Metablog

Everyone would write using the IPA. No more standard spelling. Spelling would change along with pronunciation, and so vary by region and country. No more of this stupid kanji crap, or every other word being completely irregular and impossible to know how to pronounce without a dictionary. “Know”. “How”. QED.

Ehh. Maybe.

¡Aprender español! (Y no me digas que dije eso mal.) I’ve been learning dozens to hundreds of words a day, using Supermemo. So far I’m at around 3200 items, (where common words have many items for different senses and idioms,) and still have a long way to go. But I think I’m at the point now where I can start practicing actually using the Spanish. When I was learning it in school (I’ve had about three years of classes, all told) I was always so frustrated by having an extremely limited vocabulary that I never enjoyed using what I’d learned, and of course I couldn’t understand a damn thing any native speaker said anyway. But by learning gobs and gobs of vocabulary using this great program, I think I’ll be able to get past that point easily now.

Oh, and how could I forget to mention WordReference, whose neato lookup will tell you if the word is a conjugated form of a verb, has a conjugation reference, and a fairly complete inventory of idioms? Pretty neato.

By this point I can actually say quite a bit, and even hold non-trivial, if limited, conversations with other intermediate learners. But when it comes to understanding the language spoken by native speakers, I’m still mystified. I can maybe catch 10-15% of the meaning on average, even though I know 80% of the words being used. ¡Qúe coñazo! So I plan to start reading a lot of Spanish, starting maybe with El Blog del Capi, which uses a lot of good varied and colorful non-specialist language, and is occasionally funny. Then maybe go to a bookstore at some point and pick out an easy read in Spanish, like maybe a Harry Potter translation. (If the bookstores here have anything in Spanish, they’d have that, right?) Once I get to where I’m only coming across unfamiliar words once every few hundred words or so, then maybe I’ll be good enough to start listening? And I guess I should learn the subjunctive mood at some point. And the future tense. And imperfect, and conditional, and the perfect moods. Yeah.

Damn, it takes a hell of a lot of memorizing to learn a language.

BTW, why is it that 95% of the most active blogs at es.wordpress.com are porn or warez or otherwise complete fluff? Oh well, I guess English blogs aren’t any different, I just haven’t had to look at “most popular” lists in forever.

Anyway, look for this blog to become Spanish language only in the near future.

I discuss linguistics in an Unfogged comment thread, where I am graciously tolerated for my foolish, blinkered, and obtuse comments. You, on the other hand, might find them a bit more palatable. I start off trying to establish the inefficiency of linguistic diversity, but then much of the thread is me making the case that the relationship between phonemes and meaning, and phonemes and affect, is arbitrary. Sapir-Whorf is mentioned.

Somnolent depression. Also called “retarded depression”. I’ve never heard of these terms before. I wonder if they’re in clinical use, or if some pop psychology snuck into the article.

I’ve decided to learn shorthand. I’m going with a modified Gregg, Handywrite, that has more symbols to cover many vowel sounds and a couple consonant sounds missing from Gregg. It’s a phonetic system, not an alphabetic system, which means that there’s roughly one symbol per English phoneme (roughly, “sound”). Handywrite technically isn’t a shorthand, but a full phonemic writing system.

Basically, Handywrite is just a different way of writing normal text. It’s designed with the goal of speed—of having the simplest possible shape for each sound, and picked so that common sounds patterns are easy to write. I can only write about twenty or thirty words per minute with normal cursive writing, but with a shorthand system like Handywrite, I could get 80–100 words per minute, which is about the speed I type. This would make handwriting much more practical for me, making me able to comfortably take notes about things when I’m away from my computer, and much more easily take adequate notes in classes or meetings.

Shorthand systems look pretty wild written down. Here’s a sample, from the Handywrite page:

My handwriting is not that good. You may be surprised that the above images represent 24 words. They’re simpler than you’d expect based on the spelling of the word. I think part of it has to do with the spareness of the lines, and another part with all the extra letters that English uses to spell things that aren’t really needed. (One spelling reform proposal, Cut Spelng, achieves a much simpler spelling system solely by removing specific classes of redundancies and inconsistencies (with all other redundancies and inconsistencies being left in). Cut Spelng appears more spare and streamlined, like Gregg or Handywrite shorthand.

I think a lot of Anime series are pretty cool. I even think a few are really cool. And many Japanese movies are very enjoyable. But most Anime? Not so much.

Now, it’s not that the plots aren’t enjoyable, and the animation is generally really good. It’s simply that, for most series, the dubbing is just terrible. (Notable exceptions: most Miyazaki stuff, though even there there’s room for improvement.) Characters almost always have a monotonous cadence, like the translators are trying to fit too much English into each line of dialogue. The phrasing tends to be complex and awkward—stuff that probably sounds OK written on paper, but that sounds weird coming from people’s lips. The monotony is only intermittantly broken, by strange gutteral noises corresponding to some body language completely foreign and nonsensical to Americans.

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A quote that is often attributed to Ben Franklin goes something like this: “The definition of insanity is doing something over and over and expecting different results.”

Ben Franklin? Really? It’s kind of awkwardly phrased for a writer like him. The definition of insanity? Wow. Someone call the DSM committee.

And the phrase is pretty current. How sad. How cliche. And how inane.

Insanity can be many things, but expecting different results after doing the same action twice is not one of them. For instance, is it insane to keep asking your partner or roommate to pick up their socks when they forget? (Not if they’re willing to try to remember, and they just need to be reminded.) Is it insane to change an option in a program a second time, when the first time it didn’t seem to take effect? (No, programs are buggy and people make mistakes navigating through menus.)

Usually, people use it to condemn those who seem to be unwilling to pay attention to history and learn from it. There are so many better phrases to use for this. Please, please don’t use this one.

Many say that Lojban is an unambiguous language. This is true in many respects, and is probably more true for Lojban than for practically any other language. Lojban has an unambiguous phonology (when pronounced clearly and without error) and an unambiguous grammar (again, when used correctly). In its primary word list (both for gismu and cmavo), it avoids polysemy, the assignment of multiple meanings to a word.

Now, this lack of ambiguity, as far as it goes, makes for extremely fascinating discussions about “little words”, like “the” and “so” and “a”, and about the various basic mechanisms of language. But what it does not do is substantially decrease the occurrence of ambiguity in language as it’s actually used.

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While I really like the language Lojban and really wish there were three hundred hours in the day, it’s occurred to me recently that it should be possible to modify English to give it one of the advantages Lojban currently has over it, and let English still be pretty comprehensible. (A much more minor modification than, say, Loglish. In fact, Loglish isn’t really modified English so much as it is modified Lojban.)

The advantage I have in mind is the lackadaisical tense system. You don’t ever have to specify the tense of a verb (selbri) unless you so desire. If you don’t specify, the tense is left up to context, including especially the tense you specified for any previous selbri, but also allowing other considerations.

Now, there are a few problems with trying to port over such a system to English. For one, a whole bunch of idioms are tied more closely to their sounds than the tenses of the verbs in them, so changing the verb tense could make them hard to recognize. And then, there’s just a general weirdness about not having verb tenses in English. But it’s still worth a try, for sure. So what technical issues are there?

There’s some decisions to be made. How do you choose a verb tense to be the neutral tense? And how do you show positive tenses? It’d be nice if English had a simple infinitive, like say Spanish. That would be a natural candidate for the neutral tense. Alas, English’s infinitive is unwieldly for frequent use. (”English’s infinitive to be unwieldly for frequent use.”) One could take the most common verb tense, the present tense, first-person conjugation, and just use that everywhere. Or, maybe, the infinitive minus the “to”. Then when one wants to switch out of the neutral tense, one just uses some specific other tense. What happens if you want to use a non-neutral present tense? Not sure. Maybe “does” as an auxiliary verb? One could borrow “ca” (pronounced “sha”) from Lojban, but that’s not amenable to being immediately understood. Then again, the whole practice probably would take a bit of knowledge to read (and get the full meaning), so perhaps that’s not too much knowledge to require.

Another approach is to use a single form of every verb, and use markers for all indication of tense. That avoids the ambiguity problem between the neutral and non-neutral forms, but makes the text even more odd sounding if the markers are the English auxiliaries, and increases the learning curve a lot of Lojban’s (more flexible and much more numerous) markers are used. But perhaps a bit more odd-sounding text is a reasonable sacrifice in this case, and the more comprehensible to the uninitiated, the better. So let’s see what this technique leads to. I’m going to go with the “infinitive minus ‘to’” form, and translate the first paragraph of this post. For past tense, I’ll use “did”, for future, “will”, and for progressive of any time, “has”. I think I’ll try using “is” as a present tense marker, as the word “is” isn’t used as a verb, since “be” is the infinitive version. Bolded regions indicate things I’m just not sure about.

While I really like the language Lojban and really wish there be three hundred hours in the day, it has did occur to me recently that it should be possible to modify English to give it one of the advantages Lojban currently have over it, and let English still be pretty comprehensible. (A much more minor modification than, say, Loglish. In fact, Loglish be not really modified English so much as it be modified Lojban.)

OK, so that was interesting. “Like” in the first sentence “sounds” present tense, even though it’s neutral (having no marker). And “isn’t” becomes “be not”, a very awkward construction, that probably takes one a moment to recognize. What is the present tense equivalent to “has occurred”? “has been occurring” would be present progressive, but that’s not quite the same. The future tense would be “will have occurred”. There’s the present tense, completive, “has occurred”, as in “this breaking news just in: such-and-such has occurred.”

I’m not even sure what the verb is in the phrase “should be possible”. “Be” sort of sounds like it, but what the hell part of speech is “should” in that position? An auxiliary verb? If so, does it belong there as is? Well, I guess I’ve reached the end of my explicit knowledge of the English tense system.

That was pretty fun.