Posted by Roger Keays, 5 March 2008, 12:00 PM
- bakom (prep) - Och satte sig bakom julgranen.
- aldrig (adv) - Tänker du aldrig äta några grönsaker?
- som (rel pn) - Han bodde med sin pappa som hette Anton.
- fast (conj) - Fast han såg snäll ut, det gjorde han visst det.
- att (rel pn) - Han lovade att inte göra det.
- tro (v) - Man kan tro att han var en riktig liten ängel.
- varandra (pn) - Alla presenterar sig för varandra.
- blev (v) - När han blev stor...
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Posted by Roger Keays, 2 March 2008, 10:37 AM In just about any conversation I have about European languages, somebody will inevitably declare that 'well, they all come from Latin'. Well, just for the record, English does not come from Latin. English is a West-Germanic language. Latin-based languages are called Romance Languages and the main ones are Spanish, Portugese, French, Italian, Romanian and Catalan.
Many people think English comes from Latin because of all the French words we've imported into the language. English has 27% lexical similarity to French, but actually 60% similarity to German [1]. Ha ha.. I wish English was cool enough to be a Romance Language too, but unfortunately English is more like a Bastard Language than anything else because of the way its been abused so much.
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Posted by Roger Keays, 29 February 2008, 10:44 AM I have been searching for a concise and accurate way to record the syntax of a language. One that you might be able to feed into a computer such that it only produces and parses grammatical sentences. However, during my search, I came across something in particular which really makes me doubt the analytical approach to defining languages.
Most ideas of representing syntax attempt to define a grammar which generates a tree where each node restricts the class of phrases or words which can appear beneath it. E.g. NP = (Det) (AP) N (PP).
This works pretty well, except for some tricky substitutions such as Ed is on the JPA expert group, but Roger is on the JSF one. Here, one only replaces part of the noun phrase "the JPA expert group". To handle these cases, linguists invented X-bar theory.
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Posted by Roger Keays, 26 February 2008, 1:48 PM So I've just found another funny letter while writing my last blog about debt collectors. This one is from the solicitor of some bevan who wrote off his car and nearly killed his girlfriend when he drove into us on a mountain road. They were both very shaken by the accident. She was crying and he just kept apologising.
"Well at least he admits it was his fault", I thought. Right? Wrong. Here is an excerpt of the letter we received a few weeks later:
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Posted by Roger Keays, 26 February 2008, 12:26 PM Hello lunch break. I've been looking forward to meeting you all morning. Hello chicken sandwich. You're tasty.
The debt collectors are onto me again. This time for an electricity bill which I paid using an old account number. The company got my money and I spent weeks trying to get them to fix my account before getting fed up and changing providers. So now I have a warning letter that they have referred a 'collection agency' to retrieve my 'debt'. This basically just means I can't answer private numbers on my mobile for a while. Sorry, but I'm not explaining the situation again!
My first experience with a debt collector was a few years ago when I rented an overnight video thinking it was a weekly. I returned it 9 days later and was subsequently sent an invoice for $50, which was ... a surprise.
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Posted by Roger Keays, 18 February 2008, 10:41 AM I've literally being dying to write this blog. Some topics get me very excited, but not many get me more excited than phonetics and phonology. Anyway, I wanted to make sure I got my stuff mostly right before posting. So what's all the fuss about then? Well it's Hangul that's what, and thanks to Sunny (선휘), my new Korean friend I reckon I've pretty well got it sussed.
Hangul is the writing system used for the Korean language. What got me interested is not only that it almost perfectly phonemic, but that the letters (jamo) are arranged into syllables! I had never seen this before.. I'd never even thought this before. For example, my name in Hangul is arranged into the two syllables 러자.
Okay, okay. First things first. Let's have a look at the individual jamo which make up each syllable. There are 24 characters in total, each one representing just one or two phonemes or dipthongs. First, the 14 consonants:
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Posted by Roger Keays, 11 February 2008, 2:22 PM How annoying. I have just spent the last three hours trying to connect to Tomcat remotely using JConsole/JMX. It worked fine for one server, but not the other which was started with exactly the same settings. Eventually I found the problem: Ubuntu maps the hostname to 127.0.0.1 in /etc/hosts by default and this breaks the JMX protocol. It seems that JMX opens a separate socket stream for data (like FTP) and needs to provide the host's network address to do this.
Actually, my problem was already documented in the FAQ:
http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/guide/management/faq.html
On a side note, I also had problems with Netbeans 6.0 being dog slow on Ubuntu. It seems to have had something to do with the GTK look and feel, because I fixed it by adding --laf javax.swing.plaf.metal.MetalLookAndFeel to the startup options in ${nbhome}/etc/netbeans.conf. It runs great now.
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Posted by Roger Keays, 5 February 2008, 2:51 PM Okay, so I've been doing some very interesting reading of late and recently discovered a new (for me) concept: morphophonemic spelling. English is morphophonemic, which means that morphemes retain the same spelling even if the phonetic context causes them to be pronounced differently. For example, bats and bags are both spelt with an s even though they are pronounced [s] and [z] respectively.
It's even more fascinating when observed in Korean, because Korean Hangul arranges letters into syllables and morphemes can change the preceding syllable by borrowing the consonant (just like the French liason). However... the spelling stays exactly the same even though the syllables have changed!
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Posted by Roger Keays, 31 January 2008, 12:52 AM Ahhh... I have found an old Weezer CD of mine and it is bringing back so many memories of my year of trawler work. I remember listening to this CD on the top deck of The Voyager... exhausted, sleep deprived, muscles cramping, and on a total endorphin high. The salt, the wind... the endless blue horizon. the weather, the sea, the sharks, the groper half the length of the boat. The bull rays!! The crayfish... the kingfish and pearl perch. The scallops. Seafood barbeques. Renee, my sweet sweet sweet girlfriend. The three legged dog at Temple Bay... The brown boobies, ospreys and mutton birds. the maps, the charts. Far North Queensland!!!!
The wind... the wind. The freedom. Coming back to land. The cairns' clubs. The Voyager. The slipway. Mooloolaba.
The endless blue horizon. The nothingness. The delirious, exhaustion induced laughter. Justin Tuckey. Dave, Scotty. Salt water showers. Trying to cook in high seas. Trying to stand in high seas. Trying to tie knots in high seas. Almost slipping off the booms. The salt water sea spray. Being drenched. Launching myself off the top of the wheelhouse. Slipping into the hopper. Outswimming a salty. Prawn fights.
Taking charge of The Kenandale...
Winning.
I miss the sea sooo much. I miss the adventure. I miss the senseless money making machine. I miss raping the ocean. I miss the exhaustion.
That is what I call adventure. I miss it like crazy.
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Posted by Roger Keays, 22 January 2008, 9:02 AM Hi all In case you hadn't noticed, I've set up a new blog for myself. I was running a couple of different blogs on various places on the 'Net, but it got a little tiring trying to keep them all going (besides, I got bored with only blogging about Java, CSS and Unix). So I've moved all my blogs here so I can just dump all my thoughts in the one place.
If you've come from my Java blog, here's a list of some of the new articles you'll find here:
Now that I have a non-topic specific blog I'll be writing a lot more I think. Especially about linguistics, art, politics... maybe music 'n dancing too  . See you in cyberspace!
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