Tag: language update
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ŋ
Random phonetic musing. Among Euro languages, only the Germanic group treats ŋ as a phoneme. In every language ŋ is a natural allophone of n before k or g within one word. It’s unavoidable. English has three ways of pronouncing the written arrangement of n and g. (The previous sentence includes all three.) Examples after…
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Reprint on grammar and skill
Reprint from 2021, relevant to the Altman AI monstrosity. = = = = = START REPRINT: MindMatters tries to separate out human language from animal communication: Believers in human non-exclusivity do not appear to be especially picky about what counts as evidence for their views. For example, here’s a research finding that is supposed to…
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New ESL Sucker
This is the champion Sucker Filter for stupid click-gathering spam. In recent years the English has improved a bit, but not this one. = = = = = START QUOT-BE: Your Account Prime well-be Remove Today ! Dear Prime Costumer, Your Subscription has expired! Your Subscription for Prime expired on Wed,03 Apr-2024 We tried to…
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New retronym
Headline from the Ankler: My chat with Gabe Spitzer, Netflix’s head of nonfiction sports, at the Netflix Slam tennis event reveals the streamer’s sports ambitions keep growing. Nonfiction sports? I guess fiction sports encompasses “scripted events” like this: One can easily envision this becoming an annual event, one that’s clearly meant to build on the…
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Taibbi is an aspectless idiot
One headline is enough: The Fix is In. Taibbi constantly plays the fake surprise game, pretending that journalism used to be honest and politics used to be honest. Now the Horrible Other Party has turned everything sour, but we can restore the old pristine state of integrity by “electing” My Wonderful Party. 2/3 of the…
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Recycled authentication
1. Every language has ways of marking the end of a sentence or thought. Words are much less definite and more variable. In some languages the elements we’d consider words are integral parts of one ‘word’ that forms a sentence. In every language phonetic coarticulation melds ‘words’ but doesn’t cross a sentence boundary. 2. Written…
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Couldn’t be Spanish.
I heard the Ripley item about the mysterious Mexican president Comonfort again and got puzzled again. The Ripley audio is unclear, and the announcer didn’t always handle foreign words well. Google filled in the proper name after I typed ‘Mexican president Ignacio C’. Comonfort couldn’t be Spanish. Was it from the native tribes, or a…
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Growing and shrinking /r/
BBC has an article on dialect change. Final /r/, which has been absent from The King’s English for many centuries, persisted in isolated areas. Now it’s disappearing in the isolated areas as well. = = = = = START QUOTE: Accent change is often like a puddle: it dries up in most places and leaves…
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Is it prosody or epigenes?
This is interesting. Newborns respond preferentially to stories in the ‘mother tongue’ before they’ve had a chance to hear much talking through air conduction. Were they picking up intonations and prosody through the liquids in the womb? Or is the familiarity imparted through epigenes? The former possibility could be checked by using different languages with…
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Doozy debunk
We always learned that doozy came from Duesenberg, which was an especially impressive car. Halfway recalled reading a debunk of the origin. The Duesenberg brothers started out as engineers at Maytag, which made gas-powered washers before it switched to electric. They departed and created their own car in 1920. It would have taken a few…
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Meaningless word peeve
Political spammers keep asking me if I’m proud of Biden or proud of Trump or proud of America. In the first fucking place, I have nothing but hatred toward all excrescences of the national government, with the possible exception of Jerome Powell. In the second fucking place, proud can’t possibly apply to these entities, even…
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Mammary grammary
The internal evidence of language has always implied that our brains have separate ways of processing One, Two, Three, Four, Many. Languages have basic words or grammatical forms for 1 2 3 and sometimes 4. Beyond 4, the later developed numbers take over, but without any grammatical connections. A new study firms up the brain…
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Three rings
From Phonographic World in 1889, an article that rang several of my bells. 1. This may be the first letter from an Okie in any published journal. The eastern part of Okla was in the middle of the first Land Run at that moment, and the only Euros in the state were in missions and…
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Phats?
Reading an 1891 Inland Printer, noticed an odd modern word in a report of conditions in KC: = = = = = START INLAND PRINTER: The past few months have witnessed the lowest depression in all branches of the printing business ever known in this city. Retrenchment has been the universal cry and practice among…
Polistra's Mill 