Russians and Americans

There's a commercial I just saw, about subtle changes, but oh, now I can't seem to remember what it is for. Anyway, I just noticed that they do an alternation between "Michael" and "Mikhail," but Mikhail is pronounced mikʰeʲəɫ when it should be something more like mikajɫ.

Russian phonology isn't my main area of study though, but this was pretty far different for even me. It's surprising, because the vowel quality, the main sonic concern, isn't foreign to english, and for my ears, the way he said it, although very "american" sounding, doesn't strike me as particularly common. At least for the way I talk, (or think I do, it's kind of late here), the "eʲəɫ"part resembles the word ale but not as much in fluid speech (where it seems to lower some). He was being particularly careful and as such it didn't sound natural as a result.

It's just always striking to my ears when I hear such radical pronunciations, even for more or less English words (think "Chianti"). The fact that it is Russian is countered by the fact that it is one word, and something I feel is relatively well known, enough that somebody could've told this person, who presumably has some speech training, to say it more than slightly differently.

Of course re-filming is a costly process, and nobody really knows these things anyway, so, what's the harm?

Just A Quick Complaint!

Recently my uncle was telling me that services to find your former classmates are free in Poland, and that it's quite a popular undertaking. Apparently it's not uncommon to find sections of restaurants or other places reserved for sizable get-togethers. To my knowledge, stateside this doesn't really happen. Yes, we have our high school and college reunions, but there's not as much of a student driven approach here (I am not aware of the status of school-driven reunions in Poland).

The complaint I have is not in trying to find former classmates, but rather, I had hoped that the internet would function just a little bit more as a boon to academia and learning. A colleague recommended Google Scholar to me to find articles, and I inserted my topic. I immediately saw several papers that looked like they might be interesting, but I am only shown the abstract when I click on the link. From there, I am asked to pay for the article or a subscription. It seems that several other recommended databases function this way as well.

Most likely I can probably VPN into my university's network, and search for some of the articles through the school's list of subscriptions to journals and electronic archives, but that is a lot of work for what is essentially background reading, and for articles of questionable use at best (not to mention I don't know offhand if we have access to that journal, or if that article is available for what we /do/ have access to).

I support the free trade of such journal articles, though I must admit that I'm not fully aware of the actual consequences of such an action. At the very least, I do not support the cluttering up of the internet with articles I'm not paying for either way hiding the work of the wonderful linguists who do decide to share their work with me for free.

"We Live In The Dark Ages"

...as a colleague of mine so eloquently put it. We'll get to that eventually, don't worry. To start the story, I was first hoping to find a way to write at all in a colloquial kind of way. The purpose was to convey the pronunciation more like əɾɔɫ or əɾɒɫ which I wasn't really sure how to do, just as I'm not even 100% sure on what vowel goes there. (The purpose is to get something like gonna, coulda, dinna, so on and so forth if it's not transparent.) After a minute of thinking about it, I thought that a'tall seemed to be a decent variant that didn't look hideous to me, so I decided to investigate.

Remember the original title? Google apparently doesn't do search strings that contain punctuation. Well, it does them, but it converts the punctuation to a space. I tried to use google to find a solution, but most people had nothing in terms of a solution for searching with specific punctuation. So, because of this, I get all of the results for "a tall." It seems a viable option for me, but I guess my only method now is some field testing.

It's a shame that google doesn't yet contain even an "advanced search" method for punctuation specific searches. I've had this dilemma come up before, but usually never something I couldn't work around, such as adding some context to the search.

This yielded two result from a few contexts I tried.

This page contained the text

"Thank you, Seiya. For being my friend and for understanding
and...for just being you.""Not a'tall my dear," Seiya said. "Walk me to my car?"

and Google Books yielded two books, both by Johanna Lindsey, but it looks like they are the same story in two books with slightly different titles, one is The Present and the other The Holiday Present, which includes another story. The relevant passage is:

"...you couldn't have been more right."

"Not a'tall m'dear." He grinned at his wife.

So, ol' bootstrapping can still get you a bit of evidence. I don't have any alternatives that sound any better to me, so I'm good with this for now.

Also, the aforementioned Seiya is written as 星野 in Japanese, the first character means something like "Star" which is relevant to the characters name, but I'm not entirely sure about the second part, at least for the name. Further proof I need to practice my Japanese more.

The Curse Of Language Learning Class

Personally, there are two great secret perils of language class. Most people, I would expect, fear the pressure to be correct or not sound silly, to be put on-the-spot, and even just not getting it. I've always been a decent language learner, but there are two, somewhat-related, things that go on in classes that I just can't seem to deal with.

1. The first situation I have trouble with is when the teacher (or an examination) asks the class to talk or write about something that I know nothing about or have no interest in. For me, I just have nothing to say on the subject, but for the teacher or whoever is reviewing my test, it looks like I struggled through the grammar or can't even come up with something simple to say. Two examples, translated for those monoglots out there:

Sra.: Okay, so, who watched the football game yesterday?
[moment of silence]
Another Student: Uhm, I didn't see it, but I think the Bills won?
[further silence, as nobody has seen the game or knows anything past the previous statement]
Sra.: Well, I guess we're just going to do some writing exercises out of the book since you guys are so reluctant to speak!

I would've love to chat about this, but I had nothing to say. The second situation was an exam I had to take at some point years ago (which really vexed me for reasons we'll not get into right now), where the final essay component was basically me writing both sides of an interview with some tennis player I have never heard of. I don't know very much about tennis culture, and to this day my knowledge of the world of tennis is "I enjoy playing tennis occasionally," so I'm sure I wrote some terrible nonsense.

2. The second situation that usually isn't a problem for me, because I have a decent imagination, but can be bothersome in excess is doing skits. I normally enjoy skits because they are a nice way to be creative and everybody can enjoy some silliness. It also breaks up the monotony of class. My portuguese professor has taken to having us do short skits (dialogues, really), almost every class. He also doesn't give us a whole lot of time to work on this, so it can only be so interesting or creative past getting the main idea down.

If they were less frequent, and at a less generally fatiguing time period, I would probably enjoy this. But, I am also not an actor by training, and at the end of the day, it's not as easy to turn on the clever switch as I might hope. My last skit was enjoyed by all, and probably the only one that had any serious points of humor, while most people resort to minor inanities and more unusual that funny exchanges. The skit before however, was for the most part not humorous, or particularly enjoyable for the writing, but possibly for delivery or acting independent of the writing. This shouldn't really be a main concern, as it's not an acting or writing class, but at the same time it's a little annoying to be expected to do as much.

Then again, I can't claim to particularly have any preferable alternative, it can just be irksome having to worry about being on top of any issue that could come up and making sure I can be clever in Portuguese on the spot.

Writing Sign Language

I've been reading up on sign language, which has been an interest of mine in recent times. There is a lot of interesting insight to be gained  on development of language, especially with the large number of distinctions between many sign languages and their spoken counterpart, as well as humorous or otherwise interesting aspects (a quick list of some intriguing ones on wikipedia, Nicaraguan SL, Kata Kolok, Al-Sayyid Bedouin SL, Martha's Vineyard SL)

That's mostly an aside, I came across this site, which is about writing in sign language. Apparently it's the standard for writing a whole slew of sign languages, Omniglot says 27, and the author boasts usages on all habited continents. I thought it would be nice to find something I could use to read symbols and practice, but it looks pretty unintuitive for people unfamiliar with the nuances of the symbols anyway. The site makes mention in its linguistics section a couple other notational systems, Stokoe Notation, and the rarer HamNoSys, neither of which seem like they would be good from a learner's perspective.

This seems to me to be a rather interesting phenomenon, but not quite as much as I was originally hoping. In a practical sense it's a lovely idea, since photo books, while ever so descriptive, don't really come cheap or seem to be able to contain the breadth of information for the cost. Internet sources (at least the ones I've casually encountered) also don't seem to have interfaces I am thrilled about. The interesting thing I was hoping would be more expansive is where the sign languages have a sort of "full circle" notion, since you can write characters manually, and then you can graphically represent these characters with new symbols.

I'm going to have to be short and cut that off here, but what more is there to say?