2003-02-14 13:32 (UTC)
It follows from this that such details of the file format as
reverse-engineering has established compare unfavourably in rigour,
coherence and good engineering practice with papering the floor of a
cave full of incontinent bats; leaving it over night; telling a bunch
of hippies it's the score for an interpretive dance to be performed on
a boat and having a bunch of autistic speedfreaks infer a
"requirements document" by watching this from the shore.
But they do seem to have given them binoculars this time, so the
quality audit must have had some effect.
Don't
believe
me?
Linux being Linux, trying to find a tool that plays these things
correctly regardless of the endiannesses of the data and soundcard,
and the sample width size and frequence and the stereo or mononess of
the data is also "interesting", but they didn't start it.
I was writing code to play (with) .wavs just to Find
Stuff Out; now I have to write code to use them at all, except I'm not
because I'm busy with Real Work today. (The iterative solution of
integral equations is more fun to implement than describe, but you
probably knew that.)
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2003-02-14 09:13 (UTC)
I didn't read the post, of course, and I know it's a typo, but even
so.
You will regret this, Nepal! Svenssen, unleash the Thrid!
A��eee!
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2003-02-13 17:11 (UTC)
Last night I invented "Phenomenological Phonology", and only partly
because it's pretty much impossible to say. (Go on: try it five times
fast.)
Google says I'm
too
late.
[Permalink]
2003-02-13 10:10 (UTC)
There's a "refutation" of Chomsky that's popular with certain kooks
which assumes that his notion of "deep structure" is a complete
semantic encoding of an utterance which could be used to mechanise
translation, for example. This is so obviously a ridiculous straw man
that I had always assumed they'd made it up for themselves, which
shows how much I know:
If we accept the hypothesis that all languages exhibit basically the
same deep structure, then we have theoretical grounds for supposing
that mechanical translation should be possible using this kind of
analysis. In other words, given a grammar of the input language and
an algorithm for determining the deep structure of sentences in the
language, we should be able to use this deep structure, together with
the transformations in a grammar of the output language, in order to
generate the translated sentences.
M F Bott, "Computational Linguistics" in New Horizons in
Linguistics, John Lyons (Ed.), Pelican, 1970
To his credit, Bott goes on to admit that exactly none of the
components of such a scheme are either available or immanent, and he
also doesn't claim that Chomsky would endorse such a position. In any
case, the suggestion appeared in a respectable source, so I feel
entitled to take it seriously enough to disagree with. To see why
this it's so silly, let's return to Sapir's Language, which I've
linked before and will probably link again because I love it dearly.
In his extended riffing on various translations of the sentence
"The farmer kills the duckling.", we get this:
In other words, to paraphrase awkwardly certain latent "demonstrative"
ideas, does this farmer (invisible to us, but standing behind a door
not far away from us, you being seated yonder well out of reach) kill
that duckling (which belongs to you)? or does that farmer (who lives
in your neighbourhood and whom we see over there) kill that duckling
(that belongs to him)? This type of demonstrative elaboration is
foreign to our way of thinking, but it would seem very natural, indeed
unavoidable, to a Kwakiutl Indian.
[p. 93]
That different languages encode different information as a matter of
grammatical necessity is surely obvious to anyone who has ever studied
more than one - the stuff that's "left out" from the point of view of
the speaker of another language has to be inferred from context.
In case you think this means I've gone over to the side of the
tie-dyed tree-huggers and will no longer be slagging off one
B. Whorf, think again. But before I explain why, here's Sapir again,
on the fairly modest set of tenses provided by English:
Hence "the square root of 4 is 2," precisely as "my uncle
is here now." There are many "primitive" languages that are
more philosophical and distinguish between a true "present" and a
"customary" or "general" tense.
[p. 99]
Now, I like to think I'm as aware as the speakers of any "primitive"
language that the square root of 4 is only fortuitously and
provisionally 2, whilst our uncles are, in a sense, always with us,
but unless you assume a "deep structure" that somehow encodes this
information even though English makes no use of it at the level of
"surface structure" (i.e., what English-speaking people actually say)
then Bott's hypothesis, as I shall be calling it from now on, is going
nowhere.
But, crucially, I do understand the distinction between
statements that are true in general and those that are true (only) at
present, even though I do not distinguish between them syntactically.
It seems to me that there's an interesting parallel between Bott's
flawed hypothesis and the Whorf's dafter assertions of linguistic
determinism: they both assume that individual statements encode the
whole of the speaker's understanding of that which is spoken about.
This is such a silly idea that I can only assume they are both
implicitly indebted to the taboo against "Mentalism", which was
originally a pejorative term for any theory based on the assumption
that people had mental states. American Structuralist linguistics
under Bloomfield had rejected "Mentalism" as unscientific, in that
other people's mental states are not susceptible to empirical
deduction, and was allied with a behaviourist psychology that denied
the existence of mental states at all. Currently, I am unable to see
the point of any of that, but if you did want to avoid mental states
in language then you would presumably want each statement to be as
self-contained as possible, and this certainly fits well with Whorf's
and Bott's hypotheses.
Personally, I have no problem with mental states - I self-identify as
a phenomenologist, even - and I see no reason to expect the semantic
inventory of different languages to coincide, any more than their
phonemic inventories do. Maybe different languages cultivate
different habits of mind to the same extent as they do different
habits of mouth, I could go along with that. (I'll be calling this
Structural Semantics, though, and not "Whorfian" anything.)
While there isn't much of anything in the phonemic inventory of any
known language that I can't do with my mouth - I spend long winter
evenings with phonetics textbooks, don't forget - it's another
question altogether to internalise the mouth-habits of Swedish (or
even French, and after all these years) to the extent of achieving
"unaccented" speech at conversational speed. And while I would expect
that there isn't much of anything in the semantic inventory of any
language that I couldn't learn to do with my mind - with no evidence
at all, of course - it would be another question altogether to
internalise the semantic habits of, say, Kwakiutl to the extent of not
making grammatical slips at conversational speed.
It's one thing to "know" facts about a language at an intellectual
level; it's a lot more trouble to "internalise" them so that they
become part of the everyday furniture of your mind. I can still get
flustered enough to lose the ability to put definite articles at the
end of Swedish nouns, but I have yet to propose a
distinctively Scandewegian - and deeply exotic - sense of
definiteness.
[Permalink]
2003-02-12 15:40 (UTC)
A proper convalescence story, here - have the therapeutic powers of
gratuitous pictures of Mette-Marit ever been studied scientifically?
Anyway, those Germans, isn't it?
Mette-Marit har abortert tvillinger. Er helt sikkert gravid - men er
Haakon faren? Dessuten gleder Marius seg allerede over
lilles�steren. Alt if�lge tyske ukeblader sist uke.
Disgraceful. They are aptly described in the
companion
article as
Som en blanding av Se og H�r og �Hotel C�sar�.
And, really, when VG and Se og
H�r constitute the moral high-ground by comparison then you're
really deep into "Oprah ate my alien love-child" territory.
It goes without saying, of course, that any interest I might have in
learning German is due entirely to the extensive philosophical and
philological literature in the language, oh yes.
[Permalink]
2003-02-12 09:33 (UTC)
I spent Monday night and much of Tuesday under the influence of a
lurgy which had me vomiting every couple of hours like I was being
turned inside out. I strongly recommend not getting this one,
whatever it was.
Today I feel much better - the throbbing in my head is almost soothing
by comparison - so I've come in. I may just conceivably not be at my
most scintillating, however.
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2003-02-10 15:09
Playing with soundcards may not be the ideal diversion for those
afflicted with post-weekend queasiness - I have bravely volunteered to
test this hypothesis. Since I use Linux, I have
mostly been able to find out-of-date or otherwise perplexing
documentation that assumes a good working knowledge of C programming.
Choose between the annoyingly bossy
OSS guide:
Avoid extra features and tricks. They don't necessarily make your
program better but may make it incompatible with future devices or
changes to OSS.
or the older but engagingly spaced-out
guide
by Hannu Savolainen, from the days when die("Personal
problems") was a sensible error-handling strategy.
Sometimes it's good to feel the bits between your toes.
[Permalink]
2003-02-10 09:24 (UTC)
The Forest, that is to say, of Dean; that ancient wooded borderland
between England and Wales, whose primordial silence is broken only by
the roar of the rally cars screaming round its lush tracks. Without
wanting to get all Wordsworth on you, this didn't do much for the
atmosphere; in any case my futurism doesn't extend to cars unless
they can fly which these ones apparently couldn't.
Also seen: Ghost World, a clear-eyed and unsentimental account
of how barely-legal teens find eccentric antisocial middle-aged
obsessives just irresistably fascinating. Or something.
Also bonusly seen: the amazingly good Chicago, which almost
succeeds in persuading you that there could be a place of some
consequence in America that is neither on the east or west coasts.
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