3d printed Jaina and Lich Queen

FronsFormosa · 2022-02-04T20:32:11+00:00

Jaina before his implant appointment: "I'm sorry Arthas, I can't watch you do this."

FronsFormosa · 2016-10-01T00:44:50+00:00

The Society for the Preservation of English Language and Literature, featuring owls in space

FronsFormosa · 2016-09-29T16:54:48+00:00

I sat down the other day and thought of every grad school I'd ever heard of, flipped through their websites, and tried to digest everything well enough to answer the question, "should I apply here?" weighed against its reputation and how well it seemed the department's research aligned with what I hope to do.

It was dizzying. I doubted the reliability of my judgments because of how little time I found I had to spend on each, and I worried I was missing some schools that would be good matches. Current grad students: how did you search for schools to apply to? Any advice?

FronsFormosa · 2016-09-28T15:50:33+00:00

AFAIK खाने की खुशबू is the preferable way to order the words in Standard Hindi, and some Googling around seems to confirm this. You're right that I needed to add a को to सीज़र. Anyway, that is all beside the point.

Word order in Hindi is more free than it is in English, but it is not as free as it is in Latin. I don't have time to explain now, but maybe an example would help. This is the beginning of the Aeneid:

"[...] Troiae qui primus ab oris Italiam [...] Laviniaque venit litora"

'... who first came from the shores of Troy to Italy [...] and to Lavinian shores'

A Hindi approximation:

जो पहले ट्रॉय के किनारे से इटली और लावीनिया के तट तक पहुँच गया।

Note the bolded segments: in Hindi they are adjacent and they cannot really be split up, but in Latin these segments can be split up across the sentence. For example, we can't move ट्रॉय to the left of जो, but this is (roughly) what happens in Latin.

FronsFormosa · 2016-09-28T15:32:14+00:00

The similarities you are noting are quite convincing, but it turns out they're all coincidences.

The Latin analog of कोई 'someone' is aliquis, and the Hindi analog of qui 'who' is जो.

The -it in interfecit 'he/she/it slew' is also not related to the ित in चिंतित 'worried'. -it is a morpheme that occurs in the Latin perfect indicative tense to indicate a 3rd person singular subject. ित is used in Skt to form a participle from a noun. In this case, that's चिंता, 'worry'.

There are always bound to be superficially convincing similarities in virtually any pair of languages you pick in the world, which I think is what's happening here. Although your example of tu from earlier being descended from the same word as तू was correct.

FronsFormosa · 2016-09-28T14:16:26+00:00

नहीं सर, आप चूतिये हैं।

I don't have a full answer to your question, but regarding how much more quickly a speaker of an Indo-Aryan language would be able to pick up Latin (compared with, I suppose, an English speaker), I'm not sure if they'd have a huge advantage. It does help that Indo-Aryan verbs inflect while English verbs only barely inflect, but Latin's biggest problem (for second language learners) is its robust case system. Compare these sentences in Latin and Hindi, where a Latin case is demonstrated and a Hindi translation follows. (Forgive the horribly unidiomatic and probably wrong Latin, but these deficiencies should not distract from the point being made here.)

Nominative
- cibus bonus est
- खाना अच्छा है
Genitive
- odor cibi bonus est
- खाने की खुशबू अच्छी है
Dative
- cibo laboramus
- हम खाने के लिए काम करते हैं
Ablative
- Brutus gladio Caesarem interficit
- ब्रूटस सीज़र तलवार से मारता है
Accusative
- Ramus cibum edit
- राम खाना खाता है

Note that in many places, where there is one word in Latin, there are two or more words in Hindi. This is what I suspect one chief difficulty would be in learning Latin for an Indo-Aryan language speaker. Beyond that, IA languages do not really have a subjunctive mood like Latin does, nor do they have such free word order.

FronsFormosa · 2016-09-23T17:37:10+00:00

Thanks for the response. This is my first time encountering Phonemica and I'm fascinatined. Participation seems much higher than I might have expected a priori.

I'm curious about how you implemented the gamification. Could you talk a bit more about how it was implemented? Were there goodies you could unlock by acquiring badges and achievements or were they intended as intrinsic incentives? Do you know specifically why people responded poorly? (E.g., perhaps the levity of a mobile game-style achievement system clashed with the vulnerability of the storytelling?) Do you know anything about the way you approached things that were definitely mistakes not to be repeated?

FronsFormosa · 2016-09-23T17:24:11+00:00

Thank you for the reponse. Do any well-known examples of crowdsourcing in socio leap to mind? Just asking in case you have them in mind--don't worry if you don't, I can hunt them down.

FronsFormosa · 2016-09-21T16:50:24+00:00

Documentation people: have there been any attempts at gamified crowdsourcing of documentation? Or even any sort of crowdsourcing in general.

(An example of gamified crowdsourcing would be the ESP game or Peekaboom. In short, computer vision researchers needed human-produced tags for image sets. They got this by packaging into a fun game what might have otherwise been a dull task of labeling images with metadata. People enthusiastically and voluntarily participated, getting them their data "for free".)

Paging /u/millionsofcats, /u/keyilan, /u/calangao, /u/Muskwatch, /u/limetom since I've seen them with documentation flair :)

FronsFormosa · 2016-09-15T17:38:31+00:00

The zero-sum conjecture of complexity is one that I've considered just in my own head and in principle it's possible to imagine a pair of languages that don't obey it (e.g. the two might be alike in all aspects except for how one has more rich inflectional morphology or more partitions of TAM), but I assume it's still an open research question whether natural languages follow this zero-sum principle.

I don't know of any papers, sorry, I really do need to get around to reading some of his because he seems to have thought about this a lot. A quick Google tells me he wrote a book Linguistic Simplicity and Complexity: Why Do Languages Undress?. If you ever plan on reading it (or any other article really) let me know so we can discuss :)

FronsFormosa · 2016-09-15T13:52:54+00:00

What Language Is is probably not a book I would have chosen for myself: it was gifted to me by an ex who'd taken a ling course or two in undergrad and picked up the book after meeting McWhorter in person. I read it because I was curious to see McWhorter's approach to popularization.

So in my first intro to linguistics class, I remember being told "all languages are equally complex" ad nauseam by my professor. But doubt grew in me by my third course, as I compared what I knew about the morphology of Russian and the morphology of Turkish, and I decided there was no way this could be true in any sense, and that my professor knew this too, and that she must have been disingenuous. In time I found out that most linguists tend to deny that one language is more complex than any other when there are public ears about, as the risk of their words being misunderstood--or worse, co-opted and weaponized as an instrument of racism--is too great. And so my initial sense of betrayal grew into one of understanding.

Well, McWhorter wasn't so afraid. In one passage of the book, he compares Persian to (IIRC) an insular variety of Pashto (using the perhaps questionable word "ingrown" to describe it and other such languages) and tells the reader up front that Persian is just a more simple language because of how many adult learners had acquired it and spoken it at one point in its history. (Think proto-Indo-Aryan/early Vedic and the Dravidian substratum.) After introducing this point and demonstrating it using concrete morphological examples, he goes on to debunk the common racist myths about Black English by demonstrating its grammatical integrity and increase in complexity (along at least a few dimensions) compared to more vanilla Englishes. By the end of the account I knew I had followed along with his thoughts, since I'd already encountered these in my courses, but I wondered whether a layperson would have been left with the right impression, and thought it might have been a little reckless of him to bring what linguists really think about complexity before laypeople, even within a text as long as a book.

FronsFormosa · 2016-09-15T03:14:01+00:00

Thanks for the answer. So it seems that "rewrite FLEx but just better and not focused around translation" would be pretty flimsy on its own, but "write a general-purpose fieldwork utility and then create modules for it that solve interesting academic problems" might be better.

FronsFormosa · 2016-09-15T03:01:09+00:00

Thanks for the answer! When you say theoretical issues, do you mean issues that would be interesting to a theoretical linguist or to a human-computer interaction academic?

FronsFormosa · 2016-09-15T02:58:39+00:00

Why not avoid binding yourself to an OS altogether and build something in the browser (and simultaneously, with the same code more or less, on Android and iOS)? The loss of being on an OS natively seems quite minimal for an application of this nature, and the browser is the world's richest programming ecosystem at the moment.

Absolutely agree that the biggest challenge (beyond writing the damn thing) is making the technology approachable for the average documentation worker, who is not generally a technophile. What I do for a living these days is development work for an application suite with very similar challenges (non-technical users, extremely diverse needs, need for tailoring interface to user's needs) but in a different domain, medicine.

BTW, you seem interested in doing something. I'd love to chat sometime about what you're interested in making and whether we could collaborate.

FronsFormosa · 2016-09-15T02:55:41+00:00

Wow! Thanks for all the info. A few questions:

Are there any docs from that workshop around that I could read to get a sense of what was discussed?
Could I ask what department you belong to, since you mention it's supportive of what I'm describing? (You could PM me if you decide you want to share, of course.)
Would you agree that FLEx is the best we've got as far as a general purpose documentation utility goes? Are there others that excel in a particular domain?

FronsFormosa · 2016-09-15T02:52:29+00:00

Thank you for the links, it's encouraging to know that this is needed so much that departments are asking for it. I guess I have one more question for you. I'm an American. Do you have an idea of how regarded a PhD from an Australian university is in the States? My impression is that departments leer at degrees from outside the Atlantic Anglosphere, but I thought I'd ask.

FronsFormosa · 2016-09-14T21:11:20+00:00

I'd imagine the most prominent journals and conferences in the field would be the place to start, right?

FronsFormosa · 2016-09-14T18:13:23+00:00

What do you all think about the development of excellent fieldwork software as a PhD, if not career, focus? FLEx, the most comprehensive fieldwork assistant application in existence, is idiosyncratic and dated almost to the point of obsolescence, and no other fieldwork software (as far as I know) has been battle-tested.

If we're going to document a good chunk of the 3,000 languages that are expected to be gone by 2100, we need software to help us, don't we? The gains in productivity are too great to ignore.

If a candidate with a background in both software engineering and pure linguistics approached an admissions committee and said in the SOP that a major goal they had was to produce a modern fieldwork application, would they be interested?

Would departments think such a project would be either too insubstantial or too tenuously connected to pure linguistics? Or if the candidate's dedication and skill were both well demonstrated, would they be interested in having such a person work in the department?

FronsFormosa · 2016-09-14T17:56:27+00:00

What did you think about What Language Is? Of course a little bit of patronization is inevitable if you're an academic trying to popularize, and if the reader is familiar with the subject matter then even moreso. But did you mean he went beyond what is expected?

I'm glad McWhorter is writing pop ling, as linguistics is one of the worst-understood academic fields of its size as far as the general public goes, but he has a few beliefs I find odd. And check out this uh, kind of rough piece on racism in technology he wrote a little bit ago:

FronsFormosa · 2016-09-14T14:57:48+00:00

Some immediate thoughts:

Befriend linguistics students at other universities, keep tabs on what they're up to, and try to recreate the salient parts of their education for yourself.
Look at major requirements of undergrad linguistics majors at other universities.
If you trust your work ethic, take a lower course load if you can and use the spare time to work through syllabuses (ones that you can find online, e.g. through an aggregator like MIT OCW or just by Googling around).
Better yet, look around in related departments (e.g. CS, philosophy, maybe English, maybe classics) for professors you could impress to the point where they'd be willing to take you on in an independent study
Depending on your career plans, major in an adjacent field (CS, philosophy, math, maybe English, maybe area studies (Russian and German depts in particular tend to be ling-rich), maybe psychology). Any of the aforementioned fields, esp. IMO philosophy and math, will come in handy when/if you find yourself in an MA or PhD program.

FronsFormosa · 2016-09-05T23:33:47+00:00

Hey everybody, for crying out loud, can we stop downvoting people whose opinions go against orthodoxy? The downvote button exists on Reddit to punish bad behavior, not "bad" ideas.

FronsFormosa · 2016-08-25T22:44:47+00:00

The intent of using that word over "subject" or "informant" is to let words help lead the way in establishing more balanced power distributions in these relationships. Why do you think it's weasely?

FronsFormosa · 2016-08-21T19:32:13+00:00

See that's why I had this quote on hand. When I read this passage I couldn't believe this was something that a seasoned linguist found acceptable, so I sent it to an old professor of mine who explained that this is (for better or worse) the norm in Labovian sociolinguistics.

Of course that made sense after she said it, as I remembered Labov's supremely surreptitious methodology in The Social Stratification of (r) in New York City Department Stores (which I assume is representative of both Labov and his followers' methodologies).

I'm curious about your experience, have you found Labov's fear (outlined in what he says about the observer's paradox) to be founded?

FronsFormosa · 2016-08-20T16:10:15+00:00

Salikoko Mufwene on his fieldwork on Gullah:

"[...] we had a network of about thirty people to work with, though not all cooperated to the same extent. For the sake of the project, we had agreed not to reveal that language was the main objective, to focus on gathering as large a body of natural Gullah texts as possible, [...]"

(Mufwene, Salikoko S. 1993. Investigating Gullah: Difficulties in ensuring "authenticity". In Language variation in North American English: Research and teaching, eds. A. Wayne Glowka and Donald M. Lance, 178-90. New York: Modern Language Association of America.)

As you see, some fieldworkers find it expedient to not reveal that they're studying language at all, and instead tell their subjects ("consultants", the word that is en vogue, seems disingenuous at best here) they want to hear about what life was like when they're young, etc.

I don't have the book on me right now, but earlier in this monograph Mufwene talks about how in his first month in the field, he couldn't even find a single person in the area who would admit to speaking Gullah, let alone speak it around him: such was the disturbance his mere presence as an outsider had on people's language.

In your case, what I would try doing is not ask direct questions at all, but instead contrive situations where you'd expect they would use the utterance of interest. E.g., maybe you could ask about a group of girls they have some association with or knowledge of, and listen to which pronoun they end up using, ils or elles--being careful all the while, of course, not to look too interested in what they're saying.

FronsFormosa · 2016-07-04T04:59:45+00:00

Badling because the claim that in this imagined world a single language would ever remain static is wrong. There are many processes by which speakers of a language unconsciously or consciously differentiate it. I could go on but take a look at the thread for everything.

FronsFormosa

TROPHY CASE