hic, hic est

itsmagnetic @ 2009-03-31T14:41:00

2009-03-31T12:44:40Z

itsmagnetic @ 2009-02-03T19:50:00

2009-02-03T18:47:28Z

One more reason Gabriel Delahaye is the most awesome man alive.

Antònia Font - "Wa yeah!"

2009-02-03T11:10:15Z

Hey, so this is a music video from a Majorcan band called Antònia Font (that at least one of you already knows about). They're really good, and I missed a show that they played this weekend here in Palma (fuck) that will be their last for a while (fuck fuck fuck). My flatmates and I have been listening to this song a lot, and the lyrics are really sweet, so I am going to lj-cut a translation for everyone.

"Wa Yeah!" - Antònia Font

Jo cant sa lluna i s'estrella
    I sing about the moon and the star
sa jungla i es bosc animat
    the jungle and the enchanted forest
es tren, es vaixell, s'avioneta
    the train, the ship, the little plane
i es teu submarí aquí aparcat
    and your submarine parked here
jo cant es cafè i sa galleta
    i sing about the coffee and the cookie
quan dius tu podries ser meu
    when you say you could be mine
què sexy què dolça i què freda, oh yeah!
    how sexy how sweet and how cold, oh yeah!

sa zebra que passa un semàfor
    the zebra that passes a stoplight
i com se desmunta un bidet
    and how to take apart a bidet
cosmètics i Margaret Astor
    cosmetics and Margaret Astor
ja sé com s'escriu Juliette
    I know how to write ‘Juliette’
jo cant sa rosa i es cactus
    I sing the rose and the cactus
i moltes més coses també
    and many more things too
un llapis digué a un pistatxo: oh yeah!
    a pencil said to a pistachio: oh yeah!

què divertit lo que escric quan estic avorrit per exemple es teu cos
    how fun what I write when I’m bored for example your body
es jersei destenyit, es carrer blanc de sol, es meu cos adamunt
    the unwoven sweater, the street white with sun, my body on top of
per exemple es teu llit de penombra i llençols amb es termo espenyat
    for example your bed of shadow and sheets with the broken thermos
per exemple dormits...
    for example sleeping

jo cant sa lluna i s'estrella
    I sing about the moon and the star
sa jungla i es bosc animat
    the jungle and the enchanted forest
es tren, es vaixell, s'avioneta
    the train, the boat, the little plane
i es teu submarí aquí aparcat
    and your submarine parked here

jo cant sa fruita vermella
    I sing about the red fruit
i quan acabi riuré
    and when I’m done I’ll laugh.
Galàpets, nenúfars, princeses, oh yeah!
    Toads, lilypads, princesses, oh yeah!

I tried to post this in a facebook note, but apparently they don't allow videos embedded in their notes. I have found Facebook's fatal flaw. Anyways, this song makes me smile. I hope it does you too.

itsmagnetic @ 2008-10-04T18:46:00

2008-10-04T16:44:12Z

Perhaps I've been out of the loop, but I just saw that Madonna directed a movie starring Eugene Hutz and features music from Gogol Bordello. WTF? This seems like too many things going together that ought not to. Also, the movie actually looks like it could be enjoyable. Which is surprising, because Madonna and movies don't usually add up to good. Maybe she's found her calling as a director?. Or if not calling, at least something that isn't Shanghai Surprise.

Language stuff

2008-09-21T18:52:44Z

So! When I first got here, as I think I posted, it seemed like it was a lot easier to find Catalan speakers to talk to. Or well, at least that they didn't seem to have the complex that Catalan speakers in Barcelona generally do, that with anyone they aren't used to speaking Catalan with there is some force that makes them switch to Spanish. Well, basically that's still true here, that I've seen. I have yet to meet someone who actually switches back to Spanish with me here. If I speak in Catalan, and the other person does, they speak to me in Catalan.

But, what I've really noticed is that the public face of Catalan here is a lot less than in Catalonia. I would say that the vast majority of signage in privately owned businesses are in Spanish only, even in a few cases where I've seen all the employees and customers speaking Catalan. This isn't terribly surprising - I know that the language policy of the Balearic Islands has been a lot less comprehensive than in Catalonia since democracy, and most people have kept what they've had since it was compulsory to have everything be in Spanish, or just kept on doing what they were used to. The one big exception to that, surprisingly (at least to me), is McDonald's. I've been going there off-and-on because a) it's cheap and b) it's a hell of a lot better here than in the US. They are the one private establishment I've seen here, the one and only, to have all of its signage be exclusively in Catalan. They also seem to train their employees to use Catalan, at least in a functional "how to read the menu and understand orders" way. I am not used to thinking of McDonald's as being big on cultural sensitivity, but I guess they do make a bit of an effort.

Now that I've moved into a new neighborhood, the situation is pretty different. In the old city, there seemed to be a solid Catalan-speaking population. The neighborhood where my apartment is is very different. I have only heard people speaking Catalan around here a handful of times. The overall population seems to be from somewhere else - whether from elsewhere in Spain or in the world. The language on the streets may mostly be Spanish, but it's also quite a few others - Russian, Chinese, Arabic, etc. Lots of Latin American immigrants. I mean, my two flatmates are prime examples - one from Russia, one from Mexico. Natalia, the Russian lady, speaks Spanish very well but says she still has a lot of trouble with it, but I don't think she speaks any Catalan. Oscar, however, appears to speak Catalan pretty well. I am not sure how long he's lived here, but I guess he had a leg up since he already knew Spanish when he came. He also speaks English quite well. He seems a bit of a language nerd like me.

So I haven't made great strides in making Catalan-speaking friends here. I mean, I don't feel bad about that since I've only been here three weeks and haven't exactly been hanging around even mostly Spanish-speaking places (I think I've probably met as many Germans, Dutch and British folk going out as anyone else). Also, the one bar I've been going to more regularly than any other is run by an awesome Argentine guy, so I default to Spanish with him, as would be expected. The one place with mostly Catalan interaction, I'm happy to say, is the GLBT group. The standard story about Catalan and Spanish is that if you have a group of 10 and 9 people are Catalan speakers but there is one Castillian speaker (even if he or she might understand Catalan), everyone switches to Castillian almost as a knee-jerk reaction. Well, I can say with certainty that is not true there. There is exactly one person who comes who doesn't seem to speak or understand Catalan very well (a lady from Galicia) and that doesn't seem to effect the linguistic dynamic one bit. I am assuming she can actually understand Catalan on some level, because it's not like she is left out of the conversation. One of the people who works at the center, Miguel Ángel, is actually from Granada, but speaks Catalan quite well (having lived here for not very long, I don't think, maybe a year or so). Unfortunately that is only once per week for me so far. I need to start making friends with these folk outside of the Friday coffee social hour thing.

This is all just about Palma, where the influx of people from elsewhere is pretty strong. When I was in Sóller, even with all the tourists, I don't think I found a single person who didn't speak Catalan (who wasn't German or British). Scratch that, there was one waitress who didn't speak Catalan, but she understood it, just spoke back to me in Castillian. I don't know if she was a Catalan speaker of the "he's-not-from-here-speak-Spanish" variety or if she's a Castillian speaker of the "understands-Catalan-won't-speak it" variety. So, overall that was very heartening. I'm sure that in some of the even less touristy towns around Mallorca the situation is even better. I know from reading that Manacor (Mallorca's second biggest town) has the best reputation for incorporating immigrants into the Catalan-speaking community in the islands.

There was a story, probably a few years ago now, that a politician from the Socialist party here, a Spanish speaker (and, I'm going to guess, a Palma resident) made some public announcement that it was time for people in the Balearic Islands to realize that Catalan was a minority language here now and that they needed to give Castillian a bigger place in the government because of that. He was shortly thereafter contradicted rather completely by a survey that showed Catalan was still the first language of the vast majority of residents of the Balearic Islands. How could he miss that? Because I'm going to guess Catalan was a minority language in his world. It would be very easy for me to go around Palma and never use Catalan, and here it rarely, depending on where I went and whom I talked to. It's still there though, even if coming from the outside I have to look for it.

I guess I just find it really fascinating how social situations develop for a language like that. I suppose, given the language policy that was in effect before 1975 (for the previous few centuries), it's rather amazing that there are still Catalan speakers here at all, let alone a majority. Look at France and Italy and the UK. The first has almost totally eradicated its minority languages, in the name of modernity and national unity. There are still many speakers of Catalan, Occitan, Breton, Basque and Arpitan in France (but if you haven't made an effort to know about that, you may not know about most of those), but to be perfectly frank, I'd give it a few generations before nearly all of those speakers are gone. Catalan is hanging on there by a thread because of increased ties with the Catalan speakers in Spain, Basque is probably stronger because of its very strong local identity, but everything else is soon to be a thing of the past. Italy is slightly less sad of a story than France, since they do have some concessions to regional languages, but not to most. The UK is probably the best, especially in Wales, but Cornish and Manx are casualties of the same attitude that is leading to the slow deaths of languages and cultures in France.

Anyways, this is probably too long of a rant, but oh well.

Obama, Palin, etc.

2008-08-29T18:45:43Z

Last night when I got home I went on the New York Times' website and watched Obama's speech (I had missed it while out). Now, I'll admit to being a sucker for these things, but I was very much in tears. It makes me proud to be an American in a very big way to see how far this nation has grown in a relatively short time. There's still a lot of growing to do, but this is a wonderful moment in our nation's history.

I was a little bit annoyed to see that the headlines this morning were focused on Sarah Palin as McCain's VP pick. For one thing, I was really hoping he would pick Romney because that would have made it a cakewalk for Obama. But he proved that he isn't entirely demented (or at least his staff isn't) in avoiding that. He did, however, entirely undercut the crux of his argument against Obama by picking Palin, who fairly clearly has less political experience than he does (and all of it in Alaska - you know, not a state where that much happens). Still, in two short years in the Alaska governor's seat, Palin has managed, to quote a Kids In The Hall sketch, "to abuse her very limited power" when trying to get someone to fire her ex-brother-in-law for personal reasons, and then firing the person who wouldn't do it. Coming off eight years of Vice President Dick "No-Ethics" Cheney, I hope people are wary of someone who has demonstrated such questionable ethics in such a short period of time.

Since overall the choice of Palin seems to undercut a lot of McCain's campaign up until now, I can't help but interpret the move as a ploy for the votes of dissatisfied Hillary supporters. I hope those who are still wary of throwing their lot in with Obama can tell the diffference between Hillary Clinton, a truly accomplished woman, and an anti-abortion rights, anti-equal pay, ethically challenged newcomer who was competing in beauty contests when Barack Obama was organizing on behalf of poor, working families in Chicago, and when Hillary Clinton was campaigning for children's rights. It isn't too hard from where I sit, but eight years of President Bush have left me very much doubting the capacity of the American electorate to make good decisions at the ballot.

As a person who truly does support the cause of women's rights, I think every man and woman ought to be a little offended that McCain chose a female running mate for what appears to be her youth, general good looks, and maybe also because she is more vocally against abortion rights than McCain and a member of the NRA. In other words, substantially for superficial reasons. Leave it to the Republican Party to make their first female VP choice come off as vaguely sexist.

I can't help but think that Palin's inexperience will become very obvious now that she is catapulted from a very small stage to a very big one, but she is charming and well-spoken. I hope Obama will involve Hillary (and Bill) as much as he can in his campaign because I think she is probably in a better position than anyone to point out Palin's lack of accomplishments as a politician, and remind people what a qualified female politician looks like. Luckily, Barack Obama has already proven himself capable of prevailing in a tough and close campaign, and Biden ought to be able to talk circles around Palin. Fingers crossed.

We should just put Woody allen in a home, right?

2008-08-24T18:29:20Z

Hey everyone. I haven't posted for a while. I'm doing good. What brought me out of 'retirement'? Just this: DON'T SEE VICKY CRISTINA BARCELONA. It has to be one of the worst movies ever made on God's good earth. I have yet to read a single bad review of it, though (other than my own comment I posted on the New York Times' glowing review). Let me present my feelings with bullet points:

The movie has an omniscient narrator. This is not in and of itself a bad thing. I can think of a few movies with good omniscient narrators. Y tu mamá tambíen, for instance. This narrator, however, is stifling, trite, repetitive, and sounds like a male version of Carrie Bradshaw in Sex and the City. They could have just called the movie Woody Allen's Sex and A Different City, actually. It would have been just as accurate, seeing how little Barcelona actually figures in the movie (see below). The whole narration is attempting to be a placeholder for character development, but it holds its place badly, and all the characters are hollow stereotypes.
All the characters are hollow stereotypes. Cristina (ScarJo) is "Romantic American Girl". Vicky (Rebecca Hall) is "Straightlaced American Girl". Juan Antonio (Javier Bardem) is "Passionate Spanish Male" (best line: "Love can only be romantic when it is unfulfilled"! SO THAT'S HOW!!). María Elena (Penélope Cruz) is "Passionate Spanish Female". I guess Juan Antonio and María Elena are as close to naming someone "Spanish Guy" and "Spanish Lady" while still being plausible Spanish names. Really? Seriously it's just like Sex and the City but with a gun (oops, spoiler!)
Vicky (Rebecca Hall) is, according to the narrator in the opening sequence, getting her Masters degree in "Catalan Identity". That seems like a bullshit title, but oh well. I think what Woody Allen means for this to say to the audience is "Vicky doesn't really know what she wants in life, but look! She's smart!" Well put, Woody. So she's getting a Masters in Catalan Identity. And she's going to Barcelona! This should be her Time To Shine, right?! Wrong. The only indication that she has any interest whatsoever in Catalan culture is that she likes taking pictures of Gaudí buildings. Hey, they're great buildings. But that's maybe a little trite, right? As someone who is genuinely interested in Catalan culture (in case you weren't aware), I like Gaudí, but there's a LOT MORE TO DO IN BARCELONA THAN THAT. Also, she takes a Spanish class during the movie. A Spanish class - CA. STE. LLA. NO. ??? If you didn't know that people in Catalonia speak Catalan before seeing this movie, you wouldn't know it afterwards either. There isn't a single word of Catalan in the entire movie. And this from a movie which got 10% of its budget from the Generalitat de Catalunya - what were they thinking??!?!
There isn't a single word of Catalan in the entire movie! THE ENTIRE MOVIE! And MOST OF IT TAKES PLACE IN THE LARGEST METROPOLITAN AREA OF THE CATALAN SPEAKING WORLD. But that's just it! Juan Antonio (who is referred to in the movie as a "Catalan painter", and granted, he appears to live in Catalonia) is actually from Asturias (his hometown is Oviedo, his father lives near there). María Elena - who knows, also speaks no Catalan. Let's put this in persepective. I am making a movie about how awesome Montreal is. Two girls from, hmmm, let's say Japan just for randomness' sake, go on vacation to Montreal for the summer and spend the entire movie taking English lessons and running around with some dude from Winnipeg. Would you say they got to know the real spirit of Montreal? Oh also, one of those girls from Japan was getting her Masters in Quebecois Identity. Bull. Shit.

In conclusion, Woody Allen should probably be put in a home and kept away from pen, paper or camera for the rest of his years. You were great, sir, but you ain't great no more. Go see Tropic Thunder. It's probably a lot deeper.

itsmagnetic @ 2008-06-18T21:38:00

2008-06-19T04:38:31Z

Hilltowns of Los Angeles, volume 2

itsmagnetic @ 2008-06-17T23:53:00

2008-06-18T06:52:55Z

Hilltowns of Los Angeles, pt. 1

itsmagnetic @ 2008-05-29T14:37:00

2008-05-30T00:32:12Z

Hey so, I was curious about my ability to actually write something extended about a topic in linguistics, so I decided to test myself by writing an introduction and explanation of Laryngeal Theory. I wanted to see if I could write about it in a way that was clear and not stuffy (and, if the Gods are smiling, maybe even interesting - but I'm not holding my breath). I chose Laryngeal Theory specifically because it is a topic that took me a long time to feel comfortable with, and so I felt it was more of a challenge to explain. If you're feeling bored, or if you're feeling like you might even be curious, please read. I welcome critiques - especially in the vein of 'I was totally lost when you ...', 'you could be clearer by ...', etc. At some point I might have to write about difficult topics, and I'd like to be able to do so in a way that doesn't throw people off.

An Introduction to Laryngeal Theory

Laryngeal Theory is a theory about Proto-Indo-European that posits the existence of certain sounds in the proto-language that (at the time they were first posited, any rate) were only known by their effects on other sounds that could be seen in attested languages - instead of knowing about the sounds by way of their own evolution, they are known by way of the evolution of other sounds. Since the original proposition of the theory, the Hittite language has been discovered and deciphered, and Hittite is the only attested language in which PIE laryngeals have been preserved at all - and very partially, at that. What follows is an attempt to explain Laryngeal Theory to a reader who has little or no knowledge of Indo-European Linguistics. At some points I will make us of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), and the wikipedia article I linked to could serve as a useful reference.

Background

What is Proto-Indo-European?
The Proto-Indo-European language, commonly abbreviated PIE, is a hypothetical language that is the ancestor of the Indo-European languages - a massive language family including some of the most widely spoken languages today - English, Spanish, Hindi, Bengali, Russian, Persian, French, among many others - as well as some of the more influential languages of cultures past that are no longer spoken, but exist in written corpuses of various sizes - Latin, Ancient Greek, Old Church Slavonic, Sanskrit, Gothic, Avestan (the liturgical language of Zoroastrians, related to Old Persian), Hittite, Old Irish, as well as a few others.

The Comparative Method
Proto-Indo-European is an entirely hypothetical language, proposed to have existed (and now universally believed to have existed) because of the overwhelming similarities between the various languages into which it developed over time and in different places. Linguists have reconstructed much of the language using the comparative method, that is to say, comparing corresponding items to see what the correspondences are. As a quick and fairly straightforward example, let's look at the word for 'father' in English, Latin, Ancient Greek and Sanskrit (A quick note on that: Except for English, I have only chosen ancient languages as examples. This is because ancient languages generally serve as better examples for reconstruction because - and perhaps this is obvious - they are much closer to what we are trying to reconstruct. English is on the chart instead of Gothic - the oldest attested language of the Germanic branch - because in this instance it happens to be very conservative and illustrate the point perfectly.)

'Father' in Indo-European languages
English	Latin	Greek	Sanskrit
father	pater	πάτηρ (patēr)	pitā

Before getting down to business, I would like to point out the vowels of the first syllable in each word (English 'a', Latin 'a', Greek 'a' Sanskrit 'i'). I'll get back to that in a bit. Now, let's ignore that and everything else except for the first letter of each word (English 'f', Latin 'p', Greek 'p' and Sanskrit 'p'). It doesn't take much thought to see that English is the odd one out in this bunch. It probably doesn't come as a surprise that the consensus on how to reconstruct this word is *pH2-tēr. "What the hell is that?" you are no doubt shouting. Ok, maybe that does come as a surprise. It does look pretty ridiculous. For a long time it was written *pə-tēr, which probably looks like a slightly friendlier beast. For right now, though, just ignore everything after the 'p' and know that the asterisk at the beginning of a word means that the word has no actual attestation anywhere. Because PIE is a language that has no written attestation, all PIE words are written with an asterisk at the beginning.

From the above, one might be tempted to deduce that the method was simply to see which sound is the most common result and assume that it was the original sound. That would be a mistake. After all, Germanic languages could simply be more conservative than all the rest. Perhaps the group that became Germanic separated off before a sound change that shifted *f > *p. Why linguists favor *p as the original sound in PIE has to do with more complicated issues in Phonetics than I really want to get into here - about how sound changes happen, and about what kinds of changes are more common, and also about the bigger picture of how PIE changed to become Germanic. To rely simply on taking the most frequent result and assuming it was the original might lead one to the right answer with "father". It doesn't, however, work in other examples. Take Eng. "come", Latin "ven-iō", Greek "βάινω (bain-ō)" and Sanskrit "gam-", which, if you can even manage to trust me that they are related, come from a root "*gʷṃ-" - that is to say, the original consonant (gʷ) is preserved in none of the attested languages as such.

Now, back to the word "father" for one last point. I said to take note of the vowel of the first syllable in each word. In English, Latin and Greek they are <a> (<α> in Greek if we want to be nitpicky about scripts), and in Sanskrit it is <i>. (I won't be nitpicky about Sanskrit because, on the one hand, Sanskrit has a standardized system for transcription into the Roman alphabet, and on the other hand, my computer doesn't support a single one of the many, many other scripts that are used or have been used to write Sanskrit. Getting back to business...) The lack of correspondence in the above vowels caused problems for some of the linguists who began doing work on reconstructing the PIE vowel system.

At first, most linguists (they probably still called themselves 'philologists' at this point - it was a different time!) simply didn't touch the PIE vowel system. Vowels seemed too shifty, too soft, too inscrutable. It shouldn't come as a shock to anyone that most of these guys were German. They liked their consonants. You could rely on consonants. Vowels must have seemed so, I dunno, so Mediterranean. Some people were convinced that vowels didn't operate or change in any kind of regular or systematic way. Finally, people got over it and decided to work on reconstructing vowels. When they did, they ended up coming to the conclusion that Latin <a> should corresponded to Greek <α> and Sanskrit <a>. And most of the time it does. Sometimes, though, you get a situation like 'father', where Sanskrit has <i>. There were still enough people around who thought that vowels were entirely unreliable, and so just shrugged it off, but someone had the bright idea to suggest that perhaps we're really dealing with two separate sounds in PIE: one (PIE *a) gives 'a' in Latin, Greek and Sanskrit, and another, that evolved into 'a' in Latin and Greek (and as you saw, sometimes English) and 'i' in Sanskrit. Lacking any real information about what this sound was, people decided to use the character 'ə' (schwa) to describe it - sometimes referred to as 'schwa indogermanicum', but rarely nowadays, and I think we are just as well for that. Don't, however, make the assumption that by writing *ə, that people were suggesting that the sound had the phonetic value [ə], like the 'uh' sound in English. They chose the symbol as a variable to stand for [sound-about-which-we-only-know-that-it- resulted-in-'a'-in-Latin- and-Greek-and-'i'-in-Sanskrit]. You understand, 'ə' is much shorter than that.

Ablaut
And now, if you've managed to come along with me this far, please store all that information away for just a little bit, while I introduce yet another topic. "Ablaut" is a German word that can be very literally translated as "Down sound" or "Away sound". It was conceived as a term that would contrast with the term "Umlaut" (a term that is used specifically within the realm of Germanic languages) which means "Around sound". None of this, as far as I have been able to surmise, is remotely helpful in understanding what these terms mean.

Both Ablaut and Umlaut are examples of what in Linguistics is called 'apophony' or 'vowel gradation' - an alternation of vowels within the stem of a word, which communicates grammatical information. You may not think about this all the time, but you actually use it all the time in English. A word like 'swim' has a past tense form 'swam' and a past participle 'swum'. That is actually a preservation of the Indo-European Ablaut system (albeit with some phonetic changes), something which most Indo-European languages have done away with entirely. I can't really blame them, though; I don't think there is an English speaker alive who hasn't messed up the vowel of some verb at some point, or said something liked 'swimmed' instead of 'swam' in an almost admirable attempt at regularity. But English (and Germanic languages generally) persist in their idiosyncracies while other Indo-European branches have seen fit to trade in the system for things newer, cleaner and more efficient.

A quick description of how Ablaut functioned in PIE is as follows. A word root in PIE follows this formula without fail: one or two consonants, followed by a vowel, followed by one or two consonants. One or both of the consonants on either end can be a "sonorant", which means it is a consonant that can behave like a vowel if its surrounded by consonants (or a vowel that behaves like a consonant if it is next to a vowel - it's just semantics. Still with me?). Sometimes people write this as C(C)V(C)C, which if you can parse it, is actually very useful shorthand. The vowel in the root can either be 'e', 'o', or nothing, from which fact we say that a root can have an 'e-grade', an 'o-grade' or a 'zero grade', depending on which vowel or lack thereof is operational. Onto this root can be fixed suffixes and prefixes that determine the function of the word. Let's see a concrete example.

The root *likʷ- means 'leave, abandon'. It is actually the ancestor of the word 'leave' in English. It looks a little mangled on its way, but trust me. At this point, the astute reader might think he or she has detected an inconsistency. "Stephen!" he or she exclaims, "you said that the vowel in the root could only be 'e' or 'o' or zero. How, then, does '*likʷ-' have an 'i' in the root?" Well, at the risk of blowing your mind, 'i' actually counts as one of the consonants - one of those 'sonorants' I mentioned. When 'e' or 'o' is present in the root, the 'i' is pronounced as a semi-consonant or 'glide' similar to English 'y' in 'boy'. In Greek, *likʷ- gives us the verb λείπω (leip-ō), "I leave" (trust me, that 'p' comes from *kʷ). That form is built of the e-grade of the root. The simple past tense is ἔλιπον (e-lip-on), "I left", built off the zero grade. The perfect tense is λέλοιπα (le-loip-a), "I have left", built off the o-grade.

Just to reinforce the pattern, let's look at the PIE root *drḱ-, which means 'see, watch'. Incidentally, it's where we get the word "dragon" - apparently for whomever decided to call it that, the point he or she wanted to make was that dragons watch you, but how that was more important than fire-breathing is utterly beyond me. Anyways, like *likʷ above, this word is well preserved in Greek (also in Sanskrit, not sure about other branches). The present tense is δέρκομαι (derk-omai) "I see". Once again, the present tense form is built off the e-grade root. The simple past is ἔδρακον (e-drak-on) "I saw". Here it helps to know that 'r' could also be a vowel in PIE (and continued to be so in Sanskrit). In Greek, however, vocalic 'r' became 'ra', so when we see ἔδρακον we can assume it came from PIE *e-dṛk-om (putting a little circle beneath something is a standard note that means 'this thing is a vowel, trust me'). And finally, without much surprise, we have the perfect form δέδορκα (de-dork-a), "I have seen", built off the o-grade.

So the point of going through all those examples from the roots '*likʷ-' and 'drḱ-' was this: not only do variant forms of a single root exist, but they exist in recognizable patterns. There are certain semantic and morphological spaces where one can reasonably expect to find an e-grade and not an o-grade, or a zero grade and not an e- or o-grade, etc. It isn't the only way that grammatical information is communicated (since it is reinforced by prefixes and suffixes that communicate much more specific information - which is why it was easy to scrap the system in the long run), but its variations are regular.

Laryngeal Theory
Laryngeal Theory arose from the inability of philologists to explain the ways in which certain roots seemed to deviate from the Ablaut pattern I've just explained. One of the more common roots that falls into this group is *dō-, which means "give", and ought to be fairly recognizeable to any English speaker in words its gotten from Latin sources, like 'donate' or 'dowry', even though the root that gives us 'give' has taken over in the Germanic branch. Now, let's look at the present tense form (where we've established that we expect to see the e-grade) and the past participle form (where, I'll tell you, we expect to find the zero grade); in Latin, i'll use a noun built of the root instead of the present tense form because it better illustrates the point. In all examples the hyphens are used to separate out the root from suffixes or prefixes.

Forms of *dō- in Indo-European Languages
	Latin	Greek	Sanskrit
expected e-grade	dō-num ('gift')	δίδωμι (di-dō-mi)	da-dā-mi
expected zero-grade	da-tus	δοτός (do-tos)	di-taḥ

What you see is a present tense forms that supports the root *dō- (in Sanskrit, practically everything becomes 'a' - both 'e' and 'o' do, which makes it not very helpful to look for ablaut patterns since it can't distinguish e- and o-grades). The past participle, however, is all over the board: da- in Latin, do- in Greek, and di- in Sanskrit. That's essentially useless for determining what the original zero-grade root is. Let's look at two more of these roots - *stā-, "stand, put", and *dhē-, "place, make" that similarly seem to be lacking a final consonant. Let's do more or less the same thing as before, and look at the same forms in Latin, Greek and Sanskrit. Ignore that the root begins sth- in Sanskrit. That is a Sanskrit phenomenon that doesn't need to be dealt with here.

Forms of *stā- & *dhē- in Latin Greek and Sanskrit
	Latin	Greek	Sanskrit
expected e-grade of *stā-	stā-re ('to stand')	ἱστᾱμι (hi-stā-mi)	ti-ṣṭhā-mi
expectged zero-grade of *stā-	sta-tus	στατός (sta-tos)	sthi-taḥ
expected e-grade of *dhē-	fē-ci ("I made/did")	τίθημι (ti-thē-mi)	da-dhā-mi
expected zero-grade of *dhē-	fa-ctus	θετός (the-tos)	dhi-taḥ

The way the roots vary here is very similar to the way the roots varied with *dō-, except that with the root of the Greek past participle has an 'e' vowel with '*dhē-', making the roots fa- in Latin, the- in Greek, and dhi- in Sanskrit; and an 'a' vowel with 'stā', making the roots sta- in Latin, sta- in Greek, and sthi- in Sanskrit. Wait a second. We've seen that before. That's the same set of results from our old friend schwa indogermanicum. So the zero grade of *stā- can be reconstructed as *stə-. But this doesn't really resolve anything. Nowhere else is there evidence to suggest that 'ā' should alternate with 'ə'. It still stands in contrast to the ablaut pattern generally observed. So at this point, a very clever man by the name of Ferdinand de Saussure started the way of thinking about this problem that resulted in what we know as Laryngeal Theory.

Basically, Saussure's idea was this. If *stə- is a zero grade form, then we would expect the e-grade form to be *steə- (remembering that 'ə' is still nothing more than a variable, so we could assume it takes the properties of a resonant - becoming consonant in the presence of a vowel). We could then assume that that was the original form, but that at some point still before PIE split up, '*eə' became '*ā', that is to say it merges with an 'e' in such a way that it changes the quality of the vowel to an 'a' and lengthens it.

We could do the same with both *dhē- and *dō- too, really. Let's reconstruct the zero grade of '*dhē-' as *dhə1-, where 'ə1' is defined as a sound that becomes 'a' in Latin, 'e' in Greek and 'i' in Sanskrit. The e-grade would then be *dheə1-, and the effect of 'ə1' would be to merge with the 'e' vowel in such a way that the vowel quality does not change, but just lengthens. I'll give away a bit of the story and say that linguists have rechristened the original schwa indogermanicum (the one from 'father') 'ə2'. I guess they felt that the 'ə' of '*dhē-' deserved to be 'ə1' because it is the neutral schwa, that has no qualitative change on its surrounding vowels. Then just to finish the story, you have to suppose a third schwa, 'ə3', that would have the effect of changing *deə3- to *dō-.

Now that's a terrible lot of information, so let's review with a little chart. But from now on, i'm going to change the symbol we use for the variable. H is a better variable, since 'ə' already has a real phonetic value, and we've basically moved away from any kind of implication that [ə] is the actual phonetic value when we're supposing that there are three different sounds at play.

Laryngeals
Laryngeal	Function	Result of 'e' + laryngeal	Result of laryngeal in Greek
H1	neutral	ē	ε (e)
H2	a-coloring	ā	α (a)
H3	o-coloring	ō	ο (o)

So now, if nothing else, you might be able to see how we arrived at '*pH2-tēr' way back when. Laryngeal Theory explains a lot, but it took quite a while for it to gain general acceptance among Indo-Europeanists. The main thing that riled everyone up was that this was a pretty drastic methodological shift. At the beginning of this I made a big deal about the Comparative Method. That's pretty much the basis of historical linguistics. Making a statement about something unattested without having at least two attested forms to compare, so the general wisdom went, was little more than a stab in the dark. Laryngeal Theory required people to rely on internal reconstruction , which (while logical) doesn't have anything outside of the language to compare itself to and check against. That is, until the discovery of Hittite (and the rest of the Anatolian language branch) in the early 20th century.

The Anatolian branch of languages is an entirely extinct branch of PIE that gave rise to several languages spoken in and around what is now Turkey, attested as far back as 1600 B.C. The whole branch has so many archaic features, that most linguists assume that it split from PIE at an earlier stage than the other Indo-European languages groups. Among these archaic features is the partial preservation of Laryngeals as consonants. Specifically, H2 and H3 are preserved, written as one letter (transliterated as 'ḫ'), and H2 doesn't show up all the times we expect it should; prompting some linguists to posit the existence of a fourth laryngeal simply to explain the discrepancy (a bit extreme, if you ask me).

For example, in Latin we have the word ante 'before, facing' (from an earlier *anti) and in Greek we have ἀντί (anti) 'against, facing'
(both of these are well known in many words borrowed into English: antebellum, antidote, etc.) and in Sanskrit (just to round everything out nicely) anti 'in the presence of, near'. All of these appear to be related to a noun in Hittite ḫants 'face', of which 'ḫanti' would be a normal derivative meaning 'in/at the face (of), facing'. Seizing once again on an opportunity to reëvaluate a root in terms of ablaut, linguists now reconstruct *anti as *H2ent-i.

To drive the point home, in Latin we have the word ovis 'sheep', in Greek ὄϊς (oïs) 'sheep', Sanskrit avi- 'sheep' (all of these cognate to the English word 'ewe'). In Luwian (another language of the Anatolian branch) there exists the word ḫawi-, also meaning sheep. Now, if I let you know that the change *o > a is normal in both Sanskrit and Anatolian, it would make sense to reconstruct *H3ewi- as the PIE root from which all these have sprung.

Why 'laryngeals'?
Among the many things I've asked the reader to swallow without much explanation is the term 'laryngeal' istelf. 'Laryngeal' refers to a sound articulated at the larynx, an organ in the throat. The term 'laryngeal' came to be associated with these sounds after Hittite showed that these sounds were preserved as something that was probably a laryngeal sound. Furthermore, it seemed like laryngeal sounds were good candidates for the type of sounds that would have the effects on vowels that were proposed (although both pharyngeal and glottal sounds - other points of articulation in the throat - were and are discussed as well). They are breathy, and easily lost (like 'h' in English), although the particular ways in which they were differentiated is entirely a matter of debate.

I'll bring up one suggestion as to the nature of H3 for no other reason than that I find it compelling. It is highly likely, in my opinion, that H3 would have had lip-rounding - that is to say, that when the sound was being articulated in the throat, it would have been accompanied by a rounding of the lips. 'H3' is the laryngeal that has the effect of turning 'e' into 'o', which means essentially that it turns it from a vowel that doesn't have lip-rounding to a vowel that does. Given that, it would be very surprising if 'H3' didn't have some lip-rounding. To see a parallel example, let's look at the sound [hʷ] in English, written 'wh' and in most varieites of English nowadays pronounced as [w] or [h], depending on its phonetic environment. Specifically let's look at the word 'who' in English, pronounced [hu:] in all varities of English with which I'm familiar. In Old English, the word was spelled hwa, and the consensus is that it was pronounced [hʷa:]. The first sound shift that happened in this word is the one we can see preserved in the spelling 'who'. The vowel shifted from 'a' to 'o' (another shift that required the addition of lip-rounding). The consensus is that this word would have been pronounced in Middle and Early Modern English has [hʷo:] (rhyming with its Latin relative 'quo'). After this, the lip-rounding became redundant, because it was articulated both in the consonant [hʷ] and the vowel [o:], and so the consonant was simplified to [h]. The vowel changed as well (to [u:]), but preserved the lip-rounding (we can assume that the shift from [hʷ] to [h] happened before the shift from [hʷ] to [w] in words like 'what' or 'white', which would explain why we pronounce [hu:] and not [wu:]) . Given all this, it wouldn't be out of bounds to suggest that H3 was [hʷ] , except that it could just as easily be [χʷ] or [ħʷ] or almost any other sound with lip-rounding that is articulated in the throat or in the back of the mouth.

Conclusion
So that's basically it. Laryngeal Theory is fascinating to me because it draws on an ability to see sounds through their relationships to other sounds in their phonetic environments, and also because it requires a shift away from (or, depending on your point-of-view, an addition to) traditional methodology in Historical Linguistics. It is also fascinating because ultimately it is an unaswerable question. What were these sounds? We can't really know. But we can learn more about what we do know because we know one more way (three more, i guess) in which sounds can effect each other.

itsmagnetic @ 2008-05-15T18:20:00

2008-05-16T01:23:10Z

"To what extent are endangered languages a priority in modern linguistics? Are graduate students encouraged to document moribund or endangered languages for their dissertation? How much encouragement is there to compile a dictionary of one? How many academic departments encourage applied linguistics in communities for the support of of endangered languages? How many departments provide appropriate training for speakers of these languages who are most ideally suited to do the most needed work? Obviously we must do some serious rethinking of our priorities, lest linguistics go down in history as the only science that presided obliviously over the disappearance of 90% of the very field to which it is dedicated."

- The World's Languages in Crisis, by Michael Krauss

itsmagnetic @ 2008-04-30T11:37:00

2008-04-30T18:39:49Z

In preparation for upcoming travels, I decided to create a blog specifically for photos: Nova Corpora. I tested out the waters and played with format stuff by putting up three posts of photos from my trip to Argentina and Uruguay a few years back. Also, I've decided for my own personal edification, that I will try to write entirely in Catalan there. So far pretty good.

poem

2008-04-11T22:55:30Z

Auld Lang Syne.
Here's to the rock star with the crooked teeth,
the cellist, banker, mezzo bearing gifts,
the teacher with the flask in her jeans -
those girls who made us sweat and lick our lips.

To the jeune fille who broke my heart in France,
the tramp who warmed your lap and licked your ear,
the one who bought me shots at 2 a.m.
that night I tied your pink tie at the bar.

Who smoked. Who locked you out. Who kissed my eyes
then pulled my hair and left me for a boy.
The girl who bit my upper, inner thigh.
My raspy laugh when I first heard your voice

toasting through broken kisses sloppy drunk:
To women! To abundance! To enough!

- Emily Moore

from the New Yorker

itsmagnetic @ 2008-01-30T09:18:00

2008-01-30T17:19:14Z

via Eric ...

FAIL BLOG

itsmagnetic @ 2008-01-28T22:39:00

2008-01-29T06:41:32Z

Key to song meme from last week.

1.    Interpol – Public Pervert
2.    José González – Lovestain
3.    Goldfrapp – Let it take you
4.    Jens Lekman – “Do You Remember the Riots?”
5.    Ladytron – “Jet Age”
6.    Le Tigre – “Deceptacon”
7.    LCD Soundsystem – “Daft Punk is Playing at My House”
8.    Joy Division – “Transmission”
9.    I’m From Barcelona – “We’re From Barcelona”
10.    Magnetic Fields – “Summer Lies”
11.    Ladytron – “Last One Standing”
12.    Guided By Voices – “Gold Hick”
13.    Grandaddy – “Hewlett’s Daughter”
14.    Joy Division – “From Safety to Where”
15.    Imperial Teen – “Million $ Man”
16.    Ladytron – “Cracked LCD”
17.    Golden Shoulders – “Oh come on”
18.    Liars “Loose Nuts on the Veladrome”
19.    Jens Lekman – “Someone to Share My Life With”
20.    INOJ – “Time After Time”
21.    Go Gos – “Our Lips Are Sealed”
22.    Joanna Newsom – “Sadie”
23.    GBV – “Gonna Never Have to Die”
24.    !!! – “Theme from Space Island”
25.    Gorillaz – “Feel Good Inc.”

itsmagnetic @ 2008-01-25T16:09:00

2008-01-26T00:09:43Z

itsmagnetic @ 2008-01-22T19:24:00

2008-01-23T04:11:01Z

1. put your playlist on random.
2. post the first line from the first 25 songs that play, no matter how embarrassing. (you can skip songs that are instrumental.)
3. strike out the songs when someone guesses correctly.

It's kind of obnoxious how many songs here have the title in the first line, but oh well, 's all good.

1. ~~If time is a vessel, then learning to love might be my way back to sea/ The flying, the metal, the turning above - these are just ways to be seen~~ (Interpol - "Public Pervert")
2. ~~You left a [SONG TITLE] on the ground, and you left a bloodstain on the ground, but blood comes out easily~~ (José González - "Lovestain")
3. They sail light, ocean; Sail this night, ocean; Filling my sleep so gently; Just [SONG TITLE]; Just let it steer
4. [SONG TITLE] in Gothenburg in the summer of two thousand and one?
5. ~~She caught her flight at 10 am, and checked her face at Amsterdam~~ (Ladytron - "Jet Age")
~~6. Every day and night/ Every day and night/ I can see yr disco disco dick is sucking my heart out of my mind~~ (Le Tigre - "Deceptacon")
7. ~~Well, [SONG TITLE], my house/ I'll show you the ropes kid, I'll show you the ropes~~ (LCD Soundsystem - "Daft Punk Is Playing at My House")
8. ~~Radio, live [SONG TITLE]/ Listen to the silence, let it ring on./ Eyes, dark grey lenses frightened of the sun.~~ (Joy Division - "Transmission")
9. ~~I'm gonna sing this song with all of my friends/ and [SONG TITLE kinda]/ Love is a feeling that we don't understand/ but we're gonna give it to ya~~ (I'm From Barcelona - "We're From Barcelona")
10. ~~we used to dance like it was going out of style/ when you loved me for a while~~ (The Magnetic Fields - "Summer Lies")
11. Merging away like we did yesterday/ wrong direction/ The traffic we'll know, the traffic is slow and thoughtless
12. All my dumb luck and all my misgivings/ I thrust them aside for the dead for the living
13. [SONG TITLE] loved her father/ And I think she loved me too for a little while
14. No, I don't know just why/ No, I don't know just why/ Which way to turn/ I've got this ticket to use
15. I'm a [SONG TITLE], somebody catch me while you can, I'm not afraid to be alone, all I need is water and a bone
16. [SONG TITLE], back to summertime/ it was almost six months to the day
17. Don't act like you're an architect, you're just the house I built/ And i put you in your place, and that's where you will be
18. Last night you and I we gathered berries with a flashlight/ Wide-eyed journeyed into scriptures giving me the insight
19. I don't want a girl who hangs on every word I say, who shows me off to her parents over roast beef on Sunday
20. ~~Lying in my bed I hear the clock tick and think of you/ caught up in circles, confusion is nothing new~~ (BONUS: guess which version of this song it is!) (INOJ - "Time After Time")
21. ~~Can you hear them? They talk about us/ Telling lies, well that's no surprise~~ (The Go Go's - "Our Lips Are Sealed")
22. [SONG TITLE], white coat, you carry me home/ and bury this bone, and take this pinecone
23. Weee, a motorcyle, weee, a get-away car/ weeee, a house of sparrows, i am waiting, this is where you are
24. What if you walked home alone? Would that really be so bad?/ You've got the moon and you've got the stars/
I mean what else is there to have?
25. ~~City's breaking down on a camel's back/ They just have to go 'cause they don't hold back~~ (Gorillaz - "Feel Good Inc.")

itsmagnetic @ 2008-01-19T09:51:00

2008-01-19T17:53:27Z

Mel posted this.

Uhhh ... uhhh ... can I marry this guy? Or maybe just his sunglasses?

itsmagnetic @ 2008-01-02T17:12:00

2008-01-03T01:14:00Z

Dan Deacon is playing at Great American Music Hall on the 17th!! Eeeeee!

itsmagnetic @ 2007-12-26T22:07:00

2007-12-27T06:07:48Z

quizá mi mejor regalo de navidad ...

itsmagnetic @ 2007-12-22T15:51:00

2007-12-22T23:56:25Z

Ok, so I'm nerdy and just got really impressed with this language map of the distribution of Romance languages I found in an article so I thought I'd share ...

The reason I was "impressed" was that it didn't oversimplify the regional language issues in western Europe, plus it includes the distribution of Romania in Eastern Europe which most maps either don't show together or do things like wholesale ignore the fact that it's spoken in Greece and elsewhere. Anyways, a few of you might appreciate this.

itsmagnetic @ 2007-12-09T15:54:00

2007-12-09T23:57:13Z

from Samantha ...

itsmagnetic @ 2007-12-06T15:25:00

2007-12-06T23:30:36Z

From The New Yorker's Talk of the Town section ...

"According to Andrew Kohut and Bruce Stokes's "America Against the World" (2006), based on the Pew Global Attitudes Project, there was a time, not so long ago, when foreigners 'found it easy to say their problem with American was really just President Bush, not a considered judgment of the American people. But the results of the 2004 U.S. presidential election made that rationalization untenable.' An avalanche of new international polls - from Pew, the German Marshall Fund, the BBC, and others - show that anti-Americanism has reached astronomical levels almost everywhere and has solidified even in the Northern European belt from Britain to Poland. 'Countries that would once have supported American foreign policy on principle, simply out of solidarity or friendship, will now have to be cajoled, or paid, to join us,' Anne Applebaum, a conservative commentator not given to sentimentality about 'world opinion,' wrote recently in the Washington Post. 'Count that - along with the lives of soldiers and civilians, the dollars and equipment - as another cost of the war.'"

Yep. And the sad thing is, the world's kinda right.

itsmagnetic @ 2007-12-02T13:20:00

2007-12-02T21:21:32Z

K guys, so i have decided that "NAMBLA" and "Swede" are the too funniest words in the English language, so i want to combine them and start using the word to mean "important". As in:

"The physicist said, 'This is the most namblaswede discovery of modern Physics!'"

Who's with me?

Axioms

2007-11-30T19:14:21Z

τὸ φήναι ἅτινα οὐκ ἀληθῆ γέλοιόν ἐστι, ἢ οὕτως πυνθάνομαι ἐγώ.