Teaching Phonetics

(screen grab from U. Iowa)

A collaboration of several departments at The University of Iowa (but not the Linguistics department, wtf!) has put up a really nice interactive/animated tool for demonstrating the articulatory anatomy of speech sounds in English, German and Spanish.

(HT srabivens on Twitter via #linguistics)

Doh! Nut Metaphors

Neal Whitman deconstructs the recent doughnut hole metaphor buzzing around the health car reform debate.  Money quote:

... reading about the doughnut hole in the newspaper or hearing about it on the radio, I kept having a feeling I wasn't understanding something. It was when I called upon my real-world knowledge of doughnut structure that I finally realized it wasn't the issue itself that was troubling me, but the choice of metaphor. Figure 2 shows a typical donut. We can observe that it is a glazed, cake doughnut, without sprinkles. We can also see that the gap in coverage from Figure 1 corresponds not to the doughnut hole, but to the sweet, cakey goodness of the doughnut itself.

He suggest a castle moat as an alternative metaphor. And yes, he really does use two different spellings: doughnut and donut. This may reflect an underlying ambivalent on his part, but I suspect it's just a good case of legitimate spelling change that hasn't fixed upon a final form. I suspect we'll all use donut soon enough.

Still No 'moist'

A Twitter challenge to list "the ugliest words in the English language" at #uglish. I vote for uglish.

Is There A Disfluency Gap?

Watching the health care debate on C-SPAN I find Nancy Pelosi's speaking style to be jarringly disfluent, at least as much so as George W. Bush's ever was (or Sarah Palin for that matter) yet I don't recall Pelosi being as criticized as they were. My hotel internet connection is not fast enough for me to YouTube around for examples of Pelosi speaking extemporaneously, but I suspect you can find these examples easily and I suspect you'll see what I mean.

Is this a partisan issue? Are Republicans more likely to be criticized for speech errors than Democrats?

The folks at Language Log have discussed the politics of speech errors many times (see THIS post which includes links to many others) and it's worth quoting Liberman: "Everyone commits speech errors...and anyone who makes a big deal about particular examples is either a fool or a hypocrite."

My gut reaction is that there are many fools and hypocrites reporting on our politicians ... surely I am the first to uncover this rare gem of insight.

NOTE: I make no political point by bringing this up other than to ask if there is a statistical difference between the likelihood that a Republican figure will be criticized for speech errors and the likelihood that a Democrat will be criticized for speech errors. My intuition is that there is a difference, and that difference leans towards Republicans being more likely to be criticized. I caution the reader against trying to infer my own political beliefs from this post.

A software blogger takes on the heady task of defining categories. It's not clear to me if this is prescriptivist poppycock, naive descriptive lexicography, or wishful thinking: The Difference Between A Developer, A Programmer And A Computer Scientist. I made my own foray into this world here: Computational Linguistics vs. NLP.

HT zelandiya (via #linguistics)

Auto-detecting Language

Why doesn't Google's translation tool automatically detect the language I paste in? This is not a terribly difficult problem to solve computationally. I suspect that if they took a bag o' trigrams (of characters, that is) and compared to a corpus using some kind of simple tf–idf weight, they'd get a pretty high degree of accuracy. Here are some distinctive trigrams from a page on Omniglot. Wanna guess the language based solely on these? I doubt it will be difficult. And I suspect that just one or two of these trigrams is distinctive enough to make an accurate guess.

1. änn
2. isk
3. a_m
4. är_
5. föd
6. och
7. vär

UPDATE: thanks to the cemmentators for schooling me on this. In fact, Google DOES have a detect language function. I've been trying to find documentation on their methods but haven't had much luck. I did find this discussion of a different language detector that works rather differently than I proposed. Rather than compare trigrams of letters to language models, it looks up whole words in dictionaries. While I admit to the greater simplicity of this method, I think my idea is more betterer 'cause it's more linguisticy.

Notes on  my searching:

1. Lots of programming language detecting tools.
2. Several human language detecting tools, but few discussed methodology

Some advice from Mankiw about prospective grad students choosing where to go. #8 struck me as critical for any and all students:

Don't be distressed if you did not get into your top choice.  What you do in graduate school (or college) is far more important than where you go.  Your personal drive matters more than ranking of the school you attend.