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memery from a lot of places
Seems when we see this, we're to post a poem. All right, then.
'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
"Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!"
He took his vorpal sword in hand:
Long time the manxome foe he sought -
So rested he by the Tumtum tree
And stood a while in thought.
And as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!
One, two! One, two! and through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.
"And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!"
He chortled in his joy.
'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
Lewis Carroll, of course.
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WIN
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.
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a list!
1. As I was saying to ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
wordplay yesterday, the third week of the hormonal cycle can bite me. Dear endocrines, what are you on about?, it's actually better that we're not ovulating, so stop making me so cranky kthx. [eta2: My GOD, I am not normally like a chocolate fiend, but for the past 48 hours, I've been, like, I am ready to turn my pen or my phone or my left hand into chocolate and then eat that. AUGH. Hormones SUCK. (And was it last week?, I pinged wordplay to say "I WANT PIZZA LIKE BREATHING but only about three bites, which makes it not at all worth having a whole pizza delivered", and she promised that when she rules the world, there will be pizza delivery by the slice. The fact that this is not yet available makes me suspect she is not yet our new benevolent overlord. [eta3: Overlady?])]
2. First rehearsal of the season last night, and -- oh, dear. Well, look -- just because the man was a Beatle and his choral music is what some (including our chorus master) might call overt, doesn't mean he wasn't sincere. No doubt we'll get all the snickering out of our system (including the director, who at the point of the gratuitous key change -- and, incidentally, when you modulate for dramatic effect, who modulates down?! -- turned and looked over his shoulder and raised his eyebrow at the above chorus master, and some of us had to change how we were holding our music so we could get through it without laughing at them) during the rehearsal process, so that in the performance we can sing it as it's meant.
3. I've had it with my camera. It's not the fact that it only has 3.1 megapixels that gets to me -- what non-professional needs more, really -- but the slow shutter speed is annoying and the fact that it eats batteries is making me crazy. Fully-charged batteries (relatively new and just out of the charger) almost completely drained after five or six pictures the other day. NOT ON. So please feel free to recommend me something (a) less battery-demanding and (b) smaller, in physical dimensions, because being able to put the thing in my pocket would be relatively cool.
[eta: 3a. Look how I just used "recommend" with a dative object but no preposition. Is that normal? Hmm, trivalent verbs:
Maybe it just feels weird to me because I had a friend as a kid who used to have "explain"+dative, which was really genuinely weird. (*"Explain me how this works.") What do you guys think? Is "recommend me a camera" okay?]
wordplay yesterday, the third week of the hormonal cycle can bite me. Dear endocrines, what are you on about?, it's actually better that we're not ovulating, so stop making me so cranky kthx. [eta2: My GOD, I am not normally like a chocolate fiend, but for the past 48 hours, I've been, like, I am ready to turn my pen or my phone or my left hand into chocolate and then eat that. AUGH. Hormones SUCK. (And was it last week?, I pinged wordplay to say "I WANT PIZZA LIKE BREATHING but only about three bites, which makes it not at all worth having a whole pizza delivered", and she promised that when she rules the world, there will be pizza delivery by the slice. The fact that this is not yet available makes me suspect she is not yet our new benevolent overlord. [eta3: Overlady?])]2. First rehearsal of the season last night, and -- oh, dear. Well, look -- just because the man was a Beatle and his choral music is what some (including our chorus master) might call overt, doesn't mean he wasn't sincere. No doubt we'll get all the snickering out of our system (including the director, who at the point of the gratuitous key change -- and, incidentally, when you modulate for dramatic effect, who modulates down?! -- turned and looked over his shoulder and raised his eyebrow at the above chorus master, and some of us had to change how we were holding our music so we could get through it without laughing at them) during the rehearsal process, so that in the performance we can sing it as it's meant.
3. I've had it with my camera. It's not the fact that it only has 3.1 megapixels that gets to me -- what non-professional needs more, really -- but the slow shutter speed is annoying and the fact that it eats batteries is making me crazy. Fully-charged batteries (relatively new and just out of the charger) almost completely drained after five or six pictures the other day. NOT ON. So please feel free to recommend me something (a) less battery-demanding and (b) smaller, in physical dimensions, because being able to put the thing in my pocket would be relatively cool.
[eta: 3a. Look how I just used "recommend" with a dative object but no preposition. Is that normal? Hmm, trivalent verbs:
VERB + NP(acc) + PP(=P+NP(dat))It's not a question of whether verbs can do this, in other words -- of course they can. It's a question of whether "recommend" fits in the same class as "send" and "offer" and "present" and the other GIVE-group verbs. Recommending is more of a speech act than a motion act, isn't it? But are there speaking verbs in the GIVE group? Does "tell" fit? ("She told the child a story" or "She told a story to the child".) How about "suggest"? "Propose"? "Submit", which could be more like GIVE or more like TELL, I guess.
VERB + NP(dat) + NP(acc)
So, "I gave the book to him" or "I gave him the book" (the examples are always "give" and "book"; I don't know why). "I sent the minions to her" or "I sent her the minions".
Maybe it just feels weird to me because I had a friend as a kid who used to have "explain"+dative, which was really genuinely weird. (*"Explain me how this works.") What do you guys think? Is "recommend me a camera" okay?]
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answer key
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 ... )
ellen_fremedon's family tree yourself, click the thumbnail below but NOT the lj-cut!( And now for the answers ... )
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mostly for ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
ellen_fremedon
But a little bit for some of you, too!
So the Monday morning after Deathly Hallows -- actually the Tuesday, because I didn't go to work that Monday -- I get to work and what's onellen_fremedon's whiteboard but a big family-tree type diagram with no names. It also bore the disclaimer "Some of this, of course, is entirely speculative."
It looked like ( this: )
Of course it doesn't take too much looking to realize you're looking at some sort of HP family tree. The Weasleys toward the bottom left-hand corner are a big clue. :-) Ellen told me she had been trying to see how many characters she could legitimately fit onto a single family tree. We agree that "legitimately" might be a little generous, but see above re: entirely speculative.
So I made Ellen this chart! (Diamonds, because the chart program inexplicably didn't have triangles.) And I have a list, which, as soon as I get her to remind me of the names I've forgotten, I'll also put up; but in the meantime, want to play? (Alas, unless Ellen has one to offer, there is no prize for getting the most correct answers.)
So the Monday morning after Deathly Hallows -- actually the Tuesday, because I didn't go to work that Monday -- I get to work and what's on
ellen_fremedon's whiteboard but a big family-tree type diagram with no names. It also bore the disclaimer "Some of this, of course, is entirely speculative."It looked like ( this: )
Of course it doesn't take too much looking to realize you're looking at some sort of HP family tree. The Weasleys toward the bottom left-hand corner are a big clue. :-) Ellen told me she had been trying to see how many characters she could legitimately fit onto a single family tree. We agree that "legitimately" might be a little generous, but see above re: entirely speculative.
So I made Ellen this chart! (Diamonds, because the chart program inexplicably didn't have triangles.) And I have a list, which, as soon as I get her to remind me of the names I've forgotten, I'll also put up; but in the meantime, want to play? (Alas, unless Ellen has one to offer, there is no prize for getting the most correct answers.)
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international poetry month: easter edition
"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.
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.
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ah, academic snark.
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.
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language geekery wins again!
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.
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.
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gilbert and sullivan yay!
friend from college is playing Dr Daly in the G&S Society production of The Sorcerer (note to oxonians: the production is good, and so what if the chorus is a little thin -- the principals are all excellent! and if you don't believe me, ask osymandias), so i went to see that this evening, and happened to be sitting behind the director of next term's iolanthe, and she just about talked me into auditioning. not like i'm loaded down with free time, but hey, i'll have a look at my Great Big Choir rehearsal schedule -- actually, i'm looking at it now; the question is, how much do i want to sing bach's st john passion? this is a legitimate question -- at the moment i'm feeling the G&S love enough that i might give up the st john passion -- but return to the choir the following term -- in return for being able to be in iolanthe. hmm.
anyway. my voice is in the G&S soprano heroine area, but my body type is not. the queen of the fairies is exactly right for my look and my attitude, and i could sing it, sure. so, here's the question: setting aside "oh foolish fay", what song from the G&S canon would you recommend for someone auditioning to play the fairy queen? (see, and then if i don't get the part, i can go ahead and sing the st john passion after all. spoiled for choice, i am.)
osymandias), so i went to see that this evening, and happened to be sitting behind the director of next term's iolanthe, and she just about talked me into auditioning. not like i'm loaded down with free time, but hey, i'll have a look at my Great Big Choir rehearsal schedule -- actually, i'm looking at it now; the question is, how much do i want to sing bach's st john passion? this is a legitimate question -- at the moment i'm feeling the G&S love enough that i might give up the st john passion -- but return to the choir the following term -- in return for being able to be in iolanthe. hmm.anyway. my voice is in the G&S soprano heroine area, but my body type is not. the queen of the fairies is exactly right for my look and my attitude, and i could sing it, sure. so, here's the question: setting aside "oh foolish fay", what song from the G&S canon would you recommend for someone auditioning to play the fairy queen? (see, and then if i don't get the part, i can go ahead and sing the st john passion after all. spoiled for choice, i am.)
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so much love for academia right now
some of the geeks at MIT did an experiment to test the effectiveness of tinfoil hats, and published their results. :-D ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-syndicated.gif)
badastronomy talks about it here.
badastronomy talks about it here.Entry tags:
done!
well.
scheduled opposite me was a talk about the rise of verb initial word order in Old Irish, which was certainly better-researched and -prepared than mine (on predicting compound stress by syntactic and semantic means). she got eight people, apparently; i got more like twenty, including the invited guest speaker (a moderately important professor-dude).
nervous? maybe just a little. but, i'm told it went okay. (i mean, it's hard for me to say, isn't it?, whether i made any sense, because i knew what i was talking about.) i didn't run out of things to say before my time was up, and people had questions to ask afterward, so yay. (if nobody asks any questions, it means either you didn't say anything interesting or nobody understood you. if they do ask questions, even difficult ones, it means they respect you enough to engage in your process.) the first question was from Invited Guest Speaker, and plus on the way out he gave me a list of other places i could look for more sources as i develop the paper! w00t! and, as an added bonus, i did get one question to which the answer was a graceful paraphrase of no, i'm pretty sure i know what i'm talking about there. (the question was, essentially, "I am not a native English speaker, but in this example I think you're mistaken about how the phrase is stressed in English." which, hi -- 'i am not a native speaker, but i think your native speaker assessment -- actually your report of another native speaker's assessment -- is wrong'? WTF, man. so it felt good to be able to say 'yeah -- no, i'm totally right.' [ggg])
will now enjoy peaceful evening of doing no work at all. at least until it's time to open the bar.
oh! and! if i write up my paper into a proper paper, it will count as a publication when the conference proceedings are made available online in a few months' time! that almost makes me giddier than anything else. (i have no publications, so the idea of having one is pretty exciting in general and also in a resume-building way. must check if will still be able to use substantial chunks of same text for thesis, though, before doing this.)
scheduled opposite me was a talk about the rise of verb initial word order in Old Irish, which was certainly better-researched and -prepared than mine (on predicting compound stress by syntactic and semantic means). she got eight people, apparently; i got more like twenty, including the invited guest speaker (a moderately important professor-dude).
nervous? maybe just a little. but, i'm told it went okay. (i mean, it's hard for me to say, isn't it?, whether i made any sense, because i knew what i was talking about.) i didn't run out of things to say before my time was up, and people had questions to ask afterward, so yay. (if nobody asks any questions, it means either you didn't say anything interesting or nobody understood you. if they do ask questions, even difficult ones, it means they respect you enough to engage in your process.) the first question was from Invited Guest Speaker, and plus on the way out he gave me a list of other places i could look for more sources as i develop the paper! w00t! and, as an added bonus, i did get one question to which the answer was a graceful paraphrase of no, i'm pretty sure i know what i'm talking about there. (the question was, essentially, "I am not a native English speaker, but in this example I think you're mistaken about how the phrase is stressed in English." which, hi -- 'i am not a native speaker, but i think your native speaker assessment -- actually your report of another native speaker's assessment -- is wrong'? WTF, man. so it felt good to be able to say 'yeah -- no, i'm totally right.' [ggg])
will now enjoy peaceful evening of doing no work at all. at least until it's time to open the bar.
oh! and! if i write up my paper into a proper paper, it will count as a publication when the conference proceedings are made available online in a few months' time! that almost makes me giddier than anything else. (i have no publications, so the idea of having one is pretty exciting in general and also in a resume-building way. must check if will still be able to use substantial chunks of same text for thesis, though, before doing this.)
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bright side, bright side, bright side:
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.
must make copies in the morning of the flipping powerpoint slides.
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is it easier to understand -- or at least to read -- when it's like this?
here's the Main Stress Rule from SPE again. (no, i didn't photoshop it up just for all of you. i needed to shove it on this powerpoint slide. [g])
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geekery resumes
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:
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, C0VC01Cliquid, 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.
{ [-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, C0VC01Cliquid, 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.
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it takes so little to make me happy.
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 ...
off to transfer flight information ...
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when geeks go gonzo
so yesterday i used the expression 'WTFF' when talking about the dizzying height of my mobile phone bill. (all that has been fixed, by the way; the Local Wireless Carrier website still says i'm overdue and blocked, but the phone works again, so i figure the website is just behind the times -- if it's not fixed by COB monday, then i'll talk to someone.)
i meant it, of course, to stand for 'what the fucking fuck', but just now, it occurred to me, it might just as well stand for 'what the fuck and only what the fuck'.
and i'm not even the math major, yo.
i meant it, of course, to stand for 'what the fucking fuck', but just now, it occurred to me, it might just as well stand for 'what the fuck and only what the fuck'.
and i'm not even the math major, yo.