mind your [t]s and [ʔ]s

this is a few days old, coming from this past weekend's National Spelling Bee.  ah, America.  home of the only language in the world that actually creates a need for spelling bees (as far as i know), and word final glottalization of vowels.

Erin Andrews and numbnuts?  youtube gold.

WTF, Cupertino???

i have just stumbled upon a most peculiar Cupertino effect trap.  i am writing a paper for my phonology ii class on raddoppiamento in Italian.  it's a continuation of some previous work that i did last semester.  when writing my previous paper, i was running Mac OS X 10.4.  the system-wide spellchecker had no clue what this big, long, Italian word was, and offered up no possible corrections.  to avoid lots of little red underlines, i added the word to the dictionary and went merrily on my way.  since then i suffered a hard drive failure, which had two consequences: 1) the dictionary "forgot" that raddoppiamento is a word, as far as i'm concerned and 2) i've upgraded to Mac OS X 10.5.  no problem, i just have to re-teach the dictionary the word.

and that's when this happened:

whaaaaaaaaat?  where did that "d" come from??  i fired up dictionary.app (which presumably is the same dictionary resource used by the spellchecker) and, no surprise, raddoppiamdento is decidedly not in the dictionary either.  nor, as far as i can tell, is any substring that would fool the spelling suggestions algorithm (which i know for a fact does sometimes produce novel suggestions, especially when two words are accidentally conjoined) into thinking that raddoppiamdento was not only a possibility, but in fact preferable to raddoppiamento.

just for confirmation that i wasn't going crazy, i turned to Google, which seems to know which is the real word and which is the imposter (what the hell is going on, imposter just got flagged, despite the fact that dictionary.app gives both imposter and impostor):

um, yes?

if anyone has any hypothesis whatsoever as to what the great "improvement" Apple made to its spellchecker algorithm such that it produces these shenanigans, please leave a comment.

take that, ZYZZYVAS!

zzyzx originally uploaded by brhino!

credit to my friend Brian, who found this sign on his road trip back to the west coast and snapped the picture. i almost have to believe that whoever named this "road" did so solely to make sure that it was dead last alphabetically. and it certainly beats out ZYZZYVAS, the alphabetically last entry in the Scrabble OWL4. and it actually has a semi-practical pronunciation...at least i would say [ˈzɪz.ɪks].

so i guess this gives an answer to the old "what's in a name?" question: whatever orthographic folly you want, if all you're naming is a dirt path in the middle of nowhere.

[update: sigh, i guess there's a wealth more of information on this place, as well as a number of other things inspired by the name. and it's not pronounced how i thought either, although i think the actual pronunciation goes somewhat against my orthography-phonology intuitions (although admittedly, English is just completely screwed up and such intuitions generally mean very little). ah well.]

literecy cat ≠ linguist cat

the lolcats phenomenon is ridiculous, if not a bit amusing. (i think the real reason i enjoy it is because it pokes fun at those people who take photos of their cats and post them to flickr ad nauseam.) recently the phraseology of lolcats has been noticed by linguists, and it's been asked whether there is an actual rule-based lolcat dialect, and therefore, sentences which are ungrammatical in lolcat. i think this is true, even if the rules were historically derived from snowclones. there are morphological changes, such as simplification of the paradigm of have (has is used in for all persons and numbers). there are syntactic changes, including modifications to the ways that modals combine with predicates (i can has X, i is be Y, etc.). so i was all ready to conclude that yes, cats can has grammar, when this appears on I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER, the canonical lolcats site:


dammit! here i am, ready to call lolcat a real, if contrived, dialect of English, and this guy has to go fly in the face of it. things that are wrong with it:

it doesn't know what grammar is. the sentence "Literacy Cat is amazed at your perfect grammar" is itself a perfectly grammatical sentence of standard English. deliberate misspellings have been conflated with ungrammaticality.
it enforces the concept of a standard. even though it doesn't say so explicitly, it implies that lolcat is "not perfect" and therefore stigmatizes it. (please though, don't take this as an endorsement that should there be people out there actually speaking lolcat that we shouldn't stigmatize them. there are no native speakers of this dialect, and deliberately invented dialects shouldn't have equal status as native dialects. it's just the principle of the matter.)
literacy is not language. everyone in the world, with a handful of exceptions, can and does speak a language. most of the world cannot read or write. i guess literacy cat really isn't qualified to be making linguistic generalizations. it's just that no one else realized that. and that is be my problem with stuff like this.

ohi:yoˀ update

an update to my previous post. on my return drive from Ithaca i saw more signs with IPA-looking stuff. besides the signs at river crossings, there were ones notifying me that i was entering the Allegany Indian Reservation of the Seneca Nation. turns out that the signs below are actually just printed in the Seneca language. Seneca has a fairly small set of phonemes, all of which are present in English except for contrastive long vowels and nasal vowels.

apparently since Seneca had no native orthography (that is my conjecture, i don't know that for certain), a slightly modified IPA became its de facto writing system. i'll leave commenting on that process to the socio-historical linguists.