Is it une or un ?
Finally got into Paris after about 4 hours on various trains through the benelux. Last night I had a fun evening eating fried mushrooms in Eschede, reading 'The globalization of water' and googling the history of the netherlands and the linguistic history of dutch. Dutch means some think like low german (german of the lowlands - neider means low). There was an interesting graph showing the relationship between Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian. Danish and Norwegian share vocabulary but not phonology (same words sounding different) while Danish and Swedish share phonology but not vocabulary (sound alike but mean different things). This of course brings me to my pet obession - Finnish - a linguistic isolate (totally unrelated to the other germanic languaes)- and so obviously a holdover from our alien forbearers who seeded our planet (JK :)
The doc interviews went smashingly. We learned a lot - and we want to go and shoot some dried up river beds. Also Paul and I discussed the idea of next time interviewing people for two days. On day one have the first meeting and wow them with our fantastic conversational skills and personal hygine, and day two get into the heart wrenching interview.
The Malawi ISP is STILL not working properly - although this will hopefully be fixed tomorrow - The UNICEF Malawi crew is on the case. I'm trying to push off the field work another week - arg!
We got into to Paris too late to eat. I am dehydrated and carbohydrated - I hope my room does not have bed bugs - I have fond memories of staying in Paris as a college student and my roommate getting scabies - yuck - i am too old for scabies. I am super exciting of getting up tomorrow - doing some tai chi in the place des voyges and eating croissant and cappucino and dipping my croissant into my cappucino just like Proust did. Ahhh ... Paris.
Showing posts with label linguistics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label linguistics. Show all posts
Thursday, October 8, 2009
Friday, September 25, 2009
The Pseudoscience of Phonology
This morning I finished a version of BlackListTweet. This is an application that tracks and blocks twitter spam from twitter accounts. While writing this I also wrote an application to track twitter favorites, I dont have a name for this app yet. Please email your suggestions... I am thinking something like PopTweet.
I still need to design a front end and start the back end process (cron job). I hope to finish the front end tonight. Tonight is web nite. I accidentally deleted my web templates for my new site - chang projects. So, I need to re do those as well. Once those are complete, then I plan on moving the site, and the twitter sites, over to a media temple virtual server. That way I have complete control over the server and I can install csound (and finish doeraetweet.
This morning I reread some of The Oxford Handbook of Computational Linguistics, which is actually a fantastic book and very readable. I am slowly adding different algorithms and heuristics for detecting spam tweets, and I wanted to check up on some NLP (natural language processing) algorithms. I could not help, but start rereading the book, starting with the chapter on Phonology. It sounds like phrenology- which is a pseudoscience- phonology is just a social science - which I suppose is also a pseudo science. Phonology is the study of sounds in language.
Science on the one hand refers to a methodology, however I think that science also refers to subject matter. Scientific subject matter can be verified and falsified via scientific methodology. Really I think linguistics is a set of heuristics and does not meet the possibility of validity via scientific method that should be required of things that are a science. I suppose phonology is in fact a pseudo science.
The section on phonology covered something called free variation, and this really piqued my curisosity. The t in ten, the t in net, and the t in water, are all different types of t sounds. In english we do not have two words ten: one pronounced with the t as in ten and the other as the t in net. In some languages we do have this difference -ten can have two meanings and two pronunciations (or more).
There are myriad ways one can say ten. If I say ten ten times, the t will sound slightly different each time. This diversity is called 'free variation.'
I want to the idea of free variation into my robot singularity song, because a robot really does not have free variation - or a mechanical device does not have free variation (or does it). Speech is a motor process and if the motor process is constant there will be no change. I suppose as components wear down in a robot for example, you will get free variation as well. This is interesting for me to think about. I may to an audio project about free variation.
I still need to design a front end and start the back end process (cron job). I hope to finish the front end tonight. Tonight is web nite. I accidentally deleted my web templates for my new site - chang projects. So, I need to re do those as well. Once those are complete, then I plan on moving the site, and the twitter sites, over to a media temple virtual server. That way I have complete control over the server and I can install csound (and finish doeraetweet.
This morning I reread some of The Oxford Handbook of Computational Linguistics, which is actually a fantastic book and very readable. I am slowly adding different algorithms and heuristics for detecting spam tweets, and I wanted to check up on some NLP (natural language processing) algorithms. I could not help, but start rereading the book, starting with the chapter on Phonology. It sounds like phrenology- which is a pseudoscience- phonology is just a social science - which I suppose is also a pseudo science. Phonology is the study of sounds in language.
Science on the one hand refers to a methodology, however I think that science also refers to subject matter. Scientific subject matter can be verified and falsified via scientific methodology. Really I think linguistics is a set of heuristics and does not meet the possibility of validity via scientific method that should be required of things that are a science. I suppose phonology is in fact a pseudo science.
The section on phonology covered something called free variation, and this really piqued my curisosity. The t in ten, the t in net, and the t in water, are all different types of t sounds. In english we do not have two words ten: one pronounced with the t as in ten and the other as the t in net. In some languages we do have this difference -ten can have two meanings and two pronunciations (or more).
There are myriad ways one can say ten. If I say ten ten times, the t will sound slightly different each time. This diversity is called 'free variation.'
I want to the idea of free variation into my robot singularity song, because a robot really does not have free variation - or a mechanical device does not have free variation (or does it). Speech is a motor process and if the motor process is constant there will be no change. I suppose as components wear down in a robot for example, you will get free variation as well. This is interesting for me to think about. I may to an audio project about free variation.
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