ozarque
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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in the "ozarque" journal:[<< Previous 20 entries]
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09:05 am
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Book review: The Horse Boy...
The Horse Boy: A Father's Quest to Heal His Son, by Rupert Isaacson; New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2009. ISBN-13:978-1-61523-575-9. Paperback edition; 357 pages; 16 pages of color photographs.
This book was in my Christmas gift basket from my oldest daughter and her family, and I recommend it with my whole heart; it's a wonderful book. It tells the story of Rupert Isaacson, his wife Kristin, his autistic son Rowan, and a whole cast of other characters, who go on an incredible journey together. The word "quest" is exactly the right word.
There's an intricate plotline about horses and the relationships between people and horses, that I found deeply interesting and totally convincing. I've never ridden horses -- a mule, but never horses -- which means that if this plotline isn't accurate I would have no way of knowing, but I was completely convinced.
There's a plotline about the family's trip through Outer Mongolia, first by air, then in an unreliable van, and then days on horseback. If the book had had only this story arc it would have held my interest from beginning to end; Isaacson's descriptions of the landscapes and weather, the troubles and complications, the crew of helpers (and a camera crew as well), are riveting. This man can really write; he makes you see and hear and taste and feel every mile and every experience as if you were right there with him.
There's a plotline about the shamans that Rowan's parents hoped would be able to help their son -- with detailed descriptions of their rituals and ceremonies. And then, on pp. 348-349, Isaacson writes:
"Rowan is still autistic -- his essence, his many talents, are all tied up with it. He has been healed of the terrible dysfunctions that afflicted him -- his physical and emotional incontinence, his neurological firestorms, his anxiety and hyperactivity. But he has not been cured. Nor would I want him to be. To 'cure' him, in terms of trying to tear the autism out, now seems to me completely wrong. Why can't he exist between the worlds, with a foot in both, as many neurotypical people do? Think of immigrants to the United States, living with one foot in their home language and culture, the other in the West, walking in two worlds. It is a rich place to be. Can Rowan keep learning the skills necessary to swim in our world while retaining the magic of his own? It seems a tangible dream."
And at the book's end Isaacson is making arrangements to take Rowan to the Kalahari, as one of the shamans they consulted in Mongolia told him he must do. I hope this means there will be a book about that journey as well.
I feel privileged to have had the opportunity to read this magnificent book.
Tags: book review
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08:57 am
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Na'vi language -- partial description...
Sorry about that -- I intended to post that to the Conlang Community page. However, since some of you may be interested in seeing a partial description of the Na'vi language from Avatar, I won't delete it.
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08:51 am
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Na'vi language -- partial description...
I don't know what's going on with the links I just posted -- they worked yesterday, but today they return only 404s. However, if you go to Google and type -- "Some highlights of Na'vi" Language Log -- in the search box you can get to the article.
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07:45 am
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Southern manners...
For a while in the 1980s, before the epidemic of Dumbing Down The Magazines began, there was a wonderful magazine called Southern. I was sorry when that one folded. The item below is on page 74 of "Charleston Through a Child's Eyes," by William Price Fox, on pp. 73-74 of the March 1987 issue.
"One of the better walking-around stories about the old town concerns an elderly pair of sisters who had fallen on lean times. Despite their circumstances, they insisted on telling everyone that they were still summering in Paris. At night, they would slip out of their shuttered home and take their constitutional along the Battery. One night, a child recognized them and wanted to say hello. Her mother held her back, saying, 'No dear, we don't speak to them in the summertime. They're still in Paris.' If this isn't the story that William Allen White was referrring to when he said that 'Charleston is the most civilized town in the world,' it should have been."
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11:03 am
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BBC program on constructed languages...
I've just done a thirty-minute interview about LAadan for the BBC, as part of a segment they were doing on constructed languages; other guests on the segment included Arika Okrent, author of _In the Land of Invented Languages_, someone talking about Klingon, and perhaps a few more. The interview went very well; however, I have no idea how much of the thirty minutes will actually be used.
The show is called "Word of Mouth", and this episode goes out on 5 January at 16:00 [GMT]; you can also listen again for a week at the Radio 4 website which is http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4 .
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10:19 am
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Phoneme lists for the four ET languages...
It occurs to me that these might be useful for those of you who are interested...
Thandi
Phonemes:
/b/, /bh/, /p/, /ph/, /d/, /f/, /sh/, /zh/, /TH/, /th/, /g/, /gh/, /l/, /L/, /lh/, /r/, /m/, /n/, /ng/, /w/, /y/, /a/, /e/, /E/, /i/, /o/, /u/, /h/.
Lenadess
Phonemes:
/b/, /bh/, /p/, /ph/, /d/, /t/, /f/, /sh/, /s/, /zh/, /g/, /gh/, /l/, /L/, /lh/, /r/, /m/, /n/, /ng/, /w/, /y/, /a/, /e/, /E/, /i/, /o/, /u/, /h/.
Aubre
Phonemes:
/b/, /p/, /k/, /g/, /d/, /t/, /f/, /th/, /TH/, /sh/, /ch/, /zh/, /l/, /r/, /m/, /n/, /a/, /e/, /i/, /o/, /u/, /h/.
Nangdi
Phonemes:
/b/, /bh/, /p/, /ph/, /t/, /d/, /k/, /kh/, /q/, /’/, /g/, /gh/, /w/, /l/, /r/, /R/, /m/, /n/, /ng/, /th/, /TH/, /sh/, /a/, /ae/, /e/, /E/, /i/, /I/, /o/, /u/, /oy/, /h/; three tones -- high, low, and falling.
Tags: et languages
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03:13 pm
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The Swadesh [core vocabulary] lists
The Swadesh lists for the four languages in the new U.S. Corps of Linguists novel are now at my SFWA website. The link to the lists is at the end of the first Announcement, at http://www.sfwa.org/members/elgin/Announcements.html .
If you have comments or questions, just respond to this post.
Tags: et languages
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09:03 am
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Personal note; two quick updates; postscript...
The shawl pattern is now posted at http://community.livejournal.com/crochetcrochet/1138498.html .
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08:36 am
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Personal note; two quick updates...
1. I wanted to let you know that back in November I finished the core vocabulary lists for the four ET languages that some of you were interested in, but that I haven't been able to reach my SFWA webperson to get them posted at my website. I'm working on that problem and assume that it will be straightened out soon.
2. This is truly off-topic; still, I wanted to tell you about it. The past two winters I've had to wear extra layers of clothing to stay warm, and this winter has been cold enough that I've had no luck keeping the temperature in our house at the 70 degrees it takes for elderly-lady comfort. But this year, because I serendipitously stumbled over a pattern for a Magic Shawl, I've been comfortable without any need for extra layers, even with the house at only 68 degrees most of the time. I don't understand why this particular shawl is magically warm, but I can vouch for the fact that it is. So I'm going to post the pattern for that shawl at the crochetcrochet community page, in case any of you might want to make one for yourself. Once that's done, I'll post the link for the pattern here.
This, I can do without any help from my SFWA webperson.
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08:34 am
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Living underground...
This underground house of ours continues to amaze me. It was 18 degrees outside at six o'clock this morning when we got up. But inside our house -- despite the fact that we have no heat source in here at all at night -- it was 64 degrees. And when we turned on our electric space heater, it went up to 66 degrees in only twenty minutes.
All summer long, heat is stored in the earth and stone around our house and in its concrete walls; then when winter comes, that heat is released into our house. Because we had almost no real heat this past summer -- we had a plague of thunderstorms and gloom, day after day and night after night -- I wondered if it would be colder in here this winter than it usually is. But it hasn't turned out that way. The first day that we had to turn on the space heater didn't come along until October 23rd. And well into late November, I was able to open the house to the outdoors -- which means opening the front door and all the screened windows on the front porch -- for a few hours around noon almost every day.
I had always said that it would never get below 59 degrees in here, no matter how cold it got outside. Last year, in the January ice storm when we had a five-day power outage, I found out that that wasn't true. Ordinarily in the wintertime our lights are on all day long and late into the evening in all the rooms; ordinarily we use our oven -- which has electric ignition -- often for cooking. Ordinarily we have two tiny space heaters that we run in the bathroom and the room where our computers are when those rooms are in use. Ordinarily the thirty gallons of hot water in our water heater are giving off heat around the clock.
Our little generator -- the one we've now replaced with a much larger unit -- wasn't powerful enough to do all of that; it wasn't powerful enough to run the oven or the hot water heater at all. And it not only was 55 degrees in here every morning, it never got warmer than 56 degrees inside, even with the big space heater running. Still, there was nothing ordinary about that ice storm, with its three consecutive days and nights of nonstop sleet. It seems to me that for this house to have maintained 55/56 degrees through all that was pretty amazing.
And of course it works the other way round as well. The earth and stone and concrete walls store the winter's cold as well, and then release it into the house. We don't need our air conditioning until months after people living above ground have had to turn theirs on.
I can enthusiastically recommend living underground. Not that there aren't adjustments you have to make; there are. But an underground house is a marvelous device.
Tags: living underground
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09:16 am
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Eldering; winter holidays ahead...
One of the things that goes with eldering is that everything you do -- even things you've been doing for so many years that you could practically do them in your sleep -- starts taking much longer to do than it ever has before. It's frustrating, and infuriating, and you keep thinking that if you'd just put your mind to it you could do things faster .... but you learn that that's false.
The reason I'm bringing this up isn't because I think it will come as a revelation to any of you. I'm bringing it up because starting tomorrow I'm going to be up to my eyebrows in getting ready for Christmas. Putting up the Christmas tree. Trimming the Christmas tree. Writing and addressing the Christmas cards and Christmas checks. Making the fruitcake. Making the handcrafted presents. Wrapping the presents. Putting the local presents under the tree, and getting the nonlocal ones off in the mail in time. Cleaning the house. Doing the last-minute Christmas shopping. Making the grocery list for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. Cooking the Christmas dinner. Fixing the Christmas Eve buffet. And the most important task of all: Writing the To Do lists, where all of these things get scheduled, and without which I would be helpless.
Usually we don't put up the Christmas tree until December 1st, but this year -- because George has discovered that everything he does takes him much longer now -- he has decided to get started early, and will be putting up the tree tomorrow instead. I won't be trimming it tomorrow, because tomorrow is my day off, but I will hit the ground running [slowly] on Monday.
Everything has side effects, and a side effect of all this is that I'm not going to have much time for posting here at Live Journal. I wanted to let you know. In preparation for that, here are URLs for some of my Christmas posts from years past:
Photo of our 2007 Christmas tree -- at http://ozarque.livejournal.com/476923.html .
Compiled list of Christmas links -- to holiday filksongs, holiday recipes [including that fruitcake], holiday poems, and posts about the handcrafted Christmas gifts I make -- at http://ozarque.livejournal.com/561560.html .
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08:27 am
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Linguistics; ET languages...
I'll be following your excellent suggestions and stashing the Swadesh [core vocabulary] lists for the four ET languages in my new novel on my SFWA website, so that those of you who are interested can see them and discuss them.
It will take me a while to get the material in order for posting; and then it will take a while for the SFWA webtech to post it. As soon as that's done, I'll post the URLs here.
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Nonfiction online: "How Verbal Self-Defense Works" at http://people.howstuffworks.com/vsd.htm ; "Why Are Old Women Older Than Old Men And How Can We Fix That?" at http://www.seniorwomen.com/articles/articlesElginOld.html ; Religious Language Newsletter archive at http://www.forlovingkindness.org ; Fiction online: "We Have Always Spoken Panglish" at http://www.sfwa.org/members/elgin/Story-Panglish.html ; "What The EPA Don't Know Won't Hurt Them" at http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/epa.htm ; "Weather Bulletin" at http://www.sfwa.org/members/elgin/Weather.html ; "A Quorum Of Grandmothers" at http://www.sfwa.org/members/elgin/QuorumOfGrandmothers.html ; The Communipaths at http://www.jackiepowers.com/SuzetteHadenElgin/TheCommunipaths.html . More stuff at http://www.sfwa.org/members/elgin/SiteMap.html ; LiveJournal blog index at http://www.livejournal.com/tools/memories.bml?user=ozarque ; Art Gallery at
http://www.bysuzettehadenelgin.com .
Tags: writing science fiction
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08:45 am
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Writing science fiction; the new novel...
You may or may not remember the novel I'm working on now, which has a U.S. Corps of Linguist candidate -- who has failed three of her final exams -- ordered to do a penalty monograph on the grammars of four previously unstudied ET languages. [First page, draft 17, is at http://ozarque.livejournal.com/621925.html .]
Which means that I've had to spend this past week doing the following:
1. Thumbnail sketches of each of the four languages.
2. Phoneme lists for each of the four languages. [That is, the list of meaningful sounds].
3. Swadesh lists for each of the four languages. [That is, the core vocabulary list of roughly 100 words that the linguist would use to start her fieldwork.]
These three things have to be done before I can do the plotting, and they take a lot of time. And of course, for a linguist they're mind-candy. I'll be sorry when I've finished doing them.
No title yet. Not even a glimmer of an idea for a title.
Tags: writing science fiction
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07:57 am
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Personal note; thank you...
Many thanks for all the birthday wishes! I appreciate them very much.
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08:46 am
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Poem; "Foundling"...
Foundling
It was a surprise:
finding a tiny cherub,
sucking its small thumb,
out on our doorstep
in a white wicker basket.
It was a puzzle.
How do you do it?
How do you raise a cherub?
Do you tie it down?
What do you feed it?
Can it fly now, right away,
or does it first crawl
and then walk, then fly?
Is it a boy, or a girl,
or something other?
Can it learn English?
Is it hard-wired for language?
How do we begin?
Do we report it?
And if so, who do we call --
a social worker,
or perhaps a priest?
Can humans keep a cherub
left on their doorstep?
We don't even know
if it would ever grow up
into an angel.
Tags: poem
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09:13 am
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Personal note; a very strange day...
This past Thursday was as strange a day as I've ever spent in my life...
After last January's humungous ice storm [see http://ozarque.livejournal.com/573430.html and http://ozarque.livejournal.com/573613.html ], we immediately bought a much bigger and more powerful generator than the little one we'd had before. George put in a lot of advance time doing sub-assemblies so that he could hook it up more quickly, and that was wise of him. But getting it done meant that he had to turn off all the electric power to our house, which in turn meant that Sheba and I would have been without lights, water, heat, and bathroom facilities while he worked.
In a city, we'd just have rented a motel room for the day, but where we live there are only two motels and both of them are permanently rented by local workers. So that was not a possibility. He could have taken us to my daughter's place in Fayetteville, but that would have added four hours of driving to an already-long task. That made no sense. The obvious thing to do was for Sheba and I to spend the day at Michael's mobile home, right there on our property, with all the necessary mod cons. Bathrooms. Furnace. Refrigerator. Running water. And that is what we did.
George started the job at about nine a.m., and finished at two p.m. And Sheba and I were very comfortable. We had our lunch in the refrigerator, I had plenty of stuff to read, plus my PDA with all its games. We took one of Sheba's little beds, and some of her blankets and toys, and bowls of dry dog food and water. All was well.
But it was so very strange. To be in Michael's house, surrounded by a lot of his things, made it so very hard to believe that he is gone forever. So many places where I'd seen him, so many times; I knew it was irrational, but I kept feeling as though I'd look up and he'd be there.
I had worried that Sheba might spend the day hunting for Michael, because his scent was everywhere; that would have been hard for me to watch. It didn't happen. I lay on the couch and read, and she lay curled up beside me the whole time, tucked in under one of her blankets. She wasn't any more interested in exploring and searching than I was, and I was grateful for that.
It was the adult thing to do, and it's wonderful that we now have a generator that will let us run all the electric stuff at our place if we get power outages again this year. It's wonderful that George, who wired our place himself when it was built, knows all about working with electricity and could do the job on his own.
But I am so glad that day is over.
Tags: memoir
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10:29 am
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Recommended link; whistle language...
Recommended: "Shepherds Whistle While They Work And Brains Process Sounds As Language," at http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/01/050106112603.htm .
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07:27 am
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Linguistics; ET languages; your comments (4)...
In a comment, ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) maeveenroute asked two questions. First, this one:
"What feature would (or did, in your story) make rests qualitatively different?"
Here's an edited excerpt from "Honor Is Golden" [Analog, May 2004] where Oka -- one of the two USCOL linguists sent to analyze the Goldens' language -- is explaining things to the U.S. Senate, in a hearing:
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The Senator closest to her frowned, and rubbed at his forehead with the palm of his hand.
“I don’t get it, Professor,” he said, sounding cross. “All those sounds you’re talking about -- dishes breaking, cats meowing, and so on -- we have those sounds on Earth, right? But we know they’re just noises. How come it doesn’t work that way in -- what did you call it? Oh, yeah -- in Moth. How come it doesn’t work that way in Moth? How could it not work that way? I can’t imagine such a thing!”
“That’s exactly the point,” Oka said. “Human beings are hard-wired for human languages. We’re designed neurologically to recognize only certain things and combinations of things as languages, and we’re not able to imagine anything else qualifying. We have a whole universe of sounds around us, just as you say. The first thing we do, faced with all that data, is divide sounds into language and non-language. The next thing we do is divide the sounds that are language into vowels and consonants, and we can’t imagine there being something else that would be part of language. For the Goldens there is something else... that’s part of language in the same way that vowels and consonants are. There may be only one of those alien language-parts or there may be more than one; we have no way of knowing. ... Whatever they are, our brains are able to make the right division between language and nonlanguage -- presumably the reason we can do that much is because Moth is humanoid -- but that’s as far as we can go. Faced with all the sounds that are language on Golden, we can identify the vowels and the consonants, but we’re hopelessly lost with the others. Our brains keep trying, but they can’t do it, they just flounder around. Fortunately, I finally realized that that didn’t matter.”
A Senator leaned forward and opened his mouth to speak, but Oka raised her hand to stop him.
“Hang on just one minute, please, Senator,” she said. “I’m almost finished. ... You know how in music, when part of the melody is a silence of a certain size and shape, you use a symbol called a ‘rest’ to write that down? I was looking at a piece of music all full of rests, and I suddenly realized that we could handle the sequences of Moth that way. The other parts of the words are unquestionably stable, it’s only those non-vowel/non-consonant segments that human beings perceive as sometimes one thing, sometimes another. So I had the computer replace every last damned one of the mystery sounds with a pound sign -- there wasn’t a rest symbol on my keyboard -- and transcribe all the rest. ...”
“But if you do it that way,” asked the Senator she had put on hold before, “then how can you pronounce the words?”
“We can’t,” she said. “But it doesn’t matter. We’ll never be able to speak Moth -- it has sounds in it that aren’t possible as part of language for human beings, and we’ll never be able to learn them. But we can use the language to communicate, all the same. You wear your computer, you see, in the usual way, and the computer transcribes Moth as it’s spoken and prints it out for you. ... The same way native speakers of English can easily read written English that has misspellings in it or has coffee spilled on it, native speakers of Moth can read their own language even when it’s full of rests -- full of pound signs. It’s not elegant, and it’s not perfect, but it works.”
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The second question from maeveenroute was:
"What was the reviewer's problem with your rest phoneme? I mean, I just raised a point of clarification, but I can't think of anything serious enough to merit mention in a review, much less any kind of slamming."
I don't know the answer to that question because what the reviewer said was just "And Elgin's solution is rests! Well..... duh!" I'm an old lady, but I do know what that means. I'm sorry I can't give you a link to the review; it didn't strike me as something I needed to keep track of.
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08:59 am
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Linguistics; ET languages; your comments (3)...
I am guilty of having done a post here that could only have been understood by cybertelepaths. I had all the backstory for my new novel in my head, I had all my linguistics-stuff in my head, so I just went blithely along with that post as if you [youall] were similarly encumbered. I am greatly blessed that houseboatonstyx came to my rescue with a comment, and -- with that resource in hand -- I am going to do my best to straighten up the mess I made. Here's the first paragraph of the comment:
"If we're looking for sounds that would be PERCEIVED as something other than vowels or consonsonants or something along that continuum -- that's an issue about the perceivers, isn't it? If they've been trained that to be meaningful, a sound must be classified as v, c, or in between -- then won't anything that might be meaningful be stuck into one of those categories, whether it physiologically fits the physiological definition or not?"
Yes. Terran linguists listening to the speech of native speakers of an ET language are going to expect to hear vowels and consonants because that's what they've been trained to hear, and are going to sort the sounds they hear into those two categories for that reason. Only after the U.S. Corps of Linguists (USCOL) had accumulated a large database of ET sound-based languages that included vowels, consonants, and "something else" would it be possible to train them to identify and analyze that "something else." And my conviction is that that would take a very long time to happen.
And here's the next paragraph of the comment:
"Are we looking for sounds from the vocal tract that would be so different physiologically/phonetically that they COULD NOT be fitted into those v-c categories, even by a sort of legal fiction? But would somehow be clearly meaningful so that they COULD NOT simply be disregarded or somehow marginalized?"
Yes again. My Brethandi ETs -- because their anatomy is very different from the anatomy of the Terran cattle they so closely resemble to the casual eye -- are able to speak in a fashion comparable to Terran speech, although they of course have distinctive accents. [I knew that. So I did a cognitive SHAZAM-leap and took it for granted that you would know it too. Sheesh.] And my question was serious. Supposing one or more of the Brethandi languages was composed of three meaningful classes of sounds -- vowels, consonants, and something else -- then what, I wanted to know, could that something else possibly be?
One possibility turned up in a comment from kelsied:
"Consonants, vowels, and rests. As in music. The rhythmic and intentional interruption of consonants and vowels to modify their meaning."
That option -- musical rests -- is the one I used in my USCOL story "Honor Is Golden," published in Analog. [Not online anywhere, so far as I know.] It worked, to my satisfaction and my editor's, although I got slammed for it in a review. My linguists weren't able to isolate the rest-phonemes or work with them, but they were able to establish communication. Which was their primary goal.
I hope this clarifies things just a tad. If it doesn't, let me know and I'll try again.
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12:42 pm
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Linguistics; ET languages; your comments (2)...
The second batch of your comments I want to tackle -- about a possible "third class of meaningful sounds" in an ET language -- is those that propose various kinds of noises. The noises described in your comments included percussives [sounds that could be made with drums, rattles, and the like]; crackling; clicks; whistles; burps and belches; teeth-clicks; farts; squeaks; squeals; and more.
Those of you who've complained that I didn't define my terms -- neither "vowel" nor "consonant" -- are absolutely right, and I apologize. For me, vowels are speech sounds that are produced without any obstruction of the flow of air through the vocal tract; consonants are speech sounds for which that flow of air is obstructed in some fashion. That of course means that the vowel/consonant distinction has to be a continuum, not an either/or binary split. As pgdudda has pointed out, the English liquids [L and R] and the English glides [Y and W and H] are neither strictly vowels nor strictly consonants; they fall in between the two, somewhere on the continuum.
My opinion -- and it's only that, an opinion, since I've never encountered an ET language -- is that all of the varieties of noises proposed in your comments would be perceived by Terrans, and by Terran linguists, as falling somewhere on the vowel/consonant continuum; that is, as either vowel-like or consonant-like. I don't believe they would perceive the noises as a separate, third class of meaningful speech sounds.
I could be wrong about this. For sure.
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