a minipost
My wife thinks it's funny when I'm talking with a native-speaking Montanan. After about fifteen minutes my accent shifts towards my almost hidden native accent. It's still there, buried under so many years living out of the state. The funny thing is neither I nor my Montanan friend notice what's happening. Similarly I can code-switch and fit into the culture of my parents church - at least over the phone as my beard and dress don't conform with the standards.
In high school I spent a lot of time in Alberta and became fascinated by Canadian English. I didn't realize Albertan, like the Montanan, was a dialect of its own. There were the obvious Canadianisms comedians emphasize, but my attempts at using them were unconvincing. Canadians tend to be unusually polite, but deep down inside they know your attempts are clueless. In college I ran into people from all over the world and quickly got to the point where many of the "rules" of spoken English didn't bother me like they did my k-12 teachers.
A friend happens to be a computational linguist specializing in the rhythm and sound of a language - the prosody of language. Getting this part right - good enough to begin to add the meaning in speech that's often missing in text - is one of those hard problems. I've read a few of the papers in her field and find them jargon laden and bewildering. Still, there's something very important that we just do naturally. There's another branch of linguistics that's more accessible. Sociolinguists studies how society, including cultural norms, expectations, and context impacts language. The good stuff all of us use and misuse. Aalthough nothing like earlier changes in the language, there's constant change. The Gen Z meaning of wholesome comes to mind as a recent shift in progress.
One of my most dramatic experiences with the sociology of language came as I was finishing my graduate work. A Chinese professor who didn't speak English was visiting the physics department. Not really an issue as there were several native-born professors and graduate students. I was working something out on a blackboard and didn't realize he was watching. He walked up, took a piece of chalk (yes -- we had lovely chalk back then), and gave me a look that asked permission to annotate what I was doing. It turned out he was interested in the same area. We went back and forth using drawings and equations that were part of the culture we shared and had a lovely conversation for about fifteen minutes. It occurred to me afterwards that we were relying on facial expressions and posture along with the chalk marks and never spoke a word. Afterwards I reproduced what remained on the blackboard in my lab notebook. Not that it was profound, but rather that it was such a nice chat. He was only around for a few more days, but there were grins every time we saw each other.
Two weeks ago a linguist (not the prosody expert) gave me a beginner's tour of sociolinguistics by Valerie Fridland: Like, Literally, Dude Arguing for the Good in Bad English. It's great fun! Learn where change in language comes from (hint - it's not upperclass/educated males), how text messaging is entirely different for teens and their 35 year old parents, why ums and uhs in speech are beneficial and much more. I'd go for the audiobook as she gives acoustic examples. I'm not good at communication, but now at least I'm a bit more aware.
a celebration of homophones
For those who use the American mm/dd/yyyy, it suggests 3.14 With an error of about 0.05%, it’s a good enough approximation for many uses. And those who use the more common dd/mm/yyyy notion can wait for the 22nd of July for 22/7. At 0.04% from the mark, this one's a slightly better approximation.
But just how much Pi do you really need? Eight digits is overkill for most engineering tasks. NASA uses 16 digits .. 15 to the right of the decimal .. to navigate around the solar system going beyond Pluto. The most I can imagine would be to construct a high quality circle the radius of the known universe, about 46 billion light years, to the diameter of a hydrogen atom,. You’d need 38 significant digits for the task.
xkcd has a piece on approximations that’s painfully true. For some back of the envelope calculations in astrophysics and cosmology you can get by with crude approximations.
It’s also Einstein’s birthday. Pie, being a homophone of Pi, seems to the a good bet for the day. I have it on good authority he loved cherry pie and ice cream, so there you go.
He’s one of a dozen or so people who have quotes improperly ascribed to them. He was a joker and much of what he did say is often taken out of context. But here's a real one I love. Shortly before his death he was asked to offer advice to young people. His reply was published in Life Magazine.
"The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existence. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery each day." A. Einstein 1955
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