Rems Blogt

Politics I: What to vote for

2010-05-04T19:22:00.000+01:00

Given that both in the country where I live and in the country where I get to vote in the national elections, there are national elections coming up, it's no wonder that much of my news consumption and informal conversations currently concern said national elections. There's a couple of things I've been thinking about in the past few weeks, and they may be worth putting out in the open. It's too much to put into a single blog post, and I don't have much time tonight, so I'm going to split it up into three parts:

- How do you decide what party to vote for?
- Should everyone be allowed to vote in the first place anyway?
- What is the ideal electoral system?

This post is about the first topic: how on Earth do you decide what party you vote for? I'm going to assume that you actually have a full choice -- this may not necessarily be the case in all electoral systems, but we'll get to that at some point -- so that your choice isn't restricted a priori.

I suppose a major part of what party to vote for is to do with what party your parents vote. Not necessarily because they have indoctrinated you to any significant extent, but because you've been brought up with certain values and behaviours that match those of your parents, and therefore the party that best matches their ideas is probably the party that best matches yours.

I witnessed (and not really participated in) a discussion between NG and SK, and the gist of their conversation was that it's more sensible to vote for parties' moral stances than for any economic plans. In general, government has relatively little influence over the internationalised economy. If anything, it's the other way around. Unless the vast majority of the electorate vote communist, the economy is run by big business, and any tax incentive is probably only going to help increase bonuses, not employment. Also, whatever happens to the United States economy is infinitely more important to the UK economy than who's currently living in Number 10. (This goes to an even larger extent for the Dutch economy and 't Torentje.)

So, voting for moral issues. In most of the Dutch elections I have been able to vote in, I have voted D66. The reasons for this are actually much more moral than economical: they are to do with D66 being the driving force behind the legislation of same-sex marriage, them realising the importance of education, them opposing Artikel 23 (supporting educational integration rather than segregation); and in general trying to find a balance between individual responsibility and opportunity, and taking care of the weaker groups in society. (And there's a cute picture on page 11 of their manifesto.)

Trying to translate this to the UK situation, the obvious place to look is D66's sister party, the Liberal Democrats (UK & Local). Which is what I have voted for in the elections that I have been eligible to vote for here (Council and Holyrood). Partly, this was simply a translation of my Dutch vote to the new context, but also it seems to have been the best choice out of the parties that it is worth voting for in the British constituency system. If I'd have got to vote for Westminster as well, I would probably vote LibDem too. This is a Labour/LibDem marginal constituency. No matter what the Tories say, vet boy doesn't stand a chance -- and I wouldn't vote Tory anyway given they go against pretty much everything I've said I would vote D66 for. An added bonus of a good LibDem result on Thursday would be good data on the language of proficient semi-speakers (and -- Easter egg -- on the confusion between voiced and voiceless velar stops).

Obviously the ideas here need more work, but the 'vote for ethics, not economics' idea is worth putting up, even if ineloquently.

The Poking Reel

2010-03-29T14:23:00.002+01:00

I'm going to give this whole blogging thing another go. If I have enough time to waste on watching online television, I should have enough time to publish a blog post a bit more frequently than three times a year. I am going to start with a boring dancing post, though...

Last Thursday was the New Scotland AGM, at which XO finished his second term as New Scotland president. To commemorate, SÖ had organised me to write a dance, and SF to write a tune. I wrote a reel (The Poking Reel) but the music turned out to be a jig (The Poking Jig). Doesn't matter for the dance, and we kept the name because in XO's world, things don't always have to make sense.

The Poking Reel (J 8x32)
1-8: 1C cross down to start a Reel of 3 on opposite sides (2C out and up, 3C in and up). When 1C reach the bottom, they cross back to continue the Reel of 3 on their own sides (i.e. Inveran reels). Finish with 2C in 1st place and 1C facing 1st corners.
9-16: 1C turn 1st corners RH, pass each other RS, turn 2nd corners RH to 2nd place on opposite sides. All set.
17-24: All advance and retire (4 bars). 1C turn RH 1 1/2 to own sides.
25-32: All dance circle, pivot and chase.

X:1
T:The Poking Jig
C:S. Ferguson
L:1/8
M:6/8
K:Dmaj
|: A | ddd ABc | ddd fed | efe Bcd | cec A2A |
ddd ABc | ddd fed | eee ABc | dAF D2 :|
|: f/2g/2 | a2f dfa | gbg e2g | fed Bcd | cec A2A |
ddd ABc | ddd fed | eee ABc | dAF D2 :|

The dance was presented to XO on a fluorescent orange hoodie. Because the whole iron-on printing thing didn't work, SÖ had to write it all out by hand, including 32 bars of sheet music!

Marking done

2009-12-19T22:01:00.003Z

I finished my marking today, having given out one the lowest marks I've ever given – a 7 out of 100 – to a paper that consisted of a few marginally correct answers in addition to a lot of "No chance" and "Fuck". (I have given out zeroes before, but that was only for cases of plagiarism or non-submission; and at some point someone managed to score a 4.5, but was also given a 10-point penalty for being two days late.)

Because it's against all sorts of regulations (mostly Health and Safety, I think) and also vaguely unethical to post a collection of interesting answers, here's a key to my marking comments as a sorry replacement. I should probably give this out to my students at some point around essay time so that they know what they have to do...

✓ - correct, this is something you get a point for.
✗ - not correct, this is something you would have got a point for if it had been right.
REF - REFERENCE THIS, YOU TOOL!
? - I have no idea what this says or I have no idea what you mean.
?? - I have no idea what you mean, and I'm quite sure you don't either.
! - How many times did I tell you not to write this?
OK - (read: oooo-kay....) This argument is flawed, but there's enough correctness in it that you're getting the point anyway because I'm nice like that.
Hmm - I'm not entirely convinced.
meh - I'm not entirely convinced, but it isn't relevant to the point anyway.
awk - (from awkward) There are better ways of phrasing this.
sp - This isn't spelled correctly.
:) - This is funny, but you probably didn't intend it that way.
:( - I am very disappointed in you.
good - This bit stands out i.e. The rest of your essay is not ____.

I do also write real words.

Wordle

2009-12-07T14:05:00.004Z

This is fun.

My Ph.D. is about...

My M.Sc. was about...

And my M.A. was about...

Guess what I want to do next...

Dan(c)e

2009-11-05T12:08:00.002Z

After trying his luck in Edinburgh for about a year — can't quite remember when he randomly turned up out of the blue — HSC will be moving back to Denmark tomorrow. Apparently there's many jobs for him there, and he has an interview in Copenhagen next week. With a bit of luck, and I'll know about that in two to three weeks, I might be joining him there in a little under a year's time, but until then, it's goodbye to the little drunken Dane.

Trip to Aalborg (R 8x32)

1-8 1C cross down RH to 2nd place on the wrong sides, set, and turn RH 1 1/4 times to end 1M between the 3s facing 3M, and 1L between the 2s facing 2L.
9-16 Reels of 3 across the dance; 1C end these in 2nd place on the wrong sides.
17-24 Meanwhile. 1C set, turn RH 3/4 (putting 1M at the top of the set, 1L at the bottom), set, and petronella home to 2nd place. This last petronella is more like a dodge, as supporting couples do: cross RH, set, change places on the side RH, cross LH — ending in the order 312, all on the correct side.
25-32 All circle 6H round and back.

This dance is confusing because (a) it's a 312 progression, which I never do on purpose but most of the dances I write end up with one anyway, and (b) the meanwhile bit is not J.B. Milne. Also, I might not get to dance it tonight. Grump.

Stufi

2009-10-08T18:06:00.002+01:00

According to ANP:

The European Commission have brought the Netherlands to the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg over discrimination with regard to student grants. According to Dutch law, students who want to qualify for student grants to study abroad, need to have been legally resident in the Netherlands for at least three of the previous six years. According to the European Commission, this residency requirement is in breach of EU rules about free movement of labour.

AHRC, ESRC, and friends – please take note. Thank you.

More politics (unstructured thoughts)

2009-10-08T12:24:00.003+01:00

Three interesting Op/Ed pieces from the Dutch press:

Martin Sommer in De Volkskrant continues the Irish EU referendum theme. Kees Aerts in Trouw discusses the apparent demise of social-democracy in Europe. And Hans Goslinga, also in Trouw talks about difference between old and new people's parties, and why it's important to stick to politics rather than settle on a cross-party business cabinet.

Points that they (more or less) make that I agree with:

As there is very little that can be done against whatever comes from Brussels, opposition politicians that run on an anti-Europe ticket are misleading the electorate. European integration is at a point where opting in or out of individual treaties and rules and regulations makes very little difference indeed. Empty words, then, all of it.

One of the old values of social-democracy was cultural enlightenment. Aerts is right that this was probably a top-down process. The idea is levelling upwards, raising the level of the masses, rather than levelling downwards, lowering the level of the elite down to the gross common denominator. Of course you can ask whether this is actually true, seeing as even news and discussion programmes on tv have been turned into "infotainment".

The masses see Europe as a case of "their rights versus our interests", and are no longer interested in the left-wing intellectual elite's messages about how cool international cooperation is. They feel threatened by globalisation, sometimes rightly so, and put more faith in messages about cultural conservatism, regardless of whether these messages come from traditionally right-wing or traditionally left-wing parties.

It's probably better to keep talking rather than sidelining politics and give power to a cross-party cabinet of successful academics and businessmen. That idea is probably not even that bad in theory, but in practice, it won't be accepted by the masses who have lost their faith in people with a different outlook in life. Recall the PVV's hate speech against intellectuals with university degrees and designer glasses.

Final question: is this really a question of a change from politics of left versus right to politics of intellectuals versus non-intellectuals? Are they all that different? And should we care?

Politics

2009-10-05T16:06:00.002+01:00

I was reading up on some of the issues around last week's referendum in Ireland about whether or not to ratify the Treaty of Lisbon. The quickest way to get to some relevant links of course is to look up the referendum on Wikipedia, which was made even easier by there being a link to the article on the Wikipedia front page. (Which for me functioned as a reminder that I was meaning to read some more about it.)

Two things.

I was amazed and slightly appalled that one of the people active in the "NO to Lisbon" campaign was Nigel Farage, leader of the UK Independence Party. This is not an Irish party that is rallying for Irish independence from the UK – of course, they managed to kick out the Brits somewhere between 1916 and 1949, depending on how you define independence. No, it is a British party (in fact, mostly an English party) rallying for the European Union to stay out of British politics. But apparently it is alright for UKIP themselves to butt into Irish politics. I can understand that UKIP are evangelical about their "No to EU" message, fair enough, but if you want other countries to stay out of your politics, maybe you shouldn't get actively involved in another country's politics either.

The other thing is that the same Nigel Farage has said that the referendum was like a corrupt election in Zimbabwe or Afghanistan. Part of this is probably sour grapes, but it is a bit awkward to just disregard the outcome of the previous referendum (2008) and try again just because you didn't like the result. This reminds me of a talk at the Sociolinguistics Symposium in Amsterdam, where one of the keynote speakers pulled off exactly the same trick: the first set of experiments didn't show what we wanted it to show, so we re-did them, and then we liked the results better. Maybe the Irish should have waited with a new referendum – at least the two EU referenda in Norway were twenty years apart and there was enough change in both the electorate and the political situation in Europe to warrant trying again.

I also have thoughts about referenda, the provision and processing of relevant information, and the political landscape in general, but they are for some other time.

Metro maps

2009-09-20T17:52:00.004+01:00

I'm a big fan of the stylised maps often used by metro and railway companies, where geography is made secondary to conveying information, and as a result, the world is just a little bit more typographically pleasing. So obviously different levels of my geekery got together in rejoicing over this map:

Not a true metro or train map, although the buses go through plenty of tunnels, and the 300, 400, and 410 services even go under the sea for a bit. Another bit of the geek in me is happy that there seems to be some underlying systematicity in numbering the bus and ferry connections, although it could have been done a little bit more elegantly.

Robot musicians don't like me

2009-09-11T18:29:00.000+01:00

Last weekend, me and CS went to the last day of the Cybraphon exposition, a strange robot contraption that can make music on lots of different instruments inside a 1920s-style cupboard. It was designed by two people from the department, Simon and Ziggy-who-is-really-Barry. In the middle of the top shelf of the cupboard is a sort of barometer that indicates the Cybraphon's mood. Supposedly the music it plays depends on its mood, but of course if you only go and see it once, you can't tell...

The mood-o-meter goes from "desolate" to "delirious". When we came in, the Cybraphon was moderately happy. I can't remember exactly what the mood-o-meter said, but if it's really 1920s British it would have been something along the lines of "chirpy" or "jolly". However, the minute we positioned ourselves in front of the Cybraphon, its mood went down to "indifferent".

Thanks.

But also, likewise. Simon and Ziggy's previous contraption was a whole range of chimes and xylophones and things hidden in the bushes in one of the big greenhouses at the Botanic Gardens. They were connected to motion sensors, so certain things would play if you were standing near a certain plant. You could move around the greenhouse and make things happen. The Cybraphon doesn't have this interactiveness – at least, no direct interaction between the thing and the spectators. Apparently it takes its mood from how many people write about it positively on the internet. So sorry Cybraphon, I'm going to go ruin your day now: you weren't as good as the Botanics set-up.

Boredom alleviated

2009-05-23T16:30:00.001+01:00

Troublesome Threesomes (S 3x40)
To alleviate Emma's boredom in India.

1-8 1C set, then cast to face 1st corners. Set to 1st corners, turn them RH to face 2nd corners.
9-16 Set to 2nd corners, turn them LH to end in lines across the dance. Set and link for three to end 2-1-3 on opposite sides.
17-24 All dance 6-bar reels of three on the sides, 1C dancing in and to their right to start. End with 1C turning RH to face 4th corner positions (these are 1st corner people).
25-32 Set to corners, turn them LH to end in lines across the dance. Set and link for three to end 2-1-3 on own sides.
33-40 1C dance half figures of 8 around 2nd corners, cross RH and cast one place out their own sides to end 2-3-1.

St Catherine of Siena (S 8x32)
To alleviate my own boredom on a Saturday afternoon.

1-8 1C cross RH, cast two places (2C, 3C step up), cross LH, cast up one place (3C step down).
9-16 1L with 3C (down), 1M with 2C (up), dance reels of 3 across the dance. End in 2nd place on own sides.
17-24 Dance eight bars of rights and lefts for three couples: all cross RH, then change places LH on the sides or on the 2nd corner diagonal, all cross RH, then change places LH on the sides or on the 2nd diagonal.
25-32 Set, then circle 6H to the left only (two-thirds round) back to own sides in the order 2-1-3.

Auslautverhärtung

2009-01-01T10:50:00.005Z

Hij is fijn.

2008 - A year in Facebook statuses

2009-01-01T10:28:00.002Z

January 2008
02/01 Remco is een onnozele en naïeve dwaas. Blijkbaar. Kijk, dán komen we ergens.
03/01 Remco is snowless but extremely cold.
04/01 Remco is back.
09/01 Remco is wondering how many pop culture references will fit into one presentation.
11/01 Remco is going into the weekend.
12/01 [edited out for fear of litigation]
13/01 Remco is zuurkoolschotel. Vindt iedereen lekker.
14/01 Remco is afraid Lauren is becoming physically victorious.
17/01 Remco is glad Lauren is ill, so she won't become physically victorious. (Instead, I will.)
17/01 Remco is, yes.
19/01 Remco: eppur si muove.
27/01 Remco is doing something right now.

February 2008
06/02 Remco is wondering what silly things people have decided not to eat this year. Sigh.
09/02 Remco is not (really) ill. (And hoping that if I write that it'll become true!)
12/02 Remco is going to torture the Ling 2 students with some Dutch. Rood, goot, groot. Good luck!
13/02 Remco is back to work.
19/02 Remco is marking. Joy!
21/02 Remco is glad THAT's over.
22/02 Remco is going to mark in t'Toon.
24/02 Remco is glad that THAT's over too.
25/02 Remco is despairing. Do they not have any clue at all?
25/02 Remco is getting less and less convinced.
28/02 Remco is done marking. Happy days are here again!

March 2008
08/03 Remco is weekending.
10/03 Remco is ill and sniffy.
10/03 Remco is disappointed, but determined to adjust levels of couldn't-care-lessness accordingly.
11/03 Remco heeft heel wat respect verloren voor Rob de Nijs. Van Francis Cabrel blijf je af! Grr...
12/03 Remco is getting better.
13/03 Remco is excited about getting to tour the DSB, Dirk Scheringa Be- eh... Dugald Stewart Building.
18/03 Remco is doing data entry in 8-bar phrases.
19/03 Remco is making the science a fun.
20/03 Remco rider ut or Fraklandet med dyre dros i sadel / blæs i luren Olivant på Ronsarvollen.
22/03 Remco is sitting in a railway station / got a ticket for [his] destination...
23/03 Remco is where the heart is.
24/03 Remco is terrible at keeping in touch.
30/03 Remco is taking a (very rainy) day off.
31/03 Remco is finding Monday morning radio uninspiring for work. Can we ban the EO?

April 2008
01/04 Remco is wondering why all interesting SS17 sessions are at the same time?!
01/04 Remco is thinking Dutch MPs should get lessons in logic, debating, and rhetoric.
02/04 Remco is in Mokum, representin' the Burgh.
06/04 Remco is back from Mokum, having represented the 'Burgh.
07/04 Remco is wireless.
08/04 Remco has received fanmail.
09/04 Remco is wondering why Facebook's targeted advertising is talking about "5 Tips to Lose Belly Fat."
12/04 Remco is thinking it's a bit odd that Facebook is now *proposing* people as my friends.
13/04 Remco is back. All rejoice.
15/04 Remco is wondering.
17/04 Remco had never heard ze Pope speak English before. Vat a choke!
18/04 Remco is, once again, marking.
19/04 Remco has processed lots of meat and assorted veg into (1) pasta sauce, (2) goulash, and (3) moussaka. Too bad cooking doesn't make me hungry.
20/04 Remco can't count. Which is a problem when marking, frankly.
21/04 Remco is disappointed in you.
28/04 Remco's facebook status has expired.

May 2008
02/05 Remco has expired now as well. (Just like his Facebook status last week.)
03/05 Remco has not expired, but is just reduced to clear. (Thank you. I think.)
07/05 Remco has no inspiration for a status.
09/05 Remco will be lunching outside, thank you very much.
09/05 Remco feels like a Friday afternoon.
10/05 Remco feels like a Saturday afternoon.
12/05 Remco's status is outdated.
12/05 Remco est partout où tu regardes: dans les moindres recoins de l'espace, dans le moindre rêve où tu t'attardes.
15/05 Remco and Lauren are sitting next to each other on the office sofa, communicating old-fashionedly by e-mail.
15/05 Remco has reorganised his folders with articles, and reshuffled the letters of the alphabet in the process.
17/05 Remco. Dus.
17/05 Remco: rien qui mérite qu'on en parle, rien d'inquiétant.
22/05 Remco is amused by the wealth of academic publications on Eurovision block-voting.
26/05 Remco suddenly finds the long-awaited absence of undergraduates in the University Library rather quite eerie.
27/05 Remco is enjoying phonetic transcriptions: [kut], [fok] and other such fun times.
27/05 Remco has assisted casually. Score!

June 2008
01/06 Remco is a bit boring, and very much bored.
03/06 Remco likes even-numbered chapters better. Die, you evil odd-numbered chapters! Die! Die! Die!
06/06 Remco is still not extremely fond of odd-numbered chapters.
06/06 Remco is tired and bored. Of odd-numbered chapters, and in general.
07/06 Remco s'arrange pour éviter les miroirs.
09/06 Remco is back to the evil odd-numbered chapters.
09/06 Remco is wondering whether it would be possible to turn the light off at night, so that he can get some *&^/5*@ sleep. Thank you.
09/06 Remco maybe shouldn't have eaten a bag of Haribo Happy Cola bottles.
10/06 Remco har slet ikke noget tøj på; det er der ingen andre der kan se. (Hmm... using song lyrics for status updates may not be the smartest thing I've ever done.)
11/06 Remco - plus loin que la nuit et le jour.
11/06 Remco is statusless.
12/06 Remco is back from his first meeting of the day (and it's only 9am).
12/06 Remco thinks Calvin is right: there is actually nothing in the Monopoly rule book about not robbing the bank. Stuff that, Hobbes! (Quite literally, actually.)
12/06 Remco sjunger: du kan stå under mitt paraply, du kan stå under mitt paraply-ply-ply, ja, ja, ja...
13/06 Remco het 't charisma van 'n blokske Lego.
16/06 Remco is in the office. His motivation must be somewhere else. Did it move to the new building already?
16/06 Remco zit bovenop het duin. Het is wel 100 meter hoog. Zo hoog zat werkelijk nog niemand. En hij ziet Engeland.
17/06 Remco wonders whether the 25 mins spent getting the laptop power cord he'd forgotten count as work or procrastination?
17/06 Remco is cutting, condensing and red-penning. Chapter 3.2 went from 8500 to 4500 words. Result.
18/06 Remco doesn't like the speed he swims at.
19/06 Remco is going to actually do some work today. (And fortunately, "some" is a very vague quantifier.)
19/06 Remco is Editing Central. From 7500 to 3800 words. Result again. (Total: from 16000 to 8300.)
19/06 Remco is wondering whether the *new new new* pink entrance hall to AFB is intended to let us get used to the colour scheme in the new bulding?
20/06 Remco kept his calm in the face of a raging tornado.
22/06 Remco is a domestic god. And wirelessly connected!
25/06 Remco knows everything there is to know about fire. And, has crates - will move.
26/06 Remco thinks writing introductory crap is NOT INTERESTING.
26/06 Remco is going to bed.
27/06 Remco is wondering, is this the bloody St Gotthard?!
27/06 Remco is wondering who all these people are Facebook claims I should know.
27/06 Remco is wondering who all these people are Facebook claims I *may* know. (Geez, what is it with you people!)
30/06 Remco did not get around to opening the file 'thesis.tex' today. Better luck tomorrow.

July 2008
01/07 Remco is actually working!
01/07 Remco is pleasantly surprised to find another publication to his name. (You'd have thought the journal would at least tell me?)
03/07 Remco is wondering how typographically blind you must be to mistake ramshorns for a voiced velar fricative. Not very, guessing from the frequency of this mistake.
03/07 Remco (a) managed to kill time until 7.45pm, and (b) now knows that it takes TWO packets of Sainsbury's cheesecake mix to fill his cake tin.
04/07 Remco thinks Vivaldi at 8am was a nice surprise. Yay for the Marathon Interview! :)
04/07 Remco agrees that (disgusting) Pringles are not (proper) crisps, but doesn't see why they therefore are exempt from taxes. Evil inferior crisp conspiracy, I tell you!
04/07 Remco heeft nu wel genoeg van de hik, thankyouverymuch.
04/07 Remco was van de hik haf, maar heeft hem nu weer terug. *Hik*.
05/07 Remco, tja.
06/07 Remco is acquiring lots of knowledge that is essentially pointless.
07/07 Remco isn't convinced it's been a very good day today.
08/07 Remco is amused that Dutch radio plays songs in Schwyzerdütsch (and hopes he's spelt that right).
10/07 Remco is definitely going to be an Important Person in the second semester next year.
16/07 Remco is enjoying broadcasts of the Tour 1958 on RTL, 1968 on NOS, and 2008 on both.
17/07 Remco is happy iCal Day everyone!
18/07 Remco could do with fewer faulty parts, and would like to remind the people in charge that he is not a French car.
20/07 Remco was at Sarah's wedding ceilidh, and was suitably impressed by La Linda's moves on the dancefloor.
21/07 Remco thinks July is not the proper time of year to get a stinkin' cold. Also, hence, in no state to work. Snif.
24/07 Remco can see the irony in fire doors being wedged open by fire extinguishers.
24/07 Remco wonders what would happen if the Gendarmerie would search *French* cyclists. Putains racistes.
25/07 Remco is continuing yesterday's theme. WTF is AG2R doing in 2nd place in the Teams Classification?
28/07 Remco says, Góða Ólavsøku!
29/07 Remco sings, "Hóast kavin liggur tjúkkur nú yvir bø og ong, so er tað sum í tropunum í okkara dupultsong."
31/07 Remco has internet in the new building!

August 2008
06/08 Remco is wondering when it'll stop raining!
06/08 Remco is not camping. http://www.foksuk.nl/nl?cm=79&ctime=1217541600.
07/08 Remco is wondering whether he can be bothered throwing a dinner party this weekend.
08/08 Remco thinks that people who pretend their Mac is a Windows machine probably deserve all that's coming to them.
10/08 Remco has had quite enough of getting wet all the time.
18/08 Remco is watching Weg met BNN. For obvious reasons.
19/08 Remco has fucking had enough. Edinburgh should follow Montréal's lead and build an underground part to the city.
20/08 Remco vindt rookworst gewoon heel erg lekker.
20/08 Remco is thinking Radio Kòrsou FM needs to update their jingle. Although I suppose "diskualifikashon" is not in my Papiamentu dictionary.
21/08 Remco is going to have lunch.
21/08 Remco is going to see a Fringe show.
22/08 Remco is not more like Emma than Emma is, although the evidence may have been diluted by torrential rain.
22/08 Remco is wondering whether Lionel Ritchie actually pays tax over all those things that purportedly belong to him.
23/08 Remco vindt boterbabbelaars met mintsmaak wel erg vreemd.
23/08 Remco has new shoes, and thus sore feet.
29/08 Remco is watching Weg met BNN again. Same reason.
30/08 Remco is wondering whether to interpret James' latest exploits as a new high or a new low.
31/08 Remco is amazed to see swaths of neds attentively watching a classical music concert.

September 2008
01/09 Remco is thinking, at least at the end of a short story people can be dead.
04/09 Remco is thinking that the tech support people really should come to ask me how their systems work...
09/09 Remco is looking at http://www.fontblog.be/brummi-alphabet.
10/09 Remco is glad he's not a supporter of the Bulgarian women's ice hockey team.
11/09 Remco has spent the past two and a half hours reading German Academese, and could do with a break.
11/09 Remco is thinking about figurative language (wuFcZatQnmo).
13/09 Remco should perhaps buy a Gekkur ticket.
15/09 Remco is surprised that no one's reacted on his status yet and asked what on earth a Gekkur is.
15/09 Remco is officially old now. Not a single person has offered him Snapfax this year.
17/09 Remco is Etelis coruscans. You have been warned.
19/09 Remco is cleaning the kitchen very thoroughly, so the entire house is now a mess.
20/09 Remco is settling for simply clean, thoroughly clean is too much work.
22/09 Remco is surprised to find levels of despair change so much from week to week.
22/09 Remco needs a new bag after an unfortunate incident that involved raspberries.
23/09 Remco has submitted the postdoc application and can now resume actually finishing the PhD.
24/09 Remco gelooft het allemaal wel.
24/09 Remco doesn't like being a notnice person.
25/09 Remco is wondering what Penny will wear for her presentation tomorrow, and is preparing to be surprised.
26/09 Remco is only eight weeks away from 21 November 2008.
30/09 Remco is disappointed that Innerrhoden and Ausserrhoden let the team down.

October 2008
01/10 Remco is sure winter's on its way. The spontaneous nosebleeds announcing its return have started...
01/10 Remco is sleeping. Well, almost.
02/10 Remco is making deadlines and not going insane. Yay.
06/10 Remco is in need of a new status.
06/10 Remco is not going to Beirut any time soon.
07/10 Remco hat KBA und KI.
07/10 Remco thinks it's a stroke of brilliance to say that Superman and Clark Kent are in complementary distribution, and they're allopersons of the same perseme.
10/10 Remco is suing 堅い天候の会社 for false advertising. Superdry my arse.
10/10 Remco's wall is becoming more and more of a mystery.
11/10 Remco is showing signs of old age.
11/10 Remco would say /'lansbantʃ/ but /lɑnts'bɑŋki/ is probably closer. Remco 0, 't Oog 1.
12/10 Remco is still fixing data entry stuff.
12/10 Remco has finished for the day.
13/10 Remco is ready for a brand new day.
13/10 Remco hopes his examiners won't find Chapter 5 as boring as he finds it.
14/10 Remco is quite amused by the idea of Iceland replacing North Korea on the Axis of Evil.
15/10 Remco has broken his no-food-at-the-desk rule big time. Bloody evil Chapter 5.
16/10 Remco is still chapterfiving, although the end (which is the beginning) is in sight.
18/10 Remco now has lots of data to be chaptersixing next week, but first should finish chapterfiving tomorrow.
19/10 Remco is windswept.
19/10 Remco n'est rien qui mérite qu'on en parle (rien d'inquiétant).
21/10 Remco is fabulous. Says Craig.
23/10 Remco is wordformationing in Faroese. How about "kaffistovuspurningarkappingarvinnaralið"?
24/10 Remco has just poked himself.
25/10 Remco. What can I say...
26/10 Remco is wondering where the wind and rain have suddenly gone.
26/10 Remco: Ah, there.
26/10 Remco denkt, je zal toch in Noord-Groningen zitten zonder stroom.
27/10 Remco is impressed by the Kentucky auctioneer that talks like a banjo.
27/10 Remco ligt voor op schema.
29/10 Remco is trying to find things for £1.50 per gram.

November 2008
01/11 Remco is not happy with a certain person in Obar Dheathain.
03/11 Remco can now count the days on hands and feet.
04/11 Remco will be dealing with data today.
05/11 Remco really can't do with getting ill at this point.
08/11 Remco only has 16 assignments left to mark. (And if the people who haven't submitted yet please could wait until after Thursday so they get an automatic 0, thank you).
09/11 Remco is Ifigenia Papageorgiou, according to one of his students. Who failed the assignment.
09/11 Remco is still in the office.
09/11 Remco is no longer in the office, but enough uni work left to do at home, so don't worry.
10/11 Remco is making even more funky graphics.
10/11 Remco is back to writing.
10/11 Remco should log off from Facebook and get back to work.
10/11 Remco has six chapters, and eleven days left. Please note the comma.
11/11 Remco's swipecard is denying him access to his office, and Ken Vogel is going to die a slow and horridly painful death.
12/11 Remco doesn't like Facebook's ungrammaticality. You have been poked by: X poked you!
13/11 Remco has more fingers than days.
14/11 Remco ist antimüllindiegegendschmeißistisch.
15/11 Remco is ziek. Maar niet getreurd, hoofdstuk 3 wacht.
15/11 Remco "Je bent voor polarisatie of tegen, het is wíj of zíj."
18/11 Remco is so fed-up with badly designed forms in this University that he's considering offering to redesign all of them for free.
19/11 Remco is in conclusion.
19/11 Remco noticed a smell of weed coming from where the builders were having their smoking break, and is wondering how it affects the DSB's structural stability.
20/11 Remco thinks that not winning the pub quiz is possibly a good thing, with this type of questions anyway.
20/11 Remco has written a book.
24/11 Remco, wat moet je dáár nou weer mee?
25/11 Remco has too many things to remember.
25/11 Remco is pondering what would have happened should Scotland have gone ahead with their plans to annex Iceland.
27/11 Remco is aware that this is only the first bout of unreasonable weather we've had this winter, but that doesn't make it any more comfortable.
28/11 Remco had a good idea for a funny status, but forgot.
29/11 Remco doesn't understand people who wait sheepishly at a traffic light, but don't push the button.
29/11 Remco gaat pad in 't gat eten.

December 2008
01/12 Remco... La neige sur Liè... Édimbourg! Yay!
01/12 Remco - zönder snei wordt 't ok wol old en nij.
04/12 Remco has an aim in life again.
05/12 Remco is happy his brother's friend's taxi got delayed in Mumbai last week...
08/12 Remco gaat de laatste week in.
08/12 Remco is being a cookie monster once again.
08/12 Remco is out of cookies. Proofreading again to procrastinate on Chapter 5...
08/12 Remco veit'ki um hann tímar meir.
09/12 Remco veit'ki um hann orkar meir.
09/12 Remco wants a doctor's note, 'cause he's sick of Chapter 5.
09/12 Remco is sore.
10/12 Remco veit'ki um hann klárar meir.
10/12 Remco is watching the PM Questions in an attempt at procrastination.
10/12 Remco can work right through political debate.
11/12 Remco veit'ki um hann orkar meir.
11/12 Remco is collecting Out-of-Office Auto-Replies.
11/12 Remco thinks he's finished Chapter 5, Incarnation 2.
11/12 Remco is considering €1.14 for £1, and reduced VAT, and is concluding Christmas shopping.
13/12 Remco is dealing with comments and ignoring the goblins.
13/12 Remco - hej ho det er helt okej!
14/12 Remco er heilt liðugur. (Vónaliga veruliga hesuferð...)
15/12 Remco has submitted. Celebratory apple pie in DSB common room.
17/12 Remco is marking frenzy. So far, not impressed.
18/12 Remco is a mug. But, a mug in the best Linguistics department in the UK. Fact.
19/12 Remco was slightly more successful at christmasshoppingspreeing second time round.
25/12 Remco wants everyone to have a happy Christmas.
28/12 Remco heeft een luie kerstvakantie.
29/12 Remco is planning to become a nice person again in 2009.
30/12 Remco wonders whether "authentic" TV drama paints an accurate picture of UK youth life, and what that would mean.
31/12 Remco is objecting to the Dutch Word of 2008 on phonotactic grounds. Otherwise, happy new year, everybody!

Tu/vous distinction

2008-07-11T08:09:00.003+01:00

The tu/vous distinction is very salient in Dutch. Younger people are probably more inclined to say 'je' (tu) to more people than older people, and of course that's a reason that the language and the country are both going to the dogs. Not like in the polite good ol' days, anyway. This means that any choices for 'je' or 'u' (vous) in the media are very important, and most interviews begin with some metalinguistic comment about choosing 'je' "because we've known each other for quite some time".

This morning VPRO's Marathon Interview with Marjolijn Februarie started with the question

"Heeft u liever dat ik 'je' zeg of heb je liever dat ik 'u' zeg?"

A nice and balanced way around the problem.

She chose 'je', by the way.

These boots are made for verbin'

2008-07-10T20:55:00.000+01:00

Now, if the average 18-year-old wouldn't find Nancy Sinatra the antithesis of cool, here would be an awesome way to illustrate the concept of word-formation through noun-to-verb and adjective-to-verb conversion:

You keep lying, when you oughta be truthin'
and you keep losin' when you oughta not bet.
You keep samin' when you oughta be changin'.
Now what's right is right, but you ain't been right yet.

Truthin' is not actually Nancy Sinatra's fault. The verb truth (well, treuþen) was attested before 1300, says the OED (subscription needed). Since 1300, we've had four meanings that are now obsolete, and we're on to meaning 5, 'to bring to truth, adjust accurately', with the only example from 1881. Nancy does not seem to be saying "You keep lying, when you ought to be setting things right" though, but rather "when you ought to be telling the truth". Meaning 6.

Samin' is not attested in the OED as a verb. This one is also quirky semantically. Most adjective-to-verb conversions are semantically to do with becoming whatever the adjective is. "The new lands begin to green with vineyards" or "The white frock which she had so carelessly greened on the damping grass" (see also meaning 5 in the OED for truth). But this one is not about becoming the same in an inspired bout of Gleichschaltung, it's about staying the same.

Nancy Sinatra would be a welcome change from the ever-present Jabberwocky, though...

Not to be confused

2008-07-10T09:26:00.001+01:00

Restoration: eat that, Cromwell!
Restauration: eat that, Cromwell!

Not a typo you want to make in your PhD.

Street signs

2008-07-05T22:43:00.000+01:00

Autism Warning!

Right. So one of my obsessive "must find out" things of the past couple of weeks is the design of street signs in Edinburgh (and in fact many other places in Britain). Mostly, I wanted to find out what font the black-on-white serifed capitals were. For some reason, I like subtle designs with preferably serif capitals.

Most of the street signs in Edinburgh look like this:

It turns out that the font was custom designed as part of the whole street sign design by David Kindersley (1915-1995), a (mostly) Cambridge-based stonecutter and type designer. The stone-cutting background is one of those things that you don't know, but doesn't surprise you when you find out. (A similar design is the font Trajan, which was based on carved inscriptions on Trajan's Column in Rome.)

I particularly like the R:

Whenever you try looking anything up on the internet, you learn a whole lot more than you originally intended. First, Kindersley was an apprentice of Eric Gill (of Gill Sans fame), who in turn was taught by Andrew Johnston (who designed the font for the London Underground).

And now that we're in London, there's a particularly famous street sign design there too:

Apparently only in Westminster, but there's a fair number of famous streets in that part of town – not so much Hop Gardens, but streets like Abbey Road, Downing Street, and Baker Street (with complimentary Sherlock Holmes silhouette in the top right of the street sign). The Westminster street signs are so iconic that the borough have now obtained all copyright to the design and are ready and willing to enforce it...

(Univers Condensed Bold, by Adrian Frutiger, by the way; the signs were designed by Sir Misha Black (1910-1977).)

A bit closer to (my brother's) home: street signs in Amsterdam, more well-done public typeface designing. Amsterdam street signs feature the sans-serif font described in the national norm NEN 3225:1962, which designer Sem Hartz had some influence on apparently. (This design is common throughout the Netherlands, apart from the district indication, although it's now being replaced by Gerard Unger's ANWB-Uu.) (Also, public typeface design by committee, where have we heard that before?)

For more on Amsterdam street signs, this is nice.

Question
Is it necessary to include an indication of the town district on street signs? I suppose it does have a certain je ne sais quoi, but it's probably completely redundant information. Most people will know where approximately they are. But then, street signs are probably for people that don't know where they are. For those people, some extra information could be useful. But should the information then take the form of a borough/district name (which would be meaningful to people) or a postcode (which, well, would not really...)?

CLUNY GARDENS
EH10

CLUNY GARDENS
Morningside

Which is better?

Unlikely beacon

2008-06-26T10:00:00.000+01:00

From the BBC News website, a story about replica whale jawbones that are to be put on top of North Berwick Law, as a replacement for the old whale jawbones that rotted away and were airlifted to Health & Safety in 2005:

David Berry, East Lothian Council's leader, said: "From originally being a beacon for homecoming sailors, the jawbones on top of the Law have come to be a symbol of North Berwick, recognised by visitors and locals alike."

A beacon, eh?

So imagine you're a sailor from North Berwick, sailing home. Oh look, there's Bass Rock, that iconic massive piece of volcanic rock infested with guano and covered in birds. Nope, no idea where I am in relation to North Berwick yet. Oh and see, there, on the shore, the perfectly conical hill that just must be North Berwick Law. A nice view, but am I anywhere close to North Berwick yet? Beats me. But wait! What's that on top of that unique conical hill exactly opposite the white rock? Give us the binoculars, will you? Ah, yes... I spy with my little eye... a set of incredibly ickle whale jawbones. Finally I know that we're getting close to North Berwick now!

Or am I being too cynical now?

Føroyar í globaliseringini

2008-06-23T11:59:00.001+01:00

One of the recurring sketches in E elski Førjar, the Faroese version of Little Britain, is a spoof television show called Føroyar í globaliseringini (The Faroe Islands in Globalization), where a slightly-too-slick presenter played by Sjúrður Skaale interviews a Faroese person who has had a major role in some important global event. Such as the guy who shouted "Liverpool! Liverpool!" at the FA Cup final, or the girl who as-good-as-knows Brad Pitt because she lives in Seattle, which is quite close to where Brad lives. (Tveir tímar, tað er jú púrasta einki! says Skaale.)

But just like Vicky Pollard wouldn't have been funny if there weren't millions of real-life Vicky Pollards around, there must be a real-life version of The Faroe Islands in Globalization. And yes, they really do think they have a hand in global events. Did you know that Spain beat Italy in yesterday's Euro 2008 quarterfinals with Faroese help?

(Original article)

Book Blog: Purchases

2008-06-15T21:25:00.000+01:00

The most recent purchases:

Christopher Brookmore, Attack of the unsinkable rubber ducks

Steven Pinker, The stuff of thought: language as a window into human nature

John O' Farrell, An utterly impartial history of Britain: or 2000 years of upper-class idiots in charge

Walter Moers, The 13 1/2 lives of Captain Bluebear: a novel

Particularly intrigued by the last one.

Less recent additions:

Paul Torday, The irresistible inheritance of Wilberforce

Alexander McCall Smith, The careful use of compliments

Alexander McCall Smith, Love over Scotland

Herman Pleij, Komt een vrouwtje bij de drukker: over gezichtsveranderingen van de literatuur uit de late Middeleeuwen

And for a re-read:

Jean-Paul Sartre, Les jeux sont faits

The list of books still unread is getting to quite scary levels. I need more sunny Saturday and Sunday afternoons out in the Meadows, probably, or alternatively a lot of travel. Also, I need to actually make a blog post on the rare occasions that I've actually finished a book. (The fact that I've just finished the Wilberforce book and am not planning on writing a post on it just yet doesn't bode well...)

Down South

2008-06-13T21:10:00.000+01:00

Native-speaker intuition from Scots and Scottish English speakers wanted.

What exactly is the meaning of "Down South"?
I have the impression that the general meaning is 'England', but I also have the impression that the picture is a little bit more complex than that.

Is the default meaning 'London and surroundings', if no further information is specified?

Does Northern England qualify as Down South? (Places like Manchester, Liverpool, etc.)

Does the English Far North qualify as Down South? (Places like Newcastle, Berwick, Carlisle, etc.)
- If people say they are going Down South, and it turns out they went to Manchester, Newcastle or Carlisle, would you think they had lied to you?

Is Wales part of Down South?
- If you were going to Wales by land (i.e. through England), are you going Down South?
- If you were going to Wales by air (i.e. not through England), are you going Down South?
- Is a conversation "How was your trip down south?" "I didn't go down south, I went to Wales" grammatical?

Do even the Borders qualify as Down South? (I don't think they do, but if Berwick does, then where does it end?)

Perspective

2008-06-13T19:25:00.000+01:00

Part One
Somewhere in the Haymarket area. This was a while ago already, but it's a bit of a faff getting photos off my phone onto my computer. (SonyEricsson don't like Macs, obviously.) I think this is a very nice example of how the English language doesn't quite make complete sense. If the road is open, it's closed, and if it's closed, it's open. Whichever way you look at it.

Part Two
Inside Appleton Tower, where you can't see Appleton Tower, but where you can see the new Linguistics and English Language computer teaching lab. Unlike the outside, which is falling to bits, or the view out, which is the netting that is supposed to keep the bits falling off the outside from hurting people, the inside is a true feast for the eye:

Apart from the Logitech keyboards and Microsoft mice, of course. Apart from the price, what's wrong with the proper stuff?

But then there was a little bit of cognitive dissonance here:

Oh dear.

Also: want! (But don't bother with the dual boot.)

Interestingly underlined

2008-05-08T15:26:00.001+01:00

At the mosque kitchen:

Do not feed the pigeons as they are a potential health hazard

Scottish-themed comedy

2008-04-19T21:09:00.003+01:00

Yesterday on Dutch tv in De Wereld Draait Door: comedian Marc-Marie Huijbregts shows the new tartan of his native Tilburg, the first city in the Netherlands to get their own tartan. For the occasion, he is wearing a kilt.

Backwards.

Oh well, they can be in their own selection of tv gaffes next Monday.

(Click "Bekijk Uitzending"; Marc-Marie's fashion faux pas starts approx. 4 minutes into the show.)

Weird dreams, and non-inclusive we

2008-04-18T19:17:00.000+01:00

I never remember dreams, but I had a particularly strange one last night that did somehow stick. I was at some conference in a venue I didn't recognize, and there was some talk going on. I'm not entirely sure where I was at that point. After some introductory slides, the speaker handed over to me to discuss the results. Obviously I hadn't prepared anything, so I got two minutes to read through the handout I was then to talk the audience through. Then I started:

So what we did – and with that I mean non-inclusive we – ...

realized something, and interrupted my flow of speech:

That's a strange kind of non-inclusive we, you may want to note that down, Geoff.

'Cause obviously Geoff Pullum was there. He wrote it down.

Then I woke up. I have no idea what the presentation was about, and what the results were. A pity, for I'm sure it was very interesting.

Inclusive and non-inclusive we
Some languages make a difference between two kinds of we. There is the inclusive we: me, possibly some other people, and you. We're going to the cinema, and we're going to have fun. And then there's non-inclusive (or exclusive) we: me, some other people, but not you. We're going to the cinema, and you can't come. Ha-hah.

But the non-inclusive we from my dream presentation is different. This we means some other people, maybe you (I'll get to that), but definitely not me. We analyzed some data, but I have nothing to do with it. Really it conveys a lot of the meaning that normally you would use they for; the only difference I suppose is that this time, the I is taking some of the responsibility, at least at an affectionate level, for what they did.

I suppose it's got to do with the tension between individual identity and group (corporate?) identity: I didn't personally analyze any data, I don't even have any idea what the data is about, but the group that I'm speaking for, did, and does; and I suppose in that case you do want to use a first-person pronoun.

With regard to the inclusion of you in this we, I don't think it's the same thing as nurses' talk (And how are we doing today, Mr Smith? Well, I don't know how you're feeling, but I'm feeling crap.) although there are probably some links between nurses' talk and this corporate we. How about

What we're going to do next is analyze some data.

Here it's quite possible that there's a you and some other people who will analyze some data, but that I am not getting anywhere near GoldVarb.

I wonder whether Geoff Pullum has actually written this down, and if there's anything about this type of we in the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language.

What I did at SS17

2008-04-07T10:59:00.002+01:00

THURSDAY

Plenary: Pieter Muysken (Nijmegen), 'Endangered language documentation and sociolinguistics: the case of Bolivia'

Session 1:
Miriam Meyerhoff (Edinburgh) & James Walker (York, Canada)
'On the social salience of grammatical variation: existentials in Bequia (St Vincent and the Grenadines)'

Session 2:
Paul Kerswill, Arfaan Khan & Eivind Torgersen (Lancaster)
'Multicultural London English and linguistic innovation'

Session 3:
Frans Gregersen (København)
'Bridging the gap: from macro-macro sociolinguistic analyses to variationist analyses and beyond'

Poster session

Nadia Nocchi (Zürich), 'Phonetic variants for social variables: some remarks on labiovelars in Tuscany'

Ariën van Wijngaarden (Amsterdam), 'Ethnic variation: morpho-syntactic aspects of Moroccan Dutch and Turkish Dutch'

Session 4:
David Britain, Jennifer Amos & Juliette Spurling (Essex)
'Yod-dropping on the East Anglian periphery'

Session 5:
Carmen Llamas & Dom Watt (York)
'Rhoticity in four Scottish/English border localities'

Session 6:
Sander van der Harst (Utrecht)
'Regional variation in Standard Dutch vowels'

Session 7:
Isa Buchstaller & Karen Corrigan (Newcastle)
'Towards a syntactic atlas of Northern England: micro and macro aspects of the interplay between grammar, geography and gender'

Session 8:
Heinrich Ramisch (Bamberg)
'The Northern Subject Rule and its 'northernness': a geolinguistic perspective'

Session 9:
Monika Edith Schulz (Freiburg)
'Past possession and past obligation in traditional British English dialects: the case of had got to'

FRIDAY

Plenary:
Charles Goodwin (UCLA)
'The categories Speaker and Hearer as interactive processes'

Session 1:
Stefan Engelberg (Mannheim)
'Language policies and language contact in the German colonies in the South Pacific'

Session 2:
Bettina Beinhoff (Cambridge)
'Accent and identity: are some non-native speaker accents of English 'better' than others?'

Session 3:
Julia Sallabank (SOAS)
'Endangered language maintenance and social networks'

Poster session

Hanna Lappalainen (Helsinki): 'Macro and micro perspectives on explaining variation in the use of personal pronouns'

Session 4:
Katharina Straßl (Bern)
'L1, Standard German and local dialect: language choice of immigrant children in the German-speaking part of Switzerland'

Session 5:
Charlotte Gooskens & Sebastian Kürschner (Groningen)
Swedish-Danish word intelligibility

Session 6:
Leen Impe (Leuven)
'Mutual intelligibility of Dutch language varieties: linguistic and extra-linguistic determinants'

Session 7:
Csilla Bartha (Eötvös Loránd, Budapest)
'Language shift in Romani-speaking communities in Hungary: combining macro and micro interpretations'

Session 8:
Remco Knooihuizen (Edinburgh)
'The interplay of language shift and new-dialect formation: the development of Shetland Scots'

Session 9:
Joseph Gafaranga (Edinburgh)
'Towards an interactional model for language maintenance in immigrant contexts'

Plenary
Jasone Cenoz (Euskal Herriko)
'Multilingual educuation for minorities: research methods and achievements'

SATURDAY

Session 1:
Michael Hornsby (Southampton)
'The thwarting of the linguistic subordination norm: whom does it serve?'

Session 2:
Mathilde Jansen (Meertens Instituut)
'Dialect levelling on the island of Ameland' -- cancelled

Session 3:
Wilbert Heeringa & Frans Hinskens (Groningen)
'Sound change in Dutch dialects: 1874 versus 1996'

Session 4:
Meilute Ramoniene (Vilnius)
'Age and language choice in multilingual settings of Lithuania'

Session 5:
R Vandekerckhove (Antwerpen)
'Intralingual subtitling of Dutch on Flemish television: contradictory evaluations of the linguistic scene in Flanders'

Session 6:
Sabine Jautz (Siegen)
'Relational work and constructing identity: expressions of gratitude in British and New Zealand English radio phone-ins'

Poster session

Golnaz Nanbakhsh (Edinburgh), 'Address terms in Tehran Persian: gender, politeness and language attitudes'

Ifigenia Papageorgiou (Edinburgh), 'Linguistic heterogeneity in the Greek educational system: a sociolinguistic approach to the 'cross cultural' policy'

Elma Nap-Kolhoff & Tamara van Schilt-Mol (Tilburg), 'Short and middle-long-term effects of early childhood education in the Netherlands on children's Dutch language proficiency'

Session 7:
Nanna Haug Hilton (York)
'The variation and social meaning of stress assignment in Hønefoss Norwegian'

Session 8:
Terttu Nevalainen (Helsinki)
'The diffusion of linguistic changes in real time: leaders, laggards and the in-betweens'

Session 9:
Catharina Peersman (Leuven)
'"Litteris vulgariter in lingua romana expositis": the use of Old French in the charters of the abbey of Ninove (1137-1350)'

Plenary:
William Labov (U Penn)
'Cognitive capacities of the sociolinguistic monitor'

SOME TALKS I WOULD HAVE LIKED TO SEE

Kutlay Yagmur & Eveline van Kooi (Tilburg), 'Language maintenance and shift patterns of Dutch immigrants in Turkey'

Robert Lawson (Glasgow), 'A violent vernacular? Unpacking the associations between language and violence in Glasgow'

Rias van den Doel (Utrecht), 'Similarity between L1 regional variation and L2 deviation, and its implications for the language learner'

Mercedes Durham (Glasgow/Aberdeen), '"The dialect doesna seem to be very cool": language attitudes in young Shetland speakers'

Jenny Nilsson & Margareta Svahn (SOFI, Sweden), 'Context influence on intra-individual dialect variation: the case of [r] and [R] in West Swedish teenager conversation'

Susanne Wagner (Freiburg), 'Frequencies, quality and quantity: how best to analyse null subjects in English'

Søren Beck Nielsen, Christina Fogtmann & Torben Juul Jensen (København): 'From community to conversation, and back: generic use of second person pronouns in Danish'

Ulrike Vogl & Matthias Hüning (FU Berlin), 'Why Dutch? how to account for changes in language use over time'

MY PRIZES

Best talk: Nanna Haug Hilton
Best discussion after talk: Heinrich Ramisch
Best plenary: Charles Goodwin
Best poster: Nadia Nocchi

Dinner-time experiment, Dutch-wise

2008-02-25T19:27:00.000Z

Last Wednesday in the Language in Context Research Group, and repeated this Friday in the English Language Research Group, a talk by Claire Cowie and Ross Pirie on ‘topic restrictors’ or ‘viewpoint subjuncts’ in English. The most interesting one, in the discussion afterwards anyway, was -wise – as in ‘Your performance was quite good, choreography-wise–.

German does the same thing, they can use -weise, apparently. Says Erik. But in Dutch, you can't do -wijs or -wijze. Despite some prompting from Claire and Miriam, I couldn't think of the Dutch equivalent off-hand. I have since, I think. It is technisch.

The rest of this blog post is a cop-out: the text of the e-mail I sent Claire. (Claire is from South Africa, which is why there's no translations of the Dutch as I think she'll cope with her L2 Afrikaans. If you don't have an L2 Dutch or Afrikaans, tough.)

On a completely different note... I've been thinking about what Dutch does in the absence of a "-wise" type particle. It took a while, but I think I've found our equivalent: "X-technisch (gesproken/gezien)". I did a little Google search, which came up with the following. (What one doesn't do to avoid marking first-year essays.)

Mostly, the hits are for "technisch gesproken/gezien" by itself, which may or may not have anything to do with technique. Probably quite similar to English "technically (speaking), ..." - from "The XCV-25 is technically a solid machine" to "The Berwick football team plays in the Scottish league, even though Berwick is technically in England."

Some examples from Dutch (10 each for gezien/gesproken, and some without a verb). I've not glossed or translated them as I think you'll cope in most cases (and you may not be interested enough to care anyway)...

(1) ... het behoort, compositorisch-technisch gesproken, tot de periode van Schumann of Brahms, met hoofdvormen en rondo's...
[still retains some of the "technique" meaning; the technique of composing]

(2) Ik vertel elke dag precies wat ik eet-technisch heb uitgevreten.
[a clear example]

(3) Evolutie-technisch gesproken blijkt een erectie tevens een goede methode te zijn om het zaad van de man bij de eicel van de vrouw te krijgen.
[fairly technical again]

(4) Mechanisch-technisch gesproken dan.
[I'm waiting for a 'techniek-technisch gesproken'...]

(5) Het enige voordeel dat promovendi hebben boven hun leeftijdsgenoten in het bedrijfsleven zijn de vrije dagen. Nou ja, CAO-technisch gesproken dan.
[CAO=collective employment contract]

(6) A/D-converters zijn namelijk voor een deel gebaseerd op kansberekening indien het signaal 'ruis' bevat (datacommunicatie-technisch gesproken dan).

(7) ...maar verder gewoon alleen kijken zonder getuigen, eigenwaarde-technisch gesproken.
[this was something about watching porn: only without witnesses, self-respect-wise]

(8) Carrière-technisch gesproken is het opnemen van ouderschapsverlof dan ook de beste manier om je kansen om zeep te helpen.

(9) Sinds de invoering van FUWAVAZ is de hoofdverpleegkundige geen onderdeel meer van het primaire proces. P&O-technisch gesproken dan. Voortaan heet hij of zij "operationeel of tactisch manager".
[P&O=personeel en organisatie (HR)]

(10) Als je een fotograaf bent die puur portretjes maakt, die geen eigen studie heeft, ben je een bijna niet te grijpen persoon, belasting-technisch gesproken.

(in the first 210 of 14,700 Google hits for "*technisch-gesproken")

(11) Juridisch-technisch gezien kan thans bijna alles, maar het gaat erom wat wenselijk is.

(12) Medisch-technisch gezien kunnen we heel veel, maar als we dan thuis komen, moeten we ineens terugvallen op niet-professionele hulp vanwege bezuinigingen.

(13) Medisch-technisch gezien speelt allereerst het probleem van de afstoting.
[these two could actually be proper 'technique' ones: as regards medical technique...]

(14) Belasting-technisch gezien wel ja.

(15) Literair-technisch gezien is hij eerst en vooral een round character i.p.v. het gebruikelijke flat character.
[also techniquey]

(16) Aangezien ik licentie-technisch gezien één jaar recht heb op alle updates die uitkomen, zal ik waarschijnlijk binnen enkele maanden naar versie 7 overgaan.

(17) Een knoeier ben ik schaak-technisch gezien.

(18) Doel hiervan is inzicht te geven in de mate waarin per artikel de kasbudgetten, budgettair-technisch gezien, een andere aanwending zouden kunnen krijgen.
[I would have 'budget-technisch', but maybe for some people there is a constraint that this only attaches to adjectives? Although there are examples with nouns, and even one or two verb roots (2 and possibly 17).]

(19) Juridisch-technisch gezien is ingrijpen in de ziekenfondsverzekering, respectievelijk de WTZ, relatief eenvoudig.

(20) Hij is verzonden, dus morgen of maandag komt hij er al aan. Besteltijd-technisch gezien dus dik in orde.

(in the first 80 of 111,000 Google hits for "*-technisch-gezien")

(21) Nee, dit is arbo-technisch niet toegestaan als er mensen in moeten werken.
[arbo=Health & Safety regulations]

(22) Dit is juridisch-technisch niet correct omdat nog andere vreemdelingen zich soms kunnen beroepen op het statuut van staatloze.

(23) Dit is registratie-technisch niet mogelijk.

(24) Ik ben het wel met je eens, dit is markt-technisch niet slim.

(25) Dit is begrijpelijk, maar proces-technisch niet logisch.

(26) Ruim twee weken in el casa de mi padre e mi madre. (Dit is Spaans-technisch vast niet helemaal goed, maar fijn is het wel.)
[I like this one]

(27) Dit advies is weliswaar juridisch-technisch niet bindend, maar algemeen gaat er een groot gezag uit van hetgeen de Commissie hierin stelt.

(in 95 Google hits for "dit is * technisch niet")

A wide range of sources, from blogs/forums to legal and parliamentary documents. Appears to be reasonably evenly spread over Dutch and Belgian web addresses.

So there.

Lunchtime experiment: the FOOT/STRUT split

2008-02-14T13:53:00.001Z

Someone on Language Log does breakfast experiments, but I did a lunchtime experiment today.

Necessary terminology: This is about vowels in English. People tend to discuss these referring to standard lexical sets, keywords that represent all the words with the same vowel. J.C. Wells is often credited with the introduction of standard lexical sets (in his Accents of English from 1980), but I've read something by J. Catford from 1957 that used the same idea already. I don't know if Catford stole it from someone else. Anyway... The standard lexical sets relevant for today are STRUT, FOOT and GOOSE.

Background for the experiment: Apparently I sound Northern English sometimes. This is because I use the [ʊ] vowel in STRUT words where Southern English, Scots, and Americans use the [ʌ] vowel. Southern English and Americans also use the [ʊ] vowel, but they do that in FOOT words. Northern English also uses [ʊ] in FOOT words, so they lack a distinction that Southern English and Americans do make. (Historically, the North is right, and the others introduced the distinction, which is therefore called a FOOT-STRUT split.)

Scots, as said, use [ʌ] in STRUT words, but they don't use [ʊ] in FOOT words. Instead, they use [ʉ], which is the sound they also use for GOOSE words. (English and Americans use [u]. The Scottish [ʉ] is further front, a mixture between [u] and [i] almost.) I think that historically FOOT and GOOSE were distinct, so that the Scottish system represents a FOOT-GOOSE merger, but I'm not 100% sure on this. I'm sure Wikipedia will know. Look there.

So, in summary: Southern English and American have a three-way distinction STRUT - FOOT - GOOSE. Northern English has a two-way distinction STRUT=FOOT - GOOSE, and Scottish English has a two-way distinction as well, but it goes STRUT - FOOT=GOOSE.

What do I do?

The HTML for that last sentence: What do <I>I</I> do?

The experiment: Simple. Record myself speaking, measure the acoustic properties (first and second formant frequencies) of the vowels with Praat, and plot in a graph to see what they're doing. The words were luck, butt, buck, pun, shut (STRUT), look, book, cook, soot, foot (FOOT, obviously), and Luke, chute, lute, fool, rule (GOOSE).

The result:

In this gorgeous graph (F1 on the inverted Y axis, F2 on the inverted X axis, both in Hz), there's the five STRUT words in green, the FOOT words in blue, and the GOOSE words in pink. I've also added five standard vowels – which I must confess I didn't get the formants for from my own recording, but from Wikipedia. They may not accurately represent where these vowels are in my system, but you get the general idea.

So it's obvious I have a Scottish-type system for these vowels: STRUT - FOOT=GOOSE. The realization for FOOT=GOOSE is also pretty Scots, because it's the [ʉ]. But whether I have the Northern English realization for the STRUT vowel (rather than the Northern English system where STRUT=FOOT) is not as clear. The STRUT vowels are all over the place. There's two that are where [ʊ] should be, more or less: luck and pun. Then there's shut and butt which look like they are [ɵ] (I think this is a very cute vowel) or maybe just boring old [ə]. I have no idea what buck is doing. It looks like it is where [ɛ] should be (or [œ] 'cause it's rounded), but that's way too far front (I probably measured wrong). Somewhere at the same height, but further back (say around 1250 Hz for F2) is [ʌ].

So? Well, yes, no one cares. But it's got numbers and graphs so surely this is evidence that linguistics is actually a science? Surely?

Sounds and images of yore

2008-02-11T22:16:00.000Z

Кубанские казаки
About two years ago during an episode of Zomergasten on Dutch television, they showed a fragment of a Soviet propaganda movie from the late 1940s. It was a very catchy song with people working hard and happily in the fields, harvesting grain to the benefit of the Soviet Union and the international socialist revolution. At random intervals since, I've been trying to get my hands on that fragment, and finally I struck lucky tonight. So from Кубанские казаки (Kubanskije kazaki), the 1949 movie by Иван Пырьев (Ivan Pyrjev), this is the song "Убирай! Загружай!" ("Ubiraj! Zagružaj!"):

Also note the rows and rows of combine harvesters. Later Stalinist propaganda, among other genres, would have them exchanged for all sorts of armoured vehicles.

Pre-SED recordings
James told me about a most interesting endeavour by the Germans during World War I. In their prisoner-of-war camps, they would go and record all sort of cultural events: songs, poetry, word lists... all on early grammophones. The recordings are currently being digitized at the Humboldt University in Berlin and some examples are available on their website. Under Tonbeispiele > Stimmen der Völker you can find songs in French and Malagasy (including a picture of the soldiers, presumably in French service), some Russian balalaika and mouth music, the parable of the Prodigal Son in Estonian, and a word list in Chuvash (a Turkic language spoken in the Ural Mountains).

Not on the Humboldt University website, but from that collection nonetheless, are the recordings of a prisoner of war from Alderley Edge, near Manchester, retelling the parable of the Prodigal Son. (This was possibly a set text for the German philological researchers.) People from the Manchester Museum have retrieved the fragments from Berlin, and they are available here.
The links include a transcription which is alright, even though it misses some of the instances of definite-article reduction, especially after words ending in an alveolar stop.
These recordings are now 90 years old, and a good 35 years older than the data from the Survey of English Dialects on which we base our ideas of traditional English dialects.
Although I suppose the language of the 1950s NORMs was more conservative than that of the 1918 soldier, given the apparent time hypothesis and even taking into account lifespan change. Still, they recordings are really old and very special indeed, so worth a listen.

Moving around

2008-02-10T18:12:00.000Z

I'm being very good and keeping up with my New Year's resolution of being more active.

Dancing
On the dancing front, the past couple of weeks have seen the Annual Dance, at which I danced pretty much everything, and Linda's birthday ceilidh, at which I didn't. Together with Katie we also managed to put together a display dem for Newcastle, with nice music and some interesting dances. Miraculously it seemed to work on the first night of practices, and we almost hit the lines halfway through sixteen bars of poussetting too. This is very encouraging for Newcastle, especially after all the headaches with the SUSCDF dem at the end of last year.

Dancing on Thursdays has been a bit slow on several fronts. The social programmes I write don't tend to work, even though I've made them significantly simpler since the Annual Dance. There seems to be a fair amount of turnover from week to week, so every week there's people who don't actually know what they're doing. The new plan is to write a social programme of four dances with one extra. Maybe that way we can fool the Time Gods into allowing us five dances per evening? Also, my dancing has been very intermittent, usually because of some sort of injury or (like this week) trying not to be ill. This week I had dem class off (no display practice, only technique) so I decided to go to Dunedin instead, where I danced about half because the balls of my feet started hurting. Not good. I have now ordered new dance shoes, including shockproof insoles, from James Senior (because Dancewear doesn't appear to do them), so they should be arriving by the end of the month. I'm hoping they'll hurry up and get them to me by Newcastle – one can always hope.

The Hot Cross Bun
The birthday dance I wrote for Linda, which seemed to go down well both with experienced dancers and with beginnery types. It is an 8x32 Reel, but because of the odd progression (3-1-2) it's not suitable for ‘once and to the bottom’ encores. Then again, it can be done (as we did when we demmed it for Linda) as a 3-by.

1-8. Cross, cast, turn left (4 bars) to face first corners.
9-16. Set to corners and change places right hand. Corners now back-to-back in the middle dance half a reel of four with first couple.
17-24. Corners dance another half reel of four with second corners. This starts with men facing men, ladies facing ladies, and ends with the corners facing first couple again. Set and change places right hand.
25-32. First couple turn left hand (4 bars) to end in 2nd place on the wrong sides. All set and cross.

Athletic endeavours
On the swimming front it's been a solo effort for the past two weeks. Last week that wasn't too surprising seeing as Linda was probably too busy preparing for her party; no idea why no one else was there yesterday. Either way, it meant less faffing around and more swimming lanes. Last week I did 55, and yesterday I did 41 (although it might have been 43, I tend to lose count if I'm not paying too much attention). In both cases, I added another five which I timed, in the never-ending race to qualify for the fast lane. Last week it was 2.45 for five lanes (33 seconds per lane), and yesterday I managed 2.36 (just over 31 seconds per lane). The fast lane is 30 seconds or less per lane. It'll be a while before I can do that without actually racing for it.

It mightn't have been such a good idea to have tried that yesterday, what with me not being very happy with my stomach (or vice versa). So despite the personal best time in the swimming, the rest of the day was not very good and food didn't actually stay in. (You really wanted to know that, didn't you.)

The other athletic endeavours on the frozen version of a pool are going okay as well. Last week Jen and I had a different teacher who tried to teach three levels at the same time, and it went reasonably alright. Today it was just me, but we had our old teacher back, the one who says [arəms] and on the surface doesn't seem to be too convinced we can all do what she wants us to do. She was very good at giving advice this week (maybe she wasn't there last week because she went to that seminar in Sheffield they talked about, and maybe the seminar was about teaching?) and I even got a compliment that my skating was coming along really well. Also, the skate shop was finally open, so I spent more money on footwear.

The disagreement between myself and my stomach had settled by this morning, so that was no longer bugging me. Now just a good night's sleep tonight, and I'll be all set for more activity next week (i.e. the same as last week, plus actually doing some dancing again).

Because blogging is long overdue

2008-02-10T16:15:00.000Z

More entries to follow later today, hopefully, but this linguistic one is inspired by a tv commercial. (And yay for the NOS showing the World Allround Speedskating Championships over the internet, just plugging Nederland 1 through online.)

The commercial is about some sort of toilet cleaner, and the point is that bleach doesn't get rid of limescale ("it just makes it white"), but Product X does.

Met bleek krijg je kalkaanslag niet weg.
/mɛt blek krɛɪx .../

Now apply phonotactic rules: do some voicing assimilation and get rid of geminates.

[mɛtplekrɛɪx ...]

Now parse again.

/mɛt ple krɛɪx .../
"Met plee krijg je kalkaanslag niet weg"

The fact that there is a toilet bowl ("plee") on the screen when they say that sentence doesn't help...

Faroese elections

2008-01-16T14:18:00.000Z

There are Faroese elections on Saturday, and the whole world is anxiously awaiting the results.

Participating parties, in descending order of votes according to the latest poll (January 2008) are...

Tjóðveldi (Republican party, E) - 25.6%

Sambandsflokkurin (Unionist party, B) - 25.3%

Fólkaflokkurin (People's party, A) - 19.3%

Javnaðarflokkurin (Labour party, C) - 16.1%

Miðflokkurin (Centre party, H) - 6.1%

Sjálvstýrisflokkurin (Home Rule party, D) - 6.0%

Miðnámsflokkurin (Students' party, L) - 1.5%

In other words, nothing is going to happen. The unionists and the separationists are equally big, Denmark will continue to pay, and the Faroese will continue to build underwater tunnels and eat dried mutton with whale blubber and potatoes.

One of the main issues appears to be what is known as Grein 266b. This is such a big issue, that the other day, a leaflet was distributed door to door detailing the ‘Christian values’ of all the parties (see here, with the letters in the overview above being the key to the parties on the map). Unsurprisingly, Miðflokkurin is fully supportive of Christian values, while those evil heretics in Tjóðveldi are risking ‘a light and safe future for us all’. (That was the point of the leaflet, see here).

So what is Grein 266b? It is a paragraph in the penal code, and the whole fuss is about a proposed change for the paragraph to read, with addition in bold face,

§ 266 b. Den, der offentligt eller med forsæt til udbredelse i en videre kreds fremsætter udtalelse eller anden meddelelse, ved hvilken en gruppe af personer trues, forhånes eller nedværdiges på grund af sin race, hudfarve, nationale eller etniske oprindelse, tro eller seksuelle orientering, straffes med bøde, hæfte eller fængsel indtil 2 år.

Three things:

I'm assuming they want to change more than just the bit in bold, otherwise the current penal code would be severely ungrammatical;
I had no idea this was legal in the Faroes still;
The code is in Danish.

New Year and its resolutions

2008-01-07T21:03:00.000Z

Be a nicer person
Apparently I am not a very nice person. In a way, this is probably true. I can be quite arrogant, or at least elitist in a wide variety of ways. And I appear to have a reputation for being bitchy. So the idea for 2008 is to be less bitchy in general, and also to be more careful with the contexts in which I am being bitchy.

So far this one seems to be failing. I don't think I am being significantly less bitchy, elitist or arrogant; and the fact that I haven't made any real faux pas is mostly due to the fact that I've not been in any contexts where such behaviour would have been inappropriate.

Also, this isn't my most popular resolution. People have been saying that I would not be the same person if I wasn't so bitchy.

Be healthier
I weigh 77 kg. This is a healthy weight. Still, there are the annoying chubby bits which really piss me off. In short, legs are rock hard, upper body resembles jelly pudding, especially around the waist area. So stuff needs to be done to get rid of that. The proposed methods are regular exercise and decreased intake of crappy food.

This one seems to be going alright. Of course the first week of January has a lot of candy left over from Christmas, and there's always the supply of licorice that my mum gives me when I go back to Edinburgh. But I have been eating healthy dinners, more fruit than I used to (which wasn't difficult), and I have until now avoided buying large supplies of biscuits and chocolate and crisps.

Also exercise-wise all is well. This weekend was swimming on Saturday morning, then ice-skating for Jen's birthday on Saturday afternoon. Then Jen and I decided we wanted to be able to skate better, so we went back on Sunday afternoon to take skating lessons. I think I want to continue those. And then of course there'll be dancing twice a week.

The only problem of course is that dancing and ice-skating only works to make my legs even rock-harder, and it's only the swimming that would potentially work for the upper body. Although the amount of muscle ache in my shoulders and arms has not been such that it looks like it's working. Yet.

Be less uptight and more open etc. (but not tonight)
This is one from before New Year, but it may as well count as a New Year's resolution as well.

I am still too early for everything and get slightly annoyed if other people aren't, so as far as that's concerned, this one isn't looking too bright either. But if it's also about confronting fears, there was a little victory this Sunday when I managed to do cross-over turns on the ice rink (I can't do the silly little going backwards and forwards exercises from the lessons, but I manage the things that Dutch people consider skating, so it's all good I suppose) even though I didn't want to fall and I didn't have Martina to hold my hand like the only other time I managed to do it.

The trick appears to be being quick and sitting low. At least that's what it looked like the little brats were doing and copying it worked.

Be less stressed
Ultimately being less uptight and more healthy is supposed to make me less stressed (and get rid of the bags under my eyes). Another way to that goal is taking a bath, which is what's going to happen now.

Places

2007-12-31T15:18:00.000Z

Nicked from Jen and brought to you by the power of boredom.

List the towns or cities where you spent at least a night away from home during 2007. Mark with a star if you had multiple non-consecutive stays.

In alphabetical order:

Aberdeen, Scotland.

Armbouts-Cappel, dép. Nord, France.

Athens, Greece, at Eleftherios Venizelos Airport.

Bergen, Norway.

Den Haag, Netherlands. *

Kalloni, Lesbos, Greece.

London, England, near Heathrow Airport.

Montréal, Québec, Canada.

Westerbork, Netherlands. *

Next year promises to be less exciting, what with finishing the PhD and only going to a conference in Amsterdam.

Points of view

2007-12-31T14:41:00.000Z

Commas
A while ago I had a discussion with M. about the copy-editing skills of the Scotsman editors. They are quite happy to fiddle with her column, and they appear to have some interesting ideas about where commas go. For example, if M. would write a sentence

1. This is an interesting argument, but the conclusions are mistaken.

this is likely to end up in print as

2. This is an interesting argument but, the conclusions are mistaken.

We both agreed that they did it wrong, but it took a while to agree on why they were wrong and what would be right. Or rather, until we found out that we had the same ideas all along, just different ideas of how to express them.

We agreed that in sentence 1, the comma is before but. In sentence 2, the comma is after but. Unfortunately, we didn't start the discussion with temporal prepositions, but with locative ones – and there we disagreed. I said that in sentence 1, the comma was in front of but, and in sentence 2 it was behind but, but M. thought it was exactly the other way around.

She explained that she sees words as little people that face in the direction you're reading, so their backs are towards what you've already read, and their fronts are towards what you've yet to read. Therefore, in sentence 1, the comma is near what you've already read – behind but. In my point of view (and, to be honest, in the point of view of all others I have discussed this with) the front of the word is the beginning of the word, the first letter of the word, so that comma in sentence 1 is near the front of the word.

Could be an interesting psycholinguistics research topic, especially when comparing this to people who are used to reading right-to-left writing like Arabic or Hebrew. (M. claimed having to learn some Hebrew when she was younger might have changed her perceptions of fronts and backs of words.)

Tellies
Why is it

I am sitting behind my desk (working).
I am sitting behind my computer (typing).
I am sitting behind my piano (playing).
I am standing behind the cooker (cooking).

but

I am sitting in front of t' telly (watching a movie).

Or at least in Dutch – ik zit achter mijn bureau, de computer, de piano; ik sta achter het fornuis, het aanrecht but ik zit voor de televisie.

Could this also have something to do with perspectives? If you imagine an old-fashioned director's office with a big mahogany desk in the middle of the room, the director would sit behind the desk from the point of view of the modest office clerk entering the majestic hall. At least this is what I imagine is what lies behind people standing behind the bar: it's from the perspective of the punters.

Or is it something with activity and passivity? All the ones where you're behind something are active. You're actively working, you're actively typing, playing the piano, preparing food. Except when you're vegging out in front of the television, and that's a rather passive activity. Is it the passivity, or just the analogy with televisions, that makes it possible to say

I am sitting in front of the computer watching a DVD.

Is it possible to say that?

Also, is there a difference between standing in front of the door and standing behind the door? It seems to me that someone who's standing in front of the door has just rung the doorbell and is waiting to be let in (passive), while someone who's behind the door is possibly hiding, waiting to surprise you or whatever, but is capable of coming in of their own accord (active).

And while we're on the subject of front doors... If I'm inside the house, someone who has just rung the doorbell is standing in front of the door while the box of candy for trick-or-treat is standing behind the door. From my perspective, this is wrong. Still, I think it's right.

Why strive?

2007-12-31T13:51:00.000Z

Bas Haring, Voor een echt succesvol leven.

I thought Bas Haring was a philosopher, but it turns out he did Artificial Intelligence, and now he's a professor in Leiden, doing ‘public understanding of science’. I also thought Bas Haring was witty and not necessarily unpleasant to look at, and I'm fortunately still right about that.

This book For real successful living is about our ambitions, why they are what they are (and not something else), and why they are there in the first place. Why do we strive to be the best in something, the biggest, the strongest, the highest, the fastest? Well, if the winner of a race was the person who ran the 10K slowest, everyone would just stand still and there would be no winner. If you would get prestige by building a very small tower next to your house, no one would build a tower at all and everyone would have the same prestige.

Why would you need to compete in the first place, is another question, I suppose. But that's the question of natural selection and Darwinism and suchlike, which is obvious in the book when he talks about crabs and ducks and other animals. For those who subscribe to Intelligent Design, there may be no reason to compete in the first place? So stop annoying the rest of us?

The two main things to learn from this book:

There's no point in saying something is better than something else. You always need to see it's better as what or for whom.

Things that are good for the continuation of the species need not be good for the individual.

That is a crap summary. Just read the book. It's a good book for making you think.

Purchases

2007-12-28T14:27:00.000Z

Music:

Simeon ten Holt, Canto Ostinato;

Edvard Grieg, Peer Gynt Suites 1&2 - Fra Holbergs tid - Sigurd Jorsalfar;

Fixkes, Fixkes.

Books:

Simon Vestdijk, Ierse nachten;

Luc Devoldere et al. (eds)., Overeind in Babel: talen in Europa.

Floris Cohen, De herschepping van de wereld: het onstaan van de moderne natuurwetenschap verklaard.

On the list, but as yet unbought because buying English-language books in the Netherlands is stupid as they are cheaper in Scotland anyway, especially with the pound doing so poorly against the euro currently...

Graham Burnett, Trying Leviathan: the nineteenth-century New York court case that put the whale on trial and challenged the order of nature;

Alexander McCall Smith, The careful use of compliments.

More bookblog impending, by the way, as soon as I finish the book...

A bit of language log

2007-12-28T14:15:00.000Z

I have the annoying tendency to pick up on strange things I say or hear, then make a note on it and try to figure out what's actually going on, or what's actually going wrong. I'm talking constructions here, not necessarily the content of the examples. The examples are taken from actual conversation, which does give a little insight in my life – which after all is what a blog is for...

One
From a discussion with M., when she was talking about the difficulties keeping food warm that she was going to make at a friend's house. I meant A, but I said B.

A. Put them in whatever the woman's name is's bed.
B. Put them in whatever the woman's name's bed is.

I think this is just a production error, caused by a slightly too heavy NP (CP?) whatever the woman's name is. Maybe there is a limit to the size of the NP that can take a possessive 's; this NP was too big and things went wrong.

Two
From radio football commentary.

...maar daarna is NEC beter, gedurfder, meer risico gaan nemend gaan voetballen

Possibly another production error, pre-empting the gaan from the main clause VP.

Three
From a game of Trivial Pursuit.

Q. Wat doet men als men een vallende ster ziet?

A1. Een wens.
A2. Een wens doen.

Possibly a case of do support, but more likely a case of a mix up between lexical doen and dummy verb doen.

Four
From a rant by Hans Lebbis on television yesterday.

Dokter Phil moet dood.

This reminded me of the Scots The dishes need done, but it's not X needs V'ed, but X needs A, meaning X needs ?(to be) made A.

Now just to figure out what's actually going on. But I'm too lazy for that, and have other things to do.

I'm speaking foreign (revisited)*

2007-12-27T19:05:00.000Z

In the cd shop today, upon purchasing (among other things) the cd Canto Ostinato – over an hour of very repetitive contemporary classical music, which is very entrancing – I had the following conversation with the person behind the sales counter:

Him: Ja, die is net onlangs opnieuw uitgebracht.
Me: O, is-tie?

Another one for the collection of English things I say in Dutch.

* The original (draft) title for this post was tag questions, but I'm not sure this qualifies as one.

Nationalities (revisited)

2007-12-18T21:45:00.000Z

After a previous post about fluid notions of nationality in professional cycling, here's another example from (inter)national top sport. The television commentary on Lornah Kiplagat's world championship cross-country running, earlier this year in Mombasa, Kenya:

Kiplagat heeft het waargemaakt in eigen land. Wereldkampioene op de lange cross. Wat een fantastische prestatie van deze Nederlandse.

Kiplagat did not become (Dutch) sportswoman of the year 2007.

Notes of mystery

2007-12-10T11:16:00.000Z

Because I am foreseeing lots of marking this week, I'm not really starting any big projects. This is the perfect time to tidy my desk, put stuff in the appropriate files (or the waste-paper bin) and generally get a bit more organized.

And then I find a piece of paper which I think – from the notes on it – dates from about September 2006. On the note is a mysterious sequence of abbreviations:

BS
IS

CB
DC
DPlay

BH
IH
BC
IC
C.

I have no idea what I meant by this. I'm chucking out the note because it's now useless. If I ever get a brainwave and think, ‘I wrote down ten abbreviations on a piece of paper that had to do with this’, this blog post will have saved them for posterity...

More Computing Services

2007-12-09T22:18:00.001Z

There is more to tell, which I will do over the next week when I do not foresee a whole load of useful work to be done apart from marking EL1 exams, from which I will probably take a couple of breaks which I can then use for blogging. In the mean time, another gem from Computing Services, stressing once again that unavailability of systems is their primary goal:

Problem with access to WebCT - MALTS

We are experiencing problems with users being able to log into WebCT at present. We are investigating and will rectify the problem as soon as possible.

Users being able to log on to WebCT. Well, we can't have that, surely...

Computing Services work ethic

2007-12-06T09:29:00.000Z

This morning I thought I'd check whether any of my first years had posted any panicky questions to the forum on WebCT. Unfortunately, the MyEd portal was down, with some services working, and others (among them WebCT) not. They provided a link to the homepage of the Information Services Applications Division, where I could find more information.

Not really.

But they did have a news article:

Infrastructure unplanned availability remains above 99.5% generally.

All services other than eFinancials (which experienced a weekend outage in October) are showing greater than 99.9% availability so far this year.

Surely what they mean is that unplanned unavailability remains below 0.5% (or rather 0.1%) generally, but got themselves in a bit of a knot when they tried to give a positive twist to the story. Now it seems like the availability of IT services at the university is a complete fluke, and that Computing Services had nothing to do with it. At least they never planned for this to happen. Of course, with the Computing Services' track record, this is entirely possible.

Also, it's a bit fishy and number-juggly to boast about your achievements (or chance's achievements, for that matter) and exclude the things that didn't work. That's like saying (the former) Yugoslavia is a very peaceful area, if you only ignore the gazillion wars they've fought down there.

New money

2007-12-04T16:16:00.000Z

The Bank of Scotland (one of three banks in Scotland that issue paper money) issued a new series of banknotes on 17 September, and it wasn't until last Thursday that I finally managed to get new money out of the cash machine.

I like them.

Most people find them very similar to the euro banknotes. This may well be because the previous series of Bank of Scotland banknotes (as well as the current series of Royal Bank of Scotland notes, Bank of England notes, and in particular Clydesdale Bank notes) looked like it was printed in Poland in 1934, and the design finally looks like it may have been done this century. Apart from British money, the only money people here know are US dollars (which look even shiter), and euros. So I think the main reason why people think the new notes look like euros is that they look modern.

The other euro-like feature is that the design is based on bridges. But whereas euro notes feature imaginary bridges that exist only in the brain of Robert Kalina, the bridges on the new Scottish notes are real. The £10 note I have features Glenfinnan Viaduct. The one major design flaw I could spot was that it does in fact say this, in what I estimate to be a 36-point font, whereas the text Ten Pounds is only in about a 14-point font. (The reverse/front has a picture of Sir Walter Scott. Here they do have Ten Pounds in 36 points, and Sir Walter Scott in approximately 6 points.)

The Glenfinnan Viaduct, by the way, is on the way to Fort William. It apparently appears in three Harry Potter movies, notably The Chamber of Secrets where there is a whole scene of the Hogwarts Express crossing the viaduct.

But comparing the £10 note to other countries' banknotes, I find them quite similar to the 8th series of Swiss banknotes, designed by Jörgen Zintzmeyer. I find these really clever, both because of the upright rather than oblong design, and because all banknotes are equally wide but incrementally taller as the denomination increases. This goes in steps of 11 mm, and exactly the top 11 mm of each banknote includes a specifically coloured bar, the denomination, and the Swiss cross. Genius.

The Swiss are planning on changing their banknotes again, but the current plans are not necessarily an improvement.

Also, with the new Bank of Scotland design, I am now preferring their banknotes over all the others, where I previously liked the Royal Bank designs best. Clydesdale designs still suck, and I can only hope they'll get their act together and introduce something new soon...

SUSCDF 2007

2007-12-03T21:05:00.000Z

This Saturday was SUSCDF, conveniently in Edinburgh. I had been part looking forward to it – as I do to most dances on the university programme, because that means seeing all those nice people that you don't get too see very often – and part dreading it. The dread was because of the dem, which I have previously said shall not be mentioned. Much.

The dem went better than expected, and probably as well as could optimistically be expected given the choreography and the music we were supposed to do it to. Glasgow had a traditional-type dem like we normally do, Celtic did the same Variations on a Theme-type dem that they always do, and Aberdeen have now managed to get seven couples in a Schiehallion reel, with eight planned for SUSCDF 2008.

Dance-wise, I don't think I've done as many dances off a programme as I did this Saturday for a long time. I only missed the two on either side of our dem, and I sat out Purple Heather Jig, as I do not understand, comprehend, grasp nor get any colour of Heather Jig. I think we raised some eyebrows when Johann asked me to waltz with him. Apparently he's wanting to improve his waltzing as a lady. (Scary images of Little Britain happening now.) I also danced with Bobby until he managed to rip a scab off his hand and started bleeding like a pig,* so I replaced him with Andy.** And I danced with Zsofia, Anna, Jen, Heather, Liz, Jenni, Holly, Jessie, Kirsty F.,*** Fran, Kirsty F.,**** Cara, Sarah, Jenni, Erika (those five in Caddam Wood, so they don't really count), Rosie, Kirsty F. again,***** and Emma.

* In Dutch you bleed like an ox, which sounds less pejorative, if only marginally so.
** What are Celtic doing right that we aren't?
*** Originally Edinburgh, now St Andrews.
**** Originally Newcastle, now Aberdeen.
***** As ****.******
****** Not the best system, these asterisks. I may have to look into using superscript, or be all old-fashioned about it. From Robert Bringhurst's Elements of Typographic Style: "For footnotes, symbols can be used if the notes are few. (The traditional order is * † ‡ || ¶. But beyond the asterisk, dagger and double dagger, this order is not familiar to most readers, and never was.) Numbers are more transparent, and their order is much less easy to confuse." Good to know Bringhurst doesn't trust all readers not to confuse the order of numbers...

The after dance party was slightly hard work. As soon as I got there I decided that it had probably been a bad plan to go, but then inertia took over and I didn't leave until quite a while later, and I was home and in bed by 3am.

Dancing

2007-11-30T16:29:00.000Z

The Dunedin night that Jen and I ran together was a big success. The dances were quite manic but most people appeared to cope. Afterwards we got lots of thanks and compliments for a good programme, which was nice. The best was this old frail-looking woman who first asked me where my accent is from, and then said the programme was very nice, and that she'd also said this to 'the Jen girl'.

I don't know where my accent is from. I know where I am from, but my accent is a mutt. I have been playing with the idea of having Warren record me and put my realizations in the NeighborNet programme, to see what I come out closest to, but transcribing 110 words is a lot of work and it's not really benefiting anyone, so thus far I have been reluctant to ask.

I have now also been social convenor for New Scotland for about a month. It's quite good fun to puzzle the programmes together, and to make sure that it's not too repetitive, too difficult or too boring, to make sure that the most important dances from the most important upcoming dance programmes are covered, etc. Finding callers is maybe a bit more of a challenge, but I try to cover a couple of weeks at a time in an e-mail and I also wave the social programme around on Thursday nights and press people into calling.

This Saturday is SUSCDF. It's going to be in Edinburgh, which is conveniently close. I'm sure it's going to be a ball.

There is also a dem. We shall not talk about that. People might not survive.

Sir Bob was wrong

2007-11-30T15:46:00.000Z

The good news is that I don't have to teach discourse analysis and computer-mediated communication for at least another year. And that's assuming I'll still be here next year, and that I'll still be teaching English Language 1. If I'm not, I mightn't have to teach these things for even longer.

However, in general, Fridays are not very good days. They consist of a lot of running around. I'm teaching from 10 to 12, then there's the postgraduate lunch in Teviot (something that over a year into the project still doesn't want to take off, but we keep trying), and then there's usually a research group meeting of some description from 1 to 2. Which means that by the time I come to my office ready to actually do some work, I'm completely drained of energy, and like fuck am I going to start anything new.

Mondays, in comparison, are much better. Freshly re-energized from the weekend, I do not have teaching in the morning, and the fortnightly research group is at the sensible time of 3pm. Once you get back from that, there just is not really any time to start anything new anyway, so it's okay to just sit and answer some e-mails. So I actually quite like Mondays.

Not only Bob Geldof and his Boomtown Rats had the wrong end of the stick with their I don't like Mondays. It also appears that Fridays get a much more positive review in popular culture: I remember Friday on my mind by the Easybeats, and Friday I'm in love by the Cure. Of course this is not likely to be a representative sample of the weekday song population, but as it's a Friday afternoon, I'm really not going to research this in depth.

On average, though, this year's lot appears to be a bit more on the ball than last year's, although they may not necessarily speak a whole lot more. I'm also not sure of their ontheballness comes out of a general interest in the topic – I suspect this to be the case for some of them – or out of an obsession with high marks and wanting to know exactly what to say in an exam and how to say it, rather than wanting to understand what a phoneme actually is or what the point is of conversation analysis – I am quite sure a number of my kiddies fall into this category.

Do I know what the point is of conversation analysis? No. Do I care? Not really.

By this time last year, I had seven of my then first-years having befriended me on Facebook. One group even had a tutorial group reunion (well, the people that they could remember, anyway – and quite frankly, I had forgotten about a fair number of them as well) two weeks ago, for which I was invited as well. I had expected it to be slightly awkward, but it was actually quite good fun. This year, I have more students, but none of them have tried to befriend me on Facebook yet. There was a vague attempt in one group (the Thursday group) to have a tutorial outing, but that never got properly organized. There was mention of the Big Cheese though, so I'm not exactly sorry it came to nothing...

I'm looking forward to teaching starting again in the first week of next semester, with some interesting topics: social and geographical variation in English, and history of English. The days will be getting longer by then, so Fridays may no longer be as depressing.

Dunedin Dancers

2007-11-28T18:23:00.000Z

Courtesy of Jen and myself tonight:

1. Minard Castle (R 8x40)
2. Campbeltown Loch (J 4x48)
3. Schiehallion (S 64 + R 64)
4. Gothenburg's Welcome (J 8x32)
5. Neidpath Castle (S 3x32)
6. Rest and Be Thankful (R 8x32)
7. The Bees of Maggieknockater (J 4x32)
8. Caddam Wood (R 5x32)
9. Bonnie Lass of Bon Accord (S 64)
10. Glens of Angus (R 4x32)
11. The Duke and Duchess of Edinburgh (R 8x40)

Nationalities

2007-11-22T11:27:00.001Z

This bit from the Sportgeschiedenis Weblog made me smile:

In 1997 klopte de Oekraïner Andrej Tsjmil (de Moldavische Belg had op dat moment de Oekraïense nationaliteit) de Italiaanse Engelsman Maximillian Sciandri in Parijs - Tours in een sprint met twee. De Australische Nederlander Henk Vogels werd trouwens knap derde. De gemiddelde snelheid werd vastgesteld op 48,929 (!) km/u.

A Ukrainian who is actually a Moldavian Belgian, an Italian Englishman and an Australian Dutchman (who at other points in his career was a Dutch Australian, to make things even more transparent). Fluent identities, or something.

Important issues

2007-11-18T16:27:00.000Z

Why, pray tell, did the International Olympic Committee decide to change their country code for Romania from ROM to ROU in January 2007? It doesn't make sense. The country is called România in its own language, and Romania in English, both of which would give ROM. Only French (Roumanie) would give ROU. So why change a code that makes perfect sense into something that makes less sense?

It looks ugly too.

Mess

2007-11-15T18:59:00.001Z

The package of stir fry vegetables wasn't supposed to fall over and knock over the pot of yoghurt that then rolled off the worktop and made a big "thud", splashing yoghurt all over the kitchen floor and lower regions of the kitchen cupboard.

However, I don't think it was aware of that.

Myshele said it wasn't very cooperative yoghurt. This is true. It was Tesco's.

A bit of Language Log

2007-11-14T22:35:00.000Z

This is probably evidence of me being such a geek that I can't even help doing linguistics in my spare time. But oh well, here goes.

The ferry from Norway to the Faroes got into a spell of bad weather over the weekend. One of the propellor engines ended up above water, turned itself off in an emergency procedure, another engine gave up because it couldn't deal with the extra demand, the whole ship turned at a right angle to the direction of the waves and started tilting back and forth, oscillating between 45 degrees either side. Not nice, and I don't think I'll take a ferry across the North Atlantic any time soon.

Today, Faroese news carries a story about two Danish for whom this was their first ferry experience, and who thought the whole ordeal was unpleasant, but apparently a necessary part of the trip. (Subtext: silly Danes who've never been on a boat before!)

Tvey av ferðafólkunum við Norrönu hendan nú famøsa túrin vóru ikki serliga bangin. Tað var nevniliga fyrstu ferð tey sigldu, og tí vistu tey ikki, at tey upplivdu nakað út yvir tað vanliga.

The bit in red took a while to parse. I wanted it to read "on Norröna's now famous trip", but couldn't figure out the possessive construction. Whether you use a defunct genitive or a way cooler accusative possessive construction, the possessor would typically follow the possessed NP, and that NP would not be definite (as the possessive construction itself makes it definite). The accusative one also doesn't work because it's restricted to familial relations – although it would be cool to see it spread to other relations as well...

After a while I realized, slightly disappointed, that we have two separate adjuncts, a PP við Norrönu and a temporal accusative NP hendan nú famøsa túrin. Maybe it's still cool that they're using a noun with very little temporal semantic content in that way? (Trying desperately to salvage the situation.)

Also,

Donsku hjúnini ætla sær at sigla niður aftur til Danmarkar.

"Down to Denmark" – now would that be because it's further South, or because Denmark (highest point 120 metres or so) is actually a lot lower than the Faroes (880 m)? Or actually, seeing as they still do directions with Norway as a point of reference (útnyrðingur 'north-west', landsynningur 'south-east'), might it have to do with Norway being even higher (2400 m, I think it was)?

And,

Tey eru annars komin heim at vitja vinfólk í Føroyum.

Interesting use of the word heim there. Obviously, the Faroes are not "home" to our friends, because if it were, they would most certainly have been on a boat before. They did not come home to visit friends in the Faroes, but they left home to do so. But apparently, the Faroes are "home" whichever way you look at it.

* Finally, samstundis sum dótturin spýið maga og merg úr sær which is a cool expression: to spit stomach and marrow out of yourself. I was wondering why there was a past participle spýið, because surely this was not a counterfactual and the little girl actually sicked all over the North Atlantic, but it's a typo for spýði, which is a boring past tense. (The infinitive is spýggja, which in turn is cool because of the skerping.)
** Bedtime now.

Urban exploring

2007-11-05T21:40:00.000Z

I went for a walk along the Water of Leith with Christina yesterday.

On the way to the point where we met (which was an hour's walk, and I later found out Christina had thought I would probably take a bus) I finally took a picture of the road sign that had grabbed my attention a couple of times before. I was never a real fan of rap music, but somehow this grafitti conveys a nice nostalgic feeling...

Slateford isn't the most inspiring area of Edinburgh, and it got worse the further south I walked, but sometimes there were nice views to be had. Somehow I like this railway going toward the Pentlands.

Nice autumnal colours.

Some local fauna in the Water of Leith. Spotting the heron would be a lot easier if I had had a proper camera on me, but as I only remembered that I should have taken it when I was already more than ten minutes from home, I decided the camera on my phone would do.

Really, there was nowhere else to go.

Or was there? We just soldiered on anyway.

The Edinburgh Street Naming Committee does not discriminate.

Some more local fauna.

After that it was Apfelstrudel and vanilla ice cream at Christina's flat, and there was much tiredness.

I'm speaking foreign

2007-11-04T12:37:00.000Z

A silly advertising website by Philips for their new range of electric razors. It's filled with non-sequiturs, or perhaps I'm just too thick to understand what's going on. On their main website you have to choose your country and language to proceed. The option for the Netherlands was ‘Netherlands: English’. What the fuck?

So I chose ‘Belgium: Nederlands’. I'm not sure if that was wise.

I've heard people saying that Dutch is turning into English, what with us having our own Great Vowel Shift and all, but this takes the cake.

Not very amused.

The desert is a sea of sand

2007-11-03T18:01:00.000Z

In between marking first-year assignments on phonology and morphology (some people need to be very afraid), I managed to finish another book that I bought in my September shopping spree. Paul Torday's Salmon fishing in the Yemen took three baths and an hour on the futon to finish.

The book isn't written in a normal narrative style. I seem to have a sixth sense for picking up books that are slightly odd like that. This one is a collection of diary entries, e-mails, letters, interviews, interrogations and extracts from an unpublished autobiography. It makes for a very dynamic read, which is probably why it didn't take that long to read (although I do take very long baths and slightly lose track of time).

Main character in the book is Dr Alfred Jones of the National Centre for Fisheries Excellence. He lives for his work, has no social life to speak of apart from a loveless marriage of convenience, and is slightly detached from reality. Sounds familiar. He is approached by a Yemeni sheikh who is interested in introducing salmon into a wadi in (the)* Yemen. This is of course a ridiculous project but after the British government gets involved Jones is put under sufficient pressure that he does some feasibility studies. He gets more and more convinced that it can be done, and while the government – influenced by the sketchy communications officer at No 10 who sees electoral opportunities everywhere, a very dislikeable chap – get(s)** uninvolved and involved again, salmon is being introduced into the desert. It doesn't all go exactly according to plan, but oh well, and it supposedly shows that the sheikh was right that everything can be done if you believe in it enough.

I'm not sure that that is the lesson I'm supposed to learn from this. I guess it's one, the other one being that political spin doctors are evil – but we knew that already. Still, I'm kind of sad that I finished the book already, and I would have liked to see what would have happened to the salmon. (They got netted and eaten, but what would have happened to them if they had been allowed to do their business? Would they colonize the Indian Ocean and diverge into a separate subspecies? I am way too Dr Jonesy for my own good.)

* No article for me here.
** If this was a formal piece of writing, the s would be dropped.
Footnoting your own blog posts for linguistic variation is a bit sad.

Purposeful phrasing

2007-11-01T11:55:00.001Z

Much back-blogging needed. Meanwhile...

Yvette Lont, councillor in Amsterdam-Zuidoost for the Christian Union, is putting in a motion for a change in the bye-laws of her party, to the effect that openly gay members of the party should no longer be allowed to represent the party in official positions. Now she's been sued by a VVD (liberal) councillor for inciting hatred and discrimination. Eddy Meyer's phrasing cannot be incidental:

Met deze actie werpt zij haar schaapskleren af en komt zij uit de kast met haar ultraorthodoxe karakter.

Source

English clock

2007-10-25T19:21:00.000+01:00

I saw a cool clock on the gadget reviews part of a Dutch news website (here). It tells you the time not in numbers, but in words, so it has a part that has numbers one, two, three, four, ..., ten, eleven, twelve and a part that has phrases five past, ten past, quarter past, ..., ten to, five to. The website shows a nice picture of this clock.

There is also a link to Amazon, where you can buy it. Amazon has a picture as well, with two clocks. One as described above, the other one saying één, twee, drie, vier, ..., tien, elf, twaalf and vijf over, tien over, kwart over, ..., tien voor, vijf voor. In Dutch.

This gadget website usually works in a very non-journalistic way: copy, paste, don't read closely and get things wrong, and steal pictures from your source website. But I wonder why they cropped the Amazon image to show the English clock rather than the Dutch one.

I suppose it's cool or something.

Style don't

2007-10-24T14:22:00.000+01:00

Surely it is wrong for boys to wear Ugg boots?

Faroese musings

2007-10-24T09:09:00.000+01:00

Edd (ð)
Ð is a strange letter in Faroese. It is only there because Icelandic has it, but it is never pronounced. That is, sometimes it indicates a weird type of linking sound, and there are allomorphic alternations with d (as in deyður 'dead' - deydlingur 'dead body'), but in general it's just there for its prettiness value. This results in Faroese people having no idea where to spell it and where not to:

In the centre of Tórshavn, there's a big rectangle painted on a wall where kids play football. In the rectangle it says MÁLÐ (correct: mál 'goal'). Someone has scribbled a question mark there, with an arrow to the Ð, but it's been there for ages, and it's sort of become an iconic symbol of either silly Faroese spelling rules or of Faroese schoolkids not mastering those rules.

When we were having lunch in one of Tórshavn's fine establishments at Ólavsøka 2004, the menu read MATSKRÁÐ. Again, the correct form is without a ð, matskrá 'menu' (literally 'food list'). We (and with 'we' I mean 'I') scribbled out the Ð but I doubt it had any effect.

The writing on the van that belongs to the Faroese natural history museum reads Náttúragripasavni. This should have a ð on the end.

Right, so much for the introduction. Misplaced ðs sometimes lead to some confusion or amusement, this much is clear. But the example I spotted this morning takes the cake. In an article on the main (free) Faroese news website about the musical influences for some 80s Faroese rock band that are making a comeback (heaven help us), it said one of them was Uriað Heap. Right.

Syntactic change
Less interesting maybe is an example of syntactic change in progress. I like Faroese because the verb to like doesn't take a subject, it only takes an experiencer and a patient object. (To love on the other hand takes an agent subject and a patient object. Spot the semantic difference.) So usually you would get:

Mær dámar tónleikin
me.dat like.3sg music-acc.def
'I like the music'

But on the same page as the Uriað Heap thing, in the list of current chat topics:

Hví dáma fólk betur pen enn ljót menniskjur?
why like.pl people.ntr.nom.pl better pretty.ntr.acc.pl than ugly.ntr.acc.pl person.ntr.acc.pl?
'Why do people like pretty people better than ugly people?'

Assigning case to these is a bit dodgy, as Faroese has nominative-accusative syncretism in neuter (as, in fact, all Indo-European). But fólk is definitely not the dative it should be (fólkum), and moreover, the verb agrees with a plural subject likely to be fólk rather than being impersonal and in the 3rd person singular.

Hví dámar fólkum betur pen enn ljót menniskjur?

This is not spectacular or anything. It's been going on for a while, and the same thing happened to impersonal verbs in mainland Scandinavian, Dutch and English (me thinks, for example), but it's still cool to see some syntactic change in action.

So, Dumbledore eh?

2007-10-20T19:56:00.000+01:00

According to the Beeb and J. K. Rowling, Albus Dumbledore, the late headmaster of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, was gay. Although this isn't made explicit in the book, this was Rowling's image of the man, and she even made sure that a reference in the sixth Harry Potter movie script to a childhood girlfriend of Dumbledore's, which isn't in the book either, was removed. Rowling is well aware that this gives our evangelical friends one more reason to hate the books, but who cares.

As per the BBC,

... a spokesman for gay rights group Stonewall added: "It's great that JK has said this. It shows that there's no limit to what gay and lesbian people can do, even being a wizard headmaster."

Well, yes, apart from the fact that it's actualy impossible for anyone, gay or straight, to become a wizard headmaster, as such beasts are things of fiction and do not really exist in real life.

This, by the way, has been the most read and most e-mailed news story on the BBC website all day. So it's apparently very important.

There's a time and place for everything

2007-10-16T19:24:00.000+01:00

Dinner time conversation was about silly names I got from the Dunkirk marriage registers. Lupus who turned out to be Wolfgang, a Swiss mercenary. Or Iler, in Latin Hilarius, which was Hillary. And there were a couple of Ægidiuses, which prompted some Middle Dutch poetry recital:

Egidius, waer bestu bleven?
Mi lanct na di, gheselle myn

This in turn prompted a modern Dutch parody:

Egidius, waer bestu bleven?
Het is al twintig over zeven

Then Myshele asked for the time and it was, in fact, 19:20.

Buses

2007-10-14T09:47:00.000+01:00

As is commonly known, driving on the wrong left side of the road is one of many things people in England Britain do wrong differently. What I've only just realized, is that English British Scottish buses tend to have the order of the information on them wrong mixed up inverted. So instead of, for example,

22 Emmen

which was the bus I took to high school, they say,

Penicuik 37

which will bring you to IKEA.

It all makes perfect sense if you insist on driving on the wrong left side of the road, of course, seeing as in both cases it's easier to see the bus numbers in a big long line of buses if you're standing on the pavement. But that doesn't make it right.

Diagnosis murder

2007-10-08T22:08:00.000+01:00

From the Beeb:

Symptoms develop after three to 10 days, and include flu-like illness, inflammation of the brain, coma and death.

Hmm... if death is a symptom of the disease, then you're pretty much fucked from the start. Quite scary stuff, this.

I was going to comment on the world being a healthier place before mass long-distance travel, when all we had was the occasional outbreak of ergot giving entire villages a nice trippy experience. But even then there was the plague being spread by rats travelling on ships to Norway (Det kom eit skip til Bjørgvin and all that), and I don't suppose the mass long-distance travel that were the crusades were the healthiest pastimes around. And then of course there is the case of mass long-distance travel being caused (well, facilitated, more like) by an unhealthy situation (*).

(*) Exodus 7-12, mainly.(**)
(**) Airport gates, and exits more generally, are called έξοδος in Greek. I wonder whether flights to Tel Aviv depart from Gate 12...

In the past week I have...

2007-10-08T21:32:00.000+01:00

been to Ikea and bought a Billy and a Benno, among other things;

finished The English by Jeremy Paxman (see below);

had the Evil Article finally accepted in Transactions of the Philological Society;

been sore-footed, for which I blame KH's idea that we should set with a 150 degree turnout;

failed to get internet banking, probably because they only have my mobile and I gave them the landline and so there are ‘discrepancies’ between different sets of information;

decided to do some NeighborNet stuff for my PhD, as well as do some geostatistics;

contacted the necessary people to actually do NeighbourNet stuff and geostatistics;

learned about Romance plurals;

purchased two Faroese CDs through iTunes – Fram á hermótið by Páll Finnur Páll (*) and Hugafar á ferð by Høgni Reistrup;

done some other things not worth mentioning.

Book review:

Paxman sets out on a mission to explain why the English are so damn, well, English. This mainly involves an explanation of how the English are so English, of what Englishness actually is. Another recurring argument in the book is that the English actually aren't very English at all; this is reserved for a tiny proportion of the English that Paxman calls ‘the Breed’. The Breed are the ones that live in the countryside, that are all about honour, dignity, patriotism and Etonian nepotism, that think "what-ho" and "jolly" are actual words, that excel at hunting and sports, that would gladly sacrifice a limb if it meant a Frog or a Kraut would lose two – all these quintessentially English things. The rest of them are really poor buggers who don't even have an identity. The Scots, Welsh and Irish are better off than the plebs of England; they may have been kicked off their land and replaced by sheep, or sent to work in the mines, but at least they have an identity.

But although Paxman's book is a very enjoyable read, and quite instructive about the essence of Englishness and its diachronic continuity within the Breed, I haven't been able to figure out the real crux: why are the English, if only a select few of them, so English? Or more importantly, why are most of them not?

(*) In Faroese this gets a dative: við Pálli Finni Pálli. Joyful geekery.

Beastly food

2007-10-02T17:42:00.000+01:00

Welcome to Tesco's.

stir fry veggies 1.29
pâté 0.58
butter 1.12
yoghurt 0.58
milk 1.34
bread 0.68
chocolate cookies 1.07
total 6.66

And six points on my clubcard, too.

Birds and stones

2007-09-29T12:21:00.000+01:00

Today we got rid of:

six litres of out-of-date Irn Bru;

three litres of out-of-date lemonade;

four litres of out-of-date Coca-Cola (all from Freshers' Weekend 2006);

the clog in the bathroom sink.

Accomplishment.

Why I missed my tutorial

2007-09-28T09:10:00.001+01:00

Paraphrasing:

Sorry, but I had to do a week's military service in South Korea.

The disturbing thing is that it's true.

More bookblog

2007-09-28T09:08:00.000+01:00

This one I forgot last time, mainly because I'd lend it to JF, so it wasn't on my bookshelf to remind me of its brilliant randomness:

The Book of Dave by Will Self. I really only knew Self from his appearances on Shooting Stars (uvavu, uranu, ulrikakakakakakakaka!). His persona there was someone utterly devoid of human emotion, with a heavily sarcastic view of the world and an ego that would fill several continents. I think I was right; or at least, this book shows that Will Self is positively certifiable. The plot: London taxi driver Dave is going through a bit of a rough patch. His loveless marriage broken up, he doesn't get to see his son, and everyone seems to want something from him. Dave then goes completely insane and writes a massive misogynistic rant addressed to his son. This involves a complete separation of the sexes after puberty. Also, his arrogance as keeper of The Knowledge (e.g., where Woodburn Place is) shines through as well. In a fit of rage he buries the book, printed on metal for some odd reason, in his ex-wife's backyard. Centuries later, people find it and base a new religion on it. Suppressive new world order, that sort of thing. At times the book is a bit difficult to plough through, but it is a very challenging and mind-engaging read. (I still think Will Self should be locked up, for his own safety if not for ours. He can still appear on t'telly though.)

Then two of the recently-bought ones:

Adrian Mole and the weapons of mass destruction by Sue Townsend. This reads as a diary, a year in the life of Adrian Mole. It is not a very interesting life as such, but it's woven together by a whole string of randomness. An insane relationship that is doomed to fail, a lifestyle that he can't afford, and his struggle to get a refund for a £57 deposit for a holiday in Cyprus (which he cancelled because Tony Blair had said that Iraq could develop weapons of mass destructions that could easily reach Cyprus in 45 minutes, which obviously makes it a Dangerous Place to Be).

A spot of bother by Mark Haddon. Wow. Nothing at all like The curious incident with the dog in the night time, but possibly even better. For one, it's not written from the perspective of an autistic kid, so it's slightly easier to relate to. There are 144 chapters, divided between four perspectives. Plot summary from the back of the book (paraphrased as I've lent the book to EM now): daughter Katie is marrying Ray, whom the family don't like. Son Jamie is not willing to bring his boyfriend to the wedding, afraid that his parents will make a scene about it. Mother Jean is cheating on her husband with one of his former work colleagues. And father George gets squished in the middle of all this, while he also finds a rather bothersome spot on his skin and decides he has skin cancer. This is only the beginning, watch it evolve. Because the 144 chapters are so short, it's very easy to think, ‘oh, just one more chapter’, so it didn't take too long to finish.

The irony

2007-09-17T18:12:00.000+01:00

A small avalanche-slash-episode of falling rocks in Tórshavn today, at undir Bryggjubakka in the harbour. A rather unfortunate event, especially for the two cars that got slightly damaged.

Photo credit: Jens Kr. Vang, www.portal.fo

Note the green sign in the background: this is supposed to be the safe point in case of an emergency.

Oops

2007-09-15T14:38:00.000+01:00

I went to Cameron Toll. W H Smith's has 3 for 2 on everything (yes, everything!), and Waterstone's has 3 for 2 on selected items. Today's purchases are...

A spot of bother by Mark Haddon;

Love over Scotland by Alexander McCall Smith;

Salmon fishing in the Yemen by Paul Torday;

The English by Jeremy Paxman;

Empire by Niall Ferguson; and

Adrian Mole and the weapons of mass destruction by Sue Townsend.

Reviews in due course.

I also bought a DVD: Delicatessen, which is a French movie about a butcher in France just after the war, who is keeping up with demand by killing people. Could be interesting...

Meanwhile, I finished another book – Ik mis alleen de Hema by Manon Sikkel and Marion Witter. Stories about people who emigrated from the Netherlands. Some stayed abroad, some returned. For some of them it was exactly like they expected, other people's lives took a very unexpected turn. All in all rather quite enjoyable reading, but nothing world-shocking. Also, only two of the people actually said they missed the Hema. I don't, because we've got good shops here too and I was never addicted to Hema-rookworsten anyway.

New favourite word

2007-09-11T18:03:00.000+01:00

From yesterday's Sosialurin...

Avdottin fólk og rúsdrekkakoyring

Hóast vikuskiftið hevur verið friðaligt, hava fleiri fólk verið og sovið rúsin av sær. Eisini eru 4 fólk tikin fyri rúsdrekkakoyring.

Bæði fríggja- og leygarkvøldið var mestsum fult á støðini í Jónas Broncksgøtu. Vakthavandi greiðir frá, at tey fáa nógvar áheitanir frá fólki, sum tíðliga um morgunin finna avdottin fólk í garðinum ella í túninum hjá sær. Eisini fólk, sum eru á veg heim úr býnum og síggja fólk liggja avdottin, ringja til løgregluna at boða frá.
Umframt avdottin fólk, vóru eisini fýra dømi um rúsdrekkakoyring um vikuskiftið. Tveir førarar vórðu tiknir í Suðuroynni, ein varð tikin í miðstaðarøkinum og ein varð tikin í Eysturoynni.
Vakthavandi sigur, at allir førarar høvdu eina promillu, ið var yvir tað loyvda, og onkur kann vænta at missa koyrikortið. Blóðroyndir vórðu tiknar, og einki er tó vist fyrr enn blóðroyndirnar eru afturkomnar.

It literally means ‘fallen off’, but it is used for people who are so drunk they just fall asleep. In this case, in other people's gardens – and not just the one person either. These Scandinavians and their alcohol...

Incidentally, the police station is in Jónas Bronck Street. According to the Faroese, Bronck was a famous Faroese sailor that the Bronx in New York City is named after. This is almost certainly untrue; a Swedish sailor of the same name is more likely to have given his name to the area. But hey, if you can't have an area of New York, I suppose a street in downtown Tórshavn is a decent alternative...

Culture

2007-09-11T14:36:00.000+01:00

It's been a while since I updated with a list of books recently read. In no particular order...

Harry Potter and the deathly hallows (J K Rowling) – There's no need to say very much about this. The end was a bit anti-climactic and dragged on for a bit longer than it really should. Things were repeated again and again, which was a little bit annoying. Yes I know this by now, you've only explained it three times before! Then again, as I was later reminded of, it is a children's book.

De brug (Geert Mak) – This was this year's free book gift in the Dutch book promotion week. Mak takes us to İstanbul, to the bridge that links the European and the Asian bits of the city. The story is about the people living and working on the bridge: coffee sellers, shoeshiners, people that sell random bits of junk, and people that steal it away from you just as quickly. People that have come from the countryside to get a better life in the city, and failed. But really it's the story of the bridge itself, of İstanbul, and of Turkey.

De magie van de eilanden (Ben Hoekendijk) – A non-live travel journal of a man doing a solo crossing of the North Sea, from the Netherlands to Fair Isle, Shetland, the Faroes, Orkney, the Farne Islands, and back. Nice because I recognize a fair bit from my own travels to Shetland and the Faroes, but at times rather annoying for technical speak (slightly too detailed on how an automatic steering installation works) or his emphasis on 'spiritual' (read: quite seriously Christian) things.

Zoektocht in Katoren (Jan Terlouw) – The sequel to that great classic, Koning van Katoren. Again we see a cumbersome adventure through the country, visiting all sorts of cities, each with their own problem which is an exaggerated version of something from Real Society (people suing each other over nothing, Health and Safety rules gone berserk, animal rights in the meat industry, etc.). I always found Koning van Katoren really clever, but the issues in this book were so obvious! Or would it have been the fact that I've grown older since reading Koning van Katoren (about 20 years, in fact), and that great classic, too, is in fact political commentary very thinly disguised?

Rottumerplaat (Jan Wolkers) – The €1 edition (heavily cut) of the 1971 diary of Jan Wolkers' stay on this uninhabited island. Wolkers is basically a bit of dirty old man but at the same time very loving to animals. Oddness. But perfect for a short train ride. Also from the €1 promotional series, Heblust by Ronald Giphart. Which therefore is completely about sex, so slightly ambivalent feelings toward that one.

Think that's probably it for now.

Cleaning Services

2007-09-06T12:57:00.000+01:00

At Support Services we are always trying to improve the service we provide to you. To improve communication and make it easier to contact the staff when you have a problem or need assistance we have now trained all our cleaning supervisors on Outlook. If you have any issues that you wish resolved regarding cleaning or suggestings for improvement then please feel free to contact the relevant supervisor.

Trained on Outlook. Suggestions for improvement? Ehm...

I hope you find the above useful.

Yes. My life is complete now. I can e-mail the cleaning guy.

This was distributed to all the desks in all the rooms. What a waste of paper. Of course, we will now all chuck these sheets and then have to deal with angry cleaners who get hernias because the waste paper bags are so heavy.

Discourse analysis

2007-09-01T20:23:00.000+01:00

Your discourse analysis homework du jour:

Nous informons notre aimable clientèle que tout linge emporté lui sera facturé.

Nous vous remercions de votre compréhension.

La direction

What is strange about this? And what does it mean?

Marriage

2007-09-01T10:23:00.000+01:00

Or, why I was in Duinkerken:

The joy of ancient marriage registers. I am very indebted to Johannes van de Cnocke for at least having a legible handwriting (see above). Most of the other ministers are a lot more difficult to read.

So, when I get back to Edinburgh, I can look forward to browsing through 800+ photographs of microfilm images of the marriage registers of Duinkerken, four to six photographs per spread, of the years ending in 7 between 1647 and 1697. Supposedly, and hopefully, this will give me the same kind of information* as I got from the Shetland marriage registers, and another decent chunk of PhD dissertation. From a very superficial browsing of the data, as I was taking pictures of it, it seems like there are some interesting things going on. Yay, another couple of days well spent.

* Possibly better, as for 1647 and 1657 they also list where the people were born, which gives an excellent picture of spatial mobility and social networks at the time. Unfortunately after the French came to power in 1662, this information was no longer recorded, or alternatively, everyone was just born in Duinkerken...

** iPhoto doesn't have an invert colours option, and Adobe Illustrator doesn't save as .JPG. Does anyone know of any decent picture editing software for the Mac?

Back

2007-08-31T19:12:00.000+01:00

We left Armbouts-Kappele this morning at 9, had a short visit to Fort Mardijk (one of the most depressing places I have ever used linguistic data from), and left Duinkerken around 9.30, to arrive in The Hague about 12.45. We then had lunch, left The Hague at 14.45 to arrive at my parents' at 19.00. That last bit usually takes two and a half hours, but it was rather busy on the roads.

Now my back hurts. Stupid uncomfortable drivers' seat...

France

2007-08-29T20:18:00.000+01:00

I am in France. This is evident from the font on the roadsigns rather than their content. Otherwise, it could just as well have been Belgium: Zuydcoote, Ghyvelde, Spycker, Armbouts-Cappel, Hondschoote, Pitgam, Teteghem, ...

Of course, it's only historical accident that this is in fact France, and not Belgium. (And another historical accident, quite related to the previous one, that it's not the Netherlands.) And that's why I'm here. Looking at population registers in the municipal archives of Duinkerken.* The marriage registers are quite interesting, and show some nice links to Flanders, at least before 1662 when Duinkerken became French. Afterwards, not very many Flemish origins are mentioned. If this means that there weren't any, that would be very interesting...

Very bored writing everything down by hand. It takes ages, because the documents (on microfilm) are handwritten in some 17th-century secretary hand. Time to bring in the camera, whoosh through decades of marriage registers and do the painstakingly boring work once I get back to Edinburgh.**

* The French sillily write Dunkerque on the road signs.
** They also insist that this should be Édimbourg.

Signage

2007-08-26T19:03:00.000+01:00

Possibly the most opaque Canadian traffic sign. Not entirely sure what is not allowed here. No castagnettes? (We shuddered to think of the other very obvious option and possible ways to enforce it.)

Also in Montréal. Just so you know you really have to stop.

In Athens Airport. I'm always mildly amused when I drive to a place I've never been before, and they have signs up warning me that the traffic situation has changed. So what? But this is rather quite useless too: everything's the same! Honest!

Somewhere in Mitilini. Twenty years ago, this would have landed Greece on the Axis of Evil. Now it's just quaint. Bless 'em.

In the Olympic Airways plane with the deceptive registration SX-BIG. Note that this sign was stuck on the inside of the luggage bin, and that it therefore could only be read if the information it conveyed was false.

At Heathrow. "Data or files may be lost" is not something you want to hear when you're waiting for your luggage...

Some photos from Montréal and Μιτιλήνη

2007-08-26T18:42:00.000+01:00

The flags

The flags in Montréal tended to come in fours, with the Québec flag flanked by those of Montréal, Canada, and the United States. Why the United States? I have no idea. Greece has a lot fewer flags than Canada, in my experience at least.

The skylines

Okay, so Mitilini doesn't really have a sky-line. But I didn't have a photo of the Montréal waterfront.

The local heroes

Bonus points for those who know why these people are famous. The one on the left is one Jean Drapeau, the one on the right is Vladimir Iljitsj Lenin Ελευθέριος Βενιζέλος (Elefthérios Venizélos), whom the airport in Athens is named after. (And whose statue looks in nothing like the guy on the photo on the information board next to it.)

It's all Greek to them

2007-08-25T18:25:00.000+01:00

As everyone knows, Greek is written with the Greek alphabet. For the historical linguist geeks among you, since the time of Ancient Greek, the voiced stops β [b], γ [g] and δ [d] have become fricatives (so [v], [γ] and [ð] respectively). But sometimes they need to write the sounds [b], [d] and [g] still. Fortunately [p], [t] and [k] have voiced allophones in certain positions, so they just pretend that these phonological contexts are there in spelling.

My first encounter with this insane system was at 4am in a bookshop at Athens Airport, where we saw a book by one Γκρέγκορι Ντέιβιντ Ρόμπερτς (Gregory David Roberts). But you get used to it, and after a while it gets less of a challenge, but still quite good fun, to decipher what the bar price lists mean by Ρεντ Μπουλ, Γλενφίντιχ or Τζόνι Γουόκερ (interestingly, with l-vocalization, but incorrectly with [ʍ]).

Ils sont fous, ces Grecs.

Lesbos (Μιτιληνη)

2007-08-25T07:32:00.000+01:00

Melt. Sigh.

Yet the semantics of that phrase are completely different to the description of Montréal.

More later.

Montréal

2007-08-10T16:18:00.000+01:00

Melt.
Sigh.

At the zoo

2007-07-17T20:13:00.000+01:00

Someone told me it's all happening at the zoo. I do believe it, I do believe it's true...

I joined the small expotition to Edinburgh Zoo last Sunday. We had LG, JW, JW's sister whose name I do not know, and their friend Gordon who also goes by Percy. As one does. JW is an important person who is in possession of The Membership, which gave me an additional discount on top of the student discount. I could theoretically have saved another 50p on the entrance fee by opting out of the voluntary donation that they don't really tell you is voluntary. But I was feeling charitable. Chimpanzees need a place to live as well.

There were many animals at the zoo, although there were at least equally many that should have been there according to the signs, but empirical evidence of their existence is lacking and the only possible scientific conclusions are that they are either imaginary or abducted by aliens and sold into slavery in the Andromeda nebula. (Poor sod who bought the sloth.)

The penguins went for a walk, but they did not do tap-dance nor did they burst out into polytonic renditions of classic Motown hits. Very disappointing. They must have been the wrong species.

The Avian antics were nice but also very scary. I wouldn't want to run into a turkey vulture in a dark alley on a cold November evening. (Or anywhere/anytime else.) We saw an otter having caught a little white mouse try to eat it but when he dove under for a second an evil seagull stole it. And the second one as well. I think some form of seagull deterrent near the otter enclosure is in order. Personally I was thinking about laser-guided nuclear missiles, but LG thought that was a bit harsh.

It was nice and sunny and I had a nice time and a hotdog (although not 'the greatest hotdog in the world' as they advertised on the carton).

Homer and the hippies

2007-07-17T09:15:00.000+01:00

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/dorset/6901543.stm

The Simpsons movie comes out next month, and to get some extra publicity, a giant outline of Homer Simpson holding a doughnut has been painted next to the Cerne Abbas giant, an age-old chalk carving of a guy with certain attributes that make it quite clear why people nowadays think it was a fertility symbol.

(image stolen from the BBC website)

But the Wessex district manager of The Pagan Federation (there is such a person) isn't at all happy with this.

"I'm amazed they got permission to do something so ridiculous. It's an area of scientific interest."

Which is why Homer was painted in the field next to the giant. No longer an area of scientific interest.

"We were hoping for some dry weather but I think I have changed my mind. We'll be doing some rain magic to bring the rain and wash it away."

As we all know, the weather is made possible in cooperation with differences in athmospheric pressure, among other things. I doubt rain magic comes into the picture. I can see how a massive Homer could be offensive to people who regard the Cerne Abbas giant as a holy site, but threatening with rain magic just draws it right back into the realm of the ridiculous. Another point not scored by the neo-pagans.

Which doesn't mean I think it's an excellent idea to paint Homer on a hill, but that's beside the point.

Gezellig naar de Krim

2007-07-09T21:25:00.000+01:00

I just saw the most horrendous television programme ever. Take a dozen couples of old age pensioners with caravans going on a mass holiday in the Crimea, and broadcast their adventures on national television. Why, pray tell, would this ever be a good idea? I only saw about ten minutes of the programme, but they were ten minutes of constant cringing.

At the fact they bought and pre-cooked-and-then-froze all their food in the Netherlands, so that they won't have to eat any of the Ukranian food. At the fact that they complain they can't get recent Dutch newspapers in the middle of nowhere in the Ukraine. At the fact they ridicule Ukranians for not speaking English. At the sorry state of their own English which makes me want to jump off the top floor of David Hume Tower in replacive shame. At the way they made custard by shaking the ingredients in a thermos - "because we don't have a mixer" - which of course wasn't closed properly so that the Ukranian campsite was covered in yellow mush.

At the fact that these are horrible examples of proletarians who should just have taken their sorry old excuses for a caravan to the fokking Veluwe - or the Sauerland or the Belgian Ardennes, if they were feeling adventurous. But most of all at the fact that all of this is on television and there are people who actually like to watch this.

Meanwhile... we had a couple of days of good weather. I did some cycling; I'm terribly out of shape (not as bad as some of the roads though) and now have severely sunburnt legs despite the suncream. I also bought two new CDs (Crowded House and Tori Amos) and two new DVDs (Flushed away and Wallace and Gromit and the Curse of the Wererabbit), some new clothes and a new book.

Bigotry

2007-07-03T18:04:00.000+01:00

Danny Kennedy, deputy leader of the Ulster Unionist Party on the news that the British National Party may be recruiting in Northern Ireland:

"This isn't the kind of imported hate-mongering that we want or need in Northern Ireland."
(BBC News website, 3 July 2004)

Interpretation 1: We are perfectly capable of doing our own hate-mongering, and we have enough of it already, that we don't need extra hate-mongering brought in from England. (That last bit is a bit odd for the UUP, maybe?)

Interpretation 2: They're even bigoted when it comes to the origins of their bigotry.

Backblog (2): Norway

2007-06-19T17:44:00.000+01:00

Skipping over a boring half-week with work and unsuccessfully trying to reschedule the generic Language in Context slot to Mondays, or Tuesdays, or anything but Wednesday afternoon... and we arrive at the 2nd PhD Conference in Linguistics and Philology, which was held in Bergen (Norway -- hence the post title) on June 4-6.

Flying out on the Sunday morning, a direct Widerøe flight from Edinburgh to Bergen in a relatively small propellor plane, although it was probably slightly bigger than the one I went to Shetland on last year. I had some difficulties tuning in to the flight attendant's strong Bergen accent, especially with the noise of the motors, but after five years of not actually speaking Norwegian I turned out to still be able to do so anyway. In Bergen I managed to get Norwegian money and find the airport bus to the center of town, and then quickly the hotel.

Hotel. This may be a bit of an overstatement. For £35 a night you would expect more than just a bed and a sink that doesn't actually drain, even in Norway. The light wasn't brilliant either (definitely not more than 30 W) but as it was summer and far North that didn't really matter as it didn't really get dark anyway. I quickly redefined 'hotel' as 'place to kip and nothing else' and stuck to it.

Went out wandering for the rest of the afternoon and evening, mostly oscillating between Bergenhus fort, the park at Lille Lungegårdsvann and Vågen/Bryggen. Found out where I could buy food (the Narvesen kiosk near Galleriet, or the one at Bryggen, or the Baker Brun at Zakariasbryggen) and did so. Danishes, which they call wienerbrød, are great. We have the skillingbolle, which is the local specialty: a cinnamonny Danish with a spiral of white icing. The prinsessebolle, which I can't really remember what it was but I think it's a skillingbolle without the icing. And the skolebolle, which is the skillingbolle with a big blob of set custard in the middle. Behold my breakfast for the next three days. I also need to mention the Imsdal bottled water with lime and fiber taste. Fiber, yes. Oddness.

It was fantastic weather both at Bergenhus fort...

... and at Lille Lungegårdsvann. (And also at Bryggen but I don't want to overdo it on the photo front.)

Then on Monday started the conference, which was the 'real' (right...) reason for going to Bergen. My talk was the first one up after the plenary, and it went alright. This meant that I had the rest of the conference to relax. As usual, you meet people on the first day of the conference that you hang out with for the rest of it. These were JT, a Serbian girl who grew up in Britain and is doing her PhD in Brighton on the syntax/semantics of modals; MF, a Spanish woman who is working on translation in Swansea and speaks with a Welsh lilt; and BUJ, who is from Hedmark but spent five years in Glasgow and sounds like it!

Best talk at the conference was probably the Polish girl who was talking about weak and strong adjective declensions in Old English. Interesting topic, well-presented and a convincing case. The worst talk... well, in reality this was probably the guy from Israel who rush-read through his paper with many an example in Hebrew and didn't quite succeed in telling us what he was actually talking about. But the cash prize goes to... RM from Zaporižža National University in the Ukraine. "Linguophilosophic parameters of English innovations in the sphere of new technologies." God knows what that was about; or probably he doesn't because it was completely incomprehensible and drowned in sixteen-line sentences with five-syllable words. It wouldn't have been so bad if she didn't always ask smart-arsy questions at all (!) the talks.

Also met the Icelandic incarnation of Miss Piggy. JB was chief organizer of the conference, and appears to suffer from a complexity of complexes. She really, really likes herself, is very proud of her achievements, and blames not getting all sorts of important jobs on old boys' networks. We call this a 'victim complex'. Of course these people, even though they haven't published as much as you, may well be as qualified, and just by 'being a single mother and working like a slave for eighteen hours a day' you don't always get what you want. Tough. She did get massive funding (£1m) for a project on case in Indo-European. Which, according to JB, shows that if you think big enough, it's possible to get funding, even for a woman, and even in the humanities. Think big enough. Would that be the reason for grabbing a bowl of peanuts ten minutes after the conference dinner while exclaiming, 'Gee, I'm hungry again already!'...

The flights back were okay. The plane from Bergen to Copenhagen was slightly delayed, which meant that I had to spend an extra half hour in an airport without decent shopping facilities whatsoever (yes, fags and booze, but who cares about that). The plane was a gigantic jumbo and I was sat right at the back next to a woman from Turku who had to run in Copenhagen to get her connecting flight to Stockholm. (Zigzagging your way through Scandinavia, nice...) Then had to spend some time in Copenhagen Airport until the flight to Edinburgh. Had a look at the gate where the Atlantic Airways plane to the Faroes was parked, but didn't recognize anyone. (Hey, I would easily recognize 45 Faroese people, which is 1/1000 of their population. This is a much larger proportion than what I know of the Dutch or Scottish population, and the chances of Faroese people flying to the Faroes from Denmark are also quite substantial, so it was worth a try, especially when bored.)

Danes have a strange music taste, as a quick browse through the music store showed. The new Runrig album was at number 7 in their charts. Now I like Runrig, but even in Scotland it doesn't get to that high a chart position. The Danes also like Michael Learns to Rock, which I thought stopped making music aeons ago. Apparently not.

Oh well, I bought Danish water (Egekilde) and Swedish chocolate, and then a typically Danish hotdog which was very mustardy and little meaty. (Good thing I had the Danish water...) The girl who sold me the hotdog was obviously Danish but when I asked for a hotdog in Norwegian she answered in Swedish. I would probably have understood the Danish, at least I managed to understand the Danish the rest of the airport people spoke. (Mainly the three people I had to ask for directions to the nearest cash machine which was in a very odd location.)

The plane to Edinburgh was way too small for its own good. It was a jet plane, but it was the size of the thing I went to Shetland on. That didn't really add up, and I wasn't really happy during take off, which otherwise was very pretty as you could see the bridge over the Øresund, which starts right next to the airport. (Well I think it comes out of a tunnel underneath the airport there.) Must say I didn't really like the weather report for Edinburgh: overcast and 12 degrees, after having had bright sunshine and 25 degrees in Norway (!). But I survived, and the whole experience was a Good Thing.

Now it's time to go to a dinner party at EM's.

Backblog

2007-06-19T17:21:00.000+01:00

And then suddenly three months went by without any updates. Oops. Which means that I now have an enormous backlog of adventures to relate. I don't think I'm going to manage to remember all the way back to March, but the recent past should be alright. So here we go, going in approximate reverse chronological disorder...

Last Saturday, JH and I went to see AF's choir in concert. It was nicely done, although we both had our thoughts about the singing skills of the girl with ringlets. AF also introduced us to his new boy. I say introduced; really AF just vaguely waved in the general direction and we had to wait until the boy introduced himself. He seems nice enough, but because the choir insisted on going to some odd pub miles away, we ended the night with a cup of tea at home and didn't get to meet him properly. As an aside, I was mildly annoyed by the gay militantism in the choir. Is there really a need to re-write all the lyrics? Especially those of negro spirituals from the abolition struggle? Oh, and claiming HIV as a gay disease, I thought the whole idea was to try to convince Bush that it isn't?

Moving on... On Friday I was extremely unmotivated, so I ended up going into town. I didn't buy any clothes because H&M decided not to have a sale on, but I did buy a 10-DVD set of Tintin cartoons for £20. Childhood memories. Although of course in my childhood Tintin didn't speak with an American accent. Still, have been enjoying some of the movies (there's 21 in all) already, but am trying not to watch too many of them too soon.

Friday's non-motivationality was directly related to Thursday, when I decided to try to work on the Evil Reviewer's comments on my taboo-language article. I need to relate it more to recent literature on language death. Great. I did a nice search, found nothing in the past ten years on language death apart from some monographs along the lines of 'Look at all the different ways language behaves. If we let languages die, we'll lose all of it which will greatly hamper the study of linguistics'. Agreed and all, but incredibly irrelevant to my article. As a result, within ten minutes of starting the editing I had crumpled up the piece of paper and physically chucked it against the wall, and sent AM an e-mail saying I was thinking of telling the editor to sod off with his effing journal. Still waiting for the masterplan to bypass the Evil Reviewer and get my article published...

All of last week was celebration week, really. On Monday, CH passed her viva and we had drinks in the Pear Tree. On Wednesday, RRV passed her viva, which was celebrated in style on Thursday with a mini-banquet and a concert by RRV's trio -- two flutes and piano, well impressed as well by TK's piano skills! -- in St Cecilia's Hall. And on Friday we celebrated AR's distinction in her MSc by drinks in the Pear Tree followed by Chinese buffet at Waverley.

The Saturday before that AF asked whether I wanted to go to Treefest with him. We ran into TB at the bus stop, and later also found some Shambles walking about. And later WB said he was coming too, so it was a big group. Treefest is a nice idea: see what things you can do with wood (especially the handicraftsmen were nice, although whether making wooden cubes from a tree with a chainsaw is a craft is another question) and make sure we treat our forests and our environment nicely. Too bad it was infested with tree-hugging hippies. Yuck! I wash my hands off them!

Walked home with WB and decided to try out the wooden spatula he bought at Treefest (for £3, but then again, it did come with the guarantee that this was the most fantastic spatula ever, and once you use it, you will never use another spatula again). So we had a stirfry, the spatula worked okay, and spent the rest of the evening pottering about in WB's room which turns out to double as a music studio. Some nepotist promotion: see some of the tracks at www.barras.ws (esp. 'Jane' and the Buddy Holly cover are nice), which incidentally weren't recorded in his room but in our office!

Devolution

2007-03-14T20:47:00.000Z

Yay, mail! From some bloke in Cheshire who's trying to sell New Scotland the books of dances that he wrote. Will pass on to new committee. Then my eye caught the envelope:

EDINBURGH EH_ ___
Scotland

Has devolution reached the Royal Mail?

Traffic

2007-03-14T20:42:00.000Z

This morning when I put the kettle on, I saw a car drive off from our little square, with what looked like a mother bringing her daughter to school. By the time I was pouring the milk into the tea, the car had returned, with mother but without daughter. Surely if you can drive to school and back in the time it takes for a kettle to boil, you may as well walk!

Discussion skills

2007-03-12T20:08:00.000Z

Why we like e-mail lists:

> Do you see this, or not?

Hmmm... No, not really. Perhaps if you try
capitalised letters or a bigger font, when
you repeat your arguments?

The author of that comment is actually a distinguished professor of mathematics at a Northern European university. Academics can have a sense of humour...

They don't actually listen, do they?

2007-03-02T07:59:00.000Z

— So do you get paid to mark our essays?
— Yes, I get paid for 15 hours of marking.
— £15 per essay? That's way better than Scotmid!

Lecturers

2007-02-20T17:25:00.000Z

xx mm

Surely it's not appropriate for a lecturer to end an e-mail with that?!

Philological Society

2007-02-19T19:22:00.000Z

I regret to inform you that your submission has not won the Prize on this occasion, but the reviewer(s) have recommended publication in Transactions of the Philological Society, but also suggest some revisions to your manuscript. Therefore, I invite you to respond to the reviewer(s)' comments and revise your manuscript.

Some of the reviewers' comments were actually quite reasonable, even. So I'm going to have to revise the taboo language paper, as well as transform the Shetland marriages paper into the style of the journal Local Population Studies (endnotes! grr!) within a reasonable amount of time. I think they mean two to three weeks. In addition, I will shortly receive 25 first-year essays about social and geographic variation in English, ready to mark.

Philosophical musing

2007-02-17T09:48:00.000Z

Is it possible to think you’re a hypochondriac without being one?

University e-mail

2007-02-13T16:57:00.000Z

In recent days the performance problems described below (please read that too), have got worse and this sometimes results in login failures and people being logged off. We know this is happening but we are not able to do much about it. The problem relates to the sheer number of students trying to access mail during busy periods and it is overloading the server infrastructure. The only way to solve this will be to upgrade the server and that is already planned but unlikely to take place before the end of the semester (the details are outlined below in the linked document).
The performance problems really only affect the system between 11am and 6pm on weekdays. At other times the server doesn't suffer from load issues. If you can avoid these peak times then you will get better access. You may also get better response by using a different method of accessing your mail e.g. using Thunderbird or pine rather than webmail.

Read this again.

Please do work at this university. We realise you need to use e-mail to actually do some of this work, but please do not check your e-mail during working hours.

Why don't they just fix the system?

Küpsise- ja ploomitükkidega piimašokolaad

2007-01-13T20:35:00.000Z

Koostis: suhkur, täispiimapulber, kakaovõi, kakaomass, küpsisetükid 10% (nisujahu, suhkur, margariin (taimne rasv, taimne õli, emulgaator E471, happesuse regulaator (sidrunhape), lõhna- ja maitseaine, toiduvärv E160a), invertsiirup, koorevõi, kanamunad, kondenspiim, sool, lõhna- ja maitseaine, kergitusaine (E500, E503), ploomitükid 8% (ploomimahl, ploom, õun, õunapüree, sahharoos, fruktoosisiirup, laktoos, taimne rasv, happesuse regulaator (E330, E331), želeeriv aine (E401, E440), lõhna- ja maitseaine), emulgaator (sojaletsitiin), lõhna- ja maitseaine, sool. Kakaokuivainet min 27%. Piimakuivainet min 21%. Säilitusaineteta. Hoida kuivas ja jahedas (18±3°C). Võib sisaldada vähesal määral pähkliosakesi.

That’s a lot of lõhna- ja maitseaine in the chocolate New Scotland got given last Thursday. From all the other languages on the wrapper it appears to be aroma, but in Estonian it must be two different things.

More points

2006-12-07T16:39:00.000Z

4. One of my tutees was (supposedly) ill for two tutorials in November. All the more surprising when I picked up the waste of paper that is Student Newspaper, that he should have written two concert reviews. The concerts were both in Glasgow on the Tuesday nights before the Thursday he was supposed to be at the tutorial. He said he does take the tutorials serious... but maybe the illness was partly self-inflicted? (In other words, you are so busted!)

5. My computers need to behave. My desktop needs to stop stopping. It sometimes randomly gives a black screen, sometimes also stopping the music, but sometimes continuing the music. It's very strange and annoying. The only way to get out of it, is by pushing the power button and restarting. It doesn't complain when you do that, but it might go black soon afterwards anyway.

My laptop is also annoying. I've stopped listening to music on it now, as it continues to stutter. I also sometimes get Blue Screens of Death. Error number 77, apparently that has to do with RAM. But when you do disk checks and memory checks and stuff, it says it's all okay. So not only does it refuse service, it's also a pathological liar. It just needs to behave. Please?

Some points

2006-12-06T21:49:00.000Z

1. Linguistics and English Language need to teach the same subject in the same way. Although it is very amusing, there is no reason why second-years have to learn for their syntax exam that “subjects do not move until Friday”.

2. Work is interesting. Lots of different things going on at the same time, and I enjoy most of them.

3. Just for reference: life happens in the real world, not on the web. Some people need to get a life.

Amusement

2006-11-22T07:55:00.000Z

I am mildly amused by the music for the SUSCDF dem.

Also a bit amused by the fact I managed to get three links into that sentence.

stir fry veggies	1.29
pâté	0.58
butter	1.12
yoghurt	0.58
milk	1.34
bread	0.68
chocolate cookies	1.07
total	6.66