Formerly known as the Widmann Blog
Phyllis and I were recently discussing whether we should switch from T-Mobile to another mobile phone provider given that their signal is fairly weak here in our house.
Once we realised that we didn’t know of any provider with better coverage, Phyllis got the bright idea to google for a mobile phone mast finder, and she swiftly found this site:
Sadly, it turns out that no company has any masts nearer our house than T-Mobile, so I guess they’ll get to live a little longer.
The first writing systems basically had a character for each word; then syllabic writing systems were invented, in which each character corresponds to a syllable; and finally alphabetic writing was invented, where each character more or less corresponds to a phoneme.
Wouldn’t it be logical to continue the development to achieve a writing system having one character for each distinctive feature in the phonological system?
To the best of my knowledge, only Tolkien’s Tengwar has really explored this route (see the examples on the left), but it never seems to have got any further.
This is a shame, because such a writing system would have very desirable properties.
For instance, many languages only allow homorganic nasals in front of stops (i.e., only /mp, nt, ?k/ and not */mk, np, ?t/ etc.); however, in an alphabetic writing system one has to choose a symbol, such as ‘n’ or ‘m’, because there is no symbol for a nasal stop that does not have a defined place of articulation (occasionally I’ve seen /N/ used for this, but that doesn’t save any ink). Imagine how wonderful it would be if we could just writing the symbol for ‘nasal’ and leave out any symbol for the place of articulation.
Similarly, when in Spanish [d] and [ð] are variants of one phoneme, it would be great if we could just denote it with the symbols for ‘dental/alveolar’, ‘voiced’ and perhaps ‘non-nasal’. On the right, I’ve outlined how this could potentially work.
This is just a rough outline. There are several problems with my proposal, e.g., the signs for ‘nasal’ and ‘fricative’ look the same if the place of articulation is removed, and there’s no obvious way to write ‘non-nasal’.
However, I’m sure these issues would be relatively simple to resolve.
It might be that such a writing system would never catch on as the everyday writing system of any language, but it could perhaps replace IPA as the preferred system for phonemic transcriptions.
For somebody who’s not colourblind, it can be a bit hard to understand how the world looks if you are.
However, I’ve just discovered there are now sites that can help.
For instance, here is the same photo of Anna processed in three different ways by Colour Blindness Simulator:
From left to right, that’s the original, then the way it’s seen by people with protanopia, then deuteranopia, and finally tritanopia.
This is of course really useful if you’re designing user interfaces so that you don’t unintentionally create designs that are confusing or unreadable to colourblind people.
Jeg brugte vores nylige ferie i Keith på at læse en bog, min gamle ven Sebastian havde anbefalet: Eine exklusive Liebe af hans kusine Johanna Adorján (den engelske oversættelse hedder “An Exclusive Love
Johanna har i en årrække arbejdet som journalist, og bogen er da også på mange måder en journalistisk reportage blandet op med lidt fiktion.
Bogen handler om deres ungarskfødte bedsteforældres kollektive selvmord, der fandt sted i København, da hun var 20 år gammel, og om hendes forsøg på forstå, hvem bedsteforældrene var, og hvorfor de valgte at ende deres dage sammen.
Man mærker, at deres selvmord for de efterladte må have virket uforståeligt, egoistisk og ukærligt. Johanna synes dog i løbet af bogen at begynde at forstå hvorfor, og måske næsten af acceptere det.
Deres død mindede mig i øvrigt om Romeo og Julie, der i en ungdomsudgave, jeg var med til at opføre som spejder, sluttede med disse linier: “Fyld koppen op til bredfuldt mål / vi begge dør med glæde, skål!”
Man hører ofte, at forældre skal gentage det, deres baby siger, når den pludrer.
Jeg formoder, den lingvistiske grund til dette er at hjælpe barnet med at opbygge det fonologiske system. (Jeg gik aldrig ret meget op i børnesprogstilegnelse, da jeg studerede lingvistik, så dette er gætværk fra min side.)
Men hvis man er fonetiker og i stand til at gentage vilkårlige sproglyde, gør man så sit spædbarn en bjørnetjeneste?
For eksempel siger babyen måske /ni n? ne? | ne ne? n?? | n? n?? næ? | næ næ? na/, og den danske forælder uden fonetisk træning hører og gentager det som /ni ni ne | ne n? n? | n? næ næ | næ na na/, den engelske som /ni? n? ne? | ne? n? n? | n? n? n? | næ næ næ/, og den spanske som /ni ni ni | ne ne ne | ne ne ne | na na na/, hvorimod fonetikeren vil reproducere /ni n? ne? | ne ne? n?? | n? n?? næ? | næ næ? na/ eksakt.
På samme måde med konsonanter: Hvis babyen siger /ba b?a b?a pa p?a/, vil den danske forælder høre og gentage /b?a b?a b??a b?a b??a/ (aspiration er vigtigst), den spanske /ba pa ba pa pa/ (stemthed er vigtigst), og den georgiske /ba p?a ba p?a p?a/ (stemthed og aspiration er begge vigtige), hvorimod fonetikeren igen trofast kopierer babyens produktion: /ba b?a b?a pa p?a/.
Fonetikeren hjælper dermed ikke babyen med at opbygge fonemsystemet, så den lærer formentlig derfor at tale senere.
Dette er teorien, men holder det i praksis? Taler fonetikeres børn senere end andre?
Last year, I was debating how to cut England into two parts in order to prevent England from dominating the UK completely. (For some bizarre reason, this idea seemed to upset a few Englishmen – just read the comments to that posting!)
I’ve now found a cartogram of the UK (the map on the left) that makes it much easier to pick the right cut.
Basically, large squares correspond to populous areas, and dense black lines correspond to empty parts of the country. It follows from this that the obvious division of England is by separating Greater London from the rest (the border would run from The Wash in the east to somewhere west of Bournemouth in the south), given that one could create a border running almost entirely through sparsely populated countryside. (This is the Greater London solution in my blog posting mentioned above.)
I’ve no doubt this won’t go down well in England, but as I’ve discussed before, an independent London is the way forward.
Driving through the Highlands, where the roads at this point in the democratic cycle are adorned with yellow election posters for the SNP and the Liberal Democrats, made me think about how the UK to a large extent has regional two-party systems.
Basically, although many political parties that have a chance of winning at least a few seats somewhere in the UK, there are not many places where more than two of them have a real chance of getting elected.
In most places, two parties dominate: Labour and SNP in most of Greater Glasgow, SNP and LibDems in the Highlands, Tories and LibDems in the southern part of England, etc.
This is quite different from countries that use some form of proportional representation and where you’d expect to find posters for most parties everywhere, although not necessarily with the same relative frequency everywhere.
The effect on politics is interesting. In countries with proportional representation the parties have to distance themselves from all parties at the same time, but in the UK the LibDems have to be the anti-Tory party in one place, the anti-Labour party in another, and the anti-SNP party in yet another.
This makes it really hard to create coalitions, because the coalition partner will be regarded very differently in different parts of the country.
Of course you get the same effect to a certain extent in countries with proportional representation: If a centrist party enters a right-wing coalition, it will hæmorrhage left-wing supporters, and vice versa. However, this effect will happen nationally. In the UK, it’s like the centrist party’s right-wing supporters are all in one half of the country, and all the left-wing ones are in the other half.
Just another reason to get rid of FPTP!
