Scottish-themed comedy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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:

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

New Year and its resolutions

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

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

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?

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

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

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)*

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)

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

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

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

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.