2002-08-02 17:10 (UTC+1)
They're having a ball
It's a glorious summer day, and They've put up a marquee in the
gardens just down from my office. There's a stench like unto that of
charred cow-flesh wafting in through the window and the strains of a
workmanlike funk band for a chaser. This is nothing to do with my
department - we've not been invited, and we're not enjoying it very
much.
I'd shut the windows, but I'd swelter in the heat. I will, soon,
anyway - I'm going up to my Mum's for the weekend by train with a
rucksack full of stuff.
All of which is really just an pretext to alert new readers to the
fact that I don't generally blog at weekends. Don't say I didn't warn
you!
2002-08-02 16:31 (UTC+1)
Les Voyelles (Hors Series): Rhino Snogging Time
Open your mouth a centimetre or two (that's wide enough to bite a
knuckle in Imperial Units). Pull your tongue down and back. A
long way back - either as far back as you can or until it
tickles your gag reflex, whichever comes first. Leave your lips
more-or-less slack. The overall effect should be much like you'd
expect from a sadistic doctor with a tongue depressor, just before he
tells you to say "Ahhh".
Now say "Ahhh". (My Varied Reader may be disappointed to hear that although
I have my own white coat, I am unfortunately unable to make house
calls.)
This noise that you are making (did I say you could stop? I think
not!) is a long back vowel [A:]. In practice, back vowels in
most languages are not this far back, which in practice is as much of
a relief to me as it is to you. The Swedish long "a" in (e.g.)
bra is not this far back, so you can afford to let your tongue
come forward a bit. In my pronunciation of English the "a" in
"father" is a low back vowel, but I like to use a vowel just a bit
further back for Swedish.
You'll be pleased to hear that there is a whole series of back vowels
in Swedish and delighted beyond reason that I'm going to describe them
all, but first I have to deal with monophthongisation. In English
pronunciation of vowels, especially of long vowels, the tongue tends
to glide from one position to another; this produces what are called
diphthongs where two vowels blend into each other. The
opposite of this is monophthongisation, as is typical of
French and Swedish, where the tongue stays where it's put until it's
told otherwise.
This is something English speakers hate, but that's
just life. Some phoneticians use the terms tense and
relaxed to describe the articulation of vowels, while others
object that they don't really correspond to anything that has been
measured acoustically or even muscularly. They do describe what it
feels like, though. Monophthongal vowels (the kind we want) are the
tense ones - you need to keep your tongue tense so that it won't start
drifting off and being English and stuff.
This is where the rhino comes in - when making Swedish vowels you
want to brace your tongue as though you're about to snog a rhino.
Tense, you see? There is, of course, no truth in the rumour
that the IPA requires budding phoneticians to have their tongues
callibrated against the
platinum-iridium rhino kept for that purpose in a
Parisian vault. I hope.
Now, back to the back vowels. With [A] as the lowest back
vowel the only way left is up. Keep the tongue pulled right back and
concentrate on raising the back part of the tongue. As the tongue
rises progressively round the lips. This should move you through the
vowel [o:], as found in "sova" and "v�t", about half way up
with lips fairly rounded, and then finish with [u:] as in
"ros", with the back of the tongue as close as it can get to the roof
of the mouth while maintaining a pure vowel, pronounced rounding of
the lips, and the tongue still pulled right back.
In practice, these are all more exaggeratedly back than the vowels
used in Swedish, but practicing them this way can help to break
Anglophone habits and get you used to feeling the intrinsic
backness of back vowels. You can and should tune by ear for
added authenticity. And don't forget the rhino!
(I'm saving the odd vowel out [u"+] as in "gul" for
later, but if you really insist then you can try something between
[u:] as above and [y:] as in "ny", assuming you have
a good authentic close rounded front vowel - the difference between
those should be just a question of moving the tongue forward and back
while maintaining height and lip rounding - the vowel you want should
be a little forward of what feels like half-way.)
2002-08-02 10:20 (UTC+1)
Cat and girl are very good indeed.
In a dizzying whirl
or just sat on a mat
they're a cat and a girl -
they're a girl and a cat!
[Trad., arr. Purcell.]
Bellis
alerts
us to
Cat and Girl, which I had
seen before, but not really appreciated; there's an overlay of
painfully hip US indiedom (the
Hipster Scouts, yet) that I'm too old now to join in with - I
don't expect to see the point of the mimsy Tweecore of Belle and
Sebastian even if I levar uti hundrade �r - but it's much, much better
than that. Experienced readers will know
that I like a bit of Situationism, and
Girl and Cat are Situationists:
The mutual interference of two worlds of feeling, or the bringing
together of two independent expressions, supersedes the original
elements and produces a synthetic organisation of greater efficacy -
d�tournement.
And they weigh in on the
geek/nerd controversy even if
they get it the wrong way round, by most standards of contemporary
English usage.
All these savage ironies are delivered in a j�ttecool clean-line
cartoony style (go check out the early ones to see a Voice Being
Found) and a correspondingly detached wit.
Plus, of course, I like cats.
2002-08-01 14:03 (UTC+1)
Translation trauma
All my verbal ingenuity is currently tied-up - we've reached the
writing up stage of a paper and I have to translate a colleague's
English into English. Since I am not Spanish and we are not paid by
the word I am making extensive use of the delete key.
Tomorrow I will have also for you scintillating delights, but today my
prosodic prissiness is employed elsewhere.
2002-08-01 09:02 (UTC+1)
Belated observations on S(u)paidaaman
[ I saw Spiderman in Japan - timeliness is not a virtue for which I am
noted. ]
It was in Scott McCloud's marvellous
Understanding Comics that I first came across the idea that
an integral part of the point of the cartooniness of cartoon
characters is to allow the reader to project themself onto the hero -
the more generic the drawing the more easily it could be (any of) us.
Clearly, this is also the function of Spiderman's mask, and Jonathan
Lethem's LRB
article uses precisely this manoeuvre to ground his reading of the
film from an African-American point of view. There are no prizes for
guessing that my reading of Spiderman is essentially geek
wish-fulfillment, but that's the whole point - he can be whatever you
want to make him.
It's not often that Hollywood gets it as right as it does here - and
Spidey is one of my Official Cultural Treasures, so it this is not a
small thing for me to be saying. Even the changes to the comic's
continuity were for the better. For example, making the web shooters
a biological mutation rather than an invention is a brilliant way to
reclaim the adolescence that's at the heart of the Spiderman Origin
Myth - sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, but a sudden spurt of
greyish goop unpredictably activated by a flick of the wrist in the
suddenly and disturbingly changed body of a boy/man is very rarely
just a cigar, if you know what I'm saying.
The only flaw was, of course, the Infamous Nipple Scene, and it's
again McCloud we need to invoke to understand why - by
objectivising Mary-Jane as a sexual object in that scene the film
suddenly jars us back into us-as-audience and breaks the identification
of us-as-Spidey that is the whole point of the film.
I just hope they make a sequel. (Actually I also hope they also
realise the need to appoint a suitably qualified Consultant
Semiotician To Ms Dunst's Nipples, but that may be more geek wish
fulfillment than you needed.)
2002-07-31 14:07
H�lsar!
Actual Swedish people are linking me! I am j�tte-thrilled!
Simon
postulates that he and I are essentially, in some sense,
quasi-bogomorphic. But really, I long ago stopped wanting to be a
mathematician when I grew up - I now want to be a linguist when I grow
up, my bass playing would make a dog laugh, and I stopped dyeing my
hair when I turned 30.
I'll also mention here, since I didn't elsewhere, that the truly
terrifying maths books, the ones people cite but never read, the ones
that might as well be blank beyond page 17 because anyone who actually
gets that far is undoubtedly so unhinged they won't even notice, are
the ones called Foundations of Whatever for appropriate values of
Whatever. (That means you, Dieudonn�. Not that I'm bitter.)
Incidentally, the real mathematics blog of choice is of course Brenda's
Isomorphisms.org
- if no one else understands your need for Chern classes, or why
it's cool to think of projective two-space as a circular disc with a
m�bius strip glued to each other edgewise cross-cap fashion, even if
the resulting object doesn't fit inside three-space without
self-intersection, then go talk to Brenda - she understands.
Also Erik
says,
- and this is my first plug in Swedish, so I'm quoting it verbatim in
utter delight:
Desbladet - F�rfattaren verkar plugga svenska n�gonstans i England
och t�cker kungligt skvaller bra, i synnerhet s�nt som g�ller
Kronprinsessan Victoria.
In fact Vickans recent dominance merely reflects media trends -
Desbladet remains as committed as ever to bringing you the finest in
pan-Scandinavian princess prattlings. Has there, indeed, ever been a
better
Aftonbladet headline
than
Modeexpert: "Mette-Marit �r snyggare �n
n�gonsin", the first such story we ever linked? Surely not,
although we hold out hope for Nu �r Mette-Marit snyggare �n
n�gonsin igen!. Maybe some day...
We're even willing to cover
new Danish princes - we'd prefer a juicy Kronprins Fred scandal,
of course, but we take what we can get.
2002-07-31 09:54 (UTC+1)
Syntax sin tax
The
Welfare of Ducks bill. A golden opportunity missed - consider
Section 1 subparagraph 1(i):
No duck shall be beak-trimmed, except where a vetinary surgeon
certifies that beak-trimming is necessary in the interests of that
duck's health.
Imagine, though, if that had been the whole of the act. We join the
action in one of the commons' bars, where William Vaughn,
Under-Secretary for Avian Affairs, is fuming about the invoice he's
just received for associated secretarial expenses:
"So how much was the Duck Bill Bill bill, Bill?"
"Bill Bill," Bill mimicked savagely, "He won't mind. But I
do mind!"
Of course, now I have to write a novel, just so that I can
work this in.
2002-07-30 15:08
Demystification itself can always be turned into a myth.
[ In which I attempt to explain. Explaining the explanation is left as an exercise for the interested reader. ]
I've never actually been to Sweden (which is the cause of much
hilarity in my Swedish classes) but I did go to Norway once. I liked
it a lot, but it was a bit embarrassing that bus drivers spoke good English
and I spoke no Norwegian at all, so when I got back I resolved to Do
Something About It. Except there weren't any Norwegian classes
offered locally, and there were Swedish classes, so I did that
instead. Same difference, right? (*Ducks*)
Since I also have a slightly more than casual interest in linguistics
and an innate bias towards formalism, I approach learning Swedish in a
way that everyone else seems to think is barking mad.
(Everyone else thinks tapes are better than books for learning
pronounciation. Fools! We'll show them,
won't we, Henry?)
One side-effect is what I hope will one day be recognised
as the best guide to Swedish phonetics by a non-Swedish speaker
with no formal training in phonetics ever serialised on
Diaryland. (I never got my
other award, but I'm not bitter.)
After I'd been studying Swedish for a year or so I started
using print-outs of articles from the Swedish newspaper
Aftonbladet to supplement
course material. At first it would take a large chunk of an evening
to read through an short article, and I quickly learned that frivolous
stories about Scandinavian princesses were less upsetting than Real
News to dwell on for that length of time. I kind of got hooked on
the soap-operatic aspects, and I still follow the royal gossip rather
more avidly than it probably merits.
2002-07-30 09:52 (UTC+1)
Geminate me, baby!
One feature of Swedish that is a novelty to native English speakers is
the idea of long consonants. Happily these are as easy to learn as
they are fun to use.
Consider the "d" in the English word "bad" (this is [d] in
phonetic transcription, hoorah, hoorah). When this is pronounced the
tongue momentarily blocks the air flow from the lungs and then
releases it. (Are we all singing along at home? Good!)
We can call the whole process a "plosive" and divide it into the
blocking of the air stream (the "implosive" part) and the release (the
"explosive" part).
Now consider the English phrase "bad dog". In my pronounciation, at
conversational speed, the "d" in "bad" is an implosive that is then
held, and the "d" in "dog" is the corresponding explosive. So, even
in English, we can find long consonants. (Consider also "book
keeper", "hot tea", etc.) This phenomenon only occurs across word
boundaries in English, but in other languages it can occur within
words. Italian, for one, where consonants spelt with double letters
are pronounced this way. (This is further ammunition, by the way, for one's
feud with the kind of person who
snobbishly tries to pronounce "latte" in the Italian manner, but fails
through not actually knowing what that is. If, that is, one should be petty
enough to be conducting such a feud, heaven forbid.)
More to the point, Swedish does it too. In Swedish (also Norwegish,
but not Danish) there is a rule (called "syllabic equilibrium") that
demands that a stressed syllable must have exactly one of either a
long vowel or a long consonant. Using the colon (:) as a length
marker we may notate these as V:C, and VC:. Now, in
practice, if a long consonant is followed by a vowel the explosive
part joins in with the latter vowel - the Swedish pronounciation of
the name "Anna" is essentially "An-na" (and it's this splitting of
long consonants across syllables that is called gemination, strictly
speaking). In Swedish, however, the double consonant belongs, at
least conceptually, to the previous syllable and it is quite normal
to have double consonants at the end of a word (e.g. "tack").
Finally, we may note that Swedish is fairly consistent about spelling
long consonants with double letters, except that "kk" is replaced by
"ck" (which is odd, but not really a problem) and "m" is never spelled
double at the end of words even when it's long (which is annoying).
2002-07-29 13:59
A 20th century boy marooned in the barren wastelands of the 21st century.
The department coffee machine is being decommissioned at the end of
this month. Apparently I was the only person who used it. I can
believe that - the coffee was disgusting, and required you to type a
four digit number to specify what you wanted (2836, since you ask).
I have access to the staff coffee-making facilities, of course, but
it's not the same - if I have to drink bad instant coffee then I want
a machine to make for me. It's the 21st Century, for heaven's sake!
On the other hand, the coffee jug that used to sit stewing in the
staff dining room has now been replaced by a new machine. Needless to
say, I also disapprove of this - this is supposed to be real
coffee, and that doesn't come out of machines. The machine hasn't
really worked since it's been there - either it's got a headache, or
the door hasn't achieved the exacting standards of shutness that the
discerning coffee machine of today demands, or
something. Today it claimed to be out of beans, and when they opened
it up there was indeed a (not at all empty) plastic pot of actual
coffee beans. Even so, I seethe inwardly every time I press the
button marked Americano when all I really want is a black
coffee. Much as I love machines, pretentiousness does not become
them.
Sigh. Most of all I hate it when my routine gets messed up.
2002-07-29 09:19 (UTC+1)
Aim V�-ri pliized to miit jo
Francis
disapproves of my attempts to outsource my biography, which I suppose
is reasonable enough - this is an attempt to add some concrete details
to the previous sketch.
I am 32 years old, 180 cm tall and I weigh 60 Kg (that's "tallish and
skinny" in imperial units). I have Batchelor's degrees in maths and
physics, a Master's degree in applied mathematics and a PhD in
engineering (fluid mechanics). I work as a computer programmer in a
University maths department in the west of England.
I live in abject squalor with four guitars (including a bass) and more
books than I will probably ever be able to read.
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