randomness (not daily)

for those other guitarists *cough* jenchen *cough*: Guitar Center - June 24-26

/. at it again...well, actually it's the supreme court justices who are scaring me (and other /.ers): link.

useful phonetics site (maybe i'm the last one to know): link

finally, a framework for perl that's seriously competing against RoR: Catalyst

....and my new toy (the product, not the man): it's fully loaded with pretty much all the custom upgrades, and i'm probably going to start using it as my main computer while running webapps off of it (look here, here, and here if you're interested in getting a blog up and running on a mac really quickly.)

[all posts in /]  [permanent link]

circumnavimgate comment

I know it's been a little over 3 months since the discussion took place, but I wanted to put this up because it was what I was thinking about at the time, and I'm still interested. The discussion about circumnavimgate took place on phonoloblog at the end of April. I am no way an expert in spectrogram reading, but I looked back at the handouts I got in my Phonetics course (particularly this one) and agreed with Daniel Hall's analysis that the F2 formant suggests the nasal in question is alveolar. But then I thought about it a bit more, and I'm wondering if anyone knows of an instance where a velar nasal does show an even F2 or F3 transition, possibly because of the vowel before or after it. Or does anyone know what the formant transitions of a palatal nasal are? Even tho' a palatal nasal isn't in the word "circumnavigate" (and therefore wouldn't be an example of a copy), it still is what might be there, no? Maybe even because the speaker's target was [n], yet because of the following [g], the actual contact was palatal. (I'm thinking of what Browman and Goldstein talked about in "Tiers in articulatory phonology, with some implications for casual speech"(1987).) I have never seen a spectrogram of a palatal nasal, and I've never been told how to distinguish it from other nasals. In general, it seems there's more F2-F3 "pinching" the farther one moves toward the velum (from the lips). So a palatal would sorta be somewhere in between an alveolar and a velar nasal, right? Anyway, I did find Phonetic Explanations For Nasal Sound Patterns by John Ohala in Nasalfest: Papers from a Symposium on Nasals and Nasalization (which I scanned a portion of), which talked a bit about nasal acoustics. On page 294, Ohala mentions the very thing that this discussion is about: engma being confused with [m] and [n].

This may be totally off-topic, and probably shows the extent of my ignorance, but I'm curious about the categorization of the different types of speech errors that have been studied. On page 296, Ohala also writes:

Nasal-stop clusters tend be homorganic. This is undoubtedly follows in part from the acoustic similarity of the various nasal consonants, i.e., as they are auditorily ambiguous as to place of articulation they may be articulatorily re-interpreted.

[all posts in /ling/]  [permanent link]

it got half of me right

Over the past few months, I've really enjoyed taking the random internet quizzes I come across. I guess the few that do describe you well make up for the so many that are totally off base. Although the Who's Your Inner European? quiz does not predict your ethnicity, it reminded me of my problem with labeling a person as fitting a certain ethnic category. Growing up going to public school, I remember a few times where tests asked for my ethnicity, which started me thinking about the difference between who I am and what I mark on a questionnaire. The problem does not come from my cultural heritage: I was raised with some Scottish and Italian tradition, but mostly I identify with culture of Southern California (which is broad, I know, but at least it's less general "American" culture). The problem for me comes from the racial factor of ethnicity.

My grandfathers' families are from Italy, my maternal grandmother's mom is from Scotland and her dad is from Whales, and my paternal grandmother was adopted and does not know where her biological family is from. For practical purposes, most just clump Italian, Scottish, and Welsh together as a "White"[1]< ethnicity, so I have no problem there. My problem is a conscientous one whenever I mark what ethnicity I am on a form. As far as I know, I do have "white" ethnicity, but my paternal grandmother has features and skin tone associated with Native Americans. So should I mark "Other" or "White/American Indian" on my form since my grandmother thinks she's probably Native American?

An argument for me marking "Other" or "White/American Indian"is that everyone relies on their ancestors' portrayal of who they are (to some extent), and therefore I should take my grandmother at her word. If my grandmother said that both her parents had only very dark skin tone yet she, her husband, and all her children had a very pale skin tone, I would have good reason to question the validity of her statement that her parents had very dark skin tone. But the fact is that my grandmother does have features that are associated with Native Americans, which have been passed on to my dad and his sibs. It is reasonable then, to accept my ancestor's portrayal of who she thinks she is, since she has support for it.

On the other hand, an argument for me marking "White" is that I should limit my expression of who I am to how I look, and for the most part I look "White". This would probably please statisticians since generally that is the ethnic group with which I most identify. The question seems to be used for producing generalizations anyway, so being the most general (without being too wrong) will help whoever is asking the question: "be a good chap now and answer us simply. we don't want the messy details."

As you can probably tell, I don't like the second argument (but maybe there's a better reason to go with marking "White"). It all just becomes frustrating because I don't fit the "model" that everyone is supposed to know where they are from. The ethnicity of others doesn't seem to be so cut and dry either, and I seriously wonder what good it is (besides propagating ethnic divisions or conducting serious research for medicinal or ethnological purposes) to factionalize people by ethnicity and race. Anyway, that's my $0.02. Oh yeah, and before I forget, this is what the Who's Your Inner European? quiz told me: :)

Your Inner European is Italian!

Passionate and colorful. You show the world what culture really is.

[1]but what is a "White" ethnicity anyway? It seems to broad of a term to be useful scientifically or historically, but yet people accept its use and continue to use it on a daily basis. The same goes for all the other "codes" used for determining ethnicity: what a bummer.

c'mon dromano, you're not really italian; just an italian-poser, you white boy. ch. psh. tsk.

Your Inner European is Irish!

Sprited and boisterous!

You drink everyone under the table.

Who's Your Inner European?

Hey Dave. I hope your summer is going swimmingly. I'm glad I'm a stereotypical Irish because I do like to drink and my moral prudeness does match a typical Catholic.

[all posts in /]  [permanent link]