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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in
Philip Newton's LiveJournal:
| Saturday, May 17th, 2008 | |
| 5:20 pm | robots.txt I just saw this on a forum:
I like it, and I think it's a fairly apt metaphor. (Especially to explain how it's something that only respectful bots, which have been told specifically to look out for the "sign", will heed, rather than a technical safeguard preventing access.) |
| Wednesday, May 14th, 2008 | |
| 10:21 am | Artificial Finnish
This was generated by a program based on trigraph (three-letter sequences) frequencies obtained from real Finnish text. And indeed, it does look fairly Finnish to a casual observer! See Mark Dominus's blog entry for more details on this. |
| Tuesday, May 13th, 2008 | |
| 10:21 am | The things you learn: Eating from a dish Apparently, English dish and German Tisch are cognate. (As are English disk, disc, desk, discus, and dais.) |
| Sunday, May 11th, 2008 | |
| 5:07 pm | "mizinamo" in hànzì Using the transcription tables found here, mizinamo is apparently written 米齊納莫 mîqínàmò in Chinese (using the transcription tables for Modern Greek, Maltese, Finnish, Turkish, English, and Italian—the one for German does not distinguish voiced from voiceless s and the one for Russian differs only in the fact that the second character has a three-dot water radical on the left, giving jì rather than qí). The transcription table for Ancient Greek gives completely different characters, interestingly enough: 彌最那摩 mízuìnàmó. |
| Saturday, May 10th, 2008 | |
| 3:11 pm | Self-consciousness about dialect I was slightly amused just now watching a documentation on people with dwarfism. They showed one child getting shoes custom-made, and the shoemaker spoke with a southern accent. (Austrian? Bavarian? I'm not good at pinpointing regionalisms.) He seemed to be self-conscious about the fact, since a couple of times, he repeated himself in a slightly more standard phonological form, as if he seemed to feel the need to speak as standard a German as possible on camera, even though the first version of each utterance was perfectly comprehensible to me—merely obviously regional. ("Heechstens—Höchstens" and "Auf jeden Fuj. Do wird sich net viel verändern—Da wird sich sicher nicht viel verändern. Ganz sicher nicht.") So he needn't have worried about being comprehensible to viewers from other parts of the country IMO. |
| 2:41 pm | The things you learn: enantiomers and smell
(Source: Wikipedia, s.v. Carvone.) |
| 1:54 pm | entstehen Today, when I heard someone on the bus say, „noch nicht einmal entstanden“, I thought about the German verb entstehen. I couldn't think of a good English translation for it—but then I realised that Klingon chen is probably a pretty good fit! Yay for multiple languages :) The Klingon Dictionary entry for chen reads An example of its use is in chemistry: „Bei dieser Reaktion entsteht Wasserstoff“ is “This reaction produces hydrogen” or, a bit more literally, “During this reaction, hydrogen comes into being/arises/takes form”. In my experience, Klingon chen is used more often in the causative form chenmoH, which is glossed And that made me think about the German causative. Since stehen “stand” has the causative stellen “place, put, set”, entstehen should have the causative entstellen, ĉu ne? But that means “disfigure, deface” :) That made me think of other compounds of stehen, and erstehen came to mind. I thought at first that this was a fairly rare word, but that’s only in the intransitive sense “to rise again (as by resurrection)”—the transitive sense “to obtain through purchase”, while a bit formal IMO, is not really rare. (I wonder how those two senses got to be related.) When I looked it entstehen in the dictionary, I found it interesting that one of the translations given was the passive of a causative; perhaps this inchoative meaning is comparatively unusual so there aren’t really good synonyms which one could use to define the word. (It said, Bestehen is also an interesting word, with several senses that one would probably translate by rather different words in English: 1) exist, be present; 2) consist of, be made of (a certain material); 3) succeed (in an examination); 4) insist. Current Mood:  geeky |
| Friday, May 9th, 2008 | |
| 9:03 am | Cowboydes On the Greek joke blog I found a couple of days ago, I just saw the word καουμπόυδες, and it amused me greatly—the combination of an English loan word (which I would have expected to be indeclinable) with the neo-Greek -δες ending as in καφέδες, μαϊμούδες, -τζήδες. |
| Thursday, May 8th, 2008 | |
| 11:11 am | Amy and the passive Amy doesn't seem to have acquired a passive voice yet, and will simply use the active voice instead—"stones can't eat" (= can't be eaten), for example. It reminds me of the Swedish passives(?) in -s, which otherwise look very similar to their corresponding active forms (no separate auxiliary verb, for example). |
| 9:29 am | In which I wish I were Maggie Today, I learned that Stephi is going to be transferred to another branch of the kindergarten, where she'll spend the mornings with little children (0–3) and the afternoons with administrative work. Apparently, TPTB are not happy with the rate at which new children are coming in, so they're replacing her with someone else. Which is a pity, since the children love her and the staff get along well with her and bringing in someone new is bound to be disruptive—and then it's still an open question whether the other guy will be able to "turn the ship around". One "problem" is that the kindergarten is in a commercial area (in the "offices" sense rather than the "shops" one) rather than a residential one; presumably, the organisers thought that the people working here will have lots of children which they'll all put in that kindergarten, but that didn't turn out that way—one reason Amy is there is because I work here, but I don't know whether the parents of the other children work here; at least one person said that he takes a fairly long trek upon himself every morning because he likes what the kindergarten has to offer rather than because it's geographically convenient. Vivien especially was particularly sad, since Stephi and she were the first two people here and she's worked together with her since the beginning. And she said it was counterproductive, that it would be tough on personnel morale and also on the children, but that the staff can't do anything about it. Stephi added that all the staff are still in the probationary period common in German jobs, usually half a year, during which either side can terminate the employment more or less at will, and so it's not impossible that there might be consequences if the staff were to voice their discontent to HQ. On the other hand, she said that perhaps parents could say something. I met Finja's father downstairs and he was fairly angry about the whole situation (and the short notice—the new guy is to start next Tuesday) and is collecting signatures for a parents' petition. He also said that his girlfriend phoned HQ yesterday, as soon as she found out, and that her voice was apparently taken into serious consideration. I considered writing them but I'm not sure how to word my position, since I'm not good at conflict like that. I did ask myself, though, "What would Maggie do?". (Stella suggested I phone them, too. I still worried I'd just be overrun with counter-arguments about economics or something and chicken out.) |
| Wednesday, May 7th, 2008 | |
| 3:19 pm | |
| Monday, May 5th, 2008 | |
| 9:23 pm | The quest for dextromethorphan, part 3 Went to another chemist's today, and got told that it's clobutinol(sp?) that was taken off the market, not dextromethorphan. She also said the tablets I wanted contained cl. rather than d. (which is odd, since they were listed on the mail-order site when I searched for d.); she had the lozenges I had had before, though (though in a slightly different packaging) as well as syrup, so I went with that since sucking the lozenges takes about a quarter of an hour and I found that annoying. So now I have my sweet, sweet psychoactive drugs! Hopefully that'll keep me from coughing again this night. |
| Sunday, May 4th, 2008 | |
| 6:42 pm | More on dextromethorphan and its availability in Germany DocMorris, the mail order chemists, offer various items containing dextromethorphan, including Silomat DMP, ratiopharm tablets, and Wick MediNait. So the claim that d. was taken off the German market seems even more implausible. (I also found a comparison between Wick MediNait and Vicks Nyquil, saying that the US version was better since the active ingredients are in a higher—and, they said, more sensible—dosage, and there was less alcohol in it to boot. The main difference after that was that the US version had no pseudoephedrine.) I tried the herbal cough syrup last night and wasn't too enamoured: I woke up at about one o'clock from coughing, took another dose, and it took quite a while for the coughs to subside. This morning, I was really tired because I was up for about an hour at night. Give me my chemicals back. |
| Saturday, May 3rd, 2008 | |
| 6:09 pm | No more DXM in Germany? When I tried to buy some more cough lozenges today, I was told that the product I had been using (Silomat DMP) had been taken off the market. Apparently not only that, but all products containing the active ingredient dextromethorphan (DXM)—the pharmaceutical-technical assistant whom I spoke with said that there had been concerns about the cardiovascular system or something. So she recommended a cough syrup with herbal ingredients to me. |
| Friday, May 2nd, 2008 | |
| 12:46 pm | A sucker for advertising There's this new biscuit that's come out recently, with a long, thin biscuit coated in milk chocolate except for a small bit at one end to pick it up by. I had seen advertising for it at various bus stops, with the chocolate-free bit at the end labelled "Haltestelle". That pun made it nearly irresistible for me to buy a packet of them when I went shopping today. ("Halten" in German is not only "to hold" but can also mean "to stand still", at least for vehicles such as cars and busses; compare "Hold it right there!" in English. So "Haltestelle" is primarily "bus stop" [i.e. places where busses stand still] but, in the advertisements, meant "place for holding [the biscuit]".) |
| Wednesday, April 30th, 2008 | |
| 9:14 pm | Pronouncing Koremutake An entry on acme's use.perl journal linked me to his String-Koremutake distribution, and the docs for the String::Koremutake module in turn pointed to this document on shorl.com, presumably the source of the specification. What interested me most was the Q/A pair "But it all looks like gibberish to me. How am I supposed to remember any of it unless I am a native swede or something?". I can only imagine that the authors are not native speakers of English, or at least that they speak a rather different variety of English than the ones I'm most familiar with. For starters, I find their example of "O as in mOon" strange; I would have expected <O> to represent an [o]-ish sound, not a [u]-ish one (which is what "moon" has for me). (Maybe a Swede would think along different lines; IIRC, <o> is roughly [u] for them?) On the other hand, they do say that MO is to be pronounced as in moose, so who knows. But next, their key word for U is "sUe"—which is exactly the same (phonemic) vowel for me as "moon"! (John Wells's lexical set GOOSE.) At least, if we ignore the yod that I have in "sue", but I hope that's not what the pronunciation key was supposed to get at. Maybe it was? But what really struck me was that they list S as being pronounced as in "Silly", but SY as in easy—but "silly" has /s/ for me while "easy" has /z/! Also, "E as in Eternity" is ambiguous for me, since depending on stress, that word starts for me with either schwa or /i/. While the dictionaries cited on dictionary.com s.v. eternity use the KIT vowel for the first vowel of that word—yet DE is said to be pronounced as in destination, which has DRESS in the first syllable for me! All in all, it seems like a rather odd pronunciation guide. If the authors were, indeed, not native speakers of English, then I would think: that's not a problem per se, but perhaps they shouldn't be making pronunciation guides if their grasp of English phonology is, shall we say, not that well aligned with what I think it is. (Or is there a joke I've been missing?) |
| 2:20 pm | Posted using sms_to_lj... I think that 3.5 hours is the longest I've ever spent in a doctor's waiting room. Phew! Edit: Well, that took a long time to arrive. |
| Tuesday, April 29th, 2008 | |
| 9:44 pm | Resumptive pronouns (is that the right term?) in relative clauses An interesting construction I came across just now here: That's the sort of thing that makes me wonder whether English wouldn't be "better" if it had mandatory, or at least optional, resumptive pronouns. |
| 8:58 pm | Yay linking R! This evening, while putting Amy to bed, I heard myself talking about "putting her pyjama-r-on" ("pyjamer on"? not the long "ar" sound at the end, but the schwa.) Current Mood: geeky |
| 2:42 pm | Why Serbia and Montenegro kept using .yu rather than .cs A Heise article I just read gave a plausible reason why Serbia and Montenegro kept on using the Internet ccTLD .yu: the ccTLD corresponding to their ISO 3166 code, .cs, had belonged to Czechoslovakia not long before, and they feared confusion in DNS and databases (and apparently there were even "diplomatical protests"). Anyway, that's probably academic now that they're two separate countries, each with their own ccTLD. |