Weblog | I don't like the word blog, it's ugly. Anyway, new content happens here. (Swedish dito)

About me and the site | Twenty-something male who likes text. Obsessed with things such as books, reality, communication, and one or two tv-shows.

Archives | Things written here since... well, 2001. Some of it is good, some is utter shait.

Books | Books read, not books written. So far I've struggled to maintain unpublished.

Photo | I like my camera and it likes me.

Links | Outwards, away, flee.

e-mail | J. Nicklas Andersson

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Speech-impaired

All this phonetic and phonology lately (passed the exam today, who-ho-ie) have made me realise two things. Phonology is pretty neat — much more fun than phonetics and transcriptions — and speech is not very efficient. I have lots of thoughts intervening in double helixes and even a twine-ball, and at the same time I can only say one of them. I can of course wait until I’ve said one thing, but then my mind is filled with other thoughts and my mind at times just goes pffft (plosive-bilabial (-> possibly a click sound here) -> fricative-labiodental -> voiced-fricative-dental) and implodes like a baby orange with a sudden case of “not properly contained vacuum in the middle”-disorder. Don’t you just hate it when that happens? I know I do.

Reflexive pronouns take two

Just to prove me wrong about reflexive pronouns, Sten Thaning sent me a link to a PDF about Wanyi Reflexive-Reciprocal Constructions. (To be fair, it was not a language I was familiar with, but it still managed to shoot down my confidence.) With it he had the note: “Read it and weep. Especially the table at page 2. Or the one at page 6.” I didn’t weep, I think I got a mild headache. This might be because I don’t understand Wanyi, but I don’t think that had much to do with it really.

On the other hand, the document was interesting. At times Wanyi seems perfectly logical, but then without any warning it takes a sharp turn left and everything changes. Languages are not easy.

language nut factory

Hi there.

Earlier today I had coffee, but enough about that. Earlier than that I made a startling revelation. Grammar is fun. This brings up the shear possibility that I might in fact have taken the first steps on the dark path towards being a language nut. Nice. Later, between coffee and class, I stifled a laugh somewhat effectively when a group of high school students walked past and one of them moaned about the evils of having to learn reflexive pronouns in school. Reflexive pronouns just don’t make the cut for “hard.”

Stop using that word!

I have a few pet peeves but one of these has blossomed quite a lot recently. The translation of the word freak, or, it is rather the neglect of translation that makes me distracted. I just don’t get it. It is quite easy to translate into Swedish. There is a word for it. Sometimes in rare situation you might have to use a phrase instead of just one word but all in all there isn’t any problem.

Only that more and more now ignores this and just skips the translation part. Instead they just put the word freak into the Swedish sentence as well. Which looks ridiculous. There is no reason for this whatsoever. To recognise the proper translation doesn’t require research or special knowledge, it is a basic word that is more than adequate for most needs. Children have used it and synonyms in playpens since the dawn of time.

It just irks me.

Much Ado About the Essay

Just like Néa and Sten said, the world would be a much better place if I chose a linguistic topic for the essay than a literary. I felt that I had too little knowledge so I chose literature. Now, I’ve switched and indeed, the world is a much better place. The sun shines, everyone is nice and I feel great.

Linguistics. The word is just wonderful. At last I have a direction again. At last I can sleep without weird and disturbing dreams. No, that last bit was a lie, but then again I like weird and disturbing. Perhaps disturbing is a bit of a downer at times, but weird is a two thumbs up kind of thing.

More ado about phonetics

Not doing much at the moment except sitting down reading phonetics and Flann O’Brien. Between those two, Flann O’Brien wins in style, prose and panache hands down. The story has a better flow as well. Too bad I spend most time with the phonetics-book. Some of the signs in the book are different from what we used in class, but Ladefoged is a nice man so he actually added things such as “some books may use this {symbol} instead.” Most apparent is the upside-down and curly w, a sound we transcribe as a horseshoe. Also, we don’t use the flipped r at all, which is a shame. It would be much simpler that way.

I even understand those mouth-diagrams that our teacher threw up on overhead for five seconds. (The book also contains pictures of vocal cords doing sounds. I don’t think I need to know that.) Just a few weeks left until the exam. I will be ready this time.

This heat is killing me. Turn it off, please.

Anxiety -- now?

All I can think of is the phonetics test at the end of August. I don’t know why, there is plenty of time left, time that I’ll probably end up spending on other things. I seriously consider rummaging around all the libraries I can find in order to find some good books about this (and maybe I’ll just happen to find a chest full of gold doubloons while I’m at it). The books I have — The Study of Language (George Yule) and Oxford English Grammar (Sidney Greenbaum) — may be good in all the right places, but they’re far to brief about this.

Since they’ve all I got at the moment, I’ve spent the afternoon reading through them. So far, I’ve come to this conclusion: reading phonetics out loud is easy, while transcribing them in your head isn’t. In any way, I can’t help to think that the schwa is too flexible for its own good as well as just being neat.

Hidden menings are not so hidden, really

I sat down and let my thought go out for a walk. Usually they bring back something interesting. This time it was something that had been dormant since I read John Sladek’s The Reproductive System. It is about how a company tries to milk the government on money by creating a useless machine that reproduces itself. They succeed of course and something goes wrong. It is a comedy and this is not the main point of the story.

This reproductive system is a bit like words and opinions (they are of course closely intervened even though it might not seem like it at a casual glance). They spread at an alarming rate and at one time or another something will go wrong. The meaning mutates into something else or someone forgets important parts of the idea behind the words. Logically, this would not happen anymore. Not in a digital forum, where everything is stored and everyone can read the original wordings. The possibilities for misunderstanding should be almost down to zero. This proves that this is not a perfect world, as we?re being even more hypersensitive that before.

“You wrote ?control? on index.html and ?weapon of choice? on music.html! Stop trying to disarm me. I like my guns dipshit!”

We need to reclaim the words and their meanings, may they be actual or metaphorical, from those who abuse them. To make people actually read with their heads instead of their collected bile. Otherwise, the languages will turn against us because despite what most people believe, languages are living beings. They breathe and have an agenda of their own. They demand respect. R-e-s-p-e-c-t (or as they said in a Frantic-sketch “R-E-C-P-T-U. R-Q-C. They?re not bright, but they are enthusiastic: why not hire a student this summer?”) Look up the word in a dictionary.

I?ve said mine, now it?s your turn.