OK, here’s one.
’ve after modals has already been reanalysed to of; not just as a written form, but in spoken English: would of, could of, should of.
Prediction: this gets expanded further by analogy, to link other modals and auxiliaries, now that the of is no longer analysed as a verb. can of, had of.
Stranger things have happened.
No, not Stranger things of happened. There are grammatical constraints at work here.
Jane Marr! Why no A2A from you!
I’ve long been looking for an excuse to speak here of my favourite poem of all time.
It’s an odd choice. It’s an extremely formalist choice. It needs some setup.
Esperanto poetry is very formalist, for cultural reasons you can easily guess. At least, it was up through the 70s, which is what I read up to. Lots of rondels. Lots of sonnets. All sonnets Petrarchan. All rhymes meticulous.
Victor Sadler, an officer at the Universal Esperanto Association, published a slender volume in 1967, Memkritiko “Self Criticism”. (See discussion in Esperanto.) The shtick of the volume is that he found the poems in the Association archives, and he annotates them sarcastically. Very po-mo, but this would have been at the very outset of po-mo.
My favourite poem is a Petrarchan sonnet in his collection. Its subject matter is about dissolution.
Its form is about dissolution.
It’s a Petrarchan sonnet, but its verses are way too short. Trimeter and Dimeter, going down to a single foot at the end. The rhymes are off-rhymes, which is not normal in Esperanto. And in the sestet, the off-rhymes end up merging.
It’s like a sand castle, slowly washing away. Especially in the last three verses.
Mi, dezirante ĉerkon
(kapitulaci,
ekshipokrito laca,
ĉi ŝakan ŝercon),
pluportis mian serĉon
ĝis la palaco
de ĉi korpo kuraca,
en kies riĉon
mi kitelumas
pli pace miajn ostojn
ol feton lulas
la utero; kaj ekson
mian ĝi teksas
en naskon.
I, wishing for a coffin
(to quit,
a tired ex-hypocrite,
this joke of chess),
continued my search
until the palace
of this healing body,
in whose riches
I besmock
my bones more peacefully
than the womb lulls
the fetus; and it weaves
my expiration
into birth.
Ah, Philip my old friend. I know why you’re asking, and you know where this is going.
What does Nick Nicholas’ Quora Bio on emoji say?
Emoji: Blot on the purity of Unicode
What does Nick Nicholas think about the inclusion of emojis in Unicode?
CLEANSE THEM WITH FIRE!
⛐⛏⛔⛑✘☹☠
Why does Nick Nicholas think that? Is he some sort of antiquated un-hip spoilsport?
Yes, but there’s so much more to it than that.
Unicode is meant to be an universal encoding of scripts of human languages, to be comprehensive and rigorous. It is meant to resist logos, and vanity symbols, and short term fads: it is intended to persist for the ages. It is meant to deal with finite, well-understood, stable repertoires of script signs. Inclusion of any new additions to the repertoires are meant to be pondered and debated by linguists and typographers. And it is meant to deal with communicative needs borne of real texts. Real, plain texts, not vagaries of formatting or iconography.
It’s been po-faced in the past. The German National Standards body ensured Klingon never made it into Unicode, for instance, for fear of bringing the standard into disrepute.
And then the emojis came.
It’s not just that they’re frivolous. (And yes, I also wasn’t happy about Dylan getting the Nobel for Literature.) It’s that they’re not stable, they’re not for the ages, they’re not finite, and they’re not text. Yes, they’re part of text messages. So are memes.
Emojis were included in legacy Japanese character sets, because that’s how the Japanese telcos encoded the blasted things. It was a kludge. It was not meant to be enshrined for the ages: using characters to do icons was a short term fix, and certainly not a sustainable one. Emojis are not the kinds of thing that are meant to be a well-defined, stable sign system, with additions debated by linguists and typographers: that truly defeats the purpose of emojis. Not to mention, emojis really do go against the spirit of Unicode.
But the Japanese telcos went with them, and then Apple went with them, and there we are.
The Unicode Technical Committee defends the inclusion, as they must. They say that they do not count as logos, or vanity symbols, or short term fads, and they are appropriately managed through a standards process that normally engages linguists and typographers. Not everyone in the Unicode community was convinced, but it’s done.
Damn me if I’m going to be happy about it, but.
You won’t, Quora is vigilant about not making its stats available. Even fairly superficial stats.
The closest you will get is quora numbers, by the esteemed Laura Hale. It’s based on some hand collected data: not deep or complete, it can’t be, but representative and well-analysed. She does have stats on some of your questions.
Thanks, Khateeb!
When I was in second year phonetics in university, our exam was to do just that. Our lecturer would say some sounds, we had to write them down in IPA.
With some provisos.
I don’t have a great ear. But under ideal test conditions, and limiting ourselves to distinct IPA letters? Yes. We do.
You’re looking for an app to type polytonic Greek on iOS. For example:
Like everyone else said, that’s why you try to have a sane Secretary of Defence.
Anon mentioned Nixon during Nam: Anonymous’ answer to If a president decided to go rogue and wants to nuke a country, what would happen? Anon doesn’t mention Nixon during the death throes of his presidency, when Schlessinger his SecDef was convinced Nixon really was at risk of going rogue and saying “Fuck it, let’s go blow up a country.”
Schlessinger quietly got word out that any such orders from Nixon were to be ignored.
I think Haldeman was already in jail by then. That would normally have been his job. Thank God Schlessinger did Haldeman’s job.
The critical decision was not to call the new decimal currency the pound. The pound was an option: Cyprus already had a decimalised pound, for example. But that option wasn’t taken.
As indeed it wasn’t taken in the other dominions. Canada, for example, went decimal and dollar in 1858. Decimal because My God, do you really want shillings and pence? And Dollar, because they’re next door to Dollarland.
Her Imperial Majesty wished her loyal dominion of Canada not to use the same name as Dollarland, and tried to make Canada call them royals instead. Which is a translation of the Spanish real, and which is also a suitably Imperial name for a currency.
Did not happen. Overruled by the otherwise loyal dominion’s legislature itself.
At the time Australian decimalisation was put forward, and the option of the pound wasn’t taken, Australia was in the torpor of 17 years of rule by arch monarchist Robert Menzies. Menzies thought that Canadian royal thing was an excellent idea, and wished to see it emulated.
We sneer now, we unruly latte-sipping Australian elites, at how forelock-tugging our antecedents were back then. But when Menzies’ successor Harold Holt tried to implement the royal, he got death threats. He backed down, and went with what Canada had gone with: the dollar. Shortly thereafter, so did New Zealand.
If i ever met someone from the Unicode technical committee again, I’m showing them this question, and yelling THIS! YOU MADE THIS HAPPEN!
For a look at this kind of thing done right (or at least, much more right), see Bliss Symbolics: Start . Being used by a whole lot of linguistically handicapped people.
From Sam Murray
Sam Murray’s answer to What are the best Phish songs?
If you are new to Phish, I highly recommend listening to the podcast Analyze Phish by Harris Wittels and Scott Aukerman. These two comedy writers argue about the merits of Phish, explore different songs, and relate them to various their artists. Harris Wittels died a few years ago from an overdose, but the gist of the podcast is him trying to convince Scott Aukerman to like Phish. The Earwolf link is here but you can also get it on iTunes.
Lots of links in your answer, Sarah, but I’ll start with the erudite explanation.