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2004-08-13 15:38

Sm�rg�spost

�1. Some IPA characters

ɖt̪ɞɠʎl̪ʋæ̤ɾˌɯpʼ̀ʷʍbʄtʼʉɘɺðɸħǂɟʟɗŋʙʕɚʁʌχʒɬʼɦ

Hoorah! (Would you believe that good old xterm, of all things, shows the dentalisation diacritique properly? Good old xterm!)

�2. Some commentary

Spellingreformdiscussion, Timber-style. (With added me, for sure.)

�3. Some amelioration

I think the hearing in my dodgy ear is a bit better today. I approve of this, since antibiotiques are apt to interfere with one's many drinknings.

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2004-08-13 samwidge (utc+1)

Rhythmique gymnastiques considered as a delinquent foopball match

The "Olympics" used to be a thing where nekkid and oiled Greek gentlemen contested in various obscure forms of ancient Greek foopball - some so obscure that they did not even involve a ball!

And the tradition lived on, passed down from nekkid, oiled father to nekkid, oiled son, until one day somebody realised that it would be much better if there was wimmin's beach volleyball with, like, bikinis and everything, and the modern games was born! (There are of course terrifically good reasons why the wimmins beach volleyballeuses could not also be nekkid and oiled, although they are now long since lost in the mists of time.)

The other use for Olympicses is that prinses go there to recruit new prinsessor - the king of Sweden and Kronprinsfred of Danmark both met their lovely brides in this way or manner.

And kronprinsess Knudella of Danmark, although happily married so far as we know, is back for an encore:

Hun er nu en p�redansk kronprinsesse, men alligevel f�r vi ikke lov til at holde Mary for os selv under OL i Athen. Hendes tidligere landsm�nd i Australien �nsker ogs� at m�de hende. Hilse p� nu, hvor hun er blevet en �gte kongelig.

She's now a peardanish kronprinsess, hoorah, but we still don't get to keep Knudella to ourselves during the Olympics in Athens. Her former countrypersons in Astraya wish also to meet her. To greet her now she's become an actual royal.

More to the point, the picture has her in a nice red frock and a (thankfully) a tiara instead of one of those dreadful hats she's been stuck with lately.

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2004-08-13 09:51

Well, rock-a-my soul in the bosom of Abraham

I don't know what it means either, but I do know the tune. Why not sing sing along:

Rock-a-my soul in the bosom of Abraham,
Rock-a-my soul in the bosom of Abraham,
Rock-a-my soul in the bosom of Abraham,
Oh! Rock-a-my soul!

So high, you can't get over it;

How high?

Vem har Sveriges st�rsta solros i �r?
F�r tv� �r sedan hade Ove Pettersson p� F�rings� rekordet med en j�ttesolros p� 5,35 meter.
- Det �r nog sv�rt att sl� det i �r, eftersom det inte har varit samma v�rme, s�ger han.

Who has Swedens tallest sunflower this year?
Two years ago Ove Pettersson of F�rings� set the record with a giant sunflower of 5.35 metres.
"It's going to be difficult to beat that this year, since it hasn't been as hot", he says.

How high?

Malm�s nya skyskrapa blir Europas h�gsta bostadshus

Malm�s new skyskraper will be Europe's tallest residential building!

Been there!

So low, you can't get under it;

How low?

V�rldens djupaste h�l funnet

World's deepest hole found.

(In central Croatia, hole fans!)

So wide you can't get around it;
Oh! Rock-a-my soul!

Rock-a-my soul, indeed!

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2004-08-12 tea (utc+1)

Sm�rg�spost

�1. In which we will not be satisfied by a superficial knowledge of Czech

This book is primarily intended for Czech courses offered by the Philosophical Faculty of Charles University Prague but it can be of service to anyone who will not be satisfied by a superficial knowledge of Czech.

A Course of Czech Language, Čerm�k et al.

�2. Heliotropisme

How do sunflowers do that turning and facing the sun thing that it is that they do? Why, this is of course caused and rendered possible by their heliotropic capacity!

The actual movement of the flower occurs as a result of motor cells in a structure called the pulvinus. The pulvinus is a region that is located where the flower head is connected to the stem. The motor cells get bigger or smaller depending on how much water they absorb or lose. Potassium is involved in all this. If the motor cell has a lot of potassium more water will go into the cell and the cell will inflate. With less potassium, the cell loses water and deflates. Which cells inflate and deflate causes the flower head to move as the sun moves. At night when the sun sets the flower head will move and face the direction the sun should rise in the next morning. This happens because of the amount of water contained in the motor cells of the pulvinus.

Source: Salisbury and Ross. 1992. Plant Physiology, 4th edition. Wadsworth

I have many things to say about the phenomenological prerequisites for such an implicitly agentive account of sunflowers as is involved in saying they do such a something for such a purpose, but I am too wet from a thunder storm that disrupted my samwidge procurement, so it will just have to wait.

�3. Vitamins are chemicals and chemicals are bad!

Denmark (but not Sweden) has banned a diverse assortment of Kellog's's breakfast cereals as being dangerously toxic.

Det �r vitaminberikningen av flingorna som f�tt danska myndigheter att sl� bakut. Somliga flingor inneh�ller s� mycket tillsatta vitaminer och mineraler att en mycket liten portion flingor t�cker halva det rekommenderade dagsbehovet.

�verdosering av vitaminer och mineraler kan leda till sv�ra skador p� lever, njure och nervsystemet.

It's the vitamin enrichment of the cereals that's prompted the Danish authorities to take action. Some cereals contain so much added vitamins and minerals that a very small portion accounts for half the recommended daily intake.

Overdosing on vitamins and minerals can lead to severe damage to the liver, kidney or nervous system.

EU-haters will be ecstatic to hear that Denmark has invoked a directive placing the burden of proof in these matters on the manufacturer, so that Kellog's would need to show that there is a widespread vitamin deficiency among the Danish population. Which there isn't.

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2004-08-12 morning (utc+1)

Machine-assisted translation, a case study

Suppose someone were to send you a jolly foopball link but it turned out to be in Viking:

Enskir knattspyrnu�hugamenn sp� �v� a� Chelsea, sem Ei�ur Sm�ri Gu�johnsen leikur me�, hampi Englandsmeistaratitlinum � knattspyrnu � lok keppnist�mabilsins sem n� er a� hefjast. �etta kemur fram � k�nnun, sem Nationwide, styrktara�ili enska knattspyrnulandsli�sins, hefur l�ti� gera.

Where would, indeed, we be without Ei�ur Sm�ri Gu�johnsen? Anyway, Chelsea and Nationwide, that much is clear, but what about them?

Luckily Google news knows:

In a survey carried out by Nationwide, sponsors of the England national team, 42,482 fans were asked who would win the 2004/05 Premiership.

Chelsea came out on top with 32.1 percent of the vote, pipping champions Arsenal (28.9 percent) and well clear of Ferguson's Manchester United (17.7 percent).

(The Viking version has these numbers too, in the bit I didn't quote.)

I call this methodology "global media analytic translation-memory", and a patent is of course pending.

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2004-08-11 16:14

A comparison between the used-to-beingness of things and their current being, to the detriment of the latter.

It was the case, a few months ago, that there were two (2) newsagents ("newstands") on the shopping street near work that sold diverse magazinage and sundry periodications of a Foreign persuasion, and this was a situation in which I openly and publicly rejoiced and who wouldn't?

Then one (1) of them (the better one, inevitably) shut, leaving only one (1) (the previously less good one, tautologically, now promoted to the best available, without in any way improving).

Then, a couple of weeks ("a couple weeks") ago that shut too.

That leaves only Mr Borders' Book Emporium as a viable outlet along this street of shoppnings of which I speak, and as considered as a newsagent ("newsstand") Mr Borders' establishment is certainly a very fine bookshop ("bookstore").

This vexes me somewhat, or perhaps slightly more, in view of the UKish meeja's reluctance to pull its weight on the Yoorpean League of Doughty Foopballing Champions: if ever there was a circumstance favouring the purchase of Frenchy-French sportbladet, L'�quipe, whose foopball coverage bestrides the EUFA tournament in question like unto a collossus, if only by default, then that circumstance is this and vice versa.

Some somebody really should set up a Ligue des Chamions blogue, in which coverage from such outlets as deign to provide coverage (however parochial) can be accumulated and juxtaposed, and a synthetique synchronique synoptique survey of the situation perused and contemplated. This such somebody should not, before you start, be me, but by preference someone who really does like foopball, rather than pretending to for obscure ideological purposes.

In the absence of any such, information about which provincial ("national") bladets are best perused for coverage of local sides, in any province ("nation") whose teams compete within EUFA would be appreciated.

(Ooh, La Gazzeta Della Sport does look good, doesn't it? Although the 2004 there apparently means the previous year of competition, of which I've been getting a lot. Wake up, Yoorp! It's now already, not then!)

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2004-08-11 samwidge (utc+1)

Sm�rg�squotage

�1. I bombed Istanbul, and so did my wife

Separate Kurdish and Islamist groups say they were behind a series of bombs that killed two people in Istanbul.

�2. Oooooooooooooh, yes it is!

Pre-Raphaelite art, far from being trite Arthurian kitsch, is dangerous and infused with sex.

�3. Chickens. Road. Carnage.

En lastbil fullastad med kycklingar v�lte - n�r den var p� v�g till ett slakteri.
Trafikanter p� E6 m�ttes i morse av blodbadet.

A lorry loaded with chickens overturned - on the way to a slaughterhouse.
Commuters on the E6 were met yesterday with a bloodbath.

Goodness, I bet this would make a great satirical analogy for something. If only I knew what!

�4. I may have made this one up slightly

Oh, we are all too useless and parochial to cover matches in the Champions League - the mighty league of champions! - when Our Boys are not involved. Far too useless! Far too parochial!

- The entire UK media, although Radio Foopball does at least give the scores.

�5. 2-2!

The mighty Djurg�rden held Juventus to a draw last night, hoorah, and must fancy their chances in the return leg.

I banderollv�g var det mest fyndiga - Nordic Victory 2-2

The wittiest banner read "Nordic Victory 2-2".

'Member? (The unpermalinked one above the one about Mr Klackspark.)

�6. Whale saving picture special!

Brannmenn og redningsarbeidere fors�ker � redde en 10 tonn tung hval som strandet p� Jurujuba-stranden i Rio de Janeiro.

Firepersons and rescue workers try to save a ten-tonne whale stranded on Jurujuba beach in Rio de Janeiro.

Save me a yummy steak, too, won't you, Brazilian persons?

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2004-08-11 10:58

Olive oil, indeed

So, the doctor says my disenhearment is provoked by gunk, to use the technical term, and that the best thing for gunk is olive oil, and that the best olive oil for gunk is sold by chemists, which is what we call pharmacists ("apotek"), although I personally think we should 've stuck with the Yoorpean consensus and gone with "apothecary".

The olive oil in question is pharmaceutical grade Olea europea (lah-di-dah!) and the bottle is marked "! FOR EXTERNAL USE ONLY". So when I've finished indulging this alternative therapisme malarkey I shall be cooking my eggs in it, for sure.

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2004-08-10 tea (utc+1)

Martin "Heigh-ho!" Heidegger! Freidrich "Ho ho!" Holderlin! A boat!

Total box-office, for sure:

Made by a pair of Melburnians armed with little more than a digital camera and a sense of inquiry, The Ister is loosely based on a wartime lecture [actually a series of lectures - DvB] delivered by ex-Nazi Martin Heidegger on one of Germany's most celebrated poets, Friedrich Holderlin, whose poem The Ister (an old Roman name for the Danube river) is another source of inspiration for the documentary.

But as we meander along the Danube from the Black Sea to the source of the river in Germany's Black Forest, more than 2000km upstream, the film offers a much broader series of connections and meditations from contemporary philosophers, as well as a Serbian engineer and a German botanist.

We interrupt this feature to remark that I know how to say "Ich m�chte in Schwarzwald viel Bier trinken!" in German! ("I wish in the Black Forest much �l to drink!") Do go on, though:

[co-director Daniel] Ross was concerned that it be intellectually coherent.

"In the back of his mind was, 'What if Jacques Derrida sees this?"' [co-director David] Barison says.

Jumpin' Jacques Derrida? He'd have a great deal of fun with the nesting of your quotation marks, sport, wacky Gallic funster that he is. And how much bier does he in the Black Forest wish to drink, anyway?

But I would like very much to see the film, although preferably not in the Black Forest which I understand does not have Dolby Surround sound; the Age, which already has, has declared it "A rich, dense and exhilarating series of connections, arguments and ambiguities".

[via B&W, which is also in charge of the sheep-dip.]

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2004-08-10 sunny delight (utc+1)

Monday review of stuff

�1. La Sociolinguistique L-J Calvert.

A good � Que sais-je ? �, which is to say a very good thing. Draws extensively on Labov, as you would expect, and quite a lot on Bourdieu, which you might not, in outlining the subject and developing the argument that theoretical linguistics is properly a sub-discipline of society considered from the point of view of language usage, rather than (as currently conceived) the other way round.

Il faut en fait concevoir que tous les locuteurs, m�me lorsqu'ils se croient monolingues (qu'ils ne connaissent pas de � langues �trang�res �) sont toujours plus ou moins plurilingues, poss�dant un �vantail de comp�tences qui s'�talent entre des formes vernaculaires et des formes vehiculaires, mais dans le cadre d'un m�me ensemble de regles linguistiques.

It has to be accepted that all speakers, even if they consider themselves monolingual (that they don't know any "foreign languages") are always more or less plurilingual, having a range of competences spread between vernacular and vehicular forms, but in the frame of a single set of linguistic rules.

�2. Pimsleur Basic Danish

10 half-hour "real-time" audio lessons isn't enough to learn a language, or even the rudiments of a basic touriste grasp of a language. The real-time lesson is a good idea anyway, since it relieves the student of the burden of making decisions, which they ("I") often make badly or shirk.

Within the necessarily very modest vocabulary treated, repetition is well-timed, and my biggest problem with remembering it was interference from Swedish.

In any case, I mostly wanted to get a handle on pronunciation, and I sort-of did. A big downside of modern language courses is the (entirely mistaken and ideologically-driven) assumption that you can learn to speak a new language by just listening. In fact, you can't even learn to listen to a new language just by listening, since you don't know what you're listening for, and your ears have well-established habits from your native (and other) language(s). From this point of view, especially since Danish is somewhat out of the European phonological mainstream, the tapes' refusal to discuss articulation is regrettable.

Even staying within the perverse confines of contemporary methodology, you could - and very certainly should - arrange repeated exercises around minimal pairs for both oral and aural discrimination, but I've never encountered a tape that did. (After all, what could the well-established best practices of field linguistics possibly teach us about getting a handle on a language quickly?)

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2004-08-10 morning (utc+1)

My carcass, an occasional series

I think I may finally be forced to rehydrate myself a little. It is my habit and custom to drink nothing except coffee, an occasional can of Coke, and alcoholic beverages unless I am rilly rilly thirsty, which I rarely am. (When this does happen I drink gladly the dew-gathered sweetness straight from either a tap or faucet, as circumstances dictate.)

Probably not as a result of this, I seem to have gone deaf in my right ear. However, both my own convictions and my experience of medical professionals tell me that causal mechanismes are of little consequence in addressing the many quirks of one's bemeatedness - I have, after all, been advised to give up smoking by doctors I consultated for a sore knee. (I did eventually give up smoking, of course. My knee is also a good deal better. Coincidence, you say? There are no coincidences in the esoteric world of western medicine.)

What I really need to do, I think, is to round up a collection of egregiously acausal explanations of phenomena by qualified medical personnel and use them as ammunition in a diet book which finally explains the deep mystical relationships that makes chocolate cake exempt from the constraints of a calorie-controlled diet for weight loss purposes. (By Des von Bladet, PhD, which after all I am.)

Also, a glass of water would not go amiss.

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2004-08-09 tea (utc+1)

Sm�rg�spost

�1. H�mta en pilsner till mig, till mig!

To the tune of My Bonny, a celebration of yummy �l, �l, beer and bier:

Min Pilsner skall svalka min tunga.
Min Pilsner skall duscha min gom.
Min Pilsner skall f� mig att sjunga,
om jag ser att flaskan �r tom:

PILSNER! PILSNER!
H�mta en pilsner till mig, till mig.
PILSNER! PILSNER!
H�mta en pilsner till mig!

�2. Foopball

I am of course quite terrifyingly Allez les bleus!, but there only three (3) teams in Engleesh foopball these days (Manchester United and Arsenal being the other two) and Chelsea have by far the most money, and are therefore clearly by far the best team. (Unlike in American "foopball", we do not arrange matters in a socialistique manner. No bleeding-hearts, we!)

So the real foopball this year, as every year, is the UEFA Champions League, which acts as a forerunner or precursor for the historically inevitable and deeply necessary pan-European Ultra Premier League.

I could really do with a full-sized magazine covering who all this lot are, though, and with a cut-out and colour-in progress guide, so as to know who to support. And a decent source of coverage - for some reason Club Brugge's triumph over Lokomotiv Plovdic (six-nil on aggregate!) was not widely reported, even on Radio Foopball.

I don't even know how it works, exactly, but I do know (now) that there are three (3) qualifying rounds to allow the minnows (hello, Man U!) into the group stage proper, where Chelsea are of course ensconced, and that the third and final such is tomorrow and Wednesday, so come on you (deep breath) Djurg�rdens IF, Club Brugge KV, PSV Eindhoven and Rosenborg BK!

�3. There is no �3.

[This sub-entry intentionally left blank.]

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2004-08-09 samwidge (utc+1)

Sm�rg�spost

�1. Those Frenchy-French!

Courrier International, our newsly hebdobladet of choice, is on holiday for a couple of weeks. "Hebdo, monsieur? Certainly! But of course not in August, we are not savages, hein?"

�2. Spellingreformcrisis!

Slightly German:

The new rules were first applied in a transition phase, but are slated to become mandatory on August 1, 2005. The changes aim to iron out some of the quirks in the language, and include various spelling changes such as using "ss" instead of the "�" character. They also thin out the hundreds of complex rules regarding the use of commas.

Needless to say, the new rules have been widely ignored and there's now a last-ditch protest movement. Hours of fun!

�3. Athens anthem anxiety

Slightly Serbio-Montenegran:

Serbian and Montenegran politicians will be hauled back from their holidays for an emergency session to vote for a new national anthem ahead of the Olympic Games. Parliamentary president Zoran Sami has called the session for Wednesday August 11, just two days before the Games begin in Athens.

It doesn't need to be anything special, since no one really expects Montenegro to still be in the union for, say, the Beijing olympics. What's Serbian and/or Montenegran for "My lovely horse"?

�4. Good weather is bad news

When you have to go back to work:

Bra v�der g�r oss deppiga - p� jobbet

Good weather makes us depressed - at work

A new angle!

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2004-08-09 10:13

German phonology, slightly retrotechnical

German has, or rather may or may not have, two (2) distinct fricatives:

  1. [�] which English doesn't have, except that it more or less does at the start of the name "Hugh". (If that doesn't work for you, start from "sh" and move your tongue forward.)
  2. [x] which English doesn't have, except that it more or less does at the end of "loch" or "Bach". (If that does work for you, aim for "k" and miss.)

The question is, are these two (2) distinct phonemes or only one (1), and the other question is, as you've probably anticipated, what's a phoneme?

Almost always, [x] is found after back vowels a, o and u (we are treating German vowel orthography as a reasonable guide to phonologie, which it is) and [�] turns up after the front vowels , e, i, , , and some consonants.

And if two (2) such somethings occur predictably in two (2) distinct contexts, then they don't get to be two (2) different phonemes but are instead declared to be one (1) phoneme with two (2) different ("allophonic") realisations.

Now, the problem - and it was a vair vair hot potato in post-Bloomfieldian (but pre-Chomskian) phonology - is that this isn't quite all the facts, Sir or Ma'am, not quite: there is also the German diminutive "-chen", which is always [�]. Now that's OK within the rules because it also provokes umlaut, which means changeing back vowels to front vowels, so the a turns into , and so on. ("Umlaut" was a process before it was dots, and is in fact how the dots got their name.)

Except - and this is the really important bit - when it doesn't. There aren't many examples of this, which is part of the fun, but one nice one is "Frauchen", which is the way a doggie would refer to its nice mistress, if dogs could speak German (yes, really) and which takes [�] after a back vowel (back diphthongs count as back vowels for this purpose, for sure).

The debate, which by all accounts raged and raged, was between two (2) possible treatments of this anomoly:

  1. Admit that there are two (2) distinct phonemes, /x/ and /�/, after all; or
  2. Deny it, and instead have a special kind of boundary to put before "-chen" to protect it from the horrid back vowels.

Chomskyan linguistiques grew out of the second choice, but it went on to more-or-less abandon phonemes as such anyway, so this isn't a live issue in contemporary academic phonology, but it is for me. (My approach to phonology is studiedly retro, for sure.)

(Material swiped mostly from this sci.lang thread.)

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