你好

My other half is Chinese, so naturally I am learning Mandarin — and some Shanghainese — from her. (What can I say: I’m the scholarly type and she’s a good teacher!) Anyway, like, I’m sure, many a Westerner embarking on learning a tonal language, I find it difficult to properly modulate my voice: so let me share a phonetic technique that I’ve developed!

Try to retract the base of your tongue, flattening and broadening the back, while speaking. This has a three-fold effect, conducive to speaking Chinese:

  • By tensing the muscle, you have slightly more control over your tongue, so you can move it more agilely. This is necessary for the quick response required when changing tones.
  • Retracting the tongue opens the oral cavity, giving more potential to change your voice’s frequency and hence produce the different tones.
  • A bonus effect is that doing this puts the tip of your tongue in a better place to produce the many sibilant and retroflex sounds which are common in Mandarin.

Having said all that, I’m still pretty bad at it! I find it particularly difficult to do falling tones at the beginning of words. (I cannot say 姐姐 to save my life!) My guess as to why this might be is because, while English obviously doesn’t have tones, an intonation pattern is manifested through stress, giving — as English usually stresses the first syllable — a rising tonal quality.

Posted in Personal, Phonetics and Phonology, Random, 中文 | 2 Comments

My Friend Lily

Here’s a curious bit of syntax.
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Posted in Linguistics, Syntax | 2 Comments

The World’s Prose Mix

According to Wikipedia, at the time of writing there are a total of 205 sovereign states; including those that are disputed. That’s at least 205 different cultures, so the question is: Are there any concentrations of peoples in the world that represent all of these? If I were to look, the first places which I’d examine are the so called “Global Cities”. The most prominent and, anecdotally, most diverse of which being London and New York City.

Now, suppose we can select 205 people from one of these cities, each representing their own home country, what now? Well, we’re all human and we all have stories, flavoured by our cultural heritage; so we write! That is, we set up a round-robin story where everyone in our group gets an equal share (e.g., a page each).

Potentially, all our authors would write in their own language, so we’d need a cohort of translators so everyone understands what’s going on, as well as producing a coherent end product. Furthermore, some kind of editorial control would need to be exercised, that steers and plans the characters and plot; however, beyond that, creative freedom is afforded to our authors.

An alternative — although much more ambitious — idea would be to focus on linguistic diversity, rather than sovereign cultures. This pushes the number of potential contributors through the roof and, with it, the potentially impossible task of translation! (Let alone the logistical burden of finding volunteers across the world.) Therefore, instead of writing a round-robin story, how about a dialogue-free film, where each person acts as screenwriter and co-director for a scene?

Posted in Ethnography, Random | Leave a comment

Apostrophe’s War

With a title like “Apostrophe’s War”, you’ll be forgiven in thinking that this is yet another trite rant on the supposed abuse of the apostrophe in contemporary written English. However, those who know me as a linguist may think I am writing to counter this barbarian prescriptivism with scientific purity.

No and no!
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Posted in Linguistics, Orthography and Grammatology, Rants | Leave a comment

Endianness

In computer science, there’s a concept known as “endianness”. It refers to the order in which data is stored: “big endian” means that we start with the most significant bit and move to the least; “little endian” is the other way around. For example, the decimal number 123, in 8-bits, can be represented as either 01111011 (2^6 + 2^5 + 2^4 + 2^3 + 2^1 + 2^0) in big endian, or 11011110 (2^0 + 2^1 + 2^3 + 2^4 + 2^5 + 2^6) in little. There are engineering reasons as to why one would choose one representation over the other.

Human, rather than binary encoded data often — at least from my anecdotal experience — follow the big endian model. For example, while this may be an artefact of the technology behind it, phone numbers follow a pattern like “country, area, number, extension”. Arguably, it’s much more logical as the most important part comes first, then tailing off. However, there are a number of inconstancies in some widely used formats; perhaps arising from the definition of “most important” differing from a purely quantitative scale.
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Posted in Computer Science, Orthography and Grammatology, Random | Leave a comment

D Quine

I have taken it upon myself to learn the D programming language: My motivation for doing so is involved, but bear with me!
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Posted in D, Random, Software Engineering | 2 Comments

Sanitising with Insanity

I do a lot of hacking around in an Oracle database and my chosen tool to interrogate the data is Oracle SQL Developer. Sometimes, I have to transfer the contents of one table into another schema and, because I don’t have the necessary permissions, I have to do this by taking a script backup and then restoring it (i.e., running it against the other schema).

Unfortunately, SQL Developer’s SQL backups cannot, in general, be run without modification to restore successfully. As such, because I have been learning to use my editor of choice more powerfully, I have written a VIM macro to sanitise SQL Developer’s output.
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Posted in Day Job, Oracle, SQL Developer, VIM | 1 Comment

Zeitgeist

A short story that will probably get me put on the “No Fly” list.
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Cycling in the City

I regularly commute through England’s metropolis: a 40km round trip that takes me about the same time as the train, but for free and without the claustrophobic cattle class that is South West Trains nor the carcinogenic underworld of the Tube. However, as a road cyclist who cut his teeth in the countryside — literally: I chipped a tooth, which has since been removed, in an accident! — the whole affair is less than ideal.
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Posted in Cycling, Rants | 1 Comment

Counting with Subquery Factoring

This is fairly trivial, but I thought I’d post it anyway! It’s a PL/SQL script I wrote using subquery factoring to count in natural language: from 1 to 10,000. (It will go higher, but there are gaps after 10,000.)

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Posted in Oracle, PL/SQL, Random | Leave a comment