fox

Here is a joke E told us at the fair yesterday.

( So Heisenberg and Schroedinger are in a car. )

I have figured out the correct configuration of cables to copy from the cable box to the VCR.  Hurrah!  Will now tape the Tonys for my dad, which is what I promised to do in the first place.  Will also save down the South Pacific concert from Carnegie Hall.  Yay.

This refers to this post, in which please note that the graphic is now corrected from the first version to appear there.  (No biggie; one dotted line was added, and one number was added so the rest were shifted down.)  If you want to try to fill in ellen_fremedon's family tree yourself, click the thumbnail below but NOT the lj-cut!



( And now for the answers ... )

"Loveliest of Trees"

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy years a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodland I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.

A.E. Housman 1896


A lot of ink has been spent speculating about "snow" in the last line, whether he meant it literally or figuratively.  This year, of course, a person could achieve both, going to look at the cherry trees this weekend.  Oy.

Reading over my thesis again, as the viva is tomorrow afternoon, and I've just come to this bit:

Fudge's goal, though, is simply to identify and describe the various possibilities, rather than to present any analysis of why the different types of two-word sequences may have different stress patterns.  He therefore outlines many different types of compounds based on their lexical categories—(N₁:N₂)_N, (A:N)_N,and so on—then subdivides these into semantic groups (N₁+N₂=proper name, for instance) and predicts where on each compound the primary stress will fall, offering examples of and exceptions to each rule.  But although these divisions are semantically well-motivated, the stress predictions seem not to hold up to much scrutiny:  for example, one of Fudge's categories is (N₁:N₂)_N compounds, which he predicts will normally be initially-stressed.  An exception is a group in which N₁ is a material and N₂ is made of N₁; these compounds will generally be finally-stressed.  He gives as examples iron railings, garden path (suggesting that it is apparently safe to consider a garden a 'material'), and paper napkin, but allows that there are initially-stressed exceptions such as butter mountain, dunghill, snowman, and waterfall, as well as anything 'made from' cake, juice, or milk (birthday cake, apple juice, coconut milk; a flexible interpretation of 'made from', as apple juice and coconut milk are not made from apples and coconuts the same way birthday cake is made from cake—or, as in this group N₁ is the material and N₂ the product, apple juice and coconut milk are not made from apples and coconuts the same way birthday cake is made from birthdays).

[happysigh]  I do like the part of the literature review where one respectfully points out that people who have gone before are, just, like, wrong.

the other -- when was it?  last week, i guess, last thursday.  walking back toward civilization after seeing college friend in the sorcerer.  someone said something, and for some reason the word "sure" led the boys off on a tangent about roots.  in german the word is sicher, one said, and the english word "sure" must come from the same root, mustn't it?  and in dutch it's zeker, says another.  sicher and zeker -- and, i said, big deal, in english we have secure.

the day before yesterday, sicher told me he'd looked it up and sure enough sicher and secure both come from the latin root securus.  "you were right," he said.

"yes, i know," i said.

some of the geeks at MIT did an experiment to test the effectiveness of tinfoil hats, and published their results.  :-D  badastronomy talks about it here.

in nine hours, i will be done with this talk i'm supposed to be giving.

must make copies in the morning of the flipping powerpoint slides.

observe, please, the Main Stress Rule (proposed by Chomsky and Halle 1968 in The Sound Pattern of English, just so you know what we're dealing with here:

                         {      [-tense ]      [αvoc  ] }
                         {C₀    [       ]   C₀¹ [αcons ] } (i)
                         {      [   V   ]      [-ant  ]₀}
V → [1 stress] / [X----- {                              }
                          {C₀                           } (ii)


                         {    [-tense ]      }
                         {+C₀ [       ] C₀]_NA } (a)
                         {    [   V   ]      }
               /-----    {    [-tense ]      }
                         {    [       ] C₀]_N } (b)
                         {    [   V   ]      }
                         {    ]              } (e)


and now here's what i've got to say by way of explanation:

The Main Stress Rule is a doubly applied rule -- the stress is applied to a vowel in a particular environment if that environment occurs in a particular environment -- and disjunctive, so that in fact conditions (ii) and (e) represent 'elsewhere' in each case.  So there are six possible conditions on the environment for the application of main stress; in (i)(a), the vowel takes primary stress if it is followed by a syllable consisting of, at minimum, a lax vowel, this vowel being optionally preceded by some number of consonants and followed by at most one consonant and an optional glide or liquid other than /l/ (i), provided that syllable is followed (after a morpheme boundary) by a single-syllable suffix with a lax vowel, in which the onset and coda are optional, and that the suffix is followed by a word boundary, and that the word is a noun or an adjective.

And so on for (i)(b), (i)(e), (ii)(a), (ii)(b), and (ii)(e) ('elsewhere', the simplest of the lot, in which a vowel takes primary stress if it is the final vowel in a verb).

good grief.

ETA: okay.  here goes.

V → [1 stress] / means, the Verb (V) becomes (→) primary-stressed ([1 stress] -- it takes the main accent in a word -- in the environment (/) about to be described.  everything that follows that first / is the environment; the things stacked up on top of each other in curly brackets are different possibilities that will yield the same result.

so, X----- means anything (x) can precede the Verb in question (-----), and all the stuff in the curly brackets is what could follow it in order to make it take the primary stress.  there are two choices:

(1) a syllable, C₀VC₀¹C_liquid, which may begin with one or more consonants, or with no consonant at all (the subscript 0 means 'at least zero'), must have a lax (non-tense) vowel (and the question of what makes a vowel tense or lax is not worth getting into here, trust me, and i'm saying that in comparison to all of this, which is), and may end with another consonant or consonant cluster, which has its own requirements -- the subscript 0 still means 'at least zero', and the superscript 1 means 'no more than one', so there can be at most one ordinary consonant following the vowel, and then after that there can be any number of glides or liquids other than L, so, Y, W, or R.

(2) some number of consonants. or not.

what this means is that if a vowel is followed by the kind of syllable described in (1), or if it is followed just by consonants but not by any more syllables, i.e. it it's the final vowel, it will be the stressed vowel in its word. if it's not the final vowel but it's followed by any kind of syllable that doesn't meet the criteria in (1), it will not be stressed.

which is just the beginning.

stopped in at blackwell's on the way back from the gym, just to see if the university pocket diaries for 2005-6 were in yet, even though they weren't scheduled to be in until september 1.  and they were!  i am ridiculously pleased by this.

off to transfer flight information ...

man, it is cool to have one's geekery be in demand.  i spent close to eight hours today going well, sure, that transcription matches that recording, but who pronounces contribute like that?!, and knowing i was going to be paid for it.

[wu:^wfʌkInhu:^w], if you'll allow me to say so.


So, taking the last part first, I hear from Agent Grapevine that the class of students who just finished their MSt in linguistics -- a group I somehow, inexplicably, think of as being a year behind me, although they got here at the same time I did and took a one-year degree so they finished a year sooner -- all got distinction, except one.  The first thing of course is, how wretched for that one (because, if you think about it, the fact that everyone else got distinction really just means that she's the only one who got distinction, but it's a distinction of another sort); but the thing to really focus on is, wait, ALL of them?  Even that guy, and whatshername, etc?  People I know in other departments have been pulling down distinctions since the late spring, but that hasn't done anything to reassure me about my own prospects, but now if everyone in The Class That's Not Really The Class Behind Me (apart from one) got distinction, my optimism has taken a distinct yet cautious shot in the arm.  Cautious, see, because while this does tend to make one think that distinction is the rule rather than the exception, that was for the MSt, and I don't have any idea how the MPhil people did.  It's a longer thesis, an additional exam (they had three, we'll have four), and a higher pass mark.  So if the people who just finished their MPhil -- a group I do think of as being a year ahead of me, incidentally, which they are -- got distinctions of their own, then I'll feel better.


The other thing was about people in the box and emotional distance.  Predictably, the thoughts I had the other night when I didn't have time to type them have more or less gone now, but in general, what I was thinking was, sometimes it's surprising, sometimes people are surprised, at how much opening up happens online.  How can people get so close to people they've never met, is the general refrain.  And then things turn immediately to a disagreement about the definition of meet and the question never really gets answered, but I think, for me?, sometimes, the answer is, actually mostly I don't.

It was a whole series of randomly connected thoughts about various things, but it mainly came out of this story:  two and a half weeks ago, we got the news that a friend from the curling club had committed suicide.  I didn't know him well, but a notch or two better than just to say hi, we played together for about half a season, and he was good friends with a number of people I consider good friends, so it was more than just a by-the-way thing for me.  But I was with three of my approximately six closest, dearest, fiercest friends in the world, and we were only going to get to spend a few days together, so I didn't want to talk about it, and I went about my days -- until a point on Saturday afternoon, when, I don't even know what set me off, but I couldn't play through it anymore, and I just sat down and started to cry.  And they were, understandably I suppose, surprised and alarmed, but I didn't want to talk about it and get even more upset and harsh the whole rest of the weekend for everyone, so I took a couple of minutes and then I pulled myself together and I didn't explain my mysterious bout of sobbing until I was back here and laid it out in an e-mail.

But in a chat window, or a livejournal post, I don't tend to wait to talk about things.  Or, if I do, it's because I'm not ready to talk about it, rather than because I don't want to ruin anyone's day who decides to listen.  I talk about more, and in more detail, with people who don't know my name than I often do with people I've lived with.  I have a couple of posting filters that restrict things to people I know in real life, but I have at least one that restricts things to people I don't know in real life, and what's that all about?  It's not that those of you on the non-RL filter know me better than those of you it locks out.  Probably the opposite, in fact; I'll talk about personal things where people who know me better can't see, and is it for the same reason I didn't want to talk two weeks ago with my verybest friends about why I was upset?  It's not that I'm unwilling to appear vulnerable to those who know and (presumably) love me; and it's not, I suppose, that I'm keeping things from --

Okay, I think I get it.  Maybe what it is, is that the more I'm willing to talk about with a person, the less I'm generally concerned about sparing that person's feelings.  Which is not to say I don't give a damn what people think; it's more that, the closer with a person I am, the more I suspect that I might have as much an effect on his or her mood as he or she can have on mine.  And so, when the fact that I was upset was likely to make my friends sad, and for more than just a few minutes, I didn't want to reveal to them that I was upset because I didn't want them to be sad.  But I don't mind letting it show, how upset I am, to people who, when I'm upset, may well be sorry, but when they're done reading about it will click on something else and move on with their day.

Hmm.  Well, it makes sense to me, anyway.  :-]

man, running AdAware and clearing out the cookies from the browser feels good.  it's like having the alignment checked on your car.  if only i had time to defrag, yo.

-- and today it has made me go "hee hee hee..."

[g]