So this is my first attempt to play "Scatter the Mud." It's in something like Eb Dorian because I feel like the usual A is a bit screechy on the free reeds. I'm going to try really hard here not to be apologetic (except for forgetting the repetitions on the B part -- oops) and just say that you can basically tell what I'm trying to do, and I look forward to posting another video when I've really got it figured out. Anyone interested in backing me up with guitar/bouzouki/fiddle/tin whistle/Irish flute/bodhran/kazoo?
Saturday, May 3, 2008
The Celtic Bandoneon
I'm trying something new here. I really want to dig in and figure out my bandoneon so I can start doing all kinds of cool complicated two-handed stuff, but I think I need to slow down and concentrate on getting a feel for the arrangement of the notes. For the moment, then, I'm going to try focusing on one hand at a time, playing all the Irish tunes I know -- they're fun, short (for the most part) and diatonic, which is the perfect combination.
So this is my first attempt to play "Scatter the Mud." It's in something like Eb Dorian because I feel like the usual A is a bit screechy on the free reeds. I'm going to try really hard here not to be apologetic (except for forgetting the repetitions on the B part -- oops) and just say that you can basically tell what I'm trying to do, and I look forward to posting another video when I've really got it figured out. Anyone interested in backing me up with guitar/bouzouki/fiddle/tin whistle/Irish flute/bodhran/kazoo?
So this is my first attempt to play "Scatter the Mud." It's in something like Eb Dorian because I feel like the usual A is a bit screechy on the free reeds. I'm going to try really hard here not to be apologetic (except for forgetting the repetitions on the B part -- oops) and just say that you can basically tell what I'm trying to do, and I look forward to posting another video when I've really got it figured out. Anyone interested in backing me up with guitar/bouzouki/fiddle/tin whistle/Irish flute/bodhran/kazoo?
Sunday, April 20, 2008
An input-optimization puzzle
As I was walking home the other day I was thinking about the way predictive text input works on cell phones, and how it's simultaneously cool that, because of the fact that only a tiny frequency of the possible combinations of our 26 letters are actually used as words, with only 8 symbols we're capable of entering English text without a great deal of difficulty, and irritating that a lot of common words have duplicate input sequences: soon/room, of/me, he/if, etc.; and the less frequent but still aggravatingly abundant book/cool, mind/mine/nine, cast/cart/bart, good/home/gone/hood/hoof/hone/goof, and on and on.
For reference, the way my cell phone (I assume this is a standard at this point?) groups the letters is as follows:
2 - abc
3 - def
4 - ghi
5 - jkl
6 - mno
7 - pqrs
8 - tuv
9 - wxyz
Well, I found myself thinking, what if we weren't required to disperse the letters across the keys in alphabetical order? Couldn't there be some kind of optimized arrangment such that the numbers of duplicated sequences would be dramatically reduced? I figured that I would be in a good position to try this out, having spent a lot of time thinking about the frequency of letters in English.
To this end, I read the TWL (US Scrabble) dictionary into a database and set up some automatic calculations to derive cell-phone input sequences for all the words. As it turns out, the standard layout has about 27,000 duplications out of the approximately 163,000 words in the dictionary (16.5% duplication). This shouldn't be hard to beat, right?
As it turns out, my optimism (and ego) was unwarranted. My first attempt gave me 33,000 duplications (20%), significantly worse than the baseline. After about a half hour of tinkering I managed to get it down to 25,000 (15.3%), which salved my wounded self-confidence but still was not nearly as good as I had hoped.
There must be some principles that are going to underlie any successful attempt. One is clearly that no two vowels (including y) should appear on the same key. Another one that I embarrassingly only discovered after the aforementioned half hour is that consonants frequently used in derivation and inflection should also not coincide, notably d, s, r, n.
So here's the challenge: can you come up with a scheme that's better than the 16.5% baseline standard, and/or better than my 15.3% best so far? If you send me your letter groupings, I'll feed them into my program and post the results here. Maybe together we can figure out the Grand Unified Theory of Duplication Avoidance in Cell-Phone Text Entry. Or something.
For reference, the way my cell phone (I assume this is a standard at this point?) groups the letters is as follows:
2 - abc
3 - def
4 - ghi
5 - jkl
6 - mno
7 - pqrs
8 - tuv
9 - wxyz
Well, I found myself thinking, what if we weren't required to disperse the letters across the keys in alphabetical order? Couldn't there be some kind of optimized arrangment such that the numbers of duplicated sequences would be dramatically reduced? I figured that I would be in a good position to try this out, having spent a lot of time thinking about the frequency of letters in English.
To this end, I read the TWL (US Scrabble) dictionary into a database and set up some automatic calculations to derive cell-phone input sequences for all the words. As it turns out, the standard layout has about 27,000 duplications out of the approximately 163,000 words in the dictionary (16.5% duplication). This shouldn't be hard to beat, right?
As it turns out, my optimism (and ego) was unwarranted. My first attempt gave me 33,000 duplications (20%), significantly worse than the baseline. After about a half hour of tinkering I managed to get it down to 25,000 (15.3%), which salved my wounded self-confidence but still was not nearly as good as I had hoped.
There must be some principles that are going to underlie any successful attempt. One is clearly that no two vowels (including y) should appear on the same key. Another one that I embarrassingly only discovered after the aforementioned half hour is that consonants frequently used in derivation and inflection should also not coincide, notably d, s, r, n.
So here's the challenge: can you come up with a scheme that's better than the 16.5% baseline standard, and/or better than my 15.3% best so far? If you send me your letter groupings, I'll feed them into my program and post the results here. Maybe together we can figure out the Grand Unified Theory of Duplication Avoidance in Cell-Phone Text Entry. Or something.
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
Pass the meme
Given that I've now seen this both on the Bluff post office wall and on Oona's blog, I can officially class it as being EVERYWHERE, so I'd better post it too so I'm not left out.
I would just like to say that I would live here in a heartbeat. Does anyone know the story of this...uh...complex?
I would just like to say that I would live here in a heartbeat. Does anyone know the story of this...uh...complex?
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
Down with emphasis
I have decided I am seriously fed up with language reference works' indiscriminate use of the word "emphasis" (and related forms). The thing is that the term is essentially without meaning, except insofar as it seems to indicate that something is happening that the author lacks the sophistication, patience or intelligence to explore or describe adequately.
It tends to come up a whole lot in discussions of syntactic structures: in a Latin clause, for instance, any arrangement of S, O and V is theoretically possible; and according to all my textbooks, the choice of order is largely one of emphasis. Which means what, exactly? Are we talking about topicalization? Focus? Or some other kind of pragmatic consideration? Hell, as far as we know all kinds of factors might conceivably be involved in a fluent speaker's choices, including, for instance, how she feels personally about the constituent in question. How can a learner possibly know, or even guess, how to start using this "emphasis" correctly?
In the case of Polish, for example, although SVO is typically the least marked order, VS is statistically very likely to show up unmarkedly in intransitive clauses. This simple fact would be likely to remain completely mystifying and opaque to anyone other than a trained linguist examining a large amount of data, yet would be easy at least to mention in passing rather than allowing it to be subsumed within that abyss of "emphasis."
So...what "emphasis" means is, apparently, "when you are fluent someday, you will understand." And I know that, to some extent, there is a lot about language that works this way, as much as we try to quantify and explain everything; but I feel certain that we could be doing a better job than this.
Turkish provides some particularly egregious examples, such as the fact that any word can be repeated, ostensibly to "emphasize" it. On this Edip Akbayram CD, four of the twelve track names have a repeated word:
* İnce ince bir kar yağar (adjective: a fine/graceful snowflake falls)
* Yakar inceden inceden (adverb/prepositional phrase: it burns intensely)
* Dumanlı dumanlı oy bizim eller (derived adjective: our village is full-of-smoke)
* Sev beni beni (pronoun: love me)
This clearly extremely productive process extends to verbs as well. From Elementary Turkish by Lewis V. Thomas:
baktım "I looked (stared)"
baktım baktım "I looked hard (stared and stared)"
There is obviously a lot going on here -- the repetition seems to have different effects with different parts of speech, and in different contexts. In some cases verbal aspect may be involved ("stared and stared?" isn't that perseverative or iterative or something?); sometimes there may be semantic effects; in sev beni beni in seems like it may be a pragmatic issue, showing topicalization or contrast. Yet none of my books mention it with more than a sentence; nor do they dig deeper than to call it a matter of "emphasis." Yet I am convinced that, given its frequency, even an intermediate learner would need to understand how to interpret and produce this structure appropriately -- and that it is much more important than, say, the (rarely used) past subjunctive, which gets a full treatment spanning pages in one of these textbooks.
Perhaps the worst ever use of this concept I have encountered in the world of linguistics is not in syntax or morphology, but in phonology, in reference to the so-called "emphatic" consonants of the Semitic language family. When I first dabbled with Arabic, I struggled mightily to understand what to do with these "emphatic" coronals. Should I say them more clearly? With more air pressure? At longer duration? This is usually what is meant by "emphasis" in this language of ours when it refers to sounds. But no, no. Arabic "emphatics" are not louder, harsher, stronger, etc.; they are simply pharyngealized. To my ear they actually sound less emphatic than their "normal" counterparts. Here more than ever "emphatic" means nothing more than "somehow different, with the footnote that I cannot articulate to you what I am talking about."
The real shame in all this is not just that the authors of our language reference works lack scholastic rigor -- it's that this vast area of "emphasis" is actually incredibly fascinating, and important, but gets all but ignored by our theory of language instruction, displaced by mountains of charts and paradigms. I want to know what is going on when Turks repeat words! But how will I find out? Maybe I will have time to live in Turkey and become fluent so that I can learn through osmosis, but there are so many other things I want to do with my life; I am sad that I may never know.
It tends to come up a whole lot in discussions of syntactic structures: in a Latin clause, for instance, any arrangement of S, O and V is theoretically possible; and according to all my textbooks, the choice of order is largely one of emphasis. Which means what, exactly? Are we talking about topicalization? Focus? Or some other kind of pragmatic consideration? Hell, as far as we know all kinds of factors might conceivably be involved in a fluent speaker's choices, including, for instance, how she feels personally about the constituent in question. How can a learner possibly know, or even guess, how to start using this "emphasis" correctly?
In the case of Polish, for example, although SVO is typically the least marked order, VS is statistically very likely to show up unmarkedly in intransitive clauses. This simple fact would be likely to remain completely mystifying and opaque to anyone other than a trained linguist examining a large amount of data, yet would be easy at least to mention in passing rather than allowing it to be subsumed within that abyss of "emphasis."
So...what "emphasis" means is, apparently, "when you are fluent someday, you will understand." And I know that, to some extent, there is a lot about language that works this way, as much as we try to quantify and explain everything; but I feel certain that we could be doing a better job than this.
Turkish provides some particularly egregious examples, such as the fact that any word can be repeated, ostensibly to "emphasize" it. On this Edip Akbayram CD, four of the twelve track names have a repeated word:
* İnce ince bir kar yağar (adjective: a fine/graceful snowflake falls)
* Yakar inceden inceden (adverb/prepositional phrase: it burns intensely)
* Dumanlı dumanlı oy bizim eller (derived adjective: our village is full-of-smoke)
* Sev beni beni (pronoun: love me)
This clearly extremely productive process extends to verbs as well. From Elementary Turkish by Lewis V. Thomas:
baktım "I looked (stared)"
baktım baktım "I looked hard (stared and stared)"
There is obviously a lot going on here -- the repetition seems to have different effects with different parts of speech, and in different contexts. In some cases verbal aspect may be involved ("stared and stared?" isn't that perseverative or iterative or something?); sometimes there may be semantic effects; in sev beni beni in seems like it may be a pragmatic issue, showing topicalization or contrast. Yet none of my books mention it with more than a sentence; nor do they dig deeper than to call it a matter of "emphasis." Yet I am convinced that, given its frequency, even an intermediate learner would need to understand how to interpret and produce this structure appropriately -- and that it is much more important than, say, the (rarely used) past subjunctive, which gets a full treatment spanning pages in one of these textbooks.
Perhaps the worst ever use of this concept I have encountered in the world of linguistics is not in syntax or morphology, but in phonology, in reference to the so-called "emphatic" consonants of the Semitic language family. When I first dabbled with Arabic, I struggled mightily to understand what to do with these "emphatic" coronals. Should I say them more clearly? With more air pressure? At longer duration? This is usually what is meant by "emphasis" in this language of ours when it refers to sounds. But no, no. Arabic "emphatics" are not louder, harsher, stronger, etc.; they are simply pharyngealized. To my ear they actually sound less emphatic than their "normal" counterparts. Here more than ever "emphatic" means nothing more than "somehow different, with the footnote that I cannot articulate to you what I am talking about."
The real shame in all this is not just that the authors of our language reference works lack scholastic rigor -- it's that this vast area of "emphasis" is actually incredibly fascinating, and important, but gets all but ignored by our theory of language instruction, displaced by mountains of charts and paradigms. I want to know what is going on when Turks repeat words! But how will I find out? Maybe I will have time to live in Turkey and become fluent so that I can learn through osmosis, but there are so many other things I want to do with my life; I am sad that I may never know.
Friday, January 4, 2008
Le grand chagrin
Well, I suppose it was inevitable sooner or later, and if it had to happen I am at least glad that it was another linguist, and my girlfriend to boot, who was responsible for cleaning my clock. Even so, I'm still sort of reeling from the shock.
So yes, I think it's about time I made the official announcement that Amelia has beaten me at Boggle, thereby becoming the only person ever to have done so. Rounds, that is, not whole games (yet), but still -- this past weekend we had one round that was 22 to 7, and another that was something like 12 to 3.
Clearly this is completely unacceptable, and I'm going to have to go back into intensive training or something. Yes. Up at 5 AM every day, a glass of raw eggs, and two hours of Boggle practice. Reading the OED from cover to cover couldn't hurt either.
Just prior to the aforementioned series of discomfitures: note the shameless "I'm about to embarrass yo' ass" look on her face.
So yes, I think it's about time I made the official announcement that Amelia has beaten me at Boggle, thereby becoming the only person ever to have done so. Rounds, that is, not whole games (yet), but still -- this past weekend we had one round that was 22 to 7, and another that was something like 12 to 3.
Clearly this is completely unacceptable, and I'm going to have to go back into intensive training or something. Yes. Up at 5 AM every day, a glass of raw eggs, and two hours of Boggle practice. Reading the OED from cover to cover couldn't hurt either.
Just prior to the aforementioned series of discomfitures: note the shameless "I'm about to embarrass yo' ass" look on her face.
Saturday, December 15, 2007
Baby names, apropos of nothing in particular
I wonder what it means that the last time I made a list like this it was much more rife with unpronounceable Polish on the one hand, and unabashed hippiness on the other. I hope it's that I have developed more respect for the plight of my theoretical future children on the schoolyard and not that I have sold out and become boring in my old age.
In any event, here is the list of names I would actually consider bestowing as of today, girls kinda sorta in general order of predilection, boys alphabetically:
In any event, here is the list of names I would actually consider bestowing as of today, girls kinda sorta in general order of predilection, boys alphabetically:
Girls
Eleanor (Ella)
Zoe
Isabel (Izzie or Bella)
Alexis (Lexie)
Imogene (Idgie)
Matilda (Tillie)
Bree
Zoe
Isabel (Izzie or Bella)
Alexis (Lexie)
Imogene (Idgie)
Matilda (Tillie)
Bree
Boys
Aidan
Asher
Ethan
Ewan
Ian
Jesse
Jonas
Linus
Miles/Milo
Noah
Robin
Asher
Ethan
Ewan
Ian
Jesse
Jonas
Linus
Miles/Milo
Noah
Robin
For some reason it's much, much easier for me to think of girls' names that I like than boys' -- and I'm not quite sure why this should be. Maybe it's that, being a straight male, I've spent more time considering the aesthetics of girls' names? I'd be interested to hear about other folks' experience with this, and also your lists, if you have them.
By the way, I'm sort of embarrassed to have included Aidan in the above, considering its appalling trendiness at the moment. I'm afraid I have to say I just really do like that name for a little boy, and in my defense I did first hear it attached to an adult and not a toddler.
By the way, I'm sort of embarrassed to have included Aidan in the above, considering its appalling trendiness at the moment. I'm afraid I have to say I just really do like that name for a little boy, and in my defense I did first hear it attached to an adult and not a toddler.
Tuesday, December 11, 2007
A suffusion of yellow
Douglas Adams' book The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul is available in Finnish, entitled Sielun pitkä pimeä teehetki, which translates as "The Soul's Long Dark Teamoment."
In case you were wondering.
In case you were wondering.
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