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:

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. I can hear the difference between aspirated, unaspirated and voiced stops, but I have trouble reliably making unaspirated stops.

5. After a fair amount of practice, I can make and hear Ejective stops.

6. 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.

7. 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.

8. 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:

1. Mother Tongue Annoyances
2. Language Fragments
3. LinguLangu
4. Confessions of a Language Addict
5. 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.)

Tagged with Language, Computers, and the Internet, Notes, Site News, Tirades | 7 Comments


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

Tagged with Computational Linguistics, Conventional Linguistics, Dialects and Idiolects, Language Humor, Language Usage, Language, Computers, and the Internet, Sociolinguistics, Translation and Translation Theory | 32 Comments


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.

Tagged with Conventional Linguistics, Corporate Language, Language Usage, Language, Computers, and the Internet, Phonetics and Phonology | 1 Comment

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