Koa, an IAL project I've been working on for about nine years, has now got a blog devoted to it here. There's also a link to it over on the right, but maybe you hadn't noticed yet...
Anyway, this new forum is incredibly exciting for me, and I've been being unusually productive now that I don't have to hold all my new ideas in my head simultaneously while I think about them. Serious kudos to Amelia for the idea.
Loa la po sisi! ...keka ta halu ko opi ti?
(or would that be Keka ta lu opi ti? Something for the blog.)
Thursday, May 8, 2008
Wednesday, May 7, 2008
NEVs and San Leandro living
In the unlikely event that there's anyone I haven't told yet, Amelia and I are going to be moving in together this summer. Or, more accurately, I'm going to be moving into her house in San Leandro. Yes, yes, I know, San Leandro isn't usually the first place on one's list of, say, vacation destinations, but the thing is that it's a really neat older house that she actually owns, with a huge back yard with fruit trees and oodles of garden space, and we're going to have bees and chickens and it's all going to be pretty spectacular.
However, San Leandro is still very much a suburb, and the nearest cute tea shop is in Alameda about eight miles away -- kind of too far even to bike on a daily basis, at least with my schedule. Grocery stores are also not exactly what I'd call "walkable," and though I don't personally shrink from the two-mile walk to and from the BART station, I imagine my friends would be more likely to visit me if said visit were not punctuated by said walk.
SO, if I'm going to be living in San Leandro, which I am, the conclusion is that I need a car. But I really don't want a car -- that is to say, one of those things that you pour expensive flammable substances into, the which you subsequently set fire to and dump the resultant smoke into the air in order to make it go -- so Amelia suggested that I look into Neighborhood Electric Vehicles. I'm not totally sure if she was serious, but the more research I do, the more it seems like this is exactly what I need. For longer (or faster) trips we can figure out how to trade her Camry (or maybe Prius someday soon, please please please?) back and forth, but for the vast majority of driving I would be doing, a cap of 35 mph and 40-45 miles would be absolutely fine...especially considering the fact that it would be virtually free to operate.
After a bunch of comparison shopping, it looks like the Kurrent by American Electric is my best bet. And it's nice that I would actually be able to afford it with my new job.
I don't know for sure if this is really going to happen, but I'm pretty excited about the idea. Some photos:
However, San Leandro is still very much a suburb, and the nearest cute tea shop is in Alameda about eight miles away -- kind of too far even to bike on a daily basis, at least with my schedule. Grocery stores are also not exactly what I'd call "walkable," and though I don't personally shrink from the two-mile walk to and from the BART station, I imagine my friends would be more likely to visit me if said visit were not punctuated by said walk.
SO, if I'm going to be living in San Leandro, which I am, the conclusion is that I need a car. But I really don't want a car -- that is to say, one of those things that you pour expensive flammable substances into, the which you subsequently set fire to and dump the resultant smoke into the air in order to make it go -- so Amelia suggested that I look into Neighborhood Electric Vehicles. I'm not totally sure if she was serious, but the more research I do, the more it seems like this is exactly what I need. For longer (or faster) trips we can figure out how to trade her Camry (or maybe Prius someday soon, please please please?) back and forth, but for the vast majority of driving I would be doing, a cap of 35 mph and 40-45 miles would be absolutely fine...especially considering the fact that it would be virtually free to operate.
After a bunch of comparison shopping, it looks like the Kurrent by American Electric is my best bet. And it's nice that I would actually be able to afford it with my new job.
I don't know for sure if this is really going to happen, but I'm pretty excited about the idea. Some photos:
Saturday, May 3, 2008
Gah!
Trying to record oneself playing a musical instrument is officially the most frustrating activity of any kind ever. I swear I can play Valse à Bruno with my hands tied behind my back ordinarily, but with the camera rolling I can barely get through three measures without making the kinds of mistakes that are just too bad to soldier through. After half an hour of trying, Ossie and I are spent. Arr, gah, bleah, eeeeeeee, and other noises of exasperation.
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.
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