fauxklore | Entries tagged with language

In case any of you were not aware of this, today is Thesaurus Day.

I hope it's happy, blissful, blithe, cheerful, chirpy, convivial, ecstatic, elated, gay, gleeful, jolly, joyful, joyous, jubilant, merry, mirthful, pleasant, sparkling, etc.

( behind a cut due to spoilers )

There was another "Music and the Brain" lecture tonight at the Library of Congress. I am really enjoying this series and tonight's talk was no exception. (I am also enjoying getting to know other regular attendees, but that is a separate subject for another time.)

The speaker was Aniruddh Patel of the Neuroscience Institute in San Diego and his topic was "The Music of Language and the Language of Music." His talk focused on two aspects of the similarity between music and language - rhythm and syntax - and discussed experiments related to each.

The rhythm work had to do with whether or not the rhythm of a given composer's music reflects the rhythm of his (or her) native language. Dr. Patel played two samples of music and asked the audience which one sounded English and which was French. Surprisingly, this was easy. Then he discussed one unsuccessful theory before getting to more recent research. The issue has to do with how to measure rhythm in language and the successful approach focused on the regularity of the length of vowel sounds. He discussed a metric called "normalized pairwise variability index" or NVPI, which measures how much short and long vowel sounds are in adjacent syllables. For music, the NVPI would have to do with the actual rhythm. That is, if a piece alternated quarter notes and whole notes, it would have a much higher NVPI than a piece consisting entirely of quarter notes. It turns out that English has a significantly higher NVPI than French. They analyzed music by several English composers and several French composers and, sure enough, the music by English composers had a higher NVPI. The difference in the music was less than in the language, but was still pretty obvious.

For syntax, the question was what the musical analog would be. Essentially, he used the "closeness" of chords (as in how near or far two chords are in the circle of 5ths) to describe how music would be jarring syntactically. The experiment involved having people do self-paced reading (clicking on a key to advance a phrase at a time) with a syntactically "difficult" phrase in the middle. They accompanied this with the playing of chords and measured the time that subjects took to advance the phrases. The idea was that, if the same part of the brain was involved in both types of syntax, the reaction to the jarring phrase (which is slower than to the other phrases) would be even further slowed when the jarring chord was played. Which did, indeed, happen. They looked at other aspects of changing the chord accompanying that phrase (e.g. switching from a piano chord to an organ chord) and found that had no effect. All of which they used to conclude that there is some sort of brain "interference" between syntax in language and musical syntax.

Dr. Patel did an excellent job of explaining this work to a highly varied audience and stimulated a lot of discussion among the crowd. I was also really impressed by how much he seems to enjoy his research.

Eventually, the LoC will put the lectures (which they record) up on their web site. So those of you not in the D.C. area can get to hear them too. But, if you are here (or will be), I highly recommend attending in person. Next up is Daniel Levitin on 18 November, who will also be signing his new book, The World in Six Songs: How the Brain Created Musical Nature.

Tonight may have been the VP debate, but it was also opening night of the All Roads Film Festival at National Geographic. Given the choice between hearing a debate between two people who are perpetually infected with hoof-in-mouth syndrome and seeing a movie about two linguists documenting endangered languages ... not exactly a difficult choice for me.

"The Linguists" proved to be an excellent documentary, following David Harrison and Gregory Anderson through several field trips to document languages in Siberia, Arizona, tribal regions of India, and Bolivia. Things don't always go so smoothly. For example, some of the speakers are very elderly, so a couple of the first speakers of Chulym they try to interview are nearly deaf. Another incident involves a man who claims to speak Kallawaya but really only knows a few words. It's all handled with a great deal of warmth and humor.

I'll admit to some bias since endangered languages are one of my pet subjects, but I think the film has broader appeal. It's always worth seeing people who are passionate about their interests.

There was a Q&A after the film with two of the directors, one of the linguists, and one of the speakers of an endangered Native American language. They mentioned that the film will be shown on PBS next year. But don't wait - go and see it at a film festival or other screening if you have any interest in the subject.

One possible down side is that the footage of Bolivia has added to my already lengthy list of places I want to travel to.

By the way, I had dinner at Vapiano before the screening. This is a local outpost of a German chain of Italian semi-fast food. It was surprisingly decent with pasta cooked al dente (and the sauce cooked right in front of you). The gimmicky part is that you get your food at various stations (e.g. one for pasta, one for pizza, one for salads, plus a bar) and swipe a card they give you at the entrance which records the prices. You pay the total when you leave. All very high tech, but it was convenient for a quick supper of fusilli with pesto sauce. I'd go there (or another of their local branches) again.

... and the hotel has a business center with free internet access.

The problem with driving down after work is that I didn't get much work done all afternoon because I was checking traffic.com every 10 minutes. I did, however, learn a new word. I was looking at data somebody sent me and he referred to certain satellites having been "passivated." I believe that most people would have called that "deactivated."

Checking the traffic proved to be useless, by the way, as by the time I left the traffic jams were not where it told me they'd be. Things eased up quite a bit after Fredericksburg and it took me about 3 hours and 15 minutes from Crystal City, which is not too bad. (Mapquest claims it should be 2.5 hours, but they never really account for the horror that is I-95 through Dale City.)

Dinner, which I had at an Italian restaurant chosen entirely by proximity to the close, featured a non-Colonial time warp. Let's just say that most of America has progressed past 1960's era red sauce, but this place (Sal's) had not.

The storytelling festival calendar poses numerous dilemmas, as I want to be in at least two of the tents at any given time. I will probably use my usual method of going to hear the people who I have heard the least (or, in at least two cases, never). But I can figure that out in the morning.

mais je ne parle pas francais comme Jean Lafitte!

The BBC had a piece about the dominance of Senegal in Francophone Scrabble.

It's interesting because:

1) French is a second language for many Senegalese. (Wolof is the primary language.)

and

2) Senegal's literacy rate is only about 40%.

I would do terribly in Scrabble en francais, given that I had to ask somebody today what the plural of demarche is.

Yet another unsurprising result. (For those who don't know I grew up on Lawn Guyland.)

What American accent do you have?
Created by Xavier on Memegen.net

Northeastern.
You're probably from somewhere near New York City, possibly north Jersey, or Connecticut or Rhode Island. If you are from New York City you may be one of the types who people never believe when you say you're from New York.

If you are not from here, you are probably one of the following:
(a) A Philadelphian who can't stand the way other Philadelphians say "on";
(b) A Yat from New Orleans; or
(c) Someone from England, Australia, or New Zealand, in which case why are you doing this quiz in the first place?

Take this quiz now - it's easy!

I don't think I have ever mentioned this, but I cringe whenever somebody says, "have a good one."
It reeks of mental laziness and insincerity.

1) We got an email at work today re: a "rapid fox." Of course, it was a typo and the story really said that a fox which had bitten a woman in Arlington County tested positive for rabies.

I still found myself trying to come up with a shorter but still complete version of the following:

The quick brown fox frothed at the jaw, pushing the lazy dog to get many vaccine shots.

A later email had a corrected subject line.

2) I exchanged a theatre ticket for multiple reasons, mostly being eager to see the show in question sooner. This now enables me to go to a party that weekend.

The insane part is that the party is in Colorado.

At today's session of the project which has been sucking up a lot of time (and everybody's will to live), one of the participants wanted to characterize a discussion between two members of senior leadership yesterday. But he's kind of an old-fashioned fellow and it was mixed company and it is work and all.

Hence, he used what I will now think of as a classic euphemism. He began, "After yesterday's urinary olympiad ..."

On the Orange Line going home today, the conductor announced "Thank you for choosing Metro for your travels to and from the Washington metropolitan area" at each stop.

I was unaware that the metro went anywhere outside the Washington metropolitan area. In fact, my entire ride is within Virginia and all but the last stop is inside the Beltway. I think the word he wanted was "within."

I've obviously been in the defense business too long. Today I saw a headline that said "90% of all animals remain unclassified." My immediate reaction was that the other 10% must include Secret Squirrel.