2003-01-31 18:46
The first rule of sn�kaos is: you blog a great deal about sn�kaos.
So are the second, third and fifth rules; I'll spare you.
The fourth rule of sn�kaos is that it's funny.
There is no rule six.
The seventh rule of sn�kaos is that it happens to other
people.
Sigh. I was headed up to London tonight to treat my long-suffering
mother's house as a hotel, but the tube isn't going out that far (it's
overground at that point) and there's a whole heap of
nothing
happening going on over there. Cars can't get up the hill;
schools are shut; the infrastructure is well and truly struct.
Den h�r helgen ska jag inte �ka till London, tyv�rr.
Bonus Randomness
Randomness translational arbitrage: a introductory book on the
linguistics of French, 6 EUR in
French, or a mere
$30
in English. (Amazon.uk doesn't have it, but the university bookshop
is asking 20 UKP for the British edition.) And if there was ever a
book that university students of French ought to be reading in French,
then this one is surely a solid candidate.
Random booksellage 1: a Norwegian
bookshop that will sell
overseas. [via Anna K.] So that'll be Norway 1, Denmark 1, and Sweden 0
points (la su�de, null points). Grrrr.
Random booksellage 2: the Oxfam bookshop which doesn't count for Big
Bookfreeze purposes had a Henning "Hilarity" Mankell title entitled
Steget efter which they had tried to hide in the German
section. Ha! 500+ pages of jolly Swedish hijinx, oh what fun,
hurrah.
Random minority languageage parts 1&2: some stuff
on the Lonely Planet Australian Phrasebook, which apparently
dedicates 100 pages to aboriginal languages, hurrah! Overcome with
gratitude, I have sworn a solemn vow to refrain from spitting on the next
five (5) boring eco-hippy idiots who want to tell me about how they,
like, saw the
real $RANDOM_COUNTRY, man.
[via Languagehat]
Meanwhile, seeking
stuff
on the indigenous language in that corner of the Kingdom of Denmark
which men call "Greenland" goes a whole lot better if (a) you can read
Danish and (b) you remember that sprog is Danish for
spr�k.
This looks like it
might be an authoritative guide to the Great Snow Word Thing, but
there's still an outside chance it's a collection of tasty moose
recipes, yum yum - My Danish reading comprehension is a still a bit
under construction.
[Permalink]
2003-01-31 11:04 (UTC)
Instant
nostalgia!
Oh, and a happy slightly belated bloggiversary to the bladet. In some ways I
think I liked it better back when there were Canonically Salonical
blogs to host my more baffling outbursts, but all you can do, as the
poet reminds us, is do what you must, and they don't come mustier than
Desbladet.
Onward!
[Permalink]
2003-01-31 12:19
The presentation went OK, you will be relieved to hear. The only
sensible way of doing it would have been to script the whole thing in
detail, but unfortunately the code of the von Bladets doesn't permit
such a thing. (Best joke: Norden best�r av Finland, Island,
Danmark, Norge, osv. No, no one else laughed either.)
Anna K is
joining in the Wordsworth debate by couter-rubbishing language poetry
(sorry, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E P=O=E=T=R=Y) instead. I was genuinely
surprised to find out how much I care about the stuff - for now I'll
just say that I read it as a kind of critical investigation of
language akin to William S Burroughs' cut up and fold-in stuff. (And
for me, Burroughs is more important than Derrida and Foucault put
together.)
I just don't read it as at all connected with the fetishization of
irrelevance that the American "left" has pursued in its academic
exile, which never amounts to more than a parody of political
engagement. Nowhere is the sound of not-being-listened to more
deafening than in the fatuous shrillness of those who have done to
(especially) Foucault what the Scholastic Philosophers did to
Aristotle.
I don't know what's going on now, but the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets
weren't in the academy so far as I remember, and I never
thought they were writing from its perspective or for its
consumption. (There's no critical literature to speak of on
Burroughs, either, and quite right, too.)
Iain Sinclair's mad, doomed (observe the inherent romanticism of
outsider nihilism, oops) collection of avant-skronk poetry Conductors
of Chaos probably overstates the "exclusion" of its poets, but
even so if they're in any danger of being institutionalised, it isn't
within academia. I'm in it for the psychedelia, personally, so I'll
leave it to others to make a case for the implicit politics of
negation.
In any case, what kind of poetry could have a significant effect on the
belligerent and barely-hinged theocracy we're currently being invited
to mistake for the good guys?
In other news, it has been suggested that I did Bruce "Brooce!
Brooce! Sweat for us!" Springsteen an injustice. Nebraska it
is, then.
[Permalink]
2003-01-30 14:03 (UTC)
The SICP
discussion of Huffman encoding works up to an encoding of the
following message:
Get a job
Sha na na na na na na na na
Get a job
Sha na na na na na na na na
Wah yip yip yip yip yip yip yip yip yip
Sha boom
using an encoding "designed to efficiently encode the lyrics of 1950s
rock songs."
It comes out as (0 0 0 1 1 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1
1 0 0 0 1 1 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1
0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 1), according to
my code.
Now, that's poetry!
[Permalink]
2003-01-30 13:04
[Somewhat at the behest of Anna
K.]
I hate Romanticism in general, actually, but Wordsworth most of all.
I read the Romantic construction of the Unspoilt Wilderness Sublime as an
explicit rejection of the (Enlightenment) values of progress in
general and the Industrial Revolution in particular - there's
a revealing poem where Wordsworth freaks out about a train. I
take this sort of thing very badly - I am a techno-utopian futurist at
heart.
Wordsworth is so monumentally self-important, so ready to reduce the
universe to a monument to his own self-importance, so ready
to reduce the picturesque poverty of peasants to a symbolic
"authenticity" (thereby inaugurating a whole tradition of things I
virulently detest - don't get me started on Bruce Springsteen, whatever
you do), and so flat-out drab and banal, that I am completely blind to
any merits he may be said to have.
Wordsworth is basically a repudiation of everything that has ever
mattered to me, and I take his poetry as a deep, personal insult.
Recommended background reading: Bertrand Russel's assault of Rousseau
(in his "History of Western Philosophy") covers similar ground, only
better.
[Permalink]
2003-01-30 12:07
Just this
once I'll forgive DN for being DN, on account of they're doing
"language poetry":
Jag kommer med ord och inte spr�k. Spr�ket har aldrig varit mitt. Det
�r de andras. De som pratar med de l�rde p� latin och med b�nder p�
b�nders vis. Det blir alltid tv�rtom f�r mig.
Language poetry matters to me in a way that Wordsworth (say) simply
doesn't. It calls into question the process of language itself, and
scrutinises the making of shapes out of it. This is, of course,
an infuriating, pretentious and preposterous sort of poetry which
undertakes primarily to put poetry itself in question.
But this of question of interrogating language and the ways
it is used to impose meaning on a world, of which poetry is a
paradigm, is also my question as an heir to the
the project of the Enlightenment (Upplysningstiden).
So, in so far as my Universe can have poetry in it at all, there's a
case for insisting that it would have to be this kind. Still, it
could be worse: at least it's not Wordsworth.
[Permalink]
2003-01-29 15:45
I have no time for the
concept, of course, but it's a marvellous word.
And, non-sequiturially, a bunch of
royalty attending a party. It's from VG, and I'm too tired to be
reading Norwegish today, but I don't think there's any content.
[Permalink]
2003-01-29 09:57 (UTC)
Or, where phonology went wrong.
The pronunciation of the word <cat> (angle brackets
indicate orthographic forms) is can be written in phonetic transcription
as [k^h�t] i.e., where [k^h] is an aspirated
k. This is the Zeroth Mystery of Phonology: segments can be
inferred from an acoustic flux. Phonology books are so busy arguing
about the ontological status of phonemes that they forget to do this
for segments, although there's usually a not-completely-satisfactory
discussion of the means by which the <j> ([dZ]) in <jam>
([dZ�m]), say, is classified as one phonological segment.
Phonology proper began (or, can be begun) from the observation that
writing out all the observable phonetic detail is redundant; a more
streamlined notation is possible. Phonology then becomes a question
of a reduced (and perhaps minimal) set of signs with which to write
sounds. Which is to say, phonology is a compression algorithm.
However, speech acts occur in an environment (un milieu) which
may be noisy (y compris, as we like to say round here, de
bruit) and we would want them to be robust in the face of such
adversity. This is why the redundancy was there in the first place,
obviously.
The fundamental mistake of classical phonology is to attempt to
extract one feature to use as the sign of the sign. The phonetic
redundancy (in terms of feature vectors, say) of segments means that
different analyses are possible.
An example: initial /d/ in Danish (say) once opposed initial /t/ in
the oppositions voiced/unvoiced, tense/lax and
unaspirated/unaspirated, but the Drift of History caused the latter
two oppositions to take precedence over the former so that both are
now unvoiced. (English is moving the same way, perhaps.)
So the redundancy introduced to avoid noise also introduces
ambiguity and thus makes variation possible across dialects and
time. Both of these are traditionally supressed by phonology, because
the compression in which it is engaged makes it brittle - brittleness
is precisely the symptom of success in phonology, which is a
clear a symptom of its problems as you could hope for. That the
diachronic dynamics of Danish present a problem for phonology is
exactly as it should be, in other words.
Questions of redundancy, compression and coded communication in a
noisy channel are, of course, central to information theory.
Linguists have held that information theory was not useful in
phonology (or elsewhere) for the last forty years based on a straw
(bogey) man version of it that they thought was trying to replace the
speaking subject with a Markov process. (Actually, Bloomfield and
some others probably
did want to do just that, but that really isn't much of an
excuse.)
The debates about the ontological status of the phoneme, vicious and
futile though they were, have long since given way to a debate about
the ontological status of Chomsky and Halle's underlying forms, which
replaced phonemes in generative phonology. So far as anyone can tell,
CandH take these to be psychologically real phenomena when no one's
looking, and whenever anyone points out that they're obviously not
they resort to the distinction between performance and
competence to prove that it doesn't matter and they never said
they were, actually, so there!
As Jakobson pointed out, it is clear that sub-phonemic
distinctions have psychological reality - I use a more open vowel in
<men> and <let> than in <bet> and <set>, even
in the silent privacy of my own head (take that, Bloomfieldians, I
introspected!) and he recommended leaving ontological debates to
philosophers - in particular, to phenomenologists in the Husserlian
tradition.
This was supposed to be the short version, so I'll spare you the stuff
about how I still consider phonology a model of the interesting parts
of cognition. Just reread any random excerpt of the
Jakobson/L�vi-Strauss love-fest, stir in a dose of Merleau-Ponty (who
was working closely with L-S when he died) and rewrite it as cyberpunk
(the cybernetic turn in structuralism seems to have been written out
of the story as an embarrassment, but that's Just Plain Wrong -
computers are our friends!) and voil�!
[Permalink]
2003-01-28 16:32 (UTC)
This
article by John Goldsmith on the relevance of information theory
to phonology is a Good Thing, and even points out that the concept of
the segment is problematic in its own right, even if the
arguments were always about what could be meant by phoneme.
(Every flavour of phonology I've seen ignores time, except perhaps for
articulatory factors in allophones, in favour of phones anesthetised
on the page. This is plainly silly, and didn't ought to be allowed.)
But just when he's cleared the decks and brushed off some cobwebs he
suddenly stops, and he doesn't seem to have done much in phonology
since. Bonus points for gratuitously quoting Jakobson in French,
too.
Danish phonology is weird. Danish linguist Nina Gr�nnum says so:
Recent changes in the pronunciation of standard Danish vowels have
produced surface contrasts between 14 different vowel qualities. A
classical structuralist phonological account of the vowel inventory is
no longer descriptively adequate. It definitely glosses over a lot of
what is otherwise phonologically very regular and productive
processes. It also creates an unreasonably large gulf between the
phonological systems of the younger and the older generations, and I
believe it violates speakers' own intuition about their language.
Dig around in the publications section
for more, such as Hvorfor
er dansk s� sv�rt at udtale og at forst�? (because they speak
funny, that's why!) and
Danish Vowels: The psychological reality of a morphophonemic
representation, from which the above quote is taken.
Danish phonology seems to be where the action is, frankly, Future
Self, so have at it!
While we're at it, here's an
overview of the literature on Danish phonology, from the Linguist List
archives, and a relinking of Elizabeth's Danish
phonetics site.
[Permalink]
2003-01-28 11:09 (UTC)
De tre skandinaviske spr�k: svensk, dansk og norsk, er temmelig like.
Ja, det er s� liten forkjell p� dem at en kan nesten kalle dem
dialekter.
I quote, of course, from the older Teach Yourself Norwegian: A book
of Self-instruction in the Norwegian Riksm�l by
Alf Sommerfelt (1943) and revised by Ingvald Marm (1967).
(Incidentally, Sommerfelt co-wrote a paper with Jakobson on word pitch
in Norwegian verse, which makes him a serious linguist.)
A hypothetical Norwegian is duly despatched to Stockholm to engage in
some hot, hot mutual intelleging with those crazy Swedes. Then
Shoppingharbour, the acid test:
Orden og uttrykkene er nok stort sett de samme, men danskene uttaler
ofte vokaler og konsonanter p� en ganske anne m�te.
You'll be relieved to hear, however, that after a period of
acclimatisation a workable usedness-to-it is duly got.
Nonetheless, the weirdness of Danish pronunciation is much remarked
upon by speakers of other flavours of Scandewegian, and it was
starting to bother me that I didn't know what it sounded like, so I
borrowed an unamazonable Hugo tape/phrasebook thing from the local
library in order to find out. It is weird, but in a good
way. The "fricatives" are mislabelled - barely approximants, they are
the air kisses of the snog-space of fricativity, and the unvoicing of
all plosives is an interesting touch - voicing is arguably a secondary
characteristic in other Scandiwegian tongues (and English); it's
interesting to hear the logical conclusion of this line of
development. And the glottal craziness! Man! I grew up in London
so, while there's no hint of Cockney in my own speech, I certainly
know how these things are done, and I use coarticulated glottal stops
in a variety of word-final contexts, but this Danishness still sneaks right
under my radar. Further research is called for.
I'm sticking with Swedish for practical speaking purposes, of course,
but I was never planning to resist the lure of comparativology, and
Danish phonology is not only famously idiosyncratic, it's also alleged
to be rapidly evolving. Plus it would annoy my Swedish teacher if I
end up visiting Shoppingharbour before getting to Sweden and everyone
says it's very pretty there.
[Permalink]
2003-01-28 09:03 (UTC)
Il nous faut donc reconstruire le cerveau epic� comme objet
gastro-philosophique.
Cahiers Posthume, Z. Ricoeur (no relation)
Brains! Spicy brains! Get 'em while they're hot, they're lovely!
Or was that chestnuts; I forget.
In any case, it has been demonstrated that (some forms of) memory can
be improved by using neurofeedback,
[NB: Norwegian article] which sounds like some kind of dopey
Californian therapy-scam but actually involves proper persons in white
coats and everything.
[Permalink]
2003-01-27 13:56 (UTC)
A Ren� Descartes, that is. Sorry.
This luxuriant
LRB review
of a biography of Descartes expands on the all-important Scandiwegian
royalty connection:
When Queen Christina
called in 1649, Descartes was flattered enough, or broke enough, to
answer, even though he feared - quite rightly - that the Swedish
winter (and 5am royal philosophy lessons) would be the death of him.
The idea of teaching his philosophy to a queen, especially to a queen
who was intellectually inclined, and who would be played on film by
Greta Garbo, was irresistible.
But beyond that the essay, which itself isn't anything to write home
about, makes a convincing case that the biography is worse.
Meanwhile, provoked by a
breakfast-documenting geophysicist, I have been reading the
Discourse itself. I'll review it when I have finished it,
but I do like the Livre du Poche
edition
(amazon.fr doesn't have it, bizarrely). There's a good 60-page
introduction, and an abundance of glossically inclined footnotage,
although 17th century French is a whole lot more accessible than
Shakespearian English if you ask me. (Thousands haven't.)
[Permalink]
2003-01-27 09:39 (UTC)
Well, I've already reviewed the production
values, and I've discussed the
translations, and I dare say you already
know as much as you want to about the plot of Harry Potter II, so I'll
just observe that I've now read a whole book in Swedish that wasn't
intended for foreigners and I am indecently pleased with myself, la la
la.
So I'd better do Teach
Yourself Norwegian by Margaretha Danbolt Simons as well, I
suppose.
I first got this book (and accompanying cassettes) before going to
Norway, but things went as things go and by the time I got there I had
polished the phrase "Jeg sn�kker ikke norsk" to self-defeating
perfection, but nothing else. Two-and-a-bit-years of Swedish later, I
fancied a bit of comparative Scandewegiology, but I also wanted to
know what happened in the story. You see, the book is largely
structured around the relationship between Bente (who is Norwegish)
and John (who isn't). You can think of it as a Norwegian course which
exploits a narrative structure for motivation, or, as I have come to
do, a love story that happens to make increasingly sophisticated use
of the Norwegian language as it progresses. (It's a terrific idea,
that - I bet the late Georges Perec is kicking himself.)
The good news is that I was able to read it comfortably and I now know
what happens at the end, hurrah! I could follow the tapes OK, also,
although Norwegians do speak a bit funny. The conversations are
recorded at a very gentle pace initially, and even at the end they're
not up to what I would think of as conversational speed in Swedish.
I've no idea, really, how good the book is for learning the language -
although the description of the phonetics is appallingly slight - but
it's a pretty compelling warts-and-all account of John and Bente's
relationship. So much so, that when I switched over to Routledge's Colloquial
Swedish, with its tame accounts of plasticmughandlesalesman Bill
Morris and the totally Svensson Forsberg family, I was crushed.
"Where's the drama?" I wondered, "Where's the romance?"
[Permalink]
previous,
next, latest
|
