountains, my right ear doesn’t pop at all. Strangely enough, this surgery actually improved my hearing significantly, and helped me to distinguish sounds that I previously couldn’t.
The name “Linguistic Mystic” arose while working on a project regarding the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. I was debating the idea with a friend in my group who was dead set against the idea that language affects thought. Frustrated that neither of us were changing the other’s mind, he said something along the lines of “You know what you are? You’re a damned Linguistic Mystic, trying to make language into some secret, mysterious force affecting our world.” I loved the expression then, slowly adopted it, and finally ended up making it the title of this site.

Naming the victims

So, there are my eight facts, modified to include a heavy dose of content and linguistic goodness. According to the Meme, I need to now post the rules and nominate a few other blogs.

These are the rules:
1. We have to post these rules before we give you the facts.
2. Players start with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
3. People who are tagged need to write in their own blog about their eight things and include these rules in the post.
4. At the end of your post, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.
5. Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.

Here are the blogs I’ve chosen (I couldn’t find eight), in no particular order:

Mother Tongue Annoyances
Language Fragments
LinguLangu
Confessions of a Language Addict
Aspiring Polyglot (PS: Congrats on the Bloggers Choice nomination)

So, if you’re interested in participating, fellow bloggers, you’re welcome to. Feel free to put your own spin on things as I’ve done, or feel free to ignore this altogether.

Conclusion

Much like humans grow to have a certain preferred communication style in a given context, it seems that blogs tend to settle out into different styles. Just as it would seem unusual for a normally serious professor to come into class and start discussing a party he attended over the weekend, bloggers seem to have a good idea of what’s “proper” given their particular style, and seldom violate it.

(Unless, of course, a really good chain-letter goes around. Then, we get flexible.)

The Official Linguistic Mystic Pronoun Policy

2007-07-10T11:47:36-04:00

I’ve gotten a few comments about my frequent use of “they” as a gender-neutral 3rd person pronoun, in sentences like “when a person hears a tornado siren, they should hide”.

I’m aware that that’s not necessarily conventional, and that some even consider it ungrammatical, so, I’ve decided that in order to minimize any potential confusion, an Official Pronoun Policy is needed. You can find it under “About”, and there, I explain my reasoning and my official policy in support of “they” as a legitimate third person gender-neutral pronoun.

Perhaps I’m the only person who thinks about such things, but, to misquote Gandhi, we must be the change we want to see in the language.

What do assassins and sofas have in common? English words with Arabic origins

2007-07-09T12:41:38-04:00

As you may have guessed from my earlier post on the phrase “Hermetically sealed”, recently, I’ve been researching both Alchemy and Hermeticism. Although they’re very interesting subjects in-and-of themselves, one fascinating facet of their study is the relative abundance of words of Arabic origin.

That might be expected, given that alchemy itself is of Arabic origin, both the practice and the word itself (from al-kimiya), but there are a surprising number of Arabic words which have found their way into English. I’d like to share a few of the more interesting or unexpected ones. As a simple disclaimer, I’m not an Arabic speaker, so I’m relying on other sources for transliterations and word meanings. Corrections are always welcome. Unless otherwise noted, all etymologies are from the Oxford American Dictionary included in OS X.

All about al

Very frequently, Arabic loanwords into English will begin with the letters “al-“. This is because, in Arabic, al is the definite article marker, just like “the” in English. Thus, in Arabic, “the art of transmuting metals” would be al-kimiya, al ‘the’, and kimia ‘art of transmuting metals’. As is frequently the case with word borrowings, this definite al has been combined with the original word, giving us ‘alchemy’.l-ġawl

However, there are many other loan words in English that begin with the Arabic al:

Algebra - From Arabic al-jabr ‘the reunion of broken parts,’ ‘bone setting,’ from jabara ‘reunite, restore.’ Albatross - From late 17th cent.: alteration (influenced by Latin albus ‘white’ ) of 16th-cent. alcatras, applied to various seabirds including the frigate bird and pelican, from Spanish and Portuguese alcatraz, from Arabic al-ġaṭṭās ‘the diver.’ Alcohol - Either from Arabic al-kuḥl, a powder of Antimony Sulfide, or from al-ġawl, ‘spirit’ or ‘ghost’ (which is apparently the same source from which we get the words “Spirits” (referring to alcohol) and “ghoul” for a ghost). See the Wikipedia article for the fascinating etymology. Aldeberan - This star is named after the Arabic word al-dabaran, ‘the follower’

Unexpected Arabic

However, not all Arabic words have the telltale al-. There are a number of words that I found while researching for this article which I would never expect to have derived from Arabic. Here are a few of them:

Arsenal - from French, or from obsolete Italian arzanale, based on Arabic dār-aṣ-ṣinā’a, from dār‘house’ + al- ‘(of) the’ + sinā’a ‘art, industry’ (from ṣana‛a ‘make, fabricate’ ).

Orange - Orange, as I’ve discussed before, is derived from the Arabic nāranj

Apricot - from Portuguese albricoque or Spanish albaricoque, from Spanish Arabic al ‘the’ + barḳūḳ ‘Apricot’

Assassin - from French, or from medieval Latin assassinus, from Arabic ḥašīšī‘hashish eater.’

Magazine - from French magasin, from Italian_ magazzino_, from Arabic makzin ‘storehouse,’ from kazana ‘store up.’ The term originally meant [store] and was often used from the mid 17th cent. in the title of books providing information useful to particular groups of people.

Sofa - from French, based on Arabic ṣuffah. A full explanation can be found here.

Sugar - from Old French sukere, from Italian zucchero, probably via medieval Latin from Arabic sukkar.

Zero - from French zéro or Italian zero, via Old Spanish from Arabic ṣifr ‘cipher.’

We’re all one big family

As corny as it sounds, this is proof that in this world, no one culture or language is an island. No matter how distant a culture or people may seem, there’s usually some small thread that ties us together.

Right now, tensions between Westernized countries and the Arab world are mounting and people are starting to question if these cultures have anything at all in common. That’s a silly sentiment, though. Next time you want to reassure yourself that we’re all cut from the same cloth, just grab yourself an Arabic speaker, hop on the sofa, and have yourself some oranges and sugar. You’ll find yourself communicating better than you could have ever imagined.

Update: A number of readers have commented and emailed to expand upon the etymologies here as well as to mention a few other Arabic derived words that I’ve missed. So, make sure to check out these wonderful comments, and feel free to add your own.

The double-edged sword of Linguistic passion

2007-06-28T17:46:58-04:00

Perhaps one of the most unique aspects of becoming a linguist is the fact that as you study, it begins to slowly work its way into all aspects of your life. Although most people view linguistics as “obscure” and have trouble imagining how it could affect one’s life outside of academics, let me assure you, it can.

The different fields within Linguistics, once you’ve begun to study and ponder them, simply will not let you go. The reason for this is simple: When you study language, you’re studying one of the main aspects of human existence, something that we not only use constantly, but that we simply cannot avoid.

If you’ve got a real passion for language and its analysis, you’ll find yourself constantly analyzing the flurries of language that are constantly surrounding us. However, I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing.

502 Error: Linguist temporarily overloaded

My friends have all noticed a certain tendency that I’ve developed since the start of my Linguistics training, affectionately referred to as “the blue screen of linguistic death” or “Linguist moments”.

Periodically, I’ll be carrying on a normal conversation with people, and then suddenly I’ll stop dead in my metaphorical tracks. Often, I’ll start drawing little trees in the air with my finger, or mouth words over and over again under my breath, and always, I’m pretty much catatonic.

The scary part is that really, I seldom notice when I do. I’ll be going along in conversation, and then somebody will make a speech error, make a strange sound or pronunciation, or just say something that “needs” further analysis, and I’ll just dive straight into linguistic analysis. Sometimes it’s a quick little thing (“Oh, she just combined the first two words into one…”), but from time to time, I’ve been known to actually pull out a piece of paper and do actual analysis complete with word-stress grids and IPA transcription. Generally, I’ll figure things out and pop back into the conversation down the way, but sometimes, these little moments will keep me thinking all evening.

Of course, the problem with this is that you can never really explain it to the satisfaction of the people around you. If somebody asks you what you were thinking about, there’s no graceful way to say “Oh, I was just trying to figure out why the stress pattern varies among the acronyms in the organization’s different regions.” Best case scenario, they’ll find it mildly interesting (although not worth the hour of discussion needed to actually explain), and worst case, they’ll just write you off as somebody who really needs a hobby.

However, linguist moments aren’t always a bad thing.

“Oh yes, please go on. Tell me how your dog got his name again?”

One of the most wonderful side-effects of taking phonetics is that any conversation can become fascinating. You see, when people are talking, we generally just listen for meaning, and the actual sounds never cross our minds.

However, with a little bit of phonetics training, we can make ourselves pay attention to the actual sounds and the little details inherent in them. When you sit back and actually listen, it’s shocking how many corners people cut in speech, how many little tiny speech errors we make, and how complex speech really is. So, even though the subject of discussion might be completely uninteresting, you can always find something of interest, even if it might not be that interesting to somebody without a passion in the subject.

It’s not just phonetics, though. Sometimes, little speech errors or unusual constructions will trip me up, just begging for analysis. Sometimes the analysis yields nothing more than the minor satisfaction of figuring it out, but sometimes, it’ll lead you to help solve a major problem in your own linguistic work, or give you a major insight into the way that language works.

“Wait… what?”

Finally, there are times where constantly having one’s ear to the ground for interesting language use is just mildly amusing, but not much else.

For instance, being obsessed with speech and speech sounds, I’m constantly listening to my friends’ speech. I’ve started to pick up on little interesting speech changes that they all make and that nobody notices. For instance, I’ve noticed that one of my friends (also a speaker of Korean) will pretty frequently replace Eth sounds (ð) with unaspirated t’s. It’s completely irrelevant to life in general, and most English speakers don’t even notice the swap (or just think he’s saying “da” instead of “the”), but it brings me a little bit of joy from time to time.

If you’re passionate, the sword isn’t double-edged at all.

When you become passionate about Linguistics, you’ll quickly find your passion spilling into the language use of your every day life. Whether it’s in the form of sudden bouts of near-catatonic linguistic analysis, sudden insights from random bits of conversation, or just subtle-yet-interesting observations about the world, it’s very difficult to leave your work at the office, so to speak.

However, the beauty of it all is that if you’re like me, and are truly passionate about linguistics and language, then it’s not work at all. You’re constantly surrounded by something that you’ve dedicated part of your life to understanding, and you’re always only a step away from your next insight. Sure, the occasional “blue screen of linguistic death” might be embarrassing, but in the end, it’s definitely worth it.

No matter how passionate a mechanic is about their work, they can only really explore their passion when they’re under the hood of a car. One of the true joys of being a linguist is that no matter where you go or what you do, you’re never far from your passion.

Saving Internet Radio: a plug for a good cause

2007-06-26T10:22:45-04:00

If you at all enjoy Internet Radio (whether it be through your browser, through the “Radio” tab in iTunes, or otherwise) and live in the United States, take action now before your favorite stations are silenced.

The RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America, a lobbying and legal attack-dog group representing major US music labels), has decided raise Internet Radio royalty rates so high that few, if any, independent internet radio stations will survive once these rates take effect in 18 days. This will give the RIAA-blessed stations a monopoly on your internet listening, help them to bury a lot of independent music, and, most importantly, allow them to arbitrarily bankrupt a lot of good companies full of people passionate about music.

Even if you’re just somebody interested in language, internet radio can be a very good thing. There are a number of Net Radio stations broadcasting music in languages other than English (some of it still controlled by RIAA labels), and for somebody learning a new language, nothing helps to reinforce like listening to music and broadcasts in it. Sadly, because of these changes, a lot of these multilingual and eclectic stations will be forced off the air.

So, if you’re at all passionate about internet radio, independent music, or stopping the Recording Industry’s monopolistic tactics, head over to SaveNetRadio, take a minute to call your Senators and Representative, or just spread awareness of this pending issue on your own site.

As somebody who produces and presents content online, issues like these are very important to me, and these people have my sympathy. Also, as an avid listener, I’d hate to see internet radio go silent for good.

Thanks for taking the time to read this and to help. We will now return to our regularly scheduled language analysis…

Excuse me, but your past is showing: using etymology to peer back in time

2007-06-26T09:54:15-04:00

I do apologize for the lack of posting. Sadly, I’ve been rather afflicted with illness for the last week or so, and am only now feeling human enough to return to posting. However, once you’re truly obsessed with language, not even a bout of pneumonia can stop you from noticing interesting language use.

The difference between having an issue in your chest and having a chest full of issues

During the course of this bout of illness, I (unfortunately) developed a mild case of Costochondritis. Costochrondritis is a sharp pain in the chest that happens after trauma, strain, or sometimes for less-than-clear reasons. In my case, an unusually rough bout of coughing in a very strange position did the damage. However, this is a language blog, not a medical blog, so let’s take a look at the word “costochondritis”.

Medically, costochondritis is an inflammation of the Costal cartilages, and actually, that’s well reflected in the Etymology (origin) of the word. “Costo-” seems to pretty straightforwardly reference the Costal cartilages. “Khondros”, the Greek root for “Cartilage”, is the second element of the word. Finally, “-itis” indicates an inflammation. Thus, we end up with a word which, when you translate the roots, means, literally, “Costal Cartilage Inflammation”. Makes sense.

When I first heard the “-chondr-” root in the middle, my mind jumped to the only other word I knew with that root, hypochondria. Hypochondria is a condition where somebody constantly believes that they’re ill or is always preoccupied with their health. It’s a legitimate (and serious) psychological illness, but it’s a very, very different sort of problem than costochondritis (and has nothing to do with cartilage), so I was having trouble figuring out how they could be related linguistically.

Snapshots in time

The origins of words capture not just the history of a language, but the history of the people who speak it as well.

Sometimes, this is fairly obvious. Spanish has a very large number of words derived from Arabic, so one could pretty safely infer that Spanish-speakers have had a great deal of contact with Arabic speakers throughout time.

Sometimes, words can be relics of past cultural movements that have since been supplanted. The term ”Yule” (which now refers to Christmas) is actually the old term for the Pagan winter solstice celebration which is the foundation for the modern Christmas holiday. In a widely accepted term for a Christian holy day, its Pagan origins are kept just a scratch beneath the surface, held forever by etymology.

Finally, sometimes, words reflect a past understanding of the world which we might not still have today. If a disaster area is described as being “pandemonium”, we understand it to mean “it was chaotic”. Literally, the world comes from the Greek roots “pan-” ‘all’ and “daimon” ‘demons’. Back in their day, such chaos might have been viewed in the metaphor of rampaging demons, whereas we might not see that.

A very humor-ous origin

So, what do Costochondritis and Hypochondria have in common?

Well, it turns out that hypochondria is, in fact, derived from the same root, and is a combination of “hupos” (‘under’) and “khondros” (‘cartilage’). It literally means “below the (chest) cartilage”.

It came to mean what it did because back when the word was formed, the predominant medical theory was Humorism. They believed that there were four bodily fluids (‘humours’), Blood, Yellow Bile, Black Bile, and Phlegm. Because hypochondria was considered to be a sort of melancholy, it was associated with an imbalance of black bile, produced at the spleen, which, tying everything back together, is located right below the chest cartilage.

So, even in a modern medical term, vestiges of this ancient Greek theory of medicine still show up. Similar sorts of effects from this theory have persisted in the older psychological terms referring to somebody as sanguine (‘full of blood’), bilious (‘full of bile’), or phlegmatic (‘phlegm-ful’).

Embedded history

Languages are always changing, as are the cultures that use them. However, when new words are created, they often provide a snapshot of the culture at that time. With time, people start to forget how exactly these words arose, but a little bit of digging for these origins can help you see not just the past of the word, but the past of the people who created it.

I'm very pregnant that I'm late: The joys of foreign language miscommunication

2007-06-19T16:35:46-04:00

SomethingAwful is a (generally not work-safe) comedy site that usually gets me laughing with every visit. Perhaps they’re most famous for ”Photoshop Phridays”, but they have a variety of columnists and recurring features that are worth checking out for a quick laugh.

However, a recent edition of ”Comedy Goldmine” is simply too magnificent not to feature here. The theme? Foreign Language Screw-Ups.

Although they’re all pretty funny, it seems like most of them can be broken down into a few different categories of speech error.

False Cognates

A foreign language word is considered to be a “cognate” if it’s similar in both sound and meaning to a word in one’s native language, and they both descended from the same source, either from a mother language or through borrowing. For instance, in Spanish, the word for ‘computer’ (_computadora_) is a cognate, as is the word for ‘volunteer’ (_voluntario_). These cognates happen frequently when two languages borrow heavily from the same language. In this case, English and Spanish both have many words with Latin roots.

However, it’s not uncommon for foreign language students to accidentally use a “false cognate”. These are, as you might suspect, words that sound very similar in two languages, but have different meanings. The textbook Spanish example is assistir (‘to attend’) and atender (‘to assist’). Sometimes, the mistakes can be innocent, but sometimes…

Frog writes…
Last year on a vacation to Cuba I rented a moped and managed to break it. When I returned it to the rental place I used my awesome high school Spanish to say I was ‘embarazado’ about what happened, meaning to say embarrassed. Turns out ‘embarazado’ means ‘pregnant’. I’m a guy.

Note, it’s not just English speakers who can make this mistake:

Dark Chicken writes…
This brother and sister I knew grew up in Mexico and were eating at a restaurant in the States. Well, the brother kept on bothering the sister, so she finally yelled, “Stop molesting me!” The restaurant went dead silent and everybody stared.

This comes from the false Spanish cognate, molestar, which means (completely innocently) ‘to annoy’ or ‘to bother’.

False cognates can make for some wonderful communication issues, but they’re not the only source of interlingual hilarity.

Secondary Meanings

In many languages, it’s common for words to have several meanings. Just like the English “cock” can either denote a male chicken or the male sexual organ, languages are littered with minefields of multiple meanings.

When a non-native speaker looks up a word in the dictionary, especially a small dictionary, it’s not uncommon to see several options listed. So, if a Spanish speaker wanted to tell a woman “You have a pretty cat” and looked the word up in a dictionary, there’s a decent chance that, quite innocently, he’ll use the word “pussy” instead and he’ll end up complimenting her genitalia. Here’s one wonderful example of a hilarious alternate meaning:

QueenOfMistakes writes…
The only thing I can think of was when I was in my German class and we’d been having a heatwave. I said “Ich bin heiss” (meaning “I am hot”), which made my teacher laugh.
Apparently, saying “Ich bin heiss” is one way of saying ”I’m horny” in German.

This can also work the other way around. Sometimes, a language will have a word with two meanings, and in the other language, each meaning has a distinctive word.

Luebbi writes…
When I was in London with my class (German students), something hilarious happened at the airport. We where standing in a queue and some Brits came around and started to cut in line. A friend of mine yelled: “You can’t come here! There’s a snake here!”, which not only baffled the British couple, but made everyone else, including our teacher, laugh out loud.

The German word “Schlange” is used both for snake and queue, and he used the direct translation.

Grammatical Errors

Sometimes, you can have all the words right, but a little tiny grammatical error will get you.

Fhqwhgads writes…
Back in High School, while on a class trip to Italy, one of the guys was hitting on a local chick. He was doing well, until he used the word “bello” (instead of “bella”). She slapped him and walked away. Never call an Italian girl handsome.

Here, the writer failed to take into consideration the fact that in Italian (as well as in many other languages), adjectives are marked for gender. In English, we have separate words (a girl is “pretty” and a guy is “handsome”), but in Italian, that little tiny morpheme (unit of meaning) is able to completely derail even the most persuasive of pick-ups. The gender distinction can also change the meaning of words…

Mortanis writes…
Back in high school French, we had to pair off and interview your partner, then relate their day back to the class in French. A friend of mine interviewed a girl, and promptly reported to the class “She likes to play with her cat”.
But used the feminine for cat, which is slang for pussy. Was pretty enjoyable to watch our fairly attractive French teacher start snickering over something like that.

Misleading Mispronunciations

Nearly any foreign language one studies will have some sounds that are different from those in your native language. As a phonetics student, this brings me great joy, but when speaking another language, these differences can lead to some wonderful errors:

Ayreon writes…
“Cook” in Dutch is “kok” which is pronounced “cock”. A friend of mine once tried to “thank the cock for the nice meal” at a restaurant.

A co-worker of my dad’s name is Dick de Cock, which is a perfectly normal name in the Netherlands. However, when he got a promotion and suddenly had to travel all over the world, he got a lot of weird looks.

Here, I suspect that the Aspirated/Unaspirated distinction might be causing problems:

sewid writes…
Walking around crowded night markets in Taiwan after getting a taste of my first giant chicken schnitzel I asked my girlfriend how to say chicken schnitzel in Mandarin which she told me was “gi pai”
Much to her amusement when I misheard her, thinking she said it “gi bai” i loudly proclaimed in Mandarin to all around that I loved “gi bai”
Which I found out shortly sort of means I love vagina.

All it takes is a simple change in the voicing of a consonant to go from loving sausage to loving the polar opposite. Scary, huh?

Conclusion

There’s no shortage of ways to mess up in a foreign language. Between treacherous false-cognates, deceitful second meanings, grammatical gaffes and malicious mispronunciations, sometimes a second of speech may seem like an ocean of opportunity for offensive communication.

However, the beauty of it all is that generally, people laugh when such speech errors are made. If somebody knows you’re a foreigner, you often get the benefit of the doubt.

The moral of this story: Next time you’d like to compliment a girl’s pussy, you’d better have an accent, or else you’re going to be very, very pregnant.

Etymology vs. Entomology

2007-06-14T13:24:44-04:00

Alright, today, I’d like to have a very brief discussion about two words that are often confused in everyday speech: Etymology and Entomology.

Etymology

Pronounced “eh-ta-MAH-lo-gee” (/ɛtəmalədʒi/), Etymology is the study of the origin of words. Many words end up in English after traveling through several languages and permutations, and often, the etymology of words can be fascinating.

For instance, according the Oxford American Dictionary, the etymology of the word “Orange” is as follows:

ORIGIN late Middle English : from Old French orenge (in the phrase pomme d’orenge), based on Arabic nāranj, from Persian nārang.

Sometimes, words will be incorporated into other languages at different stages in its evolution. Those of you who speak Spanish will likely recognize “Naranja” as a pretty clear derivation from the Arabic. However, the modern Russian word for orange, “aranzhevii”, is likely an import from later in the word’s evolution, perhaps from the French.

Keep in mind, though, not all words have a clear etymology. For instance, there’s still considerable debate about the origin of the word/phrase “OK” (see here, here, and the Wikipedia page).

Etymology is a really fascinating area. I’ve posted many times about different word origins (here, here and here, to start), and I’ll likely continue to do so, as they’re usually pretty interesting. Giving word origins can also be quite an entertaining party trick, too, if you’re sufficiently nerdy.

Entomology (pronounced “en-ta-MAH-lo-gee” (/ɛntəmalədʒi/)), on the other hand, is the study of insects. That’s right. Creepy, crawly insects.

Although the Wikipedia article on the subject will be able to tell you much more about this science, my main point is that Entomology is very, very different from etymology.

“So, how does the study of insects pertain to this phrase…?”

Very frequently, people will ask me for the “entomology” of a word, and it can be quite difficult sometimes to avoid discussing how the word relates to insects. I understand that they’re both unusual words, and I also understand that they’re pretty similar, but at the same time, I beg you, please note the difference.

Etymologies are a truly fascinating subject, and can really help a person grow closer to the language they speak. I’m sure that Entomology is cool too, although personally, I prefer suffixes to centipedes. That’s just me, though.

Sleazy public relations trick #413: The alternate definition dodge

2007-06-09T13:44:00-04:00

This morning, I stumbled across this story, relating some completely absurd events happening at an elementary school not too far from me:

GREENWOOD VILLAGE – When Carole Altman opened her daughter’s yearbook from Belleview Elementary, she expected to see her message congratulating her daughter on completing the 5th grade. What she did not see is what angered her.
“What has been done here, in my opinion, is un-American,” Altman said.
The Parent-Teacher Community Organization at Belleview Elementary established a yearbook committee. The committee sent a letter to parents asking them to pay $5 to publish a message to congratulate their students. The letter stated the message will include “all of your wonderful words.”
Altman and her husband submitted this message: “So proud of you Remy for achieving fantastic grades, participating in so many wonderful after school activities and surviving so many of the Belleview teachers’ liberal teachings. You are what you believe you can be. Aim high, always. Love, Mom & Dad.”
“What was taken out was surviving the liberal teachings,” Altman said.
She wanted her daughter, years from now, to appreciate how well she did in school even though Altman felt teachers were biased.
“Despite all the liberal teachings and so forth, she’s come out with a good education,” said Altman.

Obligatory rant

First, I’d like to point out that this was in an elementary school yearbook. For those of you unfamiliar with the American education system, that means that the kids involved were probably in the 8-10 years old range.

The main subjects taught here are English, math, music, gym, and the basics, and I sincerely doubt that there’s much room for heavy bias. So, unless there were some seriously strange questions on math quizzes (“Bush leaves a Big Oil lobbyist’s office going 35mph…”), I’d be willing to bet that the parents are a bit hyper-sensitive here.

No matter what the teachers were doing, this seems like an incredibly asinine thing to put in an elementary school yearbook, and I’m more than a little shocked that there are people so politically hostile that they have to take cheap shots at teachers in an elementary school yearbook.

Alright. I feel better now. Sorry about that, now back to the Linguistics…

“No no, I clearly meant something else that nobody understood…”

Now, the Altmans’ cute little jab was removed because, surprise, the yearbook editors felt that the elementary school yearbook was “just not an appropriate forum for political statements.” That seems reasonable to me, but the Altmans just had to keep fighting it, and in doing so, they resorted to one of the most common-yet-reprehensible tricks in the publicist’s book: Redefining the definition.

Altman says it was not political.

“The word liberal means loose. We have to take what the definition of liberal means. I didn’t say Democrats,” she said.

Webster’s Dictionary defines liberal in part as “not orthodox.”

Altman says that is what she meant that teachers were not using established and structured teaching practices in her opinion.

“That’s not political unless the reason why they took it out was they put a political spin on it,” said Altman. “Since when is the word liberal or conservative always to mean political?”

District leaders still believe Altman’s motives were about politics.

So, basically, Altman is arguing that she didn’t mean “politically liberal”, but instead, “loose”, and thus, her statement was politically neutral.

Many meanings, one understanding

There are many words that have more than one meaning, and when talking or reading, we have to pick the right one from context.

Sometimes that’s pretty straightforward. If somebody says “The cock chased the hen around the shed”, nobody’s going to argue that “cock” is an obscenity, because the context makes it fairly explicit that we’re discussing a male chicken. Similarly, if somebody calls a gay man a “faggot”, that person would be hard pressed to argue that he meant that the man was a small bundle of twigs (the original meaning of “faggot”).

There are cases, though, where an argument could conceivably be made for both the controversial meaning and the innocent one. Giving the Altmans the benefit of the doubt, we’ll pretend that “liberal teachings” was actually meant to mean “unorthodox”.

The problem, though, is that when something’s ambiguous, people will tend to assume the worst. Even if a farmer is standing next to a donkey when he says it, “kiss my ass” will likely be seen as insulting. Most importantly, even if the teachings at Belleview were unorthodox and the Altmans were just innocently pointing that out, people will see it as a political statement. There’s still the possibility that somebody could be using the “unorthodox”, politically neutral meaning, but in general, “liberal” is now a political term, and when people specifically mean “unorthodox”, they’ll say that instead.

When a statement is made, the speaker will have an idea about what they meant to say. That’s not really the most important part, though. In order for the communication to work, the listener has to understand as well, and there’s no guarantee that they’ll read the same meanings from the same words. If you’re going to use a common word in an uncommon way, it’s your responsibility to communicate that somehow. If you choose not to, you’ve waived your right to complain when somebody “misunderstands” you. Sorry, Mrs. Altman.

A common deception

Mrs. Altman is not alone in using this pretty transparent defense. Many people will go back to antiquated, obscure or alternate definitions of words when their remarks come back to bite them, claiming their words were innocent and without controversy. One particularly shameless example of this came from Elizabeth Hoffman, the former President of the University of Colorado at Boulder.

During a well-publicized case of sexual discrimination filed by a female ex-member of the school’s football team, Hoffman argued that when a football player told the girl to “get off the field, you f***ing cunt”, “cunt” was being used as a term of endearment. (link) Hoffman attempted to play it off using her background in Medieval studies, claiming that in Chaucer’s days, it wasn’t a negative term. Of course, this enraged a number of faculty members both because of the implications, her defense of the indefensible, and her psuedo-scholarly explanation. She was replaced not long afterwards, and although the football team and coaches never really faced appropriate justice, there’s at least a great deal more sensitivity in campus athletics because of it.

No matter your feelings on her specific case, this is another situation where somebody has tried to disguise their intent by playing off of unusual or old definitions.

It can be innocent, but usually they’re just covering their backs

Sometimes, especially with non-native speakers, mistakes like this can happen innocently. Somebody uses a word without the knowledge of its other connotations, and gets burned by a hyper-sensitive reader, listener, or even worse, the media. In that situation, it’s not only understandable, it’s completely forgivable.

However, when somebody uses a word, knowing full well how it’s usually used, then later hides behind strange, antiquated or unusual definitions to defend themselves, it’s generally just a sleazy and ineffective publicity trick.

So, Mrs. Altman, I might recommend that you look into getting a publicist. If you’re firing off gems like this and your child is still that young, it sounds like you’ll have a lot of controversial comments to distance yourself from in the future. It’s your right to say them, but if you’re going to try and hide from them afterwards, you’re going to need to do better than this.

Paging Dr. Freud: Parapraxis and everyday speech

2007-06-05T22:14:04-04:00

As I mentioned before, I’ve spent the last few days out of town, at a major conference for one of my other jobs. The conference was interesting to me as a phonetician, hearing all the various accents from around the country, but the most interesting (and funny) language moment occurred during the closing ceremonies.

A slip worthy of the ages

The conference, discussing Residence Hall life, took place on a college campus, and the 1000+ people attending were each assigned rooms in the Residence Halls on campus. So, everybody was staying in first-year dorms, with the same shared bathrooms, roommates, and tiny rooms as any incoming student would have. By no means were these luxury accommodations, but they didn’t have to be, we’re all used to Dorm life anyways, and what was provided was quite sufficient for the weekend.

Perhaps most wonderful Freudian slip I’ve seen in a long time happened during the closing ceremonies for this conference. So, myself and 1000+ other people are sitting in the main arena, and one of the conference coordinators is speaking to the entire group. He’s going through and thanking each different group or committee that made the conference possible, and then finally, he says (paraphrased) ”I’d like to thank the University’s Housing and Conference services department for providing us with our unremarkable accommodations”.

A long moment passed, and then a good portion of the arena burst into laughter. He realized several seconds later what he had said, but by then, it was too late, and his correction was overwhelmed by the laughter, and his original meaning of “remarkable accommodations” was lost to history.

This is a truly amazing example of a “Freudian slip”.

Parapraxis 101

A Freudian Slip (or Parapraxis) is where one’s subconscious thoughts are somehow expressed on the surface through their words or actions. This often happens through name replacement (“I love you Laura” when Laura is your mistress’ name, not your wife’s), or through other “slips of the tongue” (“I would do anything to you” as opposed to “I would do anything for you”). No matter the form it takes, the most basic requirement for a speech error to be considered an instance of Parapraxis is that you end up communicating something you didn’t intend to but were likely thinking subconsciously.

According the Wikipedia article on Freudian Slips, Freud thought that these slips had a psychological meaning:

The Freudian slip is named after Sigmund Freud, who described the phenomenon he called Fehlleistung (literally meaning “faulty action” in German, but termed as parapraxis in English) in his 1901 book The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. Freud gives several examples of seemingly trivial, bizarre or nonsensical Freudian slips in Psychopathology; the analysis is often quite lengthy and complex, as was the case with many of the dreams in The Interpretation of Dreams.

Popularization of the term has diluted its technical meaning in some contexts to include any slip-of-the-tongue phenomenon, often in an attempt by the user to humorously assign hidden motives or sexual innuendo to the mistake. It is not clear, however, what Freud considered an “innocent” mistake, or if he thought that there were any innocent mistakes. The enormous quantity of slips analyzed in psychopathology, many of which are banal or apparently trivial, would seem to indicate that Freud felt almost any seemingly tiny slip or hesitation would respond to analysis.

Context is everything

The social power of these slips lies in the context in which they occur. For instance, had we all been housed in a five star hotel and the speaker still said “unremarkable”, it might still be funny, but it’d be more of a simple speech error. The beauty of a Freudian slip comes from the fact that it reveals the truth (or one’s true feelings), even while a person tries to cover it up.

Because everybody knew that the accommodations were, in fact, quite unremarkable, when he misspoke, it was both extremely funny and extremely telling. He unconsciously violated the social norm as well as catching himself in his own distortion of the truth in front of 1000+ people.

So, the moral of this story is that you’re never safe from your own inner thoughts. Although some people can become very adept at lying (or mild distortion of the truth), a single speech error could pop up and blow your entire cover. You can pay close attention to your words, and try to suppress your subconscious, but sooner or later, everybody slips up.

The Alchemical origin of "Hermetically Sealed" (and some site news)

2007-05-30T19:36:19-04:00

In English, when you want to express that a container is completely airtight or sealed, you can talk about it being “Hermetically sealed”. Although the term sounds very scientific, the origin is actually rooted not in science, but in Alchemy and Spellcasting.

Hermes Trismegistus (‘Hermes the Thrice Majestic’) was the Mythical founder of both alchemy and astrology, and a God of Ancient Greece. Several very important alchemical texts are attributed to him (including the Emerald Tablet), and for some Greeks, he took the place of both the Greek God Hermes and of Thoth, the Egyptian God of writing and science.

As you may have figured out, origin of “hermetically” comes from the Latin form of Hermes’ name (‘Hermeticus’). Hermes’ name is associated with this concept because he was purported to be able to magically seal a box or chest in such a way that it could never be opened. Thanks, Wikipedia Later on, in the 17th century, Hermes’ name became linked to secrets and seals. The term “Hermetically Sealed” was then popularized by an invention called the Magdeburg Hemispheres, which used a vacuum to remain sealed no matter the force applied to take them apart.

So, what sounds like a nice, scientific Latin term is really a relic of Ancient Alchemy. Aren’t word origins awesome?

Some site news

A few major things are happening in the world of Linguistic Mysticism, most of which involve some form of bragging.

I’m proud to report that this site has now surpassed 21,000 unique hits. Thanks to all of you who read the site and link to me in all sorts of different ways. It really does my heart good to know that people enjoy the site.

I’m even more proud to report that I’ve gotten a flurry of publicity and links over yesterday’s post about LOLCode, including (I’m quite proud to say), a link from the Language Log. I’m just bragging, really, but it’s very neat to see that the world’s most famous language bloggers have noticed me.

Speaking of the site, I’m sure some of you have noticed the slightly tweaked layout, design and color scheme. I hope you like them, but I’m certainly open to suggestions, ideas and complaints. Comments and emails are welcome.

Finally, I’m going off to a conference for a few days, but I’ll be back and posting on Monday.

So, thanks again for reading, for linking, and for commenting. I appreciate it.

Now, off to bag up my shampoo and contact solution, hoping they don’t leak in my luggage on the plane. Where’s Hermes and his magical seal when you need him?

im in ur programmz, codin in ur dialect: LOLCode and Feline Dialectology

2007-05-29T16:55:05-04:00

Periodically, one goes through periods of deep metaphysical malaise. You look around at the world, wondering how such evil could flourish and such suffering could endure. You descend deeper into darkness, your faith in humanity waning, wondering why we were ever born into this cruel world. Then, suddenly, you realize that somebody has written a programming language based off of the dialect of Lolcats/Cat Macros, and your faith in humanity’s inherent good is completely restored.

LOLCode is a computer programming language concept which draws its vocabulary from the recent internet sensation of captioned cat pictures. Although not fully functional yet, it’s still linguistically fascinating on many different levels, and deserves mention.

i has dialect

One of the most interesting parts of this programming language is that it can exist at all, and the fact that it can goes a long way towards establishing the legitimacy of a feline dialect.

Imagine that I wanted to create a programming language based solely off of star wars vocabulary. I would likely start by finding a donor language, whose basic syntax and ideas I would borrow. Then, I would begin to slowly find equivalents and their translations.

Some equivalent/translation pairs might be obvious. ‘Death Star’ for a verb which meant “remove file”, maybe ‘carbonite’ for “pause process”. One could even get a bit more ornate and incorporate some movie quotes. Perhaps “there is an error” could be coded with ‘It’s a Trap!’, and “load this program” could be ‘Commence Primary Ignition’.

However, no matter how nerdy I felt at the time, my plan would be fatally flawed from the outset. Sooner or later, I would find an expression that was too niché (fulfilling just a small purpose) to have a Star Wars equivalent. I’d have to rely on a set canon of phrases to fill in the blanks, and there’s no way to work around it and still maintain the Star Wars theme.

The reason that LOLCode is so awesome is that, based on what I’ve seen so far, it doesn’t seem to have that limit. Based on my highly scientific research at icanhascheezburger.com, it would appear that LOLCat has become a full fledged dialect. There are many captioned images there, each slightly different, and each seems to fit a coherent grammatical pattern. Some linguists are starting to pick up on distinct patterns and grammatical rules, and based on the fact that any sentence can now be LOLCatted, I’m quite tempted to say that LOLCat has become a productive and functional dialect of English.

Because of this productivity of the LOLCat dialect, it would be quite possible for somebody to take any given sentence or idea and put into LOLCat, thus ensuring that LOLCode could, in theory, become fully functional without ever breaking character. This is very exciting, and very awesome.

mai translationz r not straitforwerd

LOLCode is a very special sort of translation. Conventionally, when one sits down to label a cat, the source is an English sentence (I’m yet to find any cats “en mi refrigeradora, comiendo mis comidaz”). However, here, what people are doing is finding equivalents in human/feline language for concepts, verbs, and ideas within a computer language.

Rather than being able to simply translate, they’re forced to create the inflexible, ambiguity free grammar required to tell a computer what to do. This is tough enough to do even using all sorts of abstract symbols, but to do it within LOLCat dialect and syntax is wonderfully difficult. They’re adapting a human language into a dialect, then bending it into a computer language. This is by no means an easy ask, and it’s a far more complex sort of translation than many.

For this alone, I salute the creator and contributors to LOLCode. Although it may seem silly to some, this is really some top-of-the-line linguistic work.

d00d. ur dialect is teh suxx0rs

Perhaps the even interesting than the mere fact that LOLCat has become a translatable dialect is the fact that, well, there are already people who are arguing about the “correct” way to say something in LOLCat. Take, for instance, this post on the LOLCode wiki:

I know VISIBLE is the current output command, but it’s so not LOLCAT. What if we used LOL as the output instead? So, the Count-1 example becomes:
(Code)
I think this works very well, is funny to read and matches actual LOLCAT protocol, sorta. I guess the LOL would be at the end normally.

As a linguist, this is really, really exciting. People are already trying to step in and enforce the “rules” of the LOLCat dialect. It seems like, as a “native speaker” of LOLCat, the author of this page had a distinct intuition about the “proper” means of expressing a concept in this dialect. Truly incredible.

Although this community of people has only arisen recently, I’m very excited at the potential for the later discussions of “proper” LOLCat, and the sociolinguistic goodness sure to arise from it.

o hai. i discussed ur werk.

So, author of (and contributors to) LOLCode: I salute you. This is a unique, wonderful, and groundbreaking project, and I really hope that it continues to yield such fascinating linguistic insight into the future.

Keep up the good work, and don’t let anybody convince you that what you’re building is silly or unnecessary. If there are two things that the world of technology needs, it’s probably humor and cute, fuzzy animals, and really, I can’t think of a better way to combine the two.

Alright, I’m done. kthxbye

What exactly is transitivity, and why is it important?

2007-05-26T19:54:25-04:00

Some days, I feel like I’ve spent too much time in Academia and have begun to lose touch with the way the rest of the word understands language. The biggest barrier between the public and heavy grammar description, in my mind, is the terminology.

Each and every native English speaker reading this can use past participles, gerunds, and can distinguish transitive verbs from intransitive verbs, simply by virtue of being native speakers. However, when you couch it in fancy grammar terms, it seems insurmountable or confusing.

Part of my goal here is to make the most mysterious aspects of Linguistics less mysterious to the general public, and to that end, I’d like to discuss and explain a bit of Linguistics and grammar jargon today that you’ll see come up from time to time.

Transitive Verbs and Intransitive Verbs: Not as scary as they sound

First, just for grins, let’s look at the Linguist’s definition of this concept, taken from pg. 171 of Thomas E. Payne’s Describing Morphosyntax:

…
A transitive verb is one that describes a relation between two participants such that one of the participants acts toward or upon the other. An intransitive verb is one that describes a property, state or situation involving only one participant.
…

As you can see, when it’s presented in a very complex, jargon-filled way, it seems very complicated, and thus, intimidating. Really, though, it’s not that difficult a concept.

Sometimes, in the action described by a given verb, one person is doing something to or towards another person. These are verbs like “to hit” (Stacy hit John), “to see” (I see penguins). In linguistics terms, we say that these verbs take an “argument”. This means that in addition to having a subject (a do-er/“agent”) , the verb also has an object (a do-ee/”patient”). When a verb represents somebody doing something to somebody else, it’s called a “transitive verb”.

Intransitive verbs are, as the name implies, not transitive. The actions in intransitive verbs are performed by a subject, but just in general, and are not directed at anybody or anything. Some examples are “to sleep” (I sleep after dark) and “to smile” (He smiled). You’ll never see an intransitive verb with an object (“I sleep John” or“I smiled her”). So, if a verb doesn’t take an object, it’s considered “intransitive”.

So, here’s a quick quiz: Are the bolded verbs being used as transitive verbs or intransitive verbs?

1) John ate the cake.
2) Varinia hugged Spartacus.
3) Lisa sang in the shower.
4) The Mona Lisa hangs on the wall.

Answers (No Cheating): Because they both take an object, numbers one and two are transitive, and three and four are not.

You might be wondering why I phrased the question as I did, adding “are the verbs being used as transitive or intransitive verbs”. Well, all but one of the example verbs could be used either transitively or intransitively (‘to hug’ is always transitive). Here are the other possibilities for the other three:

1) John ate quickly last night.
3) Lisa sang “Con te partiro”.
4) I alwayshang paintings with duct tape.

As you can see, some verbs can be used both transitively and intransitively. As a speaker of English, you quickly begin to learn when a given verb can be used either way (like “to eat” or “to sing”), and when you can’t (like “to smile” or “to whip”).

While we’re on the subject and explaining strange grammar terms, there are some verbs that are what linguists call “ditransitive”. This means that they can “take two arguments”, or, in plain terms, they can have a subject and two objects. Examples of verbs like this are “to give” (I gave John a book) and “to bake” (John baked Susie a cake). Ditransitive verbs are common in English, and more information about them is available at the Wikipedia page on Ditransitivity.

Transitivity in Modern Culture

This can be a bit of a dry topic, and I’m sorry I can’t make the explanation more interesting. However, the distinction can be interesting, and can show up in very interesting ways.

Let’s look at the verb “to facebook”. It can have two completely different meanings depending on how it’s used.

Used intransitively, it means ‘to access the facebook’. An example might be the sentence “I was up until 3am facebooking”.

However, when used transitively, it shifts meaning. “to facebook somebody” means ‘to look somebody up or communicate with them via the Facebook’. For instance, you’ll hear sentences like “I facebooked that cute brunette from the LSA convention” or “You should facebook her before you ask her out”.

So, as dry as the explanation may seem, transitivity can definitely be relevant, even to the most grammar-resistant of young internet users.

Conclusion

So, now you understand what the difference is between a transitive verb and an intransitive verb. If you’d like more information, Wikipedia’s transitivity page has some good links, and any linguistics textbook will discuss it in more depth.

In addition to being able to better understand grammar talk, you can also use this newfound skill to better understand when to use “who” versus “whom”. Perhaps the greatest benefit of all is the coolness factor of discussing verb transitivity at parties.

However, I must warn you: Pick up lines involving intransitive verbs and the phrase “I won’t take any argument” will be punished swiftly, decisively, and transitively.

A truly divine suffix: -mancy

2007-05-21T23:27:45-04:00

Alright, as usual, I’ve been neglecting the mystic side of this site. So, I’m going to talk a little bit about a particular morpheme (unit of meaning) which seems to come up frequently when one trolls the more mystical side of the internet: the suffix -mancy.

-mancy is what’s called a ‘derivational’ suffix, meaning that it is used to create new words by attaching to an existing word. Usually, these suffixes add a set meaning to a word. For instance, another derivational suffix, ‘-ness’, turns an adjective into a noun which describes a characteristic. So, we take “red” and add “-ness” to get “redness”, the quality of being red.

The function of the suffix -mancy is to indicate “using something as a means of divination (the telling of the future)”. So, we take a word like carte (an Old French word for ‘card’), and then tack on -mancy. Suddenly, we have “cartomancy”, defined as “using cards as a means of divination”, for example, reading the Tarot.

Etymology

Where does -mancy come from? One source, The Skeptic Report article “Divination: A Mancy for every Fancy” (great title), gives the etymology as:

…Many of these are described by words that end with the suffix –mancy, which comes to us from the old French word mancie, which in turn comes from the Greek mantis, meaning ‘prophet’.

However, the Oxford American Dictionary traces the word back to a different Greek word:

ORIGIN from Old French -mancie, via late Latin -mantia from Greek manteia ‘divination.’

I wouldn’t be shocked to find out that mantis and manteiaare somehow related, if not different forms of the same root. Also, it’s worth noting that this Greek word mantis ‘prophet’ in the first etymology is still present in Modern English, in the form of the “Praying Mantis”, a type of insect.

Although the trail begins to blur several languages back, it’s fairly obvious that this origins of this suffix came up through Greek, then Latin, then went into Old French, when it was finally borrowed into English. It’s traveled a long way to get here.

Usage

This ‘mancy’ suffix occurs in many places to mark different divination methods. Necromancy is the occult practice of summoning the dead to gain knowledge about the future (_necro_ is a Greek word borrowed into Latin which means ‘death’). Astromancy is an old term for Astrology, charting the stars for information about the future. You’ll recognize “astro” from “astronomy” and “astronaut”, it’s a Greek root which generally refers to stars or space.

Apparently, it can be used with nearly any Latin root to describe whatever sort of divination somebody’s bothered to perform. This site lists many other uses of the term, and discusses such obscure forms of divination as ‘nephromancy’ (the act of analyzing the kidneys of a sacrifice for divinatory purposes) and even ‘chalcomancy’, which is apparently a manner of divination performed by striking brass and copper bowls. Regardless of the specific root, though, you can be fairly sure that any time you stumble across this ‘mancy’ suffix, there’s divination afoot.

It’s also interesting to note that this suffix is still being used to create new words today (in Linguistic terms, it’s still ‘productive’). I got 32 hits on google for “blogomancy”, and more than 200 for “webomancy”. Considering the term “blog” has only arisen in the past few years, it’s safe to say that “-mancy” has stuck around as an independent suffix, and will likely be around for us to use for years to come. Perhaps -mancy’s continued popularity could even be used to predict the future of other Latinate suffixes in English. Anybody up for a little bit of Mancimancy?

Translating idioms: a dangerous game

2007-05-19T19:05:54-04:00

I’m a big fan of the Quote Database at bash.org (Not safe for work, may contain strong language and subject matter). The site is a pasteboard for funny quotes taken from online chats on IRC and other instant message chat services. Although some of them are just wonderful in their own right (here, here and here), many of them have to do with language and language related issues.

One example of a Bash.org quote about language is this one, reproduced here in its entirely:

< %kiwibonga> Je ne donne pas un merde - I don’t give a shit
< %kiwibonga> THAT MAKES NO SENSE
< %kiwibonga> you cannot give a shit to someone
< %kiwibonga> in french
< %kiwibonga> that sounds like ”I’m taking a shit in my hands and I’m keeping it for myself”

(For those unfamiliar with the source here, the above quote is referring to the English idiom “I don’t give a shit”, which means, roughly, “I really don’t care” or “I couldn’t care less”.)

This is a wonderful (and humorous) example of the fact that one cannot literally translate some idioms into another language and expect them to retain their meaning.

In many ways, an idiom is a phrase which has cultural meaning independent of the words that make it up. If I say “that’s the way a cookie crumbles” to a politician who just lost an election, I’m not implying that his campaign sat out too long, got stale, and then broke into small pieces when touched. Instead, I expect him to know that I’m saying that such things happen in life, and that I sympathize. There’s nothing in the words per se that carries the meaning, but instead, it’s based in a certain cultural knowledge shared by the two people.

When you start translating these idioms, you end up copying over the words, but the meaning is lost because there’s no shared cultural background. Once that’s lost, one has to read the literal meaning of the words, and thus, ”I’m taking a shit in my hands and keeping it for myself”.

This principle isn’t necessarily universal. If I said “A bird in hand is worth one hundred flying” (from Spanish), most people could understand it to mean the same thing as the idiom “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush”. “That’s flour from a different sack” (also Spanish), in context, would likely be understood to mean “That’s a whole different story”.

However, in most cases, the meaning of an idiom comes not from the words themselves, but from the originating culture. The moral of this story: When you translate idioms word-for-word, if the snake bites you, there’s no remedy in the pharmacy.

(That, or you’re playing with fire. Either way.)

Web 2.0 and syllabic consonants: a match made in Silicon Valley

2007-05-15T18:05:50-04:00

What do Flickr, Tumblr, Pooln, and Kaboodle all have in common? The obvious answer would be to say that they’re all “Web 2.0” sites, relying on user input and participation to succeed. However, there’s a less obvious (and far more language-related) characteristic that these and many other Web 2.0 sites share: Syllabic Consonants.

Phonology 1013: Syllable structure

Take an utterance like “Eddie poked a badger with a spoon”. There are several different ways we can break this down into smaller parts. We could simply break it into words (as we do in writing), giving us “Eddie”, “poked”, etc. At the other end of the spectrum, we could break it into individual sounds (phonemes), giving us ”ɛ”, “d”, “i”, “p”, and so on.

However, as all speakers of all languages know (at some level), there’s a middle step: syllables. A syllable is a phonological unit comprised of one or more sounds which are naturally grouped together in speech. We would break our above example into syllables as follows: “E-ddie poked a ba-dger with a spoon”.

Most speakers, if asked to repeat something very, very slowly, will naturally break words into syllables, and all languages can be described in terms of syllables. Syllables are handy for determining the stress pattern of a word (in some languages), for dictating when sounds are allowed to be used (the velar nasal can’t start a syllable), and they play a major role in the phonology (sound system) of most languages.

A syllable has two sections. The first is the onset, or beginning of a syllable, is always a consonant (or several). Not all syllables need one, but they’re pretty common. For example, in the word “bat”, the onset is “b”. The rhyme (or rime) is the second part of the syllable, and is composed of the “nucleus” and the “coda”. The coda is the final consonant(s) of a syllable (t in “bat”). Coda consonants are less common, and some languages (like Hawaiian) don’t allow a coda at all.

The nucleus, however, is the fundamental piece of a syllable. You can have a syllable with no onset or coda (”a”), but you have to have a nucleus. The nucleus of a syllable is usually a vowel (as in “bat” or “scowl”), but some languages allow consonants to live in that spot and function as a syllable’s nucleus. When that happens, it’s called having a “syllabic consonant”, and is represented in the IPA with a small vertical line under the sound.

Some languages use syllabic consonants frequently. For instance, as one of my readers pointed out in a comment, in Czech, syllabic R’s are used frequently, and can result in seemingly unpronounceable sentences like “Strč prst skrz krk” (‘Put your finger down your throat’). However, most relevant to our discussion, in English, only /l/, /r/, /m/ and /n/ can be syllabic, and only in certain situations.

Now that we know what a syllabic consonant is, we can better explore the world of Web 2.0.

Syllabic Consonants and the Web

As you can now see, Flickr, Tumblr, Pooln, and Kaboodle are all pronounced with syllabic consonants at the end of their names (/r/, /r/, /n/, and /l/, respectively). This is interesting to me for two reasons.

First, syllabic consonants (especially /r/) are extremely common at the end of Web 2.0 site names (see this list for proof). First flickr, then variations on it, and now sites like tumblr and even twitter are on the syllabic bandwagon. At first, I thought that it might be an isolated case (with the -r ending just being trendy), but then I noticed that other syllabic sites were popping up. Kaboodle ends with a syllabic /l/, and now sites like pooln are working their way through the other syllabics in English. It’s worth noting, though, that google beat everybody to the syllabic /l/, even though they don’t draw attention with the trendy spelling.

Second, people seem to be recognizing the syllabicity of these final consonants, and skipping the written vowels altogether when creating their site names. The flickr -r may well have started the game, but now completely unrelated sites are becoming Web 2.0 by not including the written vowel in words with syllabic endings. Pooln chose its site name over “Poolin” or “Poolen”, tumblr over “tumbler”, and I suspect it’s only a matter of time before the first sites ending in /l/ pop up (at the time of writing, rumbl, tumbl and bumbl were already reserved). Interestingly, I’m yet to see a syllabic M site (perhaps because we generally just write the m with now vowel, as in “chasm” or “orgasm”). Who knows, though, maybe “phantm” is the next Web 2.0 ghost hunting site

Web 2.0: Complexity, Interactivity, Syllabicity

So, it’s pretty tough to deny the correlation between “Web 2.0-ness” and syllabic consonants. Of course, there are plenty of Web 2.0 sites that are vowel-nucleus-only (YouTube, Facebook, MySpace), but there does seem to be a trend at work here.

What does it all mean? Well, if you’re hoping to start a new Web 2.0 business, you might want to talk to a linguist or a phonologist. Syllabic consonants might not be the only key to success, but do you really want to take that chance? I assure you, my rates would be quite reasonabl.

Sites that make me think

2007-05-14T17:34:32-04:00

Sorry everybody, I’ve been in the process of moving so I’ve not had much time for the site. I hope to get back on the horse soon.

For today, though, I’m going to cheat a little. Recently, I’ve been given a ”thinking blogger award”. Apparently, this is a new blog phenomenon in which one person lists five sites that make them think, and then, ideally, each of those five lists another five, and so on. I’m honored to have been nominated by LearningNerd, and so I figured that I’d continue the tradition by pointing out a few sites that make me think (or just teach me valuable information).

1) XKCD - xkcd.com This may well be the smartest web-comic on the internet. I’ve discussed his comics on this site several times, and it gracefully runs the gamut from physics to math to linguistics, and does so poignantly and comically. If you’ve never checked it out, take a few minutes, it’s worth it.

(By the way, the latest comic (as of this writing) discusses Godwin’s Law, a fascinating internet phenomenon which I’ve written about before.)

2) Lifehacker - lifehacker.com

Although it’s not language related, Lifehacker (and the tips on their site) have saved me many hours already. They catalog useful little tricks that save time, money, and make your life more productive. They can be a bit focused on software (and firefox) from time to time, but it’s worth keeping any eye out, because their tips can be really wonderful.

3) Treehugger - treehugger.com

Once again, it’s not language related, but Treehugger is a great site for anybody even remotely concerned with the environment. They talk about environmental issues, offer tips for minimizing one’s ecological damage, and even recommend good ecologically sound products. Linguistically, they are working hard to make “to green” an acceptable transitive verb (meaning that somebody does it to something else) which means “to make ____ more environmentally friendly”. Very good language use.

4) UrbanDictionary - urbandictionary.com

This is a truly magnificent site which exists to catalog the neologisms (new words) of my generation and beyond. In addition to being a great reference on unfamiliar words (although you sometimes have to scroll past a few less-than-serious entries), they also offer the Urban Word of the Day. This page (or RSS feed) offers a different and useful word each day. Some particularly useful Urban words of the day are ”bluetool” (one who wears a bluetooth headset all the time), ”vegi-curious” (an adjective describing somebody experimenting with vegetarianism but not serious about it yet) and the winner of the “Wow, now that I know the word for it, I see this everywhere” award, the ”I’m-not-gay seat” (the seat empty seat that male friends will often leave between them when going to a movie or restaurant).

So, surf Urbandictionary if you’ve got some spare time, and at the very least, subscribe to the daily feed. It’s a wonderful site.

5) Wikipedia - wikipedia.org

This is cliché, I know, but Wikipedia is my big, loveable internet friend. I’ve spent countless hours on wikipedia researching, learning, or just wikisurfing, and very seldom has it ever failed me. There are even a few links on Wikipedia to articles on this site (which I’m quite happy to see). It’s a good resource for people studying language and linguistics, and it’s an even better resource for somebody just trying to figure something out. Wikipedia embodies the very best of the internet, and is truly a wonderful site.

Conclusion

So, those are my five sites. They’re all fairly large sites (and not necessarily blogs), so I doubt they’ll carry on the tradition of nominating others, but they’re definitely worth endorsing. Feel free to nominate your own additions in the comments.

As I said, I’m hoping to get back in the Linguistic swing of things shortly, and hopefully start answering some of the questions sent in to be by readers too. Thanks for reading!

When acronyms lose their original meanings: a post for your FYI

2007-05-05T13:12:43-04:00

Sometimes I have to go looking for some sort of linguistic phenomenon to discuss, but other days, they seem to just fall into my lap. In this case, it fell into my inbox, in a mail from one of the school administrators:

…information about a new course…

This will not show up on the web until about the middle of next week, but is for your FYI.

FYI: An explanation of FYI

For those you unfamiliar with the English acronym, “FYI” stands for “For your information”. Generally, it’s just used to indicate that a message or bit of info is relevant to somebody. It started in the corporate world, but seems to have spread from there into everyday use. Here are a few usage examples from the EnronSent corpus:

enronsent27:28740:I received this today. FYI and follow-up if you’re interested.
enronsent42:12:4. FYI - Entities which have an asterik(*) are qualified in foreign jurisdictions and may, according to statute, need to file amended Certificates of Authority to reflect that they are now Manager managed.
enronsent43:24017:Thanks for the reminder. Just an FYI - it is not babysitting when it is your own kids. (Just kidding - wanting to share a pet peeve of my sister’s.)

Generally, it’s used in one of three ways. Sometimes, it’s used simply as an abbreviation, standing in for the full phrase, as in the first example above.

Other times, you’ll have an “FYI - ….information…” construction. Here, FYI (as a whole) means “The reason I’m sending this your way is because you probably want to know this”. See the second example.

Finally, FYI has become a noun for some people. You’ll get things like “This is just an FYI, but…” when somebody is trying to politely let somebody know of a hole in their knowledge of a situation. “An FYI” is a polite reminder or tidbit of information somebody might find useful.

However, I’ve never seen anybody say “For your FYI” before.

For your FYI? Call the department of redundancy department

“For your FYI” is a very interesting construction. I sincerely doubt that she was intending to say “for your for your information”, and I doubt that she was intending to say that the information was intended for our tidbit of information.

It’s also worth noting that this isn’t an isolated incident. A simple google search for “for your FYI” brought up several different sites containing the phrase (here, here and here), and even a CD titled “For your FYI”. On the site for the CD, there’s even a remark about the strangeness (and origin) of the title:

Exit 245’s second CD “For Your FYI” was released in 2001. The CD got it’s title from an email from current member Jason Robey who sent an email letting the group know “For their FYI” about an upcoming concert. The inside joke made it as the CD title and the disc features 15 songs a hidden track.

So, I’m not the only person who finds it strange.

Don’t worry, if you use it, I won’t call the Federal FBI

What’s happening here? Well, truthfully, I’m not sure.

One theory would be that people are forgetting (or ignoring) what people actually mean by “FYI”. Perhaps it is no longer viewed by this person as meaning “For your information”. Instead, it seems to have become an amorphous sort of word referring to “useful information”. Thus, what she really meant to say was “For your useful information”. Not terribly far from where we started, I know, but language works in mysterious ways.

I might be willing to chalk this up to linguistic randomness if “for your FYI” were the only case. However, this seems to be a trend. I found several google hits for “federal FBI” (federal federal bureau of investigation), and a handful for “hd drive” (hard drive drive). The people at PC Computer Notes (personal computer computer notes) might well be able to tell us something about this phenomenon, and it might be worthwhile to ask the next person you see discussing their “SUV vehicle” (sport utility vehicle vehicle). There might even be some posts made on language related web blogs (web web-logs) about it.

If you’ve got any ideas of what the linguistic explanation might be, I’d love to hear it As I said, I’m not exactly sure what’s going on here. I just know that it’s happening, and it’s interesting to watch.

The moral of this story: keep your eyes open, you never know what sorts of interesting language you’ll find, even places as boring as your electronic email.

Freeing the world with words: Why I'm really in Linguistics

2007-05-01T22:53:21-04:00

Nearly two months ago, I wrote a long post about Phonetics and how I got into Linguistics. Well, tonight I’d like to post a followup, because I’ve just realized that my past description wasn’t entirely accurate.

There, I describe my introduction to Linguistics as largely a question of fate and terrible Russian textbooks. That is all true, but only tonight have I realized and acknowledged the secondary (and at the same time, primary) reason why I am where I am: I thought the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis was true, and wanted to use it to improve life. Let me explain.

Applied Linguistic Relativity and you

I’ve discussed this idea (also referred to as ‘Linguistic Relativity’) elsewhere on this site before (view them all here), and in the interest of time (and friendliness to people who’ve not read the past posts), I’m just going to quote my past explanation posted here. I encourage you to read that full post to get a better idea of the controversy and guesswork involved in any exploration of Linguistic relativity, but for a quick summary, I’ve quoted the most explanatory parts:

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is a blanket term for the idea that the grammar and lexicon of a person’s language subtly affects their thoughts and perspectives on the world. It’s a very hotly contested issue in modern Linguistics, and although the most extreme variations (the idea that language determines your thought) have been disproved through some pretty ingenious color studies, the more subtle varieties are still supported in some senses.

If the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is true, a speaker of the Hopi language (which has a very different system of tenses than English) will perceive time in a fundamentally different way than an English speaker. Similarly, a Spanish speaker will have a slightly different view of the world than an English speaker, simply due to the underlying differences between the two languages. If this is, in fact, the case, then there are huge ramifications in Linguistics, Cognitive Science, and the world in general.

Basically, I believed that one’s language can limit one’s thought. If you don’t have a word, you don’t have a concept, and your brain is bound. I believed that language was the fundamental chain that bound us all, so insidiously that we don’t even know it.

So, if language is the fundamental chain that binds our cognition, then what can we do to escape? Well, we have two options.

One would be to raise our children without language. This would certainly remove the binds of language, but cause them to be incapable of most of human interaction. Without language of some sort, there likely wouldn’t be civilization, society, or even basic human cooperation. This would clearly be, as the American idiom goes, throwing the baby out with the bathwater (getting rid of the good parts of something simply because there’s a small imperfection).

The second option, simply put, is to change language as we know it. This was my plan.

Not ambitious at all, why?

My plan was simple: If a person’s language puts limits on their cognition, then really, all you need to do is change the language in such a way that those limits are removed. If language is a dam on the vast cognitive river, then to get more flow, you make a less restrictive dam. Thus, my love of language creation was born.

My hope was to create a language through which anything was expressible. I still have between 30 and 50 pages of hastily scribbled blueprints for my language (‘evlit’ was the working title), ranging from the philosophical needs to the grammatical needs. That little strip of light that shows up on the wall because of the slight imperfection of the fitting of the metal pieces of the fluorescent fixture in my Russian classroom my Freshman year would be just as easy and quick to describe as, say, a gray cat. Regularity would abound, simplicity would be a constant, and ease of learning would be maximized. Ideas from computer science, philosophy, and more all bounced around in my head in an effort to come up with a language that would not just function, but would set our minds free.

Perhaps this all sounds strange to you all, and I’ll admit, it was strange. However, I’d like you to imagine for a second that language was really the invisible chain that binds us all. Imagine being able to do something that not only freed a single person from bondage, not only a single community or even state, but the entire human race. I felt that if I could actually create a language which was truly “better”, more versatile, and allowed true cognitive freedom, I could truly help the entire human race.

The Russian department pushed me away, sure. Languages intrigued me, no doubt. However, that’s not really why I’m here today. When I signed up for my Intro to Linguistics class, I wanted to learn the nature of the chains, so I could cast them off, then help other people do the same.

Realization

I still vividly remember one day, around three years ago, walking back towards the department with my Intro to Linguistics professor and talking to him about language creation. I explained my ideas for creating a new, improved language, as he listened quietly. We arrived back in his office, he sat down behind his desk, and he shared an insight that has affected me to this day. He turned to me and said: “Well, all you’re going to be doing is re-encoding how things work in your mind as an English speaker, just using different sounds and grammar”.

Pop. There went my plan. One offhand comment showed me the folly of my idea. I tried to fight the realization in my own mind for a few weeks, but really, it died right there. If language does fundamentally bind my thought, how the heck could I escape it long enough to loosen the chains. If I’m bound, I won’t be able to free myself, because I literally cannot exist outside of this bondage. By the time we’re old enough to understand and use language, then we’re old enough that we’re trapped. Soon after that, I realized that really, whether or not language affects our thought is irrelevant.

As the Buddhist monk Shantideva once wrote, “If there is a problem and you are able to do something about it, why despair? And if there is a problem and you are not able to do anything about it, why despair?”. If language does, in fact, change how we think, well, we’re already bound and we can’t really escape, so there’s nothing we can do. If language doesn’t change how we think, then there’s no problem at all. Nobody’s bound, and there’s nothing we need to do. Either we’re bound, or we’re not, and we’ll never be able to tell the difference.

Even I were somehow able to create a truly better language, and even if it helped people, it would also likely result in a great linguistic genocide. Many of the remaining languages on Earth would gradually be abandoned in favor of a more useful and more powerful language, and the blood of all those grammars would be on my hands. So, I’ve realized that my goal, my dream, of changing and “improving” language to help the world is not only impossible, but probably not even a good idea. Yet, I’m still a linguist.

Now what?

Language is truly incredible. Next time you see a conversation taking place, sit back and watch. Patterns of air pressure, body language, and facial expressions are being used to express the millions of thoughts flying around inside our heads, and even more amazing, those things can be interpreted and understood by other people. The fact that we have a means of communication at all, let alone one so full of nuance and beauty, is simply miraculous.

I might have come to Linguistics because I wanted to improve language, and because I thought I could use it to help the world. The reason I’m still here is because I’ve realized that human language is not only sufficient for what we need, it’s truly miraculous. This may sound corny, but I am captivated by the complexity, the grace, and the sheer pragmatic beauty of grammar, sound, and the cognition required to get it there.

Nobody knows exactly where language came from, or when it developed. Heck, nobody knows exactly how language works in our minds, how we learn it, and how we understand it. We have described elements of it, have made lots of theories, and we’ve even made some progress on understanding how we go about making language. However, there are still many mysteries out there.

I might not set the world free with a single word, but language is a fundamental aspect of our everyday lives, if not the fundamental aspect. By studying language and the mysteries involved, I’m studying not only grammar, sound, or cognition, but human life itself.

If that’s not important, what is?

Seeing rhyme in writing: a foriegn concept

2007-04-28T18:01:52-04:00

For my graduate phonetics class, I was asked to phonetically transcribe a poem using the IPA. The poem given was called “The Chaos”, by Gerard Nolst Trenité. It’s a rhyming poem in the English language written to show off some of the most interesting spelling irregularities in the English language.

The assignment itself was just a great deal of transcription, but the wonderful bonus to it all was finally seeing a poem rhyme.

English spelling isn’t terribly phonetic, to put it nicely. The same letter combinations can have the different pronunciations in different words (“gh” in “ghost” and “rough”), and only through years of teaching, spelling bees, and repetition are we able to finally figure out how to read things written in our own alphabet.

So, not surprisingly, unless you speak the language, it’s nearly impossible to detect a rhyme looking at the text of a poem alone. To illustrate that point, here are the first twelve verses of “The Chaos”, justified to the right to emphasize the endings of lines:

(My apologies to those using screenreaders for using a graphic to display text, but IPA fonts and text formatting just don’t work well on websites)

If you read the poem aloud, the rhyme is obvious. Just looking at the text, though, there’s really no hint of the rhyme excepting the final letter, and rhyme is more than just final letters. “Sound” and “Wound” (injury) don’t rhyme (in the simple sense), even though every letter but the first is identical. Bough and flow share only one letter, yet they rhyme wonderfully in English.

In the English language, our writing system isn’t remotely phonetic. In order to detect rhyme, we have to hear something read (either aloud or in our heads). However, in a phonetic writing system, something truly wonderful happens.

Here are the same twelve verses transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet:

Even if you can’t read the IPA, you can see the words rhyming. Because the IPA transcribes sounds, we can see when the lines end in the exact same sounds. If the final vowel and consonant(s) are the same in the IPA, then it rhymes. It’s that simple.

Literate English speakers have a great deal of training throughout their lives dedicated to making heads or tails of our bizarre writing system. We sometimes even forget how strange it is, and we stop looking for exact correspondences to sound and rhyme.

English readers seldom see that spelling’s chains won’t let us be. We speak aloud inside our heads, we forget our long past reading dreads. The spelling bees all left behind, phonics beaten through our minds. The system seems easy, perhaps, sublime, but alas, we’ve never seen a rhyme.

The glottal stop: your new Phonetic Phriend

2007-04-23T19:00:39-04:00

Today, I’d like to talk about a sound that most English speakers don’t notice even though we use it every day: The Glottal Stop

The Glottal Stop is a unique consonant present in many languages around the world. It’s often represented as a lone ’ (as in “Hawai’i”) or as a question mark (?), but its official IPA symbol looks like this:

What do Mittens and Hawaii have in common?

Let’s look at the name of the state of Hawaii. The “proper” (native) pronunciation of the state’s name is “huh-WHY-ee”, rather than “huh-WHY” or “huh-WHYYY”.

Say the correct version slowly. The sort of “catch” in your throat between the “WHY” and the “ee” is our phonetic phriend, the glottal stop. In the IPA, Hawaii is written as (/həwaɪʔi:/), with the glottal stop showing up in all its glory.

Sometimes, you’ll see Hawaii written with a turned comma (ʻ) in the place of the glottal stop (“Hawaiʻi”)¹ to show that, but really, the glottal stop is unmarked 90% of the time in English.

Another place where the glottal stop makes an appearance in many dialects of English is in the words “mitten” or “button”. Say those words carefully, and you’ll notice that where we have a “tt”, there’s actually a glottal stop, not any sort of T sound. In the IPA, when I pronounce these words, they’re transcribed as /mɪʔn/ and /bʌʔn/ (with the n’s as their own syllables). Contrast this with “bitter” (which is actually an alveolar tap, not a t) or “mitts” (which has a true t), and you’ll see through the English writing system’s weave of deception.

You’ll also find this sound in expressions like “Uh-oh” and between many words (“new attack”). The glottal stop will also show up from time to time in English phrases replacing a t if you’re listening closely.

Whatcha gonna do with all those glottal stops, all those glottal stops inside your speech?

I’m mildly ashamed to use this as an example, but in the Black Eyed Peas song “My Humps”, the chorus is filled with glottal stops. I’ll transcribe (broadly) a bit of the chorus (from 00:13 in the above video on) below:

Look at that transcription and try to note the different glottal stops in the singers speech. They’re going to make make make you surprised, make you surprised at how many glottal stops are in our everyday speech.

What’s our throat catching, anyways?

Take a look at this picture of the human vocal folds (courtesy of Wikipedia):

Our glottis (the phonetic term for the vocal folds/vocal cords) is composed of two pieces of tissue that move together and apart during speech, and vibrate rapidly to create voicing. Those pieces of tissue can be moved a great deal, and even brought all the way together.

Hold your breath with your mouth and nose opened. You’ll feel a pressure build up below your throat, and you’ll probably be able to feel exactly where the air is stopped. That closure is the vocal folds, and what you’re doing now is holding a glottal stop. In order to make a glottal stop in speech, we just pull those two pieces of tissue all the way together until they make a seal, and then release it again. That’s it. No tongue, no voicing, no nasal worries. Just close the glottis. Easy, huh?

Glottal stops in other languages

Glottal stops are common in English, but they’re not really phonemic (meaning that they don’t generally contrast with other sounds). If I say “mitten” using a full on T, people will understand you, but just think you’re strange. They’re even more common in British English, and in some Cockney dialects, they’re really omnipresent (“then, la’er, my dau’er ‘it me”).
However, in other languages, they can carry a very distinct contrast. In Hawai’ian and Samoan, they’re phonemic, and can show up anywhere. /ʔika/ and /ika/ miɡht be entirely different words even though speakers of many languages can’t tell the difference. No matter how I’ve tried, I still can’t quite hear this difference. English speakers love our word-initial glottal stops (at the beginning of words), so I hear them most of the time, and have trouble starting a word without them.

Similarly, there are other languages where /kaʔ/ and /ka/ would be completely different. Once again, English speakers (and speakers of many other Indo-european languages) have lots of trouble with this contrast.

Reader, meet Glottal Stop

So, now that you know it’s out there, I suspect you’ll be hearing glottal stops in lots of places. Once you do, you and the glottal stop will certainly become phast phonetic phriends.

Thanks to an astute commenter who pointed out that the proper Hawaiian representation of the Glottal Stop is actually a turned comma, rather than an apostrophe as I had erroneously stated.
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10,000 Unique hits! w00t!

2007-04-22T21:13:13-04:00

Well, my trusty stats program has just informed me that I’ve now gotten over 10,000 unique hits on this site since it opened last July. w00t! Given that this is a one person Linguistics and language blog, that’s just awesome, and I’m really grateful for all the people that read my site and comment on posts.

Although I may write this site for my own enjoyment, another reward for writing all this comes from knowing people are reading and enjoying my work here. As always, feel free to share the site with a friend, with a social bookmarking site, or even using a link from your own page. Every little bit helps in getting the joys of Linguistics out to the masses.

So, thanks for reading, for commenting, for emailing and for linking, and here’s to another 10,000 people exposed to the wonders of language!

Adobe Systems Incorporated v. Continental Drift

2007-04-22T08:39:29-04:00

This morning, I stumbled Adobe Systems Incorporated’s Permissions and Trademark Guidelines. This is basically Adobe’s way of dictating how it wants people to use and display its trademarks. Many companies have these, but Adobe’s policies regarding Photoshop are more restrictive (and thus, more laughable) then most.

Photoshop “to photoshop” out of your lexicon

They begin the Photoshop section with the phrase “Trademarks are not verbs”. Here, they’re objecting to the ubiquitous use of “to photoshop”, meaning “to use Adobe® Photoshop® software or similar image manipulation software to manipulate an image”. This prohibits phrases like “Dude, that is so photoshopped” or “the printing company photoshopped it for us”. This seems to be a common theme, with paralells to Xerox fighting to stop us from Xeroxing documents, but it’s still a bit crazy.

I think it’s ridiculous that they think they can stop this usage. One of the unifiying features of human language is our lazyness, and our desire to only do the minimum amount of speaking necessary. To think that we’ll gladly surrender “Could you photoshop this real quick?” in favor of “Could you enhance this image using Adobe® Photoshop® software real quick?” is completely insane.

The fact of the matter is that the verbed form is more versatile as well. In English, we can use other particles to change the meanings of an established verb, and “to photoshop” is no exception. One can photoshop something in, photoshop it out, photoshop something away, and so on. However, one cannot “enhance using Adobe® Photoshop® software out the guy in the background”. Instead, we’re asked to “enhance an image using Adobe® Photoshop® software in such a way that the guy in the background is removed from the picture”. Yeah, we’re going to do that, Adobe. Sure thing.

Adobe doesn’t know what they want

The real beauty comes in that the next heading: “Trademarks are not nouns”. Adobe, you’re in blatant violation of your own trademark policies on this very website.

…and Photoshop is one of Adobe’s most valuable trademarks…
…Adobe and Photoshop are either registered trademarks or trademarks…
…Get everything in Photoshop CS3 plus tools for editing 3D and motion-based content and performing image analysis….

In each of the above phrases, “Photoshop” is acting as a noun. So, I don’t think noun-like usage is what Adobe’s really worried about. Let’s look at their explanation:

CORRECT: The image pokes fun at the Senator.
INCORRECT: The photoshop pokes fun at the Senator.

It looks like what they’re really trying to ban is “Photoshop-Related Metonymy”. Metonymy is where a commonly associated element (or part of something) is used to refer to the whole thing. For instance, “The White House was silent on the corruption charges” or “The press is more and more biased every day” are both metonymic expressions, using parts of these establishments to represent the whole.

So, although I suspect they have no problem with noun form use (“Photoshop® is exceptionally good at what it does”), they’re worried about metonymy with manipulated images, like “Photoshops are causing more scandals every day for the embattled prince”. Perhaps they should be clarifying that on their website, lest they be forced to sue themselves.

Other miscellaneous escapes from reality

According to Adobe, “Trademarks may never be used as slang terms”. This is just charming because it’s an attempt to control casual usage. I can understand their not wanting an ad campaign with “Help Photoshoppers Photoshop better”, but trying to regulate casual conversation shows Adobe to be out of touch with not only language usage, but with reality.

Finally, I’m not sure I buy this “Proper Adjectives” thing. To claim that “Adobe Photoshop” is incorrect and meaningless without adding “software” is a bit ridiculous. Whether or not they want to pretend that Photoshop isn’t a noun, it won’t really change how speakers view and use the term. It just makes them seem stodgy and delusional.

Adobe Systems Incorporated v. Continental Drift

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: A speaker (or grammarian) trying to stop language from changing is like a gardener trying to stop continental drift.

Adobe can write this up, and heck, they can even try and enforce parts of it with marketing and high-profile cases. However, I hope they realize the folly of trying to change established words and constructions, especially when the ones suggested are longer and less useful than the originals. No matter what they do, in everyday speech, people will photoshop images, those images will be photoshops, and photoshopping will be an entertaining pastime on the internet.

Know, however, that we’re not doing it to hurt you, Adobe. Our language is a language of love for your software, and the fact that “Photoshop” is so ubiquitous is a sign of our respect for your work. So, dearest Adobe, please stick to manipulating images, and leave the language manipulation to us.

Censoring the Dictionary, Part Two: Profanity through the eyes of Apple

2007-04-17T13:03:33-04:00

I am discussing profanity, slurs and their censorship in this post. As such, this post will necessarily contain profanity and slurs. Although I’ll do my best to keep usage to the minimum and to keep everything academic, if you’re offended by tabooed clumps of letters on screens, you might want to move on to a different post.

On Saturday, I posted about Apple’s guide to blocking “profanity” in the Dictionary application. Well, shortly after I finished the post, I became curious about the blocking itself, and began to wonder what Apple actually considers to be profane, and how effective this filter actually is.

Ask the experts

I assume that, when looking for a good definition of profanity, Apple would check their own dictionary. Here’s how it defines “Profanity”:

profanity |prəˌfønədi| |proʊˌfønədi| noun ( pl. -ties)
• blasphemous or obscene language : an outburst of profanity.
• a swear word; an oath.
• irreligious or irreverent behavior.
ORIGIN mid 16th cent.: from late Latin profanitas, from Latin profanus ‘not sacred’ (see profane ).

For the record, I disagree with their IPA pronunciation (/prəfænəɾi/ is how I say it), but everything else sounds reasonable. So, according to Apple, all words that are swears, irreligious, “irreverant”, or obscene should be removed from the dictionary.

The hunt for profanity

Then, I set off to find obscene, irreligious, offensive, and swear-ish words. Gathered both from my own corrupted mind and from other sources (Urbandictionary, George Carlin’s Seven words you can’t say on TV, and more), I assembled these words in a list, and then slowly started plugging them in to Dictionary.app. Surprisingly, only one word that I came up with wasn’t in the dictionary, “Asshat”, not shocking given its relatively recent birth online. Everything else was included and defined quite academically. I also checked a few words that aren’t really obscene, but describe a tabooed act or subject (“fellatio” or “penis”)

Once I’d checked to see what was in the dictionary, I went about enabling the parental controls. This was actually a royal pain, and requires OS X server maintenance software along with some technical knowledge, but eventually, I got it done. (No, I don’t feel any need to post a walkthrough, read my last post).

Finally, I went back through and tried all the words on the list again. The results were fascinating, and words broke down into three categories.

Beware, this post gets rather packed with profanity after this point. It’s still all in academic context, I’m just trying to minimize the “Oh, think of the children” backlash.

Category One: Unchanged

Some of the words were present in the censored dictionary in exactly the same form as in the normal dictionary. There was no change at all to the dictionary entries for these words, and they were just as easily found as before.

To Apple’s credit, all the “innocent yet tabooed” terms (penis, vagina, fellatio, cunnilingus, dildo) were in this category, showing that they seem to have a healthy (in my eyes) idea of the difference between discussing naughty things and using profanity.

Also, Apple struck a good balance with religious terms considered to be swears by some. “Hell” and “Damn” were both uncensored, and their “profane” uses were discussed as well. “Blasphemy”, the most irreligious word I can imagine, remained.

Some of the entries in this category were a bit more surprising. “Bitch” and “Bastard” were fully present, even discussing derogatory meanings. “Boob” referring to the female breast (although not profane, still viewed negatively) was there. “Slut” and “Whore” were both present as well, unedited.

Much to my relief, “cum” was present and unchanged, both in latin and in English, even keeping the reference to it being an alternate spelling of “come”, whose orgasmic meaning is still present in its entry.

Category Two: Redacted Entries

This surprised me a bit, but there were a number of words which were still present in the dictionary, but redacted such that the “profane” uses were missing.

One example of this is the word “Pussy”. Here’s the normal entry:

pussy |ˌpʊsi| noun ( pl. -sies)
1 (also pussycat) informal a cat.
2 vulgar slang a woman’s genitals.
• offensive women in general, considered sexually.
• offensive sexual intercourse with a woman.
• informal a weak, cowardly, or effeminate man.

Here’s the censored, redacted version:

pussy |ˌpʊsi|
noun ( pl. -sies)
1 (also pussycat) informal a cat.

So, not only is the sexual meaning taken out, but the pejorative (insulting) “coward” meaning is removed as well.

There were other examples of redacted entries in the censored version. When you enable parental controls, “Cock” refers only to roosters, “Crap” is a dice game, “tits” are little gray birds, and a “prick” comes only from a needle.

Interestingly, some slurs were redacted to only include their normal meanings, so “fag” and “faggot” are no longer anti-gay slurs, just terms for a bundle of sticks, and a “dyke” isn’t an offensive term for a lesbian, but instead an alternate spelling for a large, water-blocking structure.

Category Three: Disappeared Entries

Some words were evidently too obscene to include at all (or lacked non-profane meanings). These entries were just taken out of the censored dictionary altogether, and a search redirects you to the closest word (“asshole” goes to “ashore”, for instance).

Some of these weren’t surprising. The F-Bomb and its derivatives (“fuck”, “fucker”, “motherfucker”) were all disappeared by the Parental Controls option. Vulgar terms for bodily functions and areas (“shit”, “asshole”, “piss”, “cunt”, “twat”, “bollocks”) all disappeared as well. Highly obscene sexually charged terms (like “poontang” and “cocksucker”) disappeared with the censorship as well.

Finally, perhaps the most tabooed word in American society, “nigger”, is taken out completely, even though the original entry explains the taboo-ness as well as discussing the contemporary self-referential usage by those of the term within the African-American community.

So, what is profane in Cupertino?

I must say, I’m fairly impressed with Apple’s technology and their restraint. Although they did a very good job of censoring patently offensive words (category three) that have little value except as swear words, they also dealt with double meanings (“cock” or “pussy”) very well by redacting entries. Their censorship was neither too zealous nor too lax, and frankly, if they insist on allowing this, they did it well.

However, as I said last time, I still believe that the dictionary shouldn’t be censored. Kids will find the words sooner or later, and it’s better they find out what they mean from an academic source than from a google search.

I’ve brought my dictionary back to normal mode now, and I encourage people to keep theirs there as well. Parents should be attentive to their children’s language development, and explain what swearing is, why those words are a problem, and what’s not approriate to say at Grandma’s house. What you consider to be obscene may be very different than what Apple’s engineers do, so there’s no sense in having them tell you what you can look up.

Oh, and for those who are curious, “Windows” does show up in the Censored version. I guess that proves that it’s not Steve Jobs making the call…

Censoring the Dictionary

2007-04-14T17:07:21-04:00

This post contains a discussion of profanity and its censorship. As you can imagine, the post must contain profanity to advance the discussion. Sorry if that offends you.

So, a friend of mine on Twitter recently linked me to a post in Apple’s Support manuals entitled “How to prevent profanity from appearing in Dictionary”.

The obscene and filthy people at Oxford American Dictionary

As most OS X users know, Apple includes a wonderful program called “Dictionary.app” with every copy of OS X 10.4. This program lets you access an electronic copy of the Oxford American Dictionary and Thesaurus. There, you can find good definitions, etymologies, and pronunciations. You can even have it give pronunciation in the IPA if you tell it to do so in the application’s Preferences dialog.

The beautiful part of this is that it’s an entire dictionary. It may not be the full, unabridged version, but it’s very good for free software. You can find nearly any word you’d like in there, ranging from phone to phoneme to allophone. However, you can also find all sorts of profanity, defined in academic terms.

Take, for example, the treatment of one of the more vulgar words in the English language, “fuck”:

fuck |fək| vulgar slang verb [ trans. ] 1 have sexual intercourse with (someone).
• [ intrans. ] (of two people) have sexual intercourse.
2 ruin or damage (something).
noun an act of sexual intercourse.
• [with adj. ] a sexual partner.
exclamation used alone or as a noun ( the fuck) or a verb in various phrases to express anger, annoyance, contempt, impatience, or surprise, or simply for emphasis.

(There’s much, much more about this fascinating word)

So, although it definitely contains the word and examples of the usage, one could hardly argue that it’s truly wanton and profanely using them.

Why censor the Dictionary?

Yes, the Dictionary app contains uses of profanity. However, these uses are all academic, and used in the context of describing the profanity itself. So, this raises the obvious question of why one would bother censoring the dictionary at all.

Perhaps a parent might be afraid that little Jimmy will learn those horrid, horrid terms. However, in order for little Jimmy to find them, he’d have to seach for them.

Once little Jimmy knows the terms well enough to search for them, chances are, his mind is already “corrupted” and he’s heard or seen the terms elsewhere. No matter how much fundamentalist parents desire to do so, you can’t make him unlearn what a word means, so there’s not a whole lot of point to keeping the largely academic discussion of the words away from him.
However, even if little Jimmy stumbles across a profane word online, perhaps it’s better that he looks it up immediately and gets the relatively tame information from the Dictionary App, rather than asking his third grade teacher what it means.

Either way, Profanity is a fact of life, and no matter how badly some people don’t want to hear it, it exists. Blocking objective, academic analysis of it won’t make the “problem” go away, and really, it’ll only make the word more tantalizing.

So, don’t censor the Dictionary Application. In the age of the Internet, little Jimmy will always be able to find out what a given word means, no matter how hard you try to censor him. Let Jimmy use the dictionary to find out what words mean in an educational sense.

Unless, of course, you’d prefer he just type “fucking” into a Google Image Search and start browsing. I didn’t think so…

I will be hitting you regularly: The joy of elicited phrases

2007-04-10T10:10:18-04:00

Right now, I’m in a class called Field Methods. The goal of this class is to describe (at least in part) a language, using information obtained by working with a native speaker of the language in question. It’s very interesting, both for the language, and for the experience of getting data from a speaker. However, I’ve also found it hugely entertaining, in that some of the sentences we elicit (ask for translations of) are completely absurd and quite funny.

Eliciting Data

Now, there are two ways to go about this. Preferable is to have the speaker tell you a story or narrative, which you can then go through and analyze line by line. This provides good, natural speech, and also lets you see a variety of constructions as used in real life.

The other option is to elicit translations of individual sentences. This seems to be the way that most language description begins. First, you ask the speaker how to say, for instance, “sheep”, and then ask them how one would say “I saw a sheep”. From there, you might ask how to say “You saw the sheep”, and keep slightly modifiying the sentences until you start to get enough data to do more complex analysis.

However, there are times where you want to figure things out, but don’t want to wait for them to occur in a narrative. When you’re fishing for certain grammatical forms and slowly making sentences more and more complex, the sentences look less and less plausible, and usually end up seeming quite funny, no matter the language.

The road to absurdity is paved with grammatical intentions

On one afternoon, we started with a rather normal transitive (has both an agent and a patient) sentence “He hit you”, then changed to “I hit you”. Then, we decided to look into verb Tense (timeframe) and Aspect (defining this is a whole post of its own). So, we went to “I hit you this morning”, still with good intentions, and then “I hit you many times this morning”. “I hit you last year” was next, followed by “I used to hit you last year”.

Then, things developed a more threatening tone. Looking to see if the future tense acted any differently, we asked our speaker how one might say “I will hit you”. From there, we asked for “In the future (but not now), I will hit you many times”. Then, “In the future, I will be hitting you regularly”, and finally, “In the future, I will be hitting you (not just once, but many times), regularly”.

At that point, we realized that we’d gotten a tad absurd, and went back to more normal subject matter (”I’ll be seeing you regularly”).

Sometimes, we just hop right to crazy

However, there’s not always a buildup. Sometimes, in the heat of the linguistic moment, we’ll stumble upon a certain contruction and want to substitute another noun or word, to see if it still works or if it changes the sound system. These can be truly wonderful.

Through this process, we’ve ended up with the rather disturbing “Sell me to him [the sheep]”, the slightly creepy “This is indeed my female sheep here”, the prophetic “Tomorrow, you WILL see vultures”, and the polygamous “the young man will marry all these women”.

Also, sometimes, you’ll want to test certain noun-forming suffixes. For instance, we we were given the word for “bad man”, and naturally, we wanted to know how to say “bad sheep”. There, we went to “the bad sheep made the kids drink alcohol yesterday”, and then ended up discussing a very bad wild boar.

Be careful what you say

Even with phonetics training and several years of language study under our proverbial belts, we can still mispronounce things. Usually, this just makes the sentence unintelligible to the speaker, but some times, we can mess up for comedic gold. For instance, in the language we’re studying, “ai go: fu:” means “I am at home”. When I said it back to the speaker, I misspoke and said “ai ga fu:”, which, after a bout of laughter, he translated as ”I’m going to fart”. Although funny enough in a classroom, I’ve no doubt that these sorts of errors have caused more than their share of embarrassment, and maybe even a fight or two.

So, although linguistics is a serious discipline, the actual study process isn’t always completely serious. We manage to have some laughs, even while picking apart unfamiliar grammars, and I think that’s really one of the best parts of the job.

There are other perks, too. Although I’ve not had the occaision to use it yet, it is rather nice to know how to call somebody a “bad sheep” in Zarma.

The IPA Translation Widget: a wonderful impossibility

2007-04-03T16:36:15-04:00

So, I’m somewhat obsessed with checking the statistics of who comes here, who gets referred from where, and what search terms they used to find me. Well, the other day, somebody came here from google searching for “IPA translation widget”. For those of you unfamiliar with the terms, a “widget” is a small program written for Apple’s Dashboard interface, and IPA refers to the International Phonetic Alphabet. What this person seems to be wanting was a widget that, like some existing translation widgets, could take a block of text and immediately turn it into IPA characters. For the first few moments, I thought “Wow! That’d be a great idea!”.

Now, as somebody who uses the IPA very, very frequently, such a thing would be wonderful if it worked well. However, I think it would be impossible to actually create a program that goes from English writing to IPA transcriptions without incredible advances in Artificial Intelligence and speech recognition. Here’s why…

Transcription, not translation

At the surface, this doesn’t seem so crazy. Apple includes a widget to do rough, automated translations with Dashboard, and although I never trust automated translations, it does alright for basic words and phrases. I suspect that our anonymous searcher saw that widget and thought “Wow, cool! I wonder if it can help me put something into the IPA”. However, the fundamental difference between translating a sentence into Spanish and putting that same sentence into the IPA is that the IPA isn’t really a language at all, but instead, it’s a method of writing sounds.

The International Phonetic Alphabet is really a set of symbols, each of which represents a sound, sound characteristic, or other element of spoken language. What the IPA allows a linguist (or speech pathologist, or teacher…) to do is to take spoken language and put it onto paper (‘transcription’) with a great deal more precision than most other writing systems. The IPA isn’t a language in itself, it’s just an alternative, phonetic writing system for other languages. The beauty of this is that the IPA is designed to be able to be used not just for English, but for any language. The IPA symbols can be used to transcribe sounds not just from English, but from languages all over the world.

Broad vs. Narrow Transcription

The IPA can be used to transcribe sounds with two different degrees of precision.

If one takes advantage of all the symbols and diacritics, one can make a “narrow” or “phonetic” transcription. At this level, the linguist aims to capture all the detail possible about the word or phrase, including variations across word boundaries, sounds that occur in speech but are unnoticed or unrecognized by native speakers, and even features like intonation and pauses. From these transcriptions, a well-trained linguist could pronounce the words and phrases almost exactly as the speaker did, based simply on the transcriptions. The first, smallest line in the title graphic is a narrow transcription of me pronouncing the site’s title.

This degree of precision would be impossible for a modern computer widget to produce, simply because narrow transcriptions are based on actual words and phrases by a speaker, and really, one needs a fairly trained ear to make an accurate narrow transcription of a word or phrase. Sure, it could use a database of narrowly transcribed words from other speakers, but really, that’s not a narrow transcription. It’s not going to pick up on the variations that each speaker produces, like accents, vowel changes, unusual sound choices, or even tiny speech errors.

The alternative is called “broad” or “phonemic” transcription, expresses the basic sounds of a language or phrase, often more precisely than the native writing system, but at the same time, leaves out detail that’s not necessary to a native speaker. The middle line in the title graphic for this page is a phonemic transcription. Some dictionaries, including the built in OS X dictionary (if you enable IPA in Dictionary Preferences), can show you the standard american IPA Broad transcription form of a word.

Now, using a dictionary of words in a given language and their IPA equivalents, a computer could likely match things and give a passable broad transcription. However, there are variations that occur between people that show up even at a broad level, and are large enough to identify a speaker’s accent, dialect, or even idiolect. For some people (myself included), “caught” and “cot” have the same vowel, but for others, they’re two distinct vowels. So, even at a broad level, you’re not going to get any sort of reliable transcription of one’s actual speech from a computer widget, just a rough approximation.

Why are you transcribing anyways?

In the end, whether such a widget would be useful at all boils down to your reason for needing a transcription. Some people might be learning English and would want a better method of knowing how a given word is supposed to sound. For that, any good dictionary’s pronunciation key should do the trick.

Some people might be interested in the IPA, or want to know how a given word sounds. For that, they’d be better off getting a good phonetics textbook and learning a bit of the IPA themselves, along with some knowledge of phonetics.

However, our widget searcher might just be stuck in an introductory Linguistics course, having to transcribe their speech for an assignment. If so, I offer just one piece of advice: Don’t plagarize transcriptions off the web or from a dictionary. Your professor should have no trouble noticing if you’re not transcribing your own dialect, and everybody’s got a dialect.

Remember, if there’s one thing that phonetics professors are good at, it’s picking out a phone-y.

Followup: A Message from the Manager of Best Western Ruby's Inn

2007-04-03T07:31:12-04:00

Several days back, I posted a long review and commentary about Best Western Ruby’s Inn.

Well, I wanted to let you all know that the manager of Ruby’s Inn has chimed in in the comments, with a partial explanation and a partial apology. As a result, I’ve made a factual correction in the initial post (according to the manager, I’d misremembered the tax as 20% instead of 11%, and apparently the kiosks were 20 cents per minute), and replied to some of his assertions.

Although, as I say in the thread, I still can’t really recommend the hotel, I think it’s important to hear both sides, so I encourage you to check out the comments on the post and hear what Chris had to say.

As always, commenting is encouraged, and I appreciate when people do. Any reader feelings, whether they be praise, corrections, complaints or counterarguments are always welcome.

Paraphonetics 101: a Phonetic Analysis of Electronic Voice Phenomena

2007-04-01T01:21:11-04:00

It’s been a while since I’ve strayed into the Mystic side of Linguistic Mystic. This evening, while Wikipedia-Surfing, I stumbled upon an interesting reported phenomenon: Electronic Voice Phenomena (or EVP). Since I spend a great deal of my free time looking at voices and how speech works, I was interested to see what a bit of phonetic analysis would do to some of the examples that its proponents have given.

Disclaimer

EVP is not a well-studied phenomenon and there is little (if any) scientific evidence in favor of its existence. This post should not be construed as an endorsement of this phenomenon or an assertion of its reality. I try to keep an open mind on such things, but I’m doing this analysis for my own interest (if nothing else, “paraphonetics” is a cool sounding field name), not for any legitimate, scholarly purpose. Take this post (and, if you’d like, the phenomenon itself) with a grain of scientific salt.

What is EVP?

In the words of the American Association of Electronic Voice Phenomena’s FAQ page on EVP:

Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVP) is the term traditionally used to describe unexpected sounds or voices sometimes found on recording media. EVP initially involved audio tape recorders, but in later years, virtually any recording medium became a vehicle for phenomena. The term Instrumental TransCommunication (ITC) came into being to describe these expanded modes of audio- and video-format communication. Other acronyms used in the literature include Electronic Disturbance Phenomena (EDP) and Trans-Dimensional Communication (TDC).

For a more two-sided (and skeptical) discussion and other resources, I encourage you to visit the Wikipedia page on EVP.

Long story short, EVP are anomalous voices that show up in recordings, often claimed to come from the dead. These voices are reported to be phrases, words, or even dialogues with a living speaker.

Praat and the Paranormal

When I first read about this, I decided to try and find some samples of this phenomenon and run them through Praat, a Phonetic Analysis program. Luckily, the AAEVP provides a number of examples on their site. The one I’ll be analyzing today comes from Vicki Talbott’s Examples, and purports to feature a discussion between her and her son who had recently died, discussing the proper pronunciation of the word “evidentiary”. I encourage you to read her explanation (the last example on her page) and listen to the file a few times before I proceed.

As you can hear, her voice is quite clear (albeit recorded), but the other voice is nearly incomprehensible if you’re not sure what you’re looking for. However, I was curious just how much of the data I’d expect to find in speech would be there, and how much is my brain filling in the blanks. Let’s look a little more closely at the acoustics of the voices.

What’s in a voice?

We hear patterns of sound based on the emphasis and damping of certain parts of the sound spectrum. The vibration of our vocal folds is fairly constant (excepting the occaisional pitch or voicing change), but we’re almost constantly moving our mouths and tongue. Just as your voice changes when you put your mouth to a flexible tube and talk while bending the tube, the sound of your vocal folds vibrating is changed by the position of your tongue, lips, and velum in your mouth and throat. Different vowel sounds are created by modifying the shape of the mouth, which in turn modifies the sound escaping your mouth to be heard by others. This is called the Source-Filter Model of Speech Production.

So, when we hear another person make a sound, say, the vowel ‘i’ (as in feet), we’re analyzing which parts of the sound from their vocal folds are being damped (supressed) and which parts resonate (are stronger). For example, in the vowel /i/, there are strong bands of resonating sound (called ‘formants’) around (roughly) 250hz, 2500hz, and 3000hz. We hear these particular parts of the spectrum being emphasized, and interpret them as somebody making an /i/.

These formants (along with the gaps between them and some other sounds) are what we’re listening for in speech. In clear speech, the formants are well defined and strong, but in distorted or mumbled speech, they’re very tough to pick out, both by computer and with our ears.

Evidentiary evidence

So, for comparison, I’ve recorded a file of myself saying “evidentiary”. Give it a listen, if you’d like.

When I open this file in Praat, it shows me a part of the spectrum (0-5000hz). On that Spectrogram, there are darker parts and lighter parts. The darker parts show the formants (the resonating parts of the spectrum), and the lighter parts show the damped portions. I’ve also had Praat draw red dots on the formants, to make them a bit more distinct. Here’s a screenshot of the spectrogram for my “evidentiary”, labeled with English on top, and IPA on the bottom:

As you can see, the heights and separation between the formants (black parts with red dotted lines) are distinctly different for the initial “e” and the “ia” in the middle. If they weren’t, the vowels would just sound the same. Similarly, there are other trademark signs of speech sounds. The ‘sh’ sound (ti in English) shows up with a burst of noise around 3000-7000hz (as one would expect), and the ‘n’ makes everything a bit damped and quieter (as do all nasal sounds). All the formants are well defined, and Praat doesn’t have much trouble finding them and sticking to them.

Now, let’s look at a spectrogram of Talbott’s recording, annotated the same way, with red dot formants, and using her transcriptions from the diagram at the bottom of her site:

Of course, the spacing is different, and based on the white streaks around 200hz and 3500hz, it looks like she’s done some filtering to isolate these sounds. The interesting part about this is that there aren’t any well defined formants. Praat is great at finding formants in good files, but it’s also quite adept at finding them in bakcground noise if there’s not any good speech in a given file. As you can see, there are three pretty constant bands of red dots going across the entire spectrogram, with the same amount of variation in the silence as in the “spoken” portions. Although Praat thinks they’re formants, when compared to the relatively sharp black lines in my version, it looks like it’s just finding whatever pattern it can in the noise.

It doesn’t seem like there’s much of anything in the way of clear formants or expected voice patterns. The noise for the ‘sh’ is missing from ‘ti’, the ‘n’ doesn’t seem to affect much, and the formant patterns over the two different /i/’s don’t really match (as they did in mine). Over all, there’s not a lot here to latch on to, and, as you likely noticed when listening to it, it’s by no means obvious what’s being said. Most of the auditory cues we use to pick out meaningful speech are absent acoustically, yet, with a few repetitions, we can usually convince ourselves that we’re hearing speech here.

What does it all mean?

Based on what I see here (in this one example), it seems like many of the fundamental characteristics of human speech are missing in the second, purportedly paranormal voice. I suspect that this is what makes it nearly incomprehensible without coaching.

What does that mean for EVP? Well, nothing, really, because my study here isn’t particularly scientific. Just because a phledgling phonetician doesn’t see speech through one method of analysis doesn’t mean it’s not there. Also, I can’t be sure what sorts of filters were used that might have changed the sound quality. I’m not sure what results a different file would yield.

However, even if this were a perfect analysis, all that I’m proving here is that it’s actually similar to normal human speech. The EVP people will still defend their assertions, and the skeptics will still have their objections to their claims (and methodology, and other such things).

The difficulty with Paraphonetics

The other relevant question is whether such study really matters at all. To the people who believe in EVP, the clarity (or closeness to normal human speech) may not be particularly relevant.

Phonetics is a very exact sort of science, but anything to do with the paranormal is extremely subjective. We can scientifically measure things all day long, but in the end, these sorts of phenomena depend on the interpretation of the listener. Perhaps Vicki Talbott heard “evidentiality” in that noise because of her previous question (using context to make sense of inaudible portions of a “conversation”). Perhaps the noise just coincidentally sounds enough like “evidentiality” to trip the human brain’s speech analysis functions. However, as is the case with all paranormal claims, one can never prove the negative (we can’t prove completely that nothing paranormal occurred in this tape). You’re welcome to believe whatever you’d like on the subject.

Regardless, next time you go out ghost-hunting, you might want to grab a copy of Praat. It can never hurt, and at the very least, Praat can help you find some phantom formants in the background noise. It might not sound scary to you, but in the middle of a research project, they can be downright terrifying.

Lying by redefinition: Best Western Ruby's Inn

2007-03-30T19:25:55-04:00

As you all know, I’ve spent the last week traveling in the Southwestern US, visiting and photographing Bryce Canyon, Zion and Grand Canyon National Parks. Along the way, as always, I’ve been looking out for interesting uses of language, and found plenty of it. The purpose for this post is twofold, though, and for that reason, it’s more of a rant than you normally find here. My first reason for posting is that I’d like to discuss an interesting (and infuriating) technique by which people and companies can tell the truth and lie simultaneously. My second (and main) purpose for this post, however, is to let people know to avoid Best Western Ruby’s Inn, outside Bryce Canyon, Utah. They scammed us, and I’d like to see that other people aren’t similarly taken.

Barely false advertising

Being the nerd I am, I do my best to stay connected when I’m on the road. I try and pick hotels that have internet available. According to AAA (and all the hotel’s posted information), Best Western Ruby’s Inn offers “High Speed Internet Access” and “Complimentary Wireless Internet”.

Both of these statements are true, technically. Best Western Ruby’s Inn (repeated for Google) does, in fact, have Wireless Internet, and I was able to pick up their signal without any trouble, and at full strength. However, unlike other hotels, the wireless speeds are around 1 kilobyte per second to non-existent (loading my mail took around 5 minutes, and even then was unreliable). Of course, I anticipated less-than-superb speeds if they had to use a satellite connection, seeing as they’re out in the middle of Utah, but still, I expected some degree of usability.

So, I went across the way to the front desk to ask if I was doing something wrong. I explained my problem to the manager, and he informed me that the wireless system is, regrettably, “a bit slow” and that there wasn’t anything he could do. However, he eagerly pointed out that the High Speed Internet terminals in the lobby would have no such connection speed issues. What he failed to mention is that those High Speed Internet terminals (listed simply as “Eight Internet Kiosks” on their site) cost 50 cents per minute to use. (EDIT: According to their manager, the cost is 20 cents per minute. I was misinformed.) At every other Best Western we visited, “Free Wireless Internet” and “High Speed Internet” refer to one and the same service. However, Best Western Ruby’s Inn has redefined those terms, separating them, so that they can still offer what they’ve promised, but still gouge the guests for 50 cents a minute.

If you bought a car based on an ad saying “Used Car, New Engine”, then they proceeded to hand you a gutted Camry and a factory sealed engine for a lawnmower, you’d likely sue. They’re not lying, per se, but they’re certainly not being honest. By changing the meaning of the hotel catch phrase “Free Wireless and High Speed Internet”, they’re off the hook for false advertising. If it were just the internet situation, I’d be more willing to cut them some slack. However, they don’t stop there with their creative redefinition of usual terms.

We meant REALLY local calls

On the little laminated sheet next to each phone, they discuss the rates for different sorts of calls. It clearly states that long distance calls cost an arm, International costs both arms and a leg. However, it proudly proclaims that local calls are completely free.

When my girlfriend and I realized that we didn’t want to stay the planned three nights (their $16 per person buffet and $9 microwaved mozzarella sticks didn’t thrill us), we decided to try and find another hotel in the area. We called a Best Western (which didn’t have an 800 number) in the same area code and general region and made some reservations, figuring that it was a local call. One call, maybe 4 minutes, total.

The next morning, at checkout, the young lady at the desk informed me that I made $6 worth of phone calls. I explained that they were local calls, and that the charge was made in error. She then informed me that “local” refers to calls made to any room or building at the Best Western Ruby’s Inn complex, not to any outside numbers. Outside numbers are billed at $1.50 a minute, apparently, even to nearby hotels in the same chain, same region, and same area code.

Then, the sheer sleazyness of it hit: They redefined “local” so they could charge us more. Note, this wasn’t on the sheet. There wasn’t a “Ruby’s Inn Rate” and a “Far-Local” rate. Just “Local Calls are complimentary”. This is like a hotel boasting about “nearby parking”, and then explaining to customers that there’s a small plot of land that the hotel owns next to the lot, 10 miles away, so technically, the lot is right near the hotel’s land. Once again, they’ve changed the meaning of a word to hide a rather exorbitant charge.

Dishonest honesty

Unfortunately, there’s not much one can do about this sort of thing. They’re never actually lying to you, they’re just redefining terms in the language so that they can sound like a good, honest, and benevolent hotel, while still operating like a Tourist Trap.

They might not get many return customers this way, but they figure that once you’re there, you’re trapped. By the time you’ve seen through their deceptive phrasings, you’re 15 miles away from the nearest motel, likely already moved in, and probably exhausted, so you’re not going to find a better place. If you’re not careful, you’ll go to check out and be billed exorbitantly, but it’s after the service was rendered, so you’re pretty much stuck paying.

Lessons to learn

So, from this tirade, what should you take away?

1) Visit Bryce Canyon National Park (and Zion National Park) if you ever get the chance. They’re truly beautiful places, and worth every cent of the trip to get there.

2) Best Western Ruby’s Inn, near Bryce Canyon National Park, is a tourist trap. They will lure you in and sound wonderful, but once you’re checked in, they’ll do their best to charge you as much as legally possible. Between deceptive tactics like those above, hidden charges ~~(nearly 20% tax on the room)~~ (EDIT: According to the Manager’s response, the room tax is 11%. I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt and assuming my memory was in error), and the exorbitantly priced goods in the diner and grocery (often your only option), your room and board can easily jump up by half or more.

3) If you’re going to the area, I highly recommend commuting from the Best Western East Zion Thunderbird Lodge instead. From here, you can get to Bryce in around 1.5 hours, and Zion within 30 minutes, and the room rates were half of what Ruby’s charged, for equivalent (or nicer) rooms. They also offered actual high-speed wireless and free local calls, without any deception. This hotel is as good as Ruby’s was bad.

4) Ask for definitions. When you call for reservations at a hotel which smells tourist-trappy, ask if the free wireless is high speed. Ask what local means. Ask what “reasonably priced” means in the context of their restaurant. They can’t lie to you if you ask directly, and their power over your checkbook lies in your assumptions about the English language.

5) To the proprietors of Ruby’s Inn: Remember, language works both ways. You used it to distort the truth about your hotel, now I’m using it to bring some clarity to your practices. Hopefully some of your future customers will google you, read this, and decide to find another hotel based on this post.

Live by the word, die by the word.

EDIT: The manager of Best Western Ruby’s Inn has commented on this thread and refuted some of my points here. I encourage you to read the comments thread to hear both sides of the matter.

Cortez, Colorado: Awkwardness in placenames

2007-03-29T19:26:16-04:00

Greetings from hotel wireless Durango, Colorado. I’ve talked about naming and names before, as it’s a fascinating subject, and placenames can have equally interesting backgrounds. Today, while driving back from the Grand Canyon, I was struck with a wonderful example of painfully awkward naming that I just had to share with you all.

In extreme Southwestern part of Colorado (in the Four Corners region), there’s a smallish city named Cortez, Colorado. The city is named after Hernán Cortés, the Spanish conquistador who began the Spanish Colonization of the Americas.

The truly beautiful part of it all is that Cortez is the seat of Montezuma County. Montezuma County is named after Moctezuma II, the Aztec emperor at the time of the Spanish Conquest of Mexico, who met with Cortés, and who was eventually killed due to the actions of the Spanish. The actions of Cortés (and his men) destroyed Moctezuma, ended the Aztec empire, and marked the start of Colonialization of the Americas.

Maybe locals are aware of this irony, maybe they’re not. Perhaps nobody made the connection when naming the area, or maybe Cortez was named long before Montezuma County came into existence. Who knows, maybe the county was named to offset the honor given to Cortez. No matter what, I find it to be a sick sort of funny that Cortez presides over Montezuma even today.

Ig-pay atin-lay: evealer-ray of onology-phay

2007-03-22T17:49:07-04:00

(I lied, I’m getting another post in before I leave.)

Today on the bus there was a radio ad playing for some sort of storage company. This ad was an “interaction” between a female narrator and a male narrator, who, for some reason, was speaking mostly in Pig Latin.

Ackground-bay

For those unfamiliar with it, Pig Latin is an spoken English word game in which one removes the first consonant (or consonant cluster) in a word and places it at the end of the word, followed by the vowel sound /ei/ (as in “hey”, “play” or “may”). So, dog becomes “og-day”, blog becomes “og-blay”, and grammaticalization becomes ‘ammaticalization-gray’.

It’s relatively common, and has entered the popular domain in a number of places. Google (oogle-gay?) is available in pig latin, and the “ixnay on the ______” construction is fairly common (meaning “Don’t talk about/do ______”). Interestingly, there are similar (but not identical) language games played in other languages. Wikipedia has a list of some of these games which has some very interesting examples.

Anks-tay or anks-thay?

So, on this radio ad, at the very end of the ad, the female narrator said “Thanks”, and the male corrected her to “anks-tay”.

This is interesting because generally, the consonant is kept the same in pig latin, just moved to the back of the word. So, I’d expect it to be “anks-thay”, with a θ (the sound in “thistle”). This got me to thinking, why would this happen?

ut-whay oes-day onology-phay ave-hay u-tay u-day ith-way it-ay

Phonology, as I’ve mentioned before, is the study of sound systems in a language. Every language has a system of rules which dictate which clusters of sounds and sounds are valid, and which aren’t. For this reason, “lomin” sounds like it could be an English word, but “ngostla” doesn’t. If you try and pronounce something and have lots of trouble, chances are, it’s violating a phonotactic rule of your language.

So, what’s wrong with “anksthay”? Well, I tried pronouncing it. Even with my training in pronouncing strange things, it’s a bit troublesome to go from a k to an s to a θ without any vowels to rest. Since each sound is made in a different place in the mouth (the velum in the back for the K, the Alveolar ridge for the S, and with the tongue between the teeth for the θ), you have to do a lot of moving without any rest.

Compare this to “ankstay”. We have no problem with this (it’s very similar to “angst” an accepted English word) because the “st” cluster is pretty easy to make. To make an S, you bring your tongue up to the alveolar ridge (the bony ridge of the roof of your mouth, just behind the teeth) so it’s just far enough away to cause friction in the air. To make a T, you put the tongue in the same place, except you make a complete closure. To make an “st” cluster, your tongue stays in the same place, it just moves upwards to change the S to a T.

For English speakers, “kst” is a much easier cluster to handle than “ksth”. There may be a phonological or phonotactic rule to explain it, but I’m not sure what that rule would be offhand. However, if we just look at the clusters that exist in the language, we can figure out what’s allowed and what isn’t, and suddenly, it all becomes clear.

Languages games like Pig Latin may not be serious in use, but studying how people use language when playing them can reveal a great deal about the phonology and phonotactics of the language in question.

See, even the most serious linguist has a place in their life for fun and games.

Followup: Quikboy returns, and a Challenge

2007-03-20T19:49:44-04:00

The Quikboy Strikes Back

Just a few quick notes. Around a week ago, I wrote an article on the Typo defense which featured a comment from somebody posting as “Quikboy”.

Well, somebody claiming to be Quikboy (and I’ve no reason not to trust him) just posted a very courteous reply in the comments. I’ve since replied to his reply, and I wanted to let you all see his side of the argument.

This just highlights the fact that I consider everything on here a discussion. Comments are moderated (to avoid spam comments), but I’ve never once deleted a human-created comment. Rest assured, whatever you (as a human) post, it will get approved. If you don’t like what I have to say or want to defend another side, please do by posting a comment. I’ll reply, and I might even post something like this to make sure you get heard.

Find an error, get a link

In my Graduate Phonetics class, the professor carried a jar of candy. At the beginning of the first day of class, she explained that the candy is for anybody who corrects one of her mistakes in class. All throughout the semester, if somebody called her on an erroneous transcription or a misspeech, she happily handed over some candy and fixed the mistake. I like the idea, and want to try it here.

I’m just a student, and I’m often writing about things with which I’m by no means an expert. So, if anybody out there finds a mistake in my site, I’ll add a link to your blog (see the fine print below) in the sidebar in a “Found a mistake” section. If you find an issue, either email me or leave a comment, and if I think it’s one too, I’ll edit the mistake and give you your link. I really do want things on here to be fairly accurate, so if I mess up, I’d like to be called on it. So, let the games begin!

(The Fine Print: By “mistake”, I’m talking about misstatements, misrepresentations, and things that are fairly objectively wrong here. I’ll gladly discuss theoretical disputes or other such disagreements about opinions, but I’m not sure they qualify as mistakes. Also, I reserve the right to not post links to certain sites or types of sites. Sorry, but if your site has adult/not-safe-for-work content or is clearly an advertising-only or spam blog, I’ll offer to link to a different site, or at least give other recognition.)

"Oh, you're a linguist? How many languages do you speak?"

2007-03-20T15:17:25-04:00

Whenever I talk about studying linguistics or being a linguist-in-training to somebody unfamiliar with Linguistics, I inevitably get asked how many languages I speak. This is a reasonable question, especially given that most people don’t know what it is that linguists do, but really, the number of languages we speak fluently isn’t really that relevant to what we actually do in linguistics.

There are people who hear “Linguist” and think “translator”. They assume (not unreasonably) that a linguist’s job is to learn as many languages as they can, then to use that knowledge to translate and decode new languages. There are linguists who work almost exclusively with their native languages and still have productive careers, and there are people who can fluently speak many languages, but aren’t really linguists. Much of what I do in my classes is studying grammar, sounds, and constructions in other languages, with the end goal of applying that knowledge elsewhere in other languages or theories. However, the goal of learning these other languages isn’t fluency, but familiarity.

Linguistics and the study of language, is, to a large extent, the study of patterns. When you sit down to describe a new language, you find patterns that explain how meaning is expressed, and then figure out the rules from those patterns. In linguistics classes, we study parts of languages not to be able to speak them, but to become familiar with the patterns and rules they use. Once I’ve become familiar enough with the patterns in the language, I can draw links to other lanugages and use that information as an analytical tool. Of course, it’s wonderful (and encouraged) to actually learn a language to fluency and to be able to speak it, but often, just knowing a few sentences or phenomena can be very helpful in studying other languages.

This all has really been driven home to me this semester. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m currently enrolled in a class called “Field Methods” where we (along with the professor) work with a speaker to describe certain aspects of the language and grammar. The professor is an incredibly experienced linguist, familiar with (and fluent in) many different languages. It seems, just from watching him work, that his biggest “Aha!” moments come when he matches what he’s hearing with another language or pattern that he’s familiar with. The pattern may not be identical to what he’s familiar with, but it’s similar enough to get the gears going.

Familiarity with other languages can also be helpful in teaching, based on my experience with my professors. English is a nice language, but it has its own specific way of doing things. You can’t discuss many aspects of sound, grammar and meaning if you limit yourself to one particular language of discussion. If a professor is familiar with other languages that do things differently, they can pull an example out of the air from a language they know to clarify something for a student. Even more importantly, they can link what they’re teaching to languages that they’re interested in, so that their passion can bleed through the subject matter into the students, and make even a lecture about word order interesting.

The more time I spend in this field, the more I understand that every language you study, however briefly, teaches you not just about that language, but about language in general. You can learn a great deal from being able to say “I saw the man make the arrows” in a language and nothing more. Even learning a few sentences and patterns from a dying language will teach you something, however minor, about language, the world, and human thought.

That wraps back to what I usually tell people how many languages I’ve had to learn to be a linguist. Those of us in Linguistics don’t study languages, we study Language. Although it’s wonderful to learn the languages you examine to fluency, it’s not required to do so to study the patterns therein.

That, or two. Sometimes, I just don’t want to get into it.

Too much initiative: Framing, miscommunication, and a cautionary tale

2007-03-14T15:43:33-04:00

Gather round, my readers, and I’ll tell you a little story of corporate missteps and sleazy language usage.

Last summer, in a kingdom far, far away, I was sitting at home with my parents, brainstorming about how to make our family’s business a bit more manageable. We use a cell phone as the main number for the business, which is also a personal line for one of the members of my family. We came upon the idea of trying to find a cellphone that allowed one to have multiple lines, so we could turn off the business phone line at closing, yet still be able to get in touch with the person who answers it on a personal line. This would be a convenient solution for everybody involved, so I set off to try and get information.

At this point, I called our cellphone providers, Cingular, to try and get some info on this possibility. After a few minutes on hold, I was connected to a representative (“Bonnie”). After exchanging the vast quantity of personal information needed to confirm that I’m me, our conversation went something like this:

Me: I’d like to get some information on using two phone lines with a single phone, so we can have a business and personal number ring through to the same phone, ideally being able to turn the business line off at a certain point. Do you have any phones or plans that offer that as a feature?
Bonnie: Sure, hold on just a second and I’ll ask somebody
— 5 minutes of holding —
Bonnie: Alright, so you’d like to have a second line added to an existing phone?
Me: Yeah, if it’s possible
Bonnie: Which line?
— I give her the phone number —
Bonnie: Alright, let me do some research, can I place you on hold?
Me: Sure
— 20 minutes of hold —
Bonnie: Alright, I’ve gone ahead and deactivated the number [our main business number], your new number is 30…
Me: Wait, what?!
Bonnie: You said you wanted to add a new line to the phone at [the number], so I deactivated the old one
Me: No, no! I wanted to add another line in addition to the first. Can you reverse the change?
Bonnie: Oh. Well, you should’ve said so. I’ll put in a request to change the number back, it’ll be three to five business days…

At this point, the owner of the phone in question walks in to ask why her phone just cut out mid-call, and I’m in shock at the fact that a request for information has resulted in the deactivation of our business line.

I ask for a manager, and find out that yes, it does take them three to five days to reactivate a cell phone that they themselves turned off in around 20 minutes. I ask for a manager’s manager, because, well, we kinda need a business phone, and all they can offer is “We’re sorry to hear that, we’ll listen to the tapes to see if a miscommunication occurred”.

So, I give up. I get a case number, hang up, and glare angrily at their logo for a few minutes hoping for some sort of voodoo reactivation acceleration. Doesn’t work.

I called the next day to see if they had done anything. Still nothing. I called the day after. Nothing. The day after that. Nada. Zip. Zilch.

Finally, I called a consumer affairs sort of person at Shingular and explained the whole situation on the fourth day of being without a business phone number. I spent my obligatory 10 minutes on hold, and then it happened. The sleaziest, most rank corporate doublespeak I’ve ever heard. He got back on the line and said “Well, we’ve reviewed the tape. It sounds like our agent did take too much initiative with your request.”

I think I actually started laughing. “Too much initiative”. I hope, for the sake of the man who said it, that that’s a canned line that they train people to use in these situations, because if he came up with that unprompted, I fear for his soul.

Framing: BS by any other name

This particular phrasing is a wonderful example of what prominent linguist George Lakoff calls “framing”. Framing, simply put, is the creative use of wording to change a person’s perception of a given concept, statement, or question. One uses words with a good connotation (associated feeling) to describe what people might consider to be a bad thing, in hopes that they’ll listen to the words, and not the nastiness that lies beneath.

The most common example is the Republican Party’s talking point of “Tax Relief”. They do their best to use this phrase as often as possible, because whenever they do, it helps advance their cause in the mind of the listener, however subtly, due to the wording. In general, we are “relieved” of an unnecessary burden, and “relief” is always a good thing. So, by talking about tax relief, taxes are lumped in with worry, ailments, pain, and discomfort. Although somebody might not want to cut taxes irresponsibly, who wouldn’t want to give people relief?

Our nameless Cingular executive has used framing beautifully here with “to take too much initiative”. Rather than apologizing or explaining that they’ve made an error, he frames Bonnie’s blatant mistake as a good thing. Everybody likes to hear about people “taking the initiative”, setting out to get things done, not just talking. We put it on resumés and job applications, and in our corporate culture, it’s quite a virtue. How on earth could I object to an employee going above and beyond the call of duty and taking too much initiative with my request?

Of course, this same strategy of framing bad things in the guise of excess good could apply elsewhere. We could claim that a man crushed in heavy machinery “recieved an overly passionate hug from the compactor”. We could argue that really, an aerial bombardment is a “free fireworks display for opposing troops at excessively low altitude”.

The problem, of course, is that if people see through your framing (especially when it’s this shameless), you end up seeming like a real sleazeball. For him to use a line like this is bad, but to use it to avoid apologizing is just heinous.

Unfortunately for the Cingular rep, I saw through it. Moments after the “too much initiative” line, I asked to be transferred to his manager. Luckily, she was nice, competent, and willing to help. Five days after the ordeal began, we finally got the line back, and they even threw in a free month for our trouble (this is the only reason I’m not using the company’s real name for google to find).

The morals of this story

This story has two morals:

Cingular/AT&T customers, make sure and specify that you’d like the rep to ask you explicitly before they make any changes to your account. It might not be easy to undo anything.

Service Reps, please give us a little credit, and avoid using framing to try and cover your own mistakes. We’ll see through it, and your well-crafted lines will seem like a wealth of excessively fresh, free, waste-based organic fertilizer from America’s finest Cattle. See, it’s insulting when we use it with you. How do you think we feel?

Owned by English Sentence structure: the Typo defense falls agai

2007-03-13T19:11:28-04:00

I’ve recently developed a minor affinity for a blog named LifeHacker, which shares little tips, tricks, and hacks that you can apply to your computer, yourself, and your life in general. It’s a decent site, and definitely worth a look if you’re bored.

However, what caught my eye today was not the content, but an interaction in a comment thread on optimizing your Mac. As such threads tend to do on any forum, it rapidly devolved into “Yay! Macs rule!” “Eww! Macs suck!”.

Applied usage of the Typo Defense

To support the “Macs suck” side, one poster by the name of “Quikboy”, posted as follows:

I’ve used a MacBook Pro for 4 years. It’s not really anything special. At first it may seem cool, but after a while, it’s just ok. It starts seeming like the same old, same old. They’re pretty expensive too. I got a Sony Vaio during Christmas, and I’ve decided to use it for my personal use…

Now, this is fascinating, because, as “Jamie Phelps” points out in the thread, MacBook Pros first came out last April. There’s no possibility, even if he had prerelease hardware, that he could have owned a MacBook Pro for more than a year or two. I assumed that he made a simple mistake and confused “Powerbook”, Apple’s previous line of High-End laptops, with “MacBook Pro”. Had he left it alone, he might’ve seemed a bit out-of-touch or unfamiliar with his hardware, but not actively decietful.

However, “Quikboy” wouldn’t go quietly. He snapped back with this post, a variation on the ages old “typo defense”:

Sorry, my ceiling light was dim. I was using the numpad, and pressed 4 instead of one. If you didn’t notice, 4 is right above one. I didn’t see that mistake and submitted the comment. Sorry. It has been out for almost a year at least as far as I remembered. I bought it somewhere in March or April of ‘06. Seems like a year to me.

Mind you, that doesn’t mean it’s well applied

To quote Abraham Lincoln, “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt.”.If we believe his typo defense, then his intended post reads ”I’ve used a MacBook Pro for 1 years.”

The problem here is that English marks plurality (the presence of more than one subject or object) in more than one place in a sentence. To change ”I’ve used a MacBook Pro for 1 year”, we not only change the number, but we also add the plural morpheme (a chunk of sound that conveys a certain meaning) -s. In many cases, we’ll even mark a single object with an article rather than with a number (“had it for a year”).

So, even if he did, in fact, transpose the numbers due to a dim light on the keyboard, he also added an -s, and possibly even deleted an article. To me, it sounds like “Quikboy” got called on a lie, and didn’t have the sense to use a stronger defense (“Oh, I meant powerbook”). The Typo Defense failed him, but it doesn’t have to fail you.

Teh Pefrect Cirme

The Typo Defense is really limited in its applications. Here are some ground-rules.

You can only reliably argue one or two letters as a typo, not entire substitutions. You’d never get away with “You suck” “Huh?” “Oh, sorry, typo, I meant ‘You have nice hair’“.
Similarly, it’s more difficult to argue certain switches. “Quikboy” plays the “the keys are right next to each other” card well, but then fails because, as I pointed out, English grammar is sensitive to plural distinctions.
That brings us to the final rule, make sure that the sentence and sound structure doesn’t give it away. If you say “Wow, she’s quite got an ass”, you can’t go back and claim that you meant “She’s got quite a mass”. The a/an alternation will hang you.

When it works, though, the Typo Defense can be a valuable face-saving tool. Keep it in your “Oh no, what’d I just say?” toolbox right next to the Cat-on-the-keyboard Dodge and the “Oops, wrong window” absolution.

However, the best option might just be to come clean. The internet is resourceful and unforgiving, and some day, some linguist might highlight your post and dissect it, revealing the terrible truth. Wouldn’t that be creepy?

EDIT: Wow. Somebody just pointed out the Plurality error in the thread. See, there’s nowhere to hide…

Using IPA fonts with Mac OS X: The Comprehensive Guide

2007-03-08T11:31:02-05:00

This post may be many years old, but the information in it is all up-to-date, and even OS X 10.8 “Mountain Lion” compatible. Enjoy!

As a linguist, you find yourself using the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) incredibly frequently. Some of the characters are easy enough to use without any special work (ŋ, ə), as most fonts already include them. However, to get the more cool/obscure characters and diacritics, or to stack diacritics (placing, for instance, a tone marking above a nasal marking), you need special fonts, layouts and setup. In this post, I’m going to explain, as simply as possible, how to go about finding the files and setting this up, all without paying a dime for specialty software.

Getting the fonts and layout

The beauty of this method is that it uses software built into Mac OS X, and that you can use IPA fonts in any application that supports Unicode (translation: lots of them), not just specific programs. You also don’t need to install a separate program to clutter up your computer, just a few free fonts and a keyboard layout. So, here’s your freeware shopping list:

Necessary files:

Charis SIL IPA Font - The best free IPA font out there (in my opinion) because it has bold, italic, and all sorts of other characters outside of IPA. The download link is around halfway down the page, grab the file with “(Windows, Macintosh and Linux)” next to it. Thanks to the Summer Institute of Linguistics, it’s completely free!
The Unicode IPA Keyboard Layout for OS X - SIL has created a comprehensive and modern version with every key you can imagine and more at The IPA-SIL key layout site. This layout is excellent as it allows you to type regularly, but by using “deadkeys” (a key that you press before another which chooses the output), you can add any IPA key you’d like.

Optional Extra IPA fonts:

Doulos SIL - A differently styled IPA font from SIL, missing the bold and italic forms that Charis has. Install this at the same time you install the Charis SIL font below, using the same instructions.
SILIPA93 Fonts - These are desperately outdated, but occasionally necessary when reading other people’s old IPA. Install this at the same time you install the Charis SIL font below, using the same instructions.

So, download save them to your desktop (or a location of your choosing), and then proceed to the next step.

Power User’s Summary: Download the Charis SIL IPA Font and the IPA-SIL keyboard Layout from the above links and save them someplace you can find them.

Installing the font and keyboard layout

Now, double-click the CharisSIL(version).zip file that you saved to your desktop. It’ll unzip into a similarly named folder on your desktop. Take the CharisSILfontdocumentation.pdf file and move it to a safe place, it’s a handy guide to have around, and feel free to take a look at the readme and license files in the folder.

It’s time to install the font and layout themselves:

If you’re using OS X 10.7 “Lion” or later, Apple has hidden the /Users/yourname/Library (~/Library) folder from you by default, so in order to install the keyboard layout or fonts, you’ll need to unhide the ~/Library folder or to access it using the Finder’s “Go to folder” option. To do the latter, just open the finder, open the Go menu in the menubar, then choose “Go to Folder…”, then enter ~/Library. You can also open a terminal window (/Applications/Utilities/Terminal) and type chflags nohidden ~/Library to make it show up permanently.
Place the four font files from the folder (CharisSILB.ttf, CharisSILBI.ttf, CharisSILI.ttf, CharisSILR.ttf) along with any of the optional fonts you’re installing into the ~/Library/Fonts folder (the “Fonts” folder inside the “Library” folder in your user directory.
Now, the layout. First, Double click “IPA-MACkbd.dmg” on your desktop. Now click the newly opened “Keyboard” Disk Image on the desktop and examine the contents.
Save “IPA Unicode (some version numbers) MAC Keyboard.pdf”! In fact, frame it. Wallpaper your wall with copies of it. Get a version tattooed on your chest. Just make sure you have it. Without this, you’ll have trouble figuring out exactly which keypresses result in which characters, and this method won’t work very well at all.
Now, drag “IPA Unicode (Version) MAC.keylayout” into the “Keyboard Layouts” in your username/Library folder. Also, if there is no “Keyboard Layouts” folder, you might have to create it yourself (File -> New Folder, then name it “Keyboard Layouts”)
You’re done! You might want to restart your computer, then everything will be all set.

Power User’s Summary: Install the font into /Users/you/Library/Fonts, and put the keyboard layout into /Users/you/Library/Keyboard Layouts. Make sure to save “IPA Unicode (version) MAC Keyboard.pdf” from the layout folder someplace accessible. Restart.

Setting up IPA Text Input

Once you’ve restarted, go to the System Preferences Application. Click the “Language and Text” (“International” on older versions), then, click the “Input Sources” (or “Input Menu”) tab inside the Language and Text Pane, and you’ll be presented with a window like this (click to enlarge):

In this window, make sure and select “Keyboard & Character Viewer” (to see what symbols are where at a glance) and “Show input menu in menu bar”. Also, feel free to change the shortcut to switch input methods to make things faster for you down the road.

Now, use the scroll bar to scroll through the list of options until you finally see “IPA Unicode (Version Number) MAC”, and select it. It’s right below the Eskimo languages, as selected above.

Now that you’ve done that, you should have a little American flag in your menu bar. Congratulations! You’re now set up to use the IPA on your mac.

/hɛloʊ wɜ˞ld/!

To test it out, fire up any text editor (OpenOffice, TextEdit, my personal favorite, Mellel, or even MS Word, if you insist) and open a document. Be very sure to select Charis SIL for your font in the document.

Now, click the little menu in the menubar and select IPA Unicode (Version) MAC:

Start typing and you’ll find yourself typing IPA symbols! You’ll slowly learn the reasonably intuitive set of key sequences (e.g: > then n for Angma, > then r for Alveolar Tap), and soon, you’ll be typing in IPA nearly effortlessly in nearly any application. You can even IM your linguist friends in IPA if they have the font as well.

I’ve heard that sometimes, Word doesn’t play nicely with this sort of input method. I’d highly recommend that if you have troubles, you try using TextEdit (built in), Mellel, or the free Office suite for OS X, LibreOffice, all of which I’ve tried and know to work well.

At the very least, you should be able to copy/paste your IPA text into a word document, or hopefully even make the switch entirely to a better word processor. Although MS Word may be the most well known word processor, it’s far from being the best on OS X, and I highly encourage you to check out all the options.

Finally, it’s worth noting that even with these input methods, and even in a Unicode-happy Word Processor like Mellel or LibreOffice, IPA isn’t perfectly reliable on Macs, especially when you have more than one diacritic stacked above a letter. For perfectly typeset IPA, unfortunately, you’re going to have to use TIPA with LaTeX, which is a whole other can of worms, or, better still, XeLaTeX (which allows Unicode entry) with this keyboard layout and a good TeX editor.

Regardless, thanks to these free and open source fonts and layouts, you’ll never need to write a Word macro again on OS X. /oʊ, wʌɾə wʌndə˞fl̩ wɜ˞ld/!

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Your New Phonetic Phriend: The Velar Nasal

2007-03-06T19:53:57-05:00

A few weeks ago, in my gigantic post on the beauty of Phonetics, I mentioned a particular sound, called the Velar Nasal (ŋ). Well, I think the Velar Nasal is really cool, and I also want to show how much detail can go into the study of something as seemingly simple as a single sound. It’s fascinating to see how complicated something we take for granted can be. As such, I’m going to designate it as this post’s Phonetic Phriend.

A Phoundation in Phonetics

Every consonant sound we make can be described by describing the positions of the various parts of the mouth involved in speech production (“articulators”). There are five main articulatory parts that must be described for every sound:

1. The front of the tongue – Where is it? Is it pressed against the upper part of the mouth? Where’s the closure? Is it completely closed?

2. The back of the tongue – Just like the front, Is it pressed against the upper part of the mouth? Against the back of the throat? Where’s the closure? Is it completely closed?

3. The lips – Are they open? Closed? Round?

4. The velum– This is the movable bit that closes off your nose from your throat. If you look in a mirror and say “Aaaaa”, you’ll see a little dangling bit (your uvula) hanging from the roof of your mouth. The uvula is attached to the velum. When raised, the velum stops air from escaping out your nose, and when lowered, air can flow freely out your nose.

5. The vocal folds(also known as the vocal cords) – In English, they’re either vibrating or not. In other languages, there are different ways of using them

If you know these five things about a sound, you can identify it, reproduce it (given practice), and determine the proper IPA symbol for it.

A Nasal by any other name

Let’s try making it for a second. Say “Ring”, and hold the final sound. Note that we don’t say rin-g, it’s just “ring”. There’s no real “g” to it. When you hold that sound, you’ll feel air going out your nose, just like when you hold an “N”, and you’ll feel your tongue pressed against the back of the roof of your mouth.

The name itself is descriptive: It’s called a “velar nasal”, which lets you know that the tongue is pressed against the velum, and that air is escaping out your nose, instead of through your mouth. Also called “Angma” or “Eng”, the Velar Nasal is fairly common in languages of the world. It’s the sound found in the English words “ring”, “sang”, “ankle” and “think”. The IPA symbol for the Velar Nasal is ŋ, or, in a more conventional IPA font:

Here’s a cross-section of the head (“sagittal section”) of somebody making a velar nasal (created with this very cool sagittal section maker):

Using the 5-place method of describing sounds, we could describe the velar nasal as follows:

1. The front of the tongue – Lowered, and not involved.

2. The back of the tongue – Pressed up against the velum, forming a complete seal

3. The lips – Not involved in the articulation, but likely open to begin the next sound.

4. The velum– Lowered so that air can pass out from your nose

5. The vocal folds – Vibrating

What’s so cool about the Velar Nasal?

You now know, in excruciating detail, how one goes about making one, but you might still be asking what makes them so cool?

First, many English speakers don’t even know that the sound is its own sound. Sure, they can tell the difference between “win” and “wing”, and they know it’s not quite right to pronounce the G and say “win-guh”, but for most English speakers, it never crosses our minds to think about it as its own sound, just as unique as a “K” or an “M”.

Second, in English, it’s a wonderful example of what Linguists call “Assimilation”. First, say “thin”. Stop at the “N” and pay attention to your tongue. It’s further forward in your mouth, almost behind your teeth. Now, say the phrase “I saw the thin kids” quickly. Now, do it again and stop right at the “n”. Notice that this time, your tongue is back in the mouth, and you’re making a velar nasal. Now, the N in thin is clearly a normal (“alveolar”) nasal when alone, but when it’s before a velar consonant, “K”, it becomes a velar nasal. This is because we’re generally quite lazy, and would rather make two sounds in the same part of the mouth than make two in two different places. This happens in lots of languages in lots of places, and especially with nasal sounds.

Finally, it’s interesting because of its distribution in English. We can make a “T” sound anywhere in a word. We can say “Tab”, “bat”, and “baton”. That’s not that case with the Velar Nasal. We can put it at the end of a word or phrase (“king”), or in the middle (“singing”), but try and say “ngo”. As a native English speaker, it’s easy to say “en-go”, but not “ŋo”. I’ve had to train myself to be able to make these at the start of words, because English never taught me how and they’re used at the start of words in lots of languages around the world. So, just because we can say something at the end of a word doesn’t mean we’re able to start a word with it.

So, reader, meet Velar Nasal. Velar Nasal, meet reader. Hopefully you’re now phast phonetic phriends, and will be on the lookout for them wherever they may lie. You might not thiŋk so, but they’re always haŋiŋ around, waitiŋ for a liŋɡuist to pick up on them. Fascinatiŋ, ŋo?

Linguistic Diversity like whoa: The Amazon Basin

2007-03-05T21:17:22-05:00

Hello everybody! Sorry for the recent lack of posts, it’s been a very crazy few days. I just wanted to pass along a pair of pictures which I think provide some great perspective.

We’re raised and taught that South America is generally a Spanish-speaking area, with Brazil as the Portuguese-speaking exception, and then a few other official languages. South American official languages could be mapped like this:

However, those are just the languages which were promoted with colonization. In reality, there are hundreds of languages and language families which developed and flourished in South America, some of which survive even today. So, if we were to redact just a small part of that map to show past and present native languages, it would look more like this (courtesy the Athena review language archive):

Impressive, isn’t it?

Many of these original languages are dying, but there are still tens of thousands (at least) of monolingual speakers of these native languages. So, yes, many Brazilians speak Portuguese. Many Colombians speak Spanish. However, not everybody in those countries speaks these main languages, and, well, those who don’t were there first.

You can lead a horse to water but you can't teach him new tricks: The Joy of Hybridioms

2007-02-28T12:09:27-05:00

I’d like to propose a new word in today’s post, one that I think would greatly benefit the language-loving populace: Hybridiom

This word was born only yesterday as I noticed this post on a support forum that I read frequently:

… Piffle! Forgive me my cynicism but this lack of support thing is really getting on my goat!

When I read this, I burst out laughing. This poster has merged two English idioms, combining “to get my goat” and “to get on my nerves”, into “getting on my goat”. So, instead of either of two parent idioms, we get a cross between the two, a “hybridiom”, if you will.

Now, in this case, it is a somewhat understandable error, as both of the original idioms have a similar meaning (to annoy somebody) and they both begin with the verb “get”. Interestingly, though, the meaning is completely lost when the two are merged. “To get on my goat” would literally refer to the act of climbing up onto my goat. If we were to merge them in the opposite fashion, it still wouldn’t make sense. “To get my nerves” wouldn’t really mean anything in that context (unless it’s physically removing the poster’s nerve cells).

These hybridioms aren’t unheard of elsewhere in the world, and they don’t necessarily need to be idioms at all. In the movie Boondock Saints, there’s a running joke at one point after a bartender (suffering from Tourette’s Syndrome) mixes up two proverbs. Here’s a transcript:

Bartender: So you guys keep your traps shut. ya know what they say; People in glass houses sink ships.
Rocco: Y’know Doc, I gotta get you a, a, like a proverb book or something. This mix and match shit’s gotta go.
Connor: (Imitating the Bartender) A p-penny saved is worth two in the bush.
Murphy: Don’t c-cross the road if ya can’t get out of the kitchen.
(…)
Bartender: Why don’t you make like a tree and get the fuck outta here!

Here, the Hybridioms are flying fast and furious. We have mixing of a number of different expressions, and (with the possible exception of the last one), the meaning is destroyed in the final form, unless you know the two expressions being mixed.

What’s interesting in this example is that the parent proverbs were related only peripherally. Take the first example. “Loose lips sink ships” refers to a wartime saying explaining that careless talk can easily be costly to the troops. “People in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones” isn’t so much of an idiom as a proverb, basically stating that if you’re vulnerable, don’t start trouble. When merged, the result carries no meaning in and of itself.

So, have you heard any good hybridioms or hybrid proverbs? Do you enjoy merging idioms, proverbs or expressions in your free time? If so, let me know, and I’ll post some of them up.

Hopefully I won’t get swamped in submissions though. You know, be careful what you wish for, you just might count your chickens before they hatch.

Troubles with Tizowyrm: The perils of Cross-Species translation

2007-02-27T14:15:08-05:00

As I’ve mentioned in the past, I’m currently reading the New Jedi Order series of Star Wars books. They’re a series of sci-fi novels for those who enjoy the Star Wars universe and the Jedi, and I’d really recommend them as light, fun reading. However, one unintended fun consequence of them is that I keep stumbling upon new and interesting language usage in the books. Here’s one such example:

Cross-Galactic Communication

In the series, the Galaxy is invaded by a very nasty species called the Yuuzhan Vong, who come from outside the galaxy and speak a very different language than “Basic”, the accepted trade language of Star Wars. As you might expect, the Yuuzhan Vong cannot understand Basic, and the rest of the Galaxy cannot understand the Vong. This language barrier, as you can imagine, can play a significant role in any situation.

Both sides have ways of compensating for this, though. The New Republic (those in charge of the Galaxy after the Star Wars movies) uses technology to overcome the barrier, with translator robots (“droids”) doing the talking and translating for them (one book mentions offhand that the Yuuzhan Vong language is remarkably similar to an existing language, thus, permitting translation). The Yuuzhan Vong, on the other hand, bring with them complex biotechnology (living ships, weapons, even living implants), and to solve the language problems, use a small worm embedded in the ear called a ”Tizowyrm”.

A Tizowyrm understands what is said in another language, and then translates it for the host creature. This is strikingly similar to the Babel Fish in the “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”, a small fish that lives in the ear and translates similarly.

The Tizowyrm’s magical Phonological powers

So, the Babelfish in Hitchhiker’s guide only allowed one to understand other species. So, I would talk to the alien in English, the Babelfish would translate for them, and they would respond in their language, which would be translated for me. However, if the other party didn’t have a Babelfish, there would be vast confusion. This is, as far as translation fish go, fairly believable. If a creature such as that could exist, that wouldn’t be an unthinkable way of their functioning.The Yuuzhan Vong Tizowyrm, however, is purported to allow one to speak in the other language as well as understand it. This is where I start to grow more wary.

Sure, in theory, the Tizowyrm could read the mind of the Vong, understand what he wants to say, and then say it in Basic into his ear. However, that doesn’t mean he could instantly say it.

Imagine if I were to whisper a Russian phrase into your ear once. Do you think you could repeat it without speaking Russian? How about Chinese or Thai? Languages all have different sound systems, and just because you hear a given sound or tone, that doesn’t mean that you’re going to be able to pronounce (or even hear) it. Hearing something alone doesn’t allow you to say it. You must train your tongue and mouth to make the required motions (and strings of motions) until it becomes second nature to do so. This is one of the more difficult parts of learning a language, and this is also one of the reasons that children have a far easier time of picking up languages. They’re better able to learn the required gestures.

This also relies on the assumption that the Yuuzhan Vong are capable of producing the language at all. The entirety of the Basic-speaking Star Wars universe flows on the idea that there’s a single language which can be spoken by most species. However, this is fairly unlikely. The human vocal tract is incredibly advanced and complex, and a single change (say, in the tissue binding the tongue to the bottom of the mouth) could render entire groups of sounds unpronounceable. So, to imagine that a group of Extragalactic aliens has the required phonetic apparatus to create (or mimic) all the sounds of Basic is a little far fetched.

However, this is even more far-fetched with the Yuuzhan Vong. The vong also have a disturbing tendency towards self-mutilation. One prominent leader, Warmaster Tsavong Lah, is described as having lips that have been cut into small strips and which flail about when he talks. Somehow, though, he seems to have no trouble with bilabial consonants (which involve the use of both lips) such as “b” and “p” when speaking Basic in the book. Similarly, I suspect that Vong with a ritually split tongue would have trouble with laterals (like ‘L’) among other sounds.

The Tizowyrm, then, must be truly magical. Not only does it translate complex, culturally loaded statements with ease, but it allows one to overcome his or her language background and use sounds correctly to speak “the language of the infidels”.

Then again, maybe this is just a fictional Sci-Fi series written for Star Wars fans and not Phonetics nerds. Yeah, that’s probably it after all.

Neat Neology: New and interesting words and phrases highlighted

2007-02-22T12:51:55-05:00

Today, I’d like to highlight some interesting neologisms (new words, idioms and word uses) upon which I’ve stumbled recently.

Yard Sale — Noun, from Skier/Snowboarder parlance

This refers to a very bad fall when skiing, during which your skis, poles, hat, goggles and other accoutrement are ripped off of you and strewn about the snow. The origin doesn’t take a lot of imagination, it’s simply drawing a comparison between having all your gear spread out in the snow and spreading it out on your lawn for a yard sale.

“Then, I hit a mogul, and dude, it was a total yard sale”

BoBo — Noun, originally French, but imported

A contraction of “Bourgeois Bohême”, it refers to a yuppie (rich, young businessperson) who pretends to be a hippie and/or socially conscious through involvement with Eastern Religion/Decorating, Yoga, New Age beliefs, Fair-Trade Organic Shade-Grown Vegan Coffee, and conspicuous charity. There’s a level of inherent hypocrisy here, taking the Humvee to the “No blood for Oil” rally and paying $5000 for a luxury meditation retreat.

My city (Boulder, CO) is a true haven for these types. They’re attracted by the hippie reputation of the city, but also thrilled with the accessibility to modern conveniences and businesses. Perhaps the epitome of the BoBo mindset can be experienced by a quick visit to Now & Zen, a merchant which sells, I kid you not, “Zen Clocks and Timers”. Instead of a conventional tone, they knock against a Tibetan Singing Bowl. These are upwards of $100 each, and, last I checked, actual monks get up at sunrise, by natural means. However, if you’re a Bobo, what better way is there to express your spiritual consumerism than with a “tibetan phone bell”?

“Are Rob and Erma bringing little Samsara?” “Nah, they’re going to drop her off at the Meditation Center on their way to work over at Exxon.” “Ugh. They’re such BoBos”

Nascar — Noun, originating in the blogging community

“Nascar”, in the blogging context, refers to the sometimes endless list of social bookmarking site icons on the side or underneath blog posts. These are used by site authors to garner more clicks on social bookmarking sites (which help people to share interesting content and make things more well known online). See the below example:

The etymology (word origin) stems from the visual similarity of a blog like this to a NASCAR race car, which is generally plastered with many smaller advertisements.

”I’ve chosen not to put any Nascar on this site, but I don’t mean to pick on those who have. I just prefer the cleaner look.”

Toolgazing — Verb, origin unknown

This is a very colorful, humorous and poetic term for a very awkward situation. For those who might not share my Y Chromosome, American Men’s Restrooms usually have a wall with 2 or more urinals, all flush (no pun intended) with the wall, and often there are no dividers between these urinals, so men just line up side by side. “Toolgazing” refers to the act of a man glancing over at the exposed genitals of the other men urinating next to him. This is not looked upon nicely in the men’s restroom community, and those few who persist are very likely to enrage or offend the victim if caught.

“Fred’s kind of weird. One time I caught him toolgazing in the restroom at work”

Victory Lap — Noun, found among college students

A “victory lap” is the fifth year of classes taken to complete a four year degree program in college, and is often the result of a change in concentration or a school transfer. A person who is taking a victory lap is often called a “Super Senior”.

“Are you graduating this spring?” “Nah, I’m taking a victory lap, I have to take a Literature class”

Stall Call — Noun, origin unknown

A “stall call” refers to the act of placing or receiving a phone call while using the restroom. Some people are reluctant to make or take stall calls, but others seem to see no problem with the practice, even taking heroic measures to hide the associated sounds of flushing and sink usage.

“Who is Jim talking to in there?” “He’s making a Stall Call.” “Eww.”

That’s it for this episode of Neat Neology. If there are any you’d like to see featured here in the future, let me know. I hope you’ve learned some new words, and that you find interesting ways to work them into conversation. Then again, I hope you don’t have to use all of them…

You can't say "Phonetics" quickly without saying "fun"

2007-02-17T13:46:15-05:00

I came into Linguistics without a real direction, specialty or desire. Truthfully, it was more fate than anything that found me here. Today, I’d like to discuss a little bit of how I found Phonetics, why I love it, and why you might love it too.

Linguistics and Fate

When I started college, I was a Russian language major. I took a year worth of Russian language and culture classes, but I rapidly realized that their teaching style was going to kill me. A “Non-Grammatical Approach” to teaching grammar strikes me as about as effective as a “Non-Driving Approach” to Driver’s Ed, and the Russian department’s adherence to it was driving me crazy. As it worked out, I should probably be sending “Thank you” notes to the people whose terrible textbooks drove me from the department, as their failings brought me to my true passion.

The fall of my Sophomore year, I enrolled in Linguistics 2000, “Introduction to Linguistics”, just out of curiosity. I didn’t know what Linguistics was, but I decided to take it anyways, chalking it up to “College is a time for experimentation”. Well, it grabbed me. Hard.

By midterms, I had added Linguistics as a second major. By finals, I was feeling liberated. By the start of the next semester, I had dropped the Russian major (studying the language on my own instead), and l leaped off into the Linguistic Unknown. I’ve never made a better decision in my life.

Phinding Phonetics

In my intro to Linguistics classes, we touched on all the different fields of Linguistics, but only barely so. We spent a day or two looking at slides of the various IPA characters, briefly discussed the fact that English has around 10 more vowels than everybody thinks we do, and then moved on to the next field.

However, Phonetics really reached out and grabbed me. Phonetics, simply put, is the study of sounds in language, and can involve how we make sounds, how we hear them, and even how sound waves transmit information. I picked up a book, started studying the IPA, and used it in my other side projects (mostly in language creation). As soon as I could, I enrolled in the actual undergrad phonetics course, learning more and more about Phonetics, and at that point, I realized I could no longer deny my love for the sounds of language. I found myself making more and more clicks, glides, and trills, even in bed as I was going to sleep, and sometimes, I found the sounds of speech more interesting than what people were actually saying. Last year, I took the Master’s level Phonetics course offered by my school, and it sealed the deal: I love Phonetics.

I want to share the gospel of speech production; I want to show people that speech is more than just an everyday occurrence, and I want people to know that the alveolar tap in “later” can be just as graceful and precise as any figure skater’s finest trick. I’m passionate about Phonetics, and I think it’s genuinely important. Let me try and explain why.

What do speech sounds have to do with invisible aliens?

All linguists need some background in Phonetics, even if they don’t find it as interesting as I do. I remember that in my undergrad phonetics class, a lot of people really didn’t like it, and even though they wanted to be linguists, they didn’t understand why. Well, I’m going to try and explain why you need Phonetics. Let’s use a metaphor here:

We’ve likely all seen bad Sci-Fi action movies. More specifically, you’ve probably seen a movie where they have to deal with an invisible enemy. Sometimes it’s a guy in an invisibility suit, sometimes it’s a killer alien, sometimes it’s a stealth ship. No matter what, they always lose three or four expendable characters to some invisible menace before they wise up to what’s going on.

Now, imagine you’re writing a grammar of a language that’s never been described before, but you’ve never really had any phonetics training. You’re making good progress, analyzing the structures, translating words, and figuring out what the speaker is doing. Then suddenly, disaster strikes. You’re stuck with these two (made-up) sentences:

nalo bi (meaning “He saw the shrimp”)

nalo bi (meaning “He saw the necklace”)

You’ve checked and rechecked your data, but every time you ask the speaker to say those two sentences, he or she tells you the same thing. You’ve checked with other speakers to make sure it’s not a context thing, and when you repeat them back, you’re either “mispronouncing it”, or their translation varies. At this point, you’ve got the Linguistic equivalent of an invisible alien attacking your grammar.

In our bad Sci-Fi movie, what usually happens once they figure out that the invisible aliens are, forgiving the internet meme, in their base, eatin’ their doodz? Well, the nerdy guy in the basement workshop rigs up a set of (ultraviolet/thermal/spectral/force)-imaging goggles, which let you see the aliens clear as day. Then, they all go outside with their spiffy goggles, kill the aliens, get the parts for their ship, and get back to Earth. In bad movies, all you need to do to defeat an invisible alien is to learn how to detect it.

So, you’re still stuck staring at the “nalo bi” issue in your language. To you, these words sound almost exactly alike, but to the speakers, they’re obviously different. This is where Phonetics training comes in handy.

Phonetics: Invisible alien killer extraordinaire

You see, when we’re very, very young (less than a year), we can hear the differences between all of the different speech sounds in the world (a search for “Infant Phonetic Inventory” will put you on the right track to learn more). However, we’re all raised with a language, and after a while, we learn to subconsciously throw out the sounds that don’t matter in our language. In English, we rapidly stop caring whether our vocal folds are closed or open when we start a word (this is important in the Samoan language), and when people make an “n” further back in their mouths at the start of a word, our brain just turns it into a plain, alveolar “n”.

This is just fine for a monolingual English speaker, but when we get out into the field or study another language, it can cause us to stop seeing invisible aliens. People could be making two distinct sounds, but because they’re not present in our language, we won’t hear them.

You go get some Phonetics training. You learn about how different sounds are made. You listen to recordings and tapes of other languages to sensitize our ears. We study how sounds interact, and how to produce them. We get our ears, our mouths, and our brains to open up and hear the world not as English speakers, but as linguists.

Then, you go back to our invisible alien. They say the first phrase, you hear “nalo bi”, like before. They say the second one, and suddenly, you hear the difference. It’s not “nalo bi”, it’s “ŋalo bi”! The tongue is further back in the mouth, where our K is, and you’ve just been mishearing. You say it back, using your new skill at making the velar nasal (ŋ) at the start of a word, and they understand you. Through the magic of phonetics, you not only see the invisible alien, but you understand it, and can live in harmony with it.

See? Phonetics is phun!

Phonetics is really vital for anybody learning linguistics (or, to a lesser extent, learning languages of the world). We’re raised with one specific sound system, and it bends our mind. The study of phonetics can help free our mind, and let you see the complexity, beauty, and grace of the sounds of language that you’ve been conditioned to forget.

It’s a wonderful field not only because of the subject matter, but because it’s constantly applicable. A particle physicist can only do their work with million-dollar machines in labs. An engineer needs tools and computers to do their work. For a linguist or phonetician to work, all we need are ears, a brain, and language. We’ve always got our ears and our brain, and there’s nothing more omnipresent in human existence than language.

So, if you need a new hobby that lets you work from anywhere, enjoy the beauty in small things, and even catch invisible aliens, Phonetics is for you.

If you’d like resources in getting started, shoot me an email, or just go to your local linguistics department. A word of caution, though: mentioning invisible aliens probably won’t look too good on your application. We like creative people, but.. yeah…

The magical-a** workings of intonation

2007-02-15T14:41:22-05:00

I stumbled across this comic today, from the creative artist over at XKCD. As I’ve noted in the past, the artist certainly has an eye for language and linguistics humor, and I just wanted to share the latest such comic I’ve stumbled across:

Here’s a link to the full comic.

Perhaps I find this comic so funny because I know people who use the [adjective]-ass [noun] construction pretty frequently (as in “that’s a huge-ass building”). I’ve even been known to do it myself (I feel dirty). I eagerly look forward to mentally switching the hyphen as soon as I next hear the expression, even if it means I start snickering uncontrollably.

The fascinating part is that in speech, the (vast) difference between a “sweet-ass car” and a “sweet ass-car” is only expressed by timing and intonation (varying the pitch of one’s voice). Using Praat to tweak the intonation, you can fairly reliably change one into the other, and alter the meaning completely.

Think about it: at a completely subconscious level, we are able to understand complex changes in meaning expressed solely by a minor variations in the speed of vibration of a speaker’s vocal folds. The complexity, subtlety, and grace of human speech is truly amazing, and this phenomenon provides a wonderful ass-demonstration. Err, that’s not quite right…

Happy Valentine's Day from Linguistic Mystic

2007-02-14T08:20:46-05:00

Hello everybody, and Happy Valentines Day to everybody that celebrates it.

Valentine’s Day is a holiday celebrated in some Western cultures which is generally dedicated to love, romance, and relationships. Likely adapted from the Roman spring fertility ritual and Christianized with the namedropping of St. Valentine, it’s frequently considered to be a good day to go on dates, to exchange gifts (thanks to concerted marketing efforts), and to spend time with your significant other.

Of course, Valentine’s Day has its share of fascinating words and language use associated with it.

Frequently, people refer to Valentine’s Day as a “Hallmark Holiday”. This refers to the Hallmark Card company, and thus, by metonymy, to the greeting card and gift industry. The term itself reflects the somewhat popular belief that Valentine’s Day is as hyped as it is largely due to marketing, and that the real reason it exists is so that gift card companies, candy makers, and florists can sell their goods at inflated prices after the Christmas Rush.

Another popular (albeit bitter) alternate name for Valentine’s Day is “Singles Awareness Day”, evoking the sadness of being single on the day that people are expected to be celebrating romance.

Some people have been known to refer to Valentine’s Day as “Make-Up Day”, because in some relationships (apparently), showering your significant other with gifts on Valentine’s Day can make up for your past failings or infidelities.

As you can see (from the host of alternate definitions and perspectives), Valentine’s day is controversial even in the places where it’s celebrated, perhaps moreso than any other holiday. However, the fact remains, it’s a darned good time to get a date in a Western Culture.

A quick (and related) link for the OS X users in the crowd:

The Love Translator Widget is a dashboard widget which translates the phrase “I love you” into more than 100 languages, all transliterated for easy reading. Install it today, woo her tonight. Remember, nothing’s sexier than a vow of love that she can’t understand.

Another victory in the fight against legislated racism

2007-02-12T11:18:19-05:00

Hello all! A quick post, with some good news, taken from this article:

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) - Nashville Mayor Bill Purcell vetoed a measure Monday that would have made English the official language of Nashville, saying it was unconstitutional, unnecessary and mean-spirited.
“This ordinance does not reflect who we are in Nashville”, Purcell said.
The measure passed 23-14 last week by the Metro Council required all government documents to be in English, except when multilingual communications are required by federal rules or are needed “to protect or promote public health, safety or welfare.”
Opponents and supporters of the ordinance agreed it was largely a symbolic slap at illegal immigration that had no significant effect.
Purcell said his legal staff had advised him the bill violated the U.S. and state constitutions and would be costly to defend.

I can understand requesting people to know English for a service job, or if safety demands it. However, requiring a certain language background simply to vote, drive, or interact with the state is a rather roundabout way of saying that you don’t want non-English speakers in your state/town/country. It’s about damned time people recognized it for what it is, and it’s good to see the mayor judiciously smack down this particular batch of thinly veiled racism.

"How are you?" isn't actually asking how you are, and other strange greeting habits

2007-02-11T21:38:10-05:00

Greetings are really fascinating to Linguists, as they’re often culturally specific, quite colorful, and sometimes very elaborate.

For one of my classes, I (along with five other people and professor) am working with a speaker of Zarma, a language of Niger. The goal of the class is to study the language and create a working grammar, then focus in on one particular aspect of the language we find fascinating. Right now, we’re in the process of translating a narrative about the marriage rituals of the Zarma people, and we stumbled across an interesting little tidbit.

To start off this narrative, our professor offered the speaker a greeting in Zarma, fufu, which is roughly equivalent to our simple “Hi!”. The speaker responded with ba:n sami wo:la (the colons indicate long vowels, “baan samee woluh”). This is a much more complex phrase, translating down to something roughly like “God be praised, my health is without problems”, or, more succinctly, ”I’m doing fine”. The speaker explained to us that the fufu, ba:n sami wo:la interaction is a normal way of carrying out a greeting in Zarma. After the Ba:n sami wo:la, he went straight into the narrative.

My first thought at that point (which I’m not proud to admit) was that it seemed a bit pretentious. “What would they care how you were doing, all they said was “Hi”“, I thought to myself.

Then, I realized. English is no less pretentious, I’m just more used to our system. Generally, at least in my bit of the English speaking world, a greeting includes some variety of “How are you?/What’s up?” interaction. First, the first person puts out a “how are you?”, the second person gives a generic answer, then asks the first person the same question back, and the first person answers generically. Only once that’s out of the way can a conversation begin.

Perhaps what’s missing from the Zarma greeting, in my culturally biased eyes, is the return question. It’s not “Hi”, ”I’m healthy, are you?”, “I am too”. It doesn’t seem, based on the simple interaction, that the second participant actually cares about the first person.

The trouble with that point of view is that English speakers don’t actually care how you’re doing or what’s up, either. Take, for example, this made-up interaction:

(Fred walks into a gas station and goes to pay the attendant)
FRED: Hey
SHOPKEEPER: Hi, How are you today?
FRED: Well, actually, my prostate’s been acting up, so it’s an hour and a half of pain any time I have to go to the bathroom. Oh, and my dog died last week. So yeah, I’m having a tough time of it. How about you?
SHOPKEEPER: (extended pause) …I’m good
…

If you’re like me, reading that interaction likely caused at least a little bit of a cringe. It’s an unspoken rule that in general, when somebody asks you how you’re doing (or what’s up), they really, genuinely, don’t care. They want to finish the greeting and get on with life. You’re allowed a “Fine”, an “OK”, sometimes “Great!”, and maybe the occasional ”I’ve done better, how are you?”. You are not, however, allowed to tell somebody how you actually are.

There are, as always, exceptions. If a family member (or very close friend) asks, there’s a higher probability that they do care, and you’re welcome to actually answer truthfully. Similarly, you’re allowed to answer fully if somebody makes a special effort to encourage it, either through intonation (“So how ARE you?”) or through context (when a doctor asks, you don’t say “Fine”, you actually explain what’s wrong). Similarly, a “What’s up?” can be answered truthfully if the person looks like they’re trying to arrange or accomplish something (“So, what’s up? Going anywhere?”), or if the person has a legitimate interest in your activities.

Sometimes when we’re only greeting each other in passing, we have absolutely NO interest at all in the other person’s activities, and don’t even bother to use the correct response. In the dorms, just walking by people you know, it’s not at all uncommon to hear a hybrid greeting, like “What’s up?” “Fine, you?” or “How are you?” “Not much”. Sometimes, you’ll stop to correct yourself, and use the right greeting, perhaps with a minor blush, but generally, it’s not even noticed.

We can contrast English’s lack of caring with one example from the (quite complex) Samoan greeting system. In English, if you meet somebody on the street and they ask “Where are you off to?”, you’re not required to be specific. You can just say “Oh, I’m headed to the store”, and that’s just fine. However, in Samoan, if somebody of higher status (a chief/orator to a commoner, or an adult to a child) asks you where you’re going, you’re compelled to answer quite honestly, or else you’re being deceptive. Rather than just ”I’m going to the beach”, you’d explain to the chief that you’re going to the beach to talk with your friend, then going over to the bar for a drink, then headed home to see your wife after that. Imagine telling that to the gas station clerk.

When you sit back and realize that in English, we don’t really care how people are or what they’re up to even when we ask, expressing one’s state of being without solicitation in a greeting doesn’t seem that unusual or pretentious.

So, if there’s one thing to learn from this, it’s this: Any time you think some other language is strange, remember that yours is just as strange, you’re just used to it.

Perscriptivism: A healthy view, for once

2007-02-09T18:50:58-05:00

This morning, as usual, I rolled out of bed to my computer and checked my RSS feeds. In doing so, this quote from a professor, taken from Sally Thomason’s latest post on the Language Log jumped out at me. Actually, that’s not true, it sprung into my heart, soothing my harrowed soul and putting as much of a smile as it could on my still-slumbering face. Here’s a bit of it:

…
I always emphasize that it’s not so much right and wrong, that people speak differently everywhere, but that there’s a certain amount of snobbery in knowing “standard usage” and adhering to it, like it’s a password that says, “I know the code, I have learned the secrets of this society of academics/lawyers/receptionists and can be trusted to behave appropriately.” I tell them they HAVE to learn it and know when to use it unless they want to shoot themselves in the foot on resumes and applications, but they don’t have to believe it’s God’s Preferred Way of Speaking English.
I’ve had more than one student come up to me after an ACT class and say, “You’re the first English teacher I’ve had who didn’t tell me my mother spoke like an uneducated hick,” or “This is the first time anyone’s explained why standard usage is important.”

It’s sad that pointless prescriptivism may keep these kids from top schools. But that’s why we absolutely HAVE to teach it to them, so they’re not fighting an uphill battle on the language front. They’re already at a disadvantage without the money, resources, and connections wealthy suburban Chicago students have in spades. It would be brutal not to teach them the “code” they need to pass the gatekeepers.

Laura Petelle (the author of this excerpt), you are, officially, my hero-of-the-day for February 9th, 2007. This all DESPERATELY needed to be said, and it sounds like you’re saying it, not just to Language Log, but the people for whom it counts.

Standard usage is just that, a standard of usage, but that term can be deceiving. Just because a language (or a dialect) is not the same as the accepted standard doesn’t mean it’s “sub-standard” or “uneducated”. Every dialect is grammatical, meaning that it conforms to its own specific grammar (and usually more frequently than the speech of those trying to use a “standard dialect”, and there are no “better” or “worse” dialects than any others. “Non-Standard” does not mean “sub-standard”, and I applaud Laura for teaching that.

Sadly, she’s right. Knowing the “whom“‘s of the standard dialect (of any language) can be seen as a showing of one’s social status, and a person who’s never been taught those sorts of things will be at a disadvantage due to a charming little set of social stigmas based on language use. So, as she says, we have to teach people the rules, but also let them know that it’s okay to ignore them at home. Just because I need to wear a tie to go to a wedding, doesn’t mean I should wear it at home while watching a movie. “Standard Usage” is a sociolinguistic tool, and although we need to know it, we don’t need to worship it.

So, Laura, if you’re out there reading this, you have my highest respects, and if you’re ever in the area, I’ll buy you a smoothie if you post your above comments outside the English department.

Don’t worry, though, they’re just across the courtyard from Linguistics. We’d have your back.

im in mai blog, postin' bout cats: The Cuteness of Grammatical errors

2007-02-07T11:20:40-05:00

Hello everybody!

This post really has two reasons for existence. The first, a linguistic reason, is to pose a question to the readers about our use and perception of language. The second is to post a series of pictures (not my own) that will assuredly make the reader smile and/or laugh. Hopefully you’ll enjoy both.

Caturday

From what I gather, the phenomenon of funny cat pictures began on one particular web image board. I’m not going to give the name of the board as it’s an board where people can post anonymously, so there’s frequently content there I don’t want to endorse. Regardless, a tradition called Caturday arose. On Saturdays, people would find pictures of cats with interesting expressions, then caption them in humorous ways. These have been posted in various places on the internet, and it’s not uncommon for them to show up in random discussions on all sorts of sites. Recently, I went looking for more of them (as I find them quite funny), and found a treasure trove of cats, strangely enough, posted on a BodyBuilding forum. Based on these images, I’ve been able to make a Linguistic observation:

Cats have bad grammar, and it’s funnier that way

In many of the pictures I found, I’ve noted pretty significant deviations from conventional English Grammar. Ranging from the incorrect application of language rules (“eated”), to internet style contractions (“plz” for “Please”), to out and out incorrect verb agreement (“I are serious cat”), many of these captions use blatantly bad grammar. Here are some examples:

The fact of the matter, though, is that the bad grammar somehow makes it funnier. Somehow, saying “I am a Serious Cat, and this is a Serious Thread” doesn’t have the same ring to it. The best explanation I’ve come up with is that the grammatical errors remind English speakers of the speech of children, and thus, come up with more cuteness. If you have any ideas, I’d like to hear them.

A meme is born

Before I go, I’d like to talk a bit more about the “im in ur ____, ____ing your ____” construction. I’m not sure what the original version was, but since its inception, it has truly become an internet meme, a sort of internet in-joke that’s become a cliché due to frequent posting. There are lots of different variations on this construction (“im in your fridge, eating ur foodz”), and it has even been applied outside of cats. This past November, when the Democrats gained control of the US Congress, this picture promptly popped up online featuring the new Speaker of the House:

Just to think, from such humble roots, Caturday has spawned a new internet sensation reaching as far as the US Congress. Oh, the glory of the internet.

Followup: I’ve discussed the LOLCat dialect a bit more recently, so if you’re interested in this phenomenon and the heights it has reached, you might want to read “im in ur programmz, codin in ur dialect”

How do you pronounce "Ysalamiri"? Phonology to the rescue!

2007-01-31T17:37:35-05:00

The trouble of being a linguistics student is that you can never escape your work. Language is all around us, and you never know when some tiny pronunciation change, speech error, or other bit of language is going to stop you in your tracks and put you back into Linguist mode. Mind you, I really don’t mind being in linguist mode, so it’s really only troublesome when you have to explain your sudden linguistic elation to your friends who have no clue what you’re talking about.

I’ve been slowly making my way through the several-thousand-page series of Star Wars: New Jedi Order books. They’re certainly an entertaining read, and a great way to relax after analyzing language for a decent part of the day. The other day, I was reading Star by Star, one of the books in the New Jedi Order, and had one of those “linguist moments”.

Throughout the Star Wars extended universe, there is frequent mention of the Ysalamiri lizard. This lizard is unique in that, in the Star Wars galaxy, it can completely negate the effects of the Force in a small bubble around it. Its presence is frequently used as a plot device, but they never once show up in the movies.

My problem was that I couldn’t figure out how to pronounce their name, and none of my usual sources had a pronunciation guide. There are two options, based on the spelling and my particular reading of the word:

1) yi-sal-a-mee-ree (IPA below)

2) i-sal-a-mee-ree (IPA below)

Because the letter “Y” can be either a vowel sound (“fishy”) or a consonant/semivowel (“yet”), we can’t be sure just from looking at the word which one we’re talking about.

However, as I was reading through the book, I had a sudden “Aha!” moment and all became clear.

I’ve talked about the alternation between “a” and “an”before, and it’s a very cool phonological quirk of English (a quirk caused by rules governing the sound system). The rule states that “a” becomes “an” before a spoken vowel. So you have “a key”, “an object”, and, because it starts with a glide, not a vowel, ”a university”.

I stumbled across this passage in “Star by Star”:

… Jaina glimpsed a lizardlike shape clinging to the back of the tree… “An ysalamiri,” Jaina said loudly.

“An ysalamiri”! Because this rule is pretty consistent throughout the language (and adding an “N” isn’t a typo likely to survive editing), we can now safely assume that “ysalamiri” is pronounced with a vowel at the beginning of the word (option two, i-sal-a-mee-ree). We can’t be sure whether that vowel is the same as in “beat” or in “bit”, but hey, every little bit helps.

So, much like the Force, Linguistics is everywhere, in all endeavors, academic and recreational, big and small. Now, I just need to learn to use Linguistics to lift an X-Wing. Maybe I could turn a lightsaber hilt into a voice recorder…

A really fascinating take on language

2007-01-28T15:59:59-05:00

I’m not really sure what to make of this. It’s a video, made by an autistic woman, telling her take on language, the world, and the views of others. It’s around eight minutes, but I think it’s also worth it:

Here’s a link to the video on YouTube

As I said, I’m not really sure what to make of this. It’s a really beautiful video, and is exceptionally well made, far above the normal YouTube fodder. It also has a very interesting take on language, what constitutes language, and the sociolinguistics of Autism. If this is, in fact, a genuine look into the autistic mind, I’m very impressed, and I’ll definitely be thinking about language in a whole new way.

However, my internet cynicism is a bit too harsh for me to take this completely at face value. It doesn’t have any of the features of an “amateur video”, and as I said, it’s really a cut above 90% of what’s on YouTube. If this were to come out as something done by a few art students for notoriety, I’d be disappointed, but not shocked.

If this is everything it says it is, I have to thank the creator. It’s both brave and powerful, and exceptionally well done. It’s always good to have your worldview tweaked a little bit, and this video definitely did that for me. I hope it affected you as well.

(Also, as a note, you’ll notice that I’m not embedding the YouTube video in the page as many site do. I’m sorry for the (slight) inconvenience, but I think it’s the best choice for accessibility, compatibility, and the aesthetics of this site)

Who may be on third, but Whom's getting ejected from the game...

2007-01-25T15:21:46-05:00

So, I’ve discussed language change before, and I think it’s a really fascinating area of Linguistics, as it’s a good reminder that Linguistics isn’t just studying the past, but also the future. I made a few predictions about language change in English a while back in this post, and one of those predictions has just come to life again for me. In that post, I said…

However, it will happen. In the same way that “whom” is gradually fading from use, \usage of ‘their’ as a gender neutral pronoun will fade in.

For as long as I’ve been looking, I’ve maintained (along with others) that “whom” is rapidly fading from use in the English language.

What is ‘whom’?

‘Whom’, for those of you who never had this pushed on you by your High School English teacher (or have replaced it with usable information), is/was both a relative and interrogative pronoun in English. It can be used in sentences such as “For whom were you looking?” and “The police are searching for the man whom Mike Tyson attacked”.

Where most people falter is differentiating it from “who”. Let’s talk about some terminology real quick so I can give it a nice, thorough, linguistic description:

In grammatical descriptions, there are several different ‘semantic roles’, played by the different actors in a given sentence. The ‘agent’ is the person or thing that initiates the action (the dog in “the dog bit the man”). The ‘patient’ is the person or thing that is affected by the action done by the agent (the man in “the dog bit the man”). In all ‘transitive’ sentences, involving some sort of action done to somebody by somebody else, there is both an ‘agent’ and a ‘patient’.

Let’s make a sentence: “Janet Reno saw the penguin”. In that sentence, ‘Janet Reno’ is the agent, and ‘the penguin’ is the patient. Let’s ask some questions using that statement. In order to ask a question about it, we need to insert a question word (who or whom) in place of the part we want to ask about. So, if we want to ask about the agent in English, we use “who”, but, to ask about the patient, we use “whom”. We’d end up with either “Who saw the Penguin?” or “Whom did Janet Reno see?”. We could also go all out and say “Who saw whom?” So, in summary, in the glory days of Whom, we used “who” to replace the agent in a sentence, and “whom” to replace the patient.

Whom am I calling obsolete? Whom.

However, that’s rapidly going out of style. It’s not unusual to see “Who did you see?” or “Wait, who shot who?”, and really, “whom” shows up rarely in everyday usage. How rarely? Well, in the EnronSent Corpus of Enron’s corporate email, it shows up 991 times out of 13,810,266 total words. Compare that to 11,789 times for “who”. Of those 991 times, there are many “incorrect” uses (“This template is for participants, whom will be kept confidential at all times.”)

Many people don’t know when it’s actually supposed to be used, and even those who do are very seldom able to use it without seeming pretentious (or worse). Personally, I can’t imagine walking up to a girl in a bar and saying “You’re the girl for whom I’ve been waiting all my life”. So, whom is on the way out.

However, today, I saw something completely new. This was a headline submitted to fark.com today:

Submitter confuses golf story for NBA story, left confused as to who shot whome

The usage is actually classically correct, but the spelling isn’t. The submitter seems to have the idea of when to use it, but it’s gotten so rare that he or she (they!) haven’t gotten used to the usual spelling.

So, when everyday people stop using a term or grammar point, stop seeing it, and stop understanding how it works, it’s only a matter of time before it’s on its way out.

Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for ‘whom’.

PS: For those not familiar with the headline’s reference, it’s a play on Abbot and Costello’s “Who’s on first?” sketch which is definitely worth a read.

When your food comes "a la crate", there are non-native speakers afoot

2007-01-23T19:29:52-05:00

Now, I don’t want people to think I’m making fun of non-native speakers of English. I’m aware that if I were to go to China (the place of origin of the business owners), I’d likely be just as error-prone as anybody else, and damnit, I hope people would find them funny too. So, yes, some of the errors I’ll talk about are rather funny. However, I think they’re all of greater Linguistic interest than just “Haha! He’s learning a language entirely different entirely different from his own!”. Here’s just one example:

So, the other day, I went out to dinner with my girlfriend at the local hole-in-the-wall-yet-oh-so-good chinese restaurant. There, I happened to notice something fascinating on the menu board. Written in bold dry erase marker, displayed prominently, was the heading ”A la crate”.

Now, this is interesting for me in several ways. First, it’s handwritten, so it’s not just an idle typo caused by some minor keyboard mistakes. Second, this menu board has been up for several months. That means that either nobody’s noticed, or they don’t see a problem. Also, it’s dry erase, so changing it wouldn’t be an issue. Finally, it’s not the error I’d expect.

“A la carte” is an expression which means that something can be ordered separately (on the side), from the French “à la carte” (‘according to the (menu) card’). It’s pronounced “ah lah cart”. Now, given the strange spelling (compared to the pronunciation), I wouldn’t be shocked to find “a la cartay” or “ala kart”, but “a la crate” doesn’t sound like the expression at all.

I’m not sure precisely what train of thought would lead a non-English speaker to make that switch. Perhaps the writer had never heard it pronounced, and simply remembered seeing it someplace, then copied it from memory. Perhaps he or she wasn’t experienced with the English writing system and was just copying it from a menu (given that the posted shift schedules are in some variety of Chinese characters, this wouldn’t shock me).

There is another option, though. Maybe they’ve just got a crate of green beans out back that they’re looking to sell. Considering how good their green beans are, I think I’d definitely be interested in making an “a la crate” purchase.

A tongue-in-cheek response to my recent absence

2007-01-20T10:06:22-05:00

Hello everybody,

I’ve just finished the first week of classes here, so my apologies for the lapse in posting. However, there’s always more interesting language to explore.

This week, I was asked about the origin of the term “tongue-in-cheek”. For those unfamiliar with the term, it’s an adjective describing a thing or action as less-than-serious, or indicating that the speaker was kidding for a certain remark. Here’s an example of its use (involving a good deal more sexual harassment than one might expect) from the EnronSent Corpus:

oh, you don’t know the half of it. Look for baby #5 from the baby machine to be conceived by next x-mas. Oh, yeah! She has repeatedly dropped hints that she would like to have another one. Mark it down.

See my typical tongue-in-cheek response below.

“WOW! I’m sure you’re not having any pre-marital #$%! as to save that “special moment” until after the ceremony.”

Charming, no?

Moving on, it was surprisingly absent from my normal sources for etymology (the study of word origins), OS X’s built in dictionary, and my pocket etymology dictionary for Palm OS. However, Google (and by association, Wikipedia) prevailed: Origin of the term

The term first appeared in print in the book The Ingoldsby Legends by Richard Harris Barham, published in 1845. The author uses the term describing a Frenchman:

He fell to admiring his friend’s English watch,
He examined the face,
And the back of the case,
And the young Lady’s portrait there, done on enamel, he
Saw by the likeness was one of the family;
Cried ‘Superbe! Magnifique!’ (With his tongue in his cheek)
Then he open’d the case, just to take a peep in it, and
Seized the occasion to pop back the minute hand.

There you have it. Single paragraph that spawned a phenomenon.

Now, the curious part is why “tongue in cheek” means what it does. Here’s the only explanation I’ve found:

It’s believed that this saying was created by an English humorist in the 1800s. Most people have difficulty saying anything with their tongue in their cheek. But some people actually do stick their tongue against the inside of their cheek after saying a joke to show that they’re only kidding.

Personally, I’ve never seen anybody do that, but hey, whatever. If you’ve got a better idea why this means what it means, feel free to leave a comment!

I’ve got my own theory, though. Try talking with your tongue in your cheek. It didn’t work, but your attempt was likely funny to the people standing around you. See, tongue-in-cheek is funny.

The Seventh Seal has been opened, and soon, an army of "theirs" will be released to walk the Earth

2007-01-16T16:22:05-05:00

Not long ago, I discussed the increasing usage of “their” as a gender neutral English pronoun, as in “every student was on the edge of their seats during lecture.” I’d highly recommend you go back and read the original post if you haven’t, it really explains the issue more thoroughly.

In that post, I touched on my belief that “their” would soon be the de-facto gender neutral pronoun, and pointed to the fact that it’s on a billboard as a good sign. Well, I’m quite happy to say that I’ve got more evidence in favor of that. Generally, when a new generation (or those respected within that generation) begin using language in a certain way, acceptance to the mainstream isn’t far behind.

I’ve stopped using the facebook as some of their policies and alliances really, really creep me out. However, I recently spotted (while on a friend’s account) the following message in their creepy little “News Feed”:

Now, I understand their motivation, as they likely don’t even want to try guessing a person’s gender (or using their database to do so) for every update. However, the fact that they’ve used “their” rather than “his or her” is pretty interesting. Same situation as I discussed before, but much more blatant.

I hope that now that the Facebook is hailing “their” as an acceptable genderless possessive pronoun, more and more young people will start to pick it up and use it and its counterpart, “they”. Now we just need to get Snoop Dogg and Bill O’Reilly using it, and society will be all set. Hey, a man can dream, right?

So two professors walk into a bar...

2007-01-15T11:30:57-05:00

Lots of times, when I say I’m a linguist (at least, a linguist-to-be), people tend to think that’s synonymous with “Grammarian”. Next thing you know, people are trying to drop in “whom” and all sorts of obscure, eighth-grade-english-teacher grammar points. Although the attempts are flattering, it’s really not what we do.

I’ve touched on the difference between descriptivism and prescriptivism a few times before (here, here and here), but I think it’s time for a formal discussion of the differences.

So, two professors walk into a bar. One, from the English department at the local university, is a steadfast prescriptivist. The other, is a descriptivist from the local Linguistics department. As they’re sitting there, the people in the booth behind them begin talking.

Patron One: “Hey, ain’t that the prettiest little thang over there back behind the bar? I wonder where she came from!” Patron Two: “Wait, who’s you talkin’ about? Oooh, I see. She’s purty.” Patron One: “Aww, damnit. She just left with Wallace.”

The prescriptivist would hear that and think that their speech is “incorrect”. “Ain’t” ain’t a word, you can’t end a sentence with a preposition, and the second man should have said “Wait, about whom are you talking?”. To him, their language would sound grating, uneducated, and just “wrong”.

The descriptivist, on the other hand, would hear the conversation differently. He’d realize (if nothing else from the look of raw fury on his companion’s face) that the language used was outside of traditional grammatical rules. However, he wouldn’t say it’s “wrong”. Obviously, both men accomplished something through their communication, and there was a mutual understanding of what was said. The wording wasn’t painfully ambiguous, and overall, the utterance (linguist-speak for a bit of language) functioned just fine. Also, he might notice that “whom” wasn’t used even in the context where it historically has been, possibly indicating a fall from favor among this particular group of speakers.

If you have trouble remembering which is which, just look at the names. The descriptivist describes the language used, without judging it. The prescriptivist prescribes a certain pattern of language use (just like a doctor would prescribe a diet), and feels that deviations are “incorrect”.

Linguists, in general, lean towards being descriptivists, because the field of linguistics is largely dedicated to describing language. Your Grade school english teachers were likely prescriptivists (I’m sorry Mrs. F, but “a lot” will likely be one word by the time your great great grandkids are born). They’re just two different perspectives on language usage, and each has its place.

So, when you talk to a linguist, talk like you would to anybody else. We’re always listening to language, but we’re not judging. Let your prepositions roam free, and worry not about superfluous whom insertion. As long as we understand each other, it’s all good.

(As a parting gift of sorts, here’s my favorite joke on the subject.)

A young, college Freshman walks into the English department on his campus, clearly lost. He walks up to a old man in an open office.
Timidly, he asks “Excuse me, where’s the library at?”
The professor scoffs with distaste.
“Young man, if you’d like answers from me, I’d advise you never to end your sentences with prepositions.”
The young student stands back, thinking for a second, and then rephrases his question. “Where’s the library at, you old fart?”

Oh language, what can't you do...

2007-01-12T17:51:38-05:00

So, I stumbled across an interesting story on fark.com today (link requires totalfark subscription, as they decided not to publish this article). According to this article…

Knowledge of more than one language has been linked by Canadian researchers to a significant delay in the onset of dementia symptoms.

Fluency in two or more languages may be able to stave off cognitive decline because of the mental agility required to juggle them in day-to-day life, principal investigator Ellen Bialystok said.

“How you learn the language probably doesn’t make much difference; how good your grammar is probably doesn’t matter,” she said last night. “What matters is that you have to manage two complete language systems at once.”

According to this study, being bilingual or multilingual seemed to stave off dementia for an additional 4.1 years.

I think this is truly awesome. I’m a firm believer in language learning for fun and profit, but this is icing on the cake. I’d be interested to see if this increase in non-demented time showed up when you compared larger groups of, say, Midwestern Americans (generally painfully monolingual) with Europeans in mixed language areas.

Mind you, this isn’t the first time that the health effects of monolingualism have been discussed. A few years back, a French language school (in France) ran ads featuring the following (tongue-in-cheek) voiceover:

In Japan, very little fat is eaten, and the heart attack rate is lower than in the USA.
In France, a lot of fat is eaten, and the heart attack rate is lower than in the USA.
In India, very little red wine is drunk, and the heart attack rate is lower than in the USA.
In Spain, a lot of red wine is drunk, and the heart attack rate is lower than in the USA.
In Brazil, people have much more sex than in Algeria, and the heart attack rate in both countries is lower than in the USA.

In conclusion:
Eat.
Drink.
Have as much sex as you’d like.
What really kills you is speaking English.

So, get out there and learn another language, if you can. Just think, even if taking it drives you crazy for four years now, at least you know you’ll get four years of sanity back later. Ahh, the wonders of language…

The attack of the shapeshifting articles (now in HD)

2007-01-10T19:08:25-05:00

So, I’ve posted in the past about the difficulty of choosing “a” versus “an”. Generally, it’s not very difficult to decide. You use “an” before a word beginning with a vowel sound (“an enemy”, “an alley”) and “a” if the next word starts with a consonant sound (“a university”, “a shark”). However, this time, I’m stumped.

I was making a post today about Apple’s iPhone on a forum, and wanted to express my wish that they might install a hard drive in it to raise the capacity. However, it’s a fairly computer literate forum, so I was using the abbreviation for Hard drive (“HD”). So, I ended up with this sentence:

I hope that they’ll offer a version of it with __ HD next year.

The reason I’ve left the blank there is because I was stumped as to which article to use. If I expanded it to “Hard Drive”, I would use “a”, because “Hard” starts with a consonant. However, “HD” starts with a spoken vowel when said aloud (“aitch dee”) (loosely transcribed as /eit∫ di/), which would require “an”.

So, as a spoken abbreviation, it’s obviously “an”, but if the reader substitutes the full word, it uses “a”. This could happen elsewhere (“a(n) SQL server”, “an FAA regulation”), but seldom are the acronym and the real word as interchangable.

I’m stumped. I ended up cheating (“a larger HD”), but I’m curious what you all would do in this situation, if given the option to pick one or the other. This is an F’ing frustrating question. Wait… would that be “a F’ing”? I give up. :p

No one can check their grammar on billboards

2007-01-09T11:00:39-05:00

So, driving home today, I saw a billboard for Mel Gibson’s new ”Epic Snuff Film”, Apocalypto. The movie is apparently shot in Mayan (which is cool), and might even warrant me fast forwarding through it. However, what caught my eye was the tagline on the billboard:

No one can outrun their destiny

When I first read this, I felt a disturbance in the force as if thousands of English professors suddenly cried out in horror, and then were silenced.

“Their”, as used in the English of the past, is a plural possessive pronoun. Generally, it was used in sentences like “John and Clarissa stopped by to grab their pie dish” or “The girls all grabbed for their wallets”. This contrasts with the Singular possessive pronouns, “his” and “her” (“John saw his briefcase” and “Kathy hugged her penguin”).

“No one” is, in fact, a grammatically singular subject, which can be counterintuitive at first, because it refers to, well, everybody. We can check this with a simple sentence like “No one sees the purple frog”. Here, we use “sees”, the singular form, rather than ”No one see the purple frog” (Note that anasterisk before a word or sentence generally means that a sentence isn’t grammatically correct).

So, given that the subject of the sentence (“No one”) is singular, then technically, the possessive used should be singular as well. The tagline, as given, is grammatically incorrect, and if you ask an English major, should be changed to “No one can outrun his or her destiny”. (Read where Language Log discusses this phenomenon.)

This may be more “correct”, but frankly, I think this tagline is cause for celebration. A vast Linguistic party, with lots of books, dictionaries, and a big cake that says “Congratulations, English, on your new gender neutral pronoun!”.

Times are changin’

Languages are constantly changing. When a population needs something new from the language that they speak, they create it. Whether that means new words, new constructions, or new usage patterns, you can’t hold a language still.

Well, English has a new need. Due to modern political correctness, we can no longer say “No one can outrun his destiny”. Although the grammar itself is quite indifferent to the social treatment of gender, it’s true that women are excluded from groups in speech when you use “his” with universal statements. So, we’ve tabooed the “universal his”, but we’ve never had a good way around it. We can use the awkward “his or her”, but human lazyness and reluctance to say more than necessary makes this undesirable. There have been proposals to create gender neutral pronouns (the Spivak pronouns, for one), but they’ve never caught on.

However, as languages tend to do, it looks like English has grown around the problem, and, in spoken usage, the third person plural forms (them, they, their) seem to have sprung up to bridge the gap, at least in this case. Now, this suggestion won’t go over well with lots of prescriptivists (people who think that there is a correct way to speak, and grammar is set), but change is inevitable, and the fact that this construction could make it onto a billboard and be the tagline for a major movie is a good indicator of this direction.

It won’t happen overnight, and it won’t be “acceptable” for some time to come (there are already plenty of blogs trashing this tagline for its rebellion from conventional grammar). However, it will happen. In the same way that “whom” is gradually fading from use, this change will fade in. As one of my favorite quotes goes, “a grammarian trying to stop language change is like a gardener trying to stop continental drift”.

So, slowly but surely, the grammarians will give up, and English will finally have its gender neutral pronoun. When that day comes and the party happens, I’ll be right there at the front of the room, leading everybody in raising their glasses. See, isn’t that liberating?

Pronunciation kills: Use of Shibboleths in wartime

2007-01-07T19:38:59-05:00

I was Wikipedia surfing recently (drifting from page to page on Wikipedia), and I happened upon the page describing the idea of a “Shibboleth”. A Shibboleth, for those unfamiliar with the term, is a linguistic “dead giveaway” that can distinguish a member of one group from a person who isn’t. For an example, look at the term itself (explanation borrowed from Wikipedia’s Page on Shibboleth):

The term originates from the Hebrew word שבולת‎, which literally means “stream, torrent”.[2] It derives from a story in the Hebrew Bible, in which pronunciation of this word was used to distinguish members of a group (like the Ephraimites) whose dialect lacked an SH sound (as in shoe) from members of a group (like the Gileadites) whose dialect did include such a sound.

In the Book of Judges, chapter 12, after the inhabitants of Gilead inflicted a military defeat upon the tribe of Ephraim (around 1370–1070 BC), some Ephraimites crossed secretly into Gilead’s territory in an attempt to escape retribution. In order to identify and kill these disguised refugees, the Gileadites put each refugee to a simple test:

“And the Gileadites took the passages of Jordan before the Ephraimites: and it was so, that when those Ephraimites which were escaped said, Let me go over; that the men of Gilead said unto him, Art thou an Ephraimite? If he said, Nay; Then said they unto him, Say now Shibboleth: and he said Sibboleth: for he could not frame to pronounce it right. Then they took him, and slew him at the passages of Jordan: and there fell at that time of the Ephraimites forty and two thousand.” (Judges 12:5-6, KJV)

I can understand using these sorts of things to get a better idea of who you’re dealing with (or even for some friendly dialect mockery), but to kill somebody based on their pronunciation seems a little bit overboard. Apparently, it’s not though. The wikipedia site has a whole listing of Shibboleths used in War, including some very interesting examples. Apparently, the phrase “War Weapons Week” (followed by “Welmouth”) was used by British forces to distinguish Germans, who generally have trouble with the English “W”, often turning it into a V sound (“var veapons veek”).

Now, I can understand things like this to be a nice, quick and easy way of removing some initial doubt about the origins of a person. However, I can’t imagine it working as the main system of identification. Take, for instance, the “War, Weapons, Week” example. Yes, the English W is an uncommon sound, and it’s rather unlikely that a German foot soldier with little English training would be able to produce it.

However, it’s very important to remember that the vocal apparatus of a German speaker is no different than that of an English speaker. Human vocal tracts don’t vary across ethnic and social groups. The only reason most Germans can’t pronounce a W is because they’ve not been raised or trained to do so. This is the same reason that English speakers have a heck of a time with the Spanish trilled (or “rolled”) R. The basic lesson to learn here is that given enough time, dedication and training, a speaker of any language can learn to produce pretty much any sound. In fact, one of the things that you’re often tested on in Phonetics courses is your ability to pronounce sounds not found in your native language. Anybody can learn any sound, if they truly care to, so a shibboleth based on pronunciation is only as strong as the dedication of the person you’re testing. It’s also worth noting that Bilingual or multilingual speakers (who have spoken or been exposed to several languages since birth) can have good (if not perfect) pronunciation of more than one language and dialect.

So, it’s quite possible to have a false-positive, somebody who can say the Shibboleth without trouble, yet is still from outside the desired group. Also, I suppose it’s perfectly possible to have a person who is in the desired group, but has some sort of speech impediment or linguistic background which would prevent them from making the proper pronunciation.

Although it’s an interesting concept, and a good first step to identifying somebody, it’s vital to remember that a pronunciation-based test will never be 100% accurate. If you’re cutting people down because they mispronounce a word, you might be killing friends based on the slip of a tongue, and enemy linguists can walk all over you. Ninjas have nothing on us. :)

Theta and Eth, your new Phonetic Phriends

2007-01-05T16:28:48-05:00

I’m a big phan of phonetics (OK, I’ll stop now). Phonetics is the study of speech sounds, and how we make and hear them. One of the very first tasks when studying phonetics is to listen very closely to your native language, and start hearing the sounds that we ignore, can’t hear, or just never think twice about in our native language. This process can be really interesting, seeing the world of complexity in speech that we never quite notice in our everyday lives. To share a bit of this, I’m going to talk a little bit about two English distinctly different sounds that are usually considered to be one sound by Native Speakers: Theta and Eth

A Primer on Voicing

Before we discuss our new phriends, we have to talk a little about how we make some consonants. I’ve discussed the idea of “voicing” before, in my post ”Unaspirated T’s from the mouths of Babes”, but I think it might be helpful to review the idea and rephrase a little bit. In the above post, I recommended that readers do the following quick experiment to get a sense of what voicing means. Give it a try again, if you’d like:

Put your fingers on your neck (guys, find your adam’s apple) and say “Ahhhhhhhh”. You’ll feel a vibration. That’s your vocal folds vibrating to give the A its sound. Now, keep your fingers there and say “Dadadadadadadada”. You’ll feel your tongue moving, but the vibration will be pretty constant. Now, try “Tatatatatatatata”. This time, the vibrations will feel like they’re going on an off, off during the T, on during the A. This is because, as I said above, T is a “Voiceless” sound, and D is “voiced”. (If you’re still interested, try the same with “Kakaka” and “Gagaga”, as well as “papapa” and “bababa”).

“Voicing” in phonetics, is just a fancy word for when the vocal folds (a more accurate term for the “vocal cords”) are brought close together, so that when air blows between them, they produce a vibration, and thus, a sound. It’s just like if you press your lips together and blow out your mouth, your lips vibrate (slowly), and produce an (altogether different) sound. For videos and pictures of this (which is taken by a camera inside somebody’s throat, so maybe not for the squeamish), check out this site.

Just like in the above experiment, whether or not the vocal folds are vibrating while your mouth and tongue make the required gestures can be the only difference between two consonant sounds (sounds created by obstructing the airway, unlike vowels). That’s the only difference between “Ta” and “Da”, between “Ka” and “Ga”, and between “Pa” and “Ba”. So, keep this contrast of “voiced” versus “voiceless” sounds in mind as you read on.

A tale of two TH’s

Say “This thistle” a few times. Now, pay very close attention to the TH sounds at the beginning of each word. Put your hand on your Adam’s Apple (or equivalent area on your neck) while you say them. After a few tries, you’ll notice that, in the words of a friend of mine, the “TH” in “This” is “more buzzy”, or, put more scientifically, voiced. This sound, the TH in “This, That, The, There, Then, Those…”, is called an Eth (pronounced with a voiced, Eth sound). In the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), it has this symbol:

The TH in “thistle”, or “theater, theory, think, thought, throw, through…” is called a Theta, and is Eth’s voiceless counterpart (Theta is to Eth as T is to D). Theta’s IPA symbol is, shockingly, a theta, as shown here:

Aside from voicing, there is no difference between them. The sounds are produced with the tongue in the same position, the tongue is doing the same thing for both, and all the other various phonetic phactors (I couldn’t resist) are the same. The only difference between the the Theta and the Eth is vocal fold vibration, but what a difference it makes.

Your writing system is lying to you

Now that you’re listening for it, there’s (eth) a big difference between the two sounds, but chances are, you never gave them a second thought (theta). Personally, I blame the English writing system. Writing systems complicate our lives when we’re learning phonetics, and in fact, the English writing system is the main reason that most English speakers don’t know that there’s a difference between Theta and Eth.

“This” and “Thistle” are spelled with the same TH, and there’s never a situation where the two sounds are used in identical contexts (When you see a TH in a word, it’s always clearly one or the other). In fact, say this made-up word, “thaxis”. I’ll bet you made a “theta”, if you’re a native English speaker. We never read unfamiliar TH words with Eth, and new words with Eth are few and far between.

So, in our everyday life, there’s not much need to know the difference between these sounds. Between our writing system and the system of English Phonology (where and when sounds are used), we’re seldom given a contrast between the two.

So, Theta, Eth, meet your new friend. You’ll never look at “TH” the same way again. You don’t have to thank me when you catch yourself sitting at the dinner table, endlessly repeating a word to figure out if it’s Eth or Theta. Phonetics addiction is Phun, isn’t it?

My language is better than yours! Nyiii!

2007-01-03T13:27:42-05:00

I was just reading a post on LinguLangu which discusses the “Grammar-Translation” method of language teaching. It’s an interesting methodology, and not all bad (from what I’ve seen), but a particular tenet of the method described jumped up and bit me. (Keep in mind that this isn’t the feelings of the author of the original post, just a description of a mindset)

Literary language is superior to the spoken language. Student’s studies are limited with target language’s fine arts and literature.

Now, you must realize that saying “language X is better than language Y” is a truly heinous offense to me, and every time somebody says something like it, an angel’s lexicon loses a word.

No languages are better, “more complete”, “less complex”, or otherwise elevated above any other languages. Hold on, I’ll say that again. No languages are better, “more complete”, “less complex”, or otherwise elevated above any other languages.

Seriously. For a language to be used by a native speaker, it literally MUST be complete, in such a way that anything which needs to be expressed, can be expressed through some means. Even in the case of a pidgin (a newly-formed language created from elements of two or more other languages), when the first group of children are raised speaking only that language, they will fill in any holes in the grammar and make the language so it’s able to express anything one would need to. When a person is raised speaking a language, dialect, or sociolect, you can nearly guarantee that they’re speaking a fully functional language/dialect/sociolect.

Now, that’s not to say that there aren’t differences between the languages, and that some languages might not be easier in some areas. For instance, Russian has a nice, simple writing system, which is nearly phonetic (every letter represents the same sound, every time), but it has a very complex system of marking aspect (completion of an action). Similarly, Nuuchahnulth (Nootka) has a very nice way of ordering words and particles (morphemes) in a sentence, but the sound system is, to this English speaker, incredibly difficult and complex. Similarly, a language of South America might have more efficient words for describing rain, whereas another language might be more adept at snow description. However, different doesn’t mean anything is necessarily any better or worse.

So, this brings me to my final point: When people say nasty things about a language or dialect, they’re really saying nasty things about the people who use it. Mind you, I’m not talking about “language X has a complex sound system”, I’m talking about “language X is inferior to language Y”. No linguist worth his or her salt will ever tell you that a given language or dialect is “better” or “worse” than any other. That’s a social judgment, and it has nothing to do with the actual language or dialect. It really only shows the feelings of the speaker about the language’s users, and generally, it’s pseudo-intellectual snobbery.

Remember, any time you hear somebody disrespecting a language or dialect, it’s one of two things. Either the person talking really doesn’t know what they’re talking about, or they’re knocking the language because they’re not willing to knock the people who speak it. Sometimes it’s both. Either way, at that point, it’s best to drop the Linguistics knowledge, put away the reference grammar, and grab yourself a raincoat, because although it might sound like actual intellectual discussion, they’re really just throwing mud on the playground.

Be ware of uncoming care! (Site update and redesign in progress)

2007-01-02T21:08:53-05:00

Hello all!

As you’ve likely already noticed, I’m making some changes to the design of the site. As such, in the next few days, you might find the site to be temporarily down (or badly formatted) every once in a while. I encourage you to reload the page in a few minutes if you stumble onto the site during a bad moment, and you’ll likely find any issues fixed. Feedback on the site design is welcome, and nothing’s completely set in stone.

As always, I had to add a Linguistic subtext to the post. So, I lifted part of the headline text straight from this picture, showing a badly translated road sign. Isn’t it amazing what people can come up when they’re translating into a language they’re not familiar with? I just hope my future translation mistakes are as funny…

"C'est toujours la fête": a primer on Unnecessary French Syndrome

2007-01-02T09:10:32-05:00

Ladies and Gentlemen, I generally try and keep my posts both humorous and informative, but today, I’m afraid I must speak seriously about an up-and-coming issue which has already ransacked the world of American fashion and restaurant decor: Unnecessary French Syndrome.

The Symptoms

You may have experienced this terrible, terrible disease yourself. Have you every walked into a restaurant, only to see trite phrases like ”C’est toujours la fête” (‘it’s always a party’) framed and hung on the walls, with other French words stenciled at 10 foot intervals, ranging from “le rendezvous” to “le vin”? Have you walked down the street, only to see a young lady’s handbag prominently featuring a French phrase meaning ‘the cat is beneath the tea kettle’? If you’ve experienced these gratuitous, nonsensical uses of the French language aimed at creating pretense, then your life has been touched by this awful syndrome.

Generally, the syndrome is caused by the desire of an American business to fictitiously align itself with European Culture (or Couture). Once that desire is in place, some businesses choose to start using snippets of a European language (like French or Italian) in advertisements, menus, locations, or even on their products. These snippets, although incomprehensible to the vast majority of Americans (usually including the proprietor of the business), are presented as a means of gaining status, allying themselves with European Culture and elevating themselves above English speaking America.

The most disturbing aspect of this syndrome is that the French (or Italian) used doesn’t necessarily need to be grammatically correct (or even real). I’ve seen t-shirts that say ”J’ai Paris!” (‘I have Paris!’), probably intending ”J’aime Paris!” (‘I love Paris’). When I asked the wearers, they weren’t sure what it meant in the first place, confirming my suspicion that, really, it doesn’t matter what it says, so long as it looks French.
Another beautiful example of made-up words used for status is the Olive Garden restaurant’s catchphrase “Hospitaliano!”. I’m yet to find “Hospitaliano” in any Italian dictionary, and a Google search simply turns up references to the restaurant chain. So, it sounds like somebody just combined the English “Hospitality” and the Italian “Italiano”, then started throwing it on banners. Permissible, yes, but not responsible.

The Diagnosis

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t object to the use of foreign languages in American restaurants and clothing lines. I think that multilingualism aids in creating a healthier culture, and if anything, more people should be encouraged to learn foreign languages and use them even in American contexts (talking with American friends, for instance).

What irks me about Unnecessary French (and Italian) Syndrome is that it’s not actually anything to do with the languages themselves, but instead, simply a question of status. I suspect that I could write the French equivalent of “We have flaming porcupine my back pocket” on a designer t-shirt and sell it to the status crowd, and I’m not sure it would matter to them what it said, just that it’s in French. In these sorts of usages, the meaning is irrelevant, and the language used is really just a symbol worn by the people, roughly translated as ”I’m better than you”.

The Cure

So, in an effort to preserve these languages and keep them from becoming mere status symbols, I propose that we linguistically oriented citizens take action. Here are just a few steps you can take to help raise awareness of Unnecessary (Language) Syndrome:

* When you’re in an American restaurant which advertises with another language, uses it on the Menu, on the Walls, and on the napkins, order in that language if you’re able, or start asking for translations if you’re not.

* Feel free to translate slogans on T-Shirts for oblivious owners and inquire as to their meanings. If they’re going to wear a shirt, they should at least know that it means “My penguin is on fire in Paris”.

* If you stumble across a group of t-shirts with French writing on them, ideally in a High Couture type of shop, ask for translations. Then, ask if they have the same shirts in Spanish, because “I really don’t speak much French”.

* Ask people what their Chinese/Japanese tattoos mean. (Note, if you actually read the language of the tattoo, I don’t recommend telling them what it REALLY means when there’s a discrepancy. Ignorance is usually bliss, and tattoos are harder to remove than tacky shirts.)

Don’t be mean. Don’t be cocky. Remember that the store clerks are likely just as oblivious to the linguistic posturing as the average customer. Just make people think. We can fight Unnecessary French/Italian/Other Language Syndrome together! Allons-y!

… well, nobody’s completely immune.

Proving or disproving the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis in three steps: a quick and easy guide

2006-12-30T21:16:12-05:00

TheSapir-Whorf hypothesis is a blanket term for the idea that the grammar and lexicon of a person’s language subtly affects their thoughts and perspectives on the world. It’s a very hotly contested issue in modern Linguistics, and although the most extreme variations (the idea that language determines your thought) have been disproved through some pretty ingenious color studies, the more subtle varieties are still supported in some senses.

However, up until today, nobody has constructed a method to conclusively prove or disprove the idea of the language you speak affecting your thoughts (linguistic relativity).

The LinguisticMystic Method for proving/disproving the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, in three easy steps:

1. Find monolingual native speakers of Hopi and Mandarin Chinese

2. Find a skilled telepath, ideally one who can speak the same language as the researcher

3. If the telepath can read (and understand) the minds of the Hopi and Mandarin people, then complete determinism has been disproved. If he/she can read them and understand parts of it, yet notices differences, there might be some relativity going on. If the only difference between the two is the side of the room they’re sitting in, then I’d venture to say that Linguistic relativity is extremely weak or non-existent.

Actually, there’s some false advertising there. Only step one is easy, the others might just be impossible. With the right cash incentive (and a set of plane tickets), you could likely find a native speaker of pretty much any living language without too much trouble, but finding yourself a skilled telepath is far easier said than done. It’s not like you could just post a few flyers on campus (“Skilled telepaths wanted for research study! $$$$”) or check the Yellow Pages, and many people argue that no such people exist. In fact, the relative (or complete) lack of telepaths is the fatal flaw in this experiment’s design, and one of the many reasons that I myself haven’t submitted this to any reputable journals. However, it does underscore something that I’ve come to terms with throughout my study of the idea of linguistic relativity: without an impossible set of circumstances as in my experiment, it might not be possible to prove or disprove the idea, ever.

Why Sapir-Whorf may never be conclusively proved or disproved

Studying language’s effects on thought is a very troublesome area, because there are so many factors to control.

To begin, everybody views the world differently, and uses their language accordingly. For instance, my family is in the photographic printing business, so I’d likely be an extremely biased sample in a color chip study, due to my overdeveloped scrutiny of color. Similarly, there’s likely to be individual cognitive (and linguistic) quirks with every person, so really, there’s no neutral sample of a given language. You might be able to balance it out by performing the study with 150 speakers of a given language, but sadly, there’s nothing to average, much of it will be subjective.

Culture is also a complicating factor. Cultural beliefs and upbringing can have a profound effect on people’s views of the world, and in general, people sharing a given native language (or dialect) are likely to share a cultural background as well. So, you’re placed in the awkward spot of trying to decide whether a given effect is linguistic or cultural (or both). This gets into a “which came first, the chicken or the egg” type of debate that can derail an experiment pretty quickly.

Finally, there’s the issue of the experiment itself. You’re trying to study how people use language, without biasing them. However, you’re going to have to use language to explain the study and conduct the experiments. So, you’ll have to face the added complication of using a translator to pass on instructions, which may bias your participant right from the get-go. Also, keep in mind that, if there is some degree of linguistic relativity, it will likely be universal, and thus, the researcher will be affected by it too. Depending on the nature of these effects, a researcher studying this effect in another person might be like an inmate studying the behavior of fellow inmates. If we’re all looking at the same shadows, who can claim to be objective on their source?

Conclusion

Now, I don’t mean to say that it’s pointless to do research in this area. There are lots of really cool studies going on even now, and every little bit we learn about these effects (or their absence) is a Good Thing™. Although I doubt anybody will ever prove (or disprove) the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis beyond a shadow of a doubt, I’m less and less sure that we need to.

Humans have successfully lived with gravity throughout the history of our species, and only now are we starting to determine what it actually is. Similarly, if it exists, linguistic relativity has always been a force on us, and we’ve made do so far. There’s not really a way to escape it (that I can think of), so finding out more about it is a purely academic exercise. Knowledge is power though, and every little bit of knowledge about how humans function is a good thing.

However, if you do happen to see a Hopi speaker, a Mandarin speaker, and a telepath walk into a bar, keep them there and shoot me an email. I’ll put your name in my dissertation somewhere.

Eating crow: An English idiom and an example of its use in my personal life

2006-12-28T20:51:10-05:00

So, today’s post finds me in an awkward situation. I’m obliged to admit an opinion I’ve expressed earlier wasn’t, in fact, a smart one. So, in typical linguistic mystic style, I’ll couch it in a brief discussion of a delightful English idiom (an idiom is a set phrase with a certain meaning which might not be obvious from the words themselves). Today’s utterly applicable idiom is “To Eat Crow”.

For those unfamiliar with the expression, “To Eat Crow” (or “eating crow”) is an American English expression which refers to humbling yourself by admitting that a previously (and often strongly) stated opinion was wrong or incorrect. It’s roughly equivalent to the British expression “to eat humble pie” (colorfully discussed here). Now, here’s an example from this very blog to better show you the meaning.

A Brilliant Example of Crow Consumption

A few weeks ago, in my post “A Conditional Surrender”, I said the following:

I still don’t care for the Intel Chips, and would still love nothing more than a new line of PPC Macs, produced by Apple Computers, which would ideally be split off from Apple Music Sales™.

(and)

6) I will be allowed to maintain my prior sentiments that iTunes, Spotlight, iChat, and, most importantly, the Intel Switch, suck.

Why am I eating crow, you ask? Well… I’m currently writing this post from an Intel Mac (MacBook Pro), and quite frankly, it’s a wonderful machine.

Recently, our family business lost one of its laptop computers, the poor old Powerbook was cracked in half in a terrible stroller-folding accident. Because of this, I was given the opportunity to upgrade my machine and pass my old one down to replace the less-used machine. After doing some research, I realized that, even though the soul might be different, the Intel Macs have a lot going for them in terms of specs.

So, I upgraded to a 17” MacBook Pro, and have been very impressed. I’ve only run into a few bugs with the Intel software. (One is worth mentioning here: Praat’s amplitude bars don’t work during recording, but it still records. It’s a known issue in the Intel version, and the creator is working to fix it as soon as he can.) The performance gain is huge, and the software (front row and photo booth) is slick. The MagSafe adapter alone is worth the price of admission. Here’s the part where I eat crow: The Intel switch might not have been such a bad idea after all. It gets us better specs, more efficiency, and a whole new set of chip options. Yeah, the transition might have cost a little of the computer’s essence, but given the performance I’ve seen, it’s worth it. If you’ve got the cash to do so, upgrading to a MacBook Pro is definitely worth it. I was wrong, and you can disregard my previous knocks on the Intel Macs. (Note, however, that the iTunes Music Store still sucks. That’s not gonna change any time soon.)

How about the Idiom?

So, now that I’ve eaten my share of crow (purely for linguistic benefit, mind you), let’s discuss this beautiful idiom. Another wonderful example of conventional usage comes from a pet project of mine, the EnronSent Corpus:

enronsent24:33788:I’m back in the office today. Well I see you have to eat crow! I didn’t get a chance to watch the game but I saw CU play Kansas St. and CU looked good. I even think CU has a good chance of beating UT in Austin this weekend.

So, it’s mainstream enough to have been used in the emails of Enron employees. The next question, of course, it where the idiom came from. This article explains the origins as follows:

The origin seems fairly obvious: the meat of the crow, being a carnivore, is presumably rank and extremely distasteful, and the experience is easily equated to the mental anguish of being forced to admit one’s fallibility.

The author also gives a very inventive folk etymology (a story about the origin of a word created by people at large, which is usually just as colorful as it is wrong) for the expression involving two officers in the war of 1812, but then points out that the expression didn’t show up until the 1850’s, and even then, was in the form “to eat boiled crow”.

Wikipedia comes up with another wonderful etymology (explanation of the word’s origin) for the term:

Another possible connection comes from a short story by Rudyard Kipling. In his story ‘The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes’ Morrowbie Jukes falls into a place from which he cannot escape. Another man trapped there catches wild crows and eats them, but Morrowbie in his pride declares, ‘I shall never eat crow!’ After days of nothing to eat, his hunger and desperation finally forces him to do what he swore he would never do - literally eat crow.

However, I’m tempted to say that this is another folk etymology. If the first article is to be trusted, the expression first showed up in the 1850’s, and Rudyard Kipling was born in 1865. Unless he had a penchant for prenatal storytelling, the expression was likely not coined by him, although he may well have written it into a story.

Interestingly, my electronic etymology dictionary mentions the existence of a “Walter Etecroue” in the 1361 calendar of letter books of London. It also dates the expression’s first appearances to 1877 (when Rudyard Kipling was 12), so the Kipling hypothesis is still doubtful.

So, really, like so many other expressions and words, the origins of this idiom are lost. However, it’s still a great expression. Recanting a badly thought out belief is never pleasant for anybody, but I should really be more cautious then I am. I’m a vegetarian, and it wouldn’t do to be eating crow often. I wonder if Soy Crows count…

Unaspirated T's from the mouth of Babes

2006-12-27T21:40:21-05:00

Hello everybody. I hope you all had/are having/will have a Happy (insert holiday/festival/winter activity) here. Sorry for the recent lack of posts, but I hope to get back on the right foot today.

One of our good friends/employees has a one-year-old little girl, and since she frequently brings her to work, I’ve been able to watch her develop language, and as a linguist, phonetics nerd, and a person, this fascinates me. Recently, she’s been expanding her phonetic inventory (the number of sounds she can make). So, (with her mother’s blessing), I’ve been making a point of listening to the sounds she’s making, and making a number of non-English sounds around her, just to keep her mind open to new things.

Now, a confession: O Human Research Committee, I have a sinned against thee. I’ve been told that any linguistic study with participants under the age of 18 requires around 6 months of Human Research Committee meetings, so listening to the sounds that a baby is making must truly be a cardinal sin. Of that, I am guilty. I beg your pardon, and will duly start pushing papers your way if I every intend to do anything more serious than writing a blog post with the information gathered.

Anyways, today, I was bantering back and forth with the baby and we got into some mimicry (“Can you say Da Da?” “Da Da!”). She’s pretty good with voiced consonants (like B, N, M and D), but I still hadn’t heard her make anything voiceless (like a T, K, or P). Since she’s pretty good with “Da Da”, I started asking if she could say “Ta Ta”, because the only difference between the two sounds is whether your vocal cords (more accurately, vocal folds) are vibrating while your tongue is against the roof of your mouth (try it). At first, she just kept saying “Da Da”, but then, she slowly began to make what sounded to me iike a very a different sound, an Unaspirated T.

This isn’t a sound that most English speakers can distinguish (it’s not a phoneme in English), but it does happen from time to time in certain contexts, like the T in “stick” or “stop”. Most English just hear it as a “D”, and the only reason I can sometimes hear it is because I’ve done a fair amount of training and practice for my various phonetics classes. It’s different from both the English “T” and “D”, but in a very subtle way.

Aspiration 101

This is the part where you get to make fun sounds. Put your fingers on your neck (guys, find your adam’s apple) and say “Ahhhhhhhh”. You’ll feel a vibration. That’s your vocal folds vibrating to give the A its sound. Now, keep your fingers there and say “Dadadadadadadada”. You’ll feel your tongue moving, but the vibration will be pretty constant. Now, try “Tatatatatatatata”. This time, the vibrations will feel like they’re going on an off, off during the T, on during the A. This is because, as I said above, T is a “Voiceless” sound, and D is “voiced”. (If you’re still interested, try the same with “Kakaka” and “Gagaga”, as well as “papapa” and “bababa”).

Now, put your hand in front of your mouth and say “Ta”, then “Da”. Did you feel that puff of air with “Ta”? That burst of air, the momentary delay between the release of the tongue and the start of the voicing, is called aspiration (Wikipedia Link).

Here’s a little hand-drawn graph to help show what the little girl did that astounded me so (click to enlarge):

In the Aspirated T (shown on top) like we have in English “Tap” or “Tip”, the voicing (wavy line) doesn’t really kick in until after the puff of air you felt, so there’s a brief period of time where the tongue is ready to make the A sound, but without the vocal folds vibrating.

In the English D (bottom), like in “Deck” or “Dock”, the voicing is more or less constant, throughout the closure of the tongue.

In the Unaspirated T, the voicing kicks in the moment the T is released, with no delay (or “Voice Onset Time”). That’s why it sounds so much like a D to English speakers, we’re really used to hearing that puff of air.

If you’d like to hear the difference, go to this site featuring the Smalley Phonetics exercises and click 7.13. Listen to the file, keeping in mind that the sounds in the first half labeled Unaspirated are P, T, and K, no matter what they might sound like.

What use would an infant have for a Korean Consonant?

This may seem like a really, really picky distinction. However, it’s actually used in lots of languages. In Korean, for instance, they have different letters for each T/D sound (aspirated, unaspirated, and voiced), as well as for K/G and P/B. Thus, the difference between an unaspirated T and a D could be the difference between two completely different words (like “Cake” and “Bake” in English). Remember, just because we don’t have the distinction in English, doesn’t mean that it’s not important.

So, back to the little girl. It seemed as though she did in fact contrast what I’m pretty sure is an unaspirated T with D (“say TaTa” versus “say DaDa”), and it seems like she really does see the sounds as different. However, this was all lost on her mother (for whom I had to draw the above graph), and who thought that she was just saying “dada” for everything.

The beauty of language acquisition is that eventually, the girl will learn to Aspirate like the rest of the English speakers, and might even forget that she ever could do otherwise. For now, though, I’m going to be watching her voice onset time closely and with great interest.

Maybe I’ll post a followup when her aspiration arrives. If I don’t post anything else, you can just assume that the Human Research Committee got me and banished me to the land of meetings and paperwork. I just hope there’s internet access there…

Sun names Open Sourced Java "PhoneME"

2006-12-22T07:36:00-05:00

Alright, so, I might be a bit of a Linguistics nerd, but this caught my eye on Slashdot today:

“You can now get GPLed JVM sources from Sun. Everyone seemed to be expecting the desktop version (J2SE) but J2ME has been released first. It looks to be buildable for Linux x86, MIPS, and ARM platforms. Sun now calls it ‘phoneME.’ Enjoy.”

For those without the technical background, Sun Microsystems, who created the original code to the popular Java programming language (used by many applications and websites), has decided to release the source code to that language, making it usable for anybody. This is very cool, and will be a huge step for open source software. w00t for Sun!

What caught my eye, though, is the name: “PhoneME”, which is a recapitalization of ”Phoneme”, a linguistics term, indicating a group of sounds, which, although different in terms of sound and articulation, sound the same to a native speaker of a certain language (think the L’s in “People” and “Light”).

I’m not certain why they chose this particular name, but hey, whatever. Perhaps it’s a commentary on the fact that, although Java has many distinctly different libraries and implementation, all users view it as one thing. That, or maybe they just don’t have a clue what they did. Yeah, I’m gonna go with the second option there.

d00d, im riting dis post (or, a survey in E-Diolect)

2006-12-20T08:20:32-05:00

I have an instant messaging (IM) problem. I’m always on AIM or Yahoo Messenger, and pretty frequently, I’ve got a few different “conversations” going at once. It’s a great method of communication, but there are a few difficulties inherent to the medium. Perhaps the most frequently exploited difficulty (at least, among the young and drama-prone) is the fact that you never can be 100% sure that the person talking to you is who they say they are. However, there’s one, frequently overlooked means of partially overcoming this trouble.

E-Dentity Theft

First, let’s introduce some terms, this time, from Cryptography. In cryptography examples, they frequently use a short list of recurring characters. Alice and Bob are two people trying to communicate a secret message with one another. Alice wants the message to get to Bob and only Bob. Eve is a third party, trying to break into their communications and read that message (A truly great cartoon involving Eve). So, for our examples here, Bob will be trying to get in touch with Alice, and Eve will be trying to get information from them.

Every messenger service has some safeguards (usually passwords) to try and make sure that unauthorized people don’t get on your account. This will keep Eve from signing on at her home computer and pretending to be Alice. However, once Eve has physical access to Alice’s machine, this breaks down. If Alice runs down the hall to use the restroom, closing her existing conversation, Eve can sit down and start a conversation with Bob. At this point, Bob is completely vulnerable, as he still thinks he’s talking to Alice, and will share information as such. There might be a warning sign, though.

E-Diolect

Some while back, I discussed the idea of Idiolect, or the patterns of usage, meaning, and sound that are specific not just to a group, but to a single individual. In spoken language, this might be expressed by specific turns of phrase (for instance, I’ll say “w00t” in conversation) and sound changes (I usually put a slight hint of “L” in the words “walk” and “talk”).

However, people tend to have an online idiolect (I prefer E-Diolect) as well. In email, some people tend to include a full “Hello Alice” at the start of every email, and end with a “Love, Bob”. Others will just type out the message with no formalities at all. Similarly, when quoting a message, some will split the quote with their responses, and others will just respond at the top, and leave the quote at the bottom.

Over Instant Messager services, the E-Diolect really shows up nicely, and tends to express itself in many different ways:

1. Emoticons (“Smilies”): Does the person use them at all? If so, which ones? It’s rare that people will use all the different ones available, and most people stick to a comparatively small set. That set can be used to identify them. Also, do they make the smilies using an ”=” or a ”:” [“=)” or “:)”]?

2. Capitalization: I capitalize pretty obsessively in IM, whereas other people will never hit the shift key. Some are a mix, capitalizing “I” and some names, but never the first letter of a new thought/sentence. aLsO, sOmE pEoPlE are prone to varying their capitalization.

3. Contractions: sum ppl r rly obsessd wit makin cntractns on im. wut bout ur friendz? (Some people will use only specific ones (like “brb” (be right back) or “ppl” (people).

4. 1337-5p34k: Pronounced “Leet Speak”, a sociolect in which people replace certain l3tt3r5 with numb3r5, among other changes. (Check out the 1337 translator)

5. Line break habits: Some people put line breaks/between every/other word, just/hitting return as/they go/writing in a/stream of/consciousness. Others prefer long messages.

6. Correction: When somebody sends a typo in IM, do they correct it? If so, how? Do they just retype the word? Do they usually put a *star in front of it?

7. Actions: When expressing taking an action via IM, some people will put it in stars, others use IRC markup (/me writes a post), and some even ~*~get creative~*~.

8. Punctuation: Few people use periods (.) in IM, but question marks and commas aren’t uncommon, everybody has their habits.

Applied E-Diolect Studies

So, Eve is on Alice’s computer. Bob gets a message:

cryptogeekalice: hey bob, wut did u get eve 4 xmas
cryptogeekalice: i want 2 know so i dun g3t her teh same thing ;P

If Bob paid attention, he’d quickly notice that Alice capitalizes, hates contractions, never uses any smilies but :) and :D, and uses Question marks. He’d smell a rat, and likely withhold any information about Santa-related activities.

However, it’s not always that easy. Eve might know Alice’s style too, and try and make some adaptations. However, it takes a lot of observation and skill to mimic somebody online in all of the above factors, while still maintaining a natural, conversationally believable tone. Finally, Eve will have to mimic Alice’s communicative style, making sure not to use her own catchphrases, conversational norms, and other such things.

The last words

Bob and Alice are never really safe. With enough research, observation, and planning, Eve will be able to imitate either of them, and it would be very difficult to detect without a webcam or some biometric device. However, a little observation and awareness of E-Diolect goes a long way towards discouraging Eve and people like her from engaging in a little bit of E-Dentity Theft.

"EMINEM!", or, a brief foray into psychology

2006-12-19T20:46:49-05:00

This post contains some objectionable language. That’s the nature of the beast when discussing graffiti, but still, keep that in mind.

Perhaps I have too much free time, but I’m starting to realize that senseless graffiti is truly fascinating. However, I take heart in the fact that I’m not alone (for my Linguistics in US Society class, one paper option was to write about bathroom graffiti on campus). I’ve written two other posts about it already (here and here), and the more I look around, the more interesting examples I see. However, last week, I saw something that really, truly threw me.

I had the occasion to be at a moderately sized Lutheran Church helping with an event, and, as humans tend to do, I used the restroom. No place is sacred to the bathroom graffiti artists, as there was one etching on the inside of the stall door, the word “EMINEM!”.

What struck me was that, well, this was incredibly tame for stall door graffiti. On campus, generally there’s never an etching without at least one swear word, and generally, the subject matter is either political (F— LIBERALS!), sexual (YOU F— MEN!) or Drug related (F—ING LEGALIZE IT!). However, “Eminem”, the name of a popular American rap artist, is really none of those.

That led me to search for a link. On campus, the bathroom walls seem to be a sounding board for what people are thinking, but forbidden to say in public. So, you get all sorts of confessions (“I had sex with a man last night” in a men’s room), random uses of profanity (“F— you s—headed f—ing s—s!), unpopular opinions (any variety of hate speech and insults), political extremism (“Liberals should all go die!”), and talk of other societally forbidden subjects (”smoke the pot!”).

Then, it occurred to me, to a young, churchgoing boy, the mere thought of liking and listening to Eminem is an unpopular thought, and a subtle rebellion. Really, the boy carving “Eminem” in a church wall is no different than the college student carving “Smoke pot!” in the library study area, it’s just a different forbidden fruit.

My mind then jumped back to a recent retreat I went to, hosted at a YMCA camp. There, on the bottom of the bunk bed, was a series of scribbled graffiti, ranging from “Alex + Sarah = Luv!” to (really) “I just pooped on the bed”. Once again, forbidden subjects of the age group that might be prone to staying there.

So, I’m not a psychologist, but I think there’s a pretty obvious pattern, where, given a certain age group, the graffiti will pertain to the subjects which are forbidden in open discussion.

The next step, of course, is to find new age groups. So, if you’re acquainted with the graffiti in a day care center, corporate office, or retirement home, I’m interested to hear about it. I just wonder if, in the bathroom in the Linguistics department at UC Berkeley, there’s a hastily written note carved into the door, saying “Chomsky is right!”

Software you need to buy for OS X: Commercial and Shareware

2006-12-16T21:35:53-05:00

This post is now ridiculously out of date, but it’s kept around for archival purposes. Enjoy!

Hello again everybody! As promised, here’s the followup to my list of Open Source software you need to download for OS X.

I love Open Source Software, I really do. It’s good stuff, and most of the time, you’ll find what you need without paying for code. However, there are some software titles for the Mac that, frankly, are worth every penny. Also, it’s worth noting that although some of these are by large groups or corporations, lots of them are independent developers, so for those, Piracy just isn’t cool. Rest assured that anything that makes this list is, in my mind, worth every penny.

Note, I’m not getting a kickback on any of these links or programs. I just want to share some of the software I use that makes my life better.

The Grand Prize: LaunchBar ($19.95 for Home Users)

This is the first thing I install when I wipe my drive. Because of this, I can have a 2 icon dock, and just call up the obscure applications I don’t use often with a few keystrokes. In addition, it learns, based on your past habits, what you’re looking for with a given keystroke, and brings that up first. Add in the excellent iTunes search capabilities, and this software is worth every penny. Update: I’ve now moved over to Alfred

The Other Grand Prize: Mellel ($49.00, $35 for Students and Educators)

This is the single best Multilingual word processor in existence for OS X. Support for right to left as well as left to right writing, different languages, all sorts of obscure typesetting, and character style settings you’ll never know you need, Mellel’s got it all. Linguists, you’d better be buying this, there’s nothing better for writing grammars and making complex tables/glossed examples. Now with an XML format, for more document portability. This is what Office for Mac wishes it was. Great stuff. Update: I’ve now moved to LaTeX for word processing.

The Third Grand Prize: Escape Velocity: Nova ($30.00) (No Universal Binary, Windows version available)

My vote for one of the greatest computer games ever. Great gameplay, great stories, and a really addictive experience. Prepare to sacrifice hours to this game, but know that it’s worth it. Also, if you do get it, look for a “Return to Earth” mission for the single most creative storyline ever. Great language use, too, discussed here.

The Runner Up: TextMate (€39)

Great for programming, great for TeX, great for just plain plaintext. If you’re CompSci, a programmer, or just somebody who messes around with scripts and files, the context highlighting and advanced features will make this worth your while. Also, it just works, and elegantly, at that. Worth every penny of the (admittedly large) price. Update: I’ve now moved over to the free and open source Textmate 2).

Other Recommendations (in no particular order):

Apple’s Keynote Software ($79, with blech Pages)

Imagine if Powerpoint were Mac-friendly, well supported, and just plain beautiful. Powerpoint can do everything Keynote can, but Keynote does it with style. Combine with Mellel and NeoOffice to eliminate your need for Office altogether. Keynote’s worth paying the Apple Tax. (Of note, I wouldn’t recommend “Pages”, Apple’s attempt at a typesetting program, if it weren’t included in the bundle with Keynote. It’s just a bit clunky, and not quite good enough at anything to be worth it alone).

The Missing Sync for PalmOS ($39.95)

Got a Treo/Lifedrive/Tungsten/Other Palm device? Got a Mac? Good. Now, throw out the CD that came with your device, and download Missing Sync. It integrates with Address Book, iCal, iTunes and more. Also, it lets you easily perform a Bluetooth sync with supported devices (press a button, and your phone and computer will sync from your belt). It’s really an incredible program, and handles everything Palm’s software does, except, you know, well.

Transmit 3 for OS X ($29.95)

This is, hands down, the best FTP/SFTP client for OSX. Compatible, easy, slick, and full featured, Transmit makes FTP a pleasure. This was one of the programs I really missed on Linux. If you do lots of FTP, this is what you’ve been searching for.

VoodooPad ($29.95)

Want to make your own Wiki for your everyday life? This is a great way to do it. Organize files, documents, and even pictures in Wiki form, with easy exportability and lots of great features. They’ve updated it since I got my license, so I’m sure it’s only gotten better.

Command and Conquer Generals Deluxe Pack ( $54.00)

It’s a guilty pleasure, and a great Mac port.

Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic ( $44.00) (No Universal Binary)

A great game with great graphics and an engaging storyline. A must for any Star Wars fans.

Conclusion:

Take a look at these programs, and see if they look right for you. As always, your mileage may vary, and although I hope you love them as much as I do, everybody’s got a different style. Many of these products have demos, so try before you buy. Take this with the appropriate grain of e-salt, and enjoy!

Followup: Personalized Verb Examples submitted by loyal readers

2006-12-16T17:03:39-05:00

We have some submissions from myearlier thread which discussed the Verbing of website names. In that thread, I asked for examples of a person’s name going directly to a verb in English (like “To google”, but with a person’s name). Well, some astute readers have shed light on a few examples.

The first is “to Merkle”, provide by PsyMar:

I finally came up with one. It’s been out of fashion for a while, but “Merkled” was a verb for a while meaning either “to make a bone-headed mistake” or “to not arrive”, depending on who you ask, but it was named after New York Giants baseball player Fred Merkle.

The second, and one I’m now kicking myself for not remembering, is “To Bogart”, submitted by personshaped (whose name links to his rather cool language blog):

Here’s one that’s still in common use. “to Bogart” is a verb whose general sense is to hog, or take more than one’s fair share of something. It derives from actor Humphrey Bogart, though how its sense is related to the actor or popular perceptions of him, I’m not sure.

Now, I believe I do know the origins here, or at least a decent folk etymology. My impression is that this term originated in the Marijuana-smoking culture of the 60’s and 70’s, and then, referred to somebody who would, when smoking a joint (marijuana cigarette) in a group setting, smoke most of it on their own without passing. The term “to bogart” originated because Humphrey Bogart, in his films, is usually depicted either holding a cigarette or with it hanging in his mouth, but seldom smoking it. So, somebody always holding on to something, even when others are waiting, is bogarting, a perfect example of the sort of Name -> Verb transitions I had asked for.

So, thanks Personshaped and PsyMar! For anybody else out there who might have an example, send it in. Because, I mean, dude, don’t bogart the lexicon, man.

The day digg dugg fark and fark farked digg (Yes, that is a grammatical sentence)

2006-12-13T11:10:30-05:00

So, today was a semi-interesting day in the online world with some very interesting language used. First, some background.

The Background

digg.com is a website that links to other sites, based on user voting. So, if there’s a new, cool site submitted by a digg user, digg will post a link to it, and if there are enough votes, it’ll make the digg frontpage.

Similarly, fark.com is a site which posts user submitted news items (strange and mainstream), as well as other cool sites, all with comedic, user-submitted headlines. As a disclaimer, I am a Farker (one who dwells on Fark), so I might have some bias here.

One thing these two sites have in common is their tendency to flood (and sometimes take offline) the sites that they link to on the main page. They both have a massive readership, and when something is linked on either the fark or digg mainpage, thousands of visitors will be clicking the link and viewing the site. If a site has an older, less capable server, sometimes the server can get overloaded (imagine trying to carry on a conversation with 50 people at once), and the site will cease to be viewable by anybody.

The fascinating language use here comes from the fact that the site names are used to describe this flooding effect. When digg links to a site on its mainpage and floods it with people, the receiving site is said to have gotten “Dugg”. Similarly, if Fark links to a site and takes it down, the site is said to have been “farked”.

Well, today, digg dugg fark, and then fark farked digg. These two, high traffic sites fired salvoes of readers at each other. Due to their robust servers, managed to both stay alive and healthy (so perhaps neither site was dugg nor farked), and the event itself was rather trivial, but the language use is still fascinating.

Verbing in the Virtual world

It’s not uncommon on the internet to have a site name get “verbed”, or turned into a verb indicating a particular function. Perhaps the most common example is “to google”, referring to looking up a phrase, person, or idea using an online search engine (interestingly, in modern usage, one could now “google” something on yahoo.com, much to google’s disdain). Another example, also describing the effect of a traffic surge is “to slashdot” a site, where a site is linked on slashdot.org. I’ve also seen examples of “to netflick” or “to netflix”, referring to ordering something through netflix.com. So, sites’ names are fairly frequently used as verbs which refer to the main service of the site.

Verboten in reality

(I’m sorry, I couldn’t resist the crosslinguistic pun)

What struck me, though, was the lack of this with non-virtual names in English. I asked a small group of people, and none of them could come up with an example of a person’s name which has become a verb indicating the action for which they are known. There are constructions that let us do that (“I heard he pulled a Kurt Kobain after getting the results”, pardoning the morbid example), and there are some people who are really only known for a single action (when I say “Monica Lewinsky”, you’re not going to be thinking about her current contributions to society). There are also examples where a person’s name can be placed on an object, and then transferred to an action and verbed (“Yeah, I hear he molotov’ed her car”, referring to a Molotov cocktail, named after Vyacheslav Molotov, a Stalin era soviet leader). However, I still can’t think of a person’s name going directly to a verb in English. If you find one (or know about this happening in other languages), leave a comment below, and I’ll post it up with credit to you.

Regardless, I think it’s time that I claimed my verb for Linguistic Mystic. I propose that, from this day forward, “to lingmystify” shall indicate my confusing the owner of obscure, language-related sites by linking to them and causing a sudden influx of around 10 or 15 hits. It might not be in anybody’s dinner conversation anytime soon, but hey, I’ll be one of the elite few who have their own verbs. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

EDIT: Check out this post for some reader submitted examples!

Your brain is lying to you: The McGurk Effect

2006-12-12T07:34:48-05:00

Here at LinguisticMystic, I do my best to post things of interest to everybody, not just linguists. So, in the interest of wider public appeal, I’d like show off one of the stranger things to ever come out of research in Phonetics and Psycholinguistics: The McGurk effect.

Before I talk any further, you should get a demonstration. Watch the following short video, with your sound turned on. First, watch it a few times, and decide what the man is saying. Then, shut your eyes and re-play the video a few more times, with your eyes closed through the whole movie.

The Video: The McGurk Effect Demonstration

Kinda freaky, huh? When you watched it with your eyes open, you likely heard “Da Da” (or something similar). However, when you shut your eyes, he was clearly saying “Ba Ba”.

This effect is caused by the fact that in conversation, we frequently watch the other participants’ mouths moving, just to reinforce what’s being said. Generally, this works relatively well (just ask somebody who can read lips), but here, the makers of the video are messing with us a bit. The sound is a recording of the speaker saying “Ba Ba”, but the video shows him making the mouth and lip movements for “Ga Ga”. When presented with this conflicting data, some strange little loop in the brain of 98% of adults merges the two, giving us the final perception of “Da da”. This effect was first described in a paper called “Hearing lips and seeing voices”, by Harry McGurk and John MacDonald.

Truthfully, I don’t quite understand how this works, and I’m sure there’s a whole bevy of psycholinguists working on that as we speak. However, it’s a really cool effect, and it underscores the idea that what we perceive can be affected by other factors beyond our control.

So, really, I don’t have to post any interesting content here. I’ll just post boring stuff, and then make it look like it’s REALLY cool. That way, your brain will average it out. Or, you know, not. Yeah, probably not. Worth a try, though.

For more information on the McGurk effect, visit:

http://epsych.msstate.edu/descriptive/crossModal/mcgurk/index.html

http://www.media.uio.no/personer/arntm/McGurk_english.html (Includes Higher resolution versions of the above video)

http://homepage.ntu.edu.tw/~karchung/Phonetics%20II%20page%20seventeen.htm

Software you need to download or buy for OS X: Free and Open Source

2006-12-10T09:04:37-05:00

This post is now ridiculously out of date, but kept around for archival purposes. Enjoy!

Hiya everybody. Ever since my recent conversion/unconversion, I’ve been especially mindful of the different software available on OS X. Well, here’s my guide to the best of the best, the software that I can’t (or don’t want to) live without. For today, the free stuff!

Free or Open-Source Software for OS X:

Adium X (http://www.adiumx.com)

Free and Open Source, this is the best IM client for OSX, period. Unlike iChat, it supports AIM, Jabber, Yahoo, MSN, and even more services you’ve never heard of, and the interface is much nicer. A gem of the Open Source Mac community.

The Charis SIL Font

A free, beautiful, and complete International Phonetic Alphabet (and more) font. Good stuff.

Firefox 2.0 (http://mozilla.com)

It might not be the fastest browser available, or the most OSX-like, but it’s still my pick. Combine it with extensions like CookieCuller, AdBlock Plus, and DownThemAll, and you’ve got a great, vastly compatible browser.

Freemind (http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page)

A good piece of mind mapping software. It takes some getting used to, but once you do, you’re golden.

IPA-SIL Keyboard Layout for OSX (http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&item;id=ipa-silkeyboard)

A free keyboard layout for OSX that allows you to type in the International Phonetic Alphabet. Very good stuff.

iStumbler (http://www.istumbler.net/)

Software for finding open wireless networks. Not that you’d ever do that.

MplayerOSX (http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/18580)

Mplayer is a great piece of software on Linux, and the OSX port isn’t bad either. It’s necessary for playing most .avi files and some exotic Mpeg files. Not perfect, but free and necessary. Pair it with VLC and Flip4Mac to be able to open damned near any movies you come across. Make sure to use Version 1.0x as opposed to 2.x. These are two different versions of the software, and 1.x is far more recent and updated. It’s also universal.

NeoOffice (http://neooffice.com)

Repeat after me: “I do not need Office for Mac”. This is great FOSS software, a port of OpenOffice.org that really takes advantage of OS X’s features. I’ve not had a copy of Office installed for at least 5 years, and I’ve never been happier.

Onyx (http://www.titanium.free.fr/pgs2/english/onyx.html)

Free, easy system maintenance software for OSX.

Praat (http://www.praat.org)

Phonetics software, with a very functional OSX port. It’s even universal. A bit niche, but if you’re analyzing speech, there’s none better.

Tofu (http://amarsagoo.info/tofu/index.shtml)

Sooner or later, everybody stumbles upon a 500 page plaintext document that they really want to read. Tofu is designed to do just that. It formats the text in a nice font of your choosing, on the “paper color” of your choosing, with single or multi-column display. It even replicates page turning. It’s a niche tool, but it does a great job of it. 2.0 (coming soon) will be universal.

TinkerTool (http://www.bresink.de/osx/TinkerTool.html)

Tinkertool lets you change little hidden preferences within OS X, some of which can be handy. Font size, finder prefs, etc. Ever wanted to have your dock in the lower right or lower left corner of your screen? This is the way to do it. Just don’t go crazy with it.

UnRarX (http://www.unrarx.com/)

This is a great little piece of software that opens RAR archives, and does it damned well. Support for multi-part files, password protected RAR’s, and lots of other little small things. Most importantly, though, it makes the overzealous and buggy Stuffit Expander even less necessary.

Vienna (http://www.opencommunity.co.uk/vienna2.php)

A FOSS RSS reader. RSS (Really simple syndication) is a way to let people watch your site, without visiting it manually. Vienna is a free reader for the RSS format, and is already a great piece of software that can only get better from here.

Conclusion!

So, check out these programs if it sounds like you’ve got a need. If you’re looking for something else, check out OpenSourceMac. In a few days, I’ll post my list of commercial software that’s worth paying for on OS X. In the mean time, enjoy the free world, and have a good day!

sudo enjoy /this/post

2006-12-08T07:43:46-05:00

So, the good people at XKCD.com, in addition to ripping on Computational Linguists, make some very funny comics. Today, I’d like to briefly discuss one of my favorites (Re-Hosted here, as to not steal bandwidth.):

This is purely magnificent, and it has some analogues in human language. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the joke, here’s a brief explanation.

“sudo” in Unix-based computer systems stands for “Superuser Do”. When you’re using a Unix system, lots of files have complex permissions (so that people can’t do things that they’re not supposed to), and your everyday user account isn’t be able to edit all the files on the computer. If you need to run a command, but don’t have permission, you type sudo , and then enter the computer administrator’s password (if you have it), and then it’ll do the command. This is a double-edged sword, because the computer will let you do ANYTHING, even things that will break, hurt, or destroy your operating system. So, the whole operation will look like this:

$ touch /bin/newcommand
touch: /bin/newcommand: Permission denied
$ sudo touch /bin/newcommand
Password: adminpassword
$

So, sudo is just a way of saying “I have the authority to do whatever I please, so DO IT!”. (See, I told you the comic was funny). However, it’s also a bit closer to human language than one might initially think.

The assertion of authority through speech is a pretty common act, and I’ll bet that several Sociolinguists are quivering with joy at the mere idea of discussing it (and they’re welcome to email me something to post, if they’d like). Just think about how frequently somebody “changes your mind” based simply on intimidation, or a reminder of their authority in your life. Take, for example, this interaction:

Mom: Honey, could you clean your room?
Son: No, I want to play nintendo!
Mom: I’m your mother, do as I say, Jimmy!
Son: (starts cleaning)

If that’s not a sudo clean /rooms/jimmy, what is? However, it can be even more subtle:

BOSS: Carol, would you write up a quick report for me on the Jenkins account?
CAROL: Well, I just clocked out.
BOSS: Oh, alright, but I think that doing this report might be helpful for your end-of-year report.
CAROL:.. Did I say “clocked out”? I meant “admired your hair”

See, sudo write ~/thereport. However, very, very seldom (outside the military or a gun-to-the-head situation) will the authority of one person in an interaction be absolute as in the Unix example. Generally, people retain much more free will and will question obviously bad commands (”Carol, light me on fire or I’ll dismiss you”), so there’s not the same degree of mindless obedience.

Finally, just like in Unix, it’s a bad habit to append “sudo” to everything, even if you are an administrator. In computers, it’s usually unnecessary (the average person won’t need to do this), and it’s very easy to make a typo as a superuser and erase/mess up things you didn’t mean to. If you’re not sudo’ed, the computer will stop you before you do too much damage. As the message says the first time you run sudo, “with great power comes great responsibility”.

In human interaction, “sudo-ing” a conversation is something you never want to do unless it’s unnecessary. Imagine ”Carol, give me 3 sheets of copy paper or I’ll fire you right now” as an initial request? Sure, it’d work, but really, pulling rank like that is damaging to your interpersonal relationships, so you should save it for when you really, really need to.

So, I hope you enjoyed this post, and will come back to read again. If that doesn’t work, sudo read -again linguisticmystic.

I knew you’d see things my way.

Language in Gaming, Part One

2006-12-06T08:42:21-05:00

So, as many of you might have already guessed, I’m a bit of a nerd from time to time. Well, that’s a slight understatement, but regardless, as a nerd, I’m a fan of video gaming in general. So, for today, I figured I’d talk a little bit about the different ways that different languages are used in video games.

Right now, in-Game languages are usually rather disappointing to a Linguist.

For instance, in Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, the main character interacts with a variety of different human and alien species on a variety of planets. Although most interaction with humans (and a few specific non-human characters) takes place in English with actors reading lines, when an alien speaks, a soundbite of their “language” is played and a subtitle is shown on the screen. Now, this is cool, and the fact that every species that speaks has a different and recognizable sound and sound system in those soundbite is a really cool thing. However, it’s literally just two or three soundbites. So, every time your garden variety Twi’Lek speaks, one of the two or three twi’lek soundbites is played, no matter what’s being said and who’s saying it. So, although the Twi’Lek language in KOTOR has a sound system, there’s no actual grammar.

In game languages can get more complex, though. In Ambrosia Software’sEscape Velocity: Nova, they have a slightly different philosophy. Although all communication is through text, they’ve managed to work some interesting language use in. There are several species living in the same galaxy, and the naming of both the planets and the ports on them is usually reflective of the language of the species. Looking at a Galactic map, one can pretty easily distinguish the different governmental regions of control just by the planet name. For example, The Polaris (in purple) generally have names with a single syllable, an ” ’ “, and a cluster of syllables, whereas the Wraith (grey, at the top of the map) name their planets with a syllable, a ” ’ “, a capitalized orthographic vowel, ” ’ “, and a syllable cluster.

However, the really interesting stuff happens when you look more closely at the Polaris planets and personal names in EV Nova. In the game, they are explained as having Five Castes. If you learn the different castes and the naming system, then just by looking at the map, you can tell instantly which of the castes controls a given system, which offers a huge gameplay advantage. Say, for instance, you needed to purchase an armor upgrade. Knowing that military hardware is sold by the Warrior caste (the Nil’Kemoria), you could look at the map for the nearest system prefixed with “Nil’” indicating warrior caste control, and go there. Similarly, it’s easy to determine where to go for cheap medical supplies (at the Healer caste planets, with ”P’“). So, learning elements of the Polaris language in EV Nova is a boon to the gamer, and I applaud the folks at Ambrosia for taking the time to actually make something (no matter how small) out of the language, rather than just leaving it as creative gibberish.

Some games have interesting language features that aren’t even meant to be interesting. In Star Wars: Jedi Knight, Jedi Academy they have the wonderful option to have all dialogue, interface features, and subtitles in English or Spanish. Being a language nerd, I usually leave it set to Spanish. The translations are very good in general, with only a few comical aspects. Notable among them is the fact that Jedi, pronounced “Jed-eye” in English, is pronounced “Yed-ee” in the Spanish version). It’s also quite funny to see a Rodian speaking Spanish, with the distinctive Rodian pitch and filter.

So, oftentimes, games (especially in Sci-Fi and fantasy) will give a nod to the existence of non-human language, but very seldom will they actually go through the trouble to make that language into more than just background noise. However, those games that do choose to utilize some variety of actual, meaningful created language create a unique experience for the gamer, and deserve commendation.

These are just a few salient examples from the vast world of gaming. If you’ve got another example, leave a comment or send me an email and I’ll give it mention, or, if you’re space-travel enabled, just stop by Ling’angma, home planet to the Linguist caste. You might not want to bring any grammarians, though.

Also: If you look at the sidebar on the main page, you’ll notice I’ve added a new feature, the Link of the Moment. This is just a random language, life, or computing link that I’ve found interesting and bookmarked here. It changes every time you refresh the page, so come back often. :)

The Perils of English Spelling

2006-12-04T08:31:30-05:00

The English spelling system is far from perfect, as anybody who was ever “hooked on phonics” will tell you. Letters are far from having a one-to-one correspondence with sounds (like they do in Russian), and the letter-by-letter spelling of a word is only vaguely related to how it’s actually pronounced. Now, native English speakers usually know this in the back of their heads, just from the pain of grade-school spelling bees, but sometimes, it’s good to reinforce the notion.

This poem, given to me by my phonetics teacher as part of an assignment, is untitled and by an anonymous author (to the best of my knowledge). It is, to this day, one of the most awesome poems I’ve ever read. Native English speakers, read this excerpt aloud to yourself:

Dearest creature in creation,
Study English pronunciation.
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse.
I will keep you, Suzy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy.
Tear in eye, your dress will tear.
So shall I! Oh hear my prayer.

Just compare heart, beard, and heard,
Dies and diet, lord and word,
Sword and sward, retain and Britain.
(Mind the latter, how it’s written.)
Now I surely will not plague you
With such words as plaque and ague.
But be careful how you speak:
Say break and steak, but bleak and streak;
Cloven, oven, how and low,
Script, receipt, show, poem, and toe.

Hear me say, devoid of trickery,
Daughter, laughter, and Terpsichore,
Typhoid, measles, topsails, aisles,
Exiles, similes, and reviles;
Scholar, vicar, and cigar,
Solar, mica, war and far;
One, anemone, Balmoral,
Kitchen, lichen, laundry, laurel;
Gertrude, German, wind and mind,
Scene, Melpomene, mankind.

Billet does not rhyme with ballet,
Bouquet, wallet, mallet, chalet.
Blood and flood are not like food,
Nor is mould like should and would.
Viscous, viscount, load and broad,
Toward, to forward, to reward.
And your pronunciation’s OK
When you correctly say croquet,
Rounded, wounded, grieve and sieve,
Friend and fiend, alive and live.

Now look back at the actual letters of the word. Every line (or pair of lines) has a rhyme, but just looking at the letters, it’d be nearly impossible to tell that. In addition, some things (like “wind”) could either rhyme or not, depending on how you read it. See why it’s such a pain for non-native speakers to learn English? So, English spelling is a mess, but given the fact that we’ve gone through a vowel shift, absorbed countless new words, and gone hundreds of years without any major systematic spelling system changes, it’s not surprising. I’m not going to call for a spelling reform, though. It’s not because I don’t think we need it, or because I think it’s impossible.

It’s just that, well, considering tickets for the Putnam County spelling bee this Thursday are going for upwards of $94, it looks like the flawed writing system industry is making big money. I get too uppity about taking away their bottom line, I might just end up at the bottom of a consonant cluster, wearing concrete boots.

A Conditional Surrender

2006-11-27T08:32:32-05:00

So, around a month and a half ago, I posted a nice, long, elaborate post detailing my transition to Linux. It was nice, long, teary-eyed, and idealistic, and I’ve been using Linux on my home built computer ever since.

Well, I’m here today at a bittersweet moment. I’ve determined that Linux alone just won’t cut it for me. So, Apple, allow me to submit a conditional surrender.

Pros and Cons of Linux:

Linux, you’ve come a long way. You’re almost good enough for me to use as my full computer, and the main issues aren’t necessarily your fault. You’ve got some great programs, like Amarok, Akregator and TA-Spring. You’ve got some great features, and your customizability is insane. Some things are blindingly easy, but some things are incredibly tough. Plugging in a Mac hard drive on Kubuntu edgy results in instant recognition, but a USB Compact Flash reader doesn’t do a thing. Installing a new program is easier than OSX has ever made it, but trying to get your scroll wheel working on your mouse requires manual editing of the xorg.conf file, several restarts (with or without a working window system) and hours of frustration. This will all be changed with time, and Linux will improve all of these things, I’m sure. Finally, for a Linguist, Linux just can’t cut it. There’s no decent way (outside of LaTeX) to input IPA, and on my machine, Praat didn’t work well (I think it’s a Graphics issue), and sound recording was pretty bad without paying for a dedicated sound card. Also, programs like Elan, Wavesurfer, and even Ladefoged’s Phonetics Textbook CD don’t work particularly well (or at all). Unfortunately, dear Linux, your biggest problems aren’t even your fault.

ATI, your support for Linux is pretty deplorable. I’ve got a reasonable Graphics card, but your closed-source drivers don’t support recent versions of the X-Windows compositing system. Also, it’s a nice touch that since the last upgrade through Kubuntu, your Closed-Source drivers cause my computer to freeze on shutdown. Just nice. Sadly, open source alternatives can’t get frame-rates for anything more than a terminal past acceptable, so I’m kinda trapped between a rock and a hard place. Do I shell out $300 for a good NVidia card, or do I watch as my perfectly good card is badly supported? I didn’t have a choice (due to the deal I got) as to the graphics card I get, but unless it’s included, it’s doubtless that I’ll ever select an ATI card again.

In my other, non-academic life, I also work for my family’s printing business, and unfortunately, Linux isn’t ready for showtime here, either. We use all Macs (11 of them, at last count), and for me to be the only Linux box there would be a major task, even if the software were up to snuff. Unfortunately, there are a few critical missing components.

There’s not a hint of color-correction software available for Linux, there’s no good graphics software that’s compatible with my family’s Photoshop workflow (No, the Gimp doesn’t work for what we need to do), and Camera RAW support is lacking. Finally, there’s no good way to run and maintain Epson printers with a Linux box (you can print to them, but God help you if you need a nozzle check and cleaning). So, once again, it’s not Linux’s fault, but the lack of third-party software still stops me from using it full time.

So, Linux might work great for somebody who doesn’t need Linguistics tools, who doesn’t need games and graphics, and who doesn’t need any sort of high-end graphics tools. Given a few more years, even I might be able to better use Linux. However, that time has not yet arrived for me, so thus, I must make my surrender.

An Open Letter to Apple:

Apple: Unfortunately, everything I said about you earlier was true. You are in bed with the RIAA/MPAA, and altogether too interested in DRM and protecting the pocketbooks of the Copyright Oligarchs who likely deserve every bit of robbery they’ve been getting. I still don’t care for the Intel Chips, and would still love nothing more than a new line of PPC Macs, produced by Apple Computers, which would ideally be split off from Apple Music Sales™. You’re still likely going to sell out my privacy, and your service is still headed downhill. You will grow more and more locked down, and you’ll slowly become Microsoft. However, you’re not there yet, which is why I’m back here.

As much as I’d like to deny it, you’ve made some good hardware and some great software. Above and beyond that, there’s lots of great, open-source mac software. Finally, even if at the expense of customization, you’ve made it so things just work. After the 6 hour quest for a scroll wheel, I realize that when I buy OS X, part of what I’m paying is a salary for somebody else to go through the 6 hour configuration on my mouse, so I don’t have to. Quite frankly, I think that’s partially worth it, right there. For things to be supported by the manufacturers, processed such that they “just work”, and for the hardware to be certified to work with all the little gadgets and dongles, that’s going to take money or time. With Linux, you pay that in time, and do those things yourself. With OS X, you pay for it with the “Apple Tax”, the markup on every bit of hardware and Apple Software that you buy. Although it can be fun (and educational) to mess around with Linux and break-then-unbreak the various facets of things, when I actually have to get work done, those little failures are a much bigger problem, and not always as entertaining. So, yeah, I’ll pay the Apple tax, and I’ll put up with the lack of customization. However, my surrender is not unconditional.

Terms of Surrender:

I, Will, do hereby surrender control of my data to an Apple Powerbook, administered by OS X, on this, the Twenty-Seventh of November, 2006, on the following terms:

1) I will avoid Apple’s iTunes software whenever possible. No need to encourage Apple’s chief violator of privacy, efficiency, and consumer rights. Also, the iTunes Music Store won’t get a dime out of me until they start letting artists sell straight through, without major record labels stealing their cut.

2) I will attempt to use Open Source projects whenever possible, through MacPorts and Independent developers.

3) I will refuse to purchase MS Office for OS X. It’s a crappy port of crappy software, and should be picked up by any good OS X virus scanner.

4) I will to maintain a 15GB Linux Partition on my Hard Drive. Speaking of which, Apple, you should work on supporting reading from some Linux HD formats.

5) I won’t be purchasing iLife ‘0x any time soon. iMovie and iDVD are nice, but they’re buggy in project-killing sorts of ways, and iPhoto is nothing compared to the might of Photoshop. Same goes for .Mac.

6) I will be allowed to maintain my prior sentiments that iTunes, Spotlight, iChat, and, most importantly, the Intel Switch, suck.

Signed, regretfully,

Will

Final Statement by the defeated:

I originally compared Linux to an escape capsule, and I think the comparison is still valid. Linux will be my escape pod when Apple becomes intolerable. However, for now, I need the amenities of the full ship, and there’s no sense in computational asceticism when I need to get things done.

Knowing then what I know now, would I still have taken the plunge? I think so. The whole experiment wasn’t too costly. I still have a working, $212 computer, which is in good enough shape for any variety of uses (and to test other distros, without much in the way of Data on them), and it might even serve as a print server at home. I’ve still got my Powerbook, in full working order, and most importantly, I’ve learned a lot about both OS X and Linux. I’m more comfortable now when the GUI breaks down, when the computer won’t boot, and when the stuff hits the fan.

I know now that Linux isn’t perfect, but damnit, it’s a lot closer than I used to think. It won’t work for me, but it might work for you. Download a LiveCD, try an install, and see if you need the closed-source world. It’s quite possible that you do the sort of computing it supports, and have the time to support it. For me, it’s not enough, but I hope it’ll work for you.

So, onward I go, defeated, but not broken, away from the illusory world of Open-Source only computing, and back towards the land of corporate domination. I hope that someday, I might return and find pristine fields of open computing where there once were canyons of unsupported programs, and find a true home, but for now, I shall continue my path as I must, pressing on, against the tide of DRM and Trustless computing, and find my way in this world.

(…and that should about do it for the melodrama. Thanks for reading, and I hope you learned something from all this. :))

The language is always richer on the other side of the fence: a simple guide to translation bias

2006-11-26T11:42:05-05:00

I’ve been doing a fair amount of research on translation theory recently, and it’s really a fascinating field. There are as many facets and complexities as colors in a sunset, but at its core, it does have any number of interesting and easily understandable aspects. Since I’ve been looking around at different sorts of translation, I think it’s time to discuss one of the more basic choices that translators make (and one of the ones that most affects the readers): source and target language bias.

So, let’s say that I wanted to translate a modern Spanish novel into English. For the purposes of this article, I’ll be using the terms “source text/language” to refer to the Spanish version, and using “target language/text” to refer to the English translation. Translation would be far more simple if all languages were identical, abstract sets of words, used identically by everybody. If this were the case, every word construction, tense, or framing would have an exact duplicate in every other language in the world. The English word ‘Table’ would be exactly the same as the Spanish ‘Mesa’, and every time you saw ‘Table’, you could just switch it out with ‘mesa’. So, ideally, I would sit down with my dictionary and my reference grammar and start replacing English words, sentences, and paragraphs with their Spanish “equivalents”. Once this substitution was complete, I would have a perfectly accurate copy of the original text which was completely understandable to a speaker of the target language.

As convenient as that would be, it’s not remotely true. Even in our quick example, ‘Table’ in English has a number of different meanings, and not all are covered by the Spanish ‘mesa’ (ranging from a Data Table, to “tabling” a resolutions). No two languages are exactly equivalent, and although some words might have quick and easy equivalents in both the source and target language, the vast majority of words and constructions will require the translator to make some decisions.

When these decisions start being made, there’s an opportunity for bias. Let’s say I come across the Spanish phrase “Mas vale pajaro en mano que ciento volando” in the novel. I need to make a choice here, as to how to translate it. Literally, it means “A bird in the hand is worth more than a hundred flying.” However, English does have a very, very similar expression, “a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush”. So, I can translate literally, and favor the Source Language (Spanish) phrasing, or I can translate using the English idiom, and favor the Target Language.

In this case, the main difference will be in terms of native target language speaker’s perception. Using the literal Spanish would be what translators often refer to as a “difference” preference or “favoring the source language “, the choice to use different phrasing and, even through the translation, emphasize that the source language and the author’s words are different than how an English speaker might have written things. On the other side, using the English idiom might be referred to as “identity” preference (or “favoring the target language”), where the translator tries to make the target language text as accessible, understandable, and familiar as possible to target language readers.

This example is fairly simple, in that really, a native English speaker will understand what the phrase means even if it’s translated literally. However, imagine you’re given an idiom like “Estar como perro en barrio ajeno”, literally, “to be like a dog in a neighbor’s yard”. If one were to translate that literally, the target language readers might understand the words, but miss the meaning entirely. However, Ii one translated it (more accurately) as “to be like a fish out of water”, the target language reader would have a much easier grasp on the meaning behind it.

There are always other factors at play in the decision of translating certain phrases. I’ve been learning about translation theory with one of the professors in my department, and he recently made a very interesting comment about the translation of Native American stories and literatures. We were going through one of his translations of an Arapaho speech, and we stumbled across a particularly colorful phrase (along the lines of “walking into the other group’s camp”). He translated it literally for me, but he put it into the English version as a single English word, “assimilation”. When I asked why, he explained that he didn’t want to make it sound like the stereotypical, disney-style Native American speech. He said that although the Arapaho often do use metaphors related to the Old Ways, hunting and nature, he often chooses not to translate them literally, because he feels it really just reinforces the stereotype of how their language sounds, rather than the actual message of the story or speech.

So, every translation has a bit of bias. However, that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. This is a choice, and a tool in the hands of a skilled translator, and very seldom is a translation done favoring ONLY the target or source languages. Although translation theorists will likely argue this point, I suspect that the most accurate translation will likely fall somewhere in the middle, with a mix of difference and identity. Sometimes, you need to favor the target language, to make the book clear, understandable, and readable to the readers, but sometimes you need to favor the source language, if for no other reason, just to remind the reader that the original work wasn’t written two weeks ago in Des Moines.

Suggested Readings:

Introducing Translation Studies by Jeremy Munday : A good primer on translation theory and many of the issues discussed here (albeit with a generalized target language bias)

The Brothers Karamazovby Fyodor Dostoevsky, Pevear and Volokhonsky translation: A great book, and a more Target language biased translation.

The Brothers Karamazovby Fyodor Dostoevsky, Constance Garnett translation: The same great book, but this is a more source language favoring translation.

An unusual sentiment

2006-11-24T11:23:11-05:00

So, today, my girlfriend sent me a link to this comic by XKCD (NSFW language). What’s funny about it is not so much the content, but the fact that they’re ripping not only on Linguistics, but specifically on computational linguistics. Having done a bit of corpus linguistics myself, I couldn’t help but laugh, and, quite frankly, he does have a bit of a point at times. So, I applaud him for taking a strong stand.

As a counterstrike, I propose that some bored Computational Linguist create a corpus of all the text from XKCD’s website. That way, no matter their feelings, fears, or secret desires, XKCD will always be aiding the cause of Computational Linguistics. Our revenge will be swift and searchable.

First, they came for the Internet Clichés: An introduction to Godwin's Law

2006-11-19T19:15:16-05:00

I suspect that many (if not all) of the people reading this are likely to be pretty familiar with Internet discussions and the (complete lack of) rules governing them. Often, this relative lack of rules just leads to petty arguments and name-calling, but sometimes, oh sometimes, something truly magnificent can be born. That magnificence is known as ‘Godwin’s Law’.

Named after (and first formulated by) Mike Godwin, a well known attorney in the world of the internet, Godwin’s law states the following:

As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.

When applied to real internet life (heh), it basically states that as a given argument/discussion/flame-war goes on online, it is nearly inevitable that somebody will compare some aspect of the situation or participants to Nazis, Hitler, or Nazi Germany. However, perhaps more well known is the corollary to Godwin’s law, which is far less formal, but far more well known, and could be roughly stated as:

If, in an argument or discussion, somebody makes a comparison to Nazis or Hitler, the discussion is automatically over, and the person making the comparison is considered to have lost.

Thus, it’s not uncommon on some message boards to hear somebody invoking Godwin’s law to end a thread, or to hear reference to somebody “Godwinning” a conversation or discussion. Generally, although discussion may continue after the Godwinning, it seems to take on a distinctly different tone, and the person making the comparison is expected to defend him or herself.

Of course, there have been other attempts to alter or amend this law. Some have claimed that if a person admits the violation of the law and justifies it, then the corollary doesn’t apply. Others feel that the law is unfair, and that if the comparison works, there should be no repercussions.

I personally believe that although there are times when such a comparison is inevitable and necessary, there are twice as many times where it’s not. Therefore, I feel that not only should Godwin’s law (and its corollary) be enforced online, but in person too.

Don’t be afraid to invoke Godwin’s corollary next time somebody references the Third Reich when discussing Hockey (yes, I’ve seen this happen). Next time PETA starts an ad campaign featuring pictures from the Holocaust (yes, they’ve done it before), feel free to inform them that the discussion is over and that they’ve lost.

In fact, don’t even be ashamed to point out that the very title of this post is a thinly veiled reference to a quote about Nazi Germany. I think it’s justified, given the subject matter of the post, but that’s irrelevant. The fact of the matter is that this post must now end, and somehow, I’ve lost. Ahh, the magic of Godwin’s law…

This just in:I’ve discovered an article titled “How to Post about Nazis and get away with it - The Godwin’s Law FAQ”. It’s amusing, informative, and worth a read, if you’re bored.

The Stall-Door Grammarians strike back!

2006-11-13T17:29:21-05:00

So, I was on campus today and stumbled across another magnificent strike by the Stall-Door Grammarian. The whole interaction read as follows:

Fumar la molta!
FUMAN “To smoke the pot”
Fumar is infinitive you f***ing dumb stoner hippy

For those interested, here’s a picture (sorry for the quality, it’s a camera phone picture). Click to enlarge!

This is fascinating to me in so many ways.

To begin, the first inscription in Spanish reads, literally, “to smoke the Marijuana”, coming from a combination of fumar, the infinitive of “To Smoke”, and “la mota” (misspelled and corrected on the stall), a slang term for Marijuana/Pot. A fascinating sentiment to be sure, and thoroughly ungrammatical. Leaving fumar unconjugated is a mistake that anybody with more than a few months’ exposure to the Spanish language would be unlikely to make Luckily for any native Spanish speakers who might be unclear as to who exactly is smoking the pot, a second person issues the correction “FUMAN”, meaning “They smoke”, and points out the ungrammaticality of the first sentence using a word-for-word translation.

However, to add insult to injury, an angry Stall-Door Grammarian stepped in after the second person left his comments (the shape of the M’s changed, so I assume it’s a new person). He points out that not only is “fumar” in the infinitive form (which it is), but then goes on to state his belief that the original writer is, in fact, a “f***ing dumb stoner hippy”. This is clearly past the realm of simple grammatical assistance, and quite frankly, I’d even chalk this up to a very mean person, once again trying to raise himself up above another with his knowledge of grammar.

So, Mr. Angry Stall-Door Grammarian, I hope you’re proud. You’ve managed to comment on the same error as the Gentleman above you. However, you were trying to make yourself seem more intelligent and articulate than the writer, even though you were only correcting a beginner’s mistake likely made by a non-native speaker of Spanish.

Be forewarned, oh Angry Stall-Door Grammarian, if you keep down this path, you’ll end up in Mexico someday, write something on a stall door, and return the next day to find a big red X over it, labeled Es subjuntivo, pinche necio Americano. Of course, if that happens, take a picture and send it in so I can post it. Then, all will be forgiven.

Idiolect: Every time you use a word, you're using it in every situation it's ever been in.

2006-11-10T11:10:34-05:00

Readers, I cannot tell a lie. It was I who cut down that cherry tree.

What did the above statement mean to you? Some people might see it as a sort of confession, my confessing to an act that you might not have been aware of, but without much in the way of context. However, for the readers versed in American history and mythology, that statement likely evoked the words of George Washington, declaring to his father that he chopped down a cherry tree and being a shining pillar of honesty in the process. So, perhaps the question for them was twofold: Why is he talking about this, and why is he pretending to be George Washington?

Well, not to disappoint, but I’ve never cut down a cherry tree, and, considering that the statement was false, I apparently can tell a lie. However, I can prove a point with it as well. For those who were familiar with George Washington’s quotation, that statement had an entirely different meaning than for those of you who missed the reference. At least a part of the meaning in that statement was dependent on your knowing something about the background behind my word choice.

Now, imagine you walk up to a coworker, relieved at the successful conclusion of a long, drawn out project. Smiling, you enthusiastically proclaim “It’s over!!” He stares at you for a second, and promptly breaks into tears and runs off to the men’s room. You just stand, mortified, unsure what you said or did to get such a reaction, until later, he comes back, still teary eyed, and explains that only a week ago, his now ex-wife had used those same words as she presented him with unexpected divorce papers, and that your using the unintentionally called back on that. He explains that he too is happy that the project is over, and apologizes for the breakdown.

There’s really nobody at fault here, this was just an unfortunate usage of a phrase which had a different meaning to each party in the communication. This is also a very extreme example, but still, it emphasizes the fact that meaning and connotation of words can be very individual, even on top of the widely agreed “definition” among speakers.

One man’s dog…

When you walk up to a person on the street and mention the term “dog”, their interpretation will be very different depending on their life experiences. Whereas one person with a phobia might get apprehensive, a veterinarian might smile or show concern, another person might think of Sparky, their childhood pet, and a dog breeder might start picturing a specific breed or characteristic. It’s unlikely that somebody would think of one characteristic or image to the point where they wouldn’t get the reference to a generic domesticated canine, but it’s also very unlikely that a person would only see a generic, faceless, breedless dog with no connotation.

I’m sure there are some voices in semantic theory that would disagree (and they’re welcome to comment or email me to let me post their opinion), but often, the “meaning” of a word for every individual person is the sum of their past experiences with that word and what it might have symbolized. If a child got bitten by a dog, the word “dog” might have a terrible connotation the week after, but if they were to go on to work at an animal hospital, that connotation might be replaced or altered.

One could pretend that all words have a nice, easy, abstract meaning, found in the dictionary and independent of the people using it. However, in practice, every word has both a general meaning, shared by most speakers of the language, and then a more individual shade of meaning, unique to their experiences. Knowing the context, both in which you’ll use a word, and in which the listener will hear it, is vital to understanding what to say, when.

This is easier said than done, of course, because you can very seldom get in the head of your listener to know just what a given word means to them. However, it’s always worth keeping in mind, because once you do, saying “I am glad for the successful completion of our newest project” to your newly divorced co-worker doesn’t sound nearly as awkward, does it?

Monolingual A**hat of the Month: Kevin Severson of Amalgamated Sugar Company

2006-11-06T08:47:44-05:00

So, I just read a charming little news story about a company not far from me. Here’s the basic gist of it:

From 9news.com:

Gerardo Wence said he could be fired for speaking Spanish at work. According to his employer, Amalgamated Sugar Company in Brighton, employees can speak Spanish on breaks and at lunch, otherwise, it’s safety issue.
…
Days after he started, Wence said he had to sign a policy, agreeing to speak Spanish, only during breaks and at lunch.
“You get three write ups and you get fired. So I can literally get fired for speaking my language. I find that pathetic.”
The plant’s manager, Kevin Severson wouldn’t talk on camera, but gave a statement that said, “Employees can speak Spanish on personal time, because we want to make sure there are no safety issues occurring from the lack of communication.”
Severson added, “Everyone who comes through the door is given safety documentation in English, employees need to read, understand and be able to communicate in English.”
Wence said of the four Spanish speakers working at the plant, two barely speak English.

So, we’ve got an employer forcing employees to speak only English on the job, under pain of dismissal. That’s charming, but not unusual, similar cases have been battled out in courts in the past.

However, what makes me a bit livid here is his “safety” excuse when some employees “barely speak English”. Apparently, it’s safer to explain safety measures and give warnings in English to employees who don’t understand English. Presumably, this company hired these employees knowing that they weren’t English proficient, so this manager decided then that he’d have to use some other methods to communicate with them for safety, but now, for some reason, he’s decided to enact this policy instead. Information helps ensure safety. Information needs to be understandable. Banning people from giving this information in an understandable way to these employees is not safe.

So, Mr. Severson, what exactly are you trying to accomplish? I hate to break it to you, but this little policy won’t make your factory any safer. It will, however, make your workplace a bit less diverse, but that might be what you wanted all along.

Who are you if your name isn't really who you are?

2006-10-13T08:45:47-04:00

So, for one of my classes, I’ve been doing some research on the Samoan language and culture. It’s a truly fascinating language, built on a very small sound system, and nearly everything is done through syntax and word-order in the grammar. Given my past interest in name usage around the world (and in the galaxy), I thought I’d drop a quick note about one of the really interesting ways that names and titles are given in their culture.

The Samoan culture is heavily based on titles and prestige, and often, when a man becomes a matai, or ‘titled person’ (only men are eligible for this sort of title), he is given a name held by a well respected person in the past. The really interesting thing about their particular way of doing things is that in their culture is that the name remains independent from the person, and is instead a standard to be lived up to. In American culture, a name can be “sullied”, or disrespected to the point of disuse (ask any Manson whether they would name their child “Charles”), and the actions of a person carrying the name can result in the name being viewed negatively.

However, in Samoan culture, these matai names are independent of the actions and life of their holders, and the names can’t be disrespected, only the people who use them. In a situation where a matai is acting inappropriately, it’s not uncommon for people to remind them of their name, and thus, of the standard they must strive to reach. It’s a very interesting division, placing the person below his name, and making his very name another method of motivating him to do the right thing.

So, perhaps it’s not a bad idea to name one’s child after somebody famous. Let’s just hope, though, that there’s never a little Charlie Manson born in Samoa.

(Much of the information in this section is from Alessandro Duranti’s book on the Samoan Fono, a fascinating read for any budding Linguistic Anthropologists in the crowd)

Leap and the Penguin will appear: Part One

2006-10-09T16:16:48-04:00

Hello everybody!

Sorry, I’ve not updated this site in a while. I’ve been bogged down in a fairly major project recently, and I think it’s about time to share. This first segment will be about the switch and setup, and the second (and subsequent) sections will involve Linux and Linguistics.

Fare thee well, Apple

I’ve been an Apple computer user all my life. I’ve never used a Windows machine for more than a few hours at a time, and up until recently, I never felt a need to leave. However, between Apple’s switch to Intel chips, their snuggling up to the RIAA and MPAA (two large American Copyright Cartels), and their decreasing respect for customer privacy, I’ve realized that Apple and I must part ways. I know Windows isn’t an option, so I looked to Linux.

Linux, for those of you uninterested in the world of Open Source computing, is a blanket term for a number of operating systems building on a single core, the Linux Kernel. They vary in terms of included programs, User Interfaces, and ease of use, but they’re all based on the same beating heart. The whole idea of Linux, though, is that it’s free and Open Source. This means that the software is free, and the code is open for change, improvement, and examination by anybody who choses to do so. There’s no corporate nastiness, no privacy invasion, and nobody profitting from the system. It’s all just a community effort. Given this sort of atmosphere, I decided that Linux is my best shot at escaping Apple before it grows too large, nasty and locked down.

Learning to pilot the escape capsule

I’ve had some Linux experience in the past. I’ve installed a few different versions on my Powerbook, and they were all just good enough to be tantalizing. Of course, none of the specialized software ran on an Apple Laptop with a PPC chip, so I couldn’t get good graphics, Flash Player, or several other programs, but damnit, it was a good start. I gained some experience, some background, and a bit of preference in terms of what I wanted to do, and now, I’ve finally made the leap.

Enter the Liberator

As I said, PPC Linux on an Apple Laptop is far from ideal, so I knew that to really make this work, I’d need new hardware. Rather than getting a really expensive new laptop or desktop for the experiment, I decided to build my own. I bought some parts from a friend, both some others online, and after around two hours worth of assembly, I had a functional computer, which I’ve named “Liberator”. The non-geeks among you may want to skip the next sentence or so, but here are the specs: AMD Athlon 3000+ processor, 1GB RAM, ATI Radeon 9600 Graphics card, 2x 160GB Samsung Drives, 1 Samsung DVD burner, and a beautiful new case with 420W PSU.

All of the above roughly translates to “Quite fast enough”, and the resulting machine is really quite nice, especially given my total cost to build and buy, which was less than $300USD. Couple that with a used keyboard and mouse from my house and an existing display, and I’ve got a fully functional machine. Then, I just had to install software.

Kubuntu for Fun and Profit

I chose to use the Kubuntu Linux distribution for my computer, based on my personal preferences in the past. This is the KDE version of the Ubuntu Linux distribution. It’s probably the easiest one to set up, and I like the interface better in KDE. Of Linguistic Note, the Ubuntu distribution is named after an “african word” (apparently nobody told them that there are a number of languages in Africa) which means “humanity to others”.

I also chose to use the Edgy Eft distribution, the most recent beta version of Ubuntu, mostly because I like to live dangerously. Another Linguistic note, “Eft” is an archaic word for “Newt”, and apparently “Newt” was formed when “eft” when to “ewt”, and then “an ewt” became “a newt”. This distribution is pretty solid, even now, and I’m very impressed with the ease of use. There are always little things to change, but hey, such is life.

State of the Unit

At the moment, the Liberator and Edgy Eft is my primary computer. All my basic needs are met, and it’s stable and fast enough to use as my daily driver. I’m still ironing out little kinks and learning new tricks, but hey, that’s what I expected. So far, I’m pleased with the new change, enjoying a bunch of new programs, and some things that just plain work better than OS X. I’m still working on converting documents and finding ways to do everything I could on my Mac, but I’m feeling good enough about things that I’m glad I made the switch.

Until Next time…

I’m going to make a few posts about important linguistics and language related issues in Linux, as well as discussing different ways to accomplish various linguistics-related tasks on the new OS. However, I just thought I’d keep you all in the loop, and let you know that if you’re not happy with Apple and Windows, there is another path!

When overcorrection hits the stall door, the Grammarians have won.

2006-09-19T07:36:48-04:00

So, I thought I’d share this delightful bit of language use. Today, I noticed that in one of the bathrooms on campus, somebody had scrawled “(Expletive) this whole joke of a university”. A charming sentiment, to be sure, but the real beauty came when somebody else, with a different writing instrument scrawled a bold and emphasized “N” after the “a”, making it ”…joke of aN university”, along with a variety of remarks disparaging the original writer. So, it sounds like somebody else wants to prove the writer of the above to be stupid or inarticulate by emphasizing grammar/spelling mistakes. This would be a bit petty but acceptable, if it weren’t for the fact that the original was, in fact, correct, as the corrector would have realized had he tried to pronounce his correction.

Generally, the “a”->”an” shift occurs when the article “a” bumps up against another vowel, in situations like “an enemy”, “an ooze”, or “an alien”. However, what the corrector failed to realize is that this rule is invoked by spoken vowels, but not always by written ones. So, in the case of “University” or “Uvula”, there’s actually a glide before the “oo” sound, which constitutes enough of a consonant to allow “a university”. Any attempts by a native English speaker to pronounce “an university” or “an youth” requires the use of a palatal “n” (like the spanish “mañana”), a sound that we don’t produce naturally and easily.

This phenomenon is called “overcorrection”, and starts to get into sociolinguistics. It generally occurs when people are self-conscious about their grammar and want to make sure they’re speaking “correctly”, but instead, they overapply the rules, resulting in constructions like “and whom is your lovely companion?” at the office christmas party.

This is a sad relic of perscriptivism (the idea that there is one correct way to speak a language) which spills over into everyday life, which could be quickly cured by a dose of descriptivism, the linguist’s ideal that people speak how they speak, it should be described, not changed or criticized.

So, although I disagree with the speaker’s sentiment, his spelling and grammar were largely acceptable. For everybody else, remember, every time you overcorrect on petty grammar points, a sentence-final preposition loses its wings. Please, think of the prepositions.

Funny or shameless, you be the judge!

2006-09-17T20:12:33-04:00

So, I was wandering the halls of the campus the other day and stumbled across this poster (click the thumbnail for full size):

Although the camera phone picture doesn’t capture it terribly well, they’ve boldfaced letter such that it spells out “MONEY IS GREAT” down the page. I can hardly expect that they’d think this would somehow subconsciously tempt people into their business/pyramid scheme/web of crime, but still, it’s fascinating. Given my past interest in subliminal advertising, I found this as a humorously bad example of the idea, and I figured I would share.

So, really, ideas like this are floating around all the time. It’soften a tricky mystery to find them all, but if you’re observant, you might just pick one up.

Ahh, the wonders of writing system overlap

2006-09-03T18:09:56-04:00

So, I was sent a magnificent link today. Nominally, it’s an article about offensive terms sneaking their way onto personalized (or “vanity”) license plates. Some of them are a little humorous, but one in particular jumped out at me. From the letter (uncorrected):

“I would like to share my deepest concern about custom plates that your department issuing to the customers.”
…
“I would like to give you an example of such custom plate. The number is “CTO XYEB” registered in NY. In Russian it mean “one hundred penises” in a very dirty language.”

Now, having studied some Russian in the past, I nearly fell out of my chair laughing at this. Although it could easily have been an unfortunate random letter combination, the English letters “CTO XYEB” correspond to the cyrillic letters spelling a vulgar equivalent of “one hundred penises” (pronounced, “Sto huyev”) in Russian, and with amazing grammatical correctness, too.

In Russian, when counting an object, the declension of the word changes (a different ending is placed on it). So, one object is in the Nominative case singular, two is in the nominative plural, and five or more is in the Genitive Case plural, changing ‘Odin huy’ (one penis) to ‘Sto huyev’ (one hundred penises). So, in addition to be quite dirty, it’s quite grammatical.My apologies, by the way, for the transliteration. Cyrillic fonts seem to break my blogging software.Whether some enterprising young Russian speaker slipped one past the DMV, or whether a random motorist was stricken with a rather interesting random combination, this is another magnificent example of cross-linguistic translation and censorship difficulties, and a good reminder that with thousands of languages out there, it’s tough not to offend somebody sometimes.

So, if you see a brown Mercedes in Brooklyn with this magnificent license plate, you’re welcome to inform the driver of the mistake and recommend a trip to the DMV, give him or her a few choice words in Russian, or, if you’re like me, fall down laughing in the gutter. It’s all good, really.

Language and the Force: A Primer in Gand Sociolinguistics

2006-09-03T09:59:00-04:00

Now, here at Linguistic Mystic, I pride myself on considering many different perspectives, not all within the accepted realm of Linguistic Academics. Today, I would like to continue this tradition by quoting what may well be my least authoritative source yet: Michael Stackpole’s Star Wars: Rogue Squadron (Book 1).

This book is a science-fiction work, taking place in the Exapnded Star Wars universe, following the adventures of Wedge Antilles, Corran Horn, and the elite pilots of Rogue Squadron. The squadron itself is composed of many different species, and today’s example comes from Ooryl Qyrgg, a Gand pilot, and is paraphrased below.

Corran nodded in what he hoped was a friendly manner. “Why do you speak of yourself in the third person?”
…
“On Gand it is held that names are important. Any Gand who has acheived nothing is called Gand. Before Ooryl was given Ooryl’s name, Ooryl was known as Gand. Once Ooryl had made a mark in the world, Ooryl was given the Qyrgg surname. Later, by mastering the difficulties of astronavigation and flight, Ooryl earned the right to be called Ooryl.”
“This still does not explain why you do not use pronouns to refer to yourself.”
“Qyrgg apologizes. On Gand only those who have achieved great things are permitted to use pronouns for self-designation. The use of such carries with it the presumption that all who hear the speech will know who the speaker is, and this assumption is only true in the case where the speaker is so great, the speaker’s name is known to all.”
…
“Then why do you sometimes refer to yourself by your family name, and sometimes by your own name?”
The Gand looked down for a moment and his mouth parts closed. “When a Gand has given offense, or is ashamed of actions, this diminishes the gains made in life. Name reduction is an act of contrition, an apology. Ooryl would like to think Ooryl will not often be called Qyrgg, but Qyrgg knows the likelihood of this is slender.”

I’ve discussed the power of names in the past, but this is taking the idea to a whole new level. I’ve never heard of a language, culture, or speech community where a name is not assigned to a person until they “earn” it, and would be fascinated to hear about it if anybody has. However, the idea of name changes with great accomplishments (or great demerits) is not uncommon. In some Native American cultures, a child changes names at the end of adolescence, once he or she has proven his or her worth and become an adult. In addition, a warrior winning a great battle may be given a new name to celebrate the accomplishment. However, to the best of my knowledge, there isn’t a system by which these names can be given and removed as frequently and non-chalantly as in Stackpole’s view of the Gand cutlure.

The idea of first-person pronoun use being presumptuous is also an interesting concept. Certainly, there’s nothing wrong with the first-person pronoun in American English, and using a Third-person form of address would likely be a barrier to communication in everyday life (I suspect that “Excuse me, Will has lost Will’s number, can Will have yours?” just wouldn’t go over as well). It is worth noting, however, that this subsitution does occur in some specialized sorts of writing, namely police incident reports and some journalistic reports.

Now, the question of “being known to all who hear the conversation” is a different matter. In most conversations in social situations where there are unknown people in a conversation, you are either introduced, or it’s perfectly acceptable to add in a casual ”I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten your name?” without causing anybody to lose face. So, although using one’s full name instead of a pronoun might be useful every so often (as to reintroduce yourself to any new participants) or in some contexts (with a group of people, on a Walkie-Talkie system), the Gand strategy would likely result in a great deal more redundancy than usefulness in many of our human languages.

Although the Gand system of naming and self-reference is little more than a fascinating idea in our culture, it still serves as a great (albeit artificial) example of the necessary interaction between language and culture and the field of Sociolinguistics. However, if you do happen to stumble across a short, bug-eyed alien with a noticeable exoskeleton and a penchant for ammonia, you’d best remember this post, for the sake of interplanetary relations.

A new view on Translation

2006-08-20T19:35:53-04:00

So the other day, I was sitting in the hallway of my University’s Residence Halls, around midnight, and listening to a theology discussion which the RA’s were having. There were people of all different backgrounds there, but the most vocal was a young man of the Mormon faith. At one point, the question arose of Bible translation and the fallibility of human translators.

The young Mormon piped up with a very innovative analogy on translation which he learned in Seminary, which I felt was quite interesting. I’ll roughly paraphrase below:

The word of God is a lot like a picture hanging on a bulletin board. It only has one tack to secure it [representing the Old and New Testament together], so anybody can spin it around as they’d like, changing the perspective, even though the picture stays the same. The translators each tilt it a bit differently, and it’s tough to see exactly what the right orientation is.

For us [those of the Mormon Faith], the Book of Mormon is a second tack. It provides a second hold, and keeps you from spinning the picture. Whenever there’s a question about the perspective and translation in one, you can consult the other. What might be unsure with one tack, is securely locked with two.

Whether you believe in the validity of either work, this is an interesting analogy. It seems to imply a distinct split between the actual “word” or message of God, and the written words used to pass it on, much like the split between concept and language used to describe it.

A similar idea is actually used frequently in the translation of a seminal work in Mahayana Buddhism, the Bodhicharyavatara (‘Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life’) by Shantideva. Very early after its transcription (originally in Sanskrit), two highly authoritative versions were created of the work, one in Tibetan, and one in Sanskrit, and both are treated as equal by the Buddhist community. In modern translations, many of the translators choose to base their work off one version or the other, but use the other version to clarify difficult passages. My personal favorite translation, by Stephen Batchelor, was based on a 12th Century Commentary on the Tibetan text, but uses the Sanskrit for clarification in footnotes. When you’re dealing with differences as extreme as that between “May all women become men” and “May all women attain the rights and privileges of men”, a point of clarification is wonderful.

Now, let’s use a similar idea in a secular sense. I would like to describe an event, something complex, emotional, and generally slightly vague. Take, for example, an account of one’s first day leaving for College. Imagine a bilingual author were to write the story, once in, say, English, and once in Spanish. Not so much translating one into the other, but actually telling the story twice (with an effort to include much of the same information in both). Would the Spanish be a “second tack” for the English version and vice-versa? Could one use the Spanish to clarify the English ambiguities, and vice-versa? Most importantly, would another bilingual reader have a better idea what the author meant by reading both versions, rather than just one?

The more I look at it, translation seems messier and messier. I’ve begun to suspect that there is no such thing as a one-to-one translation, and that any time you switch languages or rephrase, something is lost or gained. This isn’t necessarily bad, but it, like all other things, needs to be studied further.

I hope this post made sense. If not, maybe I’ll try writing the same thing right next to it in Spanish. If it helps, I’ve just found a thesis.

Automated Censorship B*******

2006-08-07T21:07:50-04:00

(By the way, the title of the post is “Automated Censorship Breakage”, but it shows how people assume the worst when unnecessary asterisks are involved.)

Hot on the heels of my post on automated language translation, Arnold Zwicky over at the Language Log made a wonderful post about Automated Censorship systems, entitled “C*m sancto spirito” and the havoc they can wreak.

The example that jumped out at me the most is from the title, the fact that the Latin “Cum” (‘with’) was censored because it’s spelled like the American slang word for “Semen”. Incidentally, Wikipedia tells me that “Cum” is also Irish for ‘invent’ and Bengal for ‘kiss’, so Latin isn’t just the exception when it comes to innocent meanings.

This isn’t merely an example of context insensitive automatic censorship (“My poor p***y cat is sick!”) or overzealous word blocking (“Fertilization occurs after the s***m travels through the v****a into the uterus..”), but this is a whole new area. This is censoring English letter combinations in other languages, regardless of what they may actually mean.

This starts to set a dangerous precedent. In addition to quickly losing words like the Latin “cum”, it’s only a matter of time before other words start getting blocked too. Also, it starts to lead to troubles even within a language. For instance, in British English, “fag” means “Cigarette” (coming from the original “faggot”, a small bundle of wood for starting a fire), but in American English, “fag” is a slur referring to a homosexual man. So, would a Londoner step outside for a fag or for a f**?

Other examples come to mind. In Castillian Spanish (Spain), “coger” means “to grab”, but in Latin American Spanish, it is a vulgar word, meaning (roughly) ‘to fuck’. If one started a Spanish language forum, would that be censored? How about in a Spanish song on a music store like iTunes?

Russian-American comic Yakov Smirnoff has a section of his routine where he discusses the fact that in Russian, “Yep” (or “Yeb”) is a vulgar root for “to fuck”, and his initial shock when, in America, a vulgar word in his language is used so frequently in conversation (I believe his routine went something like “Do you want to go out?” “Yep” “Wow! Great!”). Of course, this is an extreme (and exaggerated) example, but the concept still stands.

Many languages share parts of their phonetic inventories (library of sounds), so it’s certainly not uncommon to see such surface correspondences in spelling or pronunciation between innocent words and swear words in among different languages. The trick is training computers to understand when you’re dealing with “cum” and when you’re dealing with “c*m”.

The trouble with Automated language anything is that computers are pretty bad at figuring out which language is being used. There are language guesser programs, and although they’re amazingly good at what they do (and handy in a pinch), they’re also a whole new step in the process, and one that I suspect most webmasters and content providers would be reluctant to include. For a service like iTunes (or an internet forum) to first run everything through a language guesser and then censor appropriately would require much more computer time, and most language guessers need large banks of text to function well. Not to mention that, it’s frequent to find little dabs of languages like Latin in vast English posts.

One potential way of training these programs is to look for context and correspondence. For instance, pussy is not censored if “cat” appears directly afterwards, or “cock” is not censored if “hen” or “fight” occur within that same sentence. This too creates additional computing time, and it’s not entirely reliable. For instance, in a google search for “cum latin”, even though much of the page deals with latin grammar, the first two sponsored links are to adult sites (In retrospect, I should’ve known better, but I was looking for other examples of usage). So, filtering based purely on context and correspondence will likely have issues too.

Perhaps the most obvious solution is to sort by hand, and use a little common sense. However, for those of you seeking a thesis, an intelligent, language-aware filter could probably make life a whole lot easier for a number of forums and services. Who knows, if you do well, you might even graduate summa c*m laude.

0ccasional probable he translation of the machine of controll with

2006-08-07T14:30:49-04:00

I’d like to showcase a wonderful little piece of webcoding, a program by Carl Tashian called Multibabel.

This program takes any given English sentence, and then runs it through Altavista’s Babelfish translation engine 7 times, translating into one language, then plugging the result in and translating back to English, then translating that into the next language, continuing through Japanese, Chinese, French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and German. It takes a little while, but in the end, you’re presented with a step-by-step view of what happened. The results are sometimes strange, occaisionally funny, and always dead wrong.

For instance, the title of this post is 0ccasional probable he translation of the machine of controll with. This, as you might suspect, is the product of Multibabel. The original phrase I entered was “Computer translation can sometimes prove troublesome”.

Although this program is a slightly biased test (I doubt that asking a series of professional translators to pass along a phrase like this would result in the same phrase at the end), it does show the difficulties of current web based automated translation engines. I particularly enjoyed this quote, by the program author on the program website:

As of September 2003, translation software is almost good enough to turn grammatically correct, slang-free text from one language into grammatically incorrect, barely readable approximations in another.

Sadly, this hasn’t changed all that much since then. There are people working hard to improve it, and strides are being taken, but it’s still a long journey ahead.

So, try Multibabel, get a few chuckles, and just in case anybody you know is tempted to just translate that essay for their language class online, remember:

if immediate translation of the stupid we-machine or the thymus of vist two, collapse; of that disabled person, you with you

(Which was originally: “When you use machine translation to cheat, you’ll look stupid, dishonest, or both; and no matter what, you’ll fail.”)

What can computer image processing teach us about language? (Part one)

2006-07-30T11:17:06-04:00

Last night, I was laying in bed, idly thinking about a project for my family’s printing business. The problem is as follows:

In order for us to replicate an image on some other medium, we need a copy of the original image. Inevitably, our less technologically saavy customers will send us tiny, highly compressed files, later asking for a large print with that same image. This is equivalent to hiring a mural painter to do your living room wall, and handing them a postage stamp to work from. File compression is a big problem in the printing business, and something that few non-graphics people really understand.

At this point, I sat up in bed and was struck that this presents a beautiful metaphor for language, on several different levels. The following is an exploration of this metaphor. For the purposes of this article, I snapped a picture of a few, not-so-randomly selected good books, and I’ll be using the same picture throughout the article. The books, in case you’re wondering, are Language, Thought and Reality by Benjamin Whorf, The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Far from the Madding Gerund, the Language Log book.

The Original Image

So let’s start from a flawless original. In order to show you the original, I’ve uploaded it as a TIFF file. Now, the beauty of the TIFF file format is that absolutely nothing is lost when you save the picture. Every bit of detail that was there in the camera is there in the TIFF, earning TIFF the designation of being a “lossless” format. However, this is not without a price. Let’s view the file now:

See the image here… (1.8mb file, it may take a while to load, or might not load at all)

Because this is a lossless file, it is a very large and cumbersome. For this small picture, the TIFF file was a little more than 1.8 Megabytes. This is why it probably took some time to load for you. In addition, they’re difficult for some software to open. Firefox has to use Apple’s Quicktime to open them, and it can take a while even for a powerful program like Adobe’s Photoshop to open them. So, there’s a compromise here. You can get a high fidelity, lossless file, but it takes a long time to transmit, load, and open it.

Quality over Cost

The next option (that I’m going to explore) is the JPEG file format. JPEG is a “lossy” format, meaning that, in order to save space and time when opening it, it throws out some of the data and detail. Ideally, it’s only throwing out details that are unnecessary or invisible to the human eye, but often, some loss becomes quickly apparent. Below is the highest quality JPEG that Photoshop can make:

This file (compressed at Maximum quality) is pretty detailed still, and little is visibly lost. However, the filesize has gone down from 1.8MB to 188kb. This is a very good compromise, because you can still get the detail across, but you don’t have to take up as much time and space to work with the file. Now, let’s check out the same file, compressed at 50% quality:

Here, you start to see some “artifacts”, or little jagged patches in the solid colors (look around the text on “language, thought and reality”). However, from this loss of quality, we are able to shrink the file down to 40kb. Finally, just for grins, let’s look at 0% quality JPEG (the most compression with the least quality):

We’ve now hit a very, very noticeable loss in quality, although the file is only 16kb in this state.

Here too, we see evidence of the compromise between size and detail.

What does this have to do with language?

Compare the following four example interactions:

One

Kim: “Where’s Mom?”
Pat: “Although I’m not entirely sure, as I’ve been out of contact with her, I have no means of locating her exactly (via GPS or otherwise), and she has been known to make stops unannounced, she had earlier expressed an intent and desire to go to the John’s Hair Salon, on 28th Street. Considering that she left around 10am, it is now 10:15am, and her salon sessions usually last approximately one hour, there is a good chance that she is still currently at the Salon.”

Two

Kim: “Where’s Mom?”
Pat: “She said she was going to John’s Hair Salon when she left 15 minutes ago.”

Three

Kim: “Where’s Mom?” Pat: “At the salon.”

Four

Kim: “Where’s Mom?” Pat: “Out.”

Here, we have a very similar situation to the one above. There is a block of information that needs to be expressed, and many options as to how to best express it to maximize detail and efficiency.

Answer one is the Maximum Quality JPEG file of verbal expression. It gives every bit of necessary detail (and more) at the expense of time and energy. However, Pat’s response violates both Grice’s Maxims of Quantity and Manner, giving FAR more information than required or desired, slowing down interaction and cluttering Kim’s mind with more detail than needed. If everybody talked like this, nothing would ever get done quickly.

Answers two and three are both slowly sacrificing detail in favor of brevity. Both are significantly faster than answer one, but have enough detail to be meaningful and answer the question. Depending on the situation, either could be an acceptable answer to Kim’s question.

Answer four is the 0% JPEG of the conversational world. Although it provides some information, it’s not really enough for most purposes, and violates Grice’s Maxims of Quantity and Manner, this time at the other extreme. This answer would likely only frustrate Kim, and would make Pat sound like a Smart-Aleck.

So, in language too, we have to make this compromise. Is detail more important than brevity? What detail should we include? All of these interactions were lossy, and although the degree of loss wasn’t problematic until example four, it’s still vital to keep this in mind when examining language.

So where’s the TIFF?

The biggest difficulty with this metaphor is trying to find out what the TIFF file of Pat’s response is, and does such a thing exist? Although answer one was long and drawn out, there is still some missing detail there that Pat might have known. He didn’t include any clarification of how long it takes to get to the Salon, nor information on other stops that Mom might’ve been planning. No information was given about Mom herself, her manner of getting to the salon, or what else was said before she left. Although you could argue that some of that information might’ve been shared knowledge or knowledge easily assumed by Kim, the fact remains that there is always more that one could say about a subject.

Is our thought the TIFF file of conversation, the singular idea which contains all the detail which we discard when formulating speech? If that’s the case, would it be possible to find or create a “lossless” language? Perhaps this idea of lossless language is what I’m referring to with “High Precision language”.

Maybe it’s even one step further. Maybe the entire sum of our experiences and knowledge formulate one massive TIFF file, and all we do in conversation is crop and JPEG it as is fitting for the context. I kinda hope not, though. A file that big would take forever to open in Photoshop.

(This post left unnamed so that you don't have power over it)

2006-07-29T20:45:08-04:00

Sometimes it seems that in mainstream American culture, words have lost some of the power attributed to them by many in the past and in other parts of the world. One of the best examples of this power is in the use of one’s name.

Many cultures and subcultures believe that knowing a person’s name gives you some degree of power over them. In Paganism and Wicca, practitioners will frequently select (or be given) a secret (or “Magikal”) name in addition to their public name. According to conventional belief, this name should never be told to anybody, and reserved only for ritual work, the idea being that this name is the one you use when communicating with the gods. This all stems from the belief that “anything we know the secret name of, we can destroy” (Source…). This idea is not unusual in the world, but still seems quite foriegn to many Westerners.

In American culture, your (only) name is public domain, expected to be used anywhere and everywhere when people need to make reference to you. We give out our name when meeting complete strangers, write it on the various cards and documents we carry at all times, wear little tags on our shirts which proudly display it, and even post it online or in a phonebook, available for anybody who might stumble across it. Our names are common knowledge.

However, I think that the attitude that knowing a name gives you power is still present, to some extent, in Western thought. We really like to know the name for everything and everybody around us, and when we can’t figure it out, we begin to feel uneasy. Imagine meeting a person at a party and introducing yourself, only for them to respond that they won’t tell your their name. If no reason were given, you’d likely feel curious at first, maybe trying to get it out of them later in the conversation. If that didn’t work, you might ask somebody else. Finally, you might be a little bit scared and distance yourself from the nameless person.

People without names are both feared and esteemed in our culture, with examples from entertainment like “V” from “V for Vendetta” or Batman, both of whom use their secrecy and namelessness as a weapon. To this day, anonymity is viewed as dangerous. Just imagine refusing to tell the police officer your name next time you get pulled over. No matter what you did, it’s doubtful that they’d let you go until they found it out, either through your surrender, or their fingerprint database.

Now, more than ever, having somebody’s name gives you power over them. Armed with just a name, you could find all sorts of information scattered over both the internet and the printed world, and with the advent of sites like Facebook and MySpace, you can even find out who matters most to them. Knowledge is power, and a name leads to knowledge about a person.

So, according to some, every nametag, business card, facebook profile, or phonebook entry you bring into existence comes with the ability to control you. However, there are still some people left who are worried about the secrecy of their name. Need proof? Just ask the next telemarketer who calls you for their first and last name. Their silence will speak volumes.

All words hypnotize, that is their function, so choose your hypnotists carefully

2006-07-25T06:33:45-04:00

Call me paranoid, but the biggest source of worry for me involving language and thought (Linguistic Relativity) research is that the research and the ideas it creates will fall into the wrong hands. Given, it’s nowhere near as dangerous as the atomic bomb or gunpowder, but it still has some potential for abuse, on a number of fronts.

Perhaps the most likely form of abuse would come from the corporate world. Marketing and advertising are a multi-billion dollar industry in the United States alone, and with a highly competitive market for many common goods, every company would like an “edge” that would bring the hearts and minds of the people over to their brand.

With enough money, any company can flood the airwaves, streets and billboards with their name and message. If Megacorp A wants you to buy from them, they can advertise as loudly, cleverly, or frequently as they like, but there’s still nothing keeping Megacorp B’s Ads from being just as loud, clever or frequent. New marketing techniques (such as Viral Marketing and new advertising media (internet ads, product placement, adware) can briefly give one company the edge, but the public will quickly move on and the technique may fade away. Right now, ads are only as effective as their exposure and presentation.

There have been efforts to gain the upper hand through other, less obvious (and more devious) means. One such effort is that of Subliminal Advertising. Designed to pass a message by our normal, everyday perception and straight into the mind, Subliminal messages are frequently used in Propaganda, but can occasionally be found in advertising. Take this example:

During the 2000 U.S. presidential campaign, a television ad campaigning for Republican candidate George W. Bush showed words (and parts thereof) scaling from the foreground to the background on a television screen. When the word BUREAUCRATS flashed on the screen, one frame showed only the last part, RATS. Democrats promptly asked the FCC to look into the matter, but no penalties were ever assessed in the case. The effect this had on the overall presidential race was unclear.

(From the Wikipedia site on Subliminal Messages)

Subliminal messages are discouraged in advertising, and the FCC and National Association of Broadcasting have both banned the use of Subliminal messages in programming or advertising (More information…), even without conclusive evidence of their effectiveness. Subliminal messages are relatively easy to find and demonstrate, and they are rare enough that having one found and exposed can be a public relations disaster for advertisers.

So what does language and thought have to do with it?

If language used does in fact affect our thoughts (both consciously and unconsciously), then a whole new avenue of research is open to exploitation by those few whose greed may outweigh their ethical standards.

Already, there have been innocuous forays into subtly structuring language to slip a message, feeling or idea by the listener. There are firms who exist solely to advise marketers about potential product names based on their “sound symbolism”. According to these people, certain language sounds denote slowness, daring, or pleasant feelings. Thus, through some strange combination of aesthetics and subliminal suggestion, they claim to be able to design a product name which helps to place your product above the competition’s in the mind of the customer.

As research into the interaction of language and thought continues, more and more techniques will arise to help get Megacorp A’s message into your head more quickly, efficiently, and powerfully than Megacorp B’s. Now more than ever, linguists and psychologists are being snatched up into the corporate world with the goal of learning how to better influence people. Ph.D’s are pitted against preteens in a battle for their purchasing power, and with the advancement of research, there are more and more tantalizing techniques for them to try each day.

Just like fire, gunpowder or dynamite, psychological and linguistic research in this field can be used both for and against the good of the everyday person. I do believe that the increased understanding that can be found through this research will be of benefit to psychology, linguistics, and our understanding of the human mind. However, we must always be on the lookout for the few bad eggs who might want to use these ideas for less-than-ethical purposes.

If all words hypnotize, then it’s vital to not only recognize who your hypnotists are, but also how they do what they do.

Communication and Composition: Relativity through the viewfinder

2006-07-19T20:18:08-04:00

As you may have guessed from the Photoblog in the sidebar, one of my (non-language related) hobbies is photography. Just today, I was reading an article on photographic composition, when a passage jumped out at me:

Counter culture placement of the subject is another way of increasing tension in a photo. In western culture, movement is generally left to right. That’s how you’re reading this page. If the movement in the scene is from right to left (even though it’s moving toward the center), it can create negative tension for western viewers.

I may be crazy (or just obsessed), but I’m seeing some hinting at Linguistic Relativity (the idea that your language affects your thought, also known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis) in that line of reasoning. He seems to be imply that the direction of the writing system you use (and thus, the language you speak) affects your processing of images and your aesthetic sense. Given, it’s one of the more concrete and common-sense arguments I’ve heard for language affecting perception, but I’m still slightly skeptical. This just begs for some sort of study.

If Mr. Altengarten’s assertion is true, then an Arabic or Hebrew speaker (who read from right to left) might not find an image with left-to-right movement as appealing as a English speaker would. This raises a few term-paper worthy questions for me. Do Arabic or Hebrew speaking composition teachers give their students the opposite advice? Is this tendency mirrored in art in Right-to-left cultures? How would such images be seen by a bilingual speaker raised speaking (and reading) both Arabic (Right-to-left) and Farsi (Left-to-right)? What about to illiterate speakers of any language?

Given, evaluating this would be very subjective (“Which of these pictures is prettier?”), but I suspect that by asking enough people using similar enough photographs (differing only in composition), the presence or absence of a pattern might be detected.

So, if you’ve got lots of free time (and easy access to native speakers of both sorts of languages), I’d be fascinated to see such a study carried out on this. Although I can’t offer funding, advice, help, or pictures, rest assured that, if the study finds anything cool, you would be my personal hero for at least an hour. That’s gotta be worth something, right?

Informality with God

2006-07-18T20:50:19-04:00

This is more of an open-ended post than normal, but the issue of formality in Religious discourse came up today.

Having not been raised in any particular religion, I was somewhat surprised to discover that in the Bible, God is usually addressed informally rather than formally (when the language so permits).

For an example, let’s use Job 10:4 (this passage is the first I found where a person speaks with God. Attribute no special significance to this choice.).

In the New International Version of the Bible, the passage is glossed:

You don’t have human eyes. You don’t see as people see

Modern English has lost the Second Person informal (‘Thou’), so this informality doesn’t show up at all in Modern English translation. However, in the King James Version, we start to see this informality:

Hast thou eyes of flesh? or seest thou as man seeth?

Here, the full informal is used in reference to God. Also interesting is the lack of the capitalization found in the NIV’s “You”, when referring to God.

Interestingly, this same informality showed up in other languages as well. The Reina-Valera Spanish Version of Job 10:4 uses the informal tu (lowercase) in place of Usted, and the Russian Synodal Version uses the informal ты (/tɨ/) instead of вы (/vɨ/) This pattern also held true in French, German, and Portuguese, as best as I can tell.

Of course, there are people who might have a field-day with this information, attributing all sorts of cultural conclusions to these choices (“People must view God as their friend!”). However, rather than jumping to any conclusions, I’m going to ask what other people think.

So, my questions for my readers are twofold:

First, if you speak another language or practice another religion, with what form of address do you address your Deity or Deities? Do you use a formal Pronoun (Usted, You, Vous, Sie, etc.) or an Informal pronoun (Tu, Thou, Du, etc.)? For languages with many levels of formality, please specify.

Second (and answer this only if you’d like), does this informality (or lack thereof) hold significance for you? Do you feel like it’s more a matter of tradition than anything? Do you think that this represents or affects your perception of your God(s)?

I hope this yields some interesting answers, and maybe some interesting discussion!

To be, or not to be. That is inexpressible in E-Prime.

2006-07-18T08:07:44-04:00

For today, I’ve decided to discuss E-Prime, a language created by D. David Bourland Jr.

Proponents of E-Prime maintain that the English verb ‘to be’ in all of its forms has no place in discourse. Thus, words like “be, being, been, am, is, isn’t, are, aren’t, was, wasn’t, were, weren’t” are strictly forbidden. However, no ban has been placed on words like “has, become, will, would, do, shall, ought”. Two wonderful poems have been placed on the Wikipedia site, one in E-Prime, and one in Conventional English.

Conventional English

Roses are red;
Violets are blue.
Honey is sweet,
And so are you.

E-Prime

Roses seem red;
Violets seem blue.
Honey pleases me,
And so do you.

E-Prime’s creator felt that these rules “reduce the possibility for misunderstanding and for conflict”. The reasoning for this seems firmly rooted in the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, as they argue that the use of ‘to be’ can create false security in characteristics (when we say “the coat is red”, we only know that “the coat looks red to me”). They also seem to feel that the elimination of ‘to be’ leads to a language based less on an objective view of reality. Thus, eliminating statements of reality which include no epistemic information (information about how we know what we know) forces us to concentrate on the subjective nature of our interpretations. By adopting this language change, the creators of e-prime seem to feel that our perceptions would gradually shift as well, and eventually, so might our thoughts.

My primary skepticism involves the benefits of adopting such a change. Even if the elimination of ‘to be’ in written and spoken discourse could actually affect our perceptions of the world, I wonder whether the resulting change would really reduce the possibility for conflict and misunderstanding. Sure, false objectivity and lack of epistemic information in language could disappear (at least partially), but I question whether the awkwardness caused by eliminating ‘to be’ might outweigh the benefits and create additional sources of confusion. However, the awkwardness would vary from person to person. I composed this entire post in a basic form of E-Prime (excepting examples), and I did not find it overwhelmingly difficult, but I also cannot imagine it working well in spoken discouse.

E-prime seems quite innovative to me, and although I cannot see it catching on in everyday use, the mere idea provides a great example of thinking outside of the linguistic box in language creation/expansion. It seems like a good step towards precision language, and the idea of eliminating words for higher precision fascinates me. Thus, like many created languages, E-Prime seems destined to a gradual journey down the river to obscurity. However, like all created languages, it offers a new perspective and a new way to view the world.

I’ll end with a great quote from one of the E-Prime sites:

“You don’t need to take drugs to hallucinate; improper language can fill your world with phantoms and spooks of many kinds.”

The role of High Precision Language

2006-07-17T21:35:17-04:00

“Be careful what you wish for, you just might get it”

I’d mentioned High Precision Language in a previous post, and I think it’s time to give it a little more consideration.

Human language is quite often ambiguous, especially outside of context. Take, for instance, the following wonderful examples of ambiguity at its best:

“Police help dog bite victim”

“Have you seen the Queen of England’s hat?”

This ambiguity is seldom a problem, especially in a conversational situation where the participants can either infer (“Oh, Jane was talking about getting bitten by a dog the other day”) or ask for a clarification. Worst comes to worst, there is a misunderstanding and some communicative catastrophy occurs.

Trouble on the Path to Precision

There are some areas where ambiguity becomes far more problematic.

One such area is that of computers. As my computational linguistics professor says, “Computers are stupid. They’ll do exactly what you tell them to.” Computers lack the ability to infer, or to ask for clarification, so if you hand a computer an ambiguous command, it will likely hand you an error in return. To conquer this, we have created a great variety of computer languages (like C, Python, Perl, etc.), all designed to prevent as much ambiguity as possible and offer the computer a command that can only be read in one way.

However, I believe that there are some human realms that are more susceptible to troubles from the ambiguity.

Whether or not language is the basis for human thought (a highly contentious idea, see the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis), we do a great deal of subvocalization (talking to ourselves, silently) when thinking or working through difficult problems. Language is a good means of communication with ourselves, as well as with others, and when spelling out one’s thoughts, precision is very helpful.

In the legal world, hours upon hours are spent on each document, finding and removing (or exploiting) ambiguity in laws, contracts, evidence, and other such documents. Precise language could quickly eliminate loopholes, shorten text, and ideally make “legalese” obsolete.

In the realm of religion and spirituality, there are many examples of ritualized speech, where precision can be very important. In religious texts (and their translations), ambiguity can cause massive difficulties. As any lawyer can tell you, a single changed word can change the meaning of a text immensely. So, when a person is using a book to develop his or her spirituality, ambiguity can put them in a very difficult position. To avoid this, some religions (such as Islam) have decreed an official language to avoid such troubles in translation. In Islam, the Koran (or Qu’ran) cannot be “translated” from its native Arabic, but rather it is “interpreted” into other languages. These interpretations are not considered valid for any serious religious discussion, and most scholars of Islam are able to read, recite, and explain the Koran in Arabic. (Referencing the Wikipedia Article on the Qu’ran). However, a potent, easy-to-use, and ambiguity free language would be very handy for translation, and for the creation of any texts which may become important to future generations.

However, even in one’s personal worship or rituals, ambiguity in language can be seen to raise difficulties. In Paganism, Wicca, and other spiritual systems involving spellcraft or invocations, words are frequently used in Spells or Rituals as a method of establishing or guiding intent. In these situations, it’s vital to “be careful what you wish for”, because, if the spell is successful, practitioners believe that you just might get it. So, if your language is ambiguous, there’s a chance that your intent might be as well, and that could quickly lead to great difficulties. I suspect that with a High Precision Language, crafting the language for rituals would become a meditation and ritual in-and-of itself, and might well lead to better creation of intent in the long run.

Similarly, in some cultures involving planned ceremonies, the use, delivery, and intent of each word is vital, and some cultures believe that if a single word is misplaced or mis-spoken, the entire ceremony may fail. In these cultures, precision in speech and language is necessary, and ambiguity might be seen as a way to break a perfectly good ceremony. (This example stems from knowledge gained from a class on Native American Culture, but I’m unable to remember the specific tribe or ritual to cite. Assistance or corrections are appreciated.)

So what is High Precision Language?

Well, truthfully, I’m not sure yet. Whether it be an expansion to existing language, a language all its own, or a fool’s pipe-dream, High Precision Language is language easy enough for human use, but precise enough for computers, rituals and lawyers. Although it would undoubtedly be difficult to create, find, or discover, I think that the benefits in situations like those above would be a boon to humanity in a variety of contexts.

The potential of these benefits are what keep me searching for such an obscure concept, and hoping to make progress on what some might consider a fool’s journey.