Diacritiques

We’re way behind schedule as indicated on various election guides/cheat sheets. Not that I feel like going to bed. Still, why is it that the US with all their high-brow electoral technology (optical scanners at least, voting computers in many cases), which ought to give instant readouts as soon as the polls close, take at as long to report results as those of us that use pen and paper, or even pen-less paper-only ballots?

The big US election day is, where I live, technically over, and the first states are about to close their polling stations. This is about the worst day it could have happened: my ADSL connection is down and has been for over ten hours now. DSLAM non joignable (unreachable) says my ISP’s network status page. So I languish on a lame 33K dialup connection; at least it’s supposedly free of charge, since it’s the ISP’s emercency connection for their ADSL customers. Worse, I had to boot into the Win98 partition, because I never bothered to set up and configure the modem on Linux, not to mention the fact that I don’t remember the dialup password. Of course, by now I could easily have fixed this, but I’ve never experienced a connection downtime that prolonged before. It is analogous to the old problem of whether to walk or to wait for the bus: if the wait takes too long you would been faster on foot; but once you realize this, it’s too late and you had better wait it out till the bus finally arrives.

The logs for this blog tell me that the greater part of its readers — not an absolute or overwhelming majority, but a majority none the less — are located in the USA. So you know whom I’m addressing when I say that I hope you did, in fact, vote (or will, for those living nearer to the west coast).  read the post »

… to birthday girl Lisa (in German), my niece, who is six today.

I haven’t been able to see her in years, which makes me sad (except for today, of course). On the pictures I’ve been getting, she looks joyful and boisterous, and I am just happy about that .

First of all, I was right, and so was caelestis at (or le?) sauvage noble: the mystery language is Romansh. It is interesting to look at the differences between our approaches. Caelestis writes in his comment section: For the record, I should state that all I went on was the MP3, the exercise having […]

Which file extension are you? I’m an .rpm: You have a nice package. You can be useful, but your many variations sometimes make you tough to find. You aren’t apt to get jealous. Surprisingly accurate for such a random collection of questions. The only problem with it, I’m using Debian Linux, so .deb would […]

This is a reply to Mark Liberman’s challenge to a) guess the language on a recording and b) transcribe it. I’ve never transcribed anything but English, and this more often into phonemes than phonetically (ie, writing down actual heard sounds, which is much more difficult). Even though I’m not a card-carrying linguist (but seriously thinking […]

On Language Log, Geoffrey Pullum links to an mp3 audio clip from Slate Magazine, in which John Kerry, visiting Haiti while campaigning, speaks a few words of French. According to Prof. Pullum, Kerry’s French is “atrocious”. Well, I have to disagree respectfully. Sure, the Mr Kerry on this clip doesn’t come up to the ankles […]

I have long wanted to learn another language or two. Apart from the obvious choices (Arabic, Russian, Hindi, Japanese), I have been particularly attracted to the idea of learning a Celtic language (Welsh, in particular) and an African one (thinking of Wolof, Bambara or Soninké). Today, I had a stroke of luck on this front: Suw […]

Bloggers, this seems to be an emerging tradition, do some navel-gazing once in a while. Why do I blog? What do I blog? Where does blogging lead me? Who reads me? I have tried to avoid this, which I find difficult because I tend to do a lot of this sort of introspection. Still, I […]

Slowly emerging from my recent bout of thought and writing stupor, I am pointing out this post by Mark Liberman on Language Log only because it reminds me of some of my teenage musings: why it is that we leaf backwards towards the front of the book (while reading forwards to reach its back cover, […]