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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in
Philip Newton's LiveJournal:
| Saturday, September 6th, 2008 | ||||||||||
| 9:53 am | SPIM So I opened Pidgin IM, as I do every once in a while... and get bombarded with MSN messages from people telling me to watch their cams or friend their other account. It's rather tiring. *sigh* SPIM Current Mood:  annoyed | |||||||||
| Friday, September 5th, 2008 | ||||||||||
| 8:25 am | Rhottic vs. Rhoatic speech So... "rhotic" has the GOAT vowel ("rhoatic")? Why'd nobody ever tell me? (Prompted by the 2 September entry of John Wells's phonetic blog.) I suppose that's yet another word that I mispronounce because I've only seen it in writing. | |||||||||
| Wednesday, September 3rd, 2008 | ||||||||||
| 9:36 am | Google Chrome I wonder whether the tab bar can be moved to the bottom—that's the way I have it in Opera and Firefox (quite possibly because my Windows tab bar is also at the bottom). One thing I miss in Google Chrome from Firefox 3 is remembering the zoom state per site. For example, Facebook and Wikipedia always looked too small to me, and I was always zooming up; when I upgraded FF to version 3, I found that it remembered the zoom state for a given site, so all windows from that site would have the new state! A bit unexpected at first, but a good idea. I also miss the custom search keywords -- I've got used to typing in, say, "en Foo" to find the English Wikipedia article on "foo". This worked in both Opera 9.5 and FF 3. | |||||||||
| 7:55 am | Amyism (In the context of coming home from kindergarten.) Amy: “Ich will nicht, dass du kommst und mich aufhebst nicht!” (Spot the English and Afrikaans.) Current Mood:  amused | |||||||||
| Tuesday, September 2nd, 2008 | ||||||||||
| 8:53 pm | L-vocalisation Amy seems to have a fair bit of L-vocalisation going on in her English—"miok" for the white stuff that cows make, etc. I can imagine that the fact that German has no "dark L" might contribute to her difficulty in making that sound, though that change is also one that native speakers in some parts make. (It's not one I think I make myself, though.) Also, the other day, we talked about where we change busses, and I said, "at Harburg Rathaus", and she repeated it as "at Harburg Rathouse". In other words, while I pronounced HR in German (code-switching the German name into the English sentence), she pronounced the final syllable with her English "ou" sound rather than her German one, perhaps because she thought that when speaking in English, one should use only English phonemes. (Though I think the remainder of the syllables she pronounced in German, like me, even though the German long A is not that close to my English "ah" sound, and the German uvular fricative R is completely missing from English....) Still, I found it interesting. | |||||||||
| 2:58 pm | Kriminalität gehört generell verboten Edit: this is a non-entry, better titled "Philip should read the context". See I happened on a page (in German) which describes various political parties present in Hamburg describing their views on a variety of topics. One thing that just caught my eye was the PARTEI's statement on "Innenpolitik" (also visible here, along with other responses only from this party), which included this gem:
That is, roughly: "All crime should be prohibited". Which is kind of circular, isn't it? Or what's the definition of "crime"? Dictionaries say, for example: "an action or an instance of negligence that [...] and that is legally prohibited" (Dictionary.com); "an act committed or omitted in violation of a law forbidding or commanding it [...]; unlawful activity" (AHD). Both dictionaries also allow for extended senses such as "any offense"; "a foolish, senseless, or shameful act"; "a serious offense, especially one in violation of morality". But it seems to me that the primary meaning is related to legal prohibition, in which case demanding that crime be prohibited is useless: it's already prohibited, otherwise it wouldn't be a crime. Ĉu ne? Current Mood: amused | |||||||||
| 9:16 am | Amy's check-up Amy had her eighth regular check-up ("U8") the other day (for children between 3.5 and 4 years of age). I think her speech was fine this time (as opposed to, say, her two-year check-up, where she spoke quite a bit less than "average"), as was her knowledge of things such as colours. Her shortcomings were her motor skills: for example, she doesn't hop on one leg, and she's not very good at drawing (as opposed to colouring in). The square, circle, triangle, and cross she had to copy turned out rather wobbly and shapeless. The doctor (a substitute, since our regular pædiatrician was on holiday) was a bit disapproving and told us to practise a lot with Amy (both drawing shapes and things such as walking with one foot in front of the other or hopping on one leg) and to come back for a repeat of the U8 in half a year, though the assistant later told Stella not to worry too much and that coming back in a year's time should be sufficient, and that Stella would know best where Amy could use more practice. | |||||||||
| Sunday, August 31st, 2008 | ||||||||||
| 3:50 pm | Double entendre is in the ear of the beholder... Amy to me: "Daddy, I am a chick! "And you can be the cock." | |||||||||
| Thursday, August 28th, 2008 | ||||||||||
| 7:18 am | Time, perception of Amy just said she wanted to eat breakfast. Stella asked me whether I was ready to eat already, and I said, "five minutes", so I could just finish off the unread mails in my inbox (I only had four or five left). At which Amy started crying, which I had half expected—but the kicker was that she didn't demand to eat breakfast now; rather, she said, "but I don't want to eat in five minutes; I want to eat in eight minutes!". Which is a longer time to wait, but I'm not sure she realised that :) | |||||||||
| Wednesday, August 27th, 2008 | ||||||||||
| 6:18 pm | unrequited I just found out that "unrequited" has a "quite" sound in it—I'd been pronouncing it with "quit" all my life. (At least, that's how I've been saying it in my head. I don't think I've ever heard it spoken out loud, nor that I've had the opportunity to say the word out loud myself.) | |||||||||
| Tuesday, August 26th, 2008 | ||||||||||
| 11:48 am | LiveJournal personality/weirdness test So, pne, your LiveJournal reveals... You are... 9% unique (blame, for example, your interest in yapc::europe) and 4% herdlike (partly because you, like everyone else, enjoy science fiction). When it comes to friends you are popular. In terms of the way you relate to people, you are wary of trusting strangers. Your writing style (based on a recent public entry) is intellectual. Your overall weirdness is: 49(The average level of weirdness is: 28. The Blogalyser reveals... Your blog/web page text has an overall readability index of 15. This suggests that your writing style is conventional CHARACTER MATRIX
Your text shows characteristics which are 59% male and 41% female | |||||||||
| Saturday, August 23rd, 2008 | ||||||||||
| 10:24 am | My topicalisation, let me show you it! I think the biggest Germanism in Amy's speech is fronting a topic, perhaps because it's a useful device that has no real counterpart in English (in general); English tends to stress the topic but not move it. For example, she might say, "Here we were already", "Here must we get off", or "This want I not", which are good translations of German "Hier waren wir schonmal", "Hier müssen wir aussteigen", and "Das möchte ich nicht", but where I would say "We've been here already", "Here's where we have to get off", and "I don't want this" instead. In unrelated news, Amy said, "I hurt myself!" today—an improvement over her previous "I hurt meself!". (Though I imagine there are some native English speakers who would disagree, for whom that would be overly formal and "meself" more natural :D) As for her pronoun use, it still seems rather arbitrary whether she'll use he/him/his/himself or she/her/her/herself to refer to anyone in particular. | |||||||||
| Friday, August 22nd, 2008 | ||||||||||
| 10:36 am | Unwarranted precision ( Cut for those who don't want to read me rant about this again ) Current Mood:  bitchy | |||||||||
| Thursday, August 21st, 2008 | ||||||||||
| 10:39 pm | टि टि When I first saw this logo:
I thought it was Devanagari for "Ti" (टि). But later it turned out that it was supposed to read "fc" instead:
Current Mood: amused | |||||||||
| 9:28 pm | Pre-natal listening device BebeSounds pre-natal listening device, deluxe set: Experience your unborn baby! ...that's the first time I've come across anything like this. (Seen in a shop window in Chur.)
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| 7:25 pm | Cadi, and the word's etymology The Surselva in Graubünden has two big sub-districts (de: Kreise, rm: circuls) in the Rhine valley itself: Disentis and Ilanz. The German names of those sub-districts are fairly self-explanatory; they are the names of each district's capital town. In Romansh, however, the names are rather different: "Kreis Disentis" is called "Circul da la Cadi" and "Kreis Ilanz" is called "Circul da la Foppa". Since the Foppa region is occasionally referred to in German as "Gruob" (presumably corresponding to High German "Grube"), I figured that would be a regular word, and indeed, my dictionary translates "foppa" as "Mulde, Delle, Senke" ("basin, dell, hollow, dent, depression, dip"). But the meaning of "Cadi" was elusive to me. The fact that the kinds of contexts where Kreis Ilanz is referred to as "Gruob" in German refer to Kreis Disentis as "Cadi" in German, too, didn't help, either. But then I read about the Three Leagues (which later themselves joined together to form Graubünden), one of which, the League of God's Hause (Gotteshausbund) has its own article in the English Wikipedia—and there I read that the Italian name is "Lega Caddea" and the Romansh is "Lia da la Chadé". And then something clicked. (It also helped that the article used the Rumantsch Grischun version of the league's name rather than the Sursilvan one, since I'm more familiar with RG morphemes). So, presuming that S "Cadi" = RG "Chadé", I presume that they're both short for "God's house" ("chasa da Dieu" in RG, and word-initial cha- in RG regularly corresponds to ca- in Sursilvan). Current Mood:  accomplished | |||||||||
| 11:02 am | Unix—it's where you go to buy rings Not the first thing that comes to my mind when I hear "Unix" :-)
(Seen in Chur, Graubünden, Switzerland.) | |||||||||
| Wednesday, August 20th, 2008 | ||||||||||
| 8:08 pm | 20.08.2008 20:08 Interesting date :) | |||||||||
| Tuesday, August 19th, 2008 | ||||||||||
| 5:11 pm | Back FWIW, I'm back from Switzerland now. I doubt I'll be able catch up with my two-week friends page backlog. (Not to mention that on my default view, ?skip=960 - the maximum for me at 40 entries a page - only goes back to Wednesday the 13th.) I'm not sure how to word this without seeming lazy or uncaring, but: if you'd like to bring something important to my attention that I've missed, please do. | |||||||||
| 4:51 pm | Samadan :: spotting errors in RG There is a town in Graubünden called Samedan. I originally assumed, from the spelling that it would be pronounced /zam@'da:n/, but the German Wikipedia article says that it is pronounced roughly Sameeden, i.e. (I assume) /za'me:d@n/. When I was travelling to Val Müstair, I heard an announcement, possibly in the station at Zernez or on the train in the lower Engadine valley (I don't remember) calling it /za'ma:den/ instead. That reminded me of something I had read about the differences between the—otherwise rather similar—Putèr (Upper Engadine) and Vallader (Lower Engadine) idioms of Romansh: that where many other idioms had long /a/, Putèr has long /e/ (which change is also reflected in the spelling), e.g. chasa/chesa for "house". And I wondered whether this was another example, that there was (etymologically?) "underlying" long a in the second syllable of the word word, which turned into long e in Upper Engadine, in the standard name for the town, but that in Vallader, the long a sound was "preserved". (Though when I glanced at the German Wikipedia article just now, it said that the official name for the town, in German, until 1943 was "Samaden". I'm not sure what that does to my theory.) I'm amused sometimes when I know enough Rumantsch Grischun to catch mistakes that people writing "officially" in RG make, influenced—no doubt—by their native idioms (since RG is nobody's native variety). (I'm also sure that I'd easily make many more mistakes in my writing.) Two in particular are dil, which I found a couple of times in the instructional grammar of RG I downloaded at once point, and attributive quai, which I found in a couple of newspaper articles in La Quotidiana. For the first, both Sursilvan and Rumantsch Grischun contract da il "of the", but S contracts it to dil while RG uses dal. For the second, I'm not sure which idiom the mistake might come from, but to the best of my knowledge, quai is used only as a remplazzant (literally, "replacer"—"pronoun" in this case, I suppose), as in "I like that", but not as in "I like that book", where it's used as an accumpagnader ("accompanier"—"determiner"?). There are several forms of pronoms demonstrativs which can be used as both accumpagnader and remplazzant, such as quest, quel, lez, but a couple which can only be one or the other; quai is one of them, which can only be a remplazzant (and also doesn't inflect for gender). So *quai cudesch "this book" would probably have to be quest cudesch or quel cudesch; *quai gasetta "this newspaper", questa gasetta or quella gasetta. I wonder what the form in the writer's idiom is that made him pick quai <noun> in his newspaper articles. | |||||||||
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