an entangled bank

FINAL POST

Wed, 15 Sep 2004 16:20:54 GMT

So that's it, all over, no longer a linguistics student. Though I am still a student of linguistics. (Wait a minute... *mutters to self*... syntax versus morphology, morphological combination must have semantic differences... No, wait! I don't do that any more!) I am an unemployed person of no fixed vocation.

Here are the last moments of That:

8.57 continue writing what I didn't do any of last night cos of the brandy
12.03 begin printing
1.03 baffled by clasp on plastic binder
2.22 finish proofreading
2.48 printer runs out of ink
2.48.02 triumphant ha! I am prepared for this
3.11 finish printing
3.14 out of house
4.04 stuff binders into box in department
5.05 back home
5.08 booze (Hobgoblin)

Sometimes for amusement I taunt spelling-checkers. Here are words I used that it doesn't know: arity, binarity, clitic, coreference, complementizer, cybernetically, discardable, disfluency, ditransitive, featural, fillable, Golgi apparatus, grammaticalized, intervenience, intonational, iterable, logophor, lookahead, minimality, moggy, nominalized, ourself, parametrize, proformal, satisfiable, specifier, stipulative, structuralist, subcategorization, subrule, syntagmatic, tertium quid, therefrom, topicalization, treehood, unaccusative, unassignable, underlyingly, unemphatically, unimplementable, unnoticingly.

So I won't be updating here any more, this is the LAST ONE, and I'm putting on the Ring and slipping out into another life.

Some of you might spot the odd luminous pale eye on the water, a faint paddling, a bit of wood on your tail, and wonder what it might be...

Citizens of Prague, beware!

Tue, 14 Sep 2004 19:42:46 GMT

Conkers have started falling, it's cold out even in a jumper, and a bottle of Courvoisier is therefore much needed. Mmm.

And this, I spose, means I have therefore finished It? Well. Well not finished as such, but section 8 (Command, government, and barriers, pity, it was the only section name longer than three words) has been stifled and upended into the wood-chipper and might make a nice pair of decorative parenthetical comments somewhere, and [I don't know any football team managers' names but pretend I do and think of one being written here, to make me seem 'with-it'] has sent section 5-1/2 (a screed about Learning I'd forgotten I'd added to) in as a substitute.

So the corpse hath torso and limbs, but to make it shamble once printed out (estimated time: noon tomorrow) it needs a little something extra, a tetragrammaton slipped under its tongue, a few choice morsels from other people's thoughts, so I've been through my book of notes and red-biro'd at least one per source so I can legitimately list 'em in the references. That I can do tonight, since it doesn't involve thinking, even though I'm sipping the brandy. Tomorrow morning, same ploy with my last-minute photocopies.

dogs etc.

Sun, 12 Sep 2004 22:35:59 GMT

oh god hav got about 2 days til The Thing is due, and must still finish typing introduction (c. 800 words) before sewing into reanimated corpses of other bits I printed out, cut up into sections, and sellotaped together. No longer have time to read or discover any more; it's just going to be barefaced lying about who's influenced me. Actually I've made it up out of my own head and everyone except Chomsky and Culicover has their head in the sand.

Pub. Dogs. An ageing salt-and-pepper Staffordshire very interested in finding nice comfy places to curl up and get to sleep on. A young particoloured collie-like heraldic beast nosing out company and being interested. Stroked both.

Green Eggs and Sam

Sat, 11 Sep 2004 14:37:36 GMT

Green Eggs and Sam

Sample snippet (with flimsy linguistic connexion at end):

Gandalf: I would not, could not, by the fire.
             I would not, could not, in the Shire.
Frodo:    Would you, could you, in a tree?
             Would you, on the road to Bree?
             Would you, with an orc or troll?
             Would you, in a hobbit-hole?
Gandalf: I would not, could not, in a tree.
             I would not, on the road to Bree.
             I would not, with an orc or troll.
             I would not, in a hobbit-hole.
             I will not take it here or there.
             I will not take it anywhere!
             For it is evil, as you say.
             You'll have to take that ring away
             And throw it in the Cracks of Doom.
Frodo:    I'll need a friend. But who, or whom?

consider siderophobia

Wed, 08 Sep 2004 20:40:20 GMT

I hate these silly made-up words for non-existent phobias, and my ire is particularly invoked on ones like Walloonophobia 'fear of Walloons' and angrophobia 'fear of anger'. Since anger is a Norse borrowing, this more than usually violates the principle that if you're going to make up words, try to have the courtesy of making them up in Greek. So fears of railways and peanut butter have respectable-looking Greek elements.

I find someone has stuck the Latin sidus, sideris 'star' into the sausage machine and created siderophobia 'fear of stars'. Now not only is there a much more familiar prefix astro-, which happens also to be Greek, but sidero- is Greek for 'iron'. Siderophobia is a perfectly good word for 'fear of iron', but a rotten one for 'fear of stars'.

The Latin and Greek roots are quite different: Latin [si:des-], Greek σιδηρ- [sidε:r-] with different vowel lengths. The medial [r] in the Latin is coincidental, since it derives from [s] by a familiar sound change in Old Latin.

Could they be related more deeply? In researching this I found to my astonishment that the meek and mild word consider is in this lot, etymologically 'consult the stars'! Wow. Add that to disaster and the other one I always forget.

Anyway, Perseus reckons they are connected... no, wait, it says 'cf.', that just means they think it looks suspicious. Well the common IE group they're connecting Latin sidus to is 'sweat, melt': English sweat, Sanskrit svid- 'sweat, melt', Greek sidε:r- '(molten) iron', Latin sud- 'sweat'. Hmm. So we need two Latin developments, one with *[s] and one with *[sw]. Well the Greek for 'sweat' is hidr-, so that fits *[s], and pre-Greek *[sw] became Greek [s], so that fits. But why the long vowel in sidus? Did you get compensatory lengthening for loss of *[w]? It doesn't look right. In fact it looks a bit like a coincidence that some old etymologist has tried to straddle with thoughts of meteoric iron.

Well I don't know, maybe the experts say this is okay and there are such correspondences, but it doesn't look right to me. But then where does si:der- or si:des- come from? Because it looks sort of like 'star' too but not enough to make sense. The PIE was *Hster, English star, Greek aster, pre-Latin ster-la, and you can't get a [d] out of that, nor a long [i:]. The way Perseus phrases their quotes it seems that sidus originally meant 'constellation' rather than an individual star.

This would all be private intra-brain mumbling/ignorance if I hadn't discovered that bit about consider.

wrought with pain/errors

Sun, 05 Sep 2004 10:58:14 GMT

Either an eggcorn or a development of a new verb form. Wrought is being treated as meaning racked or fraught, in senses such as wrought with pain, wrought with errors. In fact racked makes better sense as an origin for the first, fraught for the second, and it's picking up on the fact that racked with is often spelt wracked with by association with the older word wrack = wreck.

wh garden path

Wed, 01 Sep 2004 23:02:01 GMT

An interesting example in the comments in latin of a garden path from wh-fronting: the commenter writes 'Verres was a former official whom the Sicilian people hired Cicero to prosecute for embezzlement.'

As far as I can tell, this is not only grammatical but natural. The simplest thing is just to front the pronoun. Pied-piping is relatively costly and moves you up a register (I have to say 'for whom', 'pictures of whom', whereas direct object 'who(m)' depends on register). The pied-piped alternative here is particularly marked: you have to front an entire VP, 'to prosecute whom the Sicilian people hired Cicero'. And dammit, there's an adjunct, and it just doesn't fit anywhere else, so you have to pied-pipe the goddam adjunct! 'to prosecute whom for embezzlement the Sicilian people hired Cicero'.

So the most natural grammatical way of saying it is a garden path: 'a former official whom the Sicilian people hired...'.

Afterthought. I suppose if 'to prosecute [him]' is an adjunct itself, to 'hired', that'd be some sort of barrier to extraction.

CV

Fri, 27 Aug 2004 11:42:49 GMT

Now trying to come up with a CV. For most people keeping it down to a page is supposed to be a problem. I am up to about half a page, and that's mainly name and address. Useful skills: None. Relevant experience: Nil. Telephone manner: Abysmal. Can-do attitude: Can't even pretend. Prospects: Awful.

Thu, 26 Aug 2004 23:14:23 GMT

Am mildly amused and rather horrified and terribly embarrassed that Daniel Everett himself has picked up on my throwaway phrase "Borgesian fantasist". I could try accusing Mr Libermann of abusing the privileges of private e-mail if I hadn't bandied similar slack-jawed amazement around in several other places off my own BAT (a winged mammal). So deep apologies again to Professor Everett, but of course it is completely... er... contrary to expectations. (And oh god it would be such a wonderful Borges story!) It is literally unbelievable, and Everett seems to have acknowledged this repeatedly in his quest to be believed. I'm a staunch defender of the orthodoxy and always a rubbisher of the Sapir-Whorfian, so one of the first things to do on seeing this sort of amazing claim is to worry about other well-known expositors, Mead and Turnbull and Chagnon... but the way Everett describes it just doesn't sound like them. It doesn't sound ideologically pegged, it doesn't sound linguistically credulous, it... I don't know what it is. But worlds come crashing down. Everything I thought was part of my Sprachgefühl is wrong.

Couple this with the despair at the fact that I can't come up with anything original about the logic of grammar. I think I'm fifty years too early. We have no idea what's going on. No idea at all.

Thu, 26 Aug 2004 18:06:26 GMT

Went to library. Did some reading and note-taking. I think the only interesting quote I got was someone echoing Einstein, that grammar was subtle but not malicious. Got distracted reading about Tagalog infixation. Spent the last couple of hours reading in Huddleston and Pullum's CGEL, more interested in something I could at least partly understand. It's so good to see English grammar described freshly and impartially, with terminology appropriate to it. And they spend only a few paragraphs on such hard nuts as used to and had better. This much needs to be done on every language in the world, starting with Pirahã and Eyak and all the ones that are rich and strange or that we might be about to lose.

Am still nowhere nearer understanding anything of what I'm trying to write about. I want to give up. I don't know how I can hand in anything.

Am now about to get more maudlin over some Old Peculier.

Bootvisor

Thu, 26 Aug 2004 07:14:21 GMT

This is just an excuse to experiment with whether I can put a stylesheet in an entry. Since losing my settings I'm back to the browser's defaults, which is a whopping 12pt for everything and a bizarre hideous bold rendition of the IPA font. Well I can't impose that on you or myself, and also I can't afford to adjust my settings and forget that it's still being imposed on you. Hence <span class=ipa> naʊ prə'ʤu:səz ðɪs ɪ'fekt, whereas the old-style <font face="Lucida Sans Unicode"> prə'ʤu:səz ðɪs ɪ'fekt.

Am going into the library today. Must get more than half a dozen references for the bottom of the Thing, or it won't look good. Am going to cobble together some lunatic introduction from the forced hybrid of MP and Culicover & Nowak, and pretend that's my intention. Then later today will add and discuss some quotes and see where that brings the word count. I've been trying to do it all in my own words so far.

Turbulent night, partly sleepless, partly full of wild and whirling dreams. Classic result of alcohol deprivation. Had nothing but two bottles of Budweiser ['bu:tvaɪzə], one the normal 5,0% one, the other a new one in the shops, gold label, subtitled Premier Select, at 7,6%. Quite nice. I'm not a lager drinker but I think I could have more than one of those with pleasure.

Now the reason for the phonetics is that this premier bottle is prominently labelled just Bud, and I was wondering whether that's [bʊt] or [bu:t] or, heav'n forfend, [bad]. (In ill-advised competition with that other muck, or do the Czechs actually say this too?) And then I noticed that when I say [bu:t] as a German name I give it a cardinal rounded, back vowel, not like the centred de-rounded one of English 'boot'. In fact calling Bud Boot sounds ridiculous. But it's palliated in the full Bootvisor.

Edited. Drattit, it don't work! So I've got to put all my specifications in-line each time, so <font face="Lucida Sans Unicode" color=blue size=-1> prə'ʤu:səz ðɪs ɪ'fekt, not to mention ['bu:tvaɪzə 'bʊdva:].

Making fun of names in spam

Tue, 24 Aug 2004 15:50:46 GMT

This is a pointless distraction, isn't it? But I've actually done something the last couple of days, I deserve a break. Granted it's not my essay (I've broken it to the ranks, I can't in all conscience call it a dissertation now), but doing anything at all is a big step up. I've played website designing, and I've discovered FTP. So now to answer all those spam.

Dear Chasity Love, re tentative meeting on the 4th. Sorry, I've decided that if your parents saddled you with the name Chastity and couldn't spell it, you're going to be a neurotic bundle of lack of commitment, witness your word 'tentative'. Best wishes.

Dear Garland Melton, Dirk Kirkland, Terry Babb, I would have pictured something more pastoral than vulgar pharmaceuticals would catch your fancies. Have you considered approaching an author of antiquated romantic novels?

Dear Activists K. Prosecutor, Survival I. Deride, Umiaks O. Plagiarizes, and Unfamiliarity D. Fracture, you have strong, manly names and I predict a successful future in the pornography industry.

Dear Yolanda, Tania, Delores, Ashlee, Chuck, Marlen, Yuliana, Lillie, Aaron, and Whitney, sorry to cancel the deal, interview, loan, booking, and live videoconference, but I am unable to deal face to face with people whose names send me into fits of laughter. Love and kisses.

Unrelated happy fun quote of the day: "May you in this way make the name German remembered in China for a thousand years so that no Chinaman will ever again dare to even squint at a German!" -- Wilhelm II, 1900.

Oh, and... Child Pimp and Ho Costumes, spotted by jonquil.

Mon, 23 Aug 2004 18:33:43 GMT

Today I wrote two or three paragraphs on the Thing (I'm afraid to look in case it was only one), which is a lot more than in the past two weeks. It's a nice evening out, pleasantly cool. It's almost as if I'm not quite as depressed today, so fuelled with some Guinness I might go back and see if I can write a few paragraphs more. (Edit: No I can't.)

I heard a bloke in the supermarket say ['emti] and a barrier crumbled. I'd thought phonology was the safe, easy, boring option I'd turned my back on. But why isn't it *['em?i]? The lecturer span us some story about weak foot positions, being the reason why it's glottalled in ['ba?@] and ['wIn?@]. But why not in ['emti] or ['ma:st@]? The whole edifice of phonology is probably just as unfounded as that of syntax; they just hide it better because most of phonology seems easy to understand.

Mon, 23 Aug 2004 17:28:01 GMT

I really really need to devise some more potent abusive epithets about prescriptive grammar. I need buckets of mockery, and lashings of contempt. I need to pour scorn and impute ignorance and deride lack of education. And not drop to their level, let's not forget that.

I like the sound of 'Muggle grammar', but does it convey enough of its hopeless inadequacy?

Pirahã

Fri, 20 Aug 2004 23:05:40 GMT

The press have got hold of some garbled nonsense about the absence of number in the Brazilian language Pirahã. Their account is worthless, not because of how they garble it in this case, but because of how it falls short of the extraordinary strangeness of the language. Here's an article by Daniel Everett on Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Pirahã [warning! .pdf], in which he claims that their grammar is strongly shaped by their cultural habit of only referring to direct or reported direct experience. So he claims they have virtually no abstraction: no colour terms, no embedding or relativization, the simplest kinship system, no number or quantification, and they can't or don't or won't learn foreign languages or systems of thought that express these cultural violations.

As a description of a language it's extraordinary and alien, but as ethnography or game theory I find myself disbelieving it. A culture that has no sense of measuring value in an exchange? Is this Everett some sort of Margaret Mead dupe? The whole thing reads like a deliberate Borgesian fantasy about some impossible Uqbarian society that violates the rules of human thought. Well yes it would. Because that's what he's claiming they are. Fascinating -- dubious -- needs further study.

Bai baina. Mark Liberman in Language Log assures me Everett is pretty sound as a linguist. And I find his description of Wari' in The Handbook of Morphology eminently sensible and sober, so it looks like I have to get used to my eyes bugging out over Pirahã, which is about to get very famous indeed, even in the Muggle world.

Ez bakarrik. Language Hat points out it also contains a completely new sound, despite having the simplest phoneme inventory known. And Everett thinks they didn't use it in front of him for many years before because they knew it was strange and didn't want to be laughed at. This is scary too: because the culture is so fascinating we need lots of people studying it, but would it destroy it if we finally did convince them to learn Portuguese and arithmetic? Thankfully they seem robust against intrusion.

but economics is even worse

Fri, 20 Aug 2004 17:04:42 GMT

I'm despairing at doing my syntax, but I don't have to deal with the stuff economists make up. Here's a single equation occupying about a quarter of a page in the Latex source I'm proofreading:

$$\sum_{y=1}^{K+H+I} \left((p_y^* - \bar{c}_y^0)\frac{\partial q_y(\vec{p^*})}{\partial p_x} \right)-\left( \bar{c}_{X-3}^0 + \bar{c}_{X-2}^0 \right)\alpha \frac{\partial \underline{n}(\vec{p^*})}{\partial p_x} - \left( \bar{c}_{X-1}^0 + \bar{c}_X^0 \right)\alpha \frac{\partial \underline{m}(\vec{p^*})}{\partial p_x} + $$
$$\sum_{j=1}^J \sum_{y=K+H+Ij+1}^{K+H+I(j+1)} \left((p_y^* - p_{X-1}^* - p_X^* - \bar{c}_y^j) \frac{\partial q_y(\vec{p^*})}{\partial p_x} - q_y(\vec{p^*}) \right)+ $$
\begin{equation}
\label{eq:unconstrained foc x>X-2 1}
\sum_{j=1}^J \sum_{y=K+H+I(J+1)+Gj+1}^{K+H+I(J+1)+G(j+1)} \left( (p_y^*-p_{X-3}^* - p_{X-2}^* -\bar{c}_y^j) \frac{\partial q_y(\vec{p^*})}{\partial p_x}- q_y(\vec{p^*}) \right) = 0
\end{equation}

My current task is to remove the starred vector p arguments. In the future those absolute summation limits are for the chop.

Spam that almost passes the non-stupidity test

Fri, 20 Aug 2004 15:13:02 GMT

Occasionally for amusement I check the quarantined bulk e-mails for new mutations. Here's a subject header that certainly took my eye:

Sender "Zhenthim74" <supportexplorer@sweforums.com>
Subject What does this post mean? Your email was provided in comments
Text
Why did you post this message at www.sweforums.com (In the third window). Your email was provided in comments. What does this post mean?
I'll contact your internet provider if you do not delete it in 5 hours. Delete this information asap. Our operators will check it in 5 hours.

Sweforum team
10155 S. Knoll Circle
Highlands Ranch,
CO 80130
United States

That's really impressive. They're out to catch you, and for many a typical user it could well ring alarm bells. Even if they themself don't post their e-mail address in comments it's quite possible someone else could. And the way it's written is just so cool and professional. It's not "What does this post mean? ...oceanographic" or the like. And pointing out the window; and a full postal address. My, my.

Pity the To-list contains nine visible names all in the ZE-range of the same ISP. Then copying the text to here reveals the white bits contain the usual preacherflannelspreventedBhutancontract stuff. But nice try.

A websearch shows that there's a bona fide entity sweforum, and that this fake plural version sweforums has only just been registered.

ot, no w?

Wed, 18 Aug 2004 20:31:35 GMT

Am I the last person in the world, or in this part of it, to pronounce a [w] in 'quarter', 'quartet', 'quartz'? Cos I heard a Radio 3 announcer say [kɔ:'tet] just now, and I'm sure I keep hearing them say ['kɔ:tə] too. And the thing is, I believe I used to, when I was very young and prescriptivist, and corrected myself to ['kwɔ:tə], which is now ingrained in me. My 1993 Chambers just gives kwör'tər, no alternative, so it's sneaked (or snuck: which do I say?) up on us. But do all the best people say it w-less now? Cos if so I should do cos I'm dead posh, me.

(sings:) What do the simple folk do? Is it ['koɵʔɐ] or ['kwoɵʔɐ]? (spoken:) So they say.

And that vowel. Everyone, but everyone, up my local is called George, so I'm constantly hearing cries of what I've finally decided is [dʒoɵdʒ], i.e. a centring diphthong rounded throughout. It sounds like a consonantal [w]: but if I start with a closing diphthong [dʒoʊdʒ] and push the offglide higher, it's not right, it's too rounded and RP. Then I hit on the centring solution, and it seems about right when I try it.

SP2, the piding, and the Muckle Spate

Wed, 18 Aug 2004 15:54:00 GMT

1. When journalists don't use multiple logical operators correctly, it can be gruesomely plausible. A BBC story on a Microsmurf patch to their XP system (and to be fair XP is the first time I've known a Microsnot OS to be an improvement on previous ones) contains this awful warning:

It also lets users know the risks they are taking if they do not have the firewall turned on, do not update their anti-virus software or install future updates for XP.

2. So this new bird found on Calayan that scientists didn't know about but the local people did. Okay, catalogue it, call it Gallirallus calayanensis, but what's this "Calayan rail" bizzo? The locals have a name for it, it's the piding, so why not now make the English the piding without italics?

3. Hm, searching for {piding} finds many thousands of sites in German because it's a place in Germany. My naive attempts to winnow these are thwarted: searching for {piding -der -die -das -zu -hier -nicht -ist} still throws up thousands of sites in German, and I'm wondering as a general question how much of the top lexicon you need to include to nearly guarantee a hit. Or non-hit or whatever I'm after.

4. The Cornish village Boscastle, wrecked by a freak flood, lies on the Rivers Jordan, Paradise, and Valency. Either one of the first two is charming, and the other of the pair isn't so surprising, but the collocation with Valency is delightful. Pity about how their catchment areas are arranged. Anyway, the worst flood recorded in Britain was that of the River Findhorn in Moray in 1829, appealingly and logically called the Muckle Spate. The Findhorn rose 15 m, which I find inconceivable on an island this size. But the largest ever flow recorded here was of the Findhorn in 1970. I think I'm going to have nightmares about that.

Oh. Good.

Tue, 17 Aug 2004 19:54:21 GMT

So the Internet is the slowest it's ever been. So I wonder because I don't know any better if I've got a "virus". So I find my virus checker is "disabled". So I wonder how that happened and click on settings and it takes forever to respond. So I try to shut the machine down. So that doesn't respond. So I do it by brute force. So when I reload it comes up saying some system file can't be found. So I have to reformat by factory CDs. So I'm very lucky to have the Internet logon phone number and password scrawled on a piece of paper amongst the thousands. So I'm here now (waves hi) but my machine has funny colour schemes and icons and clicking sounds like when you just get it new. And not the files I used to have on it. The most critical were on a floppy or emailed to myself or on websites designed specifically for the reason that I knew my machine would suddenly instanteously die. But it's a bit of a sodding learning curve when it happens.

Mon, 16 Aug 2004 23:41:39 GMT

It's been a week now and I've done pretty much literally nothing at all. Most of my active time is spent lying on my bed sighing and hoping I don't have a heart attack. Sometimes I've gone for walks and picked blackberries.

I was very pleased to receive a pretty letter from my beloved Susie today. I don't know when the last time I received a personal letter was. But I think there's a good chance it was also from Susie. She's about my only contact with life now. Love you, sweetie, if you happen to be reading this.

Disappointing that the bluebell now seems to be Hyacinthoides non-scripta. Its former name Endymion non-scripta was so much more elegant. Non-scripta supposedly because ancient writers hadn't described it. Or non-scriptus.

Two Kinds of Ambiguity

Sat, 14 Aug 2004 22:58:14 GMT

A couple of examples in today's Independent of structures that are theoretically ambiguous but pragmatically not. What's interesting is that the resolution is very different in the two cases.

One is a headline Continent-wide force to counter terror planned by EU defence chief. Now I'm as amused at the next person by these ambiguous placement jokes, or things like 'Magistrates to act on strip shows', but I always rather doubted whether they were genuine. But here's an example before me, and I don't think subeditors are allowed to have much of a sense of humour, so I think this is a genuine ambiguity they didn't notice. And it is grammatically quite ambiguous: a slight shift in real-world facts would make the other reading sensible. But we don't really have a problem reading it; pragmatics tells us what's intended.

More interesting is this gem in a letter to the editor. The writer claimed to have seen a sign saying Pedestrian Casualty Reduction Signals Timing Experiment, and asked the snarky and rhetorical question 'Have we now decided that it is easier to place key words together and let readers work out the meaning themselves?'. To which the snarky answer is: Well yes, as opposed to what exactly?

Cos you put six nouns together in a row, in theory you've got some combinatorial explosion, I dunno, 6! or T₆ or something. But in this example I just cannot see an alternative reading. Every other [N N] combination gets knocked on the head because it's not interpretable. I never liked Chomsky's idea of a Feynman diagram where all possibilities are simultaneously evaluated, and those that don't satisfy constraints are closed down; but that seems to be what's happening here. None of the multifarious [N N] possibilities make sense. 'Reduction signals' yes, I can make sense of that, but it doesn't fit higher up. In the end the only recursively intelligible interpretation wins.

nɒt ɪ'naf IPA

Sat, 14 Aug 2004 14:49:45 GMT

'testɪŋ, 'testɪŋ. aɪ du: laɪk ə bɪt əv IPA, ənd æz aɪ kən si: ət hɪə, əts ə ʃeɪm nɒt tə ju:z ət mɔ:. aɪ 'wandə 'weðər 'eniwən wəd bi 'ɪntrɪstɪd ɪn ən IPA-əʊnli blɒg, ɔ: wəd 'ri:dɪŋ ən 'raɪtɪŋ ðɪs fə mɔ: ðən ə'baʊt faɪv 'mɪnɪts draɪv 'evriwən nats? ðæts ə rɪ'tɒrɪkəl 'kwestʃən.

goodigoodi birdbag

Sat, 14 Aug 2004 11:50:47 GMT

I do like detailed dictionaries of unfamiliar languages. I find that in Bardi (beware, it's a .doc) there is birdbag 'sheet lightning', goodgood 'crouch, creep along', and goodigoodi 'cypress pine'. (Lighting the chips produces good smoke for keeping mosquitos and flies away. There is a stand on Jojogarr.) Course I'm not in it for the chance resemblances, I just like the unique feel and semantic detail of each language.

galarrgan adj. tall and goodlooking
goonjoorroong n. dance performed on the visit of a distant namesake
Goonyooloonyooloo n. name of a cave on Swan Island reputed to contain ngaarri drawings which disappear and reappear
goorridid jina arnkooy phr. new moon with a silhouette
idan adv. by trying
iimimi n. chunk of fat hanging down between the two flippers of a turtle
iiral n. traditional method of taking a wife, by taking a woman’s hand to take her along
ilarrilarr adv. hands behind back
irrgoorrgooban v.i. to go fishing at high tide using a spear
irrirri n. reddening of the sky at about 5 a.m.
jaanyba adj. a generous person, a person who eats very little, and when he gets something he passes it to someone

Just give us the names, Louie

Sat, 14 Aug 2004 08:59:09 GMT

I like countries. I don't mean I like the people in them, or anything soppy like that, and I have no desire to go to any of those hot, smelly, foreign places, I just mean I like the husks and labels: rulers, flags, arms, colonies, and so on. And names. In fact I've got a wee bee in my swollen bonnet about names, and you'd think the United Nations of all people could get their names right, but oh no, Moldova begins with R and Macedonia begins with T and North Korea begins with D and Tanzania begins with U.

Now there are one or two genuine problems with names. 'United Kingdom' looks like a prefix and a naive UN flag-setter-upperer might expect us to figure under G, because that makes sense. So we inform them that, no, we do use the U name by itself quite regularly, in fact more so than the G one. East Timor want to be under T for Timor-Leste even though their official English name is still East Timor: well I'm not too happy with that, but they've had a rough time so let's indulge 'em. El Salvador goes under E but The Gambia goes under G, not really correct, but you can see the reasoning.

But as for the rest! I spose it's not really the UN's choice, but they're being spineless and appeasing. They should have stood firm against the various megalomaniac delegates who wanted loony things done. I imagine Moldova's representative as a Marty Feldman character, pointing out they want to be next to Romania, brushing aside weary explanations of alphabetical order and suggesting they could be Republic of Moldova. The UN finally agree just to make them go away. Then have to deal with Iran wanting '(Islamic Republic of)' after their name, and pointing with a bony finger at the place where the official has been pretending to add it in as they say 'yes, yes' and eventually having to do it for real.

And why oh why is Laos the Lao People's Democratic Republic, who cares?? What on earth is this rubbish about Libya being the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya? They haven't been that for ages, Colonel Quackbiscuit changed it to SPLAJ first then decided that wasn't impressively loony enough so upped it to the Great Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya.

Why I'm on this quivering bent is that I heard the Olympics are being attended by 202 countries, and I wanted to know which ones. I mean, that actually interests me. I don't care about the silly people throwing things at each other or breaking into a sweat, but a list of 202 countries is interesting. As there are 191 UN members there must be 11 non-independent countries taking part (or perhaps Vatican City is as well) and I want to know who they are. Or if Nauru aren't taking part, that's 12 others I have to identify, and so on.

No, Athens 2004, a drop-down list is not a list, it is just a nuisance. How am I supposed to do painstaking manipulation on that? And yes I realize there's a special case with Taiwan, so we need some creative naming there, but what are some of these other nonsensical non-countries you've come up with?

I.R. Iran
Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
Virgin Islands
People's Republic of China (separating it from 'Chinese Taipei')
People's Democratic Republic of Korea (separate from the joint 'Korea')

So anyway, non-independent countries taking part: American Samoa, Aruba, Bermuda, British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Taiwan ('Chinese Taipei'), Cook Islands, Guam, Hong Kong ('Hong Kong, China'), Netherlands Antilles, Palestine, U.S. Virgin Islands ('Virgin Islands'), total 12, which fits 191 minus one for a joint Korea. But why none for Guernsey, Jersey, Isle of Man, and Gibraltar; why none for Faroes, Greenland, New Caledonia, French Polynesia, Tokelau, Niue, Wallis and Futuna Islands? Harumph.