This site will be my space to post about things which, although hopefully still interesting to my readers, are not at all linguistic in nature. That way, people interested in the language blog can look here, people interested in a technology and music blog can look there, and everybody can be happy. Aalthough I’ve moved my review and followup of OS X “Lion” over to the new site, and nothing will change in any significant way over here.

On the other hand, if you are interested in technology, software, computing, music, and whatever else I choose to write about, make sure and check out the Non-Linguistic Mystic!

If you’re interested, check out:

My Linguistics Bookmarks

My Phonetics/Phonology Bookmarks

My Natural Language Processing Bookmarks

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

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!

- Using IPA fonts with Mac OS X: The Comprehensive Guide (recently updated with new information)
- Cryptorthography: Hiding your writings in plain sight
- What can computer image processing teach us about language?
- im in mai blog, postin’ bout cats: The Cuteness of Grammatical errors
- im in ur programmz, codin in ur dialect: LOLCode and Feline Dialectology
- The glottal stop: your new Phonetic Phriend
- You can’t say “Phonetics” quickly without saying “fun”

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!

Although I’m still up in the air about the form of the contest, I’ve got a few ideas, but I’m open to suggestions for rules. Consider the comments thread to be a sounding board for format ideas.

So, start working on your systems, it’ll be only a matter of time before they’re put to the test!

If any pages, links, or other functionalities are broken, please contact me and I’ll try and get things fixed up. Otherwise, it should be the same LingMystic that you know and (hopefully) enjoy.

Thanks, as always, for your readership, and I hope that this new server will allow me to expand the site and make it something even better both for me and for those who stumble across it!

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!

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.

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.)

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 in the top right corner of the page, 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.