Qglic (pronounced Anglish) is a near-phonemic alternative writing system for English. Being near-phonemic, the goal is to have as close to a one-to-one correspondence between sounds in English and the letters used to represent these. One of the benefits to Qglic is that it attempts to do this using only the letters A through Z. You can see a small sample of it following, which is this paragraph but just written in Qglic.

Qglic iz ey funymik qltrnutiv ruyti'g sistum for I'glic. Byi'g funymik (or nirly so), xu gol iz tu hav ez klos tw ey wun-tu-wun koruspqnduns bitwyn saondz in I'glic and xu letrz ywzd tu reprizent xu saondz. Wun uv xu benufits ti Qglic iz xat it utemps ti dw xis ywzi'g only xu letrz A xrw Z. Yw kan sy u smol sampul uv it fqloi'g, witc iz xis perugraf but dcist ritun in Qglic.

I discovered Qglic a year or so ago, but recently remembered it and became all excited about it again. Using my newly acquired skills in various language technological applications, I spent some time putting together a simple finite-state machine based on the phonemic rules of Qglic, and the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary, which is vast and contains a huge amount of words (approximately 133,000). The CMU Pronouncing Dictionary contains pronunciation guides written with Arpabet, which means it's fairly easy to translate it into IPA or in this case, Qglic.

ABSCOND  AE0 B S K AA1 N D
ABSCONDED  AE0 B S K AA1 N D AH0 D
ABSCONDING  AE0 B S K AA1 N D IH0 NG 
ABSCONDS  AE0 B S K AA1 N D Z
ABSECON  AE1 B S AH0 K AO0 N
ABSENCE  AE1 B S AH0 N S
ABSENCES  AE1 B S AH0 N S IH0 Z
ABSENT  AE1 B S AH0 N T
ABSENTEE  AE2 B S AH0 N T IY1
ABSENTEEISM  AE2 B S AH0 N T IY1 IH0 Z AH0 M
ABSENTEES  AE2 B S AH0 N T IY1

Taking this data, I wrote a short Python script (I'll upload it somewhere at some point soon) to translate the pronunciation guides into Qglic, and then convert them to a format used to produce a file format compatible with the Helsinki Finite State Transducer Technology (HFST):

    abscond:abskqnd         ennd ;
    absconded:abskqndud             ennd ;
    absconding:abskqndi'g               ennd ;
    absconds:abskqndz               ennd ;
    absecon:absukon         ennd ;
    absence:absuns          ennd ;
    absences:absunsiz               ennd ;

It's a very simple finite-state machine, as far as the amount of effort put into producing it. It consists of just a huge list of words in the format of english:qglic, which represents a beginning path and the end path in the machine. The result is very fast: a 385 word article on Naomi Campbell testifying before a war-crimes tribunal from CNN is converted to Qglic in just 0.143 seconds, and the whole of The Importance of Being Earnest translates in about 1.3 seconds.

There are still some issues to work out, such as how I tokenize text, so, punctuation isn't perfect, and thus results in more words not being translated... However, since I'm using the CMU database, there are very few words that don't make it through, and if they don't, it's most likely a result of a tokenization error.

One of the other problems is that words which are homonymous are not handled ideally now (the first homonym is used always), which results in funny spellings when a word is both a noun and a verb ('The farmers prodúce próduce') but used as the other ('*The farmers próduce prodúce.'). Problems like these could be solved with a few more hours of work implementing already existing technologies to disambiguate between the two words based on sentence-sized contexts. If I get a little more time to work on this, maybe I'll iron those problems out and put some of the larger texts up online that are "translated".

Instead, enjoy a couple paragraphs of Naomi Campbell's court case, which has been cleaned up for punctuation issues that I need to fix. Looking through it otherwise, I see there is at least one other issue. See if you can spot it, or find more! ;)

Neyomy Kambul wil testufuy in wor kruymz truyl xrzdey

(cnn) -- Ey dcudc in xu wor kruymz truyl uv formr Luybiryun prezidunt Tcqrlz Teylr haz disuydid xat swprmqdul Neyomy Kambulz testumony in xu keys wil go uhed xrzdey.

Xu specul kort uv Syeru Lyon kunfrmd ti syenen wenzdey xat kambul wil teyk xu stand at xu trubywnul, dispuyt an imrdcunsy mocun xu difens fuyld mundey ti diley hr testumony.

Prqsikywtrz sey Teylr geyv Kambul ey duymund dri'g xu wor in Syeru Lyon, kqntrudikti'g Teylrz testumony xat hy nevr handuld xu precus stonz xat fywuld xu kunflikt.

A lot of noise has been made recently due to a seemingly innocuous tweet from Sarah Palin, in which she defends her neologisms by comparing herself to Shakespeare, one of the English language's most known creators of words. Responses have varied but may be summed up as the following:

• LOL#1: Sarah is comparing herself to the bard!
• LOL#2: 'Refute' is a misused word, thus the formation of 'refudiate' is wrong.
• LOL#3: (care of Roger Ebert, and others): Shakespeare's coinings are okay, whereas Palin's coinings are not okay.

Roger Ebert later tweeted and in a tongue-in-cheek manner used Sarah's own neologism to tease her. The humor for me in this is actually that, in criticizing Palin, Ebert has unwittingly admitted that her neologism is acceptable— after all, he managed to use it in a sentence, where the word could be understood.

Either way, these criticisms all seem to stem from peoples' low reguard for Palin's intelligence; or stem from the idea that language change is bad or wrong. English is a living language, and although it makes me feel funny that I am depending Palin on one issue, this is something she is completely right in, and I would gladly stake my linguistics degree (and degree in progress) on. Language changes in numerous ways. Words can:

• ... Gain new meanings: gay used to mean just 'happy', and now it means, well, 'gay'; tweet used to be a noise that only birds could make, and now it is something humans do as well.
• ... Be used in new contexts (contact used to only be a noun, but now may be used as a verb: I'll contact you tomorrow.)
• ... Be derived from other words through a variety of phenomena. One of which (portmanteauization) is thoroughly accepted by those who consider themselves educated in English, turning: bro(ther) and (ro)mance into bromance.
• ... Change in pronunciation: the modern English ask used to be acsan in Old English (yes, that's right, we used to say aks).
• ... Change in social usage: ain't has its roots in 1600s England, but now is found in many regions in the U.S., both rurally and in urban settings (but the usage of ain't is often pointed out as having to do with lack of education, not dialect).

As a brief aside before getting on to the point: I find it useful citing historical roots of things like ask and ain't, because there are people out there who will strongly refudiate the usage of any word if it doesn't seem to be old enough. As if history means everything... But, back to the point.

One of the major problems with the backlash is that if people will happily adopt new words (such as tweet, to use an apt example), why won't they accept refudiate? If the claim is that refudiate is derived from the wrong usage of refute; then why is it okay to take the word tweet meaning roughly 'a noise birds make' and use it to describe the sending of a short 140-character message on twitter.com; and further derive new words from it: tweeps 'a person who uses the aforementioned site'. This said, I know there are people who reject even these neologisms, but the main thing I find fault in is that those who accept that Palin made this message on Twitter do not accept the words she is using despite that they are essentially the same.

What this all boils down to is a language prejudice, or for short: a prejudice. In this case, it is Palin's perceived intelligence which guides decisions on whether the new words are right or wrong. If people accept neologisms in one place, and they do not accept them in other places, there must be a reason for this— and right now, this is the only I can come up with that seems valid to me as a linguist. Since I know that words change in meaning over time, I see no problem with 'refute' taking on a new meaning. Since I know that new words are derived from existing words with the use of suffixes and prefixes (or even parts of other words, as with facestalker), I do not see 'misrefute' to be a problem either— after all, it has a clear meaning which is separate from either usage of 'refute' you adopt.

The problem with prejudices like these is that they are often used to fuel even worse situations, such as institutionalized racism. As I have observed in the U.S. (and many other places) some people often treat people with different dialects (regional, social) or speech defects differently merely on the basis of language. This is because we not only use language to communicate ideas, but to communicate who we are— sometimes we have a choice in the latter, and sometimes we simply can't help it. What we can help though is how we react to people based on their use of language. On paper, every language and dialect should be worth the same as every other, yet in reality, the difference between the worth of dialects and languages is all in our heads. We see people use language and dialect not only to communicate and self-identify, but to discriminate.

The situation with Sarah Palin illustrates the latter more than can any indeterminate truths about the usage of words and whether they are 'correct' or not. Perhaps one of the great ironies in this whole situation is that the people who are most loud on criticising Sarah for this recent language issue are both liberal (and supposedly forward-thinking on issues of equality) and language elitists. Ah, did I just implicate a 'liberal elite'? I guess Sarah can be credited to yet one more neologism...

Some of this is sort of adopted from a comment left elsewhere on the internets for someone asking about imperatives in languages. While musing over the data in Finnish and Northern Sámi, there appears to be an interesting puzzle: 2nd person imperatives are different from the imperatives formed for all other persons, in that non-2nd person imperatives appear to all be decended from an optative mood while 2nd-person imperatives are morphologically distinct. Perhaps this is analagous to the English imperative strategy, in which the 2nd person imperative is a bare verb stem: Go!, Sleep!; while other persons are formed periphrastically: May he go, Let him sleep.

Finnish and Northern Sámi

In Finnish, and closely related languages the second person imperative is formed with a bare verb stem, while other persons and numbers have additional morphemes, most of which include -k- (said by some to be a historical present tense marker).

(1)     mennä 'go'; mene-n 'I come

                sg.         pl.
        1.      --          menkäämme
        2.      mene        menkää
        3.      menköön     menkööt

The negative imperative is formed with help of an auxilliary negative verb, älä (2), which has similar morphology.

(2)             sg.         pl.
        1.      --          älkäämme
        2.      älä         älkää
        3.      älköön      älkööt

According to Maija Länsimäki, these ko/kö morphemes are originally from the optative. While this doesn't directly say anything about the plural 1st and 2nd persons, it seems like there's a chance that they are either related by way of optative, or connected to the present marker theory (2nd person imperative of tulla was originally *tulek).

What is just as interesting about this pattern is when the negative verb occurs with other verbs, e.g., don't go:

(3)             sg.             pl.
        1.      --              älkäämme menkö
        2.      älä mene        älkää menkö
        3.      älköön menkö    älkööt menkö

The same -ko/-kö appears on the verb. Is this a form of optative agreement, or something else? If these forms are connected, is the -ko/-kö marker found in questions (Nauroiko Mikko? 'Did Mikko laugh?') also related, or is this just a coincidence brought on by the small phoneme inventory in Finnish?

A similar pattern is to be found in Northern Sámi, as well, but slightly extended because NS allows for singular, dual and plural number (4). This paradigm is exactly the same for the negative auxilliary (5), however NS does not have anything similar to the -ko/-kö which occurs on the main verb in negative imperatives (these all occur in one form for all persons and numbers).

(4)     mannat 'to go'
                sg.         du.          pl.
        1.      mann-on     mann-u       mann-ot
        2.      mana        mann-i       mann-et
        3.      mann-os     mann-os-ka   mann-os-et

(5)     ale 'Neg'
                sg.         du.         pl.
        1.      allon       allu        allot
        2.      ale         alli        allet
        3.      allos       alloska     alloset

Here we see that 2nd person singular offers a bare stem, and that all other non-2nd person imperatives have a round vowel (o/u often alternate in NS, and in precisely this situation) which is specific to these situations only. The availability of dual in the paradigm allows us to see that there is something about 2nd person here that separates it from the other persons: and perhaps this is a difference of mood.

Estonian, as best as I can find, also has a similar pattern in the negative imperative auxilliary; but I can't find out how the main verbs go for non-2nd person imperatives. Anyone...?

(6)     minema 'go'
                sg.        pl.
        1       --         --
        2       mine       minge
        3       --         --

(7)     ära 'Neg'
                sg.        pl.
        1       --         ärgem
        2       ära        ärge
        3       ärgu       ärgu

Generalities?

This at least establishes that this pattern is similar in Finnish, Northern Sámi and Estonian (and apparently English), but what does it mean? One could assume from all of this that 'true' imperatives are restricted only to 2nd person, and other persons may be expressed with other moods for semantic reasons... 2nd person imperatives are only applied directly to the listener from the speaker and are commands, while 1st and 3rd person imperatives may refer to someone perhaps outside of the conversation and as such speakers may only wish for things that these persons may do.

Since I haven't Googled around yet, these are only my musings. May someone reading this come forward with more knowledge!

School's out! Woohoo! Now it's time to get working.

Since finishing exams, I've been spending the last week or so working with Constraint Grammar as part of my Google Summer of Code project in machine translation from Finnish to Northern Sámi. It's enlightening and interesting and there's much to learn, but it seems to give me precisely the kind of puzzles that I like to solve. Constraint Grammar is a syntactic formalism developed by Fred Karlsson (the author of the first Finnish grammar book I studied, which quite possibly changed my life) which has the essential goal of disambiguating words which are homophonous: have similar appearances but separate morphological uses or separate meanings.

An example:

minä lu-i-n kaksi kirja-a

1pSg.Nom READ-Prt-Sg1 TWO BOOK-Part

'I read two books.'

This all makes perfect sense to us, because we know what words are meant; however luin could mean "I read", or "with/by bones". Since the latter meaning is obviously not the one that we want for the sentence, Constraint Grammar provides a rule-based formalism for selecting the intended meaning based on the surrounding context. This isn't easy of course, because one actually needs quite a few rules to produce a fully disambiguated sentence, and natural sentences aren't always as simple as the one given above. Following is the full analysis of each word:

"<minä>"
    "minä" Pron Pers Sg Nom
    "mikä" Pron Interr Sg Ess
"<luin>"
    "lukea" V Act Ind Prt Sg1
    "luu" N Pl Ins
"<kaksi>"
    "kaksi" Num Card Sg Nom
"<kirjaa>"
    "kirja" N Sg Par
    "kirjata" V Act Ind Prs Sg3
    "kirjata" V Ind Prs ConNeg 
    "kirjata" V Act Imprt Sg2

As we can see, there are quite a few items that need to be removed (and listed in CG formalism below): the word minä can have its personal pronoun reading chosen because it precedes a verb with 1st person singular marking (line 1237); luin gets its verbal reading selected (as opposed to the 'bone' reading) because it follows a pronoun (line 1645); and finally kirjaa 'book+Part' is selected because it precedes a number.

1187: SELECT (Par) (-1C Num) (-1 Nom)
1237: SELECT (Pron "minä") (*1 Sg1 LINK NOT *-1 CLB?) (NOT 1 CLB?)
1645: SELECT (Sg1) (-1C MINA) (-1 Nom)

2094: MAP (@SUBJ>) TARGET Nom (0 WORD LINK *1 (Act))
2109: MAP (@<OBJ) TARGET Par IF (0 WORD LINK *-1 V BARRIER S-BOUNDARY2) ;
2115: MAP (@+FMAINV) TARGET VFIN IF (NEGATE *0 VERB BARRIER S-BOUNDARY2 OR CC) ;

Then following this disambiguation, several tags are added for later convenience... One tag, @SUBJ> tells us that the word is the subject of the sentence, preceding the verb; @+FMAINV tells us that the word is the main verb, @X tells us there is more work to be done yet; and @<OBJ says that the word is an object following its verb. The tags are shortcuts for passing along information for the generation part of the translation, in which words are produced based on the analysis. The full disambiguation is next, but note that the tags and analysis may not be correct yet; I'm just pulling this from the project as-is. Lines beginning with a semicolon (;) are those which are dropped from the analysis

"<minä>"
    "minä" Pron Pers Sg Nom @SUBJ> SELECT:1237 MAP:2094 
;   "mikä" Pron Interr Sg Ess SELECT:1237 
"<luin>"
    "lukea" V Act Ind Prt Sg1 @+FMAINV SELECT:1645 MAP:2115 
;   "luu" N Pl Ins SELECT:1645 
"<kaksi>"
    "kaksi" Num Card Sg Nom @X MAP:2348 
"<kirjaa>"
    "kirja" N Sg Par @<OBJ SELECT:1187 MAP:2109 
;   "kirjata" V Act Ind Prs Sg3 SELECT:1187 
;   "kirjata" V Ind Prs ConNeg SELECT:1187 
;   "kirjata" V Act Imprt Sg2 SELECT:1187

So, there's more work to be done. As I dig further in, I may post a few recipes if there are tricky problems that arise. I'll be running some newspaper sentences through the grammar to see what additional things need to be worked out; the rules work fine for short sentences, but it may be that they'll not hold up when applied to much more complex sentences. As you can see in the lines of code produced above, there are BARRIERs involved, which delimit the ability of the rule to search its surroundings. More of these will likely pop up as weirder sentences are tested.

As it turns out though, the above analysis for this sentence is actually enough to produce a good translation. Once all the words are disambiguated, they're sent off to a generator, which produces the following (with slashes representing dialectical variation):

$ echo "minä luin kaksi kirjaa" | fin-sme
        mun/mon lohken guokte girjji/girjje

The sentence also shows the connection between the two languages that the project concerns, if you squint you can see their relatedness.

I now know some of my summer plans: Google Summer of Code! I just found out I was accepted. The project is to start a machine translation project with Apertium to translate from Finnish to Northern Sámi. The Apertium project is also getting several other GSoC participants in other areas, as well, featuring translation projects from Polish to Czech, and French to Portuguese. In addition, there are other projects to improve and expand Apertium in various ways. If you want to see my proposal, that's available online. If you want to know a little more about machine translation, read on...

There are two major methods of machine translation (Apertium uses a combination of both): statistical and linguistic translation. Google Translate is a well known example of a statistical machine translation program, which is aided by Google's wealth of texts in various languages. Google Translate works by lining up sentences that are known to match up in translation, and then translates chunk by chunk. In a way, it's like speaking a language by phrasebook, you may say mostly the right thing most of the time, but then some other times you may tell your tobaccanist that your hovercraft is full of eels.

The linguistic translation method analyzes words in the source language morpheme by morpheme (the smallest unit of meaning within a word), and then analyzes the word order of the sentences in order to disambiguate and handle what roles the words play in the sentences. After this, a bilingual dictionary is consulted, and the analysis of the sentence in the source language is used to construct the sentence in the target language. This approach is much closer to what it is like to speak a language, in a way; because words are inflected based on linguistic rules, and the grammar is thoroughly consulted to produce the output.

Although linguistic translation seems to be more akin to learning a language and speak it, that does not mean that it is 100% perfect in the sense of what a bilingual human may provide in translating a novel, for instance; but this is not necessarily one of the immediate goals of machine translation. In order for a machine to flawlessly translate any sentence, it would have to have a more thorough understanding of all of the semantic data associated with words, and how to know when to use what word; and all of the various shades of meaning between words.

We're not there yet, but making progress... So maybe some day, once machines gain enough knowledge to translate flawlessly, they will be able to address us politely as they take over the world.

Interesting occurrance at the University of Helsinki— er, Helsingin yliopisto (I don't want to add to the problem). Translated the original article from Finnish, just drop a comment if there is anything that doesn't flow.

Language planning is always difficult, and I see that they want to bring in a more international crowd... But, there are a few issues: it is just a little ridiculous to reduce the ability of many other students to succeed in their field because there is one person who doesn't speak the language (and I'm assuming they mean one student out of a group of 20, or so). Also, if the program is a majority of Finnish-language speakers, why are they admitting people who cannot speak it? Or, is this just one of those combined programs for Finnish and international students?

Maybe I'm also just grumpy because I like Finnish.

The predominance of English has lead to complaints about the University of Helsinki

Original text: Anniina Wallius

A complaint was sent to the chancellor of justice as a result of the University of Helsinki's language politics. The complaint comes as a result of the university's Faculty of Agriculture and Forestry Science, which has decided that Finnish students must attend all of their courses in English if their is at least one foreign student in their class.

The complaint was made by one of the department's students, who views the language policy as violating a policy in the Finnish constitution. According to the law, Finnish citizens have the right to study in their native language. Finnish language professor Auli Hakulinen supports the complaint.

"Finland only has room for one thought at a time, and now the thought is that of globalization and competition. This is interpreted such, that English should be used in courses at all levels. Let all of the Finnish top researchers write in English, but that's quite a separate issue from basic studies to those, who leave after graduating to go take care of pigs," Hakulinen criticizes.

In her view, the problem results particularly from master's programs, which have now been started in large numbers in both Finnish and English. Taking cost savings into account, these programs are easy to combine, but resultantly if a class of students contains one foreigner, it is determined that the language for everyone should be English.

Another manifestation of the pursuit of internationalization is the universities' English names. The English names have been put before all other names in universities in regions outside of Helsinki.

"The regional universities are meant to serve local needs, but just now they want to be first to show that they are fun and international. For instance, there's the University of Eastern Finland and the Lappeenranta University of Technology. A mere name, however, does not increase the level of the teaching and research," says Hakulinen.

An assault committed against the Finnish language

Hakulinen sees a small spark of hope in the University of Helsinki's strategies, which must be renewed in the coming months because of a new university law. Hakulinen would allow that the new strategies are not just a question of pushing paper, and rather that there is also practical guidance on how to protect the national languages.

To those making university decisions, Hakulinen recommends taking literary translation as a model. According to her, the most purposefully international people in Finland are the translators.

"They are at an outpost, and they take the trouble to think about how the main and best works appearing elsewhere can be translated into Finnish. Culturally they are on a completely different level than the University people, who are committing an assault against their native language," says Hakulinen.

Hakulinen stresses that there is no need to go back to a one mind, one language approach, "A while ago it was a momentary political need, but in reality Finland has never had only one language, nor should it ever have one."

The radio cultural news program also called Marketta Sipi, the dean of the Faculty of Agriculture and Forestry, to hear about the field's language of practice, but Sipi did not have a comment on the issue. The university rector has responded to the complaint made to the chancellor of justice, but the chancellor has not yet given a decision.

I discovered an awesome album on Spotify of various classic covers in Finnish: Niin kauan kuin tää kestää saa, featuring Anki Lundqvist. It features a cover of Wild Mountain Thyme, for which I couldn't find the lyrics online, so I thought I'd post them here.

aamun myötä tuuli herää
laajat maat käy uuteen päivään
yöstä taas voimaa saan
silmät suljen vaikka herään
saman maan nähdä saan

jostain maat vielä nousee
nousee tiet joita kuljen
silmät suljen vaikka herään
uuden maan nähdä saan

jostain maat vielä nousee
nousee tiet joita kuljen
silmät suljen vaikka herään
uuden maan nähdä saan

Since I'm one of the few native English influences in my life now, I've been paying more attention to my own English. I've noticed some things are changing since moving over here, and I'm not exactly sure why; although I assume some part of it is attempting to provide a clearer signal for those who do not speak English as a first language.

Consonants

My consonants are mostly in line with the region I grew up in, in the U.S., however I've had some peculiarities that have stuck with me, and one or two that I've gained elsewhere.

• Rounded R. When /r/ occurs at the beginning of a syllable, it is often rounded: writer [ˈɹʷəɪɾɚ].
• Palatal release on /k/. When /k/ occurs at the end of a syllable, and even before low vowels, its release is palatal: lock [lɔkʲ]. This is due to Norwegian influence, and hearing Norwegian accents in English.
• Wine-whine merger. 90% of the time I do not produce the latter sound (/ʍ/), but I have caught myself doing it when speaking particularly carefully.
• Affricate devoicing. /dʒ/ is more likely to be devoiced than it otherwise would be. I know I already have had light voicing on this sound; but it seems to be getting worse.
• Bolth. Some discussion on a friend's Facebook status update lead me to the possibility that this comes from areas in the U.S. that is heavily populated by Danish immigrants; as supposedly at one point, the word for 'both' in Danish had a similar liquidy sound in it. I don't know a lot of Minnesotans who say both as [bołθ], but I know they exist. I know I also get teased for this one.

Vowels

Before I left, I was already a sort of odd person. The number of influences on my English I've had at varying times seem to have been most obvious in my vowels. I've identified some influences, but some I'm still unsure of. Some of the features of my vowels are:

• Canadian raising

About 5-10 years ago, I think I only had [əɪ] raising in my English, but I now have [ɛʊ] as well. I'm fairly certain I picked this up from a Canadian from Ontario while living in Helsinki, as she and another Canadian were my primary fluent English influence.

In addition however, I seem to have [ɛʊ] in non-Canadian-raising environments. I say tone as [tʰɛʊn].

• Northern Cities Vowel Shift

I was explaining to someone that someone had just left the café the other day, and he heard me say 'laughed' instead. Although I'm fairly certain I don't have a lot of the NCVS currently (nor did I have much of it before I left), it appears to be around. Oddly, a similar vowel shift is occurring in Tromsø Norwegian now. Likely these things are not related, but it's worth pointing out.

I'm somewhat concerned if I'm only picking up some of the NCVS changes, because my low vowels are already somewhat messed up, and one non-low vowel sneaking into low territory could be somewhat disastrous.

Others have pointed out before that my [ɛ] often comes out as a [ə], such as redhead [ɹədhɛd].

One additional thing related to these vowels (but not necessarily a result of this shift) are: can/to be able /kɛn/; been /bɛn/ (worth note; some Canadians say /bin/).

• Caught-cot merger, I has it. Mostly. See below.

• Californian stuff

I seem to have a few characteristics in common with Californians, such as backing of /æ/, and fronting of /u/ to [ʉ] in some environments. It's possible that the lowering of [ɛ] that I mentioned above is related more to this, especially since my /æ/ isn't turning into a diphthong (ex., bad [bɛæd], cat [kʰiæt]) as it would if I had more of the NCVS.

Where would I be picking up this Californian stuff though? Radio?

• Norwegian innovations

Here in Norway, I've noticed that I'm beginning to gain an [ɔ] vowel again, unsure as to whether this will be undoing the caught-cot merger in my speech, since that's a historical process, or if I'm aware of what non-caught-cot-merged speech sounds like enough that I'm being 100% consistent with this, because as far as I can tell now, it isn't.

• New Zealand?

I've been attempting to tweak my English by listening to a lot of Radio New Zealand, but it hasn't been quite effective. I love their vowels, but it may be that my subconscious isn't thoroughly convinced that these Kiwis are valid stylistic icons in my life. Only more time will tell.

Syntactic oddities

I think my syntax is mostly midwestern; I'm completely comfortable with preposition stranding at the end of sentences (which even may just be a feature of General American English). In addition, I'm happy with 'with'. E.g., the following are all fine in my English:

• Do you wanna come with?
• I brought it with.
• I have it with.

I never say 'along' for this.

What gives?

Idiolects are not always so simple to describe. Certainly though, most people who live in one place for a long enough time may be easier to describe, as they often fit completely with what is expected for their region and social identities. Or, better worded: everyone's idiolect can be described just as easily, but figuring out the reasons for various atypical features of someone's idiolect may be a challenge.

Idiolects also present an interesting puzzle that can only be explained with historical migrations, such as with Sarah Palin (PDF): "Clear echoes of salient Upper Midwest features found their way to Alaska via immigration of speakers from Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin in 1935, such recent immigrations that their presence should still be felt today."

In my case, I haven't yet figured out who or what all of my stylistic influences are, although I have identified some. For someone who likes language and has an ear for phonetics, maybe it's possible that I can be allowed a little more flexibility. Or maybe, I'm crazy and will somehow come back from living abroad with a strong Geordie accent.

I'm participating in the Tromsø International Film Festival this year as a volunteer. It's an awesome opportunity to see a lot of free films that are hopefully interesting, as well as help out a cool local event... And also learn more Norwegian.

I'm feeling much more comfortable speaking it now than even 3 days ago. Apparently even just thinking about and being consciously aware that I need to use it is enough to help improve. I've noticed my processing and response time is drastically improved, and I think I've been able to improve with that because I'm no longer really worried about pronunciation. The rest is just minor touch-up work that will come with more speaking.

... Anyway, things I've liked so far:

• Hipsters Official site currently down...
• It Might Get Loud
• White Material
• Home from Home
• Pranzo di Ferragosto

• Disko ja tuumasõda - Disco and Atomic War

  Disko ja tuumasõda uses dramatized scenes to tell a true story of the effects of the authoritarian Soviet Union as it tries (and fails) to control what the Estonian people are able to watch on TV. A young girl living in southern Estonia relates the stories of the television drama Dallas to her village that she receives in letters from her cousin in the north, who is able to watch it from Finnish TV. Dallas and Finnish TV, as it turns out, were actually an integral part of the Cold War in the Baltic region, with the struggle culminating in a broadcasted sex scene sneaking into the country by ally-enhanced television transmissions.

• Helsinki, Forever

  A documentary about Helsinki, Finland, which uses primarily archive movies and photographs, old movie clips and literature to tell the story of the history of the municipality over the past two hundred years.

• Optical Illusion

  A quirky comedy about some people and their connections and relationships. It follows a man as he receives a demotion at work, and falls in love with his new boss who is getting breast enhancement surgery because the company gives free plastic surgery as a bonus. She feels the need to get plastic surgery, because she is afraid she is losing her boyfriend who is himself getting a new job as a security guard at a mall, where he find a woman with the security cameras and begins an affair with her while she contemplates divorcing her husband. There are a few more connections that the movie explores. Overall entertaining.

• Forbidden Fruit (Official site is down)

  Growing up is already a struggle for some, but a particularly pungent brand of northern Finnish Laestadianism has its say in Kielletty hedelmä. One girl escapes from her hometown to the freedom of the capitol city in the south, where she explores alcohol, sexuality and her own connection to her religion. Her friend is sent to keep an eye on her and to bring her home should she stray too far from the flock, but she too has her own struggle with her religion. The story is a powerful commentary on fundamentalist societies and how their constraints are too close for some.

• House of Branching Love

  A hilarious comedy of errors as a Finnish family struggles with marital troubles and their own possible divorce. In the end, the Finnish mafia saves the day...

• Vår mann i Kirkenes

  The story of a man working at the Finnmark newspaper (Finnmarken) and his search for another job, and experience with his current one. A quirky sort of humor that one might come from the pen of Garrison Keillor. Suitable for Minnesotans.

• The Woman with 5 Elephants

  The biography of a Ukrainian-born and Russian-speaking woman who moves to Germany during the second World War. The documentary picks up when she is concluding her work on translating Tolstoy's work, and we follow her first trip to her hometown in Ukraine since she left. The story is a beautifully put together story that may be of particular interest to translators and language geeks...

... Also, must remember to track down the soundtracks and add some links to this once the festival is over. More this evening and more tomorrow, so the list will be growing! :)

Sámi Week in Tromsø (February 1. - 7.) is an event celebrating Sámi culture. Part of the significance for such an event is that Tromsø is very much a Sámi city, in that the Sámi language and cultural events are a part of city life, and Tromsø is one of the larger cities in Sápmi. There are also many famous Sámi people who make the city their home, or one of their homes.

Although I've never been around to participate in this event before, I'm excited to see it this year. The official site for the event, which is in English only for the last years festivities, shows that last year was a week full of films, art exhibits, a cooking course, and a reindeer race, amongst the many other fun events.

The program for 2010 is up (and available in English), but digging around the internet before the program was available, I also found this:

• The Faculty of Law at the University of Tromsø is having a 2 day program (4. - 5. of February) on Traditional Sámi rules of reindeer herding in refraction with reindeer herding legislation.

Also occurring during the last week of January and first week of February is the Nordlys classical music festival.

Here's some followup from the previous story about the threats of a massacre at Kongsbakken videregående skole in Tromsø. The first is an article in Nordlys, posted Monday (translation following):

New threat against Kongsbakken encouraging people to keep up with the news

On Friday a threat against Kongsbakken was repeated on the forum 4chan.org, according to the newspaper iTromsø. In a discussion thread on the site, someone wrote: "Implying I was kidding when I made that treath. Keep watching the news. I may have been foiled the first time, but time will show my seriousness."

"This sounds very scary, and I'm shocked," said Kongsbakken's Student Council leader, Kristian Støback to iTromsø. He otherwise thought it was good to come back to school to speak with other students and instructors. He believes it is important that the threat does not affect life at school.

Rector Odd Ivar Størkesen was not informed about the new threat on Sunday evening.

"I do not know of any new threat. We have been in contact with the police throughout the weekend and received an update on their work no later than Sunday", he said to iTromsø.

He says that school days rain as normal on Monday.

And another from Nordlys, which was posted Sunday:

Police believe they will find out who was behind the threat to Kongsbakken

So far in the investigation the police have not been able to uncover who is behind the threat to Kongsbakken High School.

"We still have good possibilities to solve the case. Kripos has its own system for mapping who uses the internet illegally. It will take time, but we have good hope of finding the sender of the threats to carry out a massacre at the school, says Tromsø police chief Kurt Pettersen.

He said to Kripos that the police in Tromsø are also driving some of the tactical investigation of the case.

"It is a priority both here and in Kripos to identify all factors surrounding the threat. Kripos has the expertise to identify the technological side, while we here in Tromsø hope the tactical investigation will yield results.

"It could also be someone eventually will realize the seriousness of the matter will report to the police with information," said Pettersen.

As someone who spends a good amount of time reading the news on the internet, I well know what 4chan is. 4chan may be the birthplace of LOLcats and numerous memes that go around the internet, but it's also a cesspool of ridiculousness and shock. It's not too wild of an idea that the original threat may have actually been posted by someone in town, but this follow-up threat was something continued from a random user on 4chan.

As far as the internet intelligence that Kripos is undertaking, I wonder what legal powers they have. Norway is said to have some of the strictest data privacy laws in the world, but it is reasonable that in the interest of investigating crime, Norwegian intelligence agencies may have access to quite a lot of data. If the issue is completely local, there is a good chance they will find out who did it, especially if the perpetrator has no clue what they're doing or how to anonymize their identity on the internet... Norway isn't big, so if they have an IP address, they could much more reasonably find out whose it was than could one in a much bigger country like the U.S.

I wonder what the outcome will be of this, and particularly for 4chan should it manage to be a frequent source of irritation for the police here.

This was the big news today in Norway, and a few people I know around the world have messaged me today asking if I'd heard. So far, I haven't seen any English coverage of the story, so I translated NRK's article on the issue. Added some links for more context for people not familiar with Norway, the culture.

From NRK:

Today, all 650 students at Kongsbakken high school (nor. videregående skole) were evacuated due to a perceived threat of a school massacre posted on the internet. The threat to Kongsbakken high school was aimed at Sámi people. "Scary stuff", said one Sámi student at the school.

The threat was published on Thursday under the title "School massacre" on the American internet forum, 4chan. The principal (rector) at Kongsbakken high school, Ivar Odd Størkersen, was tipped off about the threat by a journalist working at Aftenposten. As such, he immediately contacted the police.

The threat was in the form of an illustration, including a picture of a gun, a sword, the school, and a map of Tromsø. The illustration further contained the text "Targets: Sami people". The threat was later removed from 4chan for unknown reasons.

"We take a connection between weapons and the school building as a serious and severe threat. It is sad that some have felt the need to connect the school with such a serious incident, " said Rector Størkersen to NRK.

"I have no idea why Sámi people are listed as a target. There are many Sámi people in Tromsø, and there are many students with Sámi background who are students at Kongsbakken. I will not speculate on what the purpose of this threat is," said Rector Ivar Odd Størkersen.

Frightening and scary

"It is frightening and scary. Such a threat must be taken seriously," said Mihka Solbakk (18), a Sámi student at Kongsbakken.

Students who arrived at the school this morning were met by police and locked doors. The school management had decided to evacuate all students.

"I believe there are many who are afraid now," said Solbakk.

Mihka Solbakk reports that he has spoken with many of his Sámi classmates today and many of them have expressed that it is frightening that such a threat was directed against Sámi students. He has otherwise not experienced that his ethnic background has been a problem, either at school or in town.

"Of course, you get to hear the occasional derogatory comment here and there."

"Some might joke that Sámi people are inferior, you never really know if anyone believes it. It may even be that this [threat] is meant as a joke," says Solbakk.

Solbakk made it clear otherwise that such threats should be taken seriously, and he thinks that the administration of Kongsbakken has handled the matter in a good way. "There have been a number of school shootings in the U.S. and in Finland in recent months, so it's no wonder that the administration takes these attacks seriously," he says.

Losing sleep

"I received a text message about the threat when I woke up this morning. Obviously I was a little scared," said Odd Ivar Solbakk, Mihka Solbakk's father.

His son was still sleeping when the message about the threat came, and so he would not be to school until after lunchtime. Odd Ivar Solbakk said to NRK Sámi Radio that news that the threat was directed against Sámi people was a special piece of news to hear at the crack of dawn.

"Tromsø is a city with many prolific Sámis and the Sámi people are very important here. It has never seemed as if there were a threat to the Sámi youth in the city," said Solbakk.

As a parent of a student at the school, Solbakk was proud of the way the school administration and the police have handled this matter. Having learned the full extent of the situation, he says he is impressed with the response and feels the school's forthrightness is something that characterizes a good school environment. He is also impressed.

"A threat so close to us as this is something that would interfere with sleep; it's unpleasant," says Odd Ivar Solbakk.

Investigating the matter

Police chief Truls Fyhn in the Troms Police Department said in a press release that an investigation has been initiated to get more information from the site that the threat was posted to, after the police were made aware of the case on Thursday night.

"The investigation is still continuing," he wrote.

Kripos is also involved in the investigation," said Tromsø police chief, Kurt Pettersen.

School administration at Kongsbakken expects that school will resume as normal beginning on Monday. Later today, the police will have a meeting with the principal and the others in the school administration to inform them of the investigation.

Listen to interviews

• in Norwegian: Interview with Mihka Solbakk
• in North Sámi: Jearahallan Mihka Solbakkain
• in North Sámi: Jearahallan Odd Ivar Solbakkain

Read more news on NRK

• Afraid and scared
• The schools shall be safe

My own thoughts

This is hugely surprising news. On one hand, 4Chan (see Wikipedia if you don't know what it is) is full of ridiculous things and so this may have been a joke, but on the other hand, with recent school and mall shootings in Finland and the U.S., one can never be sure. I have not observed much anti-Sámi discrimination or racism here in Tromsø, aside from errant comments people make that are mostly just stupid, but then I'm not Sámi, and I haven't lived here for more than 6 months, so I know basically nothing. The history of Sámi-Norwegian relations as I know it hasn't been pretty, but things are otherwise much much better now.

Some added context is that Kongsbakken (King's Hill) is a fairly prestigious, arts-oriented, and more liberal-minded school.

I'm hoping this was all just a joke, but it looks like it's gotten damn serious.

Updates

More English-language news is available here, from My Little Norway.

Some things I've come across in the past few days that are worth saving for future reference, or worth sharing.

Web

• Using nginx as a load balancer
• ProDjango also available in ebook format.
• Markdown Syntax reference, since I've started using it.

Lols

• NirGaga - Smells like Poker Face?
• How to handle your boss asking about a project

Linguistics

• Textbooks for Germanic languages should be written in Anglish
• Explitive infixation - Opti-fuckin-mality Theory

Norway

• Solution to killer superbug found in Norway - How Norway got rid of MRSA
• Telephone Storm after mysterious light phenomenon (lysfenomenen) in Northern Norway (translation). In the end it was a failed Russian rocket launched from a submarine (translation), and capable of being equipped with nuclear warheads.

Catching up on Hel Looks

People often ask me why I like Helsinki, and all the unique fashion is one of the reasons. I caught up on Hel-Looks, an awesome documentation of cool fashion in Helsinki and found some cool things. Summary. Jeans: tighter than skinny jeans ever were, high top shoes: in, and stuff your pants into them. Big scarves are very yes. Otherwise, all of this is really optional and anything goes.

Some finds: yy, kaa, koo, nee, vii, kuu, see, kasi, ysi, kymppi

Minnesota

• 3 new autonomous schools to open in Minneapolis district
• Cultures clash among classmates at SE Minn. schools - Troubles Somali youths face as 1st generation immigrants

• Judge rules against pawlenty's allotments

  tl;dr:

  Pawlenty: "We are disappointed in the judge’s decision. We are weighing all of our options including appeal, reestablishing unallotments under the current forecast, potential legislative action, and other options."

  From Judge Gearin's ruling: "The authority of the Governor to unallot is an authority intended to save the state in times of a previously unforeseen budget crisis, it is not meant to be used as a weapon by the executive branch to break a stalemate in budget negotiatons with the Legislature or to rewrite the appropriations bill."

  Galen Robinson of Mid Minnesota Legal Assistance: "We’re enormously pleased that the court agreed with our position and relieved that our clients will be able to afford the food they need to stay healthy. We recognize that both the Legislature and the governor have a difficult burden to find a resolution to the budget shortfall." ... "This shortfall was neither unknown nor unanticipated."

Non-straight

• Same-sex marriage map of the world

Gaming, nostalgia:

• RivenX, Riven for OS X Leopard and above

In almost every discussion of language variation in the world, Finnish comes up due to its wealth of case endings. There are languages that have even more, such as Hungarian, and most languages have less. Of the languages I've learned that mark cases with suffixes, I could say that on average they have somewhere around 6 cases (excluding of course, languages very closely related to Finnish which have a similar number). I've learned some with slightly more, and some with slightly less. This amount of cases is what usually gets Finnish labeled as "difficult", but, this difficulty doesn't make Finnish impossible to learn.

Here I've attempted to collect some of my own internal reasonings based on the various things I've read over the course of time I've learned Finnish. As such, a lot of the material I don't remember my source for... Except for this source, a brief grammatical reference, which I used to check the latinate case names which I often forget. I'll list some additional resources below, as I remember or come across them, for those interested. One of the great resources is Hakulinen's Suomen kielen rakenne ja kehitys 'Structure and Development of the Finnish Language', but sadly I don't have access to it right now to check some of my memories and theories.

The symposium was quite a success, I thought. It was the first I attended, and nice to see what's going on and what others are researching. Subject matter of the talks ranged, touching on graphic design, the successes and failures behind the development of writing systems, the varying web-presence between Inari Sámi and Skolt Sámi; and the syntax and semantics of reflexive pronouns, tone and intonation, and issues involving machine translation and lexical databases.

One of the things that I felt was an important theme was that when doing academic research, it is important to return something back to the communities you are working with. Otherwise, if you're working with endangered languages, how can you help them improve their situation? Some research produces results that is usable by these communities, and some research does not. Of course, it always means extra work to do so, but isn't it good to have an effect on things?

Anyway, brief update, but, here are some projects and resources to check out for those interested. I'll add some more things from time to time, as they come up.

• 2nd Annual Sámi Linguistics Symposium, which is a part of the Saami Documentation and Revitalization Network who, along with the Department of General and Comparative Linguistics at the Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel is putting on the Winter School in Saami Language Documentation and Revitalization
• Sámi proofing tools, currently available for Northern Sámi and Lule Sámi. The tools are produced by Sámi language technology group (also known as Giellatekno Northern Sámi for 'language-tech'), which has a few projects highly worth checking out, such as dictionaries, lexical resources, word parsers.
• CASTL - Center for Advanced Study in Theoretical Linguistics - A department working on a number of projects, a lot of which involve Sámi language stuff.