Sarah Allen's Weblog

words, bullet points, semantic capitalism

I recently discovered that the infamous The Gettysburg Powerpoint Presentation was created by Peter Norvig and enjoyed reading the story of its making.

On the other side of the spectrum, Cliff Atkinson explores using this medium effectively. He recently interviewed Dale Cyphert who suggests that perhaps PowerPoint is a symptom of a cultural transition period from traditional Western "oratory" and a new global "media-age." I would like to believe that we can blend the old and the new in effective ways, but I question whether PowerPoint will get us there. Nevertheless, I haven't read Cliff's book and I have been known to use PowerPoint for presentations myself.

Dale Cyphert notes that corporations "have now discovered 'stakeholder relationships' and 'tacit knowledge' and 'narratives to communicate a vision' and are finding that these rhetorical methods are far more effective in creating viable decision-making communities, or as they like to call them, 'learning organizations.'" I'm not sure what all this words mean, but its interesting to think that our corporate communications have some cultural significance.

Christophe Bruno brings a different form of narrative, poetry, to a new medium with his Google Ad Words Happening. He has discovered that the "word 'sex' is worth $3,837, the word 'art' $410, 'net art' is only $0.05 (prices on the 11 of April 2002). And the most expensive word is 'free'!" It seems to me that the notion of "semantic capitalism" could also apply to PowerPoint.

language transformation

I wonder how you say 'jet lag' in Italian. There should be a more beautiful word to describe why I am awake at this hour of glittering sunlight in a quiet city of red tile roofs and wrought iron balconies. I listen to conversations that sound foreign, yet familar, filtered through my understanding of Spanish, rather than any true grasp of Italian. It seems an odd translation. Not one of language, but it feels instead like a shift through a spatial transformation matrix, as if all languages could be visualized as surfaces in some n-dimensional space.

John Perry Barlow

Barlow's new blog is celebrated in song. In the gutter of his blog, in his "related stuff" playlist, you can hear Haley Suitt introducing this wonderful new addition to the blogosphere.

"John Perry Barlow is a retired Wyoming cattle rancher, a former lyricist for the Grateful Dead, and co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation." (this and more on his EFF home page)

I enjoyed listening to "Reimagining the Public Domain" from his "Appearances" playlist. He talks about ideas as a lifeform, the importance of language and metaphor, and his opposition to the use of the word "content." Content requires a container. Thought has no container. Since I've personally been involved in the creation of various software containers, I've often felt uneasy with the prevailing terminology. Barlow describes the naming of content as "taking that which is immaterial, namely expression and thought, and turning it into a commercial product like a toaster."

"Information and expression is a verb and not a noun."

"The internet is not a medium it is an environment"

... the right to know is a corollary of freedom of speech ...

"we need to preserve the right to be known, the ability of the idea to circulate."

If you want to express yourself via MP3 in cyberspace, you can set up your own SoundBlox (free for non-commercial use).

Language for Math

"The language most bilingual people use to mentally solve math problems isn't necessarily their native language or even the language that is most prevalent in their environment. Psychological research shows it's the language in which they were first taught math" -- Mental Math Dependant On Language, Researchers Find

This interesting article discusses implications for bilingual instruction. Its been a while since I spoke a foreign language. I don't remember translating simple Math problems into English in my head, but maybe I did. Lately I've been playing a kids game that requires me to do a lot of addition and subtraction like 2400 + 2500 - 1450. Since my opponent (who has trouble with such large numbers) often dictates these math problems to me, I have become acutely aware of how I often translate into numeric digits arranged in collumns or scattered patterns in coming up with the answer. I'm not sure I do math in English at all, but rather in diagrams, pictures, digits and symbols.

anonymous programming

I often think about programming as an exercise in naming. By naming functions and objects we can use them elsewhere. Defining a term gives you the power to create other more interesting verbs and nouns. Eventually we provide an end-user with a complex or simple vocabulary composed of mouse gestures or type-written characters.

I'm used to object-oriented programming in C++ or Java. Both languages are driven by procedural code. Objects are created in a series of statements. Everything has a name, even temporary variables, loop iterators, and transient objects that are created to support other objects. I generally have a hatful of conventions which spares me from having to think too much about unimportant names.

Lately I've been working with a declarative object-oriented language (LZX from Laszlo Systems). Objects are created within an XML hierarchy. Many objects that appear on the screen or control other objects are anonymous. I only create names for objects when I need to reference them. It turns out that most objects don't need names.

Since I have gotten used to this unusual declarative style of programming I have found it refreshingly easy to whip up a graphical user interface. Its not that I ever thought that Javascript or even C++ was that hard, despite some cumbersome or awkward aspects of each language. Sometimes, it can be challenging to create software. I didn't ascribe that difficulty to the language itself, but rather to the solving of a particular problem.

LZX allows you to mix in Javascript. Where it is more appropriate to solve a problem with procedural code, you can define methods or include a snippet of Javascript to handle an event. Recently I solved a few problems by writing quite a bit of Javascript. I reflected on why it feels so much easier to declare a program with XML tags, depite the seemingly verbose syntax. Part of the ease of declarative XML is that common patterns are encapsulated in tags, but I think there is more to it than that. It seems that there is a certain intellectual overhead in creating even boilerplate names for transient variables. For me this was an unexpected observation.

parrots and abstract thought

Irene Pepperberg challenges the idea that the capacity for language and abstract thought is unique to primates. "If one starts with a brain of a certain complexity and gives it enough social and ecological support, that brain will develop at least the building blocks of a complex communication system."

THAT DAMN BIRD: A Talk with Irene Pepperberg provides an entertaining and thought-provoking review of her grey parrot studies and related research. I found particularly interesting a discussion of how playing with toys in physical space relates to the development of language. This has been studied in human children, chimpanzees, and grey parrots.

In the 1970s, [Patricia] Greenfield looked at young children and found that at the time they start serially and hierarchically stacking toys like cups and rings in perfect order, they also start combining their labels in somewhat regular syntactic patterns; that is, they begin to produce phrases like "Want cookie," or "Want more milk."

Greenfield argued at the time that these capabilities were unique to humans. Since then similar behavior has been observed in other primates and in grey parrots. It struck me as surprising, yet obvious, that both words and actions are reflective of abstract thought. Play is gestural language.

the shape of ideas

It must be interesting to have synesthesia. I enjoyed the vivid descriptions of this phenomenon in reading Blue Cats and Chartreuse Kittens: How Synesthetes Color Their Worlds.

My words and sounds lack texture and color, except through the effort of imagination. I do, however, feel the shape of ideas. As a software engineer, people have often told me that I must have an aptitude for logic and mathematics. I do enjoy math, but it didn't come easily to me. For me, math is a language like Spanish or Java. Software is kinetic sculpture.

Bits flow through data structures and algorithms like water over rapids or a fountain. Data has texture and color that is only occasionally tied to its human representation. Code can take on elegant organic forms or sleek, polished edges. Old code can get crusty and brittle or retain the fragile beauty of Venetian glass. Some code is lumpy like oatmeal or spiky, like pine cones. Sometimes it hangs together like some bad knock-off of a Rube Goldberg machine and its hard to believe that it works, yet it does. It is delightful when it is soft and supple -- writing a new module is like adding a partner to the dance.

When the software doesn't work quite right, I can sometimes see the flaw in my minds eye, hiding in a fold of fabric or obscured by a shiny bronze gear. Like a potter at the wheel I smooth the rough edges. Mixed metaphors are natural as I work in the n-dimensional space that is my innate conception of what may be several hundred thousand lines of code.

the history of the letter 'C'

> My five year old son asks:
> Why did they invent the letter C, when it makes the sounds of K and S?

It sure does make it tough to play "I Spy." In seeking an answer to this question, I first searched google and found Jakob Nielsen Declares the Letter "C" Unusable. A great article, but not exactly what I was looking for. Then I chanced to read danah's capitalization rules where Andrew Cone had left a link to an interesting discussion.

Only on the internet could I fulfill such random curiosity with such convenience. While waiting for paper mache to dry I submitted the question to the "Ask A Linguist" list.

In case anyone else is curious, I've compiled a few highlights from the responses I received....

The short answer

Originally, C spelled the sound /g/. But, with some help from the Etruscans, the Romans got into a bit of a tangle here, and they wound up using C to spell both the sound /g/ and the sound /k/, while they hardly used the letter K at all. Eventually, realizing this was a bad idea, they invented a new letter, G, to spell the sound /g/, and they then used C exclusively to spell the sound /k/.

This was the system borrowed from the Romans by the Anglo-Saxons. Originally C spelled only /k/ in Old English. But then the pronunciation of English changed. (Larry Trask)

Another important consideration

"'c' is often used (though not always) for roots whose pronunciation alternates between [s] and [k]. think of 'public' vs. 'publicity'. If we spelled the first 'publik' and the second 'publisity' we wouldn't be able to see the relationship between the two words as easily." (Susan Fisher)

A longer story
(this might make a good children's book if it had pictures)

"That's a very good question, and the answer is that it didn't always make those sounds. See, the language we speak has changed over the centuries, as all languages do. And writing -- which is different from talking, changes too, though much more slowly.

The letter C wasn't invented for English. It was invented several thousand years ago to write down the sounds of Phoenician, a language related to Hebrew and Arabic. At the time, the letter was called "gamel" or something like that, which means 'camel' (see the C?). It represented the G sound (the letter G was invented later, by the Romans).

Later on the Greeks started using the Phoenician alphabet and they used the letter to represent the G sound, too. Not having any camels, they called it "gamma"; the K sound was represented by the letter K, called "kappa". And later still, people in Italy used it, but they didn't have a G sound, so they used it for the K sound.

The Romans eventually wound up using this alphabet, with the letter C standing for the K sound, but they did have a G sound, so they put a little jot on the C and made it a G (they didn't use the letter K, except for words they borrowed from Greek)." (John Lawler)

"In the Norman French era, "C" was pronounced "S" before the letters "I,E,(Y)", and otherwise "K", After William the Conquerer captured England in 1066, English borrowed a lot of French words with French spellings, so "C" became a letter with two sounds. English also had words like "king, keep" where /k/ was pronounced before /e,i/, so the Greek letter "K" was reintroduced to keep things straight (more or less)." (Elizabeth J. Pyatt)

Many thanks to those fine linguists who helped me understand the interesting history of the letter C, and it's relatives K and G:
Susan Fischer, NTID/RIT
John Lawler, U Michigan Linguistics Dept
Herb Stahlke, Ball State University
Larry Trask, University of Sussex
Mike Hammond
Elizabeth J. Pyatt, Ph.D., Penn State University
Anthea Fraser GUPTA,University of Leeds

My original question and all follow-up answers are archived at "Ask A Linguist"

I still wonder... how do we know how people pronounced words thousands of years ago? were there ancient linguists who recorded their observations?