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Sesquipedalian #32
the SESQUIPEDALIAN Volume VII, No. 32
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Nelson Mandela jailed (1964) June 12, 1997
MAKING SENSE OUT OF NONSENSE
The Story of my Friend, Whose Colorless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously
by Y. R. Chao (after Noam Chomsky)
I have a friend who is always full of ideas, good ideas and
bad ideas, fine ideas and crude ideas, old ideas and new ideas. Before
putting his new ideas into practice, he usually sleeps over them to
let them mature and ripen. However, when he is in a hurry, he
sometimes puts his ideas into practice before they are quite ripe, in
other words, while they are still green. Some of his green ideas are
quite lively and colorful, but not always, some being quite plain and
colorless. When he remembers that some of his colorless ideas are
still too green to use, he will sleep over them, or let them sleep, as
he puts it. But some of those ideas may be mutually conflicting and
contradictory, and when they sleep together in the same night they get
into furious fights and turn the sleep into a nightmare. Thus my
friend often complains that his colorless green ideas sleep
furiously.
(1971)
-/-\-/ TRUE LINGUISTICS /-\-/-
-- STUCK SHIFT KEY POETRY: The following poem is excerpted from Lee
Leitner's "Viewpoint" column which is featured in a bimonthly
periodical for Prime INFORMATION users called INFOCUS magazine. The
original authors were Fred Bremmer and Steve Kroese of Calvin College
& Seminary of Grand Rapids, MI.
FYI - a "wahka" is the decidedly "proper" (by popular vote) name for
the characters ">" and "<." This is in spite of INFOCUS readers of
Denver who still refer to them as "Norkies." The Michigan crowd
apparently has corrupted the spelling to "waka."
To wit, it is -
"...a poem we think is about the lowly wahka. Maybe. Well,
perhaps--we're really not sure what the poem actually is
about. Here it goes:"
<>!*''#
^@`$$-
!*'$_
%*<>#4
&)../
|{~~SYSTEM HALTED
Transliterated:
Waka waka bang splat tick tick hash,
Caret at back-tick dollar dollar dash,
Bang splat tick dollar underscore,
Percent splat waka waka number four,
Ampersand right-paren dot dot slash,
Vertical-bar curly-bracket tilde tilde CRASH.
-/-\-/ MORE TRUE LINGUISTICS /-\-/-
DRINKING PHILOSOPHERS: Sandy Murphy and Udaya Shankar, two researchers
at the University of Maryland, recently received a reprint request for
their article "A note on the Drinking Philosophers Problem," published
in Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems.
Not too unusual, except that the request came from the
Research Institute on Alcoholism in Buffalo.
[rec.humor.funny archives]
-\-/-\ JOB ANNOUNCEMENTS \-/-\-
(REDUNDANCY NOTICE: For fuller listings of these and other jobs, don't
forget to check the Jobs binder in the Greenberg Room, and the file
'jobslist.txt' on the CSLI directory /user/linguistics.)
STAR LABS STUDENT RESEARCH ASSOCIATE: The SRI Speech Technology and
Research Laboratory has an immediate opening for a Student Research
Associate Student half time to fill a position for a new project on
"Modeling and Automatic Labeling of Hidden Word-Level Events in
Speech" funded by a joint initiative of the National Science
Foundation and other government agencies. The project involves the
automatic detection of linguistic events that structure spontaneous
speech, but are not overt in the word sequence, such as utterance
boundaries, disfluencies, and the identity of discourse markers. The
Student Associate is expected to contribute to this research by
participating in technical discussions, conducting experiments
involving speech data, and analyzing results. The student will be
supervised by project leaders Elizabeth Shriberg and Andreas Stolcke.
We are looking for a student with
* interest in spontaneous speech research.
* a research background in speech and/or natural language.
* familiarity with basic statistical methods. Some experience with
computational data modeling approaches (such as decision trees and neural
networks) would be a plus.
* good computer skills, especially good facility with UNIX text processing
and scripting tools. Programming in C would be a plus.
* good communication skills.
* enthusiasm, curiosity, and reliability.
The ideal candidate would be a graduate student in a related area who
might engage in this research as part of a long-term project. Start
date is Fall 1997. The student must be able to work on location at
SRI, although working hours are flexible and there is a possibility
for telecommuting.
Andreas Stolcke
SRI International, EJ135
333 Ravenswood Ave.
Menlo Park, CA 94025
mailto:stolcke@speech.sri.com
Tel: (415) 859-2544
FAX: (415) 859-5984
-- SONY: The Spoken Language Technology group at Sony Electronics in
San Jose has a part-time opening for a phonetic transcriber/speech
analyst. We are involved in the development of a speaker-independent
speech recognition technology, and have a large corpus of American
Enlgish speech data which requires detailed analysis and
transcription. If you are a student or recent graduate looking for a
chance to use your linguistics knowledge in the real world, this may
be the opportunity you are looking. This position is open IMMEDIATELY
and will continue until approximately August 30, 1997. This is
considered a part-time position, but you will be asked to work a
minimum of 30 hours per week. Work hours are flexible (usually
anytime Monday-Friday between 7:30 AM and 7:30 PM), but it is
anticipated that you will usually work a full 8-hour day. All work
will be performed on site at Sony Electronics, 3300 Zanker Road, San
Jose (about 2 miles south of highway 237).
Job Description: Phonetic transcribing of: 1) words in a list (broad
transcription) and 2) actual spoken words (narrow transcription) by
viewing waveforms and spectrograms displayed on a computer.
Abilities: Knowledge of IPA or other phonetic alphabets. Ability to
distinguish these sounds for various dialects of American English by
listening to recorded speech and viewing speech spectrograms.
Candidate must have some background regarding the acoustic and
phonetic properties of speech. Attention to detail, both visual and
aural. Basic computer ability. Actual experience listening to speech
to create phonetic transcriptions, and reading speech spectrograms and
waveforms is desirable.
To apply for this position, please e-mail or fax your resume
with relevant references to Lex Olorenshaw at Sony. If you have
further questions, please feel free to call.
Lex Olorenshaw
Spoken Language Technology
Sony U.S. Research Labs
Phone: 408.955.5846
Fax: 408.955.5180
mailto:lexo@lsi.sel.sony.com
(REDUNDANCY NOTICE: For fuller listings of these and other jobs, don't
forget to check the Jobs binder in the Greenberg Room, and the file
'jobslist.txt' on the CSLI directory /user/linguistics.)
-\-/-\ INSTA-PRIZE \-/-\-
-- ARE YOU REALLY A LINGUIST: Take this quiz to find out to what
degree you are cut out for this, um, exciting field (tip o' the
keyboard to the Edinburgh University Linguistics Society):
1.Linguistics is about:
(a) learning foreign languages.
(b) learning correct grammar.
(c) the systematic, scientific investigation of the nature of
language as a product of the human mind/brain.
(d) fonts.
(e) none of the above.
2.Which of these sentences is the worst?
(a) *This is the quiz my friend laughs while I do.
(b) I ain't got no prepositions what I can end me sentence
with.
(c) The horse raced by the barn fella past the Barn Fell and up
the next Fell fell, Phil.
(d) *Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
3.When you saw the asterisks in the last question, what did you do?
(a) Assumed native speaker intuitions had judged the
construction in question to be ungrammatical.
(b) Looked down the page for a footnote.
(c) Assumed the examples were reconstructed from an earlier
stage of the language.
(d) I always preferred Tintin, anyway.
4.What is Prof. Noam Chomsky most famous for?
(a) Un-American activities.
(b) Defining the key domains of investigation for a truly
scientific linguistic programme.
(c) Creating an oppressive orthodoxy of counterintuitive,
unscientific theoretical dogma.
(d) Writing the B-side of a single by top indie guitar band,
Bad Religion.
5.A colleague offers you a copy of Chomsky's latest linguistic work to
peruse. What do you do?
(a) Say, "Gnome what?"
(b) Refuse to even contemplate such specious formalist
nonsense.
(c) Eagerly accept and immediately read, analyse and believe
every word of it.
(d) Give a knowing, sceptical look and casually express an
interest. Then read, analyse and believe every word of it.
6.What does 'GB' stand for?
(a) Great Britain
(b) Golf Bag
(c) Gyles Brandreth
(d) Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti
(d) Principles and Parameters
7.What does 'IPA' stand for?
(a) International Phonetic Alphabet
(b) International Phonetic Association
(c) Inflectional Phrasal Argument
(d) Infernal Police Agency
(e) India Pale Ale
8.Which of the following is the most appropriate analogy for human
language?
(a) a biological organ, like the heart or lungs
(b) a code for passing messages
(c) a bottlebrush
(d) a 3-course meal
9.Your friend, who studies Physics, is telling you about his/her
research. Do you...
(a) invite the boring little toad to shut up?
(b) discuss enthusiastically, using phrases like "As a fellow
scientist..." as often as possible?
(c) listen, then offer an incisive critique of his/her
methodology and reasoning?
(d) as (b), all the time desperately hoping you won't reveal
that you failed the Area II GER??
(e) take data for your own research?
10.Given a regular salary, research grant or funding at the expense of
the taxpayer or your parents, with what luxury good would you
indulge yourself?
(a) chocolate
(b) cable TV
(c) a haircut and a new razor
(d) noodles
(e) baby carrots
11.How much is a cup of filter coffee in the Linguistics department
kitchen?
(a) Free.
(b) Well, it is free isn't it?
(c) What? Oh. Er, about, what, a nickel? ten cents?
(d) 25 cents.
(e) Free, just like everything else in the department.
12.Approximately how many languages are there in the world?
(a) c. 4000
(b) c. 5000
(c) Probably somewhere between 5-6 thousand, of which
approximately 50% are OV and 50% VO.
(d) The question is irrelevant.
(e) What do you mean by that?
13.Which of the following are branches of linguistics? Choose as many
as you like.
(i) Syntax
(ii) Phonology
(iii) Psychology
(iv) Biology
(v) Phonetics
(vi) Phrenology
(vii) Semantics
(viii) Sociology
(ix) Psychiatry
(x) Ethnomusicology
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So long, and thanks for all the ghoti
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