pleasant and annoying

 
We need an adjective that means “simultaneously pleasant and annoying.”

I was planning to sleep until noon today but at 9 A.M. a bird perched in the boxthorn bushes outside my bedroom window and sang. Unusually liquid and loquacious was the song, full of vernal optimism and oblivious to the fragility of avian life.

“How utterly ___,” I exclaimed, lacking the necessary adjective.

Indigenous Tweets

 
Indigenous Tweets is a project to measure Twitter usage in minority and endangered languages. Here is an explanatory article and here is their blog.

William Rice Rode

 
I spotted a conlang-related sentence in New York Times coverage of the Outsider Art Fair: “William Rice Rode, a patient in an Illinois mental hospital around the turn of the last century, made extraordinary drawings of flying machines, people and text written in a self-invented language, on bed sheets; examples are on view at the Carl Hammer Gallery.”

See also the Carl Hammer Gallery website.

poll results

 
I see that Mac OS X and Linux are the most popular operating systems among people who read this blog and choose to respond to the silly polls. Good to know.

I’m the one who voted for Mac Classic. Even though I don’t use it any more, Mac OS 9.2.2 was my all-time favorite for its ‘look and feel.’ It seemed to hit the sweet spot of balance between technical and aesthetic criteria, for me. When I am sleepy I still sometimes catch myself trying to find the calculator up there in the Apple menu, or find myself groping for the list of currently running applications up there (gesturing nostalgically)…

my lamp also burning at midnight

 
I was staring (in amazement) at this English translation of one of Ryōta Oshima’s haiku last night:

Who is it that is awake,
the lamp still burning?
Cold rain at midnight.

and it occurred to me that this can morph into Esperanto fairly easily:

Kies lamp’ ankoraŭ brulas?
Malvarma pluvo noktomeze.

Hmm. Esperanto. It resurfaces in my mind when I least expect it.

Voynich Manuscript dated

 
The Voynich Manuscript, one of the strangest books on earth, appears to be older than everyone thought. It may be 600 years old.

The Gift of the Chicken

 
Hypothetical situation. Someone hands you a magazine article, ripped out of some unknown hardcopy magazine. The title of the article is The Gift of the Chicken. There are no illustrations.

What do you think the nature of the article is going to be?

(1) it's an essay about the benefits which chickens provide to humans

(2) it's a story about one chicken which some person gave to another person as a gift

(3) it's a fairy-tale about a gift which a chicken gave to some other animal

That’s the gift of the word “of”.

book giveaway

Update Okay, the book giveaway is over. Three books found new homes and three were unwanted.



These books were adopted:
Complete Enochian Dictionary by Laycock. Softcover.
Teach Yourself Welsh. Book and 2 CDs in plastic box.
Introduction to Pali by A K Warder. Hardcover, no dustjacket.

penthemeric

 
After reading Richard Hamblyn’s book The Invention of Clouds, which describes the life and times of the man who invented the cloud-classifying terms cirrus, stratus, cumulus and nimbus, I popped over to Google Books to look at some old weather-geek magazines.

In Symons’s Monthly Meteorological Magazine, February 1885, I found on page 8 a letter from J.H. Hill of Yorkshire announcing: “I have invented a Table of Rain which I call a Penthemeric Table, a term which explains itself.”

In a penthemeric table, rainfall amounts for the first five days of the month are added together and the sum is published as a single number. Then there is another number representing the next five days of the month, and so forth. This sort of table is more compact than a table listing the 30 or 31 days of the month separately, but gives more detail than a single number representing the whole month.

The word penthemeric seems to have vanished from the face of the earth after this one appearance in print. But I couldn’t help thinking there must be another word in English meaning “an interval of five days.” My first guess, quinquediurnal, only produced two Google hits.

And then by googling for definition ‘period of five days’ I came across the word pentad, which is widely used in connection with rainfall data.

So it seems that J.H. Hill’s idea of publishing rainfall amounts in five-day sums became popular, or perhaps it was independently re-invented elsewhere, but the word he/she coined failed to survive. How sad.

Physicists call for alien comm protocol

 
Three astrophysicists suggest creating a protocol for contacting aliens.

No need to re-invent the wheel. We mustn't forget that Hans Freudenthal made an excellent plan for handling this in his book Lincos: Design of a Language for Cosmic Intercourse (1960). The English Wikipedia article on Lincos is a bit crappier than the German article.

update: Holy cow, I just discovered that Lancelot Hogben devised a protocol for communicating with aliens called Astraglossa.

umtwrfa (days of the week)

 
For many years I have been interested in the topic of one-letter abbreviations for the days of the week. It's difficult to know what to do about Tuesday and Thursday, and Saturday and Sunday, since their first letters are not distinctive.

When I had to independently invent my own 7 abbreviations for a work-related task several years ago, I decided to use R for Thursday since the American R is the vowel in that word's first syllable here in the USA. My final system was MTWRFAU.

Googling around today I found various systems in use. There are "about 96" Google hits for UMTWRFA and 7 for MTWRFAU.

Some people use H for Thursday and/or use S for Sunday with A standing for Saturday. Google gives about 3100 hits for SMTWHFA.

MTWRF scores 29,600 hits and MTWHF gets 5,710. So at least we can agree that R must be the abbreviation for Thursday and those who prefer H are deviants.

This is an idea that rattles around in my head when I design conlang vocabularies: Shouldn't the words for the numerals 1 through 12 be in alphabetical order, so the names for days of the week and the months of the year could be self-sorting?

If your word for one is ban and your word for two is din and so forth, your days of the week could be bantag (Monday), dintag (Tuesday) etc and the abbreviations might be BDFJLMP or whatever.

But then your abbreviations for the first 7 months would easily be confused with your abbreviations for days of the week, so maybe that's not such a good idea.

And another thing. How long will mainstream calendar publishers cling to the custom of putting Sunday in the left-most column of the calendar? In modern Western Civilization, the weekend is a distinct cultural phenomenon that begins on Saturday morning (some would say Friday night) and ends late Sunday. Clearly Monday is the the beginning of the week; the weekend days belong together on the right-hand side of the calendar. In some industries (such as broadcasting) people use printed calendars which are organized that way. But good luck finding a rationally arranged calendar for home use.

Microsoft taunts Google with Esperanto comparison

 
In a fit of pique Microsoft has hurled a snarky insult at Google, satirically likening Google's WebM video codec to Esperanto. The story is at PCMag.com and CNET News among hundreds of other sites.

In fact this story was published on so many websites and blogs that the Esperantists haven't been able to catch up; I only saw the obligatory "no you've got it all wrong, Esperanto is really popular and useful" responses on one of ten sites I checked.