Monday 27 April 2015

Quando coeli movendi sunt et terra

Those words are from the text of the Requiem mass... 'when the heavens and the earth are moving'. 

The recent terrible events in Nepal reminded me of three things.

The first  was 'The Great Peruvian Earthquake' of 31 May 1970. Again there was a complete   breakdown in communications. As it happened there was something  else going on not too far away, kicking off on that very day: the Mexico World Cup. The father of a member of the group I sang and played with was Peruvian, and was trying in vain to get news of his family. It struck me as ironic that at a time when hundreds of journalists with millions of pounds worth of hi-techery (which we had been told about in awestruck tones for weeks beforehand by Jimmy Hill  and his fellow pundits – the instantaneous action-replay  was a new invention at the time
<weasel_words>
...well maybe not brand new. Perhaps like many technological sporting innovations it was known of but thought too expensive – until an excuse for conspicuous consumption arose (something REALLY IMPORTANT like the FIFA World Cup.)
</weasel_words>
, and was going to revolutionize football commentary) were so nearby (well, on the same page of the map at least), the plight of the Peruvians was so dire.

I being in my Peter  Starstedt  phase (Where Do You Go To (My Lovely)?  had spent 4 weeks at no. 1 a few months previously) I wrote a song – another of Paul Simon's 'songs that voices never shared':
<digression> 
In homage to Starstedt's whimsical Zeitgeist-y references ('You sip your Napoleon brandy, and never get your lips wet'...) I had odd portentous sallies like 'What have you done, Jules Rimet?' The most heavily ironic touch  was a setting  of the football chant
Ee Aye Addio We won the Cup
in a minor  key. Pretty poignant, I think you'll agree.  
</digression>
The second was a reflexion on musical settings relating to earthquakes, which I wrote nearly a year ago here, and which I felt merited another airing:
The going rate for the (musical) difference between heaven and earth seems to be about an octave. (This is an open goal for musicologists – my theoretical knowledge of music is minimal. Please comment if this needs another update.) Verdi, as I said, drops an octave from coeli to terra (after a bar containing higher notes). [Update: the main piece had referred to Verdi‘s Requiem, which, at the time, I had recently sung.]
Fauré, an enfant terrible who was nick-named Robespierre during his Directorship of the Paris Conservatoire because of his reforming zeal, toys with expectations in his setting of Libera me [part of his Requiem].
Quando coeli movendi sunt
Quando coeli movendi sunt
Et terra ...
The words are des-cribing the Day of Judgment. Quando coeli movendi sunt – 'not too scary; a clap or two of thunder. But hang on ...et terra. Not just thunder, that felt to me like an earthquake – I've got a REALLY BAD feeling about this.' 
But the drop isn't quite an octave. This minor seventh coincides approximately with the 'that felt to me like an earthquake' in my imaginary commentary. What coincides with the words 'I've got a REALLY BAD feeling about this' is the octave drop at '...Dum veneris' {='when you [will††] come'}. Taking the music along with the text you get an even more intensely growing feeling of impending doom. 
††This is not to suggest that the original writer had any choice about using the future (if he [almost certainly a he] used a finite verb, that is). Latin, like many languages, just does this; ESOL students in fact, find it very difficult to buy in to the English way (and even when they've 'bought in', a pretty reliable bear-trap remains – a potential error that few manage to avoid!) I only insert the 'will' as a way of underlining the fact that the Latin makes it very clear that THIS IS GOING TO HAPPEN. A common way of dealing with this in English is the addition of an expression like '... And it's a question of WHEN rather than IF'.

The third was to wonder if there was any remote etymological link between 'terra-' and 'terror' – and it seems there's not.  It's just a coincidence that earthquakes (Sp. terremotos
<digression>
I use terremoto rather than tierra lest anyone think 'But of course  tierr- is not the same as terr-.'  A Spanish speaker wouldn't feel this, being used to the e/ie variation under conditions of stress in some sorts of /e/. This accounts for many irregular Spanish verbs, such as tener – with stressed tiene [='he/she/it has'] but unstressed tenemos ['we have'] (well, not totally unstressed of course, but unstressed in the relevant syllable). (Italian doesn't do this: terracotta but also terra.)
</digression>
) are both terrible and terrifying.

The Proto-Indo-European root for tierra is given in Etymonline‘s entry for 'terrain':
...from terra "earth, land," literally "dry land" (as opposed to "sea"); from PIE root *ters- "to dry" 

Meanwhile, under 'terror', the source is different:
...from terrere "fill with fear, frighten," from PIE root *tres- "to tremble" (see terrible).
         See more here (if you're that way inclined).

And the possibility of a metathetical link between *ters- and *tres- doesn‘t seem to me worth fretting about; that would be a supposed phonological development in a language that exists  only in  the minds of a few linguists.

OK – Real Life calls.

b

Update: 2015.04.28.11:20 – Added notes in red.
Update: 2015.04.30.09:20 – Added PS.

PS At the end of last year I referred to a growing following, then reaching an average of 35 daily visits. Well 35 schmirty-five. This has been a record month (an average of over 55 visits per day), and the latest version of the graph I gave then reflects this:

Update: 2015.05.01.22:55 – Added illustration  from the Libera Me.
Update: 2016.01.23.11:30 – Embellished reminiscence in purple.

Friday 17 April 2015

Outside the box

Last week, as part of the wall-to-wall election coverage (UK readers will know what I mean; non-UK readers can be extremely thankful that they are not involved in what is misleadingly called the democratic process – these guys wouldn't recognize democracy if it bit them) I heard Nigel Farrago saying 'I am outside the box'. UKIP's PR-machine seems to have leapt into action, as all the web accounts I can find have the text 'repaired' to something that uses the words 'thinking outside the box' . But I'm convinced the aforementioned populist said either 'I am' or 'We are...' – which seems to me to point the way that this idiom is likely to go (further and further from its [fairly recent] origins).
[I]ts origin is generally attributed to consultants in the 1970s and 1980s [this source places it a decade earlier] who tried to make clients feel inadequate by drawing nine dots on a piece of paper and asking them to connect the dots without lifting their pen, using only four lines:
          See more here 

But origins, as I've said before, aren't a clincher in discussions of  'what words "really" mean'.
An interesting blog from the OED stables refers to th[e] tendency to be hung-up on a supposed 'original' meaning based on etymology and calls it the 'Etymological Fallacy'.
The issue of original meaning struck me this morning when a non-native speaker of English referred to an aeroplane doing aerobatics as 'very acrobatic'. To the dyed-in-the-wool etymologically-anal word-Nazi,  any aeroplane in flight – however sedate its behaviour – is acro[Gk άκϱος ="high"]-batic[Gk βαινω [a very irregular verb, meaning "go"].  'Acrobatic', in this perverse sense of 'high-going', DEFINES the performance of  an aeroplane. But good ol' BNC lists 115 nouns that collocate with acrobatic, and none of them is aeroplane .


Tales from the Word-face

[excerpt from forthcoming offering – offered not without a certain shame-facedness (as it's not really up to scratch)]:
[HD In the first para. I mention 'the evolution of the sequel to WVGT'. As a background to this, there has also been evolution in the idea of WVGT itself. When Vowels Get Together dealt with vowels getting together with each other. Future issues will deal with vowels getting together with other phonemes (starting with the most interesting ones [as far as changes to vowel quality are concerned]: the sonorants. The Introduction goes on:] 
I'll make this issue available asap, but.... Back to the drawing board...

b

Update 2013.04.20.10:00 – Oh dear – easier said than done. Amazon have a minimum cover-price (not possible to publish a free book), and I'm blowed if I'll charge for this thing. So I went to Google Play, whose  Ts&Cs start like this:


Hmmm. I recognize the problem that the 'writer' had. S/he put  the links in a draft, and a reviewer said 'These URLs may change. What can we do about it?' The writer, of course had a deadline to meet, so rather than work something out (after all. the stuff on those linked pages constitute two out of the three documents YOU MUST READ AND ACCEPT,  so getting it right mattered). But, adopting the totally meaningless 'meaning' of  'as such' that seems to be the fashion nowadays [ignoring the fact that ‘such'  needs to refer to a noun, and that in the expression ‘as such' it needs to refer to a preceding noun], s/he strung together some words  about changing URLs and copiedNpasted a couple of parentheses regardless of how unintelligible it made the resulting 'sentence'.

As it happens they have both changed. The first gives a 404 error, and the second at least takes you somewhere – although  the pages there don't seem to use the term 'FAQ'. 

In other words, there's a lot of sorting out to do....



Mammon When Vowels Get Together V5.2: Collection of Kindle word-lists grouping different pronunciations of vowel-pairs. Now complete (that is, it covers all vowel pairs –  but there's still stuff to be done with it; an index, perhaps...?) 

And here it is: Digraphs and Diphthongs . The (partial) index has an entry for each vowel pair that can represent each monophthong phoneme. For example AE, EA and EE are by far the most common pairs of vowels used to represent the /i:/ phoneme, but there are eight other possibilities. The index uses colour to give an idea of how common a spelling is, ranging from bright red to represent the most common to pale olive green to represent the least common.

I'm thinking about doing a native iBook version in due course, but for now Mac users can use Kindle's own (free) simulator.

Also available at Amazon: When Vowels Get Together: The paperback.

And if you have no objection to such promiscuity, Like this

Freebies (Teaching resources:  
Nearly 48,000 views  and  7,800 downloads to date**. They're very eclectic - mostly EFL and MFL, but one of the most popular is from KS4 History, dating from my PGCE, with over 2,600 views and 1,050 downloads to date. So it's worth having a browse.)

** This figure includes the count of views for a single resource held in an account that I accidentally created many years ago.





Friday 10 April 2015

Android and Billy Bean


Tales from the word-face                                                

<autobiographical_note>
Image result for billy bean and his funny machine
Bill Bean's machine; see more here.
This Billy Bean is not the world's first openly gay baseball player, who is discussed here. He is the forerunner of that Bertha once beloved of my son, although Billy Bean BUILT his machine ('to see what it would do' according to the theme tune now playing in my mind's ear), whereas Bertha had a mind of her own.
Image result for tv comic annual
An early BBC publication (possibly even pre-dating BBC Publications) was  TV Comic
<meta_autobiographical_note>
(published for the first 33 years of my life)
</meta_autobiographical_note>
and a spin-off from this was TV Comic Annual.

A tussle I've been having with Android of late involved a solution that reminded me of a story in the one such Annual I ever wasted my pocket money on. The story involved Billy Bean diagnosing a problem caused by a red/green colour-blind engine driver. It was a fairly forgettable story, but it involved a rhyming couplet  (produced by the machine):
Take the train to there and back
That will put you on the track
</autobiographical_note>

My Android problem involved IPA characters. When I edited an HTML file the characters behaved, but when I opened it after compiling the HTML the IPA symbols started misbehaving.  But only after a while. The first few files I produced were fine. I tried again and again ...
<digression>
Which reminds me of a Human/Computer Interface ('HCI') course I did in the late '80s, in which the presenter told us that the Captain of the USS Vincennes in the crisis of the incident described here issued a mistaken command to his computer 17 times, hoping against hope that the response would become intelligible.
</digression>
... and then gave up. I sent two files (both of which had IPA symbols [the same characters, cutNpasted from the good file to the bad one] that seemed fine in a text editor but not in an HTML compiler) in a mail to an Android guru (who I had worked with at about the same time as that HCI course).

He was confused. And I was – at first  – even more confused. I thought the problem was obvious, but he couldn't see it at all. It was only after I took a deep breath and looked at what I had sent that I understood. It turned out that Gmail had automatically changed a setting that fixed the problem. My Android expert couldn't see what was wrong because there was nothing wrong. 

This is where Billy Bean comes in: he diagnosed the problem  accidentally, just by going for a ride. In my case, I diagnosed a problem accidentally by trying to describe it to someone else. If Gmail could do something perhaps the text editor I was using could have done it too. And I had changed editors (a detail that I had not mentioned in my mail, thinking it irrelevant).

Anyway, my HTML files are now behaving;  I just have to use a particular editor.  I'd like to know why (the particular setting that is involved), but at least they work. And after I've recharged my Android thingy I'll add one in an update. Meanwhile... gotta go.

b

PS The News on the radio as I type is reporting on Clegg's blood-money. Why-ever does he think a handful of loose change will wipe away the guilt of tricking a generation out of their birthright?

Update 2015.04.11.10:45 – Added PPS
PPS Extract from the very distant (horizontal?) WVGT2,  sv AL representing /ɑ:/
  1. almond
    Macmillan English Dictionary transcribes "almond" with this long vowel and no /l/, but many other pronunciations are current among native-speakers of British English. I have heard /ɑ:l/, /ɔ:l/, /æl/ and /ɒl/. Some of these are reported in Cambridge Dictionaries Online and identified as "American".
  2. almoner
    The Macmillan English Dictionary does not include "almoner", but other dictionaries (for example, Collins) do. In this and many other "-al-" words the letters "al" represent the phoneme /ɑ:/; there is no /l/.
  3. alms
    Note the plural ending.
  4. aloo
    The Macmillan English Dictionary gives "aloo" this long vowel, but other pronunciations are common (as is normal with foreign borrowings).
  5. fly-half
    In this expression (a position in a game of rugby) there is no clear (immediate) sense of " divided by two".
  6. gala
    Used in compounds, probably the most successful being "swimming gala". In many northern dialects the stressed vowel is pronounced /eɪ/. (This pronunciation is identified in the Macmillan English Dictionary as "American".)
  7. half-baked , half-breed and half-caste
    In these and many other words that use the qualifier "half" "half"-ness does not have a direct and/or obvious association with the word that follows "half-".
  8. half-timbered
    In this sort of building, some of the structural timbers (not necessarily half) have a cosmetic function.
  9. half-truth
    In this sort of misleading statement much of what is asserted is true (often more than half).
  10. Kabbalah
    The Macmillan English Dictionary transcribes this word with the long /ɑ:/ vowel, but the audio sample has a clear /æ/. Both pronunciations are common.
  11. marsala
    The Macmillan English Dictionary does not include this word but other dictionaries (for example, Collins) do.
  12. qualms
    The Macmillan English Dictionary gives this in the plural. The plural is indeed more common; the British National Corpus contains 141 instances of the plural and only 30 of the singular, and in the Corpus Of Contemporary American (a much bigger corpus) the preference is even stronger (705:71). But the singular is used  most commonly after a negative, as in the idiom "without a qualm".
Update 2015,10,13,16:30 – Added footnote.
<autobiographical_note>
This was also the source, now I think of it, of a gag I "wrote" [plagiarized, really] when I was in Edinburgh in 1976: (an event I mentioned in passing here. 'Don't anybody move, [said the MGM lion, threateningly, at the beginning of the Oxford Theatre Group Review] I've got eyes like a larynx'. 
The (lukewarm) review in the Scotsman accurately  observed that the line (lifted, all except the opening warning from that annual) would have worked better on paper than when spoken. Little did the reviewer know that the line had (originally) been written  with a reader rather than an audience in mind; nor did they know that when I had first read it, in the early '60s, I had had to look up larynx in the dictionary (and, knowing neither the word lynx nor the phrase eyes like a lynx, I didn't get it at the time; still, I filed it away, never knowing when it might come in handy.) 
</autobiographical_note>


Mammon When Vowels Get Together V5.2: Collection of Kindle word-lists grouping different pronunciations of vowel-pairs. Now complete (that is, it covers all vowel pairs –  but there's still stuff to be done with it; an index, perhaps...?) 

And here it is: Digraphs and Diphthongs . The (partial) index has an entry for each vowel pair that can represent each monophthong phoneme. For example AE, EA and EE are by far the most common pairs of vowels used to represent the /i:/ phoneme, but there are eight other possibilities. The index uses colour to give an idea of how common a spelling is, ranging from bright red to represent the most common to pale olive green to represent the least common.

I'm thinking about doing a native iBook version in due course, but for now Mac users can use Kindle's own (free) simulator.

Also available at Amazon: When Vowels Get Together: The paperback.

And if you have no objection to such promiscuity, Like this

Freebies (Teaching resources:  
Nearly 50,000 views  and over 7,500 downloads to date**. They're very eclectic - mostly EFL and MFL, but one of the most popular is from KS4 History, dating from my PGCE, with over 2,600 views and 1,050 downloads to date. So it's worth having a browse.)

** This figure includes the count of views for a single resource held in an account that I accidentally created many years ago.




Wednesday 1 April 2015

Making room

<oops purpose="update"> 
Yesterday a silly editorial slip let this post go out under a rather boring title. Well, Tempora mutantur isn't intrinsically boring; it was pretty interesting when that Latin guy first used it. But it's rather lazy now, and was a working title. Making room does a better job of justifying the gear-shift from New words for old to New markets for old. 
</oops>
In this term‘s CAM (CU alumni magazine) there‘s an article about words used to describe landscape. It‘s quite fun, though not as much as I had hoped. And my enjoyment of it was spoiled by an Introduction that made the writer sound like a Daily Mail-reading saloon-bar bore:


....and blah blah blah. "Why, in my day,"  one can  imagine him saying, "we had to read a chapter of Gibbons before breakfast!"

This is strange. The writer, Robert Macfarlane, who is reading from his new book Landmarks this week on BBC Radio 4, doesn't sound like that; he is a youngish Fellow of Emmanuel College, one-time winner of the Guardian First Book Award, the Somerset Maugham Award, and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award.

He should choke on his kedgeree no more. The realities of  dictionary-publishing, rather than the corruption of Our Youth, are the issue. A saleable dictionary, whatever the market, is of finite length. The editors of the Oxford Junior Dictionary aren't scheming cultural vandals who with malice aforethought "excluded" morally justified words and "replaced" them with today's ephemeral playground slang.

A modern dictionary  uses a corpus (a word-bank). Words come and go.  And in a finite dictionary the ones that are going have to make room for the ones that are coming. If, in the chosen corpus, MP3 Player occurs N times but acorn occurs N/100 times  then the writing is on the wall: acorn is weighed in the balance and found wanting. It's not a bad word, it's not a non-word, it just doesn't pull its weight in a 21st-century dictionary which records words relating to a 21st-century Junior (in that case) environment. Horses for courses.

The new words only replaced the old ones in the value-free sense of occupying the space that they (the old ones) had occupied in the previous edition. Once, that loathsome Americanism boyfriend usurped the position of swain. Language goes on, and the world of printed books tries more or less vainly to keep up.

Another instance of a passing trend that has been in the news of late (and the link is tenuous but not that tenuous) is the news that Kingfisher is back-pedalling on the DIY-front. They said on the Beeb that Kingfisher were closing some B&Q stores and opening some Screwfix ones (which cater for the trade) because the trend now was for lifestyle spend rather than DIY.
<rant>
...which explains the current spate of TV adverts (Kärcher is the latest offender, but there have been many others) that imply that a man is a ham-fisted klutz who spends hours getting tooled up and his wife saves the day by the simple expedient of spending a great deal of money. Of course! Why didn't the silly fellow think of that in the first place! DIY is so LAST YEAR.
</rant>
So the brilliant idea someone had back in 1997, helping form an association in web-users' minds between B&Q and DIY, has had its day:
extract from whois raw data: more here
Well. word-face calls; apropos ....


Tales from the word-face

I have Sigil working on Linux now. I may have said a while ago that Sigil (a WYSIWYG tool that produces EPUB files [standard mobile reader format]) was supported on Linux (which it may well have been at the time). Well, it's not. But being not supported is not the same as not working. It might mean (and does in this case) that it works but needs a bit more homework on the part of the user.
<potential_digression>
.. and don't get me started on the current lamentable trend to use on behalf of to mean on the part of.
</potential_digression>
But it's changed a good deal since I last used it, and can do much more than it could then. I need to spend some time seeing what it can do. So my earlier claim (earlier this year) to have worked out a modus operandi was a bit previous. So talk among yourselves....


b
PS And here's a clue to be going on with:

Couple at work with gin, but no energy for that sort of thing! (10)

Update 2015.04.02.09:20 –  Change from working title.

Update 2015.04.03.11:10 – Typo fixes and updated TES stats.

Update 2015.10.29.14:50 – Answer to that clue, [as if anyone needed it]COPULATING

Update 2017.10.22.18:50 – Deleted old footer.