parole

Back in 2004 I posted about a book (online at that link in both Yiddish and English) by the last editor of Haynt, a pre-WWII Yiddish newspaper in Warsaw that "chronicles the history of Jewish life in Poland between 1908 and 1939." Now the newspaper itself is online, thanks to the Historical Jewish Press Site, which "contains a collection of Jewish newspapers published in various countries, languages, and time periods. We display digital versions of each newspaper, making it possible to view the papers in their original layout. Full-text search is also available for all content published over the course of each newspaper’s publication." This Forward article by Shoshana Olidort describes it:

Founded in Warsaw in 1908, Haynt was the most widely read Yiddish newspaper in Eastern Europe, with a readership numbering in the tens of thousands. In addition to news reporting and columns on everything from humor to women’s issues, Haynt featured highbrow literary works by prominent writers like Sholem Aleichem and Hirsch Dovid Nomberg, as well as the more popular serialized shundromanen, or trash novels.

The political turmoil of the era, beginning with the outbreak of World War I, dramatically altered the scope of the paper, which for a time cut back to the bare bones of news reporting. Still, despite heavy censorship, the paper continued to be published (albeit under different names, including Nayer haynt and Der Tog), even after the outbreak of World War II. The final issue appeared on September 22, 1939, just days before Warsaw surrendered.

Young Bulgarians and guests from Italy, with support of the New Bulgarian University and project “Beautiful Europe” [bg] will meet on May 23 to discuss the “European idea” and what Europe means to Bulgarians at an event called “Blue Night” - an evening dedicated to the European idea [bg]. The event comes just one day before one of the brightest Bulgarian holidays - the Day of Slavic writing and culture.

Written by Ruslan Trad · comments (0) Share: Donate · facebook · twitter · reddit · StumbleUpon · delicious · Instapaper

Before his election as the 24th President of the French Republic, left-wing candidate Francois Hollande, had promised a new government with two specificities: an equal number of women and men and ministers - and from all ethnic and cultural backgrounds.

With a great majority of voters for candidate Hollande in the Presidential elections hailing from in the Overseas regions, French-Caribbean bloggers were impatient to see which French Guyanese, Martinican or Guadeloupean politicians would be assigned a key government ministry.

Prior to the official announcement on May 16th 2012, a Guadeloupean blogger at Indiscrétions thought it was unlikely that Christiane Taubira would get any major position [Fr]:

Christiane Taubiraby, image taken from her own blog. Photo by Jean Francois Robert. Visit Taubira's blog @http://chtaubira.tumblr.com/

La guyanaise Christiane Taubira, qu'on a entendu et réentendu en boucle sur les médias oraux nationaux le 10 mai, pourrait être ministre. Un ministère symbolique, tout comme sa présence d'ailleurs. Car, malheureusement, on ne donne que des fonctions symboliques aux ressortissants d'outre-mer quand on les prend au gouvernement. A quand un vrai ministère, comme le Budget ou l'Agriculture ?

This time around things are different and as Martinican Bel Balawou announces [Fr]:

Christiane Taubira originaire de la Guyane, a été nommée ministre de la justice et garde des sceaux dans le gouvernement de Jean-Marc Ayrault.

Guyanese blogger at Blada reposts [Fr] some of the official messages sent to congratulate the newly-appointed, but expresses, nevertheless, some mixed feelings:

Deux raisons de faire sauter les bouchons de champagne sous les palmiers… ou d'avaler cul sec un bol de vinaigre lorsqu'on a une haute idée de ce que peut être la justice.

Official government publicity photo of George Pau Langevin taken from her profile on the website of the French National Assembly (http://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/)

Among these well-acclaimed assignments, reactions to the appointment of Victorin Lurel to the Ministry of the Overseas Departments is discordant. Guadeloupean blogger at Carib Creole News publishes a post entitled “Victorin Lurel, Last Minister of the Last Colonies [Fr] in which he denounces the inconsistencies of the new Minister:

Lurel ministre, qui s’en étonne ? Personne. Lurel ministre des « outremers» (à CCN nous disons des Dernières Colonies : MDC) c’est la big surprise. Notre ex président de Région avait toujours clamé urbi et orbi, qu’il ne souhaitait surtout pas, ce ministère qu’il considérait comme « dévalué ». Sa « préférence » allait vers l’agriculture ou les collectivités territoriales. Mais il semble bien que Lurel n’ait guère eu la possibilité de choisir.

In this same post, CCN reminds his readers that since the 2009 social crisis in Guadeloupe, Lurel who was then member of the left-wing parliamentary opposition to Sarkozy's government, never stopped tackling the numerous causes of the discontent (prices, employment, status of Creole language, education and vocational training and governance) and condemning the policies enforced by the government then. He wonders how the new minister is going to solve the problems he once pointed at.

Victorin Lurel; photo taken from his Twitter profile @VictorinLurel

Regarding Lurel's appointment, Bel Balawou publishes no personal comment but reposts a letter [Fr] from Patrick Karam, a Guadeloupean-born former junior minister in Sarkozy's government, who unexpectedly expresses his complete support to his former rival, Victorin Lurel.

Le plus compétent et populaire des ultramarins, qui fut de tous les combats en faveur des outre-mer, l’homme qui a tenu bon face au LKP pendant la crise de 2009 et dont le comportement irréprochable et courageux avait été salué par le Président de la République Nicolas Sarkozy […]

These inconstencies are also pointed at by Martinican blogger at Montray Kréyol, who publishes a letter from Victorin Lurel, in a post entitled “The Contortions of Toto” (Toto being Lurel's nickname in his native Guadeloupe) [Fr]. In this letter, Lurel, before being appointed, legitimizes President Hollande's choice to honor French stateman Jules Ferry on his inauguration day. The choice was judged awkward and Lurel's support even moreso, since Ferry was the well-known advocate of the French colonial expansion.

Martinican blogger at Bondamanjak humorously wonders [Fr] why no Martinican-born politican was appointed in this new government.

Le hic dans cette histoire c'est que la Martinique, terre d'Aimé Césaire… creuset de la démocratie participative est étrangement absence de cette réunion de compétences.

Visit French mainstream online magazine, Le Nouvel Obs, to see the new faces of the French executive [Fr].

Written by Fabienne Flessel · comments (0) Share: Donate · facebook · twitter · reddit · StumbleUpon · delicious · Instapaper

The Dictionary of Old English offers a "word of the week," and last week it was hand-saex, with which Warren Clements has some fun in his Globe and Mail column; surprisingly (to me—I wasn't familiar with him), he doesn't linger on the cheap laughs but goes on to a useful examination of the history of the word:

Saex comes from a Germanic root (sah or sag) meaning to cut. It survives today only in the narrowly defined word sax, a tool used to trim roofing slates. But before the Norman Conquest of 1066 reshaped the English language and gave us Middle English – a process that took about a century to filter down to ordinary folks – saex was all the rage.

Continue reading "SAX AND DAGGER."

[The following is a guest post from Robin Queen.]

The 2013 LSA Linguistic Institute will be held in Ann Arbor, MI from June 24-July 19, 2013. The list of courses currently planned can be found here. (We are working on tagging them to make more dynamically searchable–that should be live in a week or so).

We are also currently soliciting proposals for workshops and conferences to be held in connection with the Institute. The call for proposals for these are now available on our website (http://lsa2013.lsa.umich.edu/call-for-workshop-proposals.html). If you’ve been thinking about a workshop you’d like to create, this would be a great opportunity.

If you have any questions about the Institute generally or the workshops specifically, please contact Robin Queen (rqueenumich.edu).

[The preceding is a guest post from Robin Queen.]

Reader PN wrote to comment on the first sentence of  a story by Andres Oppenheimer in the Miami Herald, "US unlikely to condemn Argentina’s ‘outlaw behavior’ — yet", Miami Herald 5/16/2012:

A U.S. congressional proposal aimed at expelling Argentina’s populist-leftist government from the G-20 group of the world’s leading economies faces an uncertain future, not the least because it lacks significant support from unexpected quarters — conservative Cuban-American Republican lawmakers.

PN's comment:

From the rest of the article — and typical attitudes of Cuban-American Republicans to leftist Latin American governments — it seems clear that they are trying to say that the *lack* of support was unexpected. But what a strange way to put it.

A Google Books search for "support from unexpected quarters" turns up plenty of examples — but all are cases of getting, receiving, finding such support, not lacking it:

From information which I have received, I shall get considerable support from unexpected quarters. Ukrainian soviets are receiving support from unexpected quarters. A main claim of the movement, which is now finding new support from unexpected quarters, is the perniciousness of neoliberal policies. Such sombre observations have received support from unexpected quarters. The dock owners and the ship owners refused to negotiate, and the strike might have collapsed had it not been for support from unexpected quarters. [T]hese attempts by Feuerbach, Freud and Sierksma to discuss religion at the cultural level as well, which in this interpretation are to be rejected, have recently received support from unexpected quarters. Phillips's argument that the plantation economy was unhealthy for both individual planters and the southern economy as a whole received support from unexpected quarters in the 1960s. They can expect some support from unexpected quarters for the twin slogan— education and atomic power.

There are just two examples of "support from expected quarters", both also involving getting or receiving such support:

The debate continued — Shaw repeating verbatim some of what he had written in the preface to The Doctor's Dilemma — with each party to the dispute receiving support from expected quarters … The BJP had hoped to reach the magic number of 269 by getting support from 'expected quarters'.

So there's a sort of idiom or collocation, "support from unexpected quarters", which is something that one can get, receive, or find. Curiously, one can also expect support from unexpected quarters. And can also, of course, get, receive, find, expect, or hope for support from expected quarters.  And finally, support, expected or otherwise, can fail to materialize.

We can tell that this is a sort of idiom because this sense of quarter(s) has a rather limited distribution — we don't see things like "*The usual quarters supported this measure", or "*A certain quarter argues that all such regulation should be eliminated."

Anyhow, you could certainly negate a phrase like "receive significant support from unexpected quarters" to get something like "It's not the case that the bill received significant support from unexpected quarters", or "The bill did not receive significant support from unexpected quarters". And you could merge "not receive" into lack: "The bill lacked significant support from unexpected quarters".

What's a bit odd about the Miami Herald's lede, as PN points out, is that the support of conservative Cuban-Americans for moves against  aleftist government in Argentina is expected support from expected quarters. What's unexpected is that this expected support has failed to materialize.

This implies a semantic structure that's informally

[[lacks support] [from unexpected quarters]]

rather than the expected

[lacks [support [from unexpected quarters]]]

If we merge the "lack of support" into a single noun, e.g. opposition, then  we wouldn't give the construction a second thought, as in these Google Books examples:

The Gilbert bill met with swift opposition from unexpected quarters. It is a well-known fact that the CLS critique of rights (and concomitant focus on needs) met with opposition from unexpected quarters, including critical gender and critical race theorists, …

So it's plausible that the analogous use of "[lacks support] from unexpected quarters" is grammatical — but just hard to process, due to the quasi-idiomatic character of "support from unexpected quarters".

While this is not an example of what we've come to call misnegation, the processing difficulty is certainly increased by the presence of multiple lexical negations along with the scalar predication implicit in unexpected and not the least because.

A report of a nice project:

In September 2011, Google and the Israel Museum launched the ambitious Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Project, with the aim of eventually making English translations and high-resolution images of all of the Dead Sea Scroll manuscripts available online. Within days of the project’s launch, more than a million people from across the world had stopped to browse digital versions of five of the longest and most complete scrolls: the Great Isaiah Scroll, the Community Rule Scroll, the Habakkuk pesher (or commentary), the Temple Scroll and the War Scroll. In recent months, the project has expanded to allow visitors to view two separate, verse-by-verse English translations of the Isaiah Scroll, one based on the standard translation of the Masoretic text, and the other provided by scroll scholar and regular BAS lecturer Peter Flint. In viewing the two translations side by side, readers can consider the various ways an ancient text can be translated and the slight variations in meaning and interpretation that can result.

If you're a native speaker of American English, a Dutch linguist needs your responses to an accent questionnaire:

In this questionnaire we will ask you as a native U.S. English speaker to rate the pronunciation of different speakers, some of whom were born outside the U.S. We ask you to rate how native-like the pronunciations are. While we offer a set of 50 speech fragments, you are free to rate as few or as many as you'd like (of course we'd prefer more, but there is no required minimum).

That was the start of my heading-comment on a photo of my son Dave: http://www.facebook.com/barbara.h.partee/posts/329948580410425

Ensuing back-and-forth on Facebook between me and Andy Rogers (with a relevant interpolation from my son Morriss):

Andy Rogers Shouldn't it be "or what?"? Barbara H Partee I punctuated it as I would pronounce it! Maybe if it was somebody else I might right "or what?". Andy Rogers Seems syntactically like a question. Barbara H Partee That's true. Well, but how would you punctuate an annoyed "Will you stop that!" It's also a question, but it's pronounced as an imperative. Maybe "Will you stop that?!" Maybe that's what some of those double punctuation marks are for — I've never seen them discussed (but haven't really looked — it's not a category I normally think about.) So maybe we could agree on "or what?!" ? Barbara H Partee But I have to confess that when I made the original post, a question mark never even entered my head. Morriss Partee Would you stop arguing about punctuation or what?!?!??!??!???!!!!?!???!!!??!??! Morriss Partee ;) Andy Rogers So what IS the relationship among syntactic form, whatever is going on in your ! examples, and punctuation? Barbara H Partee ‎(Sorry, Morriss, but wasn't it always like this at the dinner table? Should make you nostalgic!) Andy, I don't know, but somebody must. Maybe I should put a little query-post on Language Log and see what turns up.

So comments are open because I really don’t know! In this domain I’m just a naïve native writer of English, with ordinary education about prescriptive grammar, but they never taught us about what might be called “colloquial punctuation” (maybe it has a name, I don’t know that either.) I wonder if comic strip writers study colloquial punctuation somewhere, or if they just pick it up by paying attention to what other comic strip writers have done. If it’s been studied at all, I’m sure Facebook must be one good corpus-source.

When I was studying Indo-European, back in the Jurassic Era, "Sabellian" was considered to mean... well, I'll quote Webster's Third International: "one or all of a number of poorly known languages or dialects of ancient central Italy that are presumably closely related to Oscan and Umbrian." A book I used a lot in my grad school days, W. B. Lockwood's A Panorama of Indo-European Languages, has one mention of it, on p. 58: "A few early inscriptions characterised as Sabellian show that this dialect was closely akin to Oscan." Now, having found myself confused by the Memiyawanzi post about Karin Tikkanen's A Sabellian Case Grammar (Heidelberg, 2011)—how could you write a grammar about a minor dialect of which almost nothing is known?—I did a little googling and discovered that, as Wikipedia says under Osco-Umbrian languages, "Sabellic ... was later used by Theodor Mommsen in his Unteritalische Dialekte to describe the pre-Roman dialects of central Italy which were neither Oscan nor Umbrian. Nowadays, it is used to describe the Osco-Umbrian languages as a whole." I have several questions about this. First, when did it happen? Second, is there free variation between "Sabellic" and "Sabellian"? Third, and most importantly, why the hell? Why take an obscure term like "Sabellian" (or, if one prefers, "Sabellic") and decide to use it instead of a well-known and transparent term like "Osco-Umbrian"? Since the Wikipedia article is called "Osco-Umbrian languages," I assume the term isn't actually obsolete; is it just fuddy-duddies like me who hang onto it, or are there warring camps, Osco-Umbrianists versus Sabellianists (and/or Sabellicians)? It seems pointless to me, as if people were to decide one fine day to replace the term "Balto-Slavic" with "Prussian." The only thing gained seems to be confusion. But, as always, I welcome enlightenment from those who actually know something about it.

Two amusing bits from the Memiyawanzi post: a photo showing "Grammar" misspelled as "Grammer" on the spine—"ouch," as the blogger says—and a remark about Jürgen Untermann’s Wörterbuch des Oskisch-Umbrischen (Heidelberg, 2000), "a fabulously exhaustive dictionary famously known for glossing just about everything as Bedeutung unbekannt [meaning unknown]." Borges would have loved that.

On Friday, July 20, at the 2012 meeting of the Council of Writing Program Administrators in Albuquerque NM, there will be a session called "Help Wanted: Sharing Data for Research on Reading and Writing".  The proposal submitted for this session:

Should there be a large, open collection of student writing, representing the range of ability and accomplishment among American high school and college students today? We think so, but we’d like to hear your opinions.

“We” are a group of linguists, psychologists, computer scientists, and writing-program professionals.; and we believe that that a large collection of student writing, as part of a larger collection of texts and annotations, would provide an essential basis for many important kinds of research.

Our general idea is to create an open and evolving dataset of both student writing and expert writing, combined with an open and evolving collection of layers of annotation. The annotations might be linguistic (syntax, word senses, co-reference, discourse structures), editorial (mistakes, infelicities, suggested corrections), or psychological (eye tracking, EEG or MEG, reading comprehension, readers' evaluations, etc.). Since the collection would be a large one, not all kinds of annotation would be applied to all parts of it. And of course, not all users of the data would be interested in all types of annotation.

This collection could be used to estimate how much trouble students of different kinds at different levels have with different aspects of writing. It could be used to study the effects of writers' choices on readers' uptake, and might thus help to create better interactive advice for writers. And in addition to these and other innovative uses, such a collection would provide a larger and more diverse basis for standard sorts of reading research.

There are many available collections of (billions of words) of expert writing, and plenty of reading researchers who are willing to share their data, and plenty of computational linguists who are willing to share their algorithms and even their programs. The piece of the puzzle that is still entirely missing is a large and diverse collection of student writing, as well as editorial annotation, commentary, and evaluation for some of it.

In this session, we’ll sketch some of the kinds of research that such a collection would facilitate, and solicit the opinions of CWPA attendees about problems and opportunities.

This idea emerged from a series of discussions among a loosely affiliated group of people at several institutions — the set of names that ended up on the proposal, in alphabetical order, were Jonathan Brennan (Children's Hospital of Philadelphia), Chris Callison-Burch (Johns Hopkins University), Andrea Feldman (University of Colorado at Boulder), Al Filreis (University of Pennsylvania), Roger Levy (University of California at San Diego), Mark Liberman (University of Pennsylvania), Ani Nenkova (University of Pennsylvania), Rolf Norgaard (University of Colorado at Boulder), and John Trueswell (University of Pennsylvania).

If you're interested in joining the discussions, please get in touch with me.

[All links lead to sites in Portuguese.]

Set over the course of seven weeks, a creative writing competition promoted by the young Cape Verdean journalist Odair Varela on his blog, Crioulo n'Descontra, has led a dozen word lovers from three different continents to get behind their keyboards and let their imaginations flow.

The competition was launched at the end of March [en] to “promote a taste for writing and for linguistic and artistic evolution”. Odair suggested a set of four challenges; the responses, written in either poetry or prose, were published on his blog.

On 9th May the winners were announced, determined by counting the number of views their texts had received. This article will provide an overview of the stories told.

What will Cape Verde be like in 2090?

In the first challenge, competitors were asked to imagine possible routes for Cape Verde in terms of sustainable development, energy, environment and climate change. Anete Carvalho wrote ‘País Museu‘ (Museum Country), José Soares posted a poem, ‘Verdes eram as ilhas‘, (The Islands were Green), and ‘Retrospectiva 2012-2090‘ (2012-2090: Retrospective) was written by Silvianne Spencer. The piece with the most views was a poem written by Suruk Rodrigues:

Men of the Atlantic. Photo by Martin Edstrom copyright Demotix (27/07/2008).

Constrói-se uma terra de betão. E do sonho cultivado, colhe-se desilusão! Que caia chuva, para transbordar apenas barragens cheias de lágrimas dos que choram em vão!

Different approaches to tourism were also portrayed in several texts, such as that of Letícia Varela, written in Galician and entitled ‘Relógio do Tempo‘ (Time Clock). The possible extinction of Cape Verdean Creole was alluded to in the pieces by Nani Delgado, ‘Não Vou Ficar‘ (I Will Not Stay), and by Ary Rodrigues, ‘Um Povo Sempre Escravo‘ (A Nation Forever A Slave), which also talks about the country's economic growth and the influences of China.

Carla Gonçalves tells the story of an anthropologist and researcher who, in 2090, finds the book ‘A Morabeza das Ilhas Crioulas' (The Morabeza of the Creole Islands), which has a “clear cover that features stunningly beautiful white dunes; beautiful moraines and flowers with mountains towering in the background”, causing him to search for the meaning of “morabeza”. He travels to the islands; when he arrives, however, the last remaining inhabitant says ‘Não há mais Cabo Verde‘ (Cape Verde is no more):

Eis que Nhô Chico lhe responde num inglês rudimentar: Morabeza era a nossa essência, a música, a saudade. Morabeza eram as nossas crioulas, uma diferente da outra, mas todas únicas. Morabeza eram as nossas praias de areias brancas e negras, as montanhas fortes e imponentes, a simpatia e acolhimento. Morabeza eram as flores, a diversidade cultural, a dança. Morabeza era aquilo que nos distinguia, que nos fazia únicos. Mas isso acabou e não há mais aquele Cabo Verde…

Murder and escape

Dolls from Cape Verde. Photo by Wanaku on Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

“Someone has to be killed, and that's your task”, states the second challenge, which encourages the use of fast-paced prose to deliver crime, action and lots of gore.

From the boss murdered by an indignant ex-employee, the beautiful brunette who succumbed to the poison of a Loxosceles anomala spider, the ‘Grande Mistério da Boneca Assassina‘ (The Mystery of the Murdered Doll), to the crime of passion and the classic butler mystery, but there was still room for a coup d'état from the revolutionaries, and for the introduction of the movement of the “indignados” in Cape Verde, as Suruk Rodrigues wrote in the story of Zeca:

Zeca sofria com perseguição política dos novos tempos, que poucos entendem, ou seja, na rua era bandido, na escola era drogado, e não conseguia bolsas de estudo, estágio, trabalho ou coisa melhor. Arquitectou com genialidade o movimento dos indignados de Soncent com sede e acção no Mindelo, que no mês de Julho de 2012 vinha a ocupar as manchetes dos jornais neoliberais numa dura perseguição aos “fascistas” e entre eles o pai da sua amada.

He ends up being stabbed in the back by his future father-in-law in a public square, in full view of everyone.

Who killed Eva?

More crime to inspire the authors, but this time the challenge profiles the suspects of the murder of Eva Sequeira, a fifty-something-year-old wealthy widow who was found dead in her mansion.

Everyday life in Cape Verde. Photo by Nuno Lobito copyright Demotix (12/02/2008)

The suspects include “Eva's stepdaughter, who she never got on well with”, the “retired doctor who had been in love with Eva since childhood (although it was never reciprocated)”, the “young, good-looking stranger”, the “butler's son who was devoted to Cármen [the stepdaughter]”, and Eva's best friend:

No final do interrogatório, o investigador Nataniel Borges prendeu dois suspeitos sob acusação de cumplicidade na morte da senhora Eva Sequeira. Quem foi para a cadeia? Quais os motivos que os levaram a cometer tão horrendo crime?

The story with the most views, written by Margareth Lima, blamed Eva's best friend for committing a crime of passion:

…eu amei aquela vadia desde o dia em que a conheci. Sofria cada vez que a via com outro, meu único conforto era a existência de outra pessoa que ela ignorava o amor. E justo quando ganho coragem e me declaro ela pede desculpas dizendo que só me queria como amiga. Queria ficar com esse imbecil [o médico aposentado], porque era seu Adão. Mereceu morrer sem disfrutar do seu Adão.

Three days and a farewell

What would you do if you were told that you had only three days left to live?

The repentence of someone who only ever knew how to be “a vile executioner, an opportunist and often sadistic for power”: he is taken door to door to visit those he owes apologies to for his behaviour in life.

A woman from Santo Antão. Photo by Julien Lagarde on Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

The “poet“, in “Quando fui morrer” (When I went to Die),  “[she hurried] to condense [her] life for her family and closest friends” in an all-night celebration.

Vanda wanted to fulfil the dream she had beyond her Creole life: to see the snow. She ends up in the Swiss Alps with her eyes closed, a smile on her lips and a heart full to bursting.

While the “bride“ decided to block all social networking sites before she died (”I never liked the idea of seeing dead people on Facebook.”), Vitoria, the character in Bolivian Margareth Lima's winning piece, took advantage of the social network to arrange a huge birthday and farewell party with “family, former classmates, teachers, workmates, friends, and even enemies”. She was the only one who had a reversible death, as at the end of the story we find out that the results of the medical tests were not in fact hers.

And thus ended the first creative writing competition launched exclusively by a blog and promoted through Facebook, sowing the seeds for “changes in writing habits and routines that can put down their roots and become even more developed with the passage of time”.

Written by Sara Moreira · Translated by Georgi McCarthy · View original post [pt] · comments (0) Share: Donate · facebook · twitter · reddit · StumbleUpon · delicious · Instapaper

The most recent SMBC:

Though I'm a long-time fan of SMBC, and especially grateful for the math jokes, I feel that this one is slightly spoiled by the questionable use of the term "Discrete Mathematics". As Wikipedia explains

Discrete mathematics is the study of mathematical structures that are fundamentally discrete rather than continuous. In contrast to real numbers that have the property of varying "smoothly", the objects studied in discrete mathematics – such as integers, graphs, and statements in logic – do not vary smoothly in this way, but have distinct, separated values. Discrete mathematics therefore excludes topics in "continuous mathematics" such as calculus and analysis. Discrete objects can often be enumerated by integers. More formally, discrete mathematics has been characterized as the branch of mathematics dealing with countable sets (sets that have the same cardinality as subsets of the natural numbers, including rational numbers but not real numbers). However, there is no exact, universally agreed, definition of the term "discrete mathematics." Indeed, discrete mathematics is described less by what is included than by what is excluded: continuously varying quantities and related notions.

The SMBC aftercomic seems to remove any possibility that "for reals" is meant to be used in a discrete-mathematics context:

Still,

Bloomberg reports (rather delicately) that the name of France's new prime minister, Jean-Marc Ayrault, is causing a bit of problem when it is transliterated into Arabic: "When spoken, his family name is colloquial Arabic in many countries for the third-person singular possessive form of the male sex organ." France's foreign ministry has nipped this problem in the bud, however, by issuing a statement with a recommended transliteration that will prevent people from reading Ayrault's name in Arabic as "(his) dick." On the Middle East Institute editor's blog, Michael Collins Dunn breaks down the translinguistic embarrassment in more detail. The taboo word is أير ('ayr), slang for "penis" in some varieties of Arabic. Evidently "Ayrault" was being transliterated as أيره (colloquially pronounced 'ayr(h)o), which can be construed as أير plus the masculine possessive suffix ه — thus, "his dick."

The solution that the French foreign ministry came up with is to recommend that Ayrault's name be transliterated as أيرولت ('ayrolt). That takes the silent "-lt" ending in French and explicitly spells it out to avoid the problem of unfortunate homonymy. Arabic news outlets (as well as Arabic Wikipedia) have apparently taken the suggestion to heart. I would guess that Arabic newscasters are also using the spelling pronunciation of 'ayrolt to forestall any snickering from their audience.

The French are possibly sensitive to these cross-linguistic tangles after having to find a way to transliterate the last name of Vladimir Putin (Путин in Russian). As noted by William Safire in 2005 (and commenter Sarah C. here last year), spelling his name as "Putin" in French would suggest a pronunciation like putain, a slang word for "prostitute" and all-purpose curse word. So they avoided that by spelling his name as "Poutine."

Naziha Baassiri of the Now Lebanon blog noted another parallel: the name of Pakistani diplomat Akbar Zeb can be taken in Arabic to mean "the biggest dick." (His last name would be transliterated as زب, or zubb, which like أير 'ayr is an Arabic slang term for "penis.") Baasri claims that "Zeb has been unable to present his credentials as Pakistan's ambassador to a number of Arab countries, including Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Bahrain." Without a suitable avoidance strategy, some taboo language might simply be too much to bear in the decorous world of international diplomacy.

[Update: Eugene Volokh emails to say that Akbar Zeb apparently wasn't ever proposed as an ambassador to Saudi Arabia. See David Kenner's Foreign Policy post for more on the apocryphal story.]

An LJ post by glo_ku (in a sort of English after the first paragraph) reveals a wonderfully Joycean sense of wordplay, and would make an excellent test of a student's mastery of Russian idioms, colloquialisms, and slang. The "Russian" part starts off "Глад бонжурствовать юс апресле лунгаминного абсенствия" [Glad bonzhurstvovat' yus apresle lungaminnogo absenstviya], which when looked at through multilingual glasses translates as "Glad to greet you after the long absence," and proceeds to become too multilingual even for me (I have no idea what "взыл мучень бешафнят" means). The "English" part starts "The events I'd like to tell you about took place in a small town of Derry Vushko right after the old fart Party Zahn have thrown away the hooves"; "Derry Vushko" is the Russian word деревушка [derevushka] 'small town,' Party Zahn is партизан [partizan] 'partisan' (the partisan fighting behind enemy lines is a familiar figure in Russian/Soviet life and literature), and "thrown away the hooves" is бросил копыта [brosil kopyta], a slang phrase comparable to "kicked the bucket." Similarly, later on дифирамб [difiramb, 'dithyramb, eulogy'] becomes "Dee Fee Rumba" and катить бочку [katit' bochku, 'to take action to harm someone else's career'] is literally rendered as "to roll a barrel." It's lots of fun if you like that sort of thing. (Via Anatoly.)

A funny ad:

There are several serious questions behind the joke. One has to do with L1 effects: Why do speakers of some languages (Thai, Russian, Hungarian) characteristically substitute [t] for [θ], while speakers of other languages (Japanese, German, Egyptian Arabic) substitute [s], given that all of these languages have both [s] and [t]? This question is considered at length in Linda Lombadi, "Second language data and constraints on Manner: explaining substitutions for the English interdentals", Second Language Research, 2003.

Another question is whether the merger in production is also, as the ad implies, a merger in perception. The answer in this case seems to be "sort of" — see e.g. Linda Polka et al., "A cross-language comparison of /d/-/ð/ perception: Evidence for a new developmental pattern", J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 2001, from which this graph comes:

Getting back to the jokes, Linda Lombardi quotes this one — too good to check —  from John Edwards' 1994 book Multilingualism:

One of my favourite errors occurred in an American war film, subtitled in French. One fo the soldiers peers into the distance, and another says "Tanks?" The subtitle reads 'Merci'.

Mario Cordero from Diario Paranoico [es] has opened a wikispace [es] where he posts one ‘guatemaltequismo' (word that is used in Guatemala) per day. Mario also set up a Facebook [es] page where he shares that day's ‘guatemaltequismo'.

Written by Silvia Viñas · comments (0) Share: Donate · facebook · twitter · reddit · StumbleUpon · delicious · Instapaper

Every year since 2005, speech synthesis researchers have organized a yearly Blizzard Challenge, "[i]n order to better understand and compare research techniques in building corpus-based speech synthesizers". Part of the research effort involves the general public, who are invited to perform a series of evaluations of the results.

Participation takes about one hour in total — but your participation is registered, so that you can leave at any point, and then return and take the evaluation up again at the point where you left off. If you're willing, please follow this link to enroll and participate.

The technology being evaluated is the kind of speech synthesis where new texts are synthesized by re-combining bits and pieces of recordings of real human voices, or perhaps by concatenating elements drawn from a statistical analysis of the same recordings. There are many different approaches to every aspect of this process: how to choose the bits and pieces, how to take them apart and put them together, how to modify the resulting combination (if at all), and so on. The central idea of the Blizzard Challenge series is to give everyone the same collection of recordings to start with, and the same texts to synthesize, and the same limited amount of time to get it all done, and then to compare the results so that everyone can learn more about how to improve the technology.

The name "Blizzard" arose because the original speech collections used came from the CMU ARCTIC databases. And the ARCTIC name was chosen partly because

… we chose to use out-of-copyright books from the Gutenberg Project. With most of these texts being at least 70 years old, we face the issue of language drift. The English language has changed considerably over the past centuries and we did not want to infuse in our prompt set archaic English sentences. Thus we have hand selected a set of short stories whose style is recognizably modern, if not completely contemporary. Partly for consistency and partly from personal preference, we selected stories largely from the early 20th century author Jack London. Many of these stories – famously “To Build a Fire” – depict the difficult living conditions of the Yukon. Other selected books also describe the far Canadian north, hence our moniker Arctic.

The 2005 challenge was based on. The voice building data for the 2012 challenge is

[a]udiobook data, segmented into utterances and with transcriptions […], comprising around 50 hours of speech material, of which around 32 hours have high-confidence transcriptions, with the remainder having transcriptions of lower confidence.

The audiobook recordings come from librivox.org, and consist of John Greenman reading four books by Mark Twain (A Tramp Abroad; Life on the Mississippi; The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; and The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg, and Other Stories.

As Paul, who sent me the link, wrote, "To me this is asking : which is better eating, poulet de Bresse roasted with herbs or prime New York strip perfectly char-grilled ?" And of course he's right, and everyone involved in this poll at The Millions agrees, but it's still an ever-enjoyable question to chew over, and the eight Russian experts asked for their opinions by Kevin Hartnett provide an enjoyable variety of answers. (An irrelevant remark: Duke University has a Professor of the Practice of Russian? I wonder how that odd title came about.) Myself, I will have no opinion until I've read more of each writer in the original, and even then I'm pretty sure my answer will be "They're both great, and which I prefer depends on my mood that day." I must say, though, that the respondents who come down on Dostoevsky's side tend to write more entertainingly than the Tolstoyophiles, and the latter occasionally evidence a certain pomposity; when Andrew Kaufman says of Dostoevsky "What he doesn’t do, however, is make you love life in all its manifestations," my response is "You shouldn't need a novelist to make you do that, and that's not what literature is for anyway." I liked Chris Huntington's conclusion:

In any case, I realize that the “competition” between Dostoevsky and Tolstoy is just an exercise in love. No one really has to choose one or the other. I simply prefer Dostoevsky. For my last argument, I will simply cite an expert far older and wiser than me:

  Just recently I was feeling unwell and read House of the Dead. I had forgotten a good bit, read it over again, and I do not know a better book in all our new literature, including Pushkin. It’s not the tone but the wonderful point of view – genuine, natural, and Christian. A splendid, instructive book. I enjoyed myself the whole day as I have not done for a long time. If you see Dostoevsky, tell him that I love him.   -Leo Tolstoy in a letter to Strakhov, September 26, 1880

On Facebook, Fahrettin Şirin shared this special card for linguists and other lovers of ambiguity:

"I love ambiguity more than most people" is of course ambiguous, since it could mean "I love ambiguity more than most people (love ambiguity)" or "I love ambiguity more than (I love) most people." And in the case of some linguists, both of those propositions may have positive truth values.

(For more on the ambiguity of "comparative ellipsis," see Jean Mark Gawron, "Comparatives, Superlatives, and Resolution," Linguistics and Philosophy 18:333-380, 1995.)