Excursivity
I'm off to go walking in the countryside this weekend.
Yes, in this weather.
See you Monday.
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2003-02-07 17:25 (UTC)
ExcursivityI'm off to go walking in the countryside this weekend. Yes, in this weather.
See you Monday.
2003-02-07 10:28 (UTC)
Knudella, Kover StarThis week's Point de Vue has had enough; she's now "la fianc�e du Danemark", apparently. Anyone for a sweepstake on the date of an Ofiicial Announcement? I'll take Allahj�rtensdag - if you're doing fairy tale prinsess stuff you may as well go the whole hog, I say. But the NouvelObs brings news of a big Magritte exhibition coming to Paris next week (until June). I've never been to Paris, other than to change trains, but this will have to change - Magritte is my very favouritest Belgian ever and that's no small thing considering the fierce competition. Of all the many things that annoy me, the difficulty of buying poster/print reproductions of Surrealists other than bloody Dal� at his most inanely chocolate-box is higher on the list than perhaps is reasonable considering the amount of suffering in the world that can be attributed to other causes. Still, I have expended much shoe leather, and more lately clickage, in a vain search for Magritte and de Chirico reproductions. (If you know better, do tell.) And while I'm doing audience requests, can anyone recommend a good anthology of Swedish poetry through the ages? (Or even pan-Scandiwegian, but they never seem to do that.) I need texts to practice pronunciation and prosody with, and it would be nice to have Cultural Importance included.
2003-02-06 17:11 (UTC)
A day without numerical analysis
is a day without grey skies and freezing rain. This was not such a day.
2003-02-06 12:23
Woke up this morning, linkage all on my blog.I did do my homework and it was well worth the effort:
-Det er en sv�rt spent internasjonal situasjon. Det er dessverre alltid en krig i verden, kriger som aldri f�r oppmerksomhet. Men alltid venter barn p� � bli f�dt. Barna er i seg selv et h�p om fremtiden, sier prinsesse M�rtha Louise. I am assured that it is, in fact, possible not to love M�rtha Louise, but I honestly don't see how. I would bet good money she thought up the "children are a hope for the future" line all by herself - I would suspect, even, that the concept of clich� doesn't exist in her mental universe, bless her. A long article on neurogenesis (new brain cells in adults) in birds and, more controversially, primates. There's a fair bit of "then we killed all the monkeys and feasted heartily on their spicy brains, yum yum" stuff in their, caveat lector, but there's also this, which is lovely:
That, of course, is the leitmotiv of Nottebohm's career: you can understand how animals behave, and how their brains function, only if you watch them live normally. It has been Nottebohm's singular perception that behavioral analysis alone would never explain how birds learn to sing, and that just examining the molecular basis of the cells won't do it, either. "Unless you understand the needs, the habits, the problems of an animal in nature, you will not understand it at all," he said. "Put rats and mice into little plastic boxes and you will never fully comprehend why they do what they do. Take nature away and all your insight is in a biological vacuum." [via Enigmatic Mermaid] And that reminded me about a story about the changes in the brain (enlargement of posterior hippocampus) in drivers of licenses Hackney carriages in the city of London. (They have to pass rigorous exams on routes in the city, see.) And Google found me the original paper [pdf]. Very readable. Learn some Cree? Or some more Cree? Web resources for Native American languages are a bit thin, frankly. Whatever "middle school" is, I hope it's pupils like being patronised and underinformed a whole lot better than I do, is all. Phonology .pdfs: a helpful 1982 Goldsmith overview of "nonlinear" (sigh) phonology (metrical and autosegmental). Also a less-than-helpful slice of Goverment Phonology. Now must I do Swedish homework. Hej d�!
2003-02-05 14:17 (UTC)
Kungliheter KatchupI've been inattentive, I know. But there hasn't been that much till today, when suddenly: Prinsesse M�rtha Louise og Ari Behn flytter til h�sten til New York p� ubestemt tid.
Now off the civic list and with a business model that involves exploiting
Norwegians' residual brand loyalty, it might be a good idea to acquire
some glamorous remoteness. Or it might not, of course.
Meanwhile, Kronprinsfrede's slow-motion courtship (they're filming it
with timelapse photography as an art project, you see - played at full
speed it will only take a couple of hours and grown men will weep
openly at the emotional intensity of the experience)
En forlovelse mellem kronprins Frederik og hans k�reste, Mary Donaldson, ligger i luften. You know, for Danish that's almost readable.
2003-02-05 09:41 (UTC+1)
Perhaps no one has ever been sufficiently truthful about what `truthfulness' is.
First, Roger Scruton's smell-the-madeleines
reminiscence
of how watching Foucault lead the tanks into Czeckoslovakia turned
him into a life-long opponent of the pernicious cult of the
individual that communist tyrranies invariably foster, and a doughty
defender of the freedom of people generally - and women in particular
- to Know Their Place. He then leads the crowd in a moving rendition
of T S Eliot's magnificent hymn, "It's old because it's good because
it's good because it's old". (Set to the tune of "Auld Lang Syne",
of course.) Truly, he is an example to us all. Meanwhile, Jacques Derrida, that other Great Satan of modern letters, expresses an opinion:
When asked by Kofman and Dick what he'd most like to see in a documentary about one of his favorite philosophers, Derrida replies, "Their sex life." "Not a porno, you understand," he clarifies, but a glimpse into what which is most personal, most intimate and most absent from their work. Not a porno, "Jacques" - if that is your real name? Then how do you explain this: The Biggest and Hardest Questions! The Tightest Arguments! Non-stop Explicit Analytical Action! Wild Group Discussion! All in Deep Thought II, by phallogocentic philms. [via Mimi Smartypants] And finally, Aftonbladet - Sweden's biggest selling tabloid newspaper, remember - weighs in with an article on the disturbing political consequences of a postmodernist account of truth, "Det finns ingen sanning, s�ger de", in the context of a public meeting about the anti-globalisation protests in G�teborg last year. This took me so long to read last night - it's a step up in difficulty from prinsessgossip, that's for sure - that I have no energy left to discuss it. Aftonbladet, though! Who could fail to love it?
2003-02-04 12:35
The Happy Hegelian Haphazardly Hermeneuticizes History
Boney was a warrior
Boney fought the Russians That most Enigmicious of Mermaids brings us this book-length Just-So Story of How The Human Got Its Speech, which seeks to reconcile Chomsky and Darwin. Which is nice. It's a whole published book and everything - the MIT press is ahead of the curve at realising the advertising potential of uncut web editions, especially in an area like this which has a track record of high crackpot density. But first, let's set the scene, and let's be as crude and reductive as befits a preliminary sketch. The American structuralist tradition in linguistics, of which we can take Bloomfield as the foremost exponent, had tried to eliminate any trace of the thinking subject from their account of language. In this refusal of "mentalism" they were allied with behaviourist psychology (Pavlov et al.) which sought to model behaviour as exclusively a collection of conditioned reflexes. Language would then be just an elaborate set of such reflexes; different from a rat learning to push a lever on cue to get a food pellet, yum yum, in scale but not mechanism.
Moscow was a-blazing
Boney went to Elba
If that's the thesis, what's the antithesis? The Chomskyan antithesis
is that humans are different, that language is the index of their
(
Boney went to Waterloo
Then they took him off again And so on: the human rights agenda; the rubbishing of animal communication studies; the whole Chomskyan programme follows from this antithetical turn. And, as Chomsky readily acknowledges, he's singing straight out of the Descartes hymn-book, with the Language Organ substituted for all that mucking about with the pineal gland. Descartes basically had this whole shtick down in the 1630s - the animals-can't-think thing, the unfakeable productiveness of language thing, even the sign-language as index of the unstoppable human linguistic drive manoeuvre. All of which helps explain Chomsky's hostility to information theory, which was the behaviourist turf at the time - Markov processes are a conditioned reflexologists wet dream - and, I think, some of the distaste for mechanisms which has lead him to insist on competence rather than performance in phrasing his accounts of language.
He went to Saint Helena,
Boney broke his heart and died There are more twists and turns than this by a long shot, of course, but it's funny and instructive to reduce history to sequences of this kind of dialectical hypercorrection, don't you think? Oh well, suit yourselves. The shanty (which we used to sing in school, incidentally, long before we knew what it was about) is in protest at the recent American trend in French-bashing, which has popularised the claim that the French are no good in a fight. That'll be that celebrated American sense of history, then, will it? It's not that I particularly want to defend the French, but when I see them attacked by Americans I do feel trespassed against. However absurd it may be, I do feel that as an Englishman it's my God-given birthright to taunt the French, damn it. Aren't there Cananananadian's you could be taunting? (It's that big featureless icefield just to the north, you can't miss it. Some of them speak French, even!) Come on - everybody join in on the choruses, that's what shanties are all about, don't be shy!
Give her the t'gan's'ls
Drive her, Cap'n, drive her
2003-02-04 09:33 (UTC)
Earthbound Blues
Well I've been to Mars and I've been to Saturn too - Blind Spacefish Slim
2003-02-03 17:16 (UTC)
Then and now.Last term the correct answer in my boss's seminar was usually "the Heine-Borel theorem". This term it's usually "the implicit function theorem" (followed up with "uniqueness"). It would all go a lot faster if he didn't torment the PhD students, but that's just me being jealous - they're the Bright Young Things and Our Hope For The Future, while I'm just the grizzled Non-Comissioned Officer watching on from the sidelines. I will not, however, be heroically sacrificing my life at the start of the third reel, and that's final.
2003-02-03 13:25 (UTC)
Assorted words on snow(My last ones for a while, I hope.) Having had my weekend rescheduled by sn�kaos, and having misled at least one reader into thinking I had actually fallen for the Great Eskimo Snow-Word Hoax, I offer this account of the state of the art of research (as found by casual Googling) as both a penance and an offering to the Great Snow Gods. First, an account of the folkloric hyperinflation. This has nothing to do with linguistics or eskimos - it's just a meme-propagation study, but none the worse for that. The Urban Legends account is less good (it's clearly cribbed straight out of Pinker's The Language Instinct). An official count by an Official Eskimologist may be found in this digest from the LINGUIST list:
"Let it be known that Professor Anthony Woodbury (Department of Linguistics, University of Texas, Austin, Texas 78712) is prepared to endorse the claim that the Central Alaskan Yupik Eskimo language has about a dozen words (even a couple of dozen if you are fairly liberal about what you count) for referring to snow and to related natural phenomena, events, or behavior." (There's a full accounting from Prof. Woodbury in the same digest. Go read!) You might wonder why anyone would care about any of this in the first place - specialists often have a complex specialist vocabularies and it isn't usually considered to have earth-shattering implications. But when you're dealing with wilful misunderstandings of the cultural effects of language by someone who knows neither the language nor the culture then one name springs to mind with the immediacy of Pavlov's dogs drooling at the sound of a bell. Yup, it's Benjamin Lee Whorf again; tell it like it ain't, Benjy:
We have the same word for falling snow, snow on the ground, snow packed hard like ice, slushy snow, wind-driven flying snow - whatever the situation may be. To an Eskimo, this all-inclusive word would be almost unthinkable; he would say that falling snow, slushy snow, and so on, are sensuously and operationally different, different things to contend with; he uses different words for them and for other kinds of snow.[via this stroppy blogpost] So, it is as well to concede that the number of words was never really the point. Too many would-be Whorf-debunkers let him off the hook with just that misunderstanding - the meme may have taken off from there, but that meme is just a Frivolous Factoid: I diskard it. I want Whorf's scalp, and to get it I have to acknowledge that it is the existence or otherwise of generic ( cover) terms that is at stake. Whorf seems - in so far as he ever manages to say anything explicitly - to be claiming that Eskimos don't have cover terms for snow. Inevitably, though, Whorf is also wrong about this - as the enigmatic amr[at]ares.cs.wayne.edu (in the digest cited) points out:
IN THIS SENSE, West Greenlandic anyway has two words, one meaning 'falling snow', the other 'fallen snow', which is exactly the same as the situation in Classical Greek !!!!! Sigh. The most annoying thing about Whorf is the way that he managed - almost single-handedly - to make any kind of structuralist investigation of the relationship between language and semantics impossible to take seriously, while nourishing the worst excesses of those who have sought to exoticisize primitive societies. In this respect, as in all others, Sapir's work was an immense advance on that of his best-known disciple. Meanwhile, Willem J. de Reuse, another Eskimologist, offers a timely meteorology lesson Remember that the Arctic is technically a desert; i.e. there is very little precipitation, although whatever snow that does fall remains on the ground, an~rd is blown a}iround into funny shapes, for which there is of course, a technical terminology, used mainly by huntersd who need to use these things as landmarks. Snow (as a ground cover or falling) is really not very important to Eskimos. I suggest that we start looking at some of the languages of the Subarctic groups of Canada (Cree, Chipewyan), these people live in deep snow, and probably talk about it a lot more! Cree words for snow, anyone?
2003-02-03 09:29 (UTC)
An Endorsement
As the class progresses and becomes too familiar with real French words, their meaning and their phonetic dress, meaningless words, consisting of French sounds, with here and there an English word for contrast, can be dictated occasionally.
If adhered to strictly - and I must emphasise strictly - the regime outlined in Miss Armstrong's excellent handbook is sure to have a salutory effect on even the most recalcitrant pupil. What's that, Miss Armstrong?
Muscular effort of the tongue and lips is necessary. Well, quite. |