Monday 30 November 2015

Golden Ages and Pavements

There are two jumping-off points for today's intertwined musings. No, three – only the third is a concert I mean to go to in the future (next Friday  at the time of writing) , and is just a happy coincidence anyway. It is a concert given by my choir's Musical Director, who also directs (and founded) the group Siglo de Oro. The coincidence will become clear in the fullness of time.

The two are:
  • An interview with the singer of  the Eagles of Death. He was saying that he wanted to perform at the reopening of the Bataclan
  • An old Archive on Four programme, repeated last Saturday on Radio Four Extra

The first of these made me wonder how they [the band]  would start. It would be missing a trick not to resume where they had left off when the infamous killing-spree started – perhaps even in mid-song. This reminded me of a story I heard in a half-remembered lecture, about Juan del Encina.
<autobiographical_note date_range="1971-1972">
Juan del Encina
In May 1972 I was ... not quite a world authority on sixteenth-century Spanish literature, but Professor E. M. Wilson, my lecturer for that year, was. 
Juan del Encina, author of some of the seminal works in Spanish Golden Age literature, was arrested by the Holy Inquisition in the middle of a lecture. He was away for some considerable time (years, I think, but I was never much of a note-taker; I'm sure the details are somewhere on the Internet, if you‘re that way inclined).  
When he returned, his opening words were Dicebamus hesterno  die [="{As} we were saying the other day"].
<digression>
It was partly because of Professor Wilson's specialism (he had just contributed the chapter on Calderón to the standard work on Golden Age Literature first published in 1971) that the Hispanic Society chose the play mentioned here.
</digression>
</autobiographical_note>
Now for the second of those blogogenic seeds. To quote Wikipedia:
 ...Vox populi, vox Dei /vɒks ˈpɒpjuːlɪ ˌvɒks ˈdɛɪ/, "The voice of the people [is] the voice of God", is an old proverb often erroneously attributed to William of Malmesbury in the twelfth century.
(I can't say I'm entirely happy about that /ˈpɒpjuːlɪ/, but that's neither here nor there,) The work  saying 's author is anonymous, but pre-dates William of Malmesbury by centuries. And the sentiment is self-evidently ridiculous.
<digression>
It's not unlike other sayings, such as The customer is always right ([which whenever I've worked in retail...
<meta_digression possibility="0">
No, too boring. Except for the broad beans. Maybe another time.
</meta_digression>
... is emphatically not believed by the staff], that make a clear and radical statement that is manifestly untrue. 
</digression>
Part of this saying has been used to refer to the sort of interview discussed in that Archive on Four programme – vox pop. I just heard a vox pop on the radio news, featuring opinions on whether the UK should bomb Syria. The interviewer asked someone who was strongly in favour 'Will it do any good?' And, scarcely credibly, the response was "WELL IT CAN'T DO ANY HARM." ... vox Dei? Perhaps he doesn't fully understand the concept of bombing.

In France, the word for a vox pop makes no such claim. But it does, by chance, recall a trick I've noticed in other vox pops. At the end, after the interviewer's piece to camera, the camera often pans down to the pavement to show the feet walking away [in the equivalent of cowboys riding off into the sunset]. It signifies That's all folks. (I have a researcher working on this; her fairly recent lecture notes from a Media Studies degree may give this observation some authoritative backing. Maybe, though, this recurrent camera trick is just favoured by BBC South's news editor[s].)

And that pavement is suggested also in the French micro-trottoir [="microphone-pavement", not "little pavement", SILLY].

In the USA, there is another term.
... broadcast journalists almost always refer to them as the abbreviated vox pop....In U.S. broadcast journalism it is often referred to as a man on the street interview or M.O.T.S 
More
'Professional videographer, editor, and media professor David Burns', in this YouTube clip uses the PC version 'person on the street'  – maybe he's worried about tenure.

I wonder whether this 'on the street' influenced the French coining, in an attempt to avoid the borrowing of an Anglo-Saxon term (a pre-echo of La <<loi Toubon>>?).

b

PS
One other coincidence doesn't really count, as – although my choir is singing the song (an anonymous Siglo de Oro song) at the Christmas concert –  I shall be unable to join them. This is because of the traditional annual clash between my choir's Christmas concert and my daughter's windband's Christmas concert.

Update 2015.11.30.21:05 –  Misplaced para: sorry. 

Update 2015.12.03.08:50 –  A few corrections/clarifications, and added this crossword clue:

Spooner gave an uppercut to playwright for this factor in Winter's Tale. (4,5)

Update 2016.04.19..18:35 –  Crossword answer (at last) and deleted obsolete footer.

Time‘s up: WIND CHILL (not bad. TISIAS )

Wednesday 25 November 2015

Still at it

Report from the word face


Having finished a rough-cut (very rough) of the *il* section, I'm taking time out to reflect a bit on the Android spell-checker.

Android's spell-checker never ceases to amaze me: its latest suggestion, for "n o-frills" is
"up-front" which does share a hyphen followed by fr, and (though in the wrong places) an "n" and an "o"; but it shares nothing else.

In these five cases I hadn't made a mistake, but Android (or maybe Kingsoft Office – the software I'm using [I'm not really on top of this thing]) still felt I needed some help finding le mot juste:

1

(You can ignore the pink bit. Selecting a cell makes the Comment box appear willy-nilly [see below]. The green outline marks the selected word, and the suggestions made by the spell-checker are in blue, at the bottom left-hand corner.)
I wonder what's wrong with ill-advised, apart from the general hostility to the hyphen felt by some users of American English (mentioned here). Anyway, I'm impressed by the creativity underlying the suggestions of alternatives.

2

 I detect a somewhat Calvinistic value system at work here.
3

From stern to surreal. I generally expect my t-shirts to be still. The notion of an autonomous (automotive?) one is rather disturbing.
4
 

I wonder which of these full-time things is the least surreal; or indeed the most. A full-time logo sounds like something Harry Potter might know about, akin to those moving pictures in the newspapers.  And what would it do on its day off?
5


I think this might  be a thinly-veiled comment on T-Mobile's customer service.

Enough of this. Onwards and *ol*wards...

b

(PS... but this word-bashing is pretty arduous, and I have an interesting idea for a real book. So I'll carry on with #WVTbook2 as far as *ul*. Then I'll take stock,  and [maybe] change direction.)


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 9,000 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 nearly 2,700 views and nearly 1,100 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.







Sunday 22 November 2015

Reaching a consenseless


How The World Butchered Benjamin Franklin’s Quote On Liberty Vs. Security




That all seems a bt iffy: "According to  Wittes"?... "widely presumed"? But the writer needn't have hedged his [I assume Gregory Ferenstein is a he] bets quite so assiduously; Wittes was right. The letter to the governor was dated just over 260 years ago as I write, on 11 November 1755.

This article on the morphing of this meme (does that make it a morphed-meme, I wonder...) is worth a read, particularly in the light [a strangely inappropriate word to use about this unutterably dark episode] of the Paris évènements. Not that the words  of Benjamin Franklin [for he it was that wrote it ...
<digression>
I'm surprised that the writer of the article, which starts ‘One of America’s favorite liberal phrases has been sent through the political spin machine and polished into a Frankenstein of sorts...' [I know,  I know, "'s monster"] resisted the temptation to coin the word Franklinstein. Perhaps he just wasn't tempted – some people are funny like that.
</digression>
...] represent some kind of Holy Writ,  canonical in some way. If a thing is worth saying it's worth saying, whether it's ‘If a man would sell liberty...' or ‘If a person trades their Liberty...' or ‘If a man sacrifices personal liberty' or even [God help us]  ‘If a man trades in his  liberty...' or one of the hundreds of other variants (truncated and otherwise adapted to suit an argument, or a quest for Political Correctness, or  a column-width (so as to make a snappy headline) or for whatever other reason.... No one is saying ‘Only Franklin's words are necessarily true' nor ‘You may only express this truth in the canonical words'. People who talk like that are themselves fanatical self-appointed guardians of a dated text; ring any bells?

But prefacing some other words, infinitely variable but usually ending with the neat bit "deserves neither", with "In the words of Benjamin Franklin" or some such [disingenuously] thinly-veiled appeal to authority (especially the Constitutional authority of a Founding Father), should cut no ice with anyone.

Besides, what did he mean by essential in the phrase 'essential liberty'? I don‘t know, but I imagine it was closer, in 1755,  to requisite for being than to the all-purpose jolly important [to me] that is sadly common today.

b

PS A couple of clues:

Red character inverted? Carmine, after a fashion. (10)

I defined it, sort of - SIC (10)


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 9,000 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 nearly 2,700 views and nearly 1,100 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.





Thursday 19 November 2015

Singing in tongues

A few days ago my attention was caught by this tweet:
I did what I was told, and read this post. It's a fascinating field, but I was side-tracked by a digression prompted by these words...
When copying an accent in song turns out, it is all about the vowels. “Singing is all about vowels. Language is altogether is really [HD – sic; I suspect a hasty edit {you''ll know the sort of thing if you've read some of MY stuff}] vowels interrupted by consonants. Although there are things you have to be careful of when singing consonants generally it’s the vowels you have to be careful of.” Nail the vowels and you can nail the accent...
... particularly the word consonants. When you think about it  and you may have noticed that thinking about words is something I do – it does what it says (in a way often pleasing for the etymologically minded). Vowels could be regarded as 'sonants'  (not to be confused with sonorants – which really are A Thing in the world of phonetics [and I see that my made-up word sometimes is used like that {as here}, Aw shoot ...]). My point is that vowels are things produced by the vocal cords, or – to use my attempted, but misfired, neologism – 'sonants'. Con-sonants are things that just hold them together. If you think of an utterance as a stream, the water is the vowels; the consonants are the stepping stones.
<digression> 
Recently I was watching a French drama with subtitles. A subtitle read 'Have you had one?' I tried to recapture the original from my short-term memory, but failed; in my defence, it was late evening; earlier I'd've been  listening and not reading. It might have been (though I can't guarantee it)  Tu en a eu une? Hearing and making sense of that calls for quite some linguistic skill [and, for the non-Francophone, plenty of practice with the /y/ phoneme on which, don‘t get me started]. After the elision of en a the only two consonant phonemes among all those vowels are /n/ (twice) after the initial /t/. 
</digression>
The idea of accents in singing reminded me of a concert I sang in  nearly thirty years ago.
<autobiographical note>

Our conductor was a very young Paul Daniel. About two weeks before the concert, he started feeling a pain in his shoulder. He kept rehearsing us until the very last Thursday rehearsal, so on the Saturday we turned up for the dress rehearsal fully expecting him to be there. 

But on the Friday he had seen a specialist who told him if he conducted us the following day he might do serious damage. So, at almost no notice, we had a deputy to conduct us. The choir's records are sketchy, for so long ago. Paul Daniel was with us for 3 years (that's twelve concerts, of which he missed one), and there are records here of only 2 of his concerts. But there is also this:


Brian Wright had driven down that morning from Yorkshire. And when we sang 
Praise ye

The God of Brass 
he winced. He had been used to northern choirs, and was not expecting our /ɑ:/. I wonder what vowel Walton had in mind.
</autobiographical note>
I have long felt that the life of a choral singer would be made simpler if music publishers adopted use of the IPA. Amateur choirs don‘t have the luxury of foreign language coaches – mentioned by the opera singer interviewed in Faking the Funk::
I’ve long thought that it was easier to sing in an accent that isn’t your own than it is to speak in a foreign accent. This turns out to be somewhat true according to Bill Beeman, a sociolinguist at University of Minnesota. Beeman also happens to be an opera singer. He speaks and sings in multiple languages: English, German, Italian, French and Russian. However, his accent in each of these languages is acctually better when he sings than when he speaks.  
“My accent when I’m singing is very carefully constructed and we use coaches when we’re singing in order to be able to produce the language as perfectly as possible,” he says. 
        <autobiographical_rant>
I don't think I've ever sung Fauré's lovely Cantique de Jean Racine  [ranted about here] without a more or less protracted argument  repeated in rehearsals – about the false liaison of très with haut. And I've sung it at least a dozen times [in concerts and other performances, that is; getting on for a hundred rehearsals. On one occasion it was a tenor [who doesn't even sing the words in question] who complained: "We sang it that way [HD: the 'thirteen waters' versionPS/PPSon tour in Belgium and had no complaints." GIVE ME STRENGTH!
</autobiographical_rant>
It would make the life of a choral singer much simpler, as I said. And each choir that cared about these things would only have to have one member, learning at the most a few dozen symbols. Besides so many amateur singers are language teachers (I wonder why...?) that the relevant expert would be readily to hand in most cases.

But I put it to a man at OUP who convinced me that it would cause so much upheaval (and cost publishers such a deal of money, I think he meant) that it just won't happen. But a chap can dream....

Enough dreaming though. There are words to be learnt for Saturday.

b
Update 2015.11.19.15.15 – Added PS 
PS A misericord (in the metaphorical sense introduced here): 'Thirteen waters' = treize eaux [geddit? the words that provoke the false liaison are très haut]

Update 2015.11.22.19.35 – Updated the Saturday link, so that it points to something useful a review.

Update 2016.04.16.20.20 – Added PPS and deleted obsolete footer.

Just back from this:
A good   day‘s sing. We sang the Cantique, and – true to form – there was a smattering of the thirteen waters version. Oh well – these things are sent to ... evoke clichés


Tuesday 10 November 2015

Litigious software engineers?

This extract, particularly the use of actionable, was in line for a FOGGY. But I thought better of it. The word, as they say, does what it says on the tin, so what grounds have I to be sniffy about it?
Each day, our society creates 2.5 quintillion bytes of data (that’s 2.5 followed by 18 zeros). With this flood of data the need to unlock actionable value becomes more acute
Source: Coursera
The word actionable is not in the Macmillan English Dictionary  (except, of course, in the legal sense) or in Collins English Dictionary or Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary, or in the 1913 edition of Websters. In the first of these the word has a URL that suggests it is 'American' (a common, usually mistaken, gibe – but that's another story, brushed on in this blog,  passim).

But Webster's New World College Dictionary has the new sense: 
This has taken two steps away from the Path of [prescriptive] Righteousness:
  1. 'Action' is verbified
  2. The 'new' verb (which is not really new) has had the suffix '-able' applied, to turn it into an adjective (with the 'suffixer' oblivious to the fact that the neologism treads on the toes of a  pre-existing word that has an unrelated meaning).
And the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary has caught up with the second meaning too. 

It's a change that has been coming for some time, which is indicated by the Collins frequency graph showing actionable's frequency (although, as I've noted above, Collins doesn't note the new meaning):
Frequency graph from Collins English Dictionary

I suspect, though proving as much would take more corpus-query nous than I have*, that the rapid rise from the mid-'80s...
<autobiographical_note>
When I started my involvement with writing about  computer networks, in 1984, I had to get used to (and learn to live with) several new applications (there's one, for example) of words I'd been happily using for years. One of these was 'actionable', frequently used in the world of nets&comms where, as I understand it, it is used to describe a chunk of data that the software knows what to do with [and excuse the personification – that was another trick I had to get used to: a software engineer who means ‘the software assesses the data and sends it to X' {where X is another software module being developed by engineer N} says ‘I sniff the data and hand it to N'; a neat bit of jargon, but one that calls for quite a bit of decrypting]. This Google search shows that on a single site (w3.org  – home of the relevant geeks) there are 1,750 hits.
</autobiographical_note>
... is due to the spread of the new meaning.

All of which is pretty plausible... Except that I have conveniently cherry-picked my data.  Going back a further 50 years the same Collins site shows this frequency:
A tale of litigiousness in the Roaring 20s?
So what's the message? Perhaps this just underlines a point  made by David Crystal in his treatment of the 100th word, twittersphere, in The Story of English in 100 Words:


What causes language-change? Events, dear boy, events – among other things.

b

Update 2015.11.10.20:40 – added this note:
*It was easier than I expected. This BNC search throws up 87 hits for "actionable". Of these, 66 are marked as academic, and of those 64 have the sub-class W_ac_polit_law_edu. So, making the safe assumption that the ones in that sub-class had the legal meaning, there were only 23 to trawl through by hand. Out of the 87, all but 2 have the legal sense.

Update 2015.11.11.09:20 – added this PS:
PS This note, I now realize, suggests the precise opposite of  what I wanted it to. I wondered if the American story would be different. This COCA search shows that things are very different for American English:

This calls for further reflection, but not now. 

Update 2015.11.12.22:20 – Updated TES stats.

Update 2015.11.15.19:20 – made addition in blue to autobiographical bit.




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:  
Well over 49,900 views  and nearly 9,000 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 nearly 2,700 views and nearly 1,100 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.




Thursday 5 November 2015

Taking things to ♥

In last night's talk at the Great Hall, Reading, David Crystal mentioned a change on Twitter (a tweak?) that has caused ructions. Not being a daily user of Twitter –  a twenizen or twabitué – I was aware of it but could not date it so precisely; a has become a ♥ ; at my latest visit, I just noticed and thought  Whyever did they do that?
The had a pleasing ambiguity. I have used it in the past for two things:
  1. As a marker for the last tweet  I had read (back in the days when I tried to at least cast an eye over all the tweets in my timeline). This mimics the First Unseen command of my one-time great love VAX Notes – which I may have mentioned before.
  2. As a way of keeping a record of tweets I wanted to remember (typically, pointers to web pages).
Unlicensed screengrab from
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9lmCpIzhFo
So, as I saw it,  the star was a marker for my use. I had not, then, come across the concept of a social media Like. In the world of social media there is a growing trend in favour of expressing approval of things, by awarding a Like (not a precise synonym for 'a like' in the analogue world – which is a habitual preference, as in likes and dislikes). Well, to call it  'a growing trend' is something of an understatement; it's more an outpouring of unEnglish bonhomie, which is gradually seeping into British English among users of social media. A digital Like is a notch in your digital gun (or, for Not The Nine O'clock News fans, a hedgehog symbol on the cab of your lorry). It's something to be proud of, and a public statement of your worth.

I realized the importance of this distinction when posters of tweets that I had marked with my no. 1 sort of 'like' (when the nearest sense to liking was in the implied You [i.e. I –  this is an internal monologue, remember] may LIKE to note that you've seen everything before this one) started thanking me.

A questioner after the talk asked whether Crystal expected the reinstatement of the  alongside the ♥.  Many users of Twitter had complained, Crystal had said – particularly (or at least most vocally) journalists, who didn't want to Like a picture of a beheading,  for example, when they just found it noteworthy. And this called to mind an example from a forum thousands of times smaller than Twitter.
<autobiographical_note> 
When I first started using UsingEnglish.com there was no way of symbolically expressing approval. This was in 2006, when many users still had slow dial-up lines. It was frustrating to spend <however long> (90 seconds?) downloading the latest reply to a note you were subscribed to, only to see the word Thanks (or even just tx or ;) ). So the powers that be introduced a Thanks button. 
But the forum, which used the vBulletin package was, in time, social-ized. You could have Groups and Friends and stuff – all those social impedimenta that we nerds are uncomfortable with. And as part of this social-ization (or in its wake [I'm not sure of the relative dates]) the Thanks button was re-labelled Like
This was not popular. People wanted to be able to give Thanks without the emotional incontinence of spraying Likes around like an over-excited puppy. Some time afterwards  – I don't know how soon after the change to Like, as a job intervened and I took a sabbatical from my moderating duties  – a new Thanks button was introduced alongside Like. This effete contempt for Likes has backfired. The Facebook page for WVGTbook has amassed a pitiful 60-odd Likes in about 2 years. He who lives by the ... umnm, this sentence has lost its way. 
 </autobiographical_note>

So, if I were a betting man, I would put money on Twitter following suit with their symbols. Look out for a  alongside the  ♥.

b

PS My occasional award of a Tezzy (for the Time-Wasting Site of the Year) goes to this site. Unlike previous Tezzy laureates, it's not really the site itself that is the time-waster – but rather the activity that the site invites.

Update 2015.11.09.10.10 – Added this note:
Crystal-watchers will note that this prediction is at odds with the Professor's insistence on  avoiding predictions  about language-change (except the certainty that something will change). I  – no doubt unwisely  –  am less careful.

For example, in a recent reply in the UsingEnglish forum I wrote:

If I were to say 1 is wrong [HD – the question was about a dog 'perking up' or 'pricking up' its ears], I would expect a chorus of disapproval from people who thought I wasn't aware of how language changes. And one of those ways is the ultimate acceptance of something that initially was a mistake. Elsewhere I wrote

The word VESPERTILIONES was glossed in this document [an early list for travellers of equivalent phrases and mistakes] as CHAUVE-SOURIS. Elcock goes on:
.... In fact, bats are not noticeably bald..., and one is tempted to infer that CALVAS SORICES is a product of 'popular etymology', hiding a quite different word. In most French patois bats are called 'flying-mice' or 'bird-mice'; it may well be that CALVAS is in reality *KAWAS [the asterisk is a convention used to mark a supposed, not attested, form], the Germanic word which survives as the root of Fr, chouette 'owl'.
'Owl-mouse' - for chauve-souris - would make much more sense. But what caused the change from *KAWAS to CALVAS? ...
So I would say the use of 'perk up' given in 1 is not entirely acceptable yet, but it's understandable and therefore becoming more widely accepted. If you ask the same question in 50 years, the answer might be 'Yes, it's right', but somebody else would be answering!



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:  
Well over 49,800 views  and nearly 9,000 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 nearly 2,700 views and nearly 1,100 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.