lɪŋˈgwɪstɪks

Mechanical snail

00:13

@DavidWallace I don't. can is [kʰn̩] ~ [kʰɜ̃̆n] ~ [kʰɛ̃̆n]; can't is always stressed, [ˈkʰæ̃tˢs̆ʰ] ~ [ˈkʰæ̃ntˢs̆ʰ] ~ [ˈkʰæ̃ʔ] when followed by /n/.

Cerberus

@Mechanicalsnail Hah, but not in casual/fast speech.

Mechanical snail

@Cerberus Even then the vowel and final glottalization are distinctive.

IPA sucks

Cerberus

@Mechanicalsnail Well, many Americans have confirmed that confusion often ensues...

Perhaps your articulation is just better.

Mechanical snail

@Cerberus There are 2 articulations of /nt/ in AmE; many flap the /t/ in this environment, giving something like [ɾ̃], thereby merging it with /n/. For those speakers the only difference is the stress <=> vowel, so confusion is possible.

David Wallace

@Mechanicalsnail Thanks. I can't actually read those symbols (many of them just look like squares to me), but I get that you're saying there's a difference.

Mechanical snail

00:19

@DavidWallace What OS?

David Wallace

Win XP.

Oh, but are you saying that "nt" might be confused with "n"? I thought we were only talking about the vowel.

Cerberus

@Mechanicalsnail Not only then. Forget about rules—people speak fast and sloppy, and there will be all sorts of noise.

David Wallace

In my speech, the vowel in "can't" is very different to the vowel in "can". But when I listen to Americans speaking, the vowel in "can" and the vowel in "can't" sound the same to me. It never occurred to me that the consonant cluster in "can't" could contribute to the confusion.

Cerberus

The two pronunciations being quite similar, it is not always easy to hear the difference.

David Wallace

(alliteration in the last sentence unintentional)

I assumed that there would only be confusion if the next word began with T. Like "I can take it" and "I can't take it" might sound identical to me.

Cerberus

00:22

Then there is can/can't followed by d- or t-...

I can('t) do it.

David Wallace

Jinx!

Mechanical snail

@DavidWallace How do you pronounce stressed /æ/?

Cerberus

That certainly helps!

David Wallace

@Mechanicalsnail I don't know how you want me to answer that.

Mechanical snail

David Wallace

00:24

But "can't" doesn't contain /æ/ in my speech.

Oh so you're saying the vowel in "can" is not /æ/ ? That's interesting.

Do you distinguish "can" from "ken"?

Mechanical snail

@Cerberus [kʰənˈd̥ʉw] [ˈkʰɛ̃ʔ̃ːˈd̥ʉw]

@DavidWallace I merge /æ/ and /ɛ/ in unstressed syllables, but they're distinct in stressed syllables. So ken, as a common noun/verb, is always stressed and therefore distinct from stressed can.

David Wallace

So the vowel in "can" IS /æ/ then?

Mechanical snail

@DavidWallace Vowel reduction to something like a centralized [ɛ]. I tend to drop the vowels entirely, or at least they're barely audible (note that they're mostly devoiced by the preceding aspiration).

Cerberus

@Mechanicalsnail That looks very pretty, but do you see how minute that distinction can be a in a reduced vowel?

Mechanical snail

@DavidWallace Yes, underlyingly.

Cerberus

00:30

Oh, jinx.

Funny that you should bring up vowel reduction just now.

Mechanical snail

@Cerberus It's not the vowel, but the gemination/glottalization, that carries the distinction.

David Wallace

What is gemination?

Cerberus

Well.

I'm sorry, but I must remain sceptical.

Mechanical snail

@DavidWallace Gemination = long consonants.

Cerberus

Well, long...

Depends on the consonant, I suppose.

David Wallace

00:31

Oh, so that's the difference between "can take" and "can't take"? The length of T?

No wonder Americans sometimes don't understand New Zealanders.

Mechanical snail

@DavidWallace Mainly (assuming we're comparing can is also stressed in "can take").

David Wallace

Yes, the stress went without saying!

Mechanical snail

@DavidWallace Supposedly an American once boarded a flight to Auckland, thinking it was going to Oakland.

David Wallace

Oh, not just supposedly. It happened.

I'm surprised it wasn't picked up when he was asked for his passport, or when they looked at his ticket or boarding pass.

Mechanical snail

@DavidWallace Actually, the vowel in the can't syllable would also be shorter, to maintain equal time between stressed syllables.

David Wallace

00:34

articles.latimes.com/1985-04-03/local/…

@Mechanicalsnail That might be too fine a point for me to detect. Especially when I'm accustomed to distinguish these two words by the fact that they have a different vowel in my speech.

I appreciate that "Auckland" sounds very different in a NZ accent from how it sounds in an American accent too.

Mechanical snail

@DavidWallace You have "broad a" for can't in NZ, right?

David Wallace

I don't know what you mean by "broad a" but it's the same vowel as the A in "father".

Mechanical snail

@DavidWallace Yes; that's what I mean.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broad_a#Trap.E2.80.93bath_split

David Wallace

(or very similar, at least)

(says "father can't" over and over, to see whether they really are the same)

Mechanical snail

@DavidWallace How many open vowels do you distinguish?

David Wallace

00:51

Umm, I'm not sure.

I couldn't tell you for sure whether my "short e" as in "head" would count as open or closed.

And I don't know whether differences in length count, such as the difference between "bed" (verb) and "bed" (noun).

Mechanical snail

@DavidWallace If that's a minimal pair for you, then they count.

@DavidWallace Try comparing it with the IPA vowel chart: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPA_vowel_chart_with_audio

David Wallace

It's certainly a minimal pair. The question is whether these two are open or closed. They seem somewhere in the middle to me.

I could probably count up the number of vowels that I distinguish, but I'd have difficulty separating them into open ones and closed ones.

Cerberus

> NZ prime minister defends Hollywood trip in wake of Megaupload mess - John Key maintains meetings have nothing to do with ongoing Kim Dotcom case.

@DavidWallace arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/10/…

David Wallace

01:06

@Cerberus Oh, who really knows. Conspiracy theorists are everywhere.

Cerberus

And yet.

If you are travelling around the world to be fêted by extremely rich industry leaders...

Will this not influence your impressions, opinions at all?

David Wallace

Maybe. John Key is only human.

Cerberus

If you spend enough time as a hostage, you will come to love your captors.

David Wallace

John Key is my captor?

Cerberus

There are greater and lesser versions of the Stockholm syndrome, but in effect you are influenced by people around you to some degree always.

David Wallace

01:09

He's a huge improvement over our last prime minister.

Oh, you tweened me.

Cerberus

No, going to Hollywood makes him more vulnerable to regulatory capture.

Regulatory capture

Regulatory capture occurs when a state regulatory agency, created to act in the public interest, instead advances the commercial or special interests that dominate the industry or sector it is charged with regulating. Regulatory capture is a form of government failure, as it can act as an encouragement for large firms to produce negative externalities. The agencies are called "captured agencies". Theory For public choice theorists, regulatory capture occurs because groups or individuals with a high-stakes interest in the outcome of policy or regulatory decisions can be expected to focus ...

Aka soft corruption.

David Wallace

Yes, well of course it does.

Cerberus

Conflict of interest etc.

David Wallace

Conflicts of interest make the world go round.

Cerberus

Even the appearance of a conflict of interest should be enough to deter a PM from such a trip.

Of course there is no telling what our ministers do.

David Wallace

01:11

@Cerberus Yeah. I don't think that would have occurred to him.

Cerberus

Isn't that a basic element of good government?

Being innocent is not enough.

David Wallace

Besides, if he can get Hollywood to spend money in NZ, then everybody wins.

Cerberus

Uh not at all.

David Wallace

By "everybody", of course, I mean New Zealanders.

Cerberus

The price is too high, especially for NZ.

David Wallace

01:13

The price is certainly high. But too high? I'm not so sure.

Cerberus

You really don't want your ministers fêted by a corrupt and very powerful industry with an agenda that is harmful to your people.

That Hollywood money isn't going to end up in your pockets.

David Wallace

(Hey, my phantom downvoter struck again)

Cerberus

It's going to some companies that they hire to do their work here, which creates even more soft corruption.

David Wallace

@Cerberus Some of it effectively will if it improves our economy.

Cerberus

And by "here" I mean NZ. See how close I feel to NZ?

@DavidWallace To a large degree, that is a bit of a myth.

David Wallace

01:14

@Cerberus :-)

Cerberus

The multiplier is tiny.

David Wallace

Can anyone really know what the multiplier is?

Cerberus

No.

But it is small.

David Wallace

LOTR was big for us.

Cerberus

Think company coffers, shareholders, Swiss bank accounts.

And who are "us"?

Some NZ companies.

David Wallace

01:17

who employ New Zealanders.

Cerberus

Sure.

David Wallace

And some tourists who come here to see what all the fuss is about.

Cerberus

You know, they say the same stuff about the Olympics.

Which cost England about 12 billion, I think.

David Wallace

@Cerberus Yes. But I don't think we've ever had one of those.

Cerberus

Some of that came back.

But it is generally distributed badly.

@DavidWallace No, but it is comparable.

Well, a lot smaller.

And less corrupt.

But still.

David Wallace

01:19

OK, the Americas Cup was big for us; Auckland in particular.

The 2011 Rugby World Cup was big for us too.

Cerberus

Notice also that figures reporting on this pay-back often come from whoever organised the whole they. They tend to triple the real number of tourists visiting Amsterdam's festivals.

David Wallace

Our government wouldn't be spending money on these things if it didn't expect to recoup it.

@Cerberus Either you are cynical, or I am naive, or both.

Cerberus

Just so that sponsors pay more for advertisements, and the city thinks they get back more from taxes.

@DavidWallace I read some stuff about this.

There are two problems: 1.) misrepresentation of the return ratio, and 2.) whatever is returned often doesn't end up in the right pockets, even though it does end up in the right city/country.

David Wallace

Whose are the right pockets?

2

Cerberus

Of course the NZ government probably didn't spend that much on the LotR stuff, I presume.

@DavidWallace Either those who will use the money for the benefit of society, or those who need it.

Mechanical snail

01:23

@Cerberus Does this have anything to do with the previous linguistic discussion?

Cerberus

@Mechanicalsnail I'm afraid not...

David Wallace

@Cerberus Those who employ New Zealanders.

and wish to expand their businesses.

Cerberus

Yes.

Mechanical snail

@DavidWallace Or invest in New Zealand businesses, or buy from New Zealand suppliers, ....

David Wallace

I see snowballs.

Cerberus

01:24

But are the NZ film industry/suppliers the best direction for the government to divert money to?

I'm not saying LotR was bad.

The cost was probably not that great.

And a significant part ended up with people who do useful stuff.

Two things: 1.) a temporary job is not that great for the economy in the longer term.

David Wallace

It can be.

Cerberus

2.) Did officials have to do or promise anything to get the job?

@DavidWallace Yes, it can be, to some degree.

David Wallace

I doubt it.

Cerberus

@DavidWallace Perhaps they didn't.

David Wallace

@Cerberus Because the person who has the job then has money to spend on other New Zealand products and services.

Cerberus

01:28

But it's still temporary.

Again, the LotR thing was probably OK.

David Wallace

So, I see Hollywood making more movies here as more of the same.

Cerberus

Well...

Having your PM receive lots of cool stuff and heavy pressure from Hollywood is too high a price.

How much do you think the government has spent on the whole Dotcom affair already?

David Wallace

Oh, I have no idea.

Far more than we should have, of course.

Cerberus

Include the police, the courts, the time spent by other officials, the press...

Right.

David Wallace

It seems you spend a lot of time reading about New Zealand's current affairs.

Cerberus

01:31

Not that much.

No more than about most other countries that matter.

David Wallace

What's a country that doesn't matter?

Cerberus

Many African countries?

Mechanical snail

@DavidWallace Andorra

Cerberus

The ones that I don't know much about and that I never hear interesting news about.

David Wallace

In what sense is New Zealand more matterable than Uganda?

Cerberus

01:33

Or Andorra, yes.

Well, there is the Dotcom case.

There is the TPP.

There is the monarchy.

There is the accents.

Etc.

David Wallace

We don't have accents here! :-)

Cerberus

And Uganda is actually one of the more interesting central-African countries.

@DavidWallace Oh, of course.

My bad.

David Wallace

Yes, I just picked an African country at random.

Mechanical snail

@Cerberus There is the perverted morbidly obese booming flightless parrot.

Cerberus

The Académie de Wellington, then.

David Wallace

01:35

@Mechanicalsnail I assume you mean the kakapo?

Cerberus

@Mechanicalsnail Umm are you talking about the kiwi?

Mechanical snail

@DavidWallace Yes

Cerberus

Oh...

David Wallace

The kiwi is not a parrot.

Cerberus

See, I didn't even know about that one!

David Wallace

01:36

@Cerberus Yes, it is flightlessly boomingly obesely morbidly perverted.

and close to extinction.

Cerberus

Wow.

They look cute.

Another thing learned!

David Wallace

kcc.org.nz/maori-bird-names

Sadly, very many New Zealand native birds are close to extinction.

@Cerberus Don't make me say fish and chips again.

Mechanical snail

@Cerberus What's that?

Cerberus

@Mechanicalsnail I was mocking David's assertion that NZ has no "accents".

If it does not, that must be because the Official English Accent is spoken in NZ, which in turn must be because there is something like the Académie Française determining what is and what isn't an accent.

And that academy must be in NZ.

Mechanical snail

On the subject of linguistics,

0

Q: How do you make nice consonant/vowel charts and tables?

Wikipedia has some nice vowel charts, available at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:SVG_vowel_charts. Example (Korean vowels): Example (Australian English diphthongs): Similarly, there are vowel and consonant charts in tabular form; Markdown doesn't seem to support tables easily...

Cerberus

01:49

@Mechanicalsnail I wish I knew the answer.

David Wallace

You could draw them in Paint, actually.

@Mechanicalsnail and Cerberus could tease me mercilessly about this, because he knows that I have asserted over and over again on the ELU site that EVERYBODY has an accent.

Cerberus

@DavidWallace Well, you had it coming, because I never claimed otherwise when I said NZ had interesting accents.

David Wallace

@Mechanicalsnail "Australian English diphthongs" seems like a pleonasm to me.

4

Don't use my sintinces against me!

Cerberus

What? I can't hear you.

I only hear this odd noise.

David Wallace

and that probably answers my earlier question about bed/bed.

Cerberus

01:56

Like iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii.

You mean bid/bid?

David Wallace

May 27 at 1:57, by Cerberus

By the way, I like your Kiwi accent.

Cerberus

Heh.

Mechanical snail

@DavidWallace No. This is what a real Kiwi accent sounds like.

David Wallace

Haha

Cerberus

@Mechanicalsnail Awwww.

Sounds almost like David.

David Wallace

02:03

I am neither little nor spotted.

Cerberus

No comment.

Stack Exchange

08:23

0

Q: Was there ever suffix -tria in PIE?

Was there ever suffix -tria or -tra in PIE as a combilnation of zero-grade of -ter- plus -ia feminine ending?

proto-indo-european

Stack Exchange

10:08

0

Q: Influences of the origins of the phrase "Mother-fucker"

We should presume that the phrases fuck your mother fuck your mother smelly cunt mother-fucking bastard existed in the Chinese alt-cultural vocabulary for centuries in various dialects, having a high frequency of usage when the need for profanity arises. May be, I need to verify with people w...

etymology

taylor

16:11

@Cerberus I wanted to ask you about something interesting that you said earlier. Not so much as an attempt to persuade you to an opposite or dissimilar stance, but so that I can get a more lucid understanding of what you meant and the sincerity with which you meant it.

Cerberus

@taylor Haha, and what was this?

taylor

well it would be a waste of time to retrieve it verbatim, but it was when you and i were talking about the paper you are working on

your masters thesis?

Cerberus

Yes, could be?

taylor

demonstrating a similarity between two chronological texts, i think

then i started talking about chance or something

and then that lead into something i read about plagarizm

i remember you were drinking lolz

anyways, that's just the context

i remember i was trying to tell you about how informal arguments can be made formal through quantification

Cerberus

@taylor Hmm I remember we talked about quantification, but I'm not exactly sure what.

And what do you mean by "chronological"?

Contemporaneous? Or the opposite?

taylor

16:25

uhm well i don't remember the details of your thesis, and that's not related to what i wanted to ask you

that was just the context

Cerberus

All right.

So what do you want to ask?

taylor

if i remember correctly, sometime during my pontifications about how great quantification and formal methodology is, i think you said "you shouldnt trust the quantification trend to much"

Cerberus

Hmm yes, no doubt I said that.

taylor

i was wondering if you could elaborate on that a bit

Cerberus

Not saying it's useless, but it is only one of the tools you should use.

Well, what people would typically do is count how often words related to "war" occurred around 1900 and around 2000 in English prose.

Then draw some conclusion about the political climate.

taylor

16:30

okay

Cerberus

That is 1.) dangerous, and 2.) you have several other great tools at your disposal to at check your results against, if not to do the bulk of the job.

But, sure, it can be helpful.

Let me make one thing clear: the data that you get through such a count are 100 % good; the problem is interpreting them.

Without interpretation, they are just a set of numbers.

Any research paper will always try to interpret them.

taylor

well this case sounds like the person is to blame and not the method

i've seen this before too

Cerberus

Well, does the method include the interpretation and deciding what kind of data to collect?

The data themselves are not to blame, to be sure.

taylor

counting words like "democracy" and "civil liberty" in the history of presidential inaugural speeches

Cerberus

Yeah.

In my 1900 example, the occurrence of the word "war" around 1900 could be partly due to the recent publication of Tolstoy's War and Peace, for example.

And the 2000 thing due to the "war on drugs".

So the usefulness of a certain interpretation depends also on what goals you have set for your research.

And I think interpreting data is often the most academic part of such a research paper (apart from advanced statistics, which you could say is part of interpretation).

So what is your take on this?

taylor

16:36

okay, if we want to analyse this case properly lets just start at the beginning and see what claims are warranted and which claims are not warranted

Cerberus

Okay.

taylor

we should be able to identify an abuse of the method

as opposed to an inherent inadequacy of the method

in this case then

we can start with an exploratory data analysis to informally motivate a hypothesis which is then to be tested

Cerberus

What are you trying to do exactly?

taylor

i want to demonstrate how some people are making unwarranted conclusions

which I think is what you are observing

so I all i need to do is follow the scientific method which begins with a hypothesis

how we arrived at the hypothesis is not important because it is still left to be corroborated

Cerberus

@taylor Well, you may not need to demonstrate this, because I probably already agree.

The problem is data abuse.

Not wrong data.

taylor

16:46

yes exactly, but the misuse of evidence can be done in many different ways, and I think the case you mentioned here is worth looking at so that we can see exactly the fallacy

so we have X and Y, where X is the corpus count of "war" in 1990 and Y is the corpus count for 2000

can't get much simpler data then two numbers

Cerberus

Yes.

The problem is that the use of the word "war" does not say anything about the political climate.

Cum hoc ergo propter hoc, or something.

taylor

its tempting to just check if X<Y and if so then conclude with "people in 2000 are more preoccupied with war, and hence more likely to engage in war"

exactly

Cerberus

The problem is that, in some cases, the use of a word may say something about the political climate, but not in others.

taylor

but following the scientific method, comparing X to Y is not just a matter of asking "is it true that X<Y ?"

X and Y are statistics, not numbers

Cerberus

What are you getting at?

taylor

16:54

and yeah your right, even if we arrive at a well formed statistical statement or hypothesis, it is still left to elucidate the relationship between something like "political climate" and X and Y

Cerberus

Yes.

So, instead, you could just read a few newspapers from 1900 and from 2000 and interpret the tone.

That seems a more useful approach.

Common sense get you quite far in academia.

taylor

exactly, so as you point out here we have the scope of conclusions that are warranted under our hypothesis:
1) X<Y -> "people in 2000 are more preoccupied with war"
2) X>Y -> "people in 2000 are less preoccupied with war"
3) X=Y -> "people in 2000 are not more nor less preoccupied with war"

at this point to show that X is different from Y to a (statistically) significant extant, we need to do a statistical test

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