C. Callosum

Singlish and the left caudate

2006-06-15T06:47:00.000-07:00

Interesting article in New Scientist about how bilingual brains switch between different languages. Apparently there's an area of the brain called the left caudate that gets more active when switching between words in different languages (though it also lit up when, in the study, the bilingual volunteers read words in the same language but with very different meanings). Another, quite compelling, piece of evidence for the left caudate's role is the case of a trilingual woman whose left caudate was damaged, and who would switch involuntarily from one language to another.

I wonder what results one would get with Singlish speakers. Singlish is, of course, a dialect of English (maybe even a creole?) whose vocabulary is drawn from many different languages, primarily English, but also the various dialects of Chinese, Hokkien primarily, as well as Malay and Tamil. The Wikipedia entry on Singlish is very comprehensive, so read it to find out more. Would switching between English and Hokkien words activate the left caudate? Of course, there is ample evidence for even the least linguistically sophisticated speaker as to which original language a word belonged to, as their phonologies are very different. But, if Singlish is truly language-y, then perhaps pairs of words that are standard Singlish would behave similarly to pairs of words in another dialect of English.

Of course, there are issues that would need to be cleared up. I would like to know, first of all, whether a person who learned, say, German and English at a very young age and thus has two first languages and is equally fluent in both, would see the same caudate-lighting-up. The New Scientist article itself mentions "bilinguals", but doesn't mention how bilingual they truly are. And, of course, getting similar words in Singlish may be difficult. Hokkien words are usually used as exclamations, modifiers or idioms, as far as I have observed, while English words are used as connectives or if the word is technical.

[DIGRESSION: This isn't Singlish per se, but one good example of the code switching that goes on in Singapore, as well as where the words are used, is a sentence I heard the other day:

Julie 的 presentation 在哪里?
Julie POSS presentation at where
"Where is Julie's presentation?" ]

Yes!!

2006-04-03T07:05:00.000-07:00

Wow, I can't believe it took me a week to finish Puzzle 17 of the Linguist List Lexicon Game! Anyway, I was kinda slow it seems...but at least "neither the last nor the faintest were we" as the song goes. It really felt like someone at the Linguist List was mocking me today...I finally deciphered the cryptogram that is Puzzle 17 this morning, and was on tenterhooks all day waiting to get home and put in the answer...and the server was down for a couple of hours. Talk about great timing!

If you're stuck on #17, big hints can be found here. I'm kinda glad I didn't see the hints before I solved it though :-) Of course, now I'm kicking myself I didn't solve it sooner. I got a lot of Perl practice in trying to solve it, too. Learnt all about hashes and everything.

Anarchic hand syndrome

2006-04-03T05:31:00.000-07:00

MindHacks points to an article in The Psychologist [html|pdf] about anarchic hand syndrome. Far Side readers will of course recognise this as being Stuart's problem:

(Cartoon from The Far Side by Gary Larson)

Really, the range of neurological syndromes is quite fascinating. I love reading Oliver Sacks and Ramachandran et al - just as fascinating is the light that these neurological disorders throw on the workings of the brain.

Time scale modification, part 3: the $0 version (again)

2006-03-31T15:18:00.000-08:00

For more background:

Time scale modification for language learning purposes - the $29.95 version
Time scale modification - the $0 version

I just figured out that you don't have to pay $29.95 and buy Enounce to do time scale modification inside Windows Media Player - it comes straight built into WMP. This means that you can speed up or slow down the playing speed of an audio file without having to go into Audacity and repeatedly save the file with different settings. This is how you activate it:

1. When playing a file, click on the 'Now Playing' tab. This brings you to a visualisation of the file being played. Of course, you might have 'No visualisation' selected, in which case you will have a screen that's about 3/4 black, with your 'Now Playing' list on the right hand side and player controls on the bottom.

2. Just beneath the 'Now Playing' tab, there's a small button with three lines and a down arrow. Click this, then select Enhancements > Show Enhancements. This brings up a little window above the player controls.

3. Click on the right or left buttons in that little window, until you get to 'Play Speed Settings'. This is where you can speed up or slow down the player to your heart's delight.

Wow, I wish I had figured this out before. There are other enhancements you can play around with, such as turning on the WOW effects. This makes classical music sound grander and more echo-y (as far as I can tell). It's a nice effect, especially with headphones.

I'm goin' dahntahn tomorrow to catch me a bus

2006-03-17T10:56:00.000-08:00

There's a cute article in the New York Times (reg req'd) [via the CogSci Librarian] about a roadtrip across the Eastern U.S. to listen to different dialects starting in New York City, going up through Rochester and down into Pittsburgh.

Having been in Pittsburgh for the last six weeks, I can attest to the reality of the pronunciation of "downtown" as "dahntahn". I heard it when I first got on a bus and asked, "Is this bus going downtown?" and the driver replied, "Yeah, dahntahn." It was like a lightbulb going off in my head, bringing back memories of Linguistics 109 ("I'm goin' dahntahn to get me a sammich"). I can't say I've noted too many other Pittsburgh quirks though - didn't notice any sammiches, for instance. Being in the university area, most people I hear are decidedly not native Pittsburghers.

I'll try to pay more attention this weekend as I travel into the Northern Cities Vowel Shift area, but seeing as I lived in upstate New York for four years, the accent around there seems pretty normal to me now.

Plagiarism doesn't always pay

2006-02-28T17:39:00.000-08:00

Philipp Lenssen over at Google Blogoscoped discusses a case of Google-enabled plagiarism in his mother's (who is a teacher) class. It reminded me of a funny little story told to me by a good friend. So there was this boy in his class who was well-known (among the boys) for plagiarising. One day, he was summoned by his Spanish teacher, who held up an essay he'd just handed in and asked, "Did you copy this from the Internet?" He vigorously protested his innocence. "In that case," the teacher replied, "why is it in Portuguese?"

Dragonair tail logo

2006-01-19T06:15:00.000-08:00

Okay...I'm sure Dragonair is a great airline, but...couldn't they have designed their logo so that it doesn't look like a dragon flew SPLAT into it? And why does the dragon have three legs on its left side and only one leg on the right? Does it spend its day going around in circles?

(Image taken from the Aussie Pin Shop, because I couldn't find the photo I took out the window at Seoul airport a year ago.)

Is language learning Bayesian?

2006-01-13T07:54:00.000-08:00

There's an interesting article in The Economist about how Bayesian statistics are increasingly being used in the cognitive sciences [via MindHacks]. Two researchers set out to test how well humans apply Bayesian reasoning, by giving them nuggets of information and asking them to draw general conclusions.

For example, many of the participants were told the amount of money that a film had supposedly earned since its release, and asked to estimate what its total “gross” would be, even though they were not told for how long it had been on release so far.
...
All of these things have well-established probability distributions, and all of them, together with three other items on the list—an individual's lifespan given his current age, the run-time of a film, and the amount of time spent on hold in a telephone queuing system—were predicted accurately by the participants from lone pieces of data.

The participants in the study could moreover hold their own for data with many different sorts of naturally-occurring prior distributions. (Priors are "assumption[s] about the way the world works...that can be expressed as a mathematical probability distribution of the frequency with which events of a particular magnitude can happen.") Psychologists therefore suggest...

...that the Bayesian capacity to draw strong inferences from sparse data could be crucial to the way the mind perceives the world, plans actions, comprehends and learns language, reasons from correlation to causation, and even understands the goals and beliefs of other minds.

Hmm. Drawing strong inferences from sparse data? Sounds a lot like a solution to the problem of the poverty of the stimulus. But if language learning is Bayesian, then what is the prior? Does the prior = UG? What structure would it take? How are language universals encoded into it? Are language universals encoded into it? Certainly an interesting problem to think about.

Links:
Original paper [pdf]
Tom Griffiths' webpage, which includes a Bayesian reading list.
Josh Tenenbaum's webpage, which also has a paper on word-learning as Bayesian inference.

BBC snark

2005-12-20T06:46:00.000-08:00

Great snark from the BBC these past two days, with some mild paraphrasing due to faulty memory:

On intelligent design:

The proponents of intelligent design say they have no idea who or what the Intelligent Designer is, but he certainly has the skill set of a conventional God.

On people using business jargon:

Even Prince Charles, who one might hope speaks the Queen's English as if it were his mother tongue...

LibraryThing

2005-09-07T07:36:00.000-07:00

LibraryThing is an online book cataloguing website and it's GREAT. I discovered it via LibraryStuff and have been gradually cataloguing my collection ever since.

I've been getting bugged to catalogue my books for years now and I'm finding that LibraryThing makes it really fast to add in a book. All you have to do most of the time is type in the title or most of the title of a book. The service then checks in the Library of Congress' z39.50 bibliograpic information gateway to retrieve the nearest relevant information, as well as looking up Amazon. It then returns the books that match, and you just point and click. If there's only one book that matches, it just adds it in straight away. Fast and easy.

Adding up to 200 books is free, after that you need to pay a $10 lifetime subscription. I'm at sixty-something now, and will endeavour to imitate Eve Halliday this weekend, subscribe and (try to) do the rest this weekend in a feverish burst of cataloguing activity.

Cool features:

* Sort your books by author, title, date published or the tags you've used to describe them.

* An excellent search tool to see what's already in your library.

* See who else in LibraryThing has the same book in their catalogue.

* I love it that you can see the LoC classification. This sounds really dorky, but I miss the P selection of the library...all the linguistics and languages books!

* You can export your catalogue as a CSV file. This is a big big big big plus!

* New features are always being added. When I began cataloguing a few days ago, the service used only the Library of Congress z39.50 interface to get book information. Now it collects info from Amazon as well. And you can tell what's going on by checking out the LibraryThing blog.

* The site owner/builder, Tim Spalding, is really open to suggestions.

So here's my wishlist:

* Advanced tagging behaviour: It would be nice if we could select a bunch of books by checking them in the library and apply a bunch of tags to them. And if we could search for books with tag X but not tag Y.

* What about some suggested tags based on their LoC classification? I like to provide some rough tags for my books like "history" or "geography" that should be more or less deduce-able (deductible? Nah.) from the classification.

* A warning if the book you're adding is almost identical to another you'd entered previously. I'm finding that I sometimes forget where I stopped cataloguing and I enter the book twice, but the system doesn't let on. In case the user accidentally adds books with different ISBNs, maybe xISBN can help to resolve them?

* I think it would be really cool if a bunch of people could get together and pool their bibliographic resources by each building a catalogue and creating a collective library. With one search they could then see whether the book is available among their circle of friends and if so, who owns it. Then they can beg, borrow or steal it. Quite a few of my books are (to my knowledge) almost unique to Singapore since I can't find them in the national library system or any of the university libraries. OK, so I know that my friends wouldn't have those books anyway, or I'd already be asking them! I guess it'd be cool if you could specify where you lived and say that you're willing to loan books to people in the same city or within a certain radius (the latter wouldn't work for Singapore, I'm sure) and then search all available libraries to you, and e-mail the relevant person.

Of course, this would require that quite a lot of people find out about LibraryThing and start using it. But this service deserves to have a lot of people find out about it. Hence this public service announcement. Thank you.

P.S. It looks like LibraryThing is getting pretty popular. LanguageHat has blogged about it too! LH currently has one of the 20 largest libraries within LibraryThing. I want to be up there too! Alas, I think my collection, even with all the books catalogued, will never inhabit the same rarefied heights...

Scarlet Pimpernel Centennial: 1905 – 2005

2005-08-20T01:07:00.000-07:00

About a week ago I was at the Esplanade library, from which premium members of the library can borrow DVDs and other audiovisual goodies. Browsing the shelves, I came across a copy of the Scarlet Pimpernel (1982 version). I'd watched it before, on Malaysian television, and we still have a grotty version of it on two separate tapes somewhere (the tape ran out halfway and we had to scramble to find another one, losing about three minutes of one of the most romantic scenes).

Well, how could I resist borrowing my favourite representation of what is arguably my favourite book? (The paperback version, which my mother bought for a dollar among a bunch of other classics when I was about twelve, is the only book I can say that I've read to tatters.)

My long-suffering copy of The Scarlet Pimpernel

So home I went with it (the video), watching it thrice in a week, and of course setting myself off on a Scarlet Pimpernel binge, reading the tattered book again, as well as the approximately eight books I possess at full steam and then the e-texts of the rest of the books I don't have online at Blakeney Manor, arguably the best SP resource on the Internet.

I discovered a couple of interesting things: firstly, that Chauvelin in the 1982 movie is played by Ian McKellen, better known today as Gandalf in Lord of the Rings. I don't think I would have noticed the connection if I hadn't recognised his name in the credits, but once I did know they were the same, the resemblance between his younger and older selves seemed obvious.

Ian McKellen as Chauvelin, at left (http://www.mckellan.com/images/5001.jpg).

Ian McKellen as Gandalf, at right (http://www.mckellan.com/images/0426.jpg)

Sir Ian also has some notes about the filming of the Scarlet Pimpernel, here.

The second thing was that this year marks the 100^th anniversary of the publishing of the original Scarlet Pimpernel book by Baroness Orczy!

(Banner from http://www.blakeneymanor.com/100years.html)

I well remember the odyssey that the Scarlet Pimpernel set me off on. Having read it, and somehow finding out that there were other books that I just could not wait to get my hands on, I set about finding them as best I could. The Internet was not all that useful yet, at the time, and so whenever my family went overseas to places like Australia, I would duck into bookshops to inquire about the other Scarlet Pimpernel books.

I remember especially one kindly gentleman who owned a bookshop near the Sydney Harbourfront saying in response to my timid query: “Ah! The Scarlet Pimpernel! They seek him here, they seek him there!” Those two lines are the recognition signal of all Scarlet Pimpernel fans, it seems. He explained that he had another customer who had first dibs on all his Scarlet Pimpernel books, but that he had another book by Baroness Orczy, called Beau Brocade, which was very good too. So I bought it. It was a very old copy, very brittle, and if I wasn’t careful the corner of the pages would tear off as I turned them. I devoured it, and loved it, though not as much as the Scarlet Pimpernel itself.

At another Sydney bookshop, this time quite modern, I found a copy of the Triumph of the Scarlet Pimpernel, which was the last book in the series, set at the end of the French Revolution. I can remember reading the first, rather eerie, chapter while sitting in a darkened booth at some phone centre while my parents placed a call back home. The atmosphere was perfect for that first chapter.

A while after that, I discovered Amazon, and ordered all the books I could possibly afford. And then came Project Gutenberg, and e-texts in general, which saved me a lot of money. I would read them chapter by chapter as some fan on the other side of the globe painstakingly typed them out or scanned them and put them online. After a while, the plots became rather similar, the Scarlet Pimpernel unbelievably perfect, but I rather liked the irrealism. It was all just so deliciously romantic.

Work in progress: map of English parishes with names ending in -by

2005-07-03T09:59:00.000-07:00

I'm going to be off again on another overseas trip, but I thought I'd do a quick post on something that's absorbed my attention for the past few evenings. As everyone and their mother now know, Google Maps have released an API. This post from Metafilter suggests some neat things you can do with it. Well, I thought, why not make some language maps with it? This is my first try at recreating the famous map by Smith of Scandinavian place-names in England. This map only shows the parishes with names ending in -by, an Old Norse ending meaning "village" or "town". It also doesn't show the border drawn by Alfred and Guthrum's treaty, which is the whole point of the original map, but I haven't figured out the latitude and longitude coordinates for the various points delineating the boundary (anyone know where the rivers Lea and Ouse are?), so I haven't plotted it yet. It will be there in a forthcoming edition of the map though. But it looks like the parishes plotted all land on the northern side of the boundary, which is as it should be, since that was the Norse side.

In making this map, I used a list of parish names provided by this program, Parish Locator. If it had provided its coordinates in latitude and longtiude I might have finished this map a lot sooner, but unfortunately I had to educate myself in eastings, northings and the British National Grid to figure it out. The formula for converting grid references to lat/long was rather complex, but fortunately a Perl module, Geography::NationalGrid::GB is available to do the conversion.

I think a lot of cool language mapping stuff can conceivably be made with Google or Yahoo maps, or indeed any of the open-source mapping software that's out there. Some data that would be needed, such as this list of language "waypoints", showing an approximate location of the place, are already available online. These can be combined with typological databases to show the geographic distribution of certain features, for example. Matthew Dryer has done a lot of work in this direction.

[Here is the link to the clickable Google map, if you're interested. You can click on the little balloons to see the names of the parishes. But, it will take some time to plot the points, and Firefox will give you all sorts of warnings about how the script will make your browser run slowly, so be warned.]

"The Sparrow" by Mary Doria Russell

2005-06-28T07:27:00.000-07:00

I'm currently reading "The Sparrow" by Mary Doria Russell, which is science fiction but/and includes some linguistics stuff. I was inspired to by this post by Suzette Haden Elgin, herself a linguistics/science fiction writer. The book has been amazing so far (I'm halfway through it). She writes wonderfully, and it's all very interesting, and above all suspenseful.

What you know right from the beginning is that the Jesuits sent a team of priests and "civilians" to make first contact with a planet called Rakhat, something went terribly wrong, and only one man returned, physically and emotionally scarred. But why, and how? Even as you read about the inquest into what happened, a second storyline starts tunnelling its way from the beginning of the story, telling you all about the people who went on the planet and how the expedition got started. And the painful thing is that you know that every one but one is going to die. But you've started to like them, and it hurts.

Anyway, there's quite a bit on languages in it so far. I liked this bit, where the protagonist, Emilio Sandoz, describes one of his language-learning techniques:

..."Sometimes," he told her, learning forward over the table, speaking without realizing how it would sound, "I begin with songs. They provide a sort of skeleton grammar for me to flesh out. Songs of longing for future tense, songs of regret for past tense, songs of love for the present."

He blushed when he heard what he'd said, making it worse, but she took no offense; indeed, she seemed to miss any connection that might have been taken wrongly. Instead, she seemed struck by a coincidence and looked out the cafe window, her mouth open slightly. "Isn't that interesting," she said, as though nothing else he'd told her so far had been, and continued thoughtfully, "I do the same thing. Have you noticed that lullabies nearly always use a lot of command form?"...

This reminded me of a song we learnt in Arabic class: حبّيتك و بحبّك و هحبّك على طول was the first line, meaning "I loved you, I love you and I'll love you forever". It was kind of neat for remembering the distinctions between the three tenses in Egyptian Colloquial.

Yubnub

2005-06-19T08:27:00.000-07:00

Well, I'm back from a nice holiday in the States, which explains the lull in postings. While there, I discovered Yubnub, which bills itself as "a (social) command line for the web". Basically what happens is that you go to the website, type in a command like (for example) "wikipedia callosum" and get the Wikipedia search page for the word "callosum". Cool, right? What makes it cooler is that you can transform your Firefox search bar into a command line, so you can type "wikipedia callosum" straight into the URL bar and get the same result! Coolest of all is that you can submit your own commands, which is what I've been playing around with for the last ten minutes.

Here are the commands I've created:

eng2ar
Translates a word from English to Arabic using the open source Qamoose dictionary.
Example: eng2ar anything
will give you the translation for the word 'anything'.

freebook
Searches for books in the Online Books Page (http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu) by words in the title. If you wish to search by author, use the Yubnub command freebook-author.

Example: freebook beagle
Example: freebook voyage beagle

These searches return "The Voyage of the Beagle" by Charles Darwin.

freebook-author
Searches the Online Books Page (http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu) by author name.

Example: freebook-author darwin
Example: freebook-author charles darwin

nlb
Searches the National Library of Singapore catalogue by keyword.

Example: nlb harry potter

~~I also tried (and failed) to create one for the National Library catalogue, nlb, but it does NOT work as advertised. It can only take in one search term at a time, and not two (like "harry potter").~~ nlb now works as advertised - thanks Jon! You can type in "nlb harry potter" to do a keyword search on the National Library (of Singapore)'s catalogue. (If you want to know why it didn't work before, scroll down to the bottom.)

Other EXTREMELY COOL commands (that I've come across so far) are:

g - searches Google.
gs - searches Google Scholar.
shrink - TinyURL, but I'll probably stick to my regular bookmarklet most of the time for this. You can find it on the TinyURL main page if you scroll down a little.
gmaps - Google Maps.
map - Multimap.
am - searches Amazon.
tr - Google Translate. Use it like this: tr en fr friend to translate 'friend' from English to French. Other languages: simplified Chinese zh-CN, German de, Italian it, Japanese ja, Korean ko, Portuguese pt, Spanish es.
thes - thesaurus.com search
say - text-to-speech. (Cor blimey!)
acro - look up the definition of an acronym.
answer - Answers.com

Three cheers for Yubnub. I think I'll be using it a lot.

_____FOOTNOTE_____
Why nlb doesn't work:
Yubnub automatically inserts a + between two or more search terms. So "nlb harry potter" gets the URL <> which is incorrect. You want "_harry%20potter" at the end instead. The search will still return results, but it will think it's searching for the word "harry" only.

I've no idea how to fix this, but I emailed the site's creator, Jonathan Aquino, about it, to see if he can fix this. I suppose you could try using the catalogue available through elibraryhub, maybe that would work.

UPDATE: nlb does work. Jon specially implemented a new syntax that transforms spaces into, well, spaces (%20) rather than into plus signs. And the NLB catalogue is immortalised on the yubnub website as the exemplar for this syntax. Jon was also kind enough to credit me for "suggesting" this fix, but it was his idea, I just supplied the problem!

Salvation Army Book Fair

2005-05-22T08:54:00.000-07:00

To all readers from Singapore...

You mayn't know it, but the Salvation Army has a pretty big stock of books that people have donated. These books are available for sale at various branches, the biggest (for books) being the Upper Serangoon store. The book section is entirely run by volunteers from the Salvation Army Library Enterprise, and we will soon be holding a big sale (yes, it's the SALE sale) during the June holidays to sell off our excess stock. Details as follows:

Date: 3-4 June (Fri & Sat)
Time: 11 am - 7 pm
Venue: Geylang Methodist Secondary School Hall
Getting there: Map
MRT: Aljunied
Bus: 21, 26, 40, 51, 62, 63, 64, 67, 80, 100, 125, 155, 158.

We have books for children, young adults, adult fiction, non-fiction and reference - you name it, we have it. Some books are almost brand new and can be found selling for 20 times the price at bookstores; others will be much older, out-of-print and impossible to find anywhere else. And we will have lots of books at the sale: possibly up to 20,000 books (we haven't counted exactly) rolling out over the 2 days. There will also be children's activities from time to time such as lucky draws and storytelling.

The books will be dirt cheap: all of them go for $1, or 50 cents (if marked 2 for $1).* If you come across a bunch of small books and don't think they're individually worth $1, you can also approach a volunteer to have them marked down. Of course, all proceeds will go to other projects run by the Salvation Army.

Please come! Because the whole thing is being run on a shoestring budget, we haven't the money for big publicity - so please spread the word to your book-loving friends too. Also, because this is entirely volunteer-run, please forgive us if the sale isn't as professional as what you may be accustomed to. We hope the low prices and wide range will make up for any difficulties you may encounter during the sale itself. We also welcome help from anyone who is free on the days of the sale, or even interested in volunteering at our Saturday sessions at Upper Serangoon after the sale. Drop me an e-mail if you're interested and I'll put you in touch with the right people.

Link: PDF brochure for the book fair

*This is the current pricing policy; things may change before the day itself (and will be duly noted here).

UPDATE: Well, we managed to get $3000 out of the book fair, apparently. Not bad for a few mornings' work! Thanks to everyone who came and contributed!

Time scale modification - the $0 version

2005-05-19T06:53:00.000-07:00

A recap of yesterday's post: You can speed up speech (and music) without making people sound like chipmunks, and slow them down without making them sound like Darth Vader. This is called time scale modification. Apparently playing things faster is good for you because (1) it saves time and (2) it forces you to concentrate, so you learn better. But playing things slower can have a benefit too, when you're listening to, say, radio broadcasts in a foreign language that you're trying to learn. Often these go too fast for you to catch much, but slowing them down to 0.7-0.8xRT makes them perfect. One way to do time scale modification is to use Enounce, a plug-in for Windows Media Player and RealPlayer that lets you play stuff anywhere from 0.3-2.5xRT.

Today I'm going to look at another way of doing TSM, as it's commonly abbreviated. It's really quite easy. First, head over to audacity.sourceforge.com and download yourself a free copy of Audacity. Audacity is open-source software for recording and editing sounds and works in Windows, Linux, OS X, you name it. It's really nifty for manipulating audio - for example, you can mash recordings up by highlighting an area of the recording and then dragging it off somewhere else. There are other free sound editors out there, too: Audacity is just the one I have installed on my computer.

Now, how to do TSM in Audacity. Select the whole recording, then go to Effect, and Change Tempo. Don't use Change Speed, that gives you chipmunks and Darth Vaders. Change Tempo shortens (or lengthens) your audio without changing the pitch - just what Enounce does. Just move the slider to where you want the speed, and press OK. It takes a few seconds to work its magic - though you can preview the effect first just to be sure that's the speed you want - and press play. Et voila! Audio speeded up or slowed down as you wish.

I don't think that the TSM effect is quite as smooth as in Enounce, which is only to be expected - this is free software, after all. There are other drawbacks, too: you can edit Ogg Vorbis, MP3 and WAV files, but nothing else - so if you have a file in .wmv format, or RealPlayer format, the only thing I can think of for you to do is to play the file and record it simultaneously in Audacity. Which pretty much defeats the purpose of the exercise in the first place. And many Internet stations encode their files in those formats. Of course, for language-learning purposes it's not so bad to listen to anything twice. Practice, practice, practice!

So I might just overcome my habitual skinflintedness and fork out $29.95 for Enounce, unless anyone knows of a way to open up files of other - proprietary - formats in Audacity or any of the other free audio editing programs, like Praat or Wavesurfer. Now that I'm running my free 7-day trial version, I don't think I could go back to listening to audio at regular speeds again. It would just be too boring.

Time scale modification for language learning purposes - the $29.95 version

2005-05-18T09:10:00.000-07:00

I don't know about you, but I'm a really impatient person. I read fast because I don't like to spend too much time reading. Now, I would really like to be able to listen to more lectures and interviews and other audio online, because there's really good stuff out there, and coming from a college town back to Singapore, where there's not much in the way of public lectures and all that sort of thing (well, none that I'm interested in hearing, anyway), it's the next best thing.

The trouble is, I'm too impatient to sit down and listen to it. When it's not live, when you can't see the person who's talking, you realise that people actually speak really slowly. They are careful to enunciate their words - all well and good, but I've a pretty good language model in my head, I can stand some speeding up.

Now, supposing you were listening to a lecture and pressed the fast forward button - what do you hear? Chipmunks? Mickey Mouse? Well, something along those lines anyway. That's because playing it twice as fast makes the frequency twice as much, and frequency is correlated with pitch. Playing something twice as fast makes the speaker's pitch rise - hence the "chipmunk effect". I'm not kidding, that's what people call it. Now, to speed things up *without* creating the chipmunk effect - you'd probably need to take each vowel and truncate it, etc., etc. - I haven't looked into how it works, but there are tools out there to do this, and it's called time scale modification.

So I looked on the Web and found that a company called Enounce makes tools to speed up your listening. The software is a plug-in to RealPlayer and Windows Media Player, and works whether you're playing something you've downloaded or streaming from the Net. Although, of course, if it's live you can't play it twice as fast - it would be really funny if you could, but you can't. There's a free 7-day demo, so I tried it out on a talk from IT Conversations by Cory Doctorow. It worked pretty well! No squeaky voices (though you can alter the properties to get the chipmunk effect, if you need a laugh). I found 2x was a bit fast for me, I wasn't used to it yet. 1.5x was perfect this time round. If I practise with it I can probably work up to 2x or higher, I guess.

Apparently there are other benefits besides the time factor to this software: students learn better because playing it faster makes you concentrate harder, for example. [Link to BYU paper on this, pdf format] But what interested me more was seeing that you could not only speed up, you could also slow down - to as low as 0.3x the regular speed.

Many language learning advice-dispensing websites advise that you should try listening to online broadcasts in your target language. These are available for an incredible array of languages. Deutsche Welle has 30 languages, the BBC World Servic e broadcasts in 43; Radio Canada 8. (These are my favourite.) Each of these three has broadcasts in Arabic, my target language - the only thing is, the presenters speak too fast for me. I'm not yet at the stage where I can listen to broadcast news read at normal speed, though when I know the story in question I can usually work it out. What I really need is for them to go just a little bit slower. The BBC knows this, and Deutsche Welle knows this - both have programmes for language learners where they speak a little more slowly, and clearly, using less difficult words. But I haven't found anything comparable for Arabic.

But all I have to do is to put Enounce and those broadcasts together, which I tried today. I found that playing at 0.7 - 0.8x the normal speed worked pretty well for me. I had time to work out how the more complex words parse, and to recall what they meant. I think this will be a big help for my Arabic-learning efforts.

The thing is, Enounce costs $29.95. I think this is a pretty reasonable price, but tomorrow let's see if we can go one step better and do this for free.

NLB xISBN bookmarklet

2005-05-16T07:04:00.000-07:00

I forgot to post this for the longest time, but here it is at last:

There's now an official OCLC xISBN bookmarklet for the National Library Board, Singapore! You can install it here. Basically, Eric Childress of the OCLC noticed my blogpost about modifying my NLB LibraryLookup bookmarklet to take advantage of the xISBN functionality, which lets you search for various editions of a book, which have different ISBNs, with a single ISBN search. That is to say, my post was about my inability to modify the bookmarklet. Jeff Young, also of the OCLC, then created a bookmarklet specially for the NLB catalogue and e-mailed me about it. Thanks, guys.

Nature observations

2005-05-15T07:17:00.000-07:00

I've been engaged in some naturalistic pursuits lately. One, a rather curious caterpillar landed on the family car the other day and we took it and put it in a jar. Everything about it seemed quite ordinary except that it had a big bulbous green head. It looked almost as if it was a caterpillar trying to consume a pea, but it was quite clear that the green head was fused to the rest of its body. By the next morning, it had not eaten any of the leaves we put in for it, but had produced copious amounts of waste, to put it mildly. About 10 pellets. And by the afternoon, it had become a yellow cocoon! Unfortunately, I was out the whole day so I didn't see it weaving itself in. I wonder how long they stay in their cocoons, and what sort of butterfly it will become. If any readers recognise my description of the caterpillar, let me know!

The second experiment is an ant colony. I bought, rather on impulse, this Antworks set a few weeks ago. (Read the linked website for a full description & pictures.) We set out on an ant-collecting expedition today, and quickly discovered why Antworks offers packets of ants for sale. They're devilishly quick! It took a while to gather just 11, and that's nowhere near the 20-25 recommended. The ants we got also seem a bit on the bloodthirsty side. There are ant parts lying around the colony, and at least two of the ants seem to have been badly damaged. On the plus side, though, they seem avid diggers, so hopefully we'll see some beautiful tunnels - if they don't kill each other first. Another advantage is that they don't seem to have climbing feet, and can't climb up the walls of the colony, which makes it a lot easier to put new ants in, unlikely the ants we find in our kitchen. From my observations today, it looks like they have a cooperative system, with one ant digging down below and other ants passing the debris up. Very Great Escape-ish.

Game theory

2005-05-08T06:07:00.000-07:00

The BBC Magazine has an interesting article on how to win at everyday games like Connect Four and Reversi. One surprising one for which I would have thought no strategy possible is Scissors, Paper, Stone (the Americans call this Rock, Paper, Scissors as I recall). This was the game that decided which of the two great auction houses, Sotheby's or Christie's, was to have the opportunity of auctioning off Maspro Denkoh's $20 million collection of Picassos and van Goghs. Christie's consulted the 11-year-old daughters of one of their directors, who proposed the following strategy:

1. Stone is the one that "feels" the strongest
2. Therefore a novice will expect their opponent to go for stone, and will go for paper to beat stone
3. Therefore go for scissors first

I think my initial choice is rather random, but from now on I may keep their advice in mind.

Another interesting article I've read over the past few days is "On the Survival of Rats in the Slush Pile" by Michael Allen (also known as the Grumpy Old Bookman). It's a little monograph - almost a screed - on the publishing industry and what's wrong with it. Basically, the methods publishers use to determine the value of a book are completely wrong, and the machinery behind publishing is badly broken, and if you want to become a writer and earn fame and fortune, like Dan Brown or J.K. Rowling, you might as well give up now. He also suggests methods for reforming the industry, and his basic advice to would-be writers is: go ahead and write, but don't give up the day job.

It's a very quick, informative read. I especially liked how he threw in some insights from statistics, in particular Nassim Taleb's books about chance as well as the theory of the Long Tail.

I wish more books were like that - short and to the point. What happened to the old practice of writing monographs rather than books? I see so many books in the bookshops these days that talk about interesting subjects, but - honestly, who wants to read 200+ pages about, say, Daylight Savings Time? Or salt? Can't it be compressed down a bit? And made cheaper? Then I could spend less time finding out more, with less pressure on my wallet.

Writers wouldn't have to spend so much time fluffing out their books, either - they could just state their piece and be done with it, sell it for less but probably have more readers to make up for it. We need to make <100-page books fashionable again. They would be perfect to distribute electronically, too. "On the survival..." is 70 pages long, and doesn't hurt the eyes. I couldn't imagine reading 200+ pages at a stretch at the computer. But 70 pages, with generous margins, is pretty good, with a few minutes' break at the halfway mark.

Reading Chinese characters

2005-05-06T08:11:00.000-07:00

Here's an interesting article about the psychology behind learning to read. Especially interesting are the experiments it describes about halfway down about reading Chinese, which are taken from Spinks et al., "Reading Chinese characters for meaning: the role of phonological information".

Many people believe that the Chinese script is ideographic. [See John DeFrancis' The Ideographic Myth for a refutation.] But some neat psycholinguistic experiments demonstrate that Chinese characters really represent sound as well as meaning, as described in the ScienceNews article.

[In the following, I describe the different cases they examined as different experiments, but really all the possible cases were presented together in one experimental session. I call them 'experiments' for my own convenience.]

Experiment 1: the Stroop effect. If we are shown a word, e.g. RED, and are asked to say what the colour the word the printed in is, it takes us a lot longer than if the the word and the colour matched, as in RED. You can experiment with it at this site.

Turns out that Chinese has the same effect. Reading the word 红 (meaning "red") takes Chinese readers longer than if the colours matched. This establishes the baseline effect.

Experiment 2: If we give a word in Chinese that has the same pronunciation as 红, hong2 (that's the syllable "hong" in the second tone), such as 洪 (meaning "flood"), in an incongruous colour, a similar delay occurs! One of the experimenters, Charles A. Perfetti, of the University of Pittsburgh, explains:

"This effect indicates that written characters correspond to sounds in spoken Chinese, not to specific words. The pronunciation of flood calls to mind red and slows naming of the clashing ink color, Perfetti says. If the characters represented specific words, instead of sounds, this delay would not occur."

Experiment 3: If we give a word in Chinese that is of the same syllable but different tone, such as 轰 ("boom", hong1 - again the syllable "hong", but in the first tone), then there is still a delay, though it is now smaller. So evidently reading this word calls up the pronunciation "hong", which recalls the similar-sounding 红 and its meaning, red, which inhibits the correct naming of the colour the word is printed in.

Experiment 4: This one used only semantic information, providing a word that is very closely associated with the colour. For example, for the colour red, they provided the word for blood, 血 (xue4). For blue, it was 'sky', 天. This had about the same average response time as in the second case, where a word with the same pronunciation but totally different meaning was supplied.

Experiment 5: This worked in the other direction, testing whether giving a word that sounded the same as the colour it was presented in helped. For example, they provided the word 虑 ("ponder", ) which sounds the same as the word 'green', 绿，also pronounced lü4. This shortened the response time as compared to a random word presented in the colour green, though not to the extent that it was the same as presenting the colour name itself. So semantic associations could be triggered by phonological similarities. Actually, I'm not so sure about how this experiment helps so much - it seems to me that the effect can also be explained by the fact that there isn't another totally different pronunciation to interfere with identifying the pronunciation of the colour.

But anyway, to sum up, the findings are that:
(1) phonological information is obligatorily activated when reading Chinese characters, even when it is not in the reader's interest to do so. At the very least, the pathway is parallel between triggering of phonological information and triggering of semantic information (this is called the "parallel activation hypothesis").
(2) Phonetic similarities trigger semantic associations, but not to the extent that complete orthographic identity does.

I think it's a neat effect. It's a very clever use of the amount of homophony in Chinese characters.

Also interesting is the following paragraph, from the ScienceNews article:

Studies of blood flow and electric responses indicate that Chinese readers activate many of the same left brain areas that English readers do, Perfetti adds. Right brain regions involved in vision also contribute to reading Chinese but not to reading English. This finding is consistent with the possibility that learning to read Chinese stimulates spatial perception.

I wonder if Chinese speakers are better at finding their way around, then?

Baby on board - sometimes

2005-05-06T06:25:00.000-07:00

Is this lying? I saw a car today with a little sign saying "Children on board". But there weren't any children actually in the car at the time. Now, the little sign seems to be making a pretty bald statement that two or more children are in the car. Obviously, in real life you don't take the little sign down every single time the children leave the car, and put it back up when they get back in. So what the sign really means is "Children on board some of the time", even though I'm thinking most people when they read it will interpret it to mean that there are. So are these people lying? (I suppose you could say the sign is lying.) Or are our expectations managed by the static-ness of the sign?

Perceptions of randomness: survey

2005-05-02T05:16:00.000-07:00

Haven't had a whole lot of linguistic insights recently, so posting has been light. I've been working on writing up some notes for learners of Arabic. The notes are mostly for intermediate to advanced students. I'm writing up some on the verbal morphology right now. I may post them online when I'm done with them.

And now, to the main topic of this post. I've created a very short survey for testing people's perceptions of randomness. It consists of just one question. Take a look at it, and please fill it in. I'm using SurveyMonkey, and it's a free account, so I can only collect 100 responses. If (& when) 100 responses are in, I'll post the results. (I'm not sure if answering the survey brings you to a page where all the responses to date are displayed. I don't think so. Let me know if I'm wrong.)

Oh yes, one warning: the survey is image-heavy, and may take a while to load.

Click here to go to the survey. If you want to know more about the rationale behind the survey (and the correct answer), click here.

All Consuming is back

2005-04-20T08:17:00.000-07:00

After being down with server problems for a while, Erik Benson has rebuilt All Consuming, which allows you to tag books, DVDs, etc that you're reading/watching, make lists of books you're reading, and record your thoughts about books you've finished. Check out the list of books I'm currently reading in the right-hand column - you'll need to scroll down a little. You can join in the fun too, by registering on All Consuming and putting a little snippet of Javascript on your website.

Old joke, new (realistic) ending

2005-04-20T07:58:00.000-07:00

Something Awful ran a contest to come up with realistic punchlines to old jokes [via BoingBoing]. They're kind of funny, in a violates-some-Gricean-maxim way. Here are a couple:

A duck walks into a bar...

Animal control is promptly called, the duck is then taken to a near by park and released.

What's the difference between Michael Jackson and a shopping bag?

One is a famous singer songwriter facing charges of child molestation and the other's a shopping bag.

Many jokes are funny, I think (I didn't pay much attention to the pragmatics part of Ling 101), because they violate some Gricean maxim. For example, the maxim of manner says, in part, to avoid ambiguity. But ambiguity is precisely the thing that makes puns funny. The maxim of relation says to be relevant, but non sequiturs deliberately lead you one way and then make a totally irrelevant statement. But in jokes, this is totally acceptable, because we understand that Gricean maxims are often violated in jokes. They're not (necessarily) true, they're not (necessarily) brief, they're not (necessarily) relevant and they're not (necessarily) unambiguous. Perhaps there's a separate Gricean maxim that says when you're trying to tell a joke, ignore all the other maxims.

So when we come across "realistic" jokes where the beginning sounds like a joke and the "punchline" actually IS relevant, IS brief, IS unambiguous and IS true, it's kind of funny. Well to me, anyway. I'm overanalysing, aren't I? Stop reading this post and go read the "jokes". Have fun.

Egypt Exploration Society

2005-04-18T06:19:00.000-07:00

Language Hat posted a link to an intriguing article on Oxford scientists employing infra-red technology to find long-lost Greek and Roman plays and histories and poetry on a hoard of ancient papyrus thrown onto an ancient garbage heap, the Oxyrhynchus Papyri. Oxyrhynchus ("city of the sharp-nosed fish") was the "titular archdiocese of Heptanomos in Egypt", and its inhabitants were among the earliest to embrace Christianity, so there may be some early Christian documents in there too. The collection already yielded some precious documents in 1906: the Catholic Encyclopedia cites an article dating to that year titled "Les plus anciens monuments du christianisme ecrit sur papyrus".

The Telegraph article says the hoard is owned by the Egypt Exploration Society. That name rang a bell with me, and a quick look at my collection told me why: one of my favourite books, Nefertiti Lived Here, was written by Mary Chubb, who was employed by the EES in the 1930s. She volunteered to go on a season's dig at Tell El-Amarna sponsored by the society, led by the brilliant John Pendlebury, and one of the results was this lovely book. It conveys a sense of the romance of archaeology, but doesn't hesitate to point out the hardships and the disappointments as well. Reading the second-last chapter, about an ancient Egyptian folk dance, still sends a thrill down my spine - you'll have to read it to see why. Amazingly, fieldwork is still on-going at Amarna, still sponsored by the EES.

But these new techniques really go to show that it's really not all that easy to destroy information, doesn't it?* For hundreds of years those papyri have been unreadable. To all intents and purposes, they held no further information. And then people come up with a subtle, sophisticated way of teasing out information from what's left. Absolutely amazing.

*I suppose paper shredders and card shufflers and hard disk rewriters already know this, though.

Unforgettable and unrecallable passwords

2005-04-04T07:36:00.000-07:00

Came across an interesting paper today: "Passwords you'll never forget, but can't recall" by Daphna Weinshall and Scott Kirkpatrick of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. The basic aim is to leverage certain human memory phenomena to create "passwords" that can be recognised, but not described to a third party. An example is pick out about 100-200 pictures out of a database of about 20,000. The database is organised into groups of 2-9 based on a common theme; for example, all 9 of the photos in a certain group might contain a windmill. The authentication process is as follows: choose a few, say 5, photos, one of which is in the 100 to 200-strong set that the subject memorised. The subject has to pick the right one. This is repeated several times to minimise the chance that an intruder gets it right by chance.

The rationale is that "a picture is worth a thousand words", and many pictures cannot be described in sufficient detail without actually having them in front of one in order to pick them out of the group. Also, since the subject was given so many photographs, they would be unable to describe all of them anyway. On the other hand, we are pretty good at recognising photographs once we actually see them, so when actually going through the authentication process, we will be able to remember. Some allowance for forgetting is built in - the subject doesn't have to get every test right.

Anyway, this paper reminds me of a passage from Between Silk and Cyanide [NLB] by Leo Marks, which is, by the way, one of my favourite books. I think it must be the non-fiction book I've re-read the most, and given away as presents to the most people. It's clever, it's funny, and it's about cryptography, which I was really interested in for a long time. I haven't the time to review it properly here, but anyway the relevant passage is the following (page 508 of the hardback):

My dear Colonel,
...
'PANDARUS has done extremely well from the signals point of view. Before he left he was briefed by signals to give MANELAUS an identity check. This was in such a form that PANDARUS himself, if caught later by the enemy, would be unable to remember it. The position now is that MANELAUS is using the check.
'This is the first time in SOE history that an agent recruited in the field has been given an identity check without anything passing in writing!
The same system of identity check will, in due course, be used by the Zone Commanders when they use their own codes.

Yours sincerely,

Nick reminded me as head of Signals that he was my zone commander, and asked if I'd kindly tell him the secret of Pandarus's ability to forget the security checks which he had to pass on.
Astonished by its simplicity, he stared at the ceiling and muttered, 'Jesus.' (Pandarus, who's blasphemed so frequently I was convinced he was devout, said he'd try the system out. He was the first agent to use it but unless I could find a way to vary it, he was likely to be the last.)*

* I have been advised that for security reasons I must forget how it worked! Has nothing changed in fifty years except Britain's prestige?

I puzzled over this passage for some time but have never been able to even imagine a security check that comes close having the properties of unforgettability and unrecallability. I doubt that it's anything like the ones proposed in the paper, but the idea's still neat. It just goes to show that there's nothing new under the sun! (Since 1944, anyway.) Anyway, go read Between Silk and Cyanide. You won't regret it.

Some thoughts on statistical fallacies and language learning

2005-04-03T05:44:00.000-07:00

WARNING: long, rambling post ahead.

I must say that the litany of statistical fallacies I enumerated in my review of Stanovich surprised me. I had imagined that a lot of the trouble people had with statistics emerged from the formal framework that has been built up around it: technical terms such as mean, median, mode; t-tests, ANOVA, that sort of thing. A lot of the trouble that people have with it, however, is intuitive. Pose them an informal question, not incorporating any of the machinery of formal statistics, and they can still get it wrong.

Let's take a quick run through the fallacies that Stanovich discusses:
(1) "person-who" arguments
(2) discounting base rates
(3) failure to use sample size information
(4) the gambler's fallacy
(5) thinking coincidences are more "miraculous" than they are (related to (2) and (3))
(6) discounting incidences and seeing only coincidences
(7) trying to get it right every time, even when it's better to be wrong sometimes
(8) the "conspiracy theory" effect - seeing patterns where they are none
(9) the illusion of control

This intuitive mishandling of statistics is surprising to me, because I'm a firm believer in the theory of statistical language learning. By this I mean that a lot (not necessarily all, but a vast majority) of what we learn is from observations of how frequently certain words occur, how some words only occur with other words, how often some words occur in a certain context. Nor do I believe that this statistical learning is reserved for the task of language learning: as I understand it, a lot of work on our visual systems has shown that our perception of the world depends greatly on statistical considerations.

[Aside: This doesn't mean that I think linguistic knowledge consists of a big bunch of statistics. I still think that linguistic knowledge is rule-based, it's just that we use statistical learning to infer these rules.]

The most famous demonstration of statistical language learning comes from Saffran et al's 1996 article "Statistical learning by 8-month-old infants" [Google cache; link unstable] in Science. Saffran et al reasoned that

...[o]ver a corpus of speech there are measurable statistical regularities that distinguish recurring sound sequences that comprise words from the more accidental sound sequences that occur word boundaries...Within a language, the transitional probability from one sound to the next will generally be highest when the two sounds follow one another within a word, whereas transitional probabilities spanning a word boundary will be relatively low...For example, given the sequence pretty#baby, the transitional probability from pre to ty is greater than the transitional probability from ty to ba...

Transitional probabilities, therefore, can be employed in the task of word segmentation. They then demonstrated that babies exposed to a string of meaningless syllables without prosodic information, for example bidakupadotigolabubidaku... Here, bidaku, padoti and golabu are the "words". After listening to this for about two minutes, the children were presented with "words" and "non-words", where the "non-words" containing the same syllables but not in the right order. The babies could distinguish between them, listening longer to the non-words. They could also distinguish between "words" and "part-words", in which the syllables were presented in the correct order but bridging the "word boundaries", for example kupado.

As the babies were given no information other than the string of syllables (no pauses between words, no stress, etc.), the inescapable conclusion is that they derived their knowledge of word boundaries from the transitional probabilities alone. While this task was simpler than that which babies have to navigate in the real world - the stimuli were much more concentrated and did not have to be remembered over a long period of time - it is clear that some form of statistical learning is going on. In fact, infants are really, really good at statistical learning. It seems paradoxical that we're bad at reasoning statistically.

But what if our bad statistical habits are actually good for learning things like language? Take (8), for example: we induce patterns when really there are none. In the case of language, there are plenty of patterns to induce, so that's OK. And as for disregarding sample size information, perhaps that's how we get out of the trap of poverty of the stimulus. Perhaps we can and do jump to conclusions based on inadequate knowledge, but for whatever reason - the design of language itself, the built-in redundancy, or perhaps an efficient error-correcting mechanism - stumble on the right theory eventually.

So perhaps our computational models for language learning have to take into account the fact that people are using statistical information, but not in the same way that a professionally trained statistician would. We jump to conclusions, make leaps of faith - and somehow, magically, it all comes right in the end.

[Of course, it's a possibility that we grow worse and worse at statistical reasoning as we grow older, and this is why it's hard to learn language after the critical age, whenever that is. Another possibility is that it's only when we try to manipulate statistics consciously that we stumble - our subconscious is the one that's great at learning patterns, and that's why when we try to learn language actively, we don't really succeed as well as when we were little babies and picking it up instinctively.]

Further reading:
Statistical aspects of language [pdf slides]

Statistical fallacies

2005-03-25T03:46:00.001-08:00

I've just finished reading How to Think Straight about Psychology by Keith Stanovich. It's a wonderful book, and, to be honest, really about critical, scientific thinking and not so much about psychology. Most of its examples are from the field of medicine, in fact.

The best parts of the book, to my mind, are the ones that discuss how humans deal with probability and statistics. Everyone knows that statistics are dangerous, but the danger doesn't wholly come from deliberate misuse. Some of the danger comes from the way people intuitively interpret statistics - or, rather, misinterpret them. Not to mention the way people dismiss statistics when they should be taking them seriously.

To summarise the relevant chapters, as much for my sake as anything else, the ways people mistreat and misuse statistics are:

(1) "person-who" arguments (Stanovich's terminology)

People treat a statistical finding or law as invalid because they know of an exception to the law, despite "knowing" that the law was probabilistic in the first place and that there would be exceptions. A lot of this is due to "vividness" effects: probabilistic law is not concrete to most people, but a living, breathing counter-example is. What has a greater effect on their thinking? The counter-example, of course, leading them to believe the law inaccurate.

(2) discounting base rates

This topic is treated in many statistics classes (at least the ones I've been in), but people often seem to forget about it. So the classic example goes, supposing that there's a rare disease that occurs in 1 out of 1000 people (ok, so that's not so rare). Further suppose there's a test that diagnoses the disease that has a zero false-negative rate (if someone has the disease, the test always gets it right) BUT has a 5% false-positive rate (if a person doesn't have the disease, there's a 5% chance it'll say that they do).

So you pluck a random person off the street and administer the test on them, and it says yes, they have the disease. What's the chance that they do have the disease?

Well, even physicians get this wrong and say 95%. The true answer, if you do the math, is about 2%. Why is the intuitive answer so off-base? Because they forgot about the huge effect of the low base rate - the unlikelihood that that random person would have had the disease in the first place. This is also why implementing security systems that are "99% accurate" gives you absolutely no boost in security: the extremely low probability that a random person you choose will be a terrorist [I'm pretty sure Bruce Schneier discussed this at least once on his blog, but am unable to find the exact URL].

(3) failure to use sample size information

To put it simply, people forget (or don't realise) the effect of the law of large numbers - that "a larger sample size always more accurately estimates a population value".

(4) the gambler's fallacy

Say you're flipping a coin, and you've had 5 heads come up. Ask someone whether they think the sixth will come up heads, and they will say it's unlikely, despite the fact that the coin flips are independent. They operate on the basis of a "law of averages" - but in reality, there's no such thing as a law of averages!

(5) thinking coincidences are more "miraculous" than they are

Skeptics often point out that if something is a "one-in-a-million" occurrence then, depending on how you count a single event, at least 300 should happen a day in the U.S. (population approx. 300M). Another classic example is asking people in a class of 30 their birthdays and seeing if any coincide. Students often think the probability of two people in a class having a birthday as a low-probability occurrence, but it's really more probable than none of the students at all sharing a birthday!

(6) discounting incidences and only seeing coincidences

This is common to all of us. Coincidences are vivid - you think of old Uncle Al and suddenly he rings up on the phone. Hey, ESP! But what about all the times you thought of him and he didn't ring up? Oh, you forgot about those, did you?

(7) trying to get it right every time - even when it's better to be wrong sometimes

Stanovich describes an interesting experiment here (Fantino & Esfandiari, 2002 [Pubmed abstract]; Gal & Baron, 1996 [abstract]). Subjects are sat down and told to predict which of two lights, red and blue, will blink. Often, there'll be some money paid for correct predictions. The sequence of red and blue lights is random, except that red flashes 70% of the time and blue 30%. Analysis of the predictions make afterwards show that subjects pick up on the 70-30 spread pretty well, and guess red 70% of the time and blue 30% of the time. But, if they'd just guessed red 100% of the time, they'd have done better! Alternating red and blue with the 70-30 spread gives them, on average, only about 58% accuracy.

The thing is, guessing red all the time guarantees you'll be wrong 30% of the time - while alternating still opens up the possibility that you'll be right all the time, by some miracle. Hope springs eternal in the human heart.

Stanovich further explains how this carries over to clinical vs actuarial prediction. Actuarial prediction is based on historical statistical data. Clinical prediction is based on familiarity with individual circumstances. It seems to people that clinical prediction should be better - (1) you have more information to go on (actuarial + individual), and (2) doesn't actually knowing a person and his circumstances tell you more than a bunch of numbers?

Well, it doesn't: in many, many replicated studies, it's been shown that adding clinical prediction to actuarial always *decreases* the accuracy of the prediction. As unlikely as it seems, restricting yourself to judging based on past statistical trends is always better in the long run. You have to accept the error inherent in relying only on general, statistical, historical data in order to decrease error overall.

(8) trying to see patterns where there are none - or the "conspiracy theory" effect

Stanovich uses the stock market as an example. Much of the variability in stock market prices is due simply to random fluctuations. But people try to read patterns and explain every single fluctuation. What about those people who are always correct? Well, take 100 monkeys and ask them to throw darts at a board. Use the positions of the darts to determine how to place bets. Do this for a year, and 50% will have beat the Standard and Poor's 500 Index. Want to hire?

This is made even worse when people think they should be seeing a pattern, seeing structure. Take the Rorschach test, for example: clinicians using it see relationships in how people respond because they believe they are there. If they believe the theory behind the test, they think there'll be a relationship between what people see in the random inkblots and the makeup of their psychology. But there is no evidence for this whatsoever.

(9) the illusion of control

When people think they have control over a situation, they believe personal skill and actions can affect situations which are actually way beyond their control. I believe the classic example here (not cited in Stanovich's book, he has more interesting ones, actually) is the sports fan who believes that by performing certain actions, he can affect the outcome of a match.

All that's from this book, and I hope I haven't misreported or misrepresented anything. It's [the book's] very pithy, straight to the point, and is a joy to read. The explanations he gives are a good deal better than the ones I've given above, so go check it out from the library or buy it - whatever you do, I encourage you to read it. Stanovich also has a bunch of papers online that look interesting.

In my next post, I'll discuss some of my thoughts on people's statistical abilities and their relation to learning, especially learning language.

UPSID online

2005-03-18T07:48:00.000-08:00

I posted before about Nexidia's curious idea of what a phoneme is. Especially ludicrous was their claim that

All utterances made in the entire world have been catalogued within a 400 phoneme range. The majority of languages use a 40 phoneme range, and the most widely spoken languages fall within an 80 phoneme range.

which makes absolutely zero sense. Anyway, I was wondering what indeed was the phoneme count for the average language. One source is UPSID, and I've just found out that it's available online here on Langmaker, a site for conlang creators. There is a phoneme inventory index of UPSID languages with the phoneme count for individual languages. Lowest are Mura and Rotokas with 9 phonemes, and highest is Ga with 241. The mean is 30.26 phonemes, if my calculations are correct, with the mode being 26 phonemes, represented by 23 out of the 317 languages included.

Related:
a list of resources for conlang creators, also by Langmaker. Lots of materials about natural languages, though.
The Language Creation Kit, which has lots of good stuff about how languages, natural and constructed, work.

"Linguistics" in book covers

2005-03-17T06:59:00.000-08:00

Check this out: the word linguistics spelt out in book covers that contain the word "linguistics". Brought to you by amaztype, using Amazon Web Services. You put in a keyword (either in the title or author) and tell it to generate, and book covers will start appearing, gradually forming the shape of the keyword you input. (Unfortunately, they don't seem to stop generating, so don't wait for it to finish - it'll just paste the same book covers in over and over again. Also, it makes an annoying sound when you click on the link.)

You can play a geeky (dorky? nerdy?) game with it, trying to identify the publishers of the books (or, if you're feeling eagle-eyed enough, the books themselves). I saw a few Blackwell Handbooks, MIT Press and CUP ones, some from the CILT series, and spotted a few books like Linguistics at Work and the Oxford Dictionary of Linguistics.

Zeugma

2005-03-14T04:55:00.000-08:00

I learnt a new word a couple days ago from Language Log: zeugma, which is "[a] construction in which a single word, especially a verb or an adjective, is applied to two or more nouns when its sense is appropriate to only one of them or to both in different ways, as in He took my advice and my wallet."

That immediately recalled the Flanders and Swann song Have some madeira, m'dear. The lyrics are here, and these are the relevant lines:

...
And he said as he hastened to put out the cat,
The wine, his cigar and the lamps:
...
When he asked, "What in heaven?" she made no reply,
Up her mind, and a dash for the door.
...

I highly recommend all the Flanders and Swann songs; there's a set of CDs, the first of which is At the drop of a hat, the second At the drop of another hat and the famous Bestiary.

In particular, there's the Gnu Song, which is the song that got a lot of people pronouncing pre-nasal velars (that doesn't seem quite the right term, somehow...), at least in the word gnu. Here's the chorus:

I'm a g-nu, I'm a g-nu
The g-nicest work of g-nature in the zoo
I'm a g-nu, how d'you do
You really ought to k-now w-ho's w-ho.
I'm a g-nu, spelt G-N-U,
I'm g-not a camel or a kangaroo.
So let me introduce,
I'm g-neither man nor moose,
So g-nu g-nu g-nu, I'm a g-nu!

Quite a case of hypercorrection there. It's the only song I can think of off-hand that mocks the English orthographic practice of silent letters, though possibly readers will think of others. Read the rest of Have some madeira, too: it's wicked.

Linguistics olympiad problems

2005-03-09T06:08:00.000-08:00

I heard many years ago about the linguistics olympiad, which seems to be a sort of tradition in Russia and the former Soviet bloc but hasn't really seemed to catch on elsewhere (though the Netherlands seems to be something of a powerhouse in the area).

The typical form of the problem consists of raw data and translations, and you have to figure out what morpheme corresponds to what meaning, and perhaps translate a few sentences. Although there are quirkier problems (like the one where you figure out how pieces get promoted in Japanese chess - that's in the first set of problems listed below). Problems are supposed not to require any previous knowledge of the language - and they don't. They're basically exercises in pattern-finding, though I did employ some heuristics learnt in linguistics class to speed up the process (e.g. singular nouns tend to be less marked than plurals). Most of all, they're fun! A few of them are hard, but many will take no longer than 5-10 mins to solve. And they really expand your mind as to the variety of linguistic structures available to the world's languages.

Anyway, there is now an international linguistics olympiad and there were attempts to set up a U.S. linguistics olympiad (though it doesn't seem to be running now), which means there are problems available at English to solve! Thomas Payne (of "Describing morphosyntax" fame) maintained the U.S. olympiad website; it included a description and history people may be interested in. Most of the problems seem to be on sites that are down, but thanks to the genius of Brewster Kahle and the Internet Archive, we can rescue them from oblivion. I've listed a few of them here:

Problems from the first international olympiad in linguistics (2003), incl. some sample problems
Puzzles from the 1998-2001 U.S. olympiad
Problems offered at the 27th and 28th (Russian) olympiad, sorted by "stages"

Russian-speaking readers can apparently find problems here and here, but I can't tell because I don't read Russian.

Wouldn't it be fun if there were introductory linguistics textbooks chock-full of problems integrated into the text? For example, while talking about morphology you could have a problem with Arabic words and their meanings and the task would be to figure out the principles of Arabic morphology - i.e. its root-and-pattern structure and non-concatenative nature. It would sure make more of an impression than passively reading about Semitic morphology. It would be a little like Lyle Campbell's Historical Linguistics, but synchronic.

Optical delusions

2005-02-26T06:32:00.000-08:00

This is a really nice site on optical illusions that includes various animations demonstrating the various effects and, for some of the illusions, explains what's going on in our visual perception that causes those illusions. [Via BrainWaves].

My favourite one is the hollow-face illusion, but I won't give it away by describing it. A related activity that demonstrates this effect is this dragon's head optical illusion [via Mindhacks] which I've made myself. For some people it takes a while to see (some people just peer and it and say, "so what's supposed to happen?"), but eventually most people seem to get it.

Mindhacks, by the way, is the blog for the book Mind Hacks, which I've just bought and can't wait to get into. It looks pretty good.

More about ISBNs than you ever cared to know

2005-02-21T05:50:00.000-08:00

It's rather sad that I should find this fascinating, but did you know you could identify where a book was published simply from its ISBN? The first few digits will tell you. 0 and 1 are for English-speaking countries (Australia, Canada, NZ, S. Africa, UK, Gibraltar, USA, Ireland - and, strangely, Namibia, Swaziland and Zimbabwe), 2 for French-speaking countries, etc., etc., then you get to 8 and the double digits - 80 for the Czech Republic and Slovakia, up to India at 93, then the 3-digit ones beginning with Argentina at 950 (don't know where 94 went) , 4-digits at the Dominican Republic with 9945, and then Bahrain at 99901 down to Eritrea at 99948.

Of course, this is in proportion to the countries' abilities (or proclivities) to churn out books, since Eritrea can only publish 10,000 books under this scheme - 999480000 through to 9994899996. The last digit is a check-digit, so there are only four decimal places for them to play around with. You can check out the full list of country identifiers here.

The next few digits are similarly assigned to unique publishers. Again, bigger publishers get smaller codes, so they have more room to play around with the number of ISBNs they can assign.

You know, this looks a lot like a prefix-free Huffman encoding(if you're into information theory) where things that occur more frequently get a smaller identifier. The funny thing is, in information theory, that implies that these major publishers (and countries) put out stuff containing less information! This page breaks down the distribution of publishers for English-speaking countries (look down at the bottom of the gory details).

Further reading:

This is a really good textbook about information theory available on the web: Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms by David MacKay. I especially recommend the section about estimating the entropy of English given the fact that we can construct American-style crosswords. (British-style crosswords are harder to solve though!)

Another useful website: ISBN check
Wikipedia's entry on ISBNs

Oh, and, ISBNs are becoming 13 digits long - current ISBNs will have 978 prefixed to them and a recalculated check digit (which is what appears on most barcodes anyway - the 978 indicates that it's a "Bookland" EAN). This is, of course, because the 10-digit ISBNs restrict the number of books published. Looks like those Library Lookup regexes are going to need a tweak before too long.

Job advice from George Orwell

2005-02-21T05:32:00.000-08:00

Bookshop Memories, by George Orwell. [Via Language Hat]:

But the real reason why I should not like to be in the book trade for life is that while I was in it I lost my love of books. A bookseller has to tell lies about books, and that gives him a distaste for them; still worse is the fact that he is constantly dusting them and hauling them to and fro. There was a time when I really did love books — loved the sight and smell and feel of them, I mean, at least if they were fifty or more years old. Nothing pleased me quite so much as to buy a job lot of them for a shilling at a country auction ... But as soon as I went to work in the bookshop I stopped buying books. Seen in the mass, five or ten thousand at a time, books were boring and even slightly sickening.

Reason #2 not to open a bookshop, which used to be one of my dreams. The first reason, of course, is that I wouldn't make any money, since I wouldn't want to sell any of my books, because I wanted them all for myself! I wonder if working in a library would be any better...I think I would really like to become a university librarian.

Buckwalter Arabic transliteration - now a Windows keyboard

2005-02-18T07:08:00.000-08:00

Back in the day when I was studying Arabic, I used to use the Buckwalter transliteration all the time. Mostly because I was using the XRCE Arabic Morphological Analyzer as an Arabic-English dictionary - and believe me, it's better than any dictionary! Especially since I never bothered to memorise the order of the Arabic alphabet (alef, beh, um...). That proved a problem, though, when I started wanting to type in Arabic, since the Arabic input method editors basically arrange the Arabic letters alphabetically along the keyboard. So what's on the t key doesn't sound like t. This was not good. I basically gave up typing anything in Arabic.

Finally I decided that I had to do something about it, so I looked to see how I could modify keyboard mappings so that the mapping was the same as Buckwalter's. This was much more logical to my mind, since sounds that are similar in English and Arabic share the same key. So 'qaf' is a 'q'. Of course, this doesn't work for every letter - Arabic and English have very different phonological inventories - but it works for the majority of the cases, and anyway I had more or less committed the mapping to memory from using the morphological analyzer so much.

I found a few utilities that seemed to do something similar, but the ones I looked at didn't seem suitable for me: not for XP, or you can only map a few key combinations, that sort of thing. I wanted to be able to create a whole new keyboard within, say, Arabic (Egypt). Then I found that Microsoft had a keyboard layout creator - for free (!!!??? - did you say Microsoft?). Catch is, you have to download the Microsoft .NET framework, which is 20-some MB. (BTW, I should mention that Unix/Linux users can do this really easily - they have utilities built in to help with this.

The keyboard layout creator is pretty simple. It gives you a blank keyboard. You click on a key then define the Unicode character to associate with it. So you just do this for key after key, and then you build it, and it makes a nice little dll and installation file for you. Then you install it, add it to your language options, and voila!

The only thing was, I'd forgotten all about Arabic question marks being the "wrong" way round. So there I was, gaily typing away, and then ? - oops, that looks very wrong, when you're typing right to left! So I just went back to the keyboard layout creator and changed that.

So, if it so happens that you're in the same boat as me - too used to Buckwalter to use Microsoft's silly mapping, drop me an e-mail or write a comment to the effect that you would like a copy, and I'll send it to you. Or, you can give yourself a bit of fun and go through the whole rigmarole yourself! (But seriously, if you'd like this - only for Windows - let me know.)

The - national - library - is - driving - me - nuts!

2005-02-16T06:51:00.000-08:00

For a long time I wondered why books would be listed in the NLB (Singapore) library catalogue as "not yet available". That in itself wasn't so bad...after all they could be waiting for them to be delivered, or catalogued, or whatever. But then when I found that books from *1984* were listed as "not yet available", I began to wonder. That's kind of long to wait for a delivery, isn't it? And then books that I searched for three months ago were still listed as "not yet available"...hmmm.

Today the mystery was solved by a kindly librarian - apparently these books have *never been ordered*!!! Why, then, were they in the system? Because any book that is "acquire-able" is listed in the system. I was so shellshocked I just stood there staring at the librarian. I couldn't really think of anything to say, the illogic was just so dumbfounding.

So (1) why is it that there are books that aren't even listed in the library catalogue? Are they not even order-able? (My, what a lot of productive morphology I'm using today.) And (2) does it make any sense to list these books in the library catalogue? Surely the catalogue should include just books you can actually get your hands on. It's really, really annoying to think "aha! They have the book!" and then have your hopes dashed. And what's with the "not yet available" thing, anyway? I'm sure that's violating some implicature somewhere...doesn't *yet* indicate that it's almost certainly going to happen? But it's not if you haven't ordered the book!!!

In other rantings regarding the library, I was tinkering around with the library's Carlweb OPAC the other day and to my delight I found an alternative URL syntax (using +'s) that seemed like it might be more flexible than the current one I know of (using underscores) since the former might be able to handle other Boolean operators. But alas, after spending a week away that alternative syntax no longer worked. No clue what happened. Maybe some administrator got spooked by me trying to find all the ways of searching the catalogue without actually going through the catalogue's search page.

Psychology experiment interrupted by the alarm

2005-02-15T05:40:00.000-08:00

Garn. The most annoying thing happened this morning. I was having this really interesting dream: I was playing hangman (in a library...go figure) and I was guessing letters and they were coming up. But, I didn't know the answer to the puzzle!

So I thought (well, I don't know if this entire thought formed while I was having my dream but it came to me all at once when I woke up) that this would be interesting: if the puzzle turned out to be a real English phrase (it comprised four words) then that had to mean my brain knew the answer - but then whoever was guessing didn't know the answer! So there's some kind of divide between what you're dreaming of and what the character you're playing is thinking. To put it another way, there's a sort of conscious unconscious - the one playing the puzzle, who didn't know the answer - and the unconscious unconscious, which set the puzzle.

Unfortunately, I had just guessed the second letter (e, which turned up in _ _ _ E E _, the third word of the four) and I was going through words it could be (career, exceed...) when the alarm rang and the dream instantly dissipated. Dash and bother. Oh well, it wouldn't have been a real experiment anyway - no way to repeat it. I suppose this is what's called the introspective method.

Where in the world have I been?

2005-02-14T05:40:00.000-08:00

Thought this was kind of neat: a map showing what countries and cities I've visited. It's a zoomable Flash file, so zoom on in and out as you like. Green countries are ones I've visited. Blue cities/towns are ones that I've called "home" for one reason or another. Orangey-red means cities I've visited more than once or for a week or more. Yellow indicates I've only spent days there and don't really know them all that well.

I made this map using this software by Social Design Notes (thanks guys!) Was pointed there by WorldChanging. Basically, I took one of their already-created XML datafiles and modified it by inputting latitude and longitude coordinates for the cities I'd visited. A bit time-consuming, but pretty easy. There are websites where you input what countries or states you've been to and thus generate a map, but this software allows you a bit more flexibility. You can put Timbuktu in the middle of the Atlantic if you want to. And you even draw lines indicating a round-the-world trip! Neat!

Odd folk medicine remedy

2005-02-14T05:14:00.000-08:00

Was pointed to UCLA's folk medicine database [via ResearchBuzz]. Look at this cure for migraine headaches:

Woman was told she should “have her head cut off and thrown to the hogs.” She became very angry and had no more headaches.

That's just great. Yeah, I wish someone would tell me that and my migraines'd just stop...

Math jokes

2005-02-08T07:42:00.000-08:00

An article in Nature all about math jokes. This one's my favourite:

A mathematician awoken from his hotel bed by a fire sees a fire hose in the hall, exclaims, "Ah, a solution exists!" and goes back to bed.

They also feature the only math joke the author (or I) have ever seen that is based on integration. Go check it out, it's a hoot.

That's not a phoneme!!!

2005-02-03T05:50:00.000-08:00

I recently read a review (from 2002) by Jon Udell about Fast-Talk, which is now Nexidia. Their product uses what they call phonetic searching in order to mine audio - do keyword search and that sort of thing. This paragraph is from their website, under "The Science of Phonetics":

Phonetics is the systematic study of human speech-sounds. It provides means of describing and classifying virtually all the sounds that can be produced by human vocal tracts. This study is based on “phonemes”, which are the smallest unit of human speech.
All utterances made in the entire world have been catalogued within a 400 phoneme range. The majority of languages use a 40 phoneme range, and the most widely spoken languages fall within an 80 phoneme range.

Um...is that really a phoneme? First of all, phonemes are the minimally *distinct* units of human speech, not just the minimal units. That would be a "phone" they were thinking about. Plus, a phoneme is completely, utterly, language-dependent. You can't talk about a phoneme without already having a certain language already in mind. This is because different languages draw the boundaries between their phonemes in different ways. English speakers generally can't tell the difference between Hindi's dental and retroflex t's and d's, for example.

I don't know if there really are 400 phones in all the world's languages. I wish there was a single copy of Ian Maddieson's Patterns of Sounds available in Singapore (there aren't any at the main libraries) so I could check.

At first I thought that when they said "the majority of languages use a 40 phoneme range" that each individual language had ~40 phonemes. This is true for English but the usual range is 20-37 (according to this and UPSID) and the mode is at 25. Then I realised that they meant that there are 40 or so sounds that cover a respectable percentage of the world's languages. (Again, does Maddieson - or anyone else - say anything about this?) I guess that's plausible enough, after all vowels (for example) tend to have quite similar distributions around the vowel space don't they?

Elsewhere on Nexidia's site they say that for each language one has to define a "phonetic grammar" - and mention that

[a] phonetic grammar likewise depends upon the natural language in use (particularly the set of phonemes used to represent basic sounds and meanings of the input speech)...

So I *think* they've hit on the right thing here...in any case, their system seems to work quite well whether or not they actually are using phonemes or phone groups or whatever - they're more or less market leaders and all I've seen are good reviews. I just wish they'd get their terminology right.

Well, that's what you get when you hire a bunch of electrical engineers and no linguists, I guess.

On irregular verb conjugations

2005-02-03T05:07:00.000-08:00

Thinking about the forsook/forsoke problem, two questions came to mind:

(1) suppose someone doesn't "know" the past tense of a verb that happens to be irregular. What makes them decide which verb's conjugate to make the analogy to - if they don't choose to go the regular-plural route? OK, let me make that more concrete. I have no idea whether I already *knew* that "forsook" was the past tense of "forsake" back in primary school, when I argued with my teacher about it. After all, I couldn't have been more than twelve. But it's not a very common word, so suppose I didn't. Of all the possible verb conjugations to choose, why that one? After all, there's at least four conjugations I could have followed:

bake - baked - baked (regular)
make - made - made
take - took - taken (the one "forsake" follows)
wake - woke - woken (the one Logos decided to follow)

Is it something to do with the frequencies of the conjugations? Or perhaps the verbs' semantic closeness to "forsake"? Though I don't see why "take" should be any closer than "wake" or "make". This reminds me of the example we looked at in historical linguistics class, of how the plural of "dwarf" morphed from "dwarfs" to "dwarves" on analogy with elf-elves, since they were so similar semantically. Anyway, on to question...

(2) Why is it that the past tense and past participle in English are so irregular, while the 3rdSgPres -s (as in "he teases", "she laughs") and the continuous -ing ("they were doing", "I was playing") are so regular? The only irregularities I can think of with -s are "he does" (vowel change), "he is" (rather than "bes") and "he has" (rather than "haves"), and I can't think of any irregularities with "-ing". But why? Are these conjugations something newer, that haven't had the time to get corrupted by morphological madness? Or have they, for some reason, never changed - i.e. there has never been another way to form the continuous, whereas for the past tense there've been any number of ways? But then you have to explain why those are so stable while past tenses are not. Interesting question, I can't think of a simple way to answer it.

Singular "they"

2005-02-01T06:19:00.000-08:00

Language Log has another post up regarding singular "they", in the context of an SAT grammar test and links back to a bunch of previous posts about the phenomenon. In discussing the sentences

This person is not ignorant.
They are a prophet...

Geoffrey Pullum comments:

The sequence they are exhibits, of course, the syntactically correct plural verb agreement. The following phrase a prophet is a singular predicative NP complement.

So here's my question. If you're using they in a singular manner, what's the reflexive form? Themself, or themselves??? The reason I'm asking is because my "significant other" (there's them air quotes John McWhorter was talking about in his LL post!) actually said "themself" the other day. I can't remember the actual sentence, but it was something like "they bought themself an X" where the antecedent for "they" was clearly singular.

I don't know which of the two would be "right", I can see arguments for saying either. Searching for "themself" on Google yields references to an Emily Dickinson poem, some clearly incorrect instances where "themselves" was what the writer wanted, as well as genuine singular-themself instances such as

Everyone post a photo of themself?
inspire one person to better themself on 43 Things

as well as a discussion of this very phenomenon here.

Have you not forsoken...?

2005-01-27T07:34:00.000-08:00

Thought this Universal Conjugator was kinda neat (thanks to Language Hat for the pointer).

What's neat is that you don't have to specify the language for it to start conjugating, and it'll ask you to disambiguate verbs spelled identically in supported languages. Plus, if it doesn't recognise the verb at all you can specify the language and ask it to "conjugate as regular". Funny thing, though, was when I put in the verb "forsake" (not sure if the link will work; if it doesn't, click here and type in "forsake" yourself). wondering what it'd say the past tense was. Hmm..."I forsoke, you forsoke..."? "I have forsoken, you have forsoken"??? Methinks there's a bit of over-generalisation going on here from the verb "wake".

I still remember very clearly arguing with an English teacher in primary school about the past tense of that verb. I said it was "forsook", can't remember what she thought it was but she marked it as wrong. Grrr. Anyway the web agrees with me: look at the hit counts below. Mindful of the recent Language Log posts about the inaccuracy of Google's counts, I got the Yahoo! ones as well:

Google Google restricted to English Yahoo! Yahoo! English
forsaked 729 3,460 1,300 1,250
forsook 201,000 169,000 168,000 167,000
forsought 44 41 18 16
forsoke 521 369 365 278

It should be noted though that it looks like "forsoke" was an old English spelling. So go back a few hundred years, before lexicographers started standardising orthography...and Universal Conjugator would've been right. Oh, and another thing - their Arabic conjugator needs a lot of work.

My ideal book-cataloguing/book-sharing program

2005-01-22T21:20:00.000-08:00

Was reading about Delicious Library at Wired. Delicious Library is a book/DVD/media-cataloguing program for Macs. That was version 1. Version 2 is going to introducing book sharing so users can search other people's catalogues via geographic location and borrow and lend media to one another.

Sounds great, and it made me think what else I'd want in a book-cataloguing/sharing program. Here's what I came up with:

- adding media: Delicious Library relies mostly on scanning ISBNs or typing in details yourself. I imagine they would also let you type in ISBNs and look up the details. They do have a problem with international UPCs, according to their FAQ. Anyway, I'd also like to be able to add stuff from Amazon or any other store, perhaps by using a bookmarklet. Say I've surfed to a page in Amazon about a book I already have. Add to MyLibrary and ta-da, it's in. And, of course, they could then pull all the book info from Amazon or wherever.

- include LOC or Dewey classification as part of the information they pull (LOC vastly preferred). I'm not sure where you could pull this from...scrape it off the LOC's catalogue? And then let you view your books in LOC order. Then you could catalogue your whole library according to that order. Wow! OK, so I'm a library geek.

- collection generation. Related to the previous point. You could take either user-defined tags for the books, or simply Amazon or the LOC's keywords for each book and identify particular interests the person has. For example, I've a lot of books relating to World War II...I'd like the software to be able to automatically identify things like this, so I can immediately identify other people's general interests without browsing through their whole collection and without them having to define their own interests.

- incorporation of online texts such as Project Gutenberg (made easier by their having made their catalogue available in MARC format) but also via other indexes like the Online Books Page at UPenn. I'm not sure how one could do this...you'd have to use some combination title/author lookup since ISBNs wouldn't be available for this. I'm sure OCLC would be able to do this since they were able to do X-ISBN.

- incorporate the ability to search your library catalogue at the same time. And if the book isn't available there OR among fellow-users within a certain geographic distance or within the same city, give you the cheapest online price according to services like CampusI.

- generate citations for books in IEEE/APA/MLA or other common citation formats.

- ability to manage papers as well. Similar to CiteULike but with the ability to add papers found from sources other than those deemed compatible. Could be through a facility that scans through the paper to identify bibliographic details - it could then prompt you to check that they have 'em correct. Or they could just peel off the title and search in Google Scholar and get bibliographic details from Google Scholar - but those might be incomplete. Or you could just key in the data yourself, I guess, but this'd be a pain. And, of course, generate citations for these papers as well! But then you'd really have to check that you've got it right.

- This is more something for Amazon, but...when you click 'I have this book in my collection' under your recommendations it adds the book to a list they maintain. I'd like to be able to search full-text (if available) among books that I have. Plus books that I've read, I guess, but they don't give you a button for 'I have read this book and don't need you to recommend this'. Actually, come to think of it, Amazon could do most of this stuff except they probably wouldn't do the book-sharing part of it. Why do that when they could get you to buy the book from them?

So that's my list. Whoa, I'm demanding, aren't I? Well, it's more wishful thinking. But if I could have a program do all this stuff I'd be really, really happy.

Whoever wrote this phrasebook must have watched Yes Minister

2005-01-06T08:04:00.000-08:00

I can't be the only person who thought immediately of Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister while reading this Language Log post about a phrasebook decoding Britspeak. If I have the time I'll look up some appropriate passages and post them here.

X & not X

2004-12-15T06:52:00.000-08:00

Blogging has slowed down and will probably continue to be slow because I've just started work. Well, that is to say, I have started going to the office, which is a very different thing from "working". When I get into a groove I'll try to start posting more regularly.

On our way back from my office yesterday, I spotted a sign saying "Vegetarian & Non-Vegetarian Restaurant". You can guess my reaction: "Why don't they just say 'Restaurant'???" My dad had a similar reaction when he saw the sign a couple of days earlier, I hear. Makes logical sense, don't it? After all, "X & not X" potentially includes everything in the world and doesn't give you any information, right?

My mum begged to differ, though: she pointed out that vegetarians might be attracted to that restaurant, because they would be sure to find something that suited them. Similarly, carnivores would be sure that they could find something to eat, too. So to both these groups, the sign gave significant amount of information, ridiculous as it first appeared to my dad and me.

Second thing: I've just noticed that Singaporeans have a way of substituting "in" for "at", myself included. I would say "I'm in C. University" and find that perfectly natural, until someone who shall remain nameless reacted badly to the in and said, "You're at C. University, not in it!" Then yesterday, my sister said, "When I was in the San Diego Zoo", which drew a snort from me (not to mention a significant amount of teasing afterwards) because she seemed to be referring to herself as one of the long-term residents.

So there seems to be a tendency among Singaporeans to refer to being in a wide, open-space area (though with clearly delineated boundaries) although most other people would say at. It reminds me of a mistake I made when learning Hungarian: you're supposed to say, more or less, "on the university" rather than "in the university". It's considered a surface rather than an enclosed space when choosing the appropriate locational suffix. I think for Americans it might be a toss-up which one they'd choose. For me, "in" was the most natural choice, and I was pretty startled when it turned out not to be the right one.

Um...

2004-12-08T05:20:00.000-08:00

Are these really the sorts of students a college would want anyway?:

Vmag, a desktop video magazine that shows DVD-quality video clips alongside Web-like linking functionality, allows potential students to experience what the college has to offer before planning a visit to the school -- a tool that some of St. Mary's students have said was a key influencer in their choice of college to attend.
...
"People don't read anymore, and kids in particular don't read," she said. "This gives them content in a 5- to 7-minute package that matches their attention span."

Collectors vs. librarians

2004-12-01T20:09:00.000-08:00

I've just finished a book about book collecting, A Pound of Paper by John Baxter. It's a good read, especially for bibliophiles, but I found that I simply couldn't identify with the ethos of the book collector. Now, people who know me will think it strange, given that I've filled up every single shelf in the house with books (double-shelved, moreover, in many cases - something that I hate but can't help) and that every place I go, first things I look for are the bookshops. Plus, my university mounted book collection competitions in the last two years I was there and I was a finalist in the first and took first place in the second. Everything adds up to me being a collector, right?

But the difference between a collector's view of books and my view of books is how we view the books themselves. Collectors think of books as objects, while I think of books as - well, things to be read. When I read things like:

"...every time one opened a first edition, its value dropped $5."

"Collectors abominate lending libraries. They are graveyards of good books. Everything a librarian does to prepare a book for lending disqualifies it as a collectable."

It just doesn't make sense to me. What's important to me are the words within the books. I couldn't care less if the corners were frayed and the endpaper missing (it doesn't have words on it after all) so long as the pages that matter, the ones with the text, are all there. I think the saddest fate for a book is to end up like those glorified first editions, never opened, never read, never used for their intended purpose, just put up on a pedestal and worshipped. Come to think of it, it's a bit like the toys from Toy Story 2.

P.S. I'd forgotten where the quotes were in the book; I only found them by searching within the book at Amazon. Great resource - wish it could do a little more semantic mapping, for when one can only remember the gist and not the words.

Interesting spelling...

2004-11-24T08:12:00.000-08:00

Saw an article today that included the word 'segueways'. Gave me rather a start, it did. But it does make good sense: why on earth should 'segue' be a two-syllable word, when words like 'tongue' and 'vogue' aren't? (Other than the insignificant fact that it comes from Italian, and fairly recently too.) And then there's confusion with that 'Segway' transporter contraption. But everyone knows there's a 'ue' in there making trouble...so just put 'em all together and spell it 'segueway'. After all, 2,260 other people have already.

Autodidacts among "the masses"

2004-11-22T09:24:00.000-08:00

I've just read an amazing article, "Classics in the Slums" by Jonathan Rose (link via Teleread). If you're a book-lover, you ought to read it and admire what amazing intellectual curiosity drove 18th-, 19th- and early 20th-century British working class autodidacts to discover and devour classic, intellectual, literary books:

Will Crooks (b. 1852), a cooper living in extreme poverty in East London, once spent tuppence on a secondhand Iliad, and was dazzled: "What a revelation it was to me! Pictures of romance and beauty I had never dreamed of suddenly opened up before my eyes. I was transported from the East End to an enchanted land. It was a rare luxury for a working lad like me just home from work to find myself suddenly among the heroes and nymphs of ancient Greece."
...
While studying Greek philosophy at night, Joseph Keating performed one of the toughest and worst-paid jobs in the mine: shoveling out tons of refuse. One day, he was stunned to hear a co-worker sigh, "Heaven from all creatures hides the book of fate." "You are quoting Pope," Keating exclaimed. "Ayh," replied his companion, "me and Pope do agree very well."

And just look at these statistics:

Even more impressive is a 1940 survey of reading among pupils at nonacademic high schools, where education terminated at age 14. This sample represented something less than the working-class norm: the best students had already been skimmed off and sent to academic secondary schools on scholarship. Those who remained behind were asked which books they had read over the past month, excluding required texts. Even in this below-average group, 62 percent of boys and 84 percent of girls had read some poetry: their favorites included Kipling, Longfellow, Masefield, Blake, Browning, Tennyson, and Wordsworth. Sixty-seven percent of girls and 31 percent of boys had read plays, often something by Shakespeare. All told, these students averaged six or seven books per month. Compare that with the recent NEA study Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America, which found that in 2002, 43.4 percent of American adults had not read any books at all, other than those required for work or school. Only 12.1 percent had read any poetry, and only 3.6 percent any plays.

Welsh mining towns had libraries, the books being paid for by subscriptions out of the miners' meagre wages; members of the working class could go to night classes held at the university level that gave no recognition, only holding out the enticement of knowledge for knowledge's sake. The point of the article is that the classics aren't just for academics; they are for everyone; that literary historians should not only be concentrating on the reactions of academic readers, but also the "ordinary" reader - though these people weren't ordinary at all.

Ooh, Google's done it again

2004-11-18T01:26:00.000-08:00

I was just wishing the other day for a search engine that would turn up academic papers and theses and look what Google just unveiled: Google Scholar [via Paidcontent.org]. NYT article here [reg req'd].

Google Scholar enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research. Use Google Scholar to find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web.

I just tried it out. It's pretty good. The only syntax that they talk about in the About section is the author: syntax, it would be nice if there were a few others like year of publication or journal. That would be particularly useful for people without access to an academic library (like me) - you would still be able to see what new articles are coming out and then try to scout around for them online. But if you know what you're looking for, you're pretty much guaranteed to find what you're looking for anyway (if it's online). This is how they rank results:

This relevance ranking takes into account the full text of each article as well as the article's author, the publication in which the article appeared and how often it has been cited in scholarly literature.

Tried it with a few papers from Language and other papers that popped into my mind. Out of five of the articles in the latest volume from Language, I found three that had preprints online. The other two gave no useful results.

Example: Searching for "author:walker typology consonant agreement" gave me this as the first link:

[PDF] A typology of consonant agreement as correspondence
S Rose, R Walker - View as HTML - Cited by 10
Page 1. 1. A Typology of Consonant Agreement as Correspondence. Sharon Rose. ... 6. 2.
A typology of long-distance consonant agreement. 2.1 Cross-linguistic overview ...
Ms, University of California, San Diego and University of …, 2001 - ling.ucsd.edu - www-rcf.usc.edu - phil-fak.uni-duesseldorf.de - ling.ucsd.edu

You can see that several links will be given and clustered under the same paper - wonderful!

I tried a few other papers that I knew were online and Google returned all of them as first link. Great resource. I know I'll be using this a lot.

Update: this article from Resourceshelf is well worth a read:

...
+ In a nutshell, Google has built an algorithm that makes a calculated guess at to *what it thinks* is a scholarly content mined from the OPEN WEB, and then makes it accessible via the Google Scholar interface.
+ Precisely what makes something "scholarly" enough to be included in Google Scholar, Google will not say. And this is not an insignificant omission.
...

Malcolm Gladwell's "Blink"

2004-11-16T09:25:00.000-08:00

I like Malcolm Gladwell's stuff - it's always thought-provoking. He's most famous of course for The Tipping Point but he also has a whole lot of essays on his website that are worth reading. He has a recent article in the New Yorker about plagiarism and copyright that is well worth reading. Also on his website are excerpts from his upcoming book Blink which certainly seems like it'll be a worthwhile buy.

From "The Second Mind":

[Gladwell describes a psychological experiment]...right around the time their palms started sweating, their behavior began to change as well. They started favoring the good decks, and taking fewer and fewer cards from A and B. In other words, the gamblers figured the game out before they figured the game out: they began making the necessary adjustments long before they were consciously aware of what adjustments they were supposed to be making.

...

...our brain uses two very different strategies to make sense of the situation. The first is the one we're most familiar with. It's the conscious strategy. We think about what we've learned, and eventually come up with an answer. This strategy is logical and definitive. But it takes us eighty cards to get there. It's slow. It needs a lot of information. There's a second strategy, though. It operates a lot more quickly. It starts to kick in after ten cards, and it's really smart because it picks up the problem with the red decks almost immediately. It has the drawback, however, that it operates--at least at first--entirely below the surface of consciousness. It sends its messages through weirdly indirect channels, like the sweat glands on the palms of our hands. It's a system in which our brain reaches conclusions without immediately telling us that it's reaching conclusions.

This sounds interesting because of its potential relationship to language acquisition. After all, a lot of language acquisition is done subconsciously - the vast majority of us never formalize our knowledge of, say, the phonotactics of our mother tongue or the syntactic rules of agreement. When asked to explain why I thought a certain construction was ungrammatical when I was little, I would just shrug and say "It sounds wrong" (this was in an English class where not everyone was a native speaker of English - that's how it is in Singapore). The knowledge is there but it's subconscious. And moreover our brains acquire this language with what seems like insufficient evidence - the classic "poverty of the stimulus". But what if we actually need very little information to construct theories of grammar on a subconscious level? Even if our "logical" brains would be unable to derive the rules of syntax based on what evidence was presented to us in the first five years of life, perhaps this subconscious level of learning just takes what it gets and manages to produce something approaching the correct answer anyway.

All this is just speculation, of course, and there are probably serious problems with the comparison. Not least that, in all probability, this subconscious level of reasoning is something that belongs to most species, while the conscious level is what sets humans apart. (On the other hand, it could be that we're just better at the subconscious reasoning, and therefore we have language, and therefore we can reason at the conscious level...but I'm starting to get out of my depth here.) The excerpt just got me thinking, which of course is why I like reading Gladwell's work in the first place. I encourage you to go take a gander at this excerpt in particular and then wander around his website a little. You're bound to find plenty of food for thought.

Three amusing links

2004-11-16T07:10:00.000-08:00

Cycle facility of the month: "This site is dedicated to highlighting examples of how innovative design and outstanding engineering offer safety, utility, and comfort to cyclists." Must-read for cyclists and good for a few guffaws [via idiolect.org.uk].

The future is big: fortune-telling is the fastest growing industry in India, with computers and technology being harnessed to its purposes [via World-changing].

And: can you tell me how to get, how to get to Mordor?

Nothing new under the sun

2004-11-15T08:59:00.000-08:00

Since just about everyone I know reads Arts & Letters Daily, you will probably have read this review of "The Seven Basic Plots of Literature" by Christopher Booker. Basically, he claims, all storylines can be reduced to seven plots (or combinations of plots): rags-to-riches, the quest, voyage and return, overcoming the monster, rebirth, comedy and tragedy. I find this view delightfully reductionist, but couldn't help thinking of it from the perspective of copyright (I'm trying to read up on copyright right now, so my mind's full of it) - suppose there were such a thing as unlimited copyright, then the copyright holders of a book like (say) the Bible (which pretty certainly has all the plotlines given above) should be able to sue every writer of every fictional story/novel/whatever. Or, come to think of it, if you view your lifestory as some intricate plot unfolding in real time, then everyone should be sued for living - unless you have the dullest possible life just going to the office every day and going straight back home again. Then again, I guess that might qualify as "tragedy".

Anyway, something else I realised when reading "Lord of the Rings" - there really isn't anything new under the sun, is there? I mean, think about something like a (non-human) speech recognition system. That seems pretty modern, doesn't it? After all, it still isn't something we can do at all well. But the idea was there before - think of Ali Baba and the 40 thieves and how to get into the cave you had to say "Open Sesame". Well, how did the cave know to open the door? Automatic speech recognition! [LOTR equivalent: say "friend" to enter at the gates of Moria.] And what about video-conferencing? Well what about things like the Palant í ri, the seeing-stones that could be used, among other things, to communicate between distant places. I guess true genius lies not in coming up with new things, but in making what was once rare, commonplace and what was once magic, mundane.

And in other news: I guess some Republicans weren't too pleased about this site, sorryeverybody.com that publishes apologies from Americans to the rest of the world for having re-elected Bush and created their own rival sites, one of which was titled werenotsorry.com. I think they could have come up with a better URL, don't you? My automatic parse of the URL was "were not sorry", which automatically conjures up the continuation "but will be soon!". Just the message they wanted to send, I don't think!

Well that's all for today. My mood today is best characterised by the Singlish (well, originally Hokkien) phrase boh liao which explains the rambling.

Strict rules of idiolectal word usage

2004-11-09T09:30:00.000-08:00

Mark Liberman at Language Log comments on "snoots" and their propensity to make up words at will. He makes a good point, I think:

I've noticed over the years that snoots often like to make up words, and I've wondered why people who value traditional usage so highly are also so open to lexical innovation. The paradox evaporated when I realized that the snootish impulse is not a defense of the community's traditions, it's an assertion of linguistic ego. And what could be more egocentric than inventing new words? ... Snoots don't check lexicographic and grammatical facts because their complaints are about subjective pain, not about objective facts of usage. Though they masquerade as defense of social norms, such screeds are really the howls of a wounded self, demanding primacy.

I've noticed in myself a tendency to "make up" rules of usage of certain words based on how I myself perceive the distribution of these words and use them myself.

Exhibit 1: indexes/indices

I only use "indexes" when referring to the sorts of things who find at the backs of books, and "indices" with stocks and in mathematics i.e. "raising to the power of". So I've carved up the singular "index" into several meanings and strictly assigned for each meaning a certain plural, although I expect (I've no data on this whatsoever) that most people would use them interchangeably or just stick to a certain one depending on their idiolect. To me, it's anathema to say "there are four indices in the Lord of the Rings trilogy" - yuck! I mean, bluck!

Exhibit 2: dubious/doubtful

I myself have very strict rules about how to use these two words, but I know for sure that my views on this aren't shared by the majority - of Americans, at least. I would say, "I'm doubtful of his claims", NEVER "I'm dubious about his claims" - because dubious to me has a negative connotation and means something like shady in "a shady character". So "I'm dubious about his claims" first of all makes no sense because dubious can't subcategorize for any PPs or anything, and second of all seems to be saying, "I'm a shady character." I remember first encountering dubious in the sense of my "doubtful" during a linguistics class and I nearly laughed out loud at the professor for calling himself that. But since then I've heard many Americans use dubious in that way and while I may smile inwardly, I know now what they mean.

Why I love the BBC

2004-11-02T20:08:00.000-08:00

(1) the Creative Archive: pilot to start next year. This article discusses lots of cool aspects of the project, including:
- P2P distribution, "so that the public become not just their creative partners, but distribution partners too"
- metatagging of content, with layering of metadata "so that content will be searchable in many different ways"
- Creative Commons licences for the material
- Unfortunately, it looks like content is not supposed to be distributed out of the UK :-( but I'm sure there'll be ways to get access to it nevertheless
- no DRM scheme will be put on the material
etc.

(2) this Welsh-English word-by-word translation interface, called Vocab/Geirfa: mouse over Welsh words to see the English translation [via PaidContent.org]. Apparently, the program is being offered as open source code to Welsh-language sites, and it was designed to be used to translate words between any language. Oddly enough, not all words are highlighted and therefore translated: I wonder why words like sbon and gyfer receive short shrift compared to ones like Tacteg and llwyfan. Looking at a Welsh-English lexicon, it seems that:

sbon is an adverb used in expressions such as newydd sbon 'brand new/span new', and doesn't have an independent meaning.
gyfer, ddrama, cefnogwch are inflected forms - so the dictionary is basically looking up base forms, and can't handle such forms yet, it appears.
gyda "is used predominantly in South Wales", and the standard form (or so it seems) is cyda.

And of course proper names don't get a translation. Some kinks, but this is cool stuff.

I remember listening to the BBC when I was a kid, usually in the car. We'd hear the announcer saying in his RP accents (that was before they began diversifying to regional accents), "This is the World Service of the BBC, broadcasting from Bush House, London" and then the start of Lilliburlero [recording, lyrics], then the beeps to the hour. Sometimes, we'd get the Chimes of Big Ben and then "This is London" and the news. It always gave me a thrill. But nowadays they don't seem to use Lilliburlero anymore, and anyway I listen to all my BBC on the net. Radio 4 for intelligent programmes on current affairs, history, etc., BBC 7 for comedy (especially old episodes of Just a Minute) and Radio 3 for music.

We get the BBC especially strongly here (88.9 FM) because we have a shortwave retransmitter tucked in the backwoods somewhere. I went there once as part of a car rally. We were supposed to count the number of transmitting towers they had but they were hidden by the trees, so we just asked the watchman who promptly told us the answer. He knew it off the top of his head because another car had already come by and asked him the same question.

During the First Gulf War, my mum bought a little handheld receiver so we could get immediate news about all the developments in Kuwait - especially important to us because she worked in a Kuwait-based bank at the time. I remember going to her office after school and playing there and listening to the radio.

And then we'd listen to the Brain of Britain quiz and try to guess the answers (never got more than 5 in an episode), or enjoy the cleverness of the contestants on Just a Minute, and I remember scrounging around for tapes to record the science programmes (I've forgotten their names now.) Gosh, I can't wait to get my hands on the stuff in the Creative Archive. One of the first things I'd probably look for would be the broadcast by Michael Ventris of his decipherment of Linear B. If it still exists. I hope it still exists.

Other links:
Here's a nostalgic look back at 5o years of the history of the BBC World Service.
Wikipedia article on the BBC World Service

Update: I heard "Lilliburlero" today on the World Service, so it's still in use (I hadn't heard it for a long time before that). They have a new "modern" recording of it that sounds very nice. I think I might try to listen for a while to the Internet stream on the hour to catch it again.

Enblogment

2004-11-02T09:18:00.000-08:00

Another post on a neologism, this time two days old: enblogment (coined by Larry Lessig). Basically a bloggable (that's another neologism for sure, but an inevitable one once "blog" became a verb - -able is such a nice, hardworking, productive suffix) method of endorsement of a candidate. Hmm, I wonder when nasal place assimilation will occur and make this emblogment instead?

BTW, someone already pointed this out in the comments to Lessig's blog. Late off the blocks as usual.

I seem to remember that there're some other English words that have a nasal place assimilation clash but I can't seem to find any common ones.

All about libraries

2004-11-02T08:45:00.000-08:00

I am reading Nicholas A. Basbanes' Patience and Fortitude right now, and I feel like I need to share this passage with the world:

...As I was signing the books out at the front desk - the Athenaeum did not yet use a scanning device to record loans to its members, although that quaint practice was about to change as well - I confirmed by the blank cards tucked inside the rear pastedowns my assumption that they were, in fact, leaving the library fo the first time. "Eighty-one years," I said aloud, shaking my head with amused gratitude. "You wonder who they bought these books for anyway." James P. Feeney, the silver-haired circulation librarian who was checking me out, paused momentarily and fastened his unblinking eyes on mine. "We got them for you, Mr. Basbanes," he replied evenly, and resumed his work.

What Feeney did not say - what he did not have to say - was that the books had been set aside by his predecessors for the better part of a century on the off chance that one day somebody in need might want to see them. Fortunately, the fact that nobody had requested the titles before me was not considered sufficient grounds for discarding them, a practice employed by so many other libraries in these days of reduced shelf space, stretched operating budgets, and shifting paradigms. It was as if the collective hands of Aristophanes of Byzantium, Petrarch, Robert Cotton, Christina of Sweden, Thomas Jefferson, Arthur Alfonso Schomburg - every temporary custodian of the world's gathered wisdom - had reached out through the swirling eddy of the ages and placed in my hands the precious gift of a book. It was an act of faith fulfilled, and we, their heirs, owe no less a compact to the readers of the third millennium.

Unfortunately, the national library system here tends to go through books rather quickly - I've seen books from 2002 listed as being in 'RU' - 'Repository Used' - and I've even bought books at their annual sales, that nobody's ever checked out, that are about 2-3 years old. Kind of sad really. And to think a previous Chief Executive had the audacity to 'crow' that "We don't get people complaining about service quality or about our collections any more". Guess I'll have to start complaining! Just because you can always find books that you want to read that doesn't mean that you can find any book that you wanted to read a priori - i.e. I always fill up the slots on my library card without too much trouble, but on the other hand about 50% of the books I look for aren't in the national library system. I guess I tend to be too(?) understanding of the budget problems of libraries - after all, these libraries do have to cater to a certain common denominator, and I know my interests are pretty esoteric for Singapore. But then...knowing tax money has bought books that are being put into storage (to get them out costs S$1.50) or selling them away (OK, so I'm not that mad about this part - after all, means that I'll be able to buy them for S$2 or so) at the tender age of 2...sigh.

Had an interesting experience at the library today. For those of you who don't know, Singapore's library books are all RFID-tagged. This means that we check ourselves out - no standing in line waiting for a librarian, although occasionally you have to stand in line to wait for a machine - and books returned are returned instantly. No waiting around for 15 minutes for your books to clear the system. Anyway, I was trying to check out a book and after several swipes I gave up and took it to the counter (labelled 'Concierge' - interesting). While waiting for the librarian to laminate some library cards, I began reading the book and found it really interesting. And then finally the librarian took the book to see what was wrong with it and told me it was due for maintenance!!! This for a book that looked like it had never been touched. She mumbled something about the labelling being wrong or something. I didn't feel like arguing, so I just gave up on the book and left. I'm such a pushover.

Jobsworths, etc.

2004-11-02T08:19:00.000-08:00

I'm not really the type to find individual words all that interesting - etymologies and such are fun to look at from time to time but they're not something I'd devote a whole lot of time to. As you might guess, I'm pretty lazy about checking dictionaries (especially English ones - I'm more diligent with foreign languages). But when I come across a word that I've never heard before twice (maybe even thrice) in one day, I take notice. The word in question is jobsworth, and it's not in dictionary.com. I typed in "what is a jobsworth" into Google and got this answer: "someone who is getting paid to do a job that might be unpopular with some people". Alternative answer: "somebody who sticks to the work rules very rigidly". Going by the first 20 or so sites for 'jobsworth' on Google, it's a very British word. Well, you learn something new everyday.

Speaking of 'everyday', I saw a sign yesterday that stopped me in my tracks, for a Japanese restaurant here in Singapore: 'Open all day. 11 am - 10 pm.' Hmm, somebody has their quantifiers in a twist - or perhaps omitted an 's', though it wouldn't be very elegant to put it back in anyway.

Then there was this other signboard in Queenstown today: 'No. 1 Coffeeshop 268', which induced momentary confusion. How could something that's number one also be number 268? Upon further reflection, 268 was probably the number of the coffeeshop on the road, but hey, it's a genuine parsing ambiguity.

Emotionally-coloured synaesthesia and category-specific deficits

2004-10-26T07:49:00.000-07:00

ITEM 1. More on a synaesthetic theme: an article in Nature News about a synaesthetic woman who sees colours around faces and names:

G.W. is a young woman who sees colours around words or things only when the object has an emotional association for her. Many synaesthetes see letters as coloured, for example in the word 'love', 'l' might be green, 'o' might be cream-yellow, 'v' might be crimson, and 'e' royal blue.

But instead G.W. sees the whole word 'love' as pink or orange because it is a positive word. She sees the word 'James', or James himself, as pink for the same reason: she likes him. Her case is described by Jamie Ward, a psychologist at University College London in the latest issue of Cognitive Neuropsychology.

I suppose this woman has a foolproof way of knowing whether she's gone "off" someone: wait for the pink hue around their name to fade to whatever colour non-positive words take on.

ITEM 2. Snooping around Cognitive Neuropsychology (the journal in which the above research was published), I came across an issue (vol. 20, 3-6, 2003) devoted entirely to category-specific deficits in the mental lexicon. This subfield began in 1983 when Warrington & McCarthy reported "a patient with preserved knowledge for animals, foods, and flowers, relative to inanimate objects". After that, all sorts of deficits began to be reported in different patients - e.g. human vs. non-human, animate vs. inanimate, implying that objects of similar category were in some way grouped together in the brain. Even more strongly, it's been claimed that these brain groupings are the result of evolutionary pressures, restricting a natural conceptual category to 'categories for which rapid and efficient identification could have had survival and productive advantages. Plausible candidates are the categories "animals", "plant life", "conspecifics", and possibly "tools".' (from Mahon & Caramazza 2003 in the issue cited).

I think it'd be interesting if syntactic correlates could be found for many of these specific concepts. We know already that many languages are sensitive to semantic categories such as human vs. non-human and animate vs. inanimate - for example, in English we can see a distinction between animate and inanimate nouns according to what form of possession they preferentially take. For example, "the boy's sister" is more natural to us than "the sister of the boy", while "the fruit's core" is less felicitous than "the core of the fruit". Or alienable vs inalienable possession reflecting the animacy hierarchy. Etc., etc.

My question is - are the less intuitive categories such as natural vs. man-made reflected in any language? I'm thinking about languages that divide up their nouns into much more specific categories. For example, Chinese, which assigns its nouns different classifiers [link to MSWord file], or Swahili, which has several noun classes, the division of which may be said to be loosely semantics-based. Do these divisions have any correlation with the sorts of "natural" conceptual categories that neuropsychologists have been studying through brain lesions and fMRI?

Language variation/change & community size

2004-10-26T07:30:00.000-07:00

Haven't been posting much on linguistics recently, partly because I haven't been thinking a whole lot about it, other than trying to resolve a paradox in my own mind concerning the effect community size has on language variation/change in a closed monolingual environment (i.e. we'll forget about language change due to borrowing and lexical diffusion).

I'd always thought that language change should be slower in a smaller community; I think part of the reason that I held so tenaciously onto this belief for so long was due to (1) stories (myths, in some cases) about, for example, how isolated communities speak like their 16th century ancestors, (2) not separating out from these stories other variables such as trade and contact with the outside world and hence other dialects and languages.

Most of all, though, I think my misconception boils down to the difference between variation and change: a small community might not have very much in the way of variation between its speakers, but a single change can travel through the whole population a lot faster and become a part of the language than such a change in a larger community.

I suppose part of the difficulty is teasing out the difference between "language" as a product of the community and "language" as a product of one's own internal grammar. Language change is mostly a property of the first, while variation - how much one's own internal grammar varies from that of the community - is mostly a property of the second.

In the course of thinking about this I came across a few interesting papers, for example "Is the rate of linguistic change constant?" by Daniel Nettle and this simulation of language change, which you may want to check out.

In a moment I'll post about a couple of vaguely linguistically-related pieces I came across today. So the linguistics drought is over.

The Distributed Library Project

2004-10-18T09:21:00.000-07:00

This is an idea that has been simmering in my head for a long time, and now I've found that someone's actually implemented it for real! Introducing the Distributed Library Project (via LibrarianInBlack):

The Distributed Library Project is a library catalogue that allows anyone to nominate their own collection of books as a library, and themselves as a librarian. The software was developed intially in West America, see communitybooks.org . The London DLP is based at the UO in Limehouse, at the domains http://dlp.theps.net and dlpdev.theps.net.

The original blurb for the library is as follows:

The distributed library project is part of an experiment in sharing information and building community. Unfortunately, the traditional library system doesn't do much to foster community. Patrons come and go, but there is very little opportunity to establish relationships with people or groups of people. In fact, if you try to talk with someone holding a book you like - you'll probably get shushed. The Distributed Library Project works in exactly the opposite way, where the very function of the library depends on interaction.

I'd been thinking that something similar for us book-starved Singaporeans might be a good idea, but there were certain issues that needed to be worked out, e.g. how do you know your books will be returned? They solve this issue using a feedback system similar to that used on Ebay whereby borrowers who return their books on time and in good condition get positive feedback, and vice versa. They don't say anything about how books get from one user to another - presumably users arrange that between themselves. But anyway, it's a wonderful idea. I only hope that something like this can be implemented here, and save us all the horrible price of postage.

Randomness post

2004-10-14T09:45:00.000-07:00

Item 1: Google Desktop Search, via John Battelle's Searchblog and SearchEngineWatch. A step towards solving the somewhat bizarre predicament we currently find ourselves in, in which it's easier to find things on the web than on one's much smaller and better-organised disk drives!

I've just downloaded and tried it. Unfortunately, right now it's all geared towards Microsoft-based non-open-source stuff. It searches Word, Excel, Powerpoint - not OpenOffice files. And that's what I use, OpenOffice. I still save some of my files in Word and Excel formats, but only the ones that I know I'll be distributing to other people. The ones I create for myself, I just save in .sxw and .sxc formats (and so on), because I don't need to go through an extra couple of mouse-clicks (so I'm lazy). It also doesn't search PDFs - how weird is that? It only retrieves them if you have the keyword in the title. It searches AOL IM chats - and I think that's pretty cool - but most of the rest of the world (including me) uses ICQ. Oh well, I'm sure they're going to add the capabilities for all these things at some point, and if you desperately want something, you can send in a request. Or perhaps someone will hack it to include other file formats and make it a Mozilla add-on.

One thing that's kind of cool about it is that you can basically search your own browsing history with it (provided you don't delete your history, I suppose). Naturally, right now it only supports Internet Explorer (blast!) but this is a function that I've wanted to have for a long time. It's really frustrating when you've browsed through things for hours and then said, wait a minute, there's that thing that was neat but I've forgotten which page it was on - even though you knew you saw it just hours ago - and then had to look through incomprehensible URL titles to find it. Having to Google the whole web for it, instead of searching within the much smaller subset that you know your computer would be able to find if only it were enabled for it, is the ultimate in frustration. As John Battelle observes, this is challenging A9's new personalised search history feature - anyone who downloads the Desktop Search tool automatically has it, and therefore about a third of A9's advantage is gone. The Desktop Search also does some cool things with caching that I didn't realise because I don't use IE - look at the rather comprehensive SearchEngineWatch article for details.

Another interesting thing is that searches are ranked not based on relevance or anything like that, but chronological order according to when it was last accessed. I think this is a good thing. But there are improvements that could be made - for example, I think a paned search (like the interface A9 uses) would be really good. One thing I would like to have would be a pane for documents that you've created yourself or have had sent to you and a pane for documents in your browsing history and another for all others e.g. help documentation. I find it rather irritating that I get results from Microsoft documentation when looking for documents that I've authored myself. And 99% of the time you probably would want stuff from the former two categories rather than from the third.

John Battelle also has some pretty cool predictions for how Google can expand on this service - such as "a lightweight word processor so you can take notes on your searching". Oh my gosh, now that would really be something. Can't wait till they enable all the other media formats, either.

(2) Lucky Luke, my favourite bande dessinee, has been made into a film! Or even several. Now, I don't think I would find this at my local video store. I wonder if Netflix would have it. Hmm, apparently not. The good thing about America is that you can get almost anything there - any used book you want, any DVD you want - unless of course it's in a foreign language. Now that's a different story.

(3) I never thought I would get interested in Chinese serials. My mother used to try switching on the TV to Channel 8 (then the only Chinese channel on TV) when we were learning Chinese in school to interest us in the programmes there, but we never watched them for longer than 5 minutes. Now I find myself captivated by the series "Heavenly Sword and Dragon Sabre", or 倚天屠龙记 (yi3 tian1 tu2 long2 ji4), which just finished its run on Channel 8. It's an adaptation of a martial arts novel by the famous Jin Yong, also known as Louis Cha. OK, I call him "famous", but I actually had never heard of him before watching "Heavenly Sword and Dragon Sabre".

Now, why were his books (and TV serial adaptations) never mentioned in my eleven years of formal schooling in Chinese? Surely I wasn't just not paying attention the whole time? Recently there's been a lot of debate over the teaching of Chinese in schools here in Singapore, because they're realising that the system just doesn't work for a large majority of the students. Students are getting turned off from having anything to do with Chinese, as I did, because it's forced down their throats, requiring lots of memorization and reading stuffy old stories. When they could have sat us down in front of these TV serials and got us interested that way. I never thought I would, but now I find myself actually reading Chinese novels!

Part of the attraction for me is the fact that these martial arts, or wuxia, novels, although fantastic, have their basis in reality. The sects in China mentioned in the serial - Shaolin (everyone knows about them), Wudang, E-mei, Ming, etc., all exist. It's also funny to think that for so long I thought that Europe had a monopoly on knight errants and chivalry, but that halfway around the world there were similar "knights" (xia - "knight" is not the best translation, since it's really too culture-specific, but it's hard to come closer) and codes of chivalry. And apparently European chivalry was adapted from an earlier Islamic code. I think I first heard about this at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, but it was only a snippet stored at the back of my mind.

Well, you live and learn. To learn more about the stuff I'm nattering on about, check out some online (non-official) translations of Jin Yong's works.

Arabs "decoded" hieroglyphic Egyptian?

2004-10-08T10:10:00.000-07:00

Firstly, go read the post "An Arab Champollion?" on Language Hat's blog for background. Basically, an Egyptologist named Okasha El Daly has claimed that hieroglyphs were "decoded" (I hate that word) hundreds of years before Champollion, by Abu Bakr Ahmad ibn Wahshiyah, an Arab alchemist. This post immediately jumped out at me because I have wondered about how much knowledge was retained by the descendants of the ancient Egyptians of that culture. In folk dances and such, for example, they still retain knowledge of the legend of the battle between Osiris and Seth (see Nefertiti Lived Here by Mary Chubb for a description of such a dance, performed in the 1930s). And I believe that there was work carried out at the Dar al-Hikmah, which was charged with the translation of foreign texts, on unknown scripts - certainly hieroglyphic Egyptian would have been interesting to them. But I never really had the time or inclination to go any further than posing the question to myself.

In a comment to LH's post, John Hardy points to the English translation of ibn Wahshiyah's work (the Arabic text is on the same site as well) published in 1806 - prior to Champollion's breakthrough, it may be noted. So I hotfooted it over there (well, actually the text hotfooted its way to me) to take a gander. I haven't read it very closely, just taken a peek at the bits about hieroglyphic Egyptian (or the "Hermean" alphabet, as it's called in this work).

OK, so El Daly claims that "[t]he important thing is they realised that these hieroglyphs were not pictures, which was the prevailing view among classical writers". OK, that seems to be the case. On page 16, there's what seems to be an indication of some knowledge of determinative signs:

These expressions consist in innumerable figures and signs, which are to lead the mind directly, and immediately to the object expressed thereby, viz: there is a sign which signifies the name of God Almighty, simply and alone. If they wished to express one of the particular attributes of God they added something to the original sign, and proceded [sic] in this manner, as you will perceive by the alphabet in question.

I think this may be the paragraph El Daly refers to when he says, "Ibn Wahshiya was the first scholar ever to talk about determinatives, describing them in a paragraph which any modern scholar would be proud of". Though I don't know that any modern scholar would really have expressed himself in such a fashion, or been proud of it.

And then on page 43, there's a discussion of the "Shimshim alphabet", which "was inspired by divine revelation, and varied in four manners by the people who used it", one group of whom were the "Hermesians". Some of these look like hieroglyphs to me, and they are given phonetic values, unlike in the previous tables which are all given meanings. The phonetic values all consist of a single phone(me), like Z or "H hard". Although El Daly claims that some of the phonetic values given are correct, most of them seem pretty wrong to me, in consultation with Budge's Egyptian Hieroglyphic Dictionary (be aware, though, that I checked only a few signs which I recognised as hieroglyphs I'd seen before - and I'm no expert, I just have the books!) For example, the crook-shaped character is given the phonetic value /l/, whereas the accepted value today for that character is /s/. And there's no indication of any awareness of the possible syllabic nature of the phonetic elements. There's a sign on page 46 (fifth down) consisting of an enclosure and a straight line underneath it; to the best of my knowledge the straight line indicates that the ideographic meaning of the sign above should be taken, so the character as a whole indicates a house, with the corresponding phonetic content /pr/. The whole character is given instead, however, completely phonetic content consisting of a single /p/. The determinatives, similarly, don't seem to match up with any of the ones I see in Budge's dictionary.

So it seems to me that although it certainly is interesting that ibn Wahshiyah saw that hieroglyphic Egyptian was more than ideographic, I certainly wouldn't call it a "decoding". Surely he just had a deeper insight into the character of the script?

Anyhow, the English translation seems a pale shadow of the original Arabic text - 54 vs 136 pages. (The Arabic text, by the way, seems to be set in a strikingly modern typeface - the same one used in the textbooks from which I studied Arabic. But I digress.) I haven't made any attempt at all to read the Arabic (or, indeed, to read the translation in full), which seems to have much more content. So perhaps the Arabic text contains much more exciting stuff than what I found in the English translation - and then again, maybe not. Those familiar with hieroglyphic Egyptian may care to take a look at page 48 and see whether the sequences of characters given there really mean what ibn Wahshiyah claims.

My experience with Cantonese

2004-10-08T03:53:00.000-07:00

I was reading this article, "Why do people learn languages?" at Mark Rosenfelder's Metaverse site. It has some interesting discussion about child language acquisition, particularly his assertion, which is in all likelihood true, that "children don't learn a language if they can get away with not learning it" (emphasis his). He gives several examples of children exposed to two or more languages who nevertheless wind up speaking only one, because they realise that, for example, the one caregiver who speaks to them in a secondary language actually does understand their first language, and begins communicating with that caregiver in the primary language, gradually losing their fluency in the secondary language.

I had a similar experience with Cantonese. My father and mother both speak fluent English; the extended family with whom I have significant contact all speak English with varying degrees of fluency. But my mother's side of the family usually communicate in Cantonese - with some Mandarin and English thrown in. I don't think anyone ever directed any significant amount of Cantonese speech to me, so I wound up just learning English at home. Mandarin had to wait for school, and as for Cantonese - I now can understand it (with some help from context), but not speak it (apart from a few stock phrases).

I used to think to myself, "Why didn't I learn Cantonese when I had the chance? After all, I had all this linguistic input - maybe I just didn't put enough effort into it." And I guess I didn't, but it wasn't a conscious decision on my part. Some acquisition occurred, but not enough to make me fluent. If anything, I got only the parsing part of the grammar and not the generating part - now try devising a model of language processing that can take care of that! I don't think this is an uncommon situation. I think there are quite a lot of people who can understand certain languages but not speak them.

Anyway, I'm now trying to better my Cantonese. I've decided to try "leveraging" my knowledge of Mandarin Chinese to help me learn Cantonese. Even though they're far apart enough to be separate languages, their grammatical structure seems similar enough for me to do direct transliteration, as least for the time being. As for phonology, there are tables available for converting Cantonese syllables to Mandarin, vice versa, and even one for converting tones. The conversion isn't one-to-one by any measure, but there are patterns and principles to be found. For example, the final (i.e. rhyme) -im in Cantonese almost always converts to -ian in Mandarin.

The trouble with this approach, I've found, is that Cantonese is more conservative than Mandarin. In itself, this is not such a bad thing; however, Mandarin has undergone a lot of mergers, resulting in a much smaller syllabary. This means that a Mandarin syllable may correspond to many more Cantonese syllables than vice versa. So it's a lot easier to convert from Cantonese to Mandarin (fewer possibilities), than Mandarin to Cantonese (many more possibilities) - which is the direction I want!

To give the statistics: for any one Cantonese syllable, the mean number of corresponding Mandarin syllables is 2.47; for any one Mandarin syllable, the mean number of corresponding Cantonese syllables is 3.58 - a significant difference. For 60% of the Cantonese syllables, you have a 50-50 chance or better of guessing the correct Mandarin syllable; but for Mandarin syllables, it's only 46%. Only 2% of the Cantonese syllables have 7 or more possible correspondences, but an incredible 13% of the Mandarin syllables have 7 or more possible Cantonese correspondences. You begin to see the problem. Add to the fact that the original 8 tones of Middle Chinese merged into four (plus one neutral) in Mandarin, while Cantonese preserves 7 tones - gack!

So I don't know if this approach is really going to work, but it's fun going through the table I compiled from the tables linked to above and seeing all the regularities.

Recent exciting book news

2004-10-07T09:53:00.000-07:00

I've been getting quite excited by a lot of book-related news recently. Here are some things that really got me going:

The Long Tail at Wired: we're moving from a world of hit-driven economics, where what you read, watch, and consume is dictated by "mainstream culture", to a world of niche-driven economics, because publishers and sellers are discovering that there's just as much money to be made, if not more, from "the long tail" - the non-hits that are bought only by a very few people:

What's really amazing about the Long Tail is the sheer size of it. Combine enough nonhits on the Long Tail and you've got a market bigger than the hits. Take books: The average Barnes & Noble carries 130,000 titles. Yet more than half of Amazon's book sales come from outside its top 130,000 titles. Consider the implication: If the Amazon statistics are any guide, the market for books that are not even sold in the average bookstore is larger than the market for those that are ... In other words, the potential book market may be twice as big as it appears to be, if only we can get over the economics of scarcity. Venture capitalist and former music industry consultant Kevin Laws puts it this way: "The biggest money is in the smallest sales."

This especially resounds with me because I know I'm a niche reader. There aren't that many people interested in linguistics in Singapore. There're two shelves of linguistics books in our local Borders. Kinokuniya has more, but they're really, really expensive.

Then there's Brewster Kahle's call to arms at the Web 2.0 conference yesterday [via Boing-Boing]. Here are the key points I gathered from listening to the MP3 (available here):

- Universal access to all human knowledge is possible.
- There are 26 million books in the Library of Congress, of which more than half are out of copyright, then there are 8 million in copyright and out of print, and a comparatively small number of in-print books.
- A book in ASCII takes up about 1 MB, so it would take 26 terabytes to store the whole LOC - which would cost $60,000.
- It costs $10 to scan a book. Efforts ongoing at the Library of Alexandria, in China and India (not to mention Project Gutenberg, etc.)
- So, it would cost $260 million to scan the whole LOC. Which isn't that much!
- It makes no sense that we're not allowed to put out-of-print stuff but copyrighted stuff on the net, where people can actually *use* it. Brewster Kahle calls these "orphans".
- So he's suing John Ashcroft in the Supreme Court for the right to bring these orphans onto the net. Go, Brewster, go!
- Furthermore, it costs $1 to print and bind a 100-page black and white book. Harvard says it costs them $2. In other words, it's cheaper to make books available for people to bring home - forever, and free - than to go to all the effort of getting them back again!

Now, to take the idea further from the "Long Tail" article, it makes perfect economic sense to make *all* books available in this way - digitized, then cheaply printable - because sometime, somewhere, someone might pay some money for it. And if you add up all the dollars and cents from each of these out-of-print books, that's a heck of a lot of money. Plus, it's perfect for places outside the US and EU - it costs us a tonne of money to get books shipped over here. It'd cost me $8.98 to get a single book shipped to me from Amazon - which is half the price of the book! What we need is things like the Bookmobile (or more permanent and stationary print-and-bind-on-demand kiosks in bookshops). It's an old idea, but it only makes economic sense if there's the inventory and the demand. The demand's been demonstrated. We just need the inventory. There's all the out-of-copyright stuff, which is being digitized by efforts like Project Gutenberg, coming along. And if Kahle succeeds in his lawsuit against Ashcroft, that'd be a huge number of 20th-century works, timely and relevant. And then get some major publishers to jump aboard and make their works available in the same way...

And once we have all this stuff, Google will help us search it: Google has started a print service to digitize and make available for search in-print books, which is clearly to combat against Amazon and A9's Search-Inside-the-Book feature.

Oh, and, an update to the LibraryLookup bookmarklet thing. One of the big problems with it as it currently stands is that you might be looking at a certain edition of a book on Amazon with a certain ISBN, but your library has a different edition with a different ISBN, and there's no way to jump from one to the other. Ah, but in gallops the OCLC with its xISBN service, which takes an ISBN and looks for all editions, translations, etc., of that book and returns you a list of the ISBNs. Now, take the output from that and send it through your LibraryLookup bookmarklet and you should get all editions, translations, etc., available at your library! Wonderful! The OCLC already has some ready-made bookmarklets available here, but naturally not Singapore's. Next on the project list: figure out how to modify my NLB bookmarklet to take advantage of the xISBN service.

Words, words, just words

2004-09-30T09:51:00.000-07:00

I remember the good ol' days in Ling 101 when we watched this series of videos about language. One of the videos was called "American Tongues", but I don't think the bit I'm thinking of now comes from that particular video. It was a discussion about what a word is - and I remember that the only really convincing - yet unsatisfying - reply was that it was the string that went between two spaces.

I remember also looking in amazement at "words" from agglutinative languages like Chukchi which were, basically, a whole sentence - predicate and arguments all mashed up into one - and thinking to myself, "Why don't they just put spaces in between and split them up into "logical" words?

Well, now I "know" there're more complicated ways of figuring out what a word is - by prosody and minimal units and so on - though I don't think there's 100% agreement on a definition - witness the qualifier "sometimes" repeated in the SIL definition.

But there seems to be something psychologically "real" about the notion of a "word", doesn't there? I mean, would any native Turkish speaker object to writing this word (Cekoslavakyalilastiramadiklarimizdan) as a single string? (Of course, there's ambivalence over some words, especially compound words - should they be written as one word (redbrick), a hyphenated word (in which case does it count as one word or two?) (red-brick), or two words separated by a space (red brick)? But there's probably genuine ambiguity there due to different parses of such words by different native speakers.)

We're so used nowadays to the notion that a word is the thing that goes between the spaces that we still turn to that as the easiest, most accurate and yet most artificial definition of the word "word". This article about the history of punctuation (via BoingBoing) reminded me that once upon a time, words weren't separated by spaces at all. They just ran one into the other. So here's my question: when the practice of inserting spaces between words first came into general use, did people have difficulties with the whole idea? Were there ambiguities about what was to be separated? What sorts of mistakes, if any, did people make? Or are words such psychologically real objects that they wouldn't have had any trouble at all?

中秋节快乐

2004-09-28T09:32:00.000-07:00

Tonight's the 15th day of the 8th lunar month in the Chinese calendar (look out your window - the moon's completely round!) and therefore it's Mid-Autumn Festival, a time for mooncakes, lion dances - and lantern riddles. So, in honour of Mid-Autumn Festival, I'm going to give a little exposition about lantern riddles. In particular, word riddles, or 字谜 (zi4 mi2), my favourite kind of riddle, in which the answer takes the form of a single Chinese character.

Probably the closest equivalent to the Chinese word riddle in English is the cryptic crossword puzzle clue, which can involve (1) breaking a word down into its component morphemes; and (2) breaking a word down into its component letters (e.g. by scrambling them). In Chinese, these would correspond to (1) breaking down a character into its component radicals, and (2) breaking a word down into its component strokes, respectively. One major difference, however, is that cryptic crossword clues always contain a clue to the meaning of a word; this is, in general, not true for (at least one major strain) of Chinese word riddles. There are also Chinese word riddles that are entirely to do with semantics. I don't find these as interesting, so I shan't discuss them here.

Disclaimer: I'm no expert on Chinese riddles, nor even Chinese itself. Probably native speakers of Chinese would have a totally different conception and method of solving word riddles than I. I'll just give a few choice examples to illustrate how ingenious and fun to solve they are.

Let's start with some easy examples of the second type, which involve thinking about characters at the stroke level.

(1) 九点 jiu3 dian3 lit. “nine dot”, or “nine o'clock”

This riddle basically involves noticing that the second word, 点, is actually the name of a stroke in Chinese. The riddle is basically giving you complete instructions about how to write the character. The answer is to write the character 九, then a dot. The answer, therefore, is 丸.
Now for a variation on the first riddle.

(2) 十二点 shi2 er4 dian3 lit. “ten two dot”, or “twelve o'clock”

Any ideas? Again, this riddle is telling you exactly what strokes to write: those that comprise 十, then two dots, which yields 斗dou4 “fight” as the answer.

Here's a third simple one:

(3) 田中 tian2 zhong1 lit. “(in) the middle (中) of a field (田)”

Again, think in terms of characters. The riddle is asking for what's in the middle of the character 田. The answer, therefore, is just a horizontal stroke and a vertical stroke: the numeral 十 shi2 “ten”.

Now for a more challenging riddle.

(4) 夫人何处去 fu1 ren2 he2 chu4 qu4
lit. "Mrs. [wife] (夫人) where (何处) go (去)

Since “Mrs” (i.e. this is a term for addressing a married woman) 夫人 is a word in Chinese, most people take it to be a unit, in which case the riddle seems to mean "where did Mrs. go?". But, if you split them up and read the riddle like this: 夫 (the character), 人 (the character) 何处 (where) 去 (go), it means "in 夫, where did 人 go?" (something like that). So – what happens if we take the character 夫 and make the character 人 leave it? We are left with just the two horizontal strokes, which make up the numeral 二 er4 “two”, which is the answer to the riddle.

[I've corrected the explanation to (4) based on the comment from Anonymous. Thanks for pointing out the mistake!]

Now for a few examples of the first type, which really allow for more variation and ingenuity. Radical thinking, one could say.

(5) 挥手告别 hui1 shou3 gao4 bie2 lit. “wave hand (to) say goodbye”

For this sort of riddle, it's crucial that one is familiar with the system of Chinese radicals, and what they're called. The left hand side of the 挥character is called the “hand” radical. The second character, 手, means “hand”. The last two characters indicate that something is going away, or being left out. Putting them together, the riddle tells us to say goodbye to the “hand” part of the first character, 挥, which leaves us with the right hand side, 军 jun1 “soldier”.

(6) 春和秋都不热 chun1 he2 qiu1 dou1 bu2 ri4
lit. “spring and autumn (are) both not hot”

This is one of my favourites. First, let's look at the clue about heat. What gives off heat? The sun, written 日ri4, and fire, written 火huo3. Now look very closely at the first and third characters: 春 chun1 “spring”, and 秋 qiu1 “autumn”. That's right, the lower radical of the “spring” character means “sun”, and the right hand radical of the “autumn” character means “fire”. Now, it says that they're not supposed to be hot, so we take away their heat sources, so to speak, and combine them in the only way possible to yield 秦 qin2 which is apparently a variety of rice. As well as the name of the first dynasty in China.

(7) 眼看田上长青草
yen3 = eye kan4 = see tian2 = field shang4 = on zhang3 = grow qing1 = green cao3 = grass
“one (the eye) sees green grass growing on the field”

One thing to seize on is the adposition “on”, whose object in this case is the noun before it, “field”. That's a pretty clear indication that we're supposed to take the character for “field” (or some synonym – but in this case it's just “field”) and put something on top of it. There's “green grass growing” on that field. We can't put any of the whole characters for “green”, “grass” or “grow” on top of “field” to make a proper character, but there is a radical called the grass radical, consisting of one line across and two short lines down (the upper bit of 草 “grass”, which refers to any sort of flora). So, we put that on top of the word for field, which gives us 苗. But we still haven't used the first two words of the riddle. At this stage it's fairly clear that all the first two words can contribute is another radical, which must be the “eye” radical, or 目, which is the left hand side of 眼 “eye” and the lower bit of 看 “see”. It doesn't give any indication of where to put it, but in this case there's only one place that makes sense: to the left of 苗, which finally gives us 瞄 miao2, meaning to stare or look hard.

One last one, which I'm also rather fond of.

(8) 两狗谈天 liang3 gou3 tan2 tian1 “two dogs talking”

This one really requires some lateral thinking, so I'm going to work backwards and give you the answer: 狱 yu4 “jail”. This breaks up into no fewer than 3 radicals: 犭(the animal radical) 讠(the speech radical) and 犬 quan3 (a character meaning “dog”). So: we have one dog, an animal (represented by 犭) and a second dog (represented by 犬), and there's speech going on between them (represented by 讠).

I guess I like these riddles because they require you to think on so many levels. A riddle might look like a perfectly innocuous sentence, but it mightn't give you any clues until you start parsing it in a totally different way, a way that your grammar probably hasn't trained you for. And then you have to go deeper and analyse the characters in terms of radicals - which I suppose one might do on a sub-conscious level, but not in the conscious way required by the riddle. And then you may have to go still deeper and analyse the characters at the stroke level, which I doubt anybody really thinks much about except when they're taking dictation. So it really requires exploration of all the levels of language that we only use subconsciously, which I find rather fun.

(I suppose that if one wants to be pedantic, one might argue that all of language is somewhat subconscious - we don't actively have to think, "Oh, how does one say that?" but somehow I feel that these levels are deeper even than the subconscious, because our ordinary use of language doesn't really call for them.)

By the way, all these riddles come from this website, where you find others (with answers).

Cross-linguistic entropy

2004-09-23T08:33:00.000-07:00

I stumbled across this paper today: Estimating and Comparing Entropy across Written Natural Languages using PPM Compression [PS], by Behr, Fossum, Mitzenmacher and Xiao. I've mentioned before that I've been unable to find papers on the entropy values of different languages, so this seems to fill the gap somewhat, even though it relates to text rather than speech, which is what I was discussing.

Basically, they took two kinds of text: (1) the King James' Version of the Bible and its translations into Spanish, French, Chinese, Korean, Arabic, Japanese and Russian, and (2) the UN Treaty Collection and its translations into Spanish, French, Chinese, Arabic and Russian. They estimated the entropy of the various texts by compressing them and comparing their size in bytes after compression. In the first case, the translations all compressed to within about 15% of the (17th century) English original. In the second, Russian was about 20% off while the others were within the 15% range. Interestingly, the different scripts made the original sizes of the various documents vary by quite a bit (e.g. the Chinese text was half the size of the English text in bytes), when compressed the ratios were English 1:0.864 Chinese.

They also took the English KJV and translated it into French, Spanish, German and Italian using the Systran machine translation tool (which powers Babelfish). In this case the resultant machine-translations were larger than the original. This may have been due to faulty translation; also, the choice of text was somewhat injudicious, as Systran couldn't handle archaic words like "giveth" and "taketh" and just left them untranslated (which, I suppose, amounts to a faulty translation!).

The paper also has an interesting discussion of the relationship between expressibility and entropy of different languages.

We suggest that the compressed size of texts with the same information content should remain close to constant across languages, even when the uncompressed texts vary in size...[o]ur hypothesis is based on the following intuition. ...[T]he estimates of the entropy of English are based on a finite stochastic model of the language. The relevant attributes of these models can be applied to all natural languages. The first is the set of statements that can be expressed in this language...[o]ur conclusions rely on the assumption that S^{L} [= the set of statements that can be expressed in the language] is the same for all natural languages...Over this set, we have a probability distribution describing the likelihood that a statement is expressed, or output by the source...for large samples of statements, the probability distributions [p^{L}] for different languages are likely to be quite similar...[i]f our assumptions that p^{L} is roughly the same across all languages is true, we would expect compressed translations to have approximately the same size.

Now, this section made me think of the recent debate over Pirahã, which supposedly displays:

(i) the absence of creation myths and fiction; (ii) the simplest kinship system yet documented; (iii) the absence of numbers of any kind or a concept of counting; (iv) the absence of color terms; (v) the absence of embedding in the grammar; (vi) the absence of 'relative tenses' ... (viii) the absence of any individual or collective memory of more than two generations past; ... (ix) the absence of any terms for quantification...

If you're anything like me, you're probably wondering what on earth these people talk about. But anyway, supposing Pirahã really does have these gaps. Then it seems to me that they would have a lot less/fewer (without embedding, can they have an infinite number of sentences?) sentences in their set of expressible statements, S^{Pirahã}.

So here's my question. Would a test such as that which Behr et al. conducted be able to detect a much smaller S^L? I'm guessing that smaller S^L would mean a lower entropy - it'd be much easier to guess what's going to come next when you have fewer possible things to express. Here's the bit I'm unsure about. If you're translating an English text into Pirahã, then presumably you've got the basic information across, in which case regardless of the syntactic structure of the language, the compressed texts should fall within about 20% of each other. After all, English and Chinese have very different syntactic structures and yet they fall well within 15% for the cases given above. So, you wouldn't be able to detect gaps elsewhere in the language other than the set of sentences you'd worked on. So it wouldn't work.

On the other hand, I guess translating from English to Pirahã would result in a lot of simplifications. You couldn't say "fifty men" but just "a large number of men", you couldn't say "a yellow bird", just "a bird" - or maybe there's some paraphrase available. In which case the compressed size of the document might be a lot smaller, since a lot of information is left out. But then again (in another bold twist of the plot!) no compression algorithm is going to recognise that, say, "a large number of men" is less information than "fifty men". If a lot of paraphrases are necessary, then the size of the file might be larger.

So I guess the whole issue is over what "translate" means. Is it still an accurate translation if a lot of the little details are left out?

OK, enough rambling. It's time for bed.

Library Lookup P.P.S.

2004-09-17T03:33:00.000-07:00

What I had to do to convert it -

(1) change the URL of the website, in my case to vistaweb.nlb.gov.sg
(2) change the number after cw_cgi? to 10100 (from the original 10002)
(3) change the database (after use_Database) from 735 to 3002.

I don't know whether both (2) and (3) were necessary - I'm too lazy to experiment to find out. I did need to change (at least one of) them, though, otherwise it wouldn't work. How I found these numbers? The intermediate webpage when loading CARLweb (the page that says: "Loading CARLweb3.8.7.2; one moment please...." or similar) has the URL http://vistaweb.nlb.gov.sg/cgi-bin/cw_cgi?10100+REDIRX+useDatabase_3002, and that's where I got the numbers. Probably there are other numbers that work too, but somehow 10100 and 735 didn't work for me.

Library LookUp redux - success!

2004-09-17T01:00:00.001-07:00

I was complaining a few weeks ago about not being able to use the LibraryLookup bookmarklet on my local (= national = Singaporean) library system's catalogue, which uses Carlweb as its OPAC system. Well, someone smarter than me (Ian Olsen-Clark at Notes From The Box Factory - thanks Ian!) managed to find a way to get Carlweb to cooperate. I've modified his Java code slightly so you can use it to search the Singapore library system's catalogue from any webpage containing an ISBN number such as Amazon's (Amazon.uk might work better for some of the books). And its works!!! Oh frabjous day, hurrah, hurray!

Unfortunately, performance isn't so great. With IE6, it takes about 10-15 seconds, while with Mozilla, it seems to take even longer. But I think this is an artifact of Vistaweb (the NLB catalogue) - it takes quite a long time even when searching directly from the site.

Here is the link (click and drag to your Links toolbar (in IE) or Personal toolbar (in Mozilla) and pretend that you trust me, then when you're on any page with an ISBN in the URL just click on the button (called NLB Library Look-up - but you can rename it) and it will look it up in NLB. Note that it will just open in the same window.

NLB Library Look-Up

Lynne Truss in Singapore

2004-09-15T09:18:00.000-07:00

The other evening, I went to a talk by Lynne Truss, who's in Singapore for two days to promote her book. It was a wonderful evening, full of wry British humour (the talk was arranged by the British Council in Singapore), phonetic punctuation (in a tribute to Victor Borge) and more hilarious punctuation errors. Here are two - drop the apostrophes to appreciate the humour:

Residents' refuse to go in the bins
Those old things over there are my husband's

Lynne Truss does come across as a lot less mavenish in person than in her book, I must say. Contrary to popular belief, she really doesn't go around correcting every punctuation mistake she meets, but is often quite shy about pointing such errors out. Well, that's what she claims, anyway. And she seemed quite resigned to the loss of proper punctuation.

I suppose I'm sympathetic because I feel her pain. As someone who's studied linguistics, I know that common usage dictates what's right and what's wrong in grammar, but still, punctuation and spelling mistakes like saying "Apple's 50 cents" drive me up the wall. After all, if it ISN'T an abbreviation for "is" and it ISN'T a possessive, then there's no apostrophe!!! I guess the discussion on Language Log recently, particularly by Arnold Zwicky, about "the thin line between error and mere variation" is of significance here.

So that's how they do it!

2004-09-15T07:22:00.000-07:00

I was looking at some ventriloquism websites yesterday, wondering how it works. Turns out that ventriloquists use three techniques:

(1) strenuously avoid words with labial consonants, which are the only "visible" consonants, but
(2) if they must, pronounce (mostly initial, because later consonants can be slurred more) labial consonants by making substitutions, such as:

(according to one site - different people seem to have different ideas about what substitutions are appropriate)

/g/ for /b/
/θ/ for /f/ and /v/
/n/ for /m/
/kl/ for /p/
/ku/ for /kw/ (e.g. in quality)
/u/ for /w/

(3) priming the audience to expect a problematic word, by saying it beforehand in one's original voice, then having the dummy say the word with problematic consonants substituted.

Looking at the success of ventriloquism over the centuries (it's been around since the Greeks, and the Zulus are supposed to have (had?) it too), ventriloquism and its techniques would appear to be good confirmation that there's a lot of room in speech for errors that nevertheless make no difference to the comprehensibility of the speech stream. Fitting to the lexicon, with the benefit of context, is enough to smooth over things like wrong consonants.

Related ponderings:
throwing one's voice

I wonder how people speech-read with any success, since they would be unable to observe featural differences such as [+/- voice]. I'll have to get a book out on it.

All these issues must be related to issue of entropy of natural languages. As I understand it, a language with a large amount of entropy could have basically no phonotactics at all - any letter (considering the written language) can follow any other letter. So mishearing a single consonant could be particularly bad - there's a pretty high chance of having another consonant following it. But with less entropy, there's more room for mistakes. I wonder if different languages differ in their entropy values? What does having a different phoneme inventory and system of phonotactics do to the entropy value of a language? Here's some interesting linguistics research that's been carried out regarding the entropy of natural language: link. I still can't find any estimates of entropy of any other natural language besides English, however.

I wonder, also, how well a speech recognition system would be able to pick up on these ventriloquistic differences. Probably too well - it wouldn't be able to make any sense of it.

Chinese Tones in Music

2004-09-09T09:46:00.000-07:00

I was originally going to entitle this post, "Who needs Chinese tones, anyway?" because of something that I noted before but never really thought much about: that when one sings Chinese music, the tonal information on the syllables is deleted, since the musical tones overwrite those of the syllables. And yet in most cases people have no problem understanding what's going on in Chinese songs. Of course, this may just be due to context - but nevertheless, I feel (felt) that perhaps Chinese tones were becoming irrelevant, especially in view of the fact (?) that Chinese words, consisting of >1 syllable, probably are more or less unique on the syllable level. That is, if you have two syllables (for example, chang and ge), the chances of there being another combination changge with different tonal features other than the one I am thinking of, namely chang4 ge1, is pretty remote. (It would be neat to do an analysis of this - if only I could find a list of Chinese words as opposed to just characters - to see if what I'm claiming really is true. I'm just speaking from rather limited personal experience.)

But I've decided to reserve judgment until I finish reading this paper, When Tones Are Sung, by Lian-Hee Wee. Seems that the case of Chinese tones in music might be more complex than I thought. Reactions once I've fully digested the paper.

This reminds me of a little paper I wrote explaining why the rule for placing tonal markers on vowels in hanyu pinyin, the commonest method of transcribing Mandarin Chinese, is the way it is. I really must blog about that at some point, since it's pretty neat - but not of any real consequence, and hence not something to publish.

Oh, and, the paper is hosted at the National University of Singapore, much to my surprise. I really ought to get in touch with some of the linguistics people there.

Last week's good readings

2004-09-07T08:11:00.000-07:00

So you want to learn Japanese - read it for yourself!

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I've always preferred the Library of Congress classification system to the Dewey Decimal System. I don't know why, since DDS is what I grew up with. But here's a good reason not to like the DDS: Western bias.

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An amusing essay by Arthur Phillips about how he overcame "Hemingway's tyrannical proverb... [w]rite what you know" to write The Egyptologist. With the help of the British Museum, of course. Followed by two interviews with him, one about The Egyptologist and the other about Prague, his earlier first novel, which I really should get around to reading. That I should, in fact, have read while I was in Budapest. But no matter. I particularly like this line of his:

"My 'ultimate destinations' tend to be a little more difficult to explain to a travel agent. Prague in 1913. Budapest in 1931. Rome in 1964."

I feel pretty much the same: there are just these magical intersections of ages and places in my memory's reckoning that I wish I could visit but never can. Because, of course, "the past is another country", and one that's very, very difficult to visit.

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"The Age of the Essay", by Paul Graham. There's some really interesting stuff in this essay, about why writing skills are always taught in English literature classes in high schools, about what it really means to write an essay (essai, of course, is the French word for attempt), how to write a good essay (follow the example of the Meander river in Turkey - though probably not in the way you think), etc. A couple of good bits from his essay:

To some extent it's like learning history. When you first read history, it's just a whirl of names and dates. Nothing seems to stick. But the more you learn, the more hooks you have for new facts to stick onto-- which means you accumulate knowledge at what's colloquially called an exponential rate.

History seems to me so important that it's misleading to treat it as a mere field of study. Another way to describe it is all the data we have so far.

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French police stumbled upon an underground cinema and bar among the 170 miles of tunnels, caves, galleries and catacombs - which were formerly quarries. Patrick Alt, a "cataphile" who has published a book on urban underground exploration, said there were "a dozen more where that one came from".

Links from the past week

2004-09-06T21:45:00.000-07:00

The beach as a miracle of self-organised and emergent behavior (Prospect Magazine) - and guess where the whole idea of going to the beach originated? Not in some sunny clime, as you might expect! Although avid readers of Enid Blyton might be able to hazard a guess!

Miracle on Probability Street (Scientific American) - on the laws of large numbers: "miracles" happen much more frequently than you think - a one-in-a-million event occurs 295 times per day in America, and in the course of a normal person's life, miracles should happen at a rate of one per month. This is actually a review of Georges Charpak and Henri Broch's Debunked! (I have the French edition, Devenez sorciers, devenez savants and highly recommend it).

An informative piece on Language Log about how computer-assisted transcription is done - this is used for closed-captioning and other purposes.

Hearing colours, eating sounds: two half-hour programmes about synaesthesia from BBC Radio 4 . As I was listening to these programmes, it struck me that the links between, for example, the senses of sight and of sound in some random homo sapiens could have given rise to the first proto-language and given them the idea. And of course, someone has already come up with this idea - it's mentioned towards the last bit of the second programme. I wonder if any other animals experience synaesthetic effects?

Mosque names in Singapore

2004-09-06T07:06:00.000-07:00

One last thing for the night. I've noticed something about the transliterated names of mosques here: they transliterate some post-velar consonants such as /ʔ/ (glottal stop) and /ʕ/ (voiced pharyngeal fricative) as . The relevant examples are: where replaces the glottal stop hamza, and where replaces the pharyngeal fricative 'ain. I suppose it makes sense: /k/ is the nearest English/Malay consonant to these two, excepting perhaps /h/ for /ʕ/. Just a little linguistically-related tidbit.

El cheapo in the bookshop

2004-09-06T06:47:00.000-07:00

Well, our entire national library system may have fewer books than a university library in a small city in upstate New York, but one good thing about the local book scene: we get plenty of cheap international textbook editions! These are usually paperback and printed on cheaper paper (though not necessarily, since I got Kandel et al's Principles of Neural Science in what seems to be exactly the same edition that's sold in the U.S. for about half the price). The other day I got Russell and Norvig's Artificial Intelligence for about 1/5 the U.S. price - this was a paperback edition, but doesn't look to be inferior quality paper.

And today, I found the strangest thing: linguistics textbooks by a variety of publishers re-published by a Chinese publisher (Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press) - again, in paperback and this time with cheap paper. I got The Handbook of Contemporary Syntactic Theory (Baltin & Collins, ed.) for S$32.35 which makes it about a quarter of the U.S. price. Funny thing is, the prefaces and introduction were all translated into Chinese (as well, of course, as being reproduced in English). The rest of the book remains the same, and with the same pagination.

Now, if only we had a few more decent used bookstores, where I wouldn't go in only to find books that I recognised from five years ago, and university libraries that I could stroll into without paying exorbitant membership fees, I would be happy.

Reflections on Old Entish

2004-09-05T19:53:00.000-07:00

I was just watching Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers the other day, quite by accident since I didn't know it was going to be shown on Singapore TV. One thing struck me as a bit odd: Old Entish, which raised two questions in my mind.

Firstly, if there's an Old Entish, that more or less seems to imply the existence of a New Entish. And if there's a New Entish, why are the Ents still using the old one? One reason I thought of was that Old Entish is something like Latin - no one speaks it as a first language any more, but it's the language to use when you're discussing diplomatic affairs and such-like. And I guess deciding whether or not to go to war against Saruman is a diplomatic affair. A second reason might be that the Ents from a very large geographic area were gathered for the Ent-moot (though this reason seems a little suspect since (1) the Ents converged very quickly, and (2) the Ents were supposed to be only found in Fangorn forest, which doesn't seem to cover a very wide geographic distance - not for the Ents, anyway), and so there may have been different dialects spoken among the Ents, and the only language that would be mutually intelligible to them all was Old Entish. Alternatively, it was more or less agreed-upon that in such situations, Old Entish would be the language adopted. I suppose this is more or less akin to the diglossic situation of Arabic - though no one would call "Modern Standard Arabic" anything like "Old Arabic". Probably the first reason is more reasonable.

A second question that Old Entish raised was as follows: are there significant differences in human languages in terms of the amount of time used to say something? OK, so there're languages like Hawaiian that have a small phonemic inventory and therefore have words many syllables long - but is there a corresponding reduction in the length of a syllable, since with a smaller set of possible syllables to choose from, careful enunciation of every syllable is not required?

Let me put it another way. Assume that we have a certain sentence translated into languages A and B. The sentences mean exactly the same thing in languages A and B - let's not bother for the moment about cultural differences in the way languages express different concepts - nothing like schadenfreude, no metaphors, not even any compound tense and aspect or whatever, just simple sentences like, oh, I don't know, "John kicked the dog". Presumably, these sentences convey the same amount of information. Taking this amount of information (how is it to be quantified?) and dividing it by the amount of time needed to communicate these sentences, and averaging this over a whole bunch of random sentences gives you the efficiency of the language. You'll also need to figure out what the average syllables/second rate is for the language, I suppose. Ultimately, my question boils down to this: is any one language significantly more efficient than another in communicating concepts? It seems to me that Old Entish is a singularly inefficient method of communication.

Stop press! : a couple of articles I've just found relating to the discussion above:

Peter Roach. 1998. "Some languages are spoken more quickly than others". In L. Bauer and P. Trudgill (eds.) Language Myths. London: Penguin. pp 150 - 8.

Plus, a surprisingly detailed "definition" of Ents, including a discursus on Old and "New" Entish, from wordIQ. Turns out "New" Entish is mixed language, with Quenya vocabulary (and presumably, morphology and phonology) but with Old Entish grammar, so it took just about as long to say anything as in Old Entish.

Things linguists (well, some of them) often forget

2004-08-30T06:39:00.000-07:00

Seems to me that linguistics today has too many frameworks, too many ways of looking at things. When there are as diverse ways of looking at language as Government and Binding, Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar and the Minimalist Program - well, they can't all be right. I think linguists really have to go back to the biology and the neuroscience and say, what really is "natural" and what really is "real"? Are trees natural? Is movement real?

Here are some things that I think linguists all know about but tend to overlook when they're constructing theories:

- Language isn't perfect. It's riddled with errors. People quite often don't finish sentences, for example. Do we nevertheless understand them because we can fill in the blanks from context, or is it because you don't need all the words to understand language?

- The distinction between competence and performance: often noted, but do any of the different frameworks explain or in any way provide for this distinction? Computational grammars (I think, I haven't done nearly enough work on them to know for sure) find parsing harder than generating because over-generation is often the result. But most people can't even find one way of saying what they want, not several (wrong) ways to say what they want. Is this merely a problem of word choice, or does syntax play a part?

- We begin parsing even before we come to the end of a sentence, whether we're listening or reading. The most dramatic proof for this probably comes from garden-path sentences like The horse raced past the barn fell. It seems to me that most computational grammars take only the whole sentence and then parse it. Is any provision made for this undeniable fact of language? If so, what predisposes us to thinking that raced past the barn is the predicate of the sentence and not a reduced relative clause? There must be some sort of minimality effect going on here. I think that insights from computational neuroscience, particularly in the field of vision, may come in useful here.

- A lot of these frameworks are way too powerful. I was working in LFG this summer, and you could do just about anything with it just by adding another feature. Is such power really a good thing? Is there a cap on the number of features a language should have? A big problem is that we have no idea where the boundaries lies between what's unattested and what's impossible. I know there's been some work done in phonotactics on this, but what of syntax? Is there any way to design an experiment to test the boundary in the realm of syntax? Good thing to think about.

Still more about libraries

2004-08-28T07:42:00.000-07:00

Then, if all your friends build their own library catalogues, you can search each others' catalogues to see whether they have books that you want! (Of course, they'd have to be pretty good friends - as you can tell, I'm very particular about people seeing what books I have, since they're pretty personal things. You can tell a person by their friends, and by their books too.)

Interesting links from the past week

2004-08-26T21:19:00.000-07:00

How linguists prove that all odds are prime (David Mortensen's website) - really, really hilarious.

Cold fusion back from the dead? (IEEE Spectrum, via Slashdot) Scientists are re-evaluating the long-held and entrenched view that cold fusion is junk science, with more and more confirmations rolling in of the Fleischmann-Pons effect.

ET should write, not call (CNN) Basically, broadcasting radio messages all over the galaxy is expensive; hard-copy is better, especially for long messages.

Humans context-free, monkeys finite-state? Apparently not. (Language Log) - earlier this year, Hauser and Fitch claimed that an experiment they had run showed that monkeys could not master grammars generated at the phrase-structure level, only a finite-state level. Now there's a new paper by Perruchet and Rey that rebuts this claim.

WordCount - tracking the way we use language. An innovative display of the Zipfian relationship between frequency and rank in the English language.

How conservatives use language to dominate politics (UC Berkeley News) - an interview with linguist George Lakoff. Really, truly worth a read. Update: a follow-up interview, with more recent news.

Incidentally... (more about libraries)

2004-08-26T19:49:00.000-07:00

I chanced upon the LibraryLookUp site while looking for tools (preferably free) with which to catalogue my own modest library. The idea I had was to type in, or possibly scan in (buying some cheap barcode scanner) the ISBNs of the books I have. Presumably I could then use some sort of lookup service to get the full information for those books (including edition information). But these lookup services all seem to cost money, which seems slightly bizarre.

The alternative idea, which I will explore if I have the time, is to write some code with which to look up the book information via a site like Amazon. Then you can look up all the product information, and also (presumably) get access to reviews and even content, using Amazon's Look/Search Inside the Book system. Maybe this can be done using the Amazon API. (Some interesting applications that use the Amazon API service.)

It seems to me that a really interesting application that Amazon might want to enable is for people to easily build their own library catalogues within the Amazon environment. Then you could easily search within your own catalogue. The only issue that I can see is privacy - do you want Amazon to know all the books that you have? Then again, they already know about quite a few of the books that I have, some of which I bought from them, and the others of which I told them I had through the recommendation system, in order to get them to stop recommending me books I already have. And millions of people already tell Amazon what they read when they purchase and review books on the site.

And then again, how many people actually have big enough collections that they want to make a formal catalogue of? I do, but how many other people do? Probably not many (when I hear about things like how the value of one's property decreases with an increasing number of bookshelves (couldn't find information about this on the internet, heard it more than a year ago on one of those let-us-help-you-sell-your-house type of home improvement shows. May be untrue for all I know.). And then, I suppose, there may be people like Lord Emsworth, creation of the immortal P.G. Wodehouse:

Lord Emsworth - "Catalogue the library? What does it want cataloguing for?"
Lady Constance - "It has not been done since the year 1885."
Lord Emsworth - "Well, and look how splendidly we've got along without it."

(From Leave It To Psmith).

Bookmarklet for the National Library of Singapore (failed)

2004-08-26T19:36:00.000-07:00

How sad. I recently happened upon the concept of the bookmarklet, and was especially intrigued by this particular application of them, called LibraryLookUp: a one-click hop from investigating a book on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or any website that contains the ISBN of a book in the URL, to the book's lookup page on your local library website. So, if you chance upon a book on Amazon, say, that you find interesting, you can look it up in your local library to see if it's available - with just one click. Stupendous!

The service supports any library website in which you can access the book's lookup page via a URL that also contains the ISBN of the book. So, naturally, I wanted to apply this to my local library system, the National Library of Singapore (catalogue), which uses the CARLweb system. Unfortunately, poking around for hours (well, all right, minutes), I couldn't find any magic way of accessing a book's lookup page via a URL that contains the ISBN of a book - even by looking up a book via ISBN. So it appears that CARLweb can't be supported by this application, which is a tragedy indeed. All I can do is to look the book up on something like the National University of Singapore's library catalogue, which doesn't do me much good, since they require membership for entry (something that I have a MAJOR ISSUE with). Sigh.

How many people do you need to develop a language?

2004-08-09T19:02:00.000-07:00

Here's an interesting question that came to me one night while I was lying awake: how many people do you need to develop a language? By "develop" I mean to really create it from scratch, the way the children who developed Nicaraguan Sign Language might have done, not just learn a fully-fledged language from their families.

The standard accounts of the development of NSL all start of by saying that before the Sandinista Revolution, deaf children in Nicaragua were isolated and never developed any system of communication sophisticated enough to be called a language. It was only when they came together in a deaf school that they began to sign with each other in what presumably could be called a pidgin, which quickly developed into a full-blown language.

So my question is - what is the threshold number before one becomes able to develop a language from scratch? (Call this x.) What about from an incomplete system of communication such as a pidgin?

A related topic that I was recently reading about in Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point is that brain size (specifically, the size of the neocortex, the specifically mammalian area of the brain) is correlated with social group size. The bigger the neocortex, the bigger the average size of a mammal's social group. (The optimal size for human social groups is 150, extrapolating from the data for other mammals - and there's some fascinating evidence to back this up.) Anyway, assuming (I'm not sure) that humans' social group size is larger than that of just about all other mammals (excepting dolphins, probably), what if it so happens that our brains are just over the threshold x?

Of course, this is pure speculation, and it doesn't entirely explain why great apes would still be unable to learn language. (This last statement, of course, is in itself a contentious issue.)

Pseudo-pun

2004-08-09T10:39:00.000-07:00

Hmm, I just realised that I could call this blog "Corpus Linguistics", a pseudo-pun on my nom de plume. Tee hee hee.

Maps of the London tube

2004-08-06T17:22:00.000-07:00

- The official Underground tube maps from Transport for London.
- History of the Tube map (TFL). Don't forget to check out the Flash presentation showing the 1933 map morphing into the present-day one.
- The geographically correct Tube map (very, very large). (Via London Underground, which is in itself a hilarious and highly recommended site.)
- Compare subway systems of the world (including the Tube), presented at the same scale.
- Tube Walklines, showing you when it's quicker to walk between stations than to take the Tube. Remember the famous example in Bill Bryson's Notes from a small island, Bank and Mansion House, which are 200 yards apart but require travelling two lines and six stations to get from one to the other.
- A couple of maps of the Tube, translated into (fake) German and (real) German (via Boing Boing)
- Map of the projected London Underground in 2016, with plenty of new lines.

And, in a new discovery, the following site is probably THE directory for maps of the London underground: Mapper's Delight: the London Underground diagrams. Unfortunately they don't have a link to any track maps, which I'm looking for, and that I KNOW exist.

Fine example of metathesis spotted in the wild

2004-08-06T11:33:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I was listening to a talk on computational vision techniques. The speaker consistently pronounced "daguerrotypes" as "derogatypes" /də.ɹɔ.gə.taɪps/ - effectively transposing /g/ and /r/, and also changing the vowel pattern. It seems to me pretty clear that he was doing this on analogy to the word "derogatory", since the quality of the two vowels in "derog" was exactly the same as the first two vowels in his pronunciation, which in my mind boosts Elizabeth Hume's theory that metathesis errors serve to make rarer sound sequences conform to more often-attested sound sequences.

Which gets me to thinking - this would seem to mean that theories of phonology have, in some way, to take the corpus of sound sequences into effect, which at present they don't seem to. This is a topic that I'd really like to know more about.

By the way, the IPA in this message was input using the new service Charwrite from Emeld, which seems really useful. All you have to type in is a letter that vaguely resembles the IPA character you want, for example, if you want <ə>, then right-click on the field to get a list of characters with similar shapes, and then select the right one. Good if you're working on a computer (like this one) that doesn't have IPA fonts installed, and if you just want to type in a really quick word and don't fancy hunting around in Microsoft Word or your LaTeX guide. (I discovered CharWrite through the Language Log, by the way.)

Links for 6 August

2004-08-06T11:29:00.000-07:00

Fool's World Map - absolutely hilarious, and very apt (from BoingBoing).
38 Dishonest Rhetorical Tricks - see which ones you've been a victim of (from BoingBoing).
Booktastic - a new game for booklovers (from BookBrowse)
An March 1, 2003 article from the Japan Times about the possibility of there being a secret underground city under Tokyo.

Some often-overlooked uses of linguistics - 2

2004-08-05T19:11:00.000-07:00

There's a second skill that linguists get a lot of training in too, as I found when I was writing my thesis. That skill is the use of very indirect evidence to build up argumentation. The truth of the matter is that the facts of language are complex, and their "deep" representation is still pretty much unknown. Take the following sentence (from Hungarian):

Tetsz-em a főnök-nek.
please-I the boss-DAT
lit. "I please to the boss."
i.e. "I please the boss." / "The boss likes me."

On the face of it, this sentence has the following grammatical relations:

1 P 3
I please the boss.

where P=predicate, 1=subject, 2=direct object, 3=indirect object.

But I argue in my thesis on Hungarian syntax that this in fact has a deeper layer of derivation, namely:

2 P 1
2 P 3
1 P 3
I please the boss.

Unfortunately, Hungarian has no passive (it uses impersonals), so there is no marker of 2-1 advancement, neither is there any 1-3 demotion marker. So how can one argue for the increased layers of complexity, which is, after all, contrary to principles such as Occam's razor?

My argument stems from what seems on the surface to be a completely unrelated phenomenon, which is a case hierarchy for binding relations. What this means is that when you have a reflexive, which by Principle A of Binding Theory must refer back to the an antecedent within the same binding domain, the reflexive must be lower than the antecedent in the following case hierarchy:

Nominative > Accusative, Dative > Instrumental etc.

So you can have "John pinched himself", not "Himself pinched John", for example. This is more significant for Hungarian than for English since it has a fairly free word order. Now, apply this case hierarchy to the surface form of our Hungarian sentence. Since "I" is in nominative case, and "the boss" is in dative case, "I" is higher in the case hierarchy than "the boss". Replacing "the boss" with "himself" and "I" with "John", we predict that you can say "John-NOM pleases (to) himself-DAT" and not "Himself-NOM pleases to John-DAT" or "John-DAT himself-NOM pleases":

Prediction:
*Jánosnak önmaga tetszik (* indicates the predicted ungrammaticality)
John-DAT himself-NOM pleases
lit. "to John, himself pleases"

János önmagának tetszik
John himself-DAT pleases
lit. "John to himself pleases"

However, about 2/3 of my Hungarian informants accepted the first sentence (up to variation in word order). So, conclusion: either the case hierarchy is wrong, OR the case hierarchy must be able to apply to a different layer of derivation. If the case hierarchy can apply at the initial tier for (2), in which "I" stood in the 1 relation (subject) and "myself" stood in the 2 relation (direct object), then we get the correct predictions.

I know that there are probably good counter-arguments for this, but I was pleased at being able to come up with it on my own, because it involved the creative use of some pretty indirect evidence (even if I do say so myself).

Anyway, there's my plug for linguistics as a way to equip yourself with some valuable life skills.

Some often-overlooked uses of linguistics - 1

2004-08-05T17:33:00.000-07:00

Upon telling people that I study linguistics, I almost invariably get the response, "Cool! ...What is linguistics??" Linguistics is sufficiently unknown as an academic discipline that many linguistics departments actually put up a little introductory note on "what is linguistics". Aside from any practical or scientific applications of the study of linguistics, though, there are some very useful personal skills to be derived from the study of linguistics.

Firstly, anyone studying syntax and semantics will quickly encounter the concepts of ambiguity (how many ways can you read "Time flies like an arrow"?) and presupposition, and will come out of these classes much better-equipped to spot them. Which is an incredibly useful skill for keeping oneself informed. I'll talk a little bit more about presupposition, because I find it a lot more interesting.

Consider a scenario in which you and your companion see two sleeping dogs, that look more or less identical, and with which you have no prior acquaintance. Saying "the dogs are sleeping" will get you a nod in response. So will "the two dogs are sleeping". What about "the dog is sleeping"? You'll probably get a weird look and the question, "Which dog?" Your friend will assume that one of the dogs is more contextually-relevant than the other for you for some reason, or perhaps that you're referring to a completely different dog altogether - but again, you'll first have had to establish the context in which that different dog was relevant. Now, suppose you said something like "the three dogs are sleeping". Your friend will probably think that you can't count. Because if you say "the X" in a statement in which you're not overtly negating the existence of X (i.e. "the X doesn't exist"), you are basically presupposing that there is one and only one contextually-relevant X, before making a statement about that X. (You can extrapolate this to "the Xes" and "the N Xes" quite easily.)

Presupposition is not something that only alert linguists can spot. All of us derive presuppositional inferences from statements such as "the X". It's just that a lot of people do this subconsciously, not consciously. It's only when the presupposition is exceptional in some way (very negative, for example) that we sit up and take notice, as in the famous question "Do you still beat your wife?" You can't answer "yes" or "no" to that without implicating yourself in a crime of abuse. You have to actively dispute the presupposition by saying, "I've never beaten my wife, and I don't beat her now!'

All definite determiners, including possessors, create this presuppositional inference. When George W. Bush refers to "Saddam's weapons of mass destruction" in a non-negative context, he is unconsciously creating the inference that those weapons of mass destruction exist. I suspect that if you look at his speeches, even the recent ones in which he seeks to distance himself from the flawed intelligence that led to the Iraq war, you'll find that he still says phrases like "the WMDs" and "Iraq's WMDs". (If I find the time to look up his speeches, and find evidence of this, I'll be sure to post it.)

Whew! That was a long spiel about presupposition. I'll write about the second skill in the next post.

Statement of purpose

2004-08-05T17:11:00.000-07:00

I anticipate this blog being a collection of ideas, thoughts and notes, mostly about linguistics and cognitive science, but also on books, digital libraries and publishing, mathematics (especially cryptography and graph theory), research, public transportation, etc., etc. As you can tell, I have a fairly eclectic set of interests, and see myself as a bridge between typical left-hemisphere and right-hemisphere interests.

Ironically, I don't really subscribe too much to the strict left-brain/right-brain division. Most behaviours, especially something like language, are so incredibly complex that I think they must activate parts of both hemispheres. So you can't say that language is a left-brain phenomenon, because it harnesses the powers of the right-brain too. But anyway, I'm only just embarking on my study of neuroscience, so I'll not harp on too much more about things I don't know about here.