Chinese Without Tone?

("please, wait a moment", image from braille.ch)

Vivian Aldridge has a nice website devoted to explaining braille systems for different languages (HT Boing Boing). If I understand correctly, tone is rarely represented for Chinese braille (let's forgive for the moment that "Chinese" is the name of a language family, not a particular language):

In the few examples of Chinese braille that I have come across, the signs for the tones were not used except in the following cases:

• with the syllable yi, for which a good Chinese-German dictionary lists almost 50 different inkprint characters. In this case the indication of the tone helps to limit the number of possible meanings. 

• in words where a syllable with a suppressed vowel comes before syllable without a consonant, for example the word sh'yong (try out, test) in which the braille sign for the fourth tone is used instead of the apostrope. In this case the tone sign seems to be used to separate the two syllables.

Tone is a non-trivial feature of Chinese languages. Omniglot has a nice page with the system displayed (fyi, it cites braille.ch as one of its sources). The interesting point is that tone has the ability to be represented, but according to Vivian, it normally is not (however, she notes that she has only seen a few examples). I spent two years in college struggling in Mandarin courses. I would have liked to have dispensed with tone.

yo xochitl

I'm a sucker for installation art projects. Even though most of them suck, I'm an optimist and I find the genre interesting and compelling so I keep waiting until I find one that doesn't suck. You can find me sitting in the little white rooms in the basement of the Hirshhorn on many Saturday mornings ... waiting. So I was happy to stumble upon (though, not via StumbleUpon) the video above called "Barrio Linguistics: An experimental study of the linguistic landscape of Spanish Harlem, New York" (HT Mahalo).

While it is neither experimental nor a study in the academic sense, I found it enjoyable as linguistics related art. FYI, I'm not sure how to translate the phrase from the video "yo xochitle" (apparently, xochitle is Nahuatle for 'flower' ... I flower???).

From the video's YouTube page:

Barrio Linguistics is an exploration of nomadic Spanish found in the linguistic landscape of Spanish Harlem, New York City through interactive video installation. Makes use of photography, animation, poetry, video projection and electroacoutic audio to incite dialog about the role of language and advertising in contemporary society. The piece is an experimental documentary of the linguistics of south-north migration and the changing face of urban semiotics.  The piece was created by sampling all publicly viewable Spanish language text within a five block radius in Spanish Harlem. Later, a poem was written using exclusively this vocabulary.   In the installation, the order of the videopoem is dictated by the user. 

Bad Linguistics ... sigh

(cropped image from Huffington Post)

It has long been a grand temptation to use simple word frequency* counts to judge a person's mental state. Like Freudian Slips, there is an assumption that this will give us a glimpse into what a person "really" believes and feels, deep inside. This trend came and went within linguistics when digital corpora were first being compiled and analyzed several decades ago. Linguists quickly realized that this was, in fact, a bogus methodology when they discovered that many (most) claims or hypotheses based solely on a person's simple word frequency data were easily refuted upon deeper inspection. Nonetheless, the message of the weakness of this technique never quite reached the outside world and word counts continue to be cited, even by reputable people, as a window into the mind of an individual. Geoff Nunberg recently railed against the practice here: The I's Dont Have It.

The latest victim of this scam is one of the blogging world's most respected statisticians, Nate Silver who performed a word frequency experiment on a variety of U.S. presidential State Of The Union speeches going back to 1962 HERE. I have a lot of respect for Silver, but I believe he's off the mark on this one. Silver leads into his analysis talking about his own pleasant surprise at the fact that the speech demonstrated "an awareness of the difficult situation in which the President now finds himself." Then, he justifies his linguistic analysis by stating that "subjective evaluations of Presidential speeches are notoriously useless. So let's instead attempt something a bit more rigorous, which is a word frequency analysis..." He explains his methodology this way:

To investigate, we'll compare the President's speech to the State of the Union addresses delivered by each president since John F. Kennedy in 1962 in advance of their respective midterm elections. We'll also look at the address that Obama delivered -- not technically a State of the Union -- to the Congress in February, 2009. I've highlighted a total of about 70 buzzwords from these speeches, which are broken down into six categories. The numbers you see below reflect the number of times that each President used term in his State of the Union address.

The comparisons and analysis he reports are bogus and at least as "subjective" as his original intuition. Here's why:

All Of Them

A Most Excellent Blog

The excellent blog Cognitive Daily is calling it quits. This is one of the blogs that has most inspired me and helped me understand just how good academic blogs can be in reviewing and critiquing academic research. They leave a legacy not only of their excellent posts, but also the founding of the exceptional aggregator Research Blogging which continues to be a constant source of intriguing and thought-provoking reviews of the most current academic research (it happily dominates my feed).

One of the prime architects, Dave Munger, promises a "Mystery Project to be named later" (soon?) and I'm holding my breath (so hurry up Dave!).

Blob Wars

(images from Neuroskeptic)

Neuroskeptic reports on some disturbing news that the results of fMRI studies can be seriously impacted by the software package used to analyze the results. There are several packages available and while most do much the same thing, at least one uses a unique statistical approach which produces different results. Not "better" or "worse" mind you, just different. The image above contrasts results using the same data but different analysis software. Money quote:

Analysis using both programs revealed that during the processing of emotional faces, as compared to the baseline stimulus, there was an increased activation in the visual areas (occipital, fusiform and lingual gyri), in the cerebellum, in the parietal cortex [etc] ... Conversely, the temporal regions, insula and putamen were found to be activated using the XBAM analysis software only (emphasis added).

The comments on Neuroskeptic's post are detailed and instructive.

The Linguistics of Food

At Gambler's House, blogger teofilo provides a very nice walk through of a couple of studies that use linguistics to study the spread of agriculture into the Southwest Unites States from Mexico. The methodology hinges on 1) tracking loanwords and 2) the assumption that Proto-Northern-Uto-Aztecan (PNUA) is a valid genetic unit. I'm not qualified to comment, but I felt the post was thorough and raised some fair objections as well as noting strengths.  Money quote:

"...the fact that the loans seem to have gone both ways shows that whatever contact took place involved both groups continuing to exist as social entities of some sort.  This is not evidence for assimilation, in other words, but for peaceful contact between agricultural and hunter-gatherer groups involving the exchange of information that enhanced the subsistence options of both parties."