Today is the 20th anniversary of the Berlin Wall being opened up, and people were talking about it on the radio. I started thinking.

I remember in the sixth grade, everyone in my class got a country to do a report on. Lucky me, I got East Germany. I was frustrated for weeks because I could find all sorts of information about West Germany, but not enough information on East Germany to fill a sixth-grade report.

I even went to my teacher to see if I could do West Germany instead.

No. East Germany.

I think she did it because I was the smartest and most even-tempered kid in her class. No one else would have been able to handle that shit!

But I did it, I did it well enough, scraping together all sorts of random facts I pulled out of every single encyclopedia I could find in the greater Carson City metro area (ha ha). I think it may have even been a 1/2 page shorter than the minimum, but JEEZ!

And not even a year later, the Wall comes down, and what's my thought? "OH THANK GOODNESS no one will ever have to write a report on East Germany again!"

In a comment, maeveenroute asked two questions. First, this one:
"What feature would (or did, in your story) make rests qualitatively different?"

Here's an edited excerpt from "Honor Is Golden" [Analog, May 2004] where Oka -- one of the two USCOL linguists sent to analyze the Goldens' language -- is explaining things to the U.S. Senate, in a hearing:

=====
The Senator closest to her frowned, and rubbed at his forehead with the palm of his hand.
“I don’t get it, Professor,” he said, sounding cross. “All those sounds you’re talking about -- dishes breaking, cats meowing, and so on -- we have those sounds on Earth, right? But we know they’re just noises. How come it doesn’t work that way in -- what did you call it? Oh, yeah -- in Moth. How come it doesn’t work that way in Moth? How could it not work that way? I can’t imagine such a thing!”
“That’s exactly the point,” Oka said. “Human beings are hard-wired for human languages. We’re designed neurologically to recognize only certain things and combinations of things as languages, and we’re not able to imagine anything else qualifying. We have a whole universe of sounds around us, just as you say. The first thing we do, faced with all that data, is divide sounds into language and non-language. The next thing we do is divide the sounds that are language into vowels and consonants, and we can’t imagine there being something else that would be part of language. For the Goldens there is something else... that’s part of language in the same way that vowels and consonants are. There may be only one of those alien language-parts or there may be more than one; we have no way of knowing. ... Whatever they are, our brains are able to make the right division between language and nonlanguage -- presumably the reason we can do that much is because Moth is humanoid -- but that’s as far as we can go. Faced with all the sounds that are language on Golden, we can identify the vowels and the consonants, but we’re hopelessly lost with the others. Our brains keep trying, but they can’t do it, they just flounder around. Fortunately, I finally realized that that didn’t matter.”
A Senator leaned forward and opened his mouth to speak, but Oka raised her hand to stop him.
“Hang on just one minute, please, Senator,” she said. “I’m almost finished. ... You know how in music, when part of the melody is a silence of a certain size and shape, you use a symbol called a ‘rest’ to write that down? I was looking at a piece of music all full of rests, and I suddenly realized that we could handle the sequences of Moth that way. The other parts of the words are unquestionably stable, it’s only those non-vowel/non-consonant segments that human beings perceive as sometimes one thing, sometimes another. So I had the computer replace every last damned one of the mystery sounds with a pound sign -- there wasn’t a rest symbol on my keyboard -- and transcribe all the rest. ...”
“But if you do it that way,” asked the Senator she had put on hold before, “then how can you pronounce the words?”
“We can’t,” she said. “But it doesn’t matter. We’ll never be able to speak Moth -- it has sounds in it that aren’t possible as part of language for human beings, and we’ll never be able to learn them. But we can use the language to communicate, all the same. You wear your computer, you see, in the usual way, and the computer transcribes Moth as it’s spoken and prints it out for you. ... The same way native speakers of English can easily read written English that has misspellings in it or has coffee spilled on it, native speakers of Moth can read their own language even when it’s full of rests -- full of pound signs. It’s not elegant, and it’s not perfect, but it works.”
=====

The second question from maeveenroute was:
"What was the reviewer's problem with your rest phoneme? I mean, I just raised a point of clarification, but I can't think of anything serious enough to merit mention in a review, much less any kind of slamming."

I don't know the answer to that question because what the reviewer said was just "And Elgin's solution is rests! Well..... duh!" I'm an old lady, but I do know what that means. I'm sorry I can't give you a link to the review; it didn't strike me as something I needed to keep track of.

shlomarosenberg passed away this morning. I only got to meet him in person once, but I'll never forget it. I was so hoping to get a chance to see him again. Not in this life, I guess. Peaceful rest, Shloma. Afolabi, ibae bae tonu. Baruch Hashem. I miss you.

@TehranBureau Petition to Free Majid Zamani http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/tehranbureau/2009/11/a-letter-to-sadegh-larijani.html

Estou a ler a edição de Novembro da revista Ler. Logo nas primeiras páginas há dois artigos de que gostei muito. Uma lista, elaborada pela Joana Amaral Dias, das 10 personagens literárias feministas mais inspitadoras, pela ordem, como ela diz, por que se sentaram no sofá. A lista é deliciosa porque é simples, natural, mas pouco óbvia, inteligente, e porque as justificações fazem muito sentido. É a lista que eu gostaria de fazer. A habitual crónica de José Eduardo Agualusa, O Lugar do Morto, desta vez é sobre Saint-Exupéry e as Misses. É um pedaço de humor do mais sarcástico que se possa imaginar, e faz tremer qualquer devoção ao Principezinho.

Para além destes artigos, já li a entrevista ao Richard Zimler e um conjunto de artigos muito interessantes sobre Jorge de Sena. Assim que me lembre, ainda tenho para ler um outro sobre Vinicius de Moraes. É isso, o número da Ler deste mês é imperdível.

Just brought the total number of books catalogued on my Library Thing on-line database to more than 1225 books. These were books that I have had for a while but were hiding in a tall dining room bookcase which was removed yesterday and replaced with a new Maple finish bookcase with an extra shelf. danceswithfish says the new bookcase brings more light into the dining room: a happy accident as that was not the reason for changing out bookcases.

( switching out bookcases... )

BRAIN = SURVIVAL MODE.

I am guilty of having done a post here that could only have been understood by cybertelepaths. I had all the backstory for my new novel in my head, I had all my linguistics-stuff in my head, so I just went blithely along with that post as if you [youall] were similarly encumbered. I am greatly blessed that houseboatonstyx came to my rescue with a comment, and -- with that resource in hand -- I am going to do my best to straighten up the mess I made. Here's the first paragraph of the comment:

"If we're looking for sounds that would be PERCEIVED as something other than vowels or consonsonants or something along that continuum -- that's an issue about the perceivers, isn't it? If they've been trained that to be meaningful, a sound must be classified as v, c, or in between -- then won't anything that might be meaningful be stuck into one of those categories, whether it physiologically fits the physiological definition or not?"

Yes. Terran linguists listening to the speech of native speakers of an ET language are going to expect to hear vowels and consonants because that's what they've been trained to hear, and are going to sort the sounds they hear into those two categories for that reason. Only after the U.S. Corps of Linguists (USCOL) had accumulated a large database of ET sound-based languages that included vowels, consonants, and "something else" would it be possible to train them to identify and analyze that "something else." And my conviction is that that would take a very long time to happen.

And here's the next paragraph of the comment:

"Are we looking for sounds from the vocal tract that would be so different physiologically/phonetically that they COULD NOT be fitted into those v-c categories, even by a sort of legal fiction? But would somehow be clearly meaningful so that they COULD NOT simply be disregarded or somehow marginalized?"

Yes again. My Brethandi ETs -- because their anatomy is very different from the anatomy of the Terran cattle they so closely resemble to the casual eye -- are able to speak in a fashion comparable to Terran speech, although they of course have distinctive accents. [I knew that. So I did a cognitive SHAZAM-leap and took it for granted that you would know it too. Sheesh.] And my question was serious. Supposing one or more of the Brethandi languages was composed of three meaningful classes of sounds -- vowels, consonants, and something else -- then what, I wanted to know, could that something else possibly be?

One possibility turned up in a comment from kelsied:
"Consonants, vowels, and rests. As in music. The rhythmic and intentional interruption of consonants and vowels to modify their meaning."

That option -- musical rests -- is the one I used in my USCOL story "Honor Is Golden," published in Analog. [Not online anywhere, so far as I know.] It worked, to my satisfaction and my editor's, although I got slammed for it in a review. My linguists weren't able to isolate the rest-phonemes or work with them, but they were able to establish communication. Which was their primary goal.

I hope this clarifies things just a tad. If it doesn't, let me know and I'll try again.

Мне тут прислали песню, которая очень известна, но на французском.
А вот на испанском я её никогда не слышала. А вы?
Me han enviado una cancion que es muy conocida (mundialmente conocida, diria yo), pero en Frances.
Pero nunca antes la habia escuchado en castellano.
Y vosotros?



Nathalie - Hermanos Arraigada

A friend today said "There is more and more darkness in the world today."

In one sense I agree: there is no shortage of problems and difficulties faced by life on this planet today.

However, to me darkness is the baseline. Sometimes more light is added, sometimes it is diminished but the darkness is always there. I tend not to think of it that much except to resist it and try to hold it back in favor of the light.

So this is what I do: Fight the darkness. Look for the light.

The second batch of your comments I want to tackle -- about a possible "third class of meaningful sounds" in an ET language -- is those that propose various kinds of noises. The noises described in your comments included percussives [sounds that could be made with drums, rattles, and the like]; crackling; clicks; whistles; burps and belches; teeth-clicks; farts; squeaks; squeals; and more.

Those of you who've complained that I didn't define my terms -- neither "vowel" nor "consonant" -- are absolutely right, and I apologize. For me, vowels are speech sounds that are produced without any obstruction of the flow of air through the vocal tract; consonants are speech sounds for which that flow of air is obstructed in some fashion. That of course means that the vowel/consonant distinction has to be a continuum, not an either/or binary split. As pgdudda has pointed out, the English liquids [L and R] and the English glides [Y and W and H] are neither strictly vowels nor strictly consonants; they fall in between the two, somewhere on the continuum.

My opinion -- and it's only that, an opinion, since I've never encountered an ET language -- is that all of the varieties of noises proposed in your comments would be perceived by Terrans, and by Terran linguists, as falling somewhere on the vowel/consonant continuum; that is, as either vowel-like or consonant-like. I don't believe they would perceive the noises as a separate, third class of meaningful speech sounds.

I could be wrong about this. For sure.

Hoje vinha a viajar de comboio e tive, acho que pela primeira vez, uma ideia para um romance. Claro que já me aconteceu muitas vezes ter ideias para histórias, mas foi a primeira vez, tanto quanto me lembro, que tive uma ideia tão completa, tão desenvolvida, com uma voz narrativa tão autonomizada e distinta. E audível: mal a ideia me surgiu, percebi logo com clareza que era uma coisa na qual eu estava interessado e que tinha pernas para andar. Claro que não a vou escrever, não tenho tempo nem, principalmente, disponibilidade mental, para me organizar e começar a escrevê-la. Mas mesmo assim fiquei contente. Sempre achei que nunca iria ser capaz de escrever um romance basicamente porque nunca tinha tido uma ideia para um, assim uma história que eu achasse que fazia sentido, e fazia falta, contá-la.

Claro que não vou aqui dizer do que se tratava, mas, até para fixar alguns detalhes importantes, registo que o tempo da narrativa seria um arco de dez anos, entre 1989 e 1999, e o romance teria três momentos. Começaria com uma espécie de epílogo feliz, depois teria uma enorme travessia no deserto, e terminava com uma redenção. Pronto, fica aqui anotado, pode ser que um dia ainda a venha a usar.

The first batch of your comments on my ET phonology question that I want to tackle is the batch that doesn't try to answer my question. I don't know whether it's because I didn't make myself clear, or because the question was perhaps read too quickly, or because the commenters just preferred not to color inside the lines. In any case...

My question was narrow and specific:
Suppose the ET language we're dealing with has three classes of meaningful sounds: vowels; consonants; and something else. What could the something else be?

Comments proposing that the something else could be colors, or smells, or the position of the speaker's face/ears/tail/fur -- something other than a class of meaningful sounds -- are answering a different question. It's an interesting question, and I thank you for the comments, but it's not the question that I asked.

Denims and Curls by The Chameleons

(a nearly impossible track to get! Lucky you if you've got it. Of course, I have it in its rarest form - the Tony Fletcher Walked on Water EP - on VINYL. Thankyouverymuch! /snark. :D)

Denims and curls
Is this all that you are
No I think there's something more
Behind that barricaded door
Are you hiding in a bedroom singing away
To someone elses tunes
Are you frightened by the forces
We've unleashed in all our passion
Those who see you
Never see
And those who hear you
Never hear
They're just the way they'll always be
You'd better run little boy
Run little girl

Sack cloth and curls
Is this all that you are
Is this all that others see
Are they blind as well as stupid
They can lock you away
Just for thinking out loud
And throw away the key
No-one's caring how you feel
Or what is or isn't real
This foolish world
Will hold you down
Screw your feet into the ground
But they can't take away the stars
Just like that night on the sands
I was there too
I held your hand

Where in the world is your inspiration
To say the things you're aching to say
Wherever that turns out to be
Go there this day
That's what my teacher said to me

You'd better run little boy
Run little girl

This foolish world will hold you down
Screw your feet into the ground
But they can't take away the stars
Just like that night on the sands
I'll be there too
I'll hold your hand

desafio. aprender a esperar. a não querer tudo no imediato.
desfrutar do percurso, até mais que do fim. dos percalços e das sensações.

as ilustrações são lindas. simples. cheias de doçura.
e este vai esperar nas mãos do J. até um dia ser entendido.

( tamb�m quero um )

 

In a recent post, I said:
"Suppose you encounter a language that has three basic classes of meaningful sounds: vowels, consonants -- and something else. The question then is: What could that 'something else' be?" Now I'm not quite sure what to do with the blogmonster I managed to create with that question.

One possibility is to take up each of your comments, one at a time, and respond in detail. That means finding a way to explain a great deal of basic information about phonetics and phonology, without resorting to LinguistSpeak, and without creating additional confusions that would tie us up in knots for weeks, maybe months, while I tried to straighten them out. This would take a very long time.

Another possibility is for me to sort the comments into classes of some kind and deal with them in batches, with all the same caveats attached.

Another possibility is to notice that you seem to have had a good time proposing answers to my question, to thank you for all your excellent comments, and then to just butt out and mind my own business.

Do you [youall] have a preference?