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meichenxi · 4 years

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Grimm’s Law and Verner’s Law: part 1 - Indo-European background

OR: how ‘cannabis’ and ‘hemp’ are actually cognates

tldr: sound change is cool and this great series of videos can explain it better than I can: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aal9VSPkf5s. this is going to be the first of a few posts on sound change in German and English. I originally wanted to explain the second sound shift, but quickly realised that it doesn’t make sense without any of the historical context, so please bear with me

What makes a language Germanic? Imagine for a moment that you’re an alien a la Matt Haig, newly arrived to Earth and presented with a sample of the world’s languages - or specifically, part of Eurasia’s. Some languages look very similar to each other; some very different. How would you go about building a hypothesis about which languages were related to each other, and which weren’t? How would you then test this hypothesis? And how, presented finally with data that shows your languages are related, would you explain how these changes came to happen in the first place?

Before we go on to Germanic, though, let’s talk about Indo-European today. You guys probably all know that IE is a large language family that stretches from Icelandic to Hindi; Germanic is one of the sub-groupings of this wider IE family. Within the sub-family itself, there are divisions: German is more closely related to Dutch, Norwegian to Swedish, Icelandic to Faroese and so on. This seems all fairly obvious to us now.

Way back when many centuries ago (not that many centuries, and certainly long after the Bible began), the idea of a language family spanning English to Russian to Farsi was a little less obvious. For much of the 17th century, people (esp a bishop dude called John Wilkins) sought to prove that English was related to Hebrew - this was an important endeavour at the time, because it would lend the language religious authority, especially in its translation of the Bible. Fast forwarding to the 18th century, a man named Sir Williams Jones who lived in Bengal realised - on account of his classical education and extensive contact with Indian languages - that there were much greater similarities between Latin, Greek and Sanskrit than anybody had previously realised. He wasn’t the first to think it, but he was one of the first to make such a definitive statement. The following quote is probably one of the most famous in historical linguistics, so I apologise for quoting it in full: ‘The Sanscrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have spring from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists: there is a similar reason, though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothick and the Celtick, though blended with a very different idiom, had the same origin with the Sanscrit, and the old Persian might be added to this family.’

He was wrong in a lot of ways - he excluded some languages that do belong in this family and erroneously included others. He also wasn’t the first to come up with this idea. This quote, more than anything, marks the beginning of people’s interest in the ‘common source’: how could such a thing ever be proven, if we didn’t have access to the language itself? Part of the building ground for Indo-European historical linguistics was the desire to prove that linguistics was an empirical science much like any other, with laws that held universally and hypotheses that could be tested and demonstrably falsified. This rested on two principles both promoted by the Junggramatiker, or Neogrammarians, a Leipzig based group of scholars. Firstly, that sound change - the process by which sounds change, arise and disappear - was a highly regular process that held universally and obeyed certain rules. Secondly, that languages that exist today are structurally and in principle no different from languages that existed thousands of years ago - that is, we have no reason to assume that processes existed in the past that don’t exist today. This is called the uniformitarian principle.

If both of these things are true, that means that it would be possible to not only determine how exactly these languages were related, but also reconstruct an earlier version of the language once spoken by all Indo-Europeans!! (I hope you agree that this is immensely cool.)

Reconstructing these rules is important, because it allows us to better understand structural similarities between languages. There are some similarities which are surface deep: it’s easy to compare English cold and German kalt or warm and - well - warm, and say that they look alike. Pfad and path is a little harder, but when you compared Pfeffer and pepper it’s clear, ok, there’s a <pf> / alteration going on there. Leaving the Germanic family behind, though, things get a little more tricky.

How exactly is venue cognate with come? What about English quick and Latin vīvus? And how can sister and Hindi bahan possibly be cognates??

Some of the most meaningful observations are structural; they are not surface deep, and they’re not immediately available for study. This is because, quite simply, the time depth since Indo-European was spoken is vast; there have been extensive sound changes in all of the languages concerned.

And that’s exactly what Grimm’s Law is. It’s a sound change that happened specifically in the Germanic branch of Indo-European, so it’s common to all Germanic languages, and nothing else. It’s one of those diagnostic criteria that an alien would use to determine that Norwegian and Dutch were related: it’s present, apart from where further sound change has obscured it, in every Germanic language - and it’s not present, apart from in borrowed words, in any non-Germanic language. That’s what we mean by diagnostic.

Let’s have a look at some examples! We’ll explain it in more detail next time, but this might whet your appetite. Don’t worry if you can’t read the phonetic description; it’s the consonants that are important at the moment (don’t, please, ask me about vowels. just please don’t).

(nb: where I use an asterisk *, this means that this form is reconstructed, not actually attested: we don't have any records of IE. > just means ‘goes to’ or ‘becomes’ in the various daughter languages. Also <these> brackets are talking about spelling, and /these/ brackets are talking about phonemes, or actual sounds. Also, the little ‘ means aspiration - we’ll talk more about what that means next time)

*p > f (no later shift in German, though /f/ is sometimes spelled v):

Engl. brother, Germ. Bruder (cf. Lat. frāter, Skt. bhrā́tā)

Engl. full, Germ. voll (cf. Lat. plēnus, Skt. pūrṇás)

*t > *þ (Engl. th) > Germ. d

Engl. three, Germ. drei (cf. Lat. trēs, Gk. /trê:s/, Skt. tráyas) Engl. thin, Germ. dünn (cf. Lat. tenuis, Skt. tanús)

*ḱ, *k > h (no later shift in German):

Engl. hundred, Germ. hundert (cf. Lat. centum, Gk. /he-katón/, Skt.

śatám)

Engl. horn, Germ. Horn (cf. Lat. cornū)

*kw > *hw (Engl. wh) > Germ. w:

Engl. what, Germ. was (cf. Lat. adjective & relative quod, Skt. kád)

*d > *t (Engl. t) > Germ. z:

Engl. two, Germ. zwei (cf. Lat. duo, Gk. /dúo/, Skt. dvā́)

BRUH. ISN’T THIS COOL!! AND THERE ARE MORE!

You can see here already by looking at the German and English that both have sometimes subsequently undergone sound changes, like English */hw/ to /wh/ and then finally to /w/, which becomes German <w> or /v/ - these sometimes obscure things. And if you really want to find out why German is different to English, well, we’ve got quite a few sound changes to get through before we get there!

Melissa, you might be saying, I know for a fact there’s something yucky and not-worky about Grimm’s Law. What about cases where it doesn’t seem to apply? What’s that? Also, I swear some Danish dude had the idea first but just didn’t publish...

Well. You’re not wrong. But this post is long enough already. Next time, we’ll go over what exactly it is, where exactly it manifests itself, and how it didn’t seem to work 100% of the time...and I suppose I still haven’t answered how ‘hemp’ and ‘cannabis’ are cognates...you’ll just have to stay tuned!

Bis zum nächsten Mal!

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ehliena · 4 years

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FilAms referring to the Philippines as the acronym PI while they are calling homelanders for the use of Filipinx and Pinxy is peak irony. That is without adding these two facts: the letter F is a loaned letter in Tagalog from the oppressors (and its corresponding phoneme too) and that the demonym is an appellation to Felipe II of Spain. And for someone like me who reads and writes in Baybayin since age 15, to write a Baybayin X seems like a dark humor scene in a Taika Waititi comedy. (Yes, I do Baybayin shiz for fun, but not as serious as Kristian Kabuay and NordenX.)

I first encountered PI among FilAms during Christmas vacation 2002 in LA; and Pilipinx when I joined the theatrical production of a FilAm musical at CalState East Bay in 2016. I understand that it is their culture and I respect it, and I assimilate. I easily assimilate with what I call my Nickelodeon voice, which I have acquired from when jailbroken cable services became a thing in Mega Manila and through my theatre background. But when in Rome, we live the Roman way, so as the Santa Mesa-born foreigner, I have to hide that dark laughter every single time someone uses PI.

But of course, 2020 had to make us see PI-using FilAms pressuring homelander to use Filipinx, citing political correctness and gender neutrality (while white American Pemberton, the killer of Filipino transwoman Jennifer Laude, was given an absolute pardon by Duterte).

So, let us start my TEDtalk.

P.I. is a colloquial acronym for Putanginamo (the equivalent of Fuck You) used by conservative Filipinos who probably are only retelling a story.

Tsismosa 1: “Minura ni Aling Biring si Ka Boying.” (Aling Biring cursed Ka Boying)

Tsismosa 2: “Oh? Ano ika?” (Really? What did she say?)

Tsismosa 1: “Malutong at umaatikabong PI.” (A hard and surging PI.)

Then I imagine PI as the curse when FilAms say some sentences:

“Are you flying back to Putangina?”

“I miss Putangina. We went to Boracay.”

“Duterte is President of Putangina.”

But it’s fine with me. I understand they mean well and I know that Americans, as first world as they are, have poor grasp of history. It’s a little sad though that FilAms have not always been reminded of this special footnote in the history of the United States:

P.I. stands for Philippine Islands. That’s the colonial name of the Philippines as a commonwealth republic under the United States, which the republic stopped using when the 1935 Constitution was enacted in 1946. Yes, in case people are forgetting, the Philippines has long been a state with full sovereignty recognized by the United Nations (of which we are a founding member of and wherein Carlos Romulo served as President) and recognized by Shaider Pulis Pangkalawakan.

Also, RP is used to refer to the Republic of the Philippines before the use of the standard two-letter country code PH.

I’m not saying FilAms should stop using PI to refer to the Philippines but I’m saying that the roots of that practice is from American oppression that homelanders have already cancelledttt.

Our oldest bank in the Philippines is BPI. It stands for Bank of the Philippine Islands, originally named El Banco Español Filipino de Isabel II because it was founded during Queen Isabella II’s reign. It was a public bank by then; perhaps comparable to the Federal Reserve. Upon its privatization during the American occupation, the bank started using BPI for the sake of branding because it was the Americans who christened us with P.I. (I have a theory that Manila was a character in Money Heist because the Royal Mint of Spain used to have a branch in the Philippines and operated very closely with BPI. And my other supernatural theory is that our translation of peso which is ‘piso’ affects our economy. ‘Piso’ means ‘floor’ or ‘flat’ in Spanish.)

Now, going back. To me, P.I. is more appropriate an acronym for the ethnic group of Pacific Islanders. I don't think I need to explain further why. These would be the natives of Hawai’i, Guam, Tuvalu, Kiribati, and other islands in the Oceania continent, and maybe even New Zealand. If a curious FilAm raises a question of whether Filipinos are Pacific Islanders or Asians or Hispanics, the answer is long but easy to understand.

The Filipinos live in a group of islands within the Pacific Plate. The Philippines is an Asian country, following conventions of geopolitical continental borders from the other. We are Hispanics by virtue of being under Spain for three fucking centuries. And Teresita Marquez is Reina Hispanoamericana because why not? (We could’ve been a part of America still if not for the efforts of Quezon.) So, the quick answer is that the Filipino is all of it.

Yes, the Filipinos have an affinity with the Pacific through nature and geography. Think of the earthquakes, volcanoes, flora and fauna, and the coconuts. And they even look like us. The earlier inhabitants of the archipelago were Pacific Islanders who were introduced to Hinduism and Buddhism as being closer to the cradles of civilization India and China. Then, the Islamic faith has grown along with the rise of the kingdoms and polities in Southeast Asia. The Spaniards arrived in the archipelago, to an already civilized Islamic polity - too civilized that they understood how diplomacy is necessary in war. We knew that it resulted to the defeat and death of Magellan who was fighting for Rajah ‘Don Carlos’ Humabon. Then came the 333 years of being under Spain AND (sic) the Catholic Church which made us more Hispanic. Our Austronesian/Malayo-Polynesian languages (Tagalog, Bisaya, Kapampangan, Ilocano, Bikol, Waray, Cuyonon, etc.) have kept our Asian identity intact - unlike Latin American countries where the official language of each is one of the Romance languages; thus "Latin".

(It is only towards the end of that 333-year Spanish rule that the 'Filipino' emerged to be something the oppressed could claim, and for that we thank the poet in Jose Rizal. I see a parallel in how Christians claimed the cross, the former symbol of criminals in Jewish tradition, to become the symbol of God’s love and salvation through Jesus. Wow. That’s so UST of me. Lol.)

You add into the mix that our diaspora is so large and identifiable, the data gatherers decided to mark the tables with “Filipino” - too Asian to be Hispanic and Pacific, too Pacific to be Hispanic and Asian, and too Hispanic to be Asian and Pacific.

What many FilAms do not realize everyday is that unlike the words Blacks, Latinx, Asians, or Pacific Islanders, or Hispanics, the word Filipino is not just a word denoting an ethnic group. At its highest technical form, the word Filipino is a word for the citizenship of a sovereign nation, enshrined in the constitution of a free people whose history hinges on the first constitutional republic in Asia.

By state, we mean a sovereign nation and not a federal state. (Well, even with Chinese intervention, at the very least we try.)

By state, we mean we are a people with a national territory, a government, and a legal system inspired by the traditions of our ancestors and oppressors. It may be ugly, but it is ours, and we have the power to change it.

This one may be as confusing as Greek-Grecian-Greco-Hellenic-Hellene, but let’s examine the word 'Filipino' further when placed side by side with related words.

*Pilipinas is the country; official name: Republika ng Pilipinas. It is translated into English as “Philippines”; official name: Republic of the Philippines. Spanish translates it into “Filipinas”, the Germans “Philippinen”, the French “Les Philippines”, the Italians “Filippine”.

*Pilipino refers to the people. It is translated into English as Filipino. The plural forms are ‘mga Pilipino’ and ‘Filipinos’.

*Philippine is an English adjective relating to the Philippines, commonly used for official functions. It may be used as an alternative to the other western adjective ‘Filipino’ but the interchangeability is very, very nuanced. Filipino people not Philippine people. Filipino government and Philippine government. Philippine Embassy, Filipino embassy, not Filipino Embassy. Tricky, eh?

*Filipino also refers to the official language of the state (which is basically Tagalog).

*Filipiniana refers to Philippine-related books and non-book materials (cultural items, games, fashion, etc.) which could be produced by Filipinos or non-Filipinos, inside or outside the Philippines.

*Pinoy is a colloquial gender-neutral demonym; comparable to how New Zealanders use the word Kiwi.

The demonym Filipino has evolved from that of referring only to Spaniards in the Philippines into becoming the term for the native people who choose to embrace the identity of a national.

It started from when Jose Rizal wrote his poem “A la juventud filipina” and he emerged as an inspiration to the Philippine Revolution through Andres Bonifacio’s leadership. (But take note of ‘filipina’ because ‘juventud’ is a feminine word in Spanish.)

Today, no less than the 1987 Philippine Constitution, which was neither written by Hamilton nor a group of straight white men but by people of different faiths, genders, disabilities, and skin colors, in its first five words in both Filipino and English versions read: "Kami, ang nakapangyayaring sambayanang Pilipino", translated as "We, the sovereign Filipino people” validates the legitimacy of the word as gender-neutral, alive, aware and awake with our history of struggles.

Article 14 Section 7 of the current Constitution says Filipino is the national language. And while I agree that it is not really a real language but an alias for Tagalog, it is a conscientious codification of a social norm during the time of Manuel Quezon as he is aiming for the world to recognize the unified Filipinos as a sovereign people. People. Not men. Not heterosexual men. People.

It is a non-issue for the homeland Filipino that the word Filipino refers to the people and the language. But FilAms are concerned of political correctness due to an understandable cultural insecurity also felt by other non-whites in the US. And there is added confusion when FilAms pattern the word Filipino after the patriarchal Spanish language, without learning that the core of the grammars of Philippine languages are gender-neutral. The Tagalog pronoun "siya" has no gender. "Aba Ginoong Maria" is proof that the Tagalog word 'ginoo' originally has no gender. Our language is so high-context that we have a fundamental preposition: “sa”.

It is difficult to be a person of color in the United States especially in these times of the white supremacy’s galling resurgence. Well, it’s not like they have been gone, but this time, with Trump, especially, it’s like the movement took steroids and was given an advertising budget. But for FilAms to force Filipinx into the Philippines, among homeland Filipinos, is a rather uneducated move, insensitive of the legacies of our national heroes and magnificent leaders.

The FilAm culture and the Filipino homeland culture are super different, nuanced. It’s a different dynamic for a Latinx who speak Spanish or Portuguese or whatever their native language is - it reminds entitled white English-speaking America of their place in the continent. It should remind a racist white man whose roots hail from Denmark that his house in Los Angeles stands on what used to be the Mexican Empire.

Let’s use a specific cultural experience by a Black person for example: the black person not only has Smith or Johnson for their last name, but there is no single easy way for them to retrieve their family tree denoting which African country they were from, unless the Slave Trade has data as meticulous as the SALN forms. Let’s use a specific cultural experience by a Mexican-American with Native American heritage: the person is discriminated by a white US Border Patrol officer in the border of Texas. Texas used to be part of Mexico. Filipinos have a traceable lineage and a homeland.

Filipinos and FilAms may be enjoying the same food recipes, dancing the same cultural dance for purposes of presentations every once in a while, but the living conditions, the geography, the languages, social experiences, the human conditions are different, making the psychology, the politics, the social implications more disparate than Latinxs like Mexicans and Mexican Americans.

I don’t know if it is too much advertising from state instruments or from whatever but FilAms don’t realize how insensitive they have become in trying to shove a cultural tone down the throats of the citizens of the republic or of those who have closer affinity to it. And some Filipino homelanders who are very used to accommodating new global social trends without much sifting fall into the trap of misplaced passions.

To each his own, I guess. But FilAms should read Jose Rizal’s two novels, Carlos Romulo’s “I am a Filipino”, materials by Miriam Defensor Santiago (not just the humor books), speeches of Claro Recto, books by historians Gregorio Zaide, Teodoro Agoncillo, Renato Constantino, Nick Joaquin, Regalado Trota Jose, Fidel Villaroel, Zeus Salazar, Xiao Chua, and Ambeth Ocampo, and really immerse themselves in the struggle of the Filipino for an unidentifiable identity which the FilAms confuse for the FilAm culture. That’s a little weird because unlike Blacks and the Latinx movement, the Philippines is a real sovereign state which FilAms could hinge their history from.

I have to be honest. The homelanders don’t really care much about FilAm civil rights heroes Philip Vera Cruz and Larry Itliong, or even Alice Peña Bulos, because it was a different fight. But the media can play a role sharing it, shaping consensus and inadvertently setting standards. (But it’s slightly different for Peña Bulos, as people are realizing she was already a somebody in the Philippines before becoming a who’s who in the US, which is somehow similar to the case of Lea Salonga who was not only from the illustrious Salonga clan, but was also already a child star.) How much do Filipino millennials know about Marcoses, Aquinos? Maybe too serious? Lol. Then, let’s try using my favorite examples as a couch potato of newer cultural materials accessible to FilAms - cultural materials on television and internet.

FilAms who only watched TFC wondered who Regine Velasquez was when ABSCBN welcomed her like a beauty queen. Those with the GMA Pinoy TV have a little idea. But they did not initially get why the most successful Filipino artist in the US, Lea Salonga, does not get that level of adulation at home that Velasquez enjoys. Was it just Regine’s voice? No. Well, kinda, maybe, because there is no question that she is a damn good singer with God knows how many octaves, but it is the culture she represents as a probinsyana who made it that far and chose to go back home and stay - and that’s already a cultural nuance Filipinos understand and resonate with, without having to verbalize because the Philippines is a high-context culture in general, versus the US which is low-context culture in general. I mean, how many Filipinos know the difference of West End and Broadway, and a Tony and an Olivier? What does a Famas or a Palanca mean to a FilAm, to a Filipino scholar, and to an ordinary Filipino? Parallel those ideas with "Bulacan", "Asia", "Birit", "Songbird".

You think Coach Apl.de.Ap is that big in the Philippines? He was there for the global branding of the franchise because he is an American figure but really, Francis Magalona (+) and Gloc9 hold more influence. And speaking of influence, do FilAms know Macoy Dubs, Lloyd Cadena (+) and the cultures they represent? Do FilAms know Aling Marie and how a sari-sari store operates within a community? Do FilAms see the symbolic functions of a makeshift basketball (half)courts where fights happen regularly? How much premium do FilAms put on queer icons Boy Abunda, Vice Ganda? Do FilAms realize that Kris Aquino's role in Crazy Rich Asians was not just to have a Filipino in the cast (given that Nico Santos is already there) but was also Kris Aquino's version of a PR stunt to showcase that Filipinos are of equal footing with Asian counterparts if only in the game of 'pabonggahan'? Will the FilAms get it if someone says ‘kamukha ni Arn-arn’? Do FilAms see the humor in a Jaclyn Jose impersonation? Do FilAms even give premiums to the gems Ricky Lee, Peque Gallaga, Joel Lamangan, Joyce Bernal, Cathy Garcia Molina, and Jose Javier Reyes wrote and directed? (And these are not even National Artists.) How about AlDub or the experience of cringing to edgy and sometimes downright disgusting remarks of Joey De Leon while also admiring his creative genius? Do FilAms understand the process of how Vic Sotto became ‘Bossing’ and how Michael V could transform into Armi Millare? Do FilAms get that Sexbomb doesn’t remind people of Tom Jones but of Rochelle? Do FilAms get that dark humor when Jay Sonza’s name is placed beside Mel Tiangco’s? What do FilAms associate with the names ‘Tulfo’, ‘Isko’, ‘Erap’, ‘Charo’, ‘Matet’, ‘Janice’, ‘Miriam’, ‘Aga’, ‘Imelda’ and ‘Papin’? Do FilAms get that majority of Filipinos cannot jive into Rex Navarette’s and Jo Koy’s humor but find the comic antics of JoWaPao, Eugene Domingo, Mr Fu, Ryan Rems, and Donna Cariaga very easy to click with? Do FilAms know Jimmy Alapag, Jayjay Helterbrand, Josh Urbiztondo? Oh wait, these guys are FilAms. Lol. Both cultures find bridge in NBA, but have these FilAms been to a UAAP, NCAA, or a PBA basketball game where the longstanding rival groups face each other? Do FilAms know the legacy of Ely Buendia and the Eraserheads? Do FilAms know about Brenan Espartinez wearing this green costume on Sineskwela? Do FilAms know how Kiko Matsing, Ate Sienna, Kuya Bodjie helped shape a generation of a neoliberal workforce?

That list goes on and on, when it comes to this type of Filipiniana materials on pop culture, and I am sure as Shirley Puruntong that while the homeland Filipino culture is not as widespread, it has depth in its humble and high-context character.

Now, look at the practical traffic experiences of the homelanders. People riding the jeepneys, the tricycles, the MRT/LRT, the buses, and the kolorum - the daily Via Crucis of Mega Manila only Filipinos understand the gravity of, even without yet considering the germs passed as the payments pass through five million other passengers before reaching the front. Add the probinsyas, people from periphery islands who cross the sea to get good internet connections or do a checkup in the closest first-class town or component city. Do FilAms realize that the largest indoor arena in the world is built and owned by Iglesia ni Cristo, a homegrown Christian church with a headquarters that could equal the Disney castle?

Do FilAms know the experience as a tourist's experience or as an experience a homelander want to get away from or at least improved?

Do FilAms understand how much an SM, a Puregold, or a Jollibee, Greenwich, Chowking branch superbly change a town and its psychology and how it affects the Pamilihang Bayan? Do FilAms realize that while they find amusement over the use of tabo, the homelanders are not amused with something so routinary? Do FilAms realize how Filipinos shriek at the thought that regular US households do not wash their butts with soap and water after defecating?

Do FilAms understand the whole concept of "ayuda" or SAP Form in the context of pandemic and politics? The US has food banks, EDDs, and stubs - but the ayuda is nowhere near the first world entitlements Filipinos in the homeland could consider luxury. But, that in itself is part of the cultural nuance.

Do FilAms know that Oxford recognizes Philippine English as a diction of the English language? While we’ve slowly grown out of the fondness for pridyider and kolgeyt, do FilAms know how xerox is still used in the local parlance? Do FilAms know how excruciating it is to read Panitikan school books Ibong Adarna, Florante at Laura under the curriculum, and how light it is to read Bob Ong? Do FilAms realize that Jessica Zafra, with all her genius, is not the ordinary homelander’s cup-of-tea?

Do FilAms know that Filipinos do not sound as bad in English as stereotypes made them believe? Do FilAms really think that Philippines will be a call center capital if our accents sound like the idiolects of Rodrigo Duterte’s or Ninoy Aquino’s Philippine English accent? Do FilAms realize how Ninoy and Cory speak English with different accents? Lea Salonga's accent is a thespian's accent so she could do a long range like that of Meryl Streep if she wants to so she wouldn't be a good example. Pacquiao's accent shows the idiolect unique to his region in southern Philippines. But for purposes of showing an ethnolinguistic detail, I am using President Cory Aquino’s accent when she delivered her historic speech in the US Congress as a more current model of the Philippine English accent.

Do FilAms bother themselves with the monsoons, the humidity, and the viscosity of sweat the same way they get bothered with snowstorms, and heat waves measured in Fahrenheit?

Do FilAms know that not only heterosexual men are accepted in the Katipunan? Do FilAms even know what the Katipunan is? Do FilAms realize that the Philippines had two female presidents and a transwoman lawmaker? Do FilAms take “mamatay nang dahil sa’yo” the same way Filipinos do? Do FilAms know the ground and the grassroots? Do FilAms know the Filipino culture of the homeland?

These are cultural nuances FilAms will never understand without exposure of Philippine society reflected from barrio to lalawigan, from Tondo to Forbes Park. It goes the same way with Filipinos not understanding the cultural weight of Robert Lopez and the EGOT, or Seafood City, or Lucky Chances Casino, or what Jollibee symbolizes in New York, unless they are exposed.

The thing though is that while it is harder for FilAms to immerse to the homeland culture, it is easier for homeland culture to immerse into the FilAm’s because America’s excess extends to the propagation of its own subcultures, of which the FilAm’s is one.

We’re the same yet we’re different. But it should not be an issue if we are serious with embracing diversity. There should not be an issue with difference when we could find a common ground in a sense of history and shared destiny. But it is the burden of the Filipinos with and in power to understand the situation of those who have not.

Nuances. Nuances. Nuances.

And while I believe that changing a vowel into X to promote gender-neutrality has a noble intention, there is no need to fix things that are not broken. Do not be like politicians whose acts of service is to destroy streets and roads and then call for its renovation instead of fixing broken bridges or creating roads where there are none.

The word ‘Filipino’ is not broken. Since Rizal’s use of the term to refer to his Malayan folks, the formal process of repair started. And it is not merely codified, but validated by our prevailing Constitution, which I don’t think a FilAm would care to read, and I cannot blame them. What's in it for a regular FilAm? They wouldn’t read the US Constitution and the Federalist Papers; what more the 1987 Saligang Batas?

The bottomline of my thoughts on this particular X issue is that FilAms cannot impose a standard for Filipinos without going through a deeper, well-thought-out, more arduous process, most especially when the card of gender neutrality and political correctness are raised with no prior and deeper understanding of what it is to be a commoner in the homeland, of what it is to be an ordinary citizen in a barangay, from Bayan ng Itbayat, Lalawigan ng Batanes to Bayan ng Sitangkai, Lalawigan ng Sulu. It is very dangerous because FilAms yield more influence and power through their better access to resources, and yet these do not equate to cultural awareness.

Before Rizal’s political philosophy of Filipino, the ‘Filipino’ refers to a full-blooded Spaniard born in the Philippines, and since Spain follows jus sanguinis principle of citizenship, back then, ‘Filipino’ is as Spaniard as a ‘Madrileño’ (people in Madrid). The case in point is Marcelo Azcárraga Palmero - the Filipino Prime Minister of Spain.

But the word ‘Filipino’ was claimed by Rizal and the ilustrados to refer to whom the Spaniards call ‘indio’. The term was then applied retroactively to those who helped in the struggle. It was only later that Lapu-Lapu, Francisco Dagohoy, Gabriela and Diego Silang, Sultan Kudarat, Lorenzo Ruiz, and GOMBURZA were called Filipinos.

The word 'Filipino' was long fixed by the tears and sweat of martyrs through years of bloody history in the hands of traitors within and oppressors not just of the white race. The word Filipino is now used by men, women, and those who do not choose to be referred to as such who still bears a passport or any state document from the Republic of the Philippines. Whether a homelader is a Kapuso, Kapamilya, Kapatid, DDS, Dilawan, Noranian, Vilmanian, Sharonian, Team Magnolia, Barangay Ginebra, Catholic, Muslim, Aglipayan, Iglesia, Victory, Mormon, IP, OP, SJ, RVM, SVD, OSB, OSA, LGBTQQIP2SAA, etc., the word 'Filipino' is a constant variable in the formula of national consciousness.

Merriam-Webster defines Filipina as a Filipino girl or woman. Still a Filipino. Remember, dictionaries do not dictate rules. Dictionaries provide us with the meaning. To me, the word Filipina solidified as a subtle emphasis to the Philippines as a matriarchal country faking a macho look. But that’s not saying the word Filipino in the language is macho with six-pack.

The word Filipino is not resting its official status on the letter O but in its quiddity as a word and as an idea of a sovereign nation. The words Pilipino, Filipino, and Pinoy are not broken. What is broken is the notion that a Filipino subculture dictates the standard for political correctness without reaching the depth of our own history.

If the Filipinx-Pinxy-Pilipinx movement truly suits the Filipino-American struggle, my heart goes out for it. But my republic, the Philippines, home of the Filipino people, cradle of noble heroes, has no need for it (not just yet, maybe) - not because we don't want change, but because it will turn an already resolved theme utterly problematic. The Filipinos have no need for it, not because we cannot afford to consider political correctness when people are hungry, abused, and robbed off taxes. We could afford to legalize a formal way of Filipino greeting for purposes of national identity. But as far as the Filipinx, it should not be the homeland’s priority.

We may be poor, but we have culture.

From Julius Payàwal Fernandez's post

#Filipino #culture #Philippines #filipinx #pinxy #pinoy #filipina #pinay

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rigelmejo · 3 years

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sometimes it is a bit frustrating how purist some language learning forums can be about their learning method being best and unquestionable, unable to find resources from more. like, i get liking a study method that works for you, we all do! i do not get shooting down resources that can and already helped someone, just because they didn’t help you personally (or you don’t like using them particularly), so it makes it hard for another person to find those resources and discourages using them in the first place.

the post (featuring some interesting links) by Strong-Philosophy-46 : https://www.reddit.com/r/Refold/comments/n09cxk/i_think_shadowing_should_be_used_in_the_early/

from all what I've read, shadowing seems to improve phonemic awareness (the ability to hear phonemes), listening comprehension and even pitch accent in Japanese. Which all seem to be the whole point of doing an only input/no output period in the beginning.

I was on the Refold reddit again (used to be massiveimmersionapproach). And someone mentioned that shadowing may have benefits earlier on in language study - compared to Refold, which does do shadowing but not until you are basically passively able to comprehend most things to all overall things in a language (so 1-2 years into study at least). Refold insists it is efficient (I would argue while it certainly is, it amounts to srs flashcards to speed up memorization and lots of comprehensible input and ambiguous input which generally will help learners at any stage improve comprehension skills). And that its goal in mind is to learn effectively.

I sort of think, to a degree, some people who do Refold appreciate the fact there’s no encouraged output early on - either they don’t like talking, practicing with people, don’t feel comfortable writing grammar until they have a much more solid foundation compared to when textbooks make you from day 1 (that last reason’s a big reason I tend to put off output until I know more grammar). Now its great to do what you prefer! Because it will get you to KEEP studying, and that’s always more effective and efficient than what makes you give up/avoid the language. So in that sense yes avoiding output until later, if you desire, is probably the more effective choice to make.

But at the same time? Refold encourages NOT doing output sooner, even if you feel the urge and even if some Refold studiers outputted sooner, the general consensus is ‘you will mess up accent, build bad habits, sacrifice your eventual output quality’ so people tend to discourage it. By earlier I mean like 5 months, in 10 months in - not day 1 of study. So if research happened to find, that shadowing at those earlier stages of 5 months etc actually Improves long term output skills? Then that’s great! It shows Refold’s tendency to discourage output until excellent passive comprehension fluency is achieved is unnecessary, and if you desire to output sooner (and it will motivate you, since what’s most effective is always what you’ll DO versus quit), then it would be great to know shadowing is something you can do sooner! And that it may even help your goals faster!

As I mentioned, Refold still eventually encourages shadowing after you’ve reached a high level of comprehension fluency - and at that point, you still have to do all the same shadowing techniques and work (you don’t get to skip steps, though the sounds might be more familiar). So ultimately Refold does use shadowing and already knows its helpful. I do wonder though if some people feel they need to justify their desire to not output earlier as ‘its better for my skills to Wait.” When like... in some ways that sounds to me just like perhaps a textbook/classroom learner who refuses to try to read target language novels for 2 years because they haven’t learned “the skills yet” and might misinterpret the grammar of what they read or reinforce fuzzy understanding - even though no matter how long its put off, immersion in target language content will eventually have to happen and be practiced.

Like, the unwillingness to do shadowing earlier even if it proves to be more effective - especially if the arguement is “oh well despite proof i think it will be less effective” just rings to me like people trying to avoid what they dislike. And i think its fine to avoid what one dislikes, because for an individual it IS going to be more effective always than quitting. I just also think that Reason is good enough on its Own - there is no reason to belittle other learning approaches and strategies as less effective (especially if its proven they are more effective, but even just if someone finds them useful they’re effective to the person who will do them), when your reason of ‘i prefer not to yet’ is really good enough. Its good enough.

Just to emphasize, I’ve seen the exact opposite - traditional learners claiming ‘refold’ is ineffective and should be avoided and it ‘slows’ progress and is inefficient and a waste of time. I really do think those kinds of discouragements just keep learners who might learn or simply prefer to study DIFFERENT from you from finding wonderful ideas/materials/resources that may suit them much better, simply because a person would rather shoot down offering more resources rather than just say “well that’s useful to someone, but for me I hated doing it so I do it this way since it works better for me/I can stay motivated.”

When I started studying chinese, I looked up lots of “how to read chinese” articles and forum posts. Since I wanted to read asap. I found some good advice. I also found a lot of angry posts. There were some people on chinese learner forums who insisted one must learn up to HSK 6 vocabulary (some were huge proponents of using anki, some hated anki - i relate to the can’t do flashcards crowd lol). And then even after that, start with graded readers, learn 3000+ hanzi before being able to tackle target language novels made for natives with a dictionary. Its pretty clear from what I describe, they probably had a personal preference for little ambiguity when engaging with chinese (too much incomprehensible input would cause them to want to quit/burn out and that’s perfectly understandable since most people generally don’t like tolerating under 95-98% comprehension).

They were very opposite of the Refold method’s idea of immersing in content from day 1, so huge amount of ambiguity for many months. Well these people on this forum really insisted reading in chinese even with a dictionary was an insurmountable task without years of study. I obviously ended up not following their preference. But they didn’t talk about it like “oh I dislike ambiguity so I prefer to prepare this much to make the material tolerable to immerse with” they instead talked about it like “doing it any other way is hopeless and will result in needing to do this anyway.”

I ended up following the advice of people who wanted to learn like I like learning - I found examples of people who did it more like I would, knew they succeeded so I’d have some success, and copied them. There really are all kinds of methods for different people and needs/wants. I read an article of a guy who read some radical basics (me too), learned 2000 common words in memrise with a linked deck (I did it too it took 2 months, but I spread it out over 4 months of a month on then a break then another month on). Then they said they just started reading, with a dictionary, learning more words from there. I did that too - it worked for me too. I also knew from prior japanese study I needed hanzi learning help so i read a reference for maybe 500 hanzi during those months. I knew from french prior study I did better reading a grammar summary ahead of reading, so I did that too (before the common words, it took 2 weeks). I did NOT end up having to wait for years, to learn up to HSK 6, to start reading with a dictionary (my initial goal). It took about 8-10 months for the grammar to click enough that vocab lookup became the only issue, and one month burst studying about 500 more hanzi in a Hanzi Mnemonic Anki deck to quickly learn some hanzi I was running into in reading and just wanted to remember easier. So about a year in, I could move to just reading for enjoyment and looking up words with a dictionary without new hanzi frustrating me (learning them the same as words now just looking them up) and without grammar confusing me. So that base goal, that some people’s experiences learning up to HSK 6 I read - they could not even tackle some graded readers by HSK 6.

I think part of what held back their progress there was just... not wanting to immerse and insisting it would be ‘too hard’ to try sooner. While its fine if it kept them studying, for people like me who need to engage right away? It could’ve been discouraging and caused some people to feel less motivated if they happened to be setting up such expectations. I still don’t know a lot of HSK 6 words, and about 2/3 maybe of HSK 5 words? After HSK 4 the common 2000 words I studied didn’t match up as much to HSK, and also I started picking up words mainly in my reading and shows so now what words I know is much more related to the genres I engage with. I’ve read some stats that The Little Prince has a low unique word count but about 50% of the words aren’t in HSK - so if you learned only from HSK without outside sources, its still not necessarily 98% comprehensible. Whatever smattering I learned from must have shared more words than 50% (though not 98% either I don’t think - not quite that easy).

My point is just like... yeah I am aware the lack of listening i did in french held me back, the lack of shadowing/producing in chinese is now my weaker area. I know i avoid them more because i’m less interested and mainly just would not be as motivated to write a journal/talk regularly right now as i am in other things. But i also think if people learn differently? Things may work better for them, we all have different preferences. Anything useful, that might get someone To study, I think is worthwhile to share.

#article #april #refold #mia #yeah i ran into some wild takes on chinese language learner forms #massive immersion approach is usually pretty chill because its flexible #but certain things i think relate to a lot of ppl who do it not liking the output skill work as much #which like. its fine. but also there's other studiers out there who love output and its how they get so good!#like people who choose to speak only in the language when they start learning - ive seen people do that for korean and chinese #and it worked well for them though id n #Neverrrrr wnat to do it personally #but them sharing what they did could help someone who learns/appreciates those activitities the same way a

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yeli-renrong · 5 years

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I remember the phrase "sound it out" from school, and I vaguely remember learning something about long & short vowels or such and to (on Between the Lions) but I don't think I ever understood that or paid it any thought since there were so many exceptions. of course, that doesn't mean it didn't do me any good, just that I didn't consciously recognize that it did (perhaps explaining what non-phonic approaches to teaching reading could be contemplated to begin with?)

One non-phonic approach to reading instruction is based on the belief that reading is a process of integration of syntactic, semantic, and graphic (i.e. whole word shape) cues -- in other words, a series of context-based guesses. This model has no allowance at all for the fact that spelling isn’t completely irregular -- as far as it’s concerned, the English alphabet may as well be a logography!

The paper that originally laid out this model (doi:10.1080/19388076709556976) can speak for itself:

Simply stated, the common sense notion I seek here to refute is this: “Reading is a precise process. It involves exact, detailed, sequential perception and identification of letters, words, spelling patterns and larger language units.”

In phonic centered approaches to reading, the preoccupation is with precise letter identification. In word centered approaches, the focus is on word identification. Known words are sight words, precisely named in any setting.

This is not to say that those who have worked diligently in the field of reading are not aware that reading is more than precise, sequential identification. But, the common sense notion, though not adequate, continues to permeate thinking about reading.

Spache presents a word version of this common sense view: “Thus, in its simplest form, reading may be considered a series of word perceptions.”

The teacher's manual of the Lippincott Basic Reading incorporates a letter by letter variant in the justification of its reading approach: “In short, following this program the child learns from the beginning to see words exactly as the most skillful readers see them . . . as whole images of complete words with all their letters.” In place of this misconception, I offer this: “Reading is a selective process. It involves partial use of available minimal language cues selected from perceptual input on the basis of the reader's expectation. As this partial information is processed, tentative decisions are made to be confirmed, rejected or refined as reading progresses.” More simply stated, reading is a psycholinguistic guessing game. It involves an interaction between thought and language. Efficient reading does not result from precise perception and identification of all elements, but from skill in selecting the fewest, most productive cues necessary to produce guesses which are right the first time.

The argument in favor of this position is... a handful of case studies of reading errors made by young children! (And some Chomskyist stuff that I don’t care to work through.) And Ken Goodman, the author of the paper quoted above and one of the major proponents of ‘whole-language theory’, had some studies to back this up:

In a study conducted by Goodman (1965), students in grades 1-3 first read lists of words. Then the children were presented the same words to read in meaningful text. The students made many more errors when they read the words out of context (i.e., when the words were in lists) than they did when the words were read in context. This, of course, is consistent with the hypothesis that reading will be facilitated when semantic-contextual and syntactic-contextual cues are present (i.e., when words are read as part of a text) compared to when words are read devoid of context cues (i.e., when words are read on lists). This finding has been used repeatedly to defend the meaning-emphasis practice of teaching students to recognize words by analyzing syntactic, graphemic-phonemic, and especially semantic cues.

Nicholson (1991) detected several very serious shortcomings in the Goodman (1965) study, however. First, no attention was paid in the Goodman (1965) investigation of the patterns of performance by good and poor readers. In addition, the participants always read the lists followed by reading of the words in context, and thus there was the possibility that the improved performance in moving from list reading to reading in context might reflect some type of practice effect (i.e., the words in context had been seen before, on the lists).

In Nicholson (1991), students once again were asked to process words in lists and in context. In this study, however, the list-context order was manipulated such that some participants read the lists first and others read the words in context first. Moreover, the study included systematic analysis of reading as a function of the grade of participants and their reading abilities relative to other students (i.e., good, average, weak). The outcomes in this study were anything but consistent with Goodman's (1965) results:

- Some readers did benefit from reading the words in the sentence context -- namely, poor readers at each age level and average 6- and 7-year-olds. - In context, a positive effect on reading was obtained in sentence context for good 6-year-old readers and average 8-year-olds only when reading words in sentence contexts followed reading words in lists, consistent with the practice effect explanation of the original Goodman (1965) finding. - There was no positive effect derived from reading words in context for good 7- and 8-year-old readers. Indeed, when the 8-year-old good readers did sentence-context reading first, they did better on reading of the words in list format.

Oops!

In very simple terms: how do you prompt a student who’s struggling with a word -- “Sound it out!” or “Context clues!” (The teachers I had always said clues instead of cues; I don’t know if that was because children would be more likely to know the former word or if someone misread it somewhere in the chain of transmission.) And there are a few problems with that:

- No attention is paid to the process of encoding. Even if treating words as logograms whose readings are to be inferred from context works to teach children to read (it doesn’t), how are they supposed to learn to write? (At the height of whole-language theory’s influence, some states banned public schools from buying spelling books.)

- What happens if you hit a proper noun? Take the following sentence: “Notably, Ross' classification does not support the ☃☃☃☃ of the Tsouic languages, instead considering the Southern Tsouic languages of Kanakanavu and Saaroa to be a separate branch.” Context cues let you extract meaning from this sentence without knowing the reading of ☃☃☃☃, but if you have to read it aloud and you can’t sound things out, you’ll hit “Kanakanavu” and produce garble. (You might still be wrong even if you can sound it out, because stress is unwritten and English words aren’t marked for which rule-set to use -- consider the words alveolar and maraschino -- but there’s a difference between being wrong and producing garble. Garble will probably accurately represent the cues, including the vague, impressionistic shape of the word, but a stress or rule-set error will at least convey the spelling. Buegehti for Buttigieg is a good example of garble -- you have the word-shape cues (starts with Bu, most of the letters are there) and the semantic cues (weird surname from the periphery of Europe; I assume Buegehti is pseudo-Finnish), but it’s not even close, and probably unrecoverable without context. (So contextual information isn’t totally useless.)

- Even if the relevant actors were willing to accept lack of attention to spelling and inability to decode phonetic information that context won’t help you with in order to get gains in reading ability... there are no gains.

But, as things do, whole-language theory got a lot wackier from there. Its proponents started referencing Chomsky’s language instinct to posit a reading instinct, which, the theory went, would lead children to automatically acquire reading with no instruction necessary (except highly technical facilitation was still considered necessary, because if schoolteachers aren’t essential, what’s the point?); claiming that phonics actually impeded literacy; attacking opponents of their theory as part of a far-right conspiracy to suppress teachers’ freedom and destroy public education; calling whole-language education a ‘revolution’ that would lead to true liberation and model the egalitarian society of the future; and so on.

For example, Shafer 1998:

Over the years, various writers, politicians, and media sources have taken aim at whole language, vilifying its motives and misrepresenting its goals. While many of the attacks have come from a lamentable ignorance on the part of T.V. reporters and talk show hosts, evidence exists that a portion of it has been carefully orchestrated by conservatives who clearly seem threatened by the implications of a whole language curriculum. Indeed, the list of writers who have opposed whole language initiatives reads like a who's who of conservative pundits. William Bennett, Phyllis Schlafly, Cal Thomas, and Chester Finn have all written articles deriding whole language, despite its overwhelming acceptance among academic organizations and respected scholars.

Many theories have been offered as to why whole language has become so partisan and acrimonious - and why conservatives in particular seem threatened by its humanistic objectives. What seems glaringly clear, in the end, is that whole language - with its caveat for student liberation and control - scares people who want to maintain a hierarchical, top-down approach to learning. The threat of whole language, at least from my perspective, lies in its bold challenge to traditional icons and time-honored practices. Some teachers feel intimidated by the notion that their way is not the only way - that their favorite authors shouldn't be their students' favorite authors.

When students cease to be receptacles of information and begin generating their own ideas, they occasionally formulate theories that are disconcerting to those who want to maintain "authority" in the classroom. Thus, the recent controversy over teaching a literary canon and classes in western civilization helps illustrate the result of whole language - where students question rather than absorb - and where learning comes to be a very personal, reflective activity. "To study," argues Paulo Freire, "is not to consume ideas, but to create and recreate them" (4).

(On the same page: “It seems clear that people learn best when they are progressing from whole to part so that they understand the importance of correctness and the viability of certain non-standard dialects in certain settings.” First, what the fuck is this supposed to mean? And second, I can’t see something like “progressing from whole to part” without having flashbacks to the polemics against Hegel from one of my philosophy professors -- the direction of progression and the concomitant assignment of more basic status to that which one progresses from, he said, was what distinguished Hegelian from analytic philosophy, and the Hegelian progression from whole to part underlay all the most prominent horrors of the 20th century. It was hard enough to quibble with that then, but it gets harder every time I see someone try to shore up nonsense with that ‘Hegelian’ formula.)

Edelsky 1993 (doi:10.2307/3587486):

Whole language (WL) is, first of all, a perspective-in-practice, anchored in a vision of an equitable, democratic, diverse society. A WL perspective highlights theoretical and philosophical notions about language and language learning, knowledge, and reality. In a WL perspective, language is an exquisite human tool for making (not finding) meaning. The WL view is that what people learn when they learn a language is not separate parts (words, sounds, sentences) but a supersystem of social practices whose conventions and systematicity both constrain and liberate. And the way people acquire that system or are acquired by it (Gee, 1990) is not through doing exercises so that they can really use it later but rather by actually using it as best they can with others who are using it with them, showing them how it works and what it is for (Smith, 1981). ...

Appropriating the label, the jargon, or the typical materials and activities of WL without taking on the liberatory (and therefore status-quo-disrupting) political vision, and without adopting a WL theoretical perspective, is a sure way to prevent genuine change.

And from the sewer of journalism, Metcalf 2002:

Why the infatuation with testing? For its most conservative enthusiasts, testing makes sense as a lone solution to school failure because, they insist, adequate resources are already in place, and only the threat of exposure and censure is necessary for schools to succeed. Moreover, among those who style themselves "compassionate conservatives," education has become a sentimental and, all things considered, cheap way to talk about equalizing opportunity without committing to substantial income redistribution. Liberal faddishness, not chronic underfunding of poorer schools or child poverty itself, is blamed for underachievement: "Child-centered" education, "progressive" education or "whole language"--each has been singled out as a social menace that can be vanquished only by applying a more rational, results-oriented and business-minded approach to public education. ...

Why is the same conservative constituency that loves testing even more moonstruck by phonics? For starters, phonics is traditional and rote--the pupil begins by sounding out letters, then works through vocabulary drills, then short passages using the learned vocabulary. Furthermore, to teach phonics you need a textbook and usually a series of items--worksheets, tests, teacher's editions--that constitute an elaborate purchase for a school district and a profitable product line for a publisher. In addition, heavily scripted phonics programs are routinely marketed as compensation for bad teachers. (What's not mentioned is that they often repel, and even drive out, good teachers.) Finally, as Gerald Coles, author of Reading Lessons: The Debate Over Literacy, points out, "Phonics is a way of thinking about illiteracy that doesn't involve thinking about larger social injustices. To cure illiteracy, presumably all children need is a new set of textbooks."

Whole-language theory isn’t as popular now as it used to be. But the underlying Lysenkoist tendency has taken strong root in L2 education, which is why most of the people in my second-year German class couldn’t properly decline the definite article.

Sometimes you just have to drill.

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canid-slashclaw · 5 years

Text

The Outliers - A Guildwars Love Story

Chapter 6

Two months had passed since the siege against the centaurs had begun in Kressex Hills. During those tenuous months, Kaleb, Brad and Cynthia would alternate duties between fighting on the front line and running much-needed supplies from the lake-port town. Kaleb's reputation as a fine cook also began to take hold. Some of his recipes became so popular that troops from other garrisons would stop by just to sample some of his cuisine. It was also during this time that he made it a point of volunteering for supply running duty to Triskell whenever the opportunity presented itself.

He enjoyed the unusual rapport he had developed with the market owner's daughter. Even though she was a charr and viewed by many of his people as the mortal enemy, he somehow found their respective differences to be intrinsically fascinating.

Today he was scheduled to pick up a fresh supply of imported cheeses from the marketplace. Along with the meats, soldiers discriminating tastes demanded an increasing array of finer foods. He was well aware that all of this was his own fault. But he simply couldn't help it - he liked to ensure that everyone enjoyed the little things in life for one never knew when all of it would suddenly end.

The morning was overcast and the plume of smoke rising from the upstairs chimney of the meat market indicated one thing. Amalthia was there, working away at whatever it was her kind liked to do. But even during subsequent visits, Kaleb could somehow never work up the nerve to ask her what she was working on.

He entered the shop and his nostrils were immediately greeted with the familiar array of scents from the spices and herbs. As always, Ludrick the big tabby patterned charr was there to greet him the moment he walked in.

"Two-thousand pounds of freshly-slaughtered bovine are ready for pickup. I hope you got some sturdy paws carrying this stuff. My ankle has been giving me fits and I'm not gonna be much use to anyone today," Ludrick grumbled as he shifted his center of gravity on his crutches.

Two months of coming to these felines' shop and I still don't know either of them on a personal level. Kaleb mused as he handed Ludrick the work order.

"Amalthia. Get down here and help this customer. He's got a meat wagon that needs to be loaded up," the old charr bellowed out towards the upstairs. "Just a minute. One last spot and I'll be finished."

Kaleb heard Amalthia's voice from upstairs. Summoning his courage, Kaleb stood in front of the big charr and quickly asked in a rushed voice. "So what has your daughter been working on?" Ludrick just shook his head and grumbled. "Ask her." He then pointed towards the staircase to where Amalthia had already been present. "Ask me what?" Kaleb swallowed as he was at a loss for words for the moment. "I was..." "It's okay, just remember your fahrar training when learning to speak. Or is it the Asuran School of Synergetics? Either way, you seem to have a hard time completing sentences whenever you are around me." Kaleb looked at Ludrick then commented. "Is your cub like this to all her customers?"

"Only to the ones who act like fools. Which, I might add, seems to include everyone." "Whathaveyoubeenworkingonupstairs? There! I asked it!" "Is that some sort of lost Orrian gibberish? Ohh... now I get it. I think you were trying to ask me a personal question. Something along the lines of what I do with my time while I'm upstairs. Am I right?" Amalthia conjugated her thoughts aloud. "Well, the acrid smell of burning coal does pique my curiosity. I can't help but to be curious." Amalthia gazed in his general direction with her amber eyes then replied. "I am not in the business of forming personal relationships with customers. If there is something business-related you or your people want to discuss with my sire, or me then by all means, do so. Otherwise don't pester me with personal questions." Human or not, Kaleb could tell that she had her defenses on high alert. Like the Seraph army he served under, he wanted to strategically break them down. "Business question." "Okay. Shoot." "How does your shop produce such a large volume of market cuts in such a short amount of time? And please don't tell me it's a trade secret, cause I know you people have commonplace technologies that our people don't even possess." Amalthia looked at her father who gave his silent nod of approval. "Did you bring anyone with you this time?" "No. Just me." "Good. Now take off those filthy shoes and socks," Amalthia said as she pointed her clawed finger towards Kaleb's boots. She led him down the stairs and into the basement cutting room. For the moment, the room was pitch black. But with the flick of her hand, a series of gaslight propane lights came to life. "Tada! Welcome to the cutting room. Or as I like to call it, the slaughter shack." The plucky charr beckoned him to tread carefully across the freshly mopped stone floor. She reached up and pulled back a chain-mail curtain revealing a row of cattle quarters dangling on a series of hooks. "The cattle are gutted just beyond that doorway over there. Once they have been dressed, sire and I bring the carcasses here to be cleaned up and ready for quartering." "What do you use to quarter them with... a tree saw?" Kaleb asked. Amalthia walked him over to a giant fearsome-looking machine that sported a giant saw blade. As he got closer, Kaleb could hear the high-pressure rushing sound of water that was coursing through the complex array of pipes. "Steam-powered quartering saw. Charr trade secret. You are to keep this mum under sever pain of a horribly gruesome death," she said laconically. "How charming. I suppose some of the meat I saw may have very well been the remains of customers who foolishly betrayed your secrets?" "Well, those and the ones who ask too many stupid personal questions. But other than that, you needn't worry. The chances of you inadvertently eating your dead uncle are practically nil," Amalthia quipped as she began adjusting the controls of the saw blade. "Amalthia! Customer with two little ones." "Great. Well that's it for now. I gotta put on the charming routine and help those pesky humans." As Kaleb and Amalthia emerged from the downstairs cutting room, a young mother and her squealing kids greeted them. "Mommy. Another charr!" The mother had a brief look of terror on her face as Amalthia kneeled down to make eye contact with the youngster. Without any sense of fear or trepidation, the little girl started to run her fingers across Amalthia's large horns. Within moments, the child was playing with her whiskers and ears, apparently being delighted by their twitching movement. "What's your name, little one? Mine is Amalthia. Can you say that?" The little girl tried to mimic Amalthia's feline muzzle phonemes as she attempted to sound out her name. "Ah.."

"..mall.."

"...thia!" Kaleb was utterly stunned. He was amazed at how patient she was with the human child. "You are really good with kids. I didn't expect that from someone like you," he said off-the-cuff. "What is that supposed to mean? 'Someone like me'?" "What I meant to say was, I didn't take you for the type to be so good around kids. I thought they would push your buttons and drive you crazy," Kaleb replied humbly. "There is a lot about me you don't know or want to know about. And for your sake as well as mine, it's for the better." Kaleb noticed the other child, a boy, clamoring over one of the displays.

"Be right back."

He gently picked up the arrant boy then promptly returned him to his mother. "There ya go fella. Just keep off of high places, yea hear? Otherwise you might fall and break something." Without Kaleb noticing, Amalthia witnessed the interaction as a wide grin came over her face that caused her ears to flatten with a sensation of happiness.

Kaleb walked back over sans the child. "I disagree. With your last statement, that is. Because I would like to get to know you better." "Do you have cubs?" Once again, Kaleb was caught off guard. But he learned to recover from the initial shock of her bold questions. "None at present. You?" "Nada." "Havarti is my favorite cheese. Okay, that one was pure randomness," Kaleb said in a relaxed tone. "Goat cheese for me. The harder ones clog me up something fierce. Randomness back at you," she chided. "More fiber will fix that issue. You've been served," Kaleb said gleefully. "Rebound - charrs don't consume fiber. Two and zero, with Amalthia in the lead." "You moved the goalpost. That's cheating!" "Accusing an Iron Legionnaire of cheating is an insult worthy of a duel... to the death!" Amalthia gnashed her teeth at Kaleb. "Match accepted. But first - may I treat you to some refreshments? You know, the kind outside this slaughterhouse?" Kaleb said with a wink. The little boy tugged on the hem of his mother's dress and pointed. "Mommy, that man and that charr are really talking weird to each other." The mother looked apprehensively at the odd bantering between the two then quickly decided it was best to pull up her spawn and leave. Ludrick planted the palm of his hand over his face as he shook his head. "You cubs are giving me a splitting headache. Would the both of you be so courteous as to take your jabber-jawing somewhere else? Preferably somewhere far out of my earshot?" "Oh crap! Where has the time gone? It looks like the dessert thing will have to wait another time. I was only supposed to be here for no more than an hour and now look at the time. I'm going to be in deep dolyak doo with my sarge if she finds out I've been goofing around," Kaleb said with a sigh of disappointment. Amalthia flicked her ears as she looked over the young soldier. "Then I wouldn't want to be the one to keep you from your appointed rounds. Meet me by the bay door and I'll help you load up your supplies." As they were working together in stocking up his cart, Amalthia couldn't help but notice Kaleb's bulging biceps as he helped her heft the large hunks of rations. But she immediately averted her gaze the moment he turned his head towards her. Once the necessary cargo had been loaded aboard the wagon, Amalthia proceeded to close and latch the receiving bay door. "That's the last of it," she said with a raised clawed thumb. "Thanks for everything. I couldn't have done this without your help. And next time, I promise there will be desserts," Kaleb replied with a smile. "Then I'll hold you to your word, Kaleb."

Her ears twitched upon saying his name. And for his part, he couldn't have felt happier when she said it too.

#gw2 fanfic #tyriaslibrary #gw2 stories #the outliers #charr

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mornyavie · 5 years

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Indigenous Languages Challenge #2: Proto-Algonquian

(see bottom of post for a quick introduction to language families and proto-languages, if you’re not familiar with my terminology here.)

Name of the language is Proto-Algonquian; since we have no record of this language actually existing, we don’t know what its speakers might have called themselves, though we could guess. Looking at the root of the Wôpanâak word hutuwôk (”that [language] which they can speak to each other”), from the first post I made in this series, we might guess that it’s related to *eϴketoᐧmakatwi, the verb “speak,” but I haven’t found any writings on this yet. The word “algonquian” itself may descend from a Maliseet word, elakómkwik, meaning “they who are our allies/relatives,” whose root I haven’t been able to find.

Basic Information - We get to Proto-Algonquian by pulling back from Wôpanâak to look at the entire Algonquian language family; this is sometimes subdivided into Plains Algonquian (such as Blackfoot / Siksiká), Central Algonquian (such as Ojibwe / Ojibwemowin / Anishinaabemowin), and Eastern Algonquian (such as Wôpanâak), but we can argue for a while about how the sub-groups should actually be split up. (There are many more in the Algonquin language family than I’ve listed here, of course).

History - Of course, much like we don’t have direct record of Proto-Algonquian, we don’t have direct record of who its speakers were; however, based on the geography and history of the groups in the language family, its guessed that they were a largely settled group in the central-south Canada area; northeast of the Great Lakes. Part of the point of this challenge is to recognize indigenous people and languages as living and existent, not historical curiosities, which I’m already stretching by talking about proto-languages, so instead of continuing to tell you about that, I’ll give you a little information on those two randomly-chosen subgroups I mentioned above, excluding Wôpanâak since I already talked about it.

The Blackfoot Confederacy (Niitsitapi or Siksikaitsitapi) describes four groups in Montana and in southwestern Canada. They were originally nomadic inhabitants of the Great Plains area. There’s several strong language revitalization and education movements among the Blackfoot Confederacy. The Piegan Institute, founded by Darrell Robes-Kipp, supports several immersion schools; and Montana radio station KBWG broadcasts shows in the language.

The Ojibwa or Chippewa (this is still a wide group, and there are so many different names for them, based on exact langauge, dialect, and area, that there’s an entire wikipedia article List of Ojibwa ethnonyms) are an Anishinaabe people and members of the Council of Three Fires; they live largely in an area I can best describe as south-middle-eastern Canada, north of the Great Lakes and sweeping a bit east and west, as well as a bit south into the United States. In 2001 an Ojibwe-language school, Waakoododaading (”the place where we help each other”) was founded by a community effort in Wisconsin; there were many people involved, but some of the original founders still working with the school are Keller Paap and Lisa LaRonge.

Linguistic revitalization - Algonquian has been one of the more heavily studied of the American language families; a first attempt at its reconstruction was published by one Leonard Bloomfield in the early 1900s, not long after Proto-Indo-European obtained a widely accepted form. A dictionary of Proto-Algonquian was published here (x) by the Algonquian Dictionaries Project, a subsidiary of the Algonquian Linguistic Atlas. The dictionary project makes available here (x) many resources on Algonquian languages; the Atlas also offers great resources for learning and use of these languages, such as fonts, conversation audios and manuals, and this super neat “terminology forum” (x) with common and important phrases.

Support - I wasn’t able to find an active donation site for Waakoododaading, and the Algonquian Dictionaries Project is an academic project which gains funding through grants, not donations, but...

Support the Piegan Institute here!

Linguistic Information:

Phonology - As we saw with Wôpanâak , voicing / aspiration were not phonemic in Proto-Algonquian. The consonant inventory is a bit restricted as a result, but, notably, there’s a palatal or post-alveolar series as well as alveolar (again, as in Wôpanâak). The language did have at least one approximant/trill in the form of /l/, or /ɹ/. And, like Wôpanâak, there are four basic vowels and a length distinction, though nasalization was probably not phonemic. Like its daughter language, Proto-Algonquian was likely distinctive for its abundance of multi-vowel and semivowel-vowel syllables.

Morphology - Again, like Wôpanâak (and like many proto-languages), Proto-Algonquian is pretty heavily marked. It heavily uses a proximate-obviative distinction - much like the difference between “this” and “that,” this is the distinction between an object/person who is close to / part of / more relevant to the conversation, vs. one who is far away / not participating / less relevant. The distinction is used with pronouns to keep track of third person referents (as if you were referring to this-he and that-he, instead of leaving it unclear who a particular “he” refers to), for instance.

Syntax - I wasn’t able to find a ton on the syntax of Proto-Algonquian (it’s even more difficult to reconstruct grammars than phonologies, and heavily-marked languages tend towards less rigid syntax anyways), so, in interest of getting this posted, I will refrain from trying to find and get an interesting factoid from a paper on Proto-Algonquian syntax.

Vocabulary - Like Wôpanâak, many Algonquian languages have lent words to English / American terms and place-names. From Massachusetts, which we saw before, to Michigan (mishigamaa, Ojibwe “big water”), to animals such as moose and woodchucks (from Cree otchek or Ojibwe otchig, altered to match “wood” [now you know how much wood a woodchuck can chuck: none]), and even the word tuxedo (named for the town the style originated in, which in turn took its name from a Munsee-langauge place-name).

Information from one of the listed sources, Wikipedia, World Atlas of Language Structures, Online Etymology Dictionary, etc.

In case you don’t know what I’m talking about here, a “proto” language is one for which we have no record (living speakers or writings), but which we can reconstruct based on the similarities of languages we do know about. A proto-language is constructed for a language family, a set of languages that we know are related because of similarities in their words and grammars. Roughly speaking, this means comparing words we think are related, and hypothesizing an ancestor word which can produce all of the descendants via regular sound changes; of course, it tends to get a lot more complicated than that might sound.

Often, because of the relatively short history of written language, more than one proto-language can be constructed in the history of a language family; the Algonquin language family is itself part of the Algic family (unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, linguistics haven’t followed biologists in the order-phylum-class-etc-etc classification, so everything’s a family of different sizes), along with Wiyot and Yurok, and we have another reconstructed language, Proto-Algic, from which they all descend.

As an example, Wikipedia helpfully provides the word for “woman” in many Algonquin languages; a random sample of them is okwéew, iskwew, and aakííwa. Clearly related, right? The hypothesized root for these is *eϴkweᐧwa; so the major changes we have are deleting /ϴ/ (the sound at the end of “with”) or replacing it with /s/ (if this seems improbable, considered how often non-native speakers pronounce English “the” like “ze;” the two sounds are, by linguistic standards, quite similar), and messing about with the vowels. If I had the time and energy to pull up more words and roots, we’d expect to see regular correspondences between languages, like “o,” “i,” and “aa” appearing in the same word.

As a note, reconstructed words are generally marked with * to indicate that they aren’t actually attested.

#iyil-challenge #linguists #information #algonquian #algonquin #Sorry this took forever to write #there's not a ton of available information on the language and I kept getting sidetracked by researching the daughter languages.

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manjuhitorie · 6 years

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SLEEPWALK - Hitorie - English Translation

youtube

逃がしてくれって声を枯らした Let me run away, I whimpered あたしの願いなど叶うでしょうか Will my measly wish ever be granted 目を合わせて喋れないんだ I can’t look you in the eyes when we talk 喜怒哀楽のどれでさえ No matter which emotion I draw out of the pile 愛してくれって何度叫んだって Gimme love, how many times do I have to shout it 君が見てんのはあたしじゃないな？ I’m not the one you’re looking at though, huh? 腑に落ちないことばかりだなぁ None of this sits well with me この世界、世界はさ In this world, this world, y'know 「愛し方なんてわからないんだ」って “I don’t know how to love” I say あたしの言葉は伝うでしょうか Will my measly words ever reach you 振り返ることは出来ないな、ただ唄い続けるだけ There’s no turning back, I can only continue on singing 「ねえ神様、視界はどうだい」夜を虚附く彼女は言うよ¹ "'Scuse me God, what's your perspective” says a girl who roams the empty space of night 「なぜあなたの目に映るあたしの横に誰もいない？いない？」 “Why's there nobody by my side, when I reflect in your eyes? There's nobody?” SOS鳴らしているんだ I’m sending out the SOS もうそろそろ気付いてくれよ Heed my calls already, c’mon 今日もまたアスファルトのグレー照らすだけだね Alas my efforts only shine light on the gray of asphalt again 放蕩しようぜ Let's debauch fulfill 徘徊しようぜ Let's wander off ill 正解なんて誰一人知らない Nobody can deem what I’m supposed to be 「愛してみようぜ」 "Let's give love a spin” 「失ってみようぜ」 "Let's lose it all within” あたしの思うまま、逃げ出してみようぜ To my hearts desire, let's run away and begin

探してくれって何度叫んだって Come find me, how many times do I have to shout it あたしの言葉は届かないや Alas my measly words don’t reach you 振り回されてばかりだなぁ All of this feels manipulative この世界、世界にさ In this world, this world, y'know 愛し方なんて忘れたんだって I've forgotten how to love, 君の瞳がささやいたんだ Your eyes whispered the message to me 縋り附くことは出来ないな、また独り声を枯らすだけ I can't depend on sticking around here, all I’m left with is a shriveled throat 夢の中を歩いてるような夜にあたしは溺れてました Once upon a night of walking through a dream, did I immerse 無意識の片隅に眠るあなたの姿が痛い、痛い You sleeping in the corner of my subconscious, hurt to look at, it hurts その引力に逆らうなんてどうしてもやり切れないんだ Try as I must, I can’t defy the force which pulls us together 真夜中に交わるその思いドラマみたいだね Our feelings mingling in the middle of the night are like a drama 不時着した夜の海で The night takes a crash landing, it's us ditched upon such sea 何を祈る What do you pray for 誰を彩る Who do you dye in ああ Ahh あたしはまだ何も知らない I still don’t understand anything 焦がし続けるだけ My spirit only continues to burn 夢の中で遊んでるような夜にあたしはあなたを待った Once upon a night of playing amidst a dream, I had waited for you 自意識の裏側に沈むあたしの本音が痛い Stuck sinking back into the hidden side of self-conscious, my true feelings are hurted 痛い It hurts 本当の Nobody 正解なんて knows 誰も the right way 何も things’re 知らない supposed to be 「神様、今日のあたしはどうだい」夜を乱して彼女は言うよ "God, how do you like me now”, says a girl as she perverts the night 「もしあなたの目に映るあたしの横に誰もいないなら "If there truly is nobody at my side when I reflect in your eyes SOS鳴らしているのもうそろそろ終わりにしようか」 Then, there’s no reason for you to keep up this SOS business" 今日もまたアスファルトを踏みしめるだけだね I guess I’ll only be stomping on the asphalt all over again 話をしようぜ Let's chat free あたしをやろうぜ Let's do me 世界のルール壊してしまえばいい Fucking break the rules of the world 愛し方なんて The how-to's of love どうして、どうして Why now, why now あなたの思うままにさせはしないよ I won’t let it go the way your heart desires 放蕩しようぜ Let's debauch fulfill 徘徊しようぜ Let's wander off ill 正解なんてあたしがもう決める Now I deem how things are supposed to be 愛してみようぜ "Let's give love a spin” 失ってみようぜ "Let's lose it all within" あたしの思うままに愛してみようぜ To my heart’s desire, let’s give love a spin

Keynotes:

wowaka(Producer/G/V) wrote this song’s entirety by himself, from start to finish. Using a recording of Yumao(Drummer)’s drums like a sample. As a band they were hesitant to include it on the album, Yumao said “It’s a mad good song so I super-pushed to have it included!” Production began in the first place because Yumao suggested wowaka make a song solo once again, with fortunate results too, as Yumao himself was able to “remember so many things!!!” because of this song. (Credit to Mi-san for posting this info).

¹ 虚附く is an original phrase. He pronounces it “urotsuku”, a word which usually means ”彷徨く(to roam)”. The twist is that the characters he chose for these phonemes is a mutation of “虚衝く(to attack an empty unguarded spot)”. His original character could literally translate to “attach to empty”, so I guess he purposely manipulated the "roam" word to highlight the “empty” aspect. Because like the empty station in the MV, emptiness is important to this song and un un.

To avoid confusion, the last lines would more literally translate to: 愛してみようぜ "Let’s see what happens when we love" 失ってみようぜ "Let’s see what happens when we lose it”

Also behold research into all of wowaka’s syllable mix-and-matches. https://twitter.com/tamagotoji_/status/1103496255139831808

#ヒトリエ #wowaka #SLEEPWALK #HOWLS #https://smar.lnk.to/YPehY #new album SOON #Hitorie #special thanks to Ohm and Keen

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secretcupcakesublime · 3 years

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Creating speech skills for Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant

A dramatic transition to conversational interfaces has occurred in the last decade. As people hit 'peak screen' and even begin to scale back their use of the app with digital wellness apps embedded in most operating systems.

In order to combat screen fatigue, voice assistants have entered the market to become a preferred option for rapid information retrieval. A well-repeated status states that in 2020, 50 per cent of searches will be carried out by voice. It's also up to developers to add "Conversational Interfaces" and "Voice Assistants" to their tool belt, as adoption grows.

What Is An Interface to Conversation?

A Conversational Interface (sometimes shortened to

CUI

, is any interface in a human language. It is tipped to be a more intuitive interface for the general public than the Visual User Interface GUI, which front end developers are used to creating. A GUI allows people to know about the basic interface syntaxes (think buttons, sliders, and drop-downs).

This main difference in the use of human language makes CUI more intuitive to humans; it needs little knowledge and places the burden of interpretation on the instrument.

There are two forms of popular CUIs: chatbots and voice assistants. In the last decade, both saw a huge increase in take-up due to developments in the NLP.

JARGON UNDERRSTANDING Speech

What Is An Assistant to the Voice?

A voice-assistant is a piece of

NLP

(Natural Language Processing) capable software. It receives a voice command, and returns an audio response. The complexity of how you can communicate with an assistant has grown and changed in recent years, but the crux of the system is natural language in, tons of computation, natural language out.

To those seeking a little more detail:

1. The program receives an audio request from a user, converts the sound into phonemes, which are the language building blocks.

2. By the magic of AI (Speech-To - Text in particular), these phonemes are translated into a string of the approximate request, which is held within a JSON file which also contains additional user, request and session information.

3. The JSON is then processed to find out the meaning and purpose of the request (usually in the cloud).

4. A answer is returned on the basis of intent, again in a larger JSON document, either as a string or as SSML (more on that later)

5. The answer is processed back using AI (naturally the reverse-Text-To-Speech) that is returned to the user afterwards.

There's a lot going on there, much of it needing no second thought. But-platform does this differently, and it is the platform nuances which require a little more understanding.

Devices with Voice Enabled

The specifications for a computer to have a baked in voice assistant are relatively small. They need a microphone, a connection to the internet, and a speaker. Smart Speakers like the Nest Mini & Echo Dot offer such low-fi voice control.

Next up in the ranks is voice + screen, this is known as a multimodal system (more on these later), which are devices such as the Nest Hub and the Echo Display. Because smartphones have this feature, they can also be considered a form of device allowed for multimodal voice.

Voice Competencies

First of all, for their 'Speech Skills,' each platform has a different name, Amazon goes with skills, for which I will stick as a widely understood word. Google opts for 'Actions' and for 'capsules' Samsung opts.

Growing platform has its own baked-in skills, including asking for the games of time, weather and sport. Developer-made (third-party) skills may be invoked with a specific phrase, or can be invoked indirectly without a main phrase if the user likes it.

INVOCATION EXPLICIT: "Hey Google, Speak to < app name >."

It is expressly specified which skills are being requested:

What Are Their Voice Assistants?

Audio assistants are very much a tri-horse challenge on the western market. Apple, Google and Amazon have very different approaches to their assistants and, as such, cater to developers and consumers of all kinds.

APPLE’S SIRI

DEVICE NAME: ”Siri”WAKE PHRASE: ”Hey Siri”

Siri has more than 375 million active users, but I don't go into too much detail for Siri for the sake of brevity. Although it may be well accepted worldwide, and built into most Apple devices, it allows developers to have an app already on one of Apple 's platforms and is written in swift (whereas the others can be written in the favorite of all: Javascript). If you are an app developer who wants to increase the scope of their app, you can actually skip past apple until it opens up its website.

GOOGLE ASSISTANT

DEVICE NAMES: ”Google Home, Nest”WAKE PHRASE: ”Hey Google”

Google has the most apps of the big three, with more than 1 trillion globally, this is largely due to the mass of Android devices that have baked Google Assistant in, in terms of their dedicated smart speakers, the figures are a little lower. Google's ultimate goal is to please consumers with its help, and they've always been really good at delivering light and intuitive interfaces.

Their key goal on the site is to use time — with the intention of being a frequent part of the everyday life of the customers. As such, they concentrate mainly on usefulness, fun in the family and pleasant experiences.

Google-built skills are best when they're pieces of interaction and games, with a emphasis on family-friendly fun. Their recent inclusion of game canvas is a testament to that approach. Google's site is far more rigorous for ability submissions and as such, their list is much smaller.

AMAZON ALEXA

DEVICE NAMES: “Amazon Fire, Amazon Echo”WAKE PHRASE: “Alexa”

In 2019, Amazon has reached 100 million products , mainly from sales of its smart speakers and smart screens, as well as its range of fire or tablets and streaming devices.

Skills built for Amazon appear to be geared towards purchasing skills. Amazon is for you if you're looking for a forum to extend your e-commerce / service or offer a subscription. That being said, ISP is not an Alexa Skills prerequisite, they endorse all kinds of uses, and are far more open to submissions.

Installation On Amazon Alexa

Amazons voice ecosystem has evolved to allow developers to build all of their skills inside the Alexa console, so I will use its built-in features as a simple example.

Alexa deals with the processing of the natural language and then determines a suitable Purpose, which is passed on to our Lambda function to deal with the reasoning. This returns some conversational bits (SSML, text, cards, etc.) to Alexa which converts those bits to audio and visuals for display on the app. It's pretty easy to work on Amazon because it helps you to build all parts of your ability inside the Alexa Developer Console. There is versatility to use AWS or an HTTPS endpoint but it should be enough to run anything inside the Dev console for basic skills.

LET's Create A SIMPLE SKILL ALEXA

Go to the console of Amazon Alexa, create an account if you don't have one, and log in.

Click Build Skill and then name it,

Choose your model customised,

And select Alexa-Hosted (Node.js) for the tool on your backend.

If provisioning is completed, you're going to have a simple Alexa experience, you're going to have your plan developed for you, and some back end code to start you up.

If you click in your Intents on the HelloWorldIntent, you'll see some sample utterances already set for you, let's add a new one at the top. Our ability is called hello world, so add a sample utterance to Hello World. The aim is to catch whatever the user may say to cause the purpose. This could be "Hello World," "Howdy World" etc. What Happens In The JS Fulfillment?

This uses the ask-sdk-core, and basically builds JSON for us. CanHandle wants to know if it can handle attempts, namely 'HelloWorldIntent.' Handle takes the input and constructs the response. And it looks like this produces

Construction For Google Assistant

Use their AoG console in conjunction with Dialogflow is the easiest way to create Actions on Google, you can expand your skills with firebase, but let's keep it simple, as with the Amazon Alexa tutorial.

Google Assistant uses three primary parts: AoG, which deals with the NLP, Dialogflow, which works out the plans, and Firebase, which fulfills the request, and generates the response which will be returned to AoG.

As with Alexa, Dialogflow enables you to create your functions directly within the platform.

LET 'S ACTION ON GOOGLE BUILD

With Google's solution, there are three systems to juggle at once, which are reached by three separate devices, so tap up!

Set up Dialogflow

1. Let's start by logging into the Console for Dialogflow. After you've logged in, build a new agent just below the Dialogflow logo from the dropdown.

2. Give your agent a name and add to the 'Dropdown of the Google Project' when selecting "Build a new Google project."

3. Click the Create button, and let it do its magic, setting up the agent will take a little bit of time, so be patient.

Firebase Functions Setup

1. We can start plugging in the Fulfillment logic right now.

2. Head over to tab Fulfilment. Tick to allow the inline editor, and use the following JS snippets:

3. Itex.js

package.json

Now go back to your intent, go to Default Welcome Intent, and scroll down to fulfillment, make sure that 'Enable Webhook Call for this Intent' is tested for any javascript attempts you wish to fulfill. Touch Save.

Update AoG

Now, we are reaching the finish line. Head over to the Integrations tab and click at the top of the Google Assistant Option on Integration Settings. This will open a modal, so let's click check, which will integrate your Dialogflow with Google, and open a check window on Google Behavior.

We can click Talk to my test app on the test window (we'll change this in a second), and voila, we've got the message from our javascript displayed on a google assistant test.In Develop tab, we can change the name of the assistant, up at the top.

And WHAT 'S TO THE Delivery JS?

Firstly, we use two npm packages, actions-on-google that provide all the fulfillment that both AoG and Dialogflow need, and secondly, firebase-functions that you guessed contain firebase helpers.

Then we build the 'template' which is an entity containing all our intent.

Every purpose that is generated is passed 'conv' which is sends the Behavior On Google conversation object. We can use the conv content to detect information about past user interactions (such as their ID and their session with us).

We return a 'conv.ask object' that contains our return message to the user ready to reply with a different purpose. If we decided to end the conversation there we could use 'conv.close' to end the conversation.

Finally, we wrap all up in an HTTPS firebase feature, which deals with the request-response logic for us on the server side.

Once again, if we look at the produced response:

We can see that conv.ask had its text inserted into the field of textToSpeech. If we had chosen conv.close the expectUserResponse would be set to false and the conversation would end after the message was delivered.

Third-party Voice Makers

Much like the software industry, 3rd party platforms have started popping up as voice gains momentum in an effort to ease the burden on developers, enabling them to build twice once they launch. At the moment Jovo and Voiceflow are the two most popular, especially since Apple acquired PullString. Each platform offers a different abstraction level, so it really depends on how simplified your interface is.

Extend your know-how

Now that you've got your head around developing a simple 'Hello World' skill, there's plenty of bells and whistles to add to your skill. They are the cherry on top of Voice Assistants' cake, which can add a lot of added value to the customers, contributing to repeat practice which future business opportunity.

SSML

SSML stands for speech synthesis markup language and operates with a syntax similar to HTML, the main difference is that you are building up a spoken response, not text on a web page.

'SSML' as a concept is a little deceptive, can do so much more than a synthesis of expressions! You can have parallel voices, you can have sounds of the setting, speechcons (worthy of listening to them in their own right, think emojis for popular phrases), and music.

When Should I Use SSML?

SSML is great; it makes the user's experience much more enjoyable, but what it also does is that the audio output's versatility. I suggest to use it for more static speech areas. You can use variables in it for names etc, but unless you are planning to create an SSML generator, most SSML will be very static. Begin with simple speech in your language, and once complete, upgrade areas that are more static with SSML, but get your core correct before moving on to the bells and whistles. That said, a recent report says that 71 per cent of users prefer a human (real) voice to a synthesized one, so if you have the facility to do that, go out and do it!

IN Sales ON SKILL

In-skill shopping (or ISP) is similar to the in-app purchasing model. Skills appear to be free, but some make it possible to buy 'premium' content/subscriptions inside the app, which can improve a user's experience, unlock new levels of gameplay, or enable access to paid content.

MULTIMODAL

Multimodal responses cover so much more than speech, this is where voice assistants can really shine on devices this provide them with complementary visuals. Multimodal interaction concept is much wider, which basically implies multiple inputs.

Multimodal skills are meant to complement the core voice experience , providing additional additional information to boost the UX. Recall the voice is the primary carrier of knowledge when creating a multimodal experience. Many apps don't have a screen, so your skills still have to operate without one, so be sure to check with different types of devices; either actual or simulated.

MULTILINGUAL

Multilingual abilities are abilities that function in multiple languages and expose your abilities to different markets.

The complexity of multilingualizing your skills lies in how dynamic your responses are. Skills with fairly static answers, e.g. returning the same phrase each time, or using just a small bucket of phrases, are much easier to render multilingual than dynamic skills distributed.

Multilingual trick is to have a reliable translation partner, whether by an agency or a Fiverr translator. You must be able to trust the translations provided, especially if you do not understand the language to which they are being translated.

Summary

If there ever was a chance to get into the voice business, it would be right now. Also in its prime and infancy, as well as the big nine, are plowing billions to expand it and get voice assistants into the homes and daily routines of all. Choosing the platform to use can be difficult, but the platform to use will shine through or, failing that, use a third-party tool to hedge your bets and build on multiple platforms , particularly if your capacity is less complicated with less moving parts.

As a reputed Software Solutions Developer we have expertise in providing dedicated remote and outsourced technical resources for software services at very nominal cost. Besides experts in full stacks We also build web solutions, mobile apps and work on system integration, performance enhancement, cloud migrations and big data analytics. Don’t hesitate to

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brainyparenting · 3 years

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How to Teach Your Kid to Read at Home 💡 👨‍👧‍👦 📗

This year has forced you to do quite a bit at home—figuring out where your Peloton bike will go, discovering your hidden passion to make macarons (or, perhaps, eat them), among others. For parents of young children, you have a very unique challenge—to teach your kids how to read at home instead of fully at school.

In a previous article, I detailed how you may go about homeschooling your children. This post will be more succinct and highlight a particularly specific skill—the ability to read. Thankfully, the most important academic skill isn’t too scary if you know how to approach the process and what to look for as your young kiddo builds skill in this area.

Phonics, Phonemic Awareness, and Phonological Awareness

Before learning how to teach your kids to read, let me first discuss some quick terminology. Have you heard to terms phonics, phonemic awareness, and/or phonological awareness? Likely, you have not unless you’re an elementary school teacher like me. These terms are often difficult to decipher from one another yet are critical for your success at teaching reading at home.

Let’s start with tackling each of these terms individually.

Phonics is simply understanding that each letter has a corresponding sound. For example, you definitely know that “tee” sounds like the letter “T”, right? Yup, right. That’s phonics.Phonemic awareness takes the understanding of phonics and ups the ante a bit. It explains how we can discern that the /c/ at the beginning of the word “cat” is different from the /at/ that follows that sound. (Fun fact! There are 43 individual phonemes in the English language. But fear not, you won’t be quizzing your kiddo).Phonological awareness is similar to phonemic awareness but is, again, a bit loftier. In the previous example, we highlighted the understanding of /c/ in “cat” sounding like a “K”, right? Well, phonological awareness is one’s ability to manipulate the various sound units in a word. So, placing the sound /ack/ with /p/ as the beginning makes a different word sound than if you put /b/ before /ack/.

Tired yet? Fear not. Chances are, your young reader is going to need some support with one of these skills as they begin their reading journey.

So, let’s take a dive into how to know where your child is and what to do if they need phonics, phonemic, or phonological awareness support.

Does Your Student Understand Basic Phonics?

Does your student look at a “D” and say “C” or start to pronounce the word “kart” and say “start”? If so, it’s likely they have an issue with the alphabetic principle or, simply, phonics. They may also not be able to produce the correct letter when you give them a sound or vise versa. (Say “K”, and they’ll write “F”, for example.).

What Can I Do to Help My Child Build Phonics?

I’m glad you asked! If you have a Scrabble set or a fancy tablet game with letters, get to building! Talk with your student about the sounds of letters as you construct new and exciting words. And don’t be afraid to create words, too!

Nonsense words are often used to help students understand the basic rules of phonics. For example, “frub” is not a word, but if a student can 1) say it and 2) clap the syllables, they are getting the hang of phonics!

The Nuance of Phonemic vs Phonological Awareness

There’s a lot of grace here, and unless you are both a parent and elementary school teacher, your student won’t be upset if you constantly confuse these two. I’ll actually offer support for both of them at once because the difference really doesn’t matter in the living room.

You may remember, as a student, (depending on how old you are or how good your memory is) clapping words aloud in class. This is called syllabication, and each clap occurs on a different syllable in a word, right? Well, get to clapping!

One of the earliest indicators that students need support with early literacy is their inability to decipher between syllables. So, if your child has a difficult time clapping out “potatoes,” they don’t really understand the sounds within the word. Those sounds, called phonemes, are what build up the English language.

You might be thinking, “Well, okay, awesome—how the heck do I help my child with that, though?”

Great question! I’ll brief you on a couple of strategies below for when you are strictly teaching your kids to read or intervening (not during actual reading). But for now, let’s discuss a quick and helpful way to support a reader when they are actually attempting the skill of reading and get to a word they cannot sound out.

First, you’ll want to let them struggle. Don’t be too mean here. We aren’t talking 3 minutes of cliffhanging—more like 10 seconds. Encourage them, pause for them, and whatever you do, do not help them during this time. Why? If they aren’t with you and encounter a large or scary word they’ve never seen, they’ll simply look at the word, give up, look at the larger person (i.e., adult) in the room and wait for the life jacket. Nope, don’t do that!

Instead, point to the word, and ask them what part of the word they think they may already know. Let’s take a word for example’s sake here: memorize. Whoa, that’s a doozy! But wait, isn’t there a “me” in that word? And how about a “mo”? And doesn’t a word that ends in “e” makes the vowel before the final consonant (in this case, “i” before the “z”) say its name (so that i-z-e is EYE-z-eh—the EYE is what “i” sounds like, right)?

Well, it’s likely your kiddo may now know how to decipher memorize right off the bat, but with some support (after 10 seconds of struggle), they’ll be on their way!

So, again, for the terms, and briefly—phonemic equals simplest sounds of a language. Phonological equals manipulating the simplest sounds of a language. (See? Not a lot of difference, and you shouldn’t split hairs.)

If your child is having issues with syllables, do the awesome activity mentioned above with all kinds of fun words around the house and in reading.

Segmenting and blending activities – Take time to break apart words (segmenting) and put words together (blending) from a sound perspective. This is fun, and your kids will love slicing and dicing words.Take words, delete sounds – “Hey kiddo, what’s “fun” without /f/?” This helps build their recognition of specific sounds and how they fit within the context of larger units. (For those of you overachievers, that’s a phonological awareness skill). Few Notes on Sight Words

Unfortunately, the English language is very tricky. Some words, like “the”, fit no simple phonetic understanding. They simply need to be taught. Search for various sight word lists depending on your child’s age.

Here’s how you determine if your child is needing sight word support and exactly what sight words they need help with depending on their age:

Remember that sight words are searchable by age or grade level. So, you’ll start by searching (or asking your child’s teacher, if that’s a possibility) online to find the list of sight words for their specific age.Quiz them at the top of the list. Don’t randomly choose words from the list. Start at the top, and go straight down.If your child masters their way through the list for their grade level, go above one grade level. For example, if your child is in second grade, start with a fourth-grade sight word list. Should they get all of those words correct, find a third-grade sight word list and continue.When your child misses two or three words on a sight word list, that’s the list they will need to practice and thus, the list you will need to actively teach.

Though frustrating (because they follow no real convention that is teachable), sight words are the key to unlocking complicated text. This is worth your time!

Beyond Phonics—Fun With Fluency (And Book Selections!)

Okay, whew. You’re now a literacy instructor! Well done. It may be difficult to teach your kids to read, but that’s normal.

So, here’s the deal: once your child has a solid grasp of the phonics world, begin having fun with text selection and check their fluency constantly! Fluency is simply how many words your child can correctly read in one minute (minus the errors made from the total words read). Fluency, in a sentence, also measures how animated your student reads (called prosody) and if they cruise gently around commas and stop hard at periods. Fluency helps with all of that.

And finally—books! Ask them what they love, and find books that bring them closer to understanding more about those topics. And get them books from a wide variety of various topics, from various sources.

The steps to reading are exciting and profound. Take joy in the simple things, and delight in your child coming to you at night and saying “can I read to you tonight?”

Find the Small Joys in Reading

We’ve blabbered with phonics, phonemic awareness, and fluency—whew! Take it all in, and reference this post when and if necessary. But most importantly, take joy in the little steps your child takes when mastering the skill of reading.

Read with them often, not just before bed. Ask them questions about the book to see their comprehension really soar. Read often yourself, so you create a “more is caught than taught” type situation. You’ll be glad you took an active interest in, perhaps, the most critical skill a young person can learn.

More on How to Teach Your Kids to Read

3 Essential Ways to Help Your Kids Love Reading As Much As You Do7 Apps That Can Help Teach Kids To ReadReading for Kids: 17 Reasons Why It’s Important and Where to Start

Featured photo credit: Priscilla Du Preez via unsplash.com

The post How to Teach Your Kid to Read at Home appeared first on Lifehack.

By: Charlie Moynahan Title: How to Teach Your Kid to Read at Home Sourced From: www.lifehack.org/894710/how-to-teach-kids-to-read Published Date: Fri, 15 Jan 2021 15:01:10 +0000

Teach Your Child How To Read On An Early Age

#homeinstead #amongothers #athome #pelotonbike #youhave #forparents

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eurekakinginc · 5 years

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"[D] training ASR checking assumptions"- Detail: Suppose you're training an ASR system from scratch using audio books, where you have the plain text as well as the audio. One big mp3 file for the book (or maybe split into several chapter's mp3 files ). And several text files corresponding to the chapters.The first stage is you need labelled data, ie 1.wav with a transcript 1.txt for the first line of the book. Then 2.wav with a transcript 2.txt for the 2nd line of the book. And so on. Once you have those pairings you can feed pairs into your ASR system (eg mozilla deepspeech). The algorithm wont take bigger chunks, so a sentence seems to be the right way to go. You could try feeding it per word but I don't know if that would improve performance? I don't even know how you begin to detect and segment on single words in an utterance, that seems to be a far harder problem than waiting for natural pauses which are easier to detect by machine. Anyway suppose it's per line for simplicity, because you don't really want a bazillion files of just one word uttered and transcribed.But how exactly do you segment the bigger audio files into smaller line sized pieces? You can try by voice activity detection. I can stick a large mp3 in Audacity and have it do approximately per line labelling via voice segment labelling, it's easy to produce a bunch of 1-5s long wav files that have been cut on silence. But now you don't know exactly how each piece of audio (say foo.wav) produces a corresponding foo.txt since the narrator might blend two sentences together with an altogether too small pause in some cases. If the narrator pauses faithfully between sentences it would be easy. But you can't assume VAD will give you neat divisions of 1:1 speech line to text sentence, so you can't easily work out which sentence of text corresponds to what chunk of audio. Unfortunately sentences will often spill over wav boundaries. In the best case it might just mean you have two whole sentences combined, so you need to split them up into two separate wavs, but the worst case would be a sentence being divided over two wav files. Then you need to edit the wavs by hand. Or just accept broken sentences.So your data is cut up into 1-5s pieces, by voice activity, unlabelled, you need to label it. In this phase I think you're supposed to use tools like forced alignment. But the problem is we don't really care about word alignment which is what forced aligners do, we're just after sentences after all. And forced alignment needs line by line, per wav, transcripts to work in the first place, which we don't have, which is the problem we were originally faced with before anyone mentioned forced aligner. If you are working with broken lines then labelling doesn't even correspond to text sentences anymore, just whatever words of the book are uttered in that given wav.Apparently one solution is to simply segment the speech into small wavs and then run ASR on those pieces to generate transcripts. Easy, except the problem is we don't have a working ASR to use, so does that mean the bootstrapping is done by hand? That's where i'm stuck. Is there no way around the bootstrapping by hand? For a low resource language you're just stuck with hand labelling lots of data first. Are all my assumptions correct?I should probably mention there is an assumption that we're training an end-to-end deepnet ASR system. I'm not sure how the classical systems worked but they're probably even harder to train, because you need to get into producing a phoneme dictionary and then training a model to discriminate and identify those in a given speech fragment. Which means you do need per word alignment on training data, a much harder problem than the per sentence alignment needed by the end-to-end system.. Caption by sicp4lyfe. Posted By: www.eurekaking.com

#machine learning #data science #software #programming #engineering #saas #eCommerce #marketing

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meichenxi · 4 years

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I hope you don't mind me asking, feel free to ignore this, but you mentioned you have synesthesia. I'm curious, how does this work for you? From my understanding (which is limited) everyone experience a bit differently. It just sounds really interesting, so I hope I'm not overstepping 😅

No not at all!! It’s a really interesting topic :D (and I’ll answer your other ask in a bit if you don’t mind once I’ve got some good resources together!)

This is going to be long, because I think it’s really fascinating! So I apologise in advance. It’s also going to get quite linguistics-y, because that’s what I’m here for always.

So my synesthesia presents itself in a number of ways. Most obviously, I have the ‘normal’ bog-standard colour-grapheme synesthesia, whereby every letter or word is strongly associated with a certain colour and sort of...feel. So for example <k> is a sly orange, sharp and mischievous. Not all letters have very strong impressions; and for instance are both just sort of wishy-washy and pale cloudy lemonade colour.

Also! I have evidence for the psychological reality of the syllable and the phonological word. Often word- or syllable-initial consonants ‘colour’ the rest of the word, especially with ‘light’ vowels like <e> or or <y>. So for example, even though I’m not sure whether your username is a name or a word or what exactly, it’s ‘split’ into two halves: <karo> with an orange undertone, whilst still being able to see the ‘colour’ of the other letters, and <lincki> which is a pale yellow, despite the presence of the <k>.

One other interesting thing is that these associations seem to come from quite well-founded generalisations based on place and manner of articulation. We’ve all heard of the Boba-Kiki affect (if not, look it up) where ‘kiki’ is the sharp, pointy object and ‘boba’ is the flat, blobby one, despite them both being non-words. This holds with my synesthesia too, so there are seemingly articulatorily-founded patterns!! For instance, many of my plosives are middle to dark blue; almost all of my voiceless/voiced pairs match up with the voiced version being darker than the voiceless version (except /k/ and /g/, and that’s because of the ‘orange’ pressure from palatals and ‘green’ pressure from velars, I think); many of my palatals are on a spectrum from pale yellow-white to orange, etc. My back vowels are dark, warm, deep colours, and my front vowels are lighter. I’d be interested in knowing if this holds with other people with synesthesia: I can only do so many experiments on myself lmao (and trust me I’ve done a lot).

Each letter also occupies a certain ‘space’ in the air, like the spikes in a line graph. This is how I read quickly; I memorise the ‘shape’ of the word (which doesn’t always map on to the physical shape) and use that.

One weird thing which happens is that phonemes and graphemes don’t always have the same colour!! Which leads to very interesting results. For instance, is a sort of terracotta brown, so I hate this letter in most words (I have very strong opinions about a lot of this. I hate and with all of my heart). But the sound /u/ is a deep, crystal midnight green! So if I hear the word ‘Undomiel’ (thank you Tolkien), it’s incredibly beautiful. Writing it down, though, I can’t stand it, especially clashing with the pink of <m>.

This is why I dislike some languages so irrationally for no reason I think. 1) I don’t like their colour palette. If it’s all over the place or a mess or a horrible sludge-green, sorry, I’m probably not going to learn it. 2) The colour palette of what I’m hearing and what I’m reading don’t match. This could in theory happen with English, but doesn’t, because I’m so used to it I think. But this is why I dislike French so much (sorry everyone!!), because what I’m hearing and what I’m seeing literally clash in front of my eyes and it’s gross.

Where it gets really interesting is in foreign language acquisition. What happens with tone? Non-Latinate writing systems?

I don’t have as strong associations for sounds which have no representation in the Latin alphabet (so, say, the distinction between Hindi aspirated and non-aspirated stops), because a lot of it is still based on graphemes, but that representation is still there. Sometimes it’s a modified version of the representation of a phoneme I’m familiar with (for example, the heavily aspirated Irish /t/ is a lighter blue than my /t/, and the non-aspirated Hindi /t/ is a darker version), but sometimes it’s a murky new colour based, occasionally, on place of articulation. For example, whilst <ch> should be orange and then terracotta brown in terms of graphemes, the German ach-Laut is a completely different colour to the German ich-Laut!! The ach-Laut <ch> is a dark green (which makes sense, since my velars and uvulars are usually dark green), but the ich-Laut is an orange - because, again, palatals are orange!!! Isn’t that cool?

Features have psychological reality guys!

Another interesting thing is that I often acquire a colour-based distinction long before I consciously notice a difference even if it’s not phonemic. This is nuts!! So for instance the standard Mandarin /t/ is pronounced slightly differently to the English /t/ (both have aspiration, but slightly different places of articulation); and correspondingly, way before I learnt this or could hear the difference consciously, I noticed the colour of the Chinese /t/ was a different shade of blue!! Similarly, when I was in a Hindi-speaking environment in India I noticed that I was remembering whether words had one of (many) t-like phonemes based on colour alone; I couldn’t tell you if it was aspirated, retroflex or anything, but I could tell you, if I thought to ask, what colour it was, and so produced the correct sound appropriately - because it’s a dark blue word, right? Importantly, I wasn’t making a conscious link between those features and the colour, so if you asked me what it ‘being a dark blue word’ actually meant phonetically, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you until I sat down and worked it out myself after looking at Hindi phonology. It’s just ‘dark blue’, so you pronounce it in a ‘dark blue’ way.

I mean ultimately this is just another way of distinguishing sounds so it’s not actually that exciting, it’s just conceptualised in a different way, and still takes a long time to develop, so it’s only happened with languages where I’ve been immersed for a couple of months or more, rather than say, French or Spanish. But it’s still kind of cool.

As for tone, tone contours also colour the word!! I don’t know if this is influenced by anything in particular (common words with those tones, maybe?) but it’s fun. The first tone is a sort of yellow; the second tone is a steely blue; the third tone is like /w/ which is a deep green; the fourth tone is a red.

One exciting thing is also that, the more I read Chinese, the more I ‘see’ the colour of a word. This isn’t just me knowing the pronunciation; if I know the pinyin but it isn't a familiar word, I don’t see any colour. Only if I’m very familiar with that phonetic component (because guess what!! That has an affect), a similar word, or the word itself do I see the colour. Which is just wild. So, can confirm that my brain is processing phonetic components via analogy on a similar level to ‘letters’, which is really interesting. Usually the character is just the colour of the initial, sometimes coloured by the final; it’s not as detailed as the representation in the Latinate alphabet.

In other non-Latinate writing systems, the more I’m familiar with the system, the more I see the colours. These are usually colours of the phonemes not graphemes where they differ; so for hiragana, for example, /u/ is its phonemic dark green, and not its graphemic rusty brown.

This colour palette is really useful in conlanging btw: I don’t have to actually think up a phonological system, I just have to think ‘autumnal’, and I get words that look similar.

Numbers are also highly coloured for me, as well as being gendered (really brain??) in a very predictable way - all even numbers are female and all male numbers are male. This is probably the strongest of all my synesthesia: I genuinely mentioned this to someone when I was about eighteen and just assumed that the rest of the world knew this too, it was so obvious. What this means is that I remember things in ‘colour palettes’ and I have quite a good visual memory because of that - I just remember the ‘shape’ and ‘colour’ of the numbers and then can reconstruct it in my head. Some numbers are also ‘higher’ than others, like if you imagine a graph, so I can map out a sequence of numbers using the ‘peaks’ and ‘dips’ in space. I was doing a psychology test looking into people with synesthesia once actually where you are flashed a sequence of numbers, and then have to type them backwards. I was able to type about 12/13 numbers backwards in after being flashed for one second, compared to an average of 4 or 5. I couldn’t remember the actual numbers; but I knew that there were purple edges, then a yellow spike and a green blob etc, and so could look at the ‘picture’ and work it out from there because the representations were so stable.

It’s actually really helpful sometimes! I remember numbers/words in these ‘colour palettes’, and once forgot the last two digits of my PIN when in China (6 digits, not 4, which I was not used to). But because I had chosen the number myself and the other digits were a sort of gloomy heather-purple/black/grey, I knew that the last two digits had to match that palette and ‘shape’ (how high a number rests in space). So I was able to guess them both within three tries!

Other things: people’s personalities and events sometimes are associated with colours, as well as music and sounds to a limited degree, but I don’t know enough about music theory to know if what is ‘purple’ or ‘lush green’ actually has any impact. It’s not individual notes alas - that would be so useful/cool.

The personality thing is a bit annoying - I am often terrible at remembering people’s names if they don’t match with their personality in some way. I have two friends called Liam and Adam, and to this day (despite being friends with them for years and years) I still have to stop myself calling Adam ‘Liam’. I think everybody knows the phenomenon of ‘but he just looks like a Liam!’. It’s like that, but so strong I have to correct myself basically every time. I also get names that have the same ‘colour palette’ but nothing alike mixed up: for example Henry and Carl or Mary-Anne and Belinda.

One other thing that is difficult is that if the orthography and phonology are particularly mismatched, or use letters in ways I’m not used to, this really hinders learning. I learnt some Medieval Welsh a few years ago as part of my degree and couldn’t remember anything because it was all just green. Or I kept writing /b/ instead of, say, /t/ or a dental fricative, because I knew it was a ‘blue’ sound, but couldn’t remember exactly which one. It sometimes leads me to make mistakes that are really stupid and probably don’t make sense to anyone else - /k/ doesn’t sound anything like /j/ but because they’re both orange-coloured, I’ll often mix them up especially if /k/ is next to a high vowel.

So, that was very long!! Thank you for the ask :D But I hope it was interesting to any fellow linguists or language-lovers out there, and if there are any psycholinguists in the room, I have made a chart of all of this and mapped it out so hmu if you want some data lmao

Do you experience synesthesia too? What’s your experience like?

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un-enfant-immature · 5 years

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Google details AI work behind Project Euphonia’s more inclusive speech recognition

As part of new efforts towards accessibility, Google announced Project Euphonia at I/O in May: An attempt to make speech recognition capable of understanding people with non-standard speaking voices or impediments. The company has just published a post and its paper explaining some of the AI work enabling the new capability.

The problem is simple to observe: The speaking voices of those with motor impairments, such as those produced by degenerative diseases like amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), simply are not understood by existing natural language processing systems.

You can see it in action in the following video of Google research scientist Dimitri Kanevsky, who himself has impaired speech, attempting to interact with one of the company’s own products (and eventually doing so with the help of related work Parrotron):

youtube

The research team describes it as following:

ASR [automatic speech recognition] systems are most often trained from ‘typical’ speech, which means that underrepresented groups, such as those with speech impairments or heavy accents, don’t experience the same degree of utility.

…Current state-of-the-art ASR models can yield high word error rates (WER) for speakers with only a moderate speech impairment from ALS, effectively barring access to ASR reliant technologies.

It’s notable that they at least partly blame the training set. That’s one of those implicit biases we find in AI models that can lead to high error rates in other places, like facial recognition or even noticing that a person is present. While failing to include major groups like people with dark skin isn’t a mistake comparable in scale to building a system not inclusive of those with impacted speech, they can both be addressed by more inclusive source data.

For Google’s researchers, that meant collecting dozens of hours of spoken audio from people with ALS. As you might expect, each person is affected differently by their condition, so accommodating the effects of the disease is not the same process as accommodating, say, a merely uncommon accent.

Live transcription and captioning in Android are a boon to the hearing-impaired

A standard voice-recognition model was used as a baseline, then tweaked in a few experimental ways, training it on the new audio. This alone reduced word error rates drastically, and did so with relatively little change to the original model, meaning there’s less need for heavy computation when adjusting to a new voice.

The researchers found that the model, when it is still confused by a given phoneme (that’s an individual speech sound like an e or f), has two kinds of errors. First, there’s the fact that it doesn’t recognize the phoneme for what was intended, and thus not recognizing the word. And second, the model has to guess at what phoneme the speaker did intend, and might choose the wrong one in cases where two or more words sound roughly similar.

The second error in particular is one that can be handled intelligently. Perhaps you say “I’m going back inside the house,” and the system fails to recognize the “b” in back and the “h” in house; it’s not equally likely that you intended to say “I’m going tack inside the mouse.” The AI system may be able to use what it knows of human language — and of your own voice or the contest in which you’re speaking — to fill in the gaps intelligently.

But that’s left to future research. For now you can read the team’s work so far in the paper “Personalizing ASR for Dysarthric and Accented Speech with Limited Data,” due to be presented at the Interspeech conference in Austria next month.

#TechCrunch

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kingofthewilderwest · 7 years

Video

youtube

I felt like talking about how science fiction alien names tend to contain underlying English sound patterns. So I did! Below, a transcript of what I basically said in the video:

One of the fun things about science fiction, fantasy, and other forms of fiction is the ability to create new worlds – and with it, new cultures. This often means creating new languages or at least new names for people, places, and special items. Something I’ve noticed from observing created names or alien languages… is that, even though they’re meant to sound “different” than English, they nevertheless retain a lot of innate principles and rules from the English language. Linguistic elements of the English language almost always seem to slip into these “different” alien words.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not complaining. I’m not even criticizing. I’m just observing, amused, as a linguist, what I see and hear. I don’t expect people to be accurate in how languages actually work when creating new, foreign names. In fact, it’s true that names are often modified by speakers of different languages to conform to their own language’s characteristics. English speakers say “France,” Tajik speakers say “Faronsa,” Khmer speakers say “Barang,” Amheric speakers say, “Ferenisayi,” and Nepali speakers say “Phrānsa.” Based upon the characteristics of each person’s language, how the word “France” is spoken by the French speakers gets modified into the new tongue. Languages that don’t have an “F” sound aren’t going to have an “f” at the start of their word for France. That’s how it works. So it’s not too terrible if a science fiction name has English characteristics; you could blame it on the “translation” from the alien language to how English speakers would pronounce it themselves.

However, if you happen to be curious about the discrepancies between how people create languages and names for their stories… versus what is linguistically accurate… I’m happy to share some of the common inaccuracies I’ve observed. You’re free - if you wish - to try to apply some of my commentary to your own worldbuilding to make your names feel more linguistically “realistic.” But I’m mostly just writing this for the fun of showing how a person’s innate, subconscious understanding of their native language (in this case, English) can influence how writers try to make alien names… and turn up just reproducing lots of the familiar rules from their native tongue. The internal grammar structure of English just keeps slipping in!

To make the content of this post more manageable, I’m only going to talk about inaccurate sound properties of science fiction names (that is, their phonetics and phonology). I don’t have time to talk about sentence structure or other linguistic elements. We’ll focus just on sound patterns here!

1. Stress systems identical to English

In English and many other languages, some syllables are stressed - or pronounced louder/longer/etc. - in words and sentences. For instance, the first syllable in “butter” is stressed and the second syllable in “computer” is stressed. Languages often have rules about what syllable gets stressed within a word and/or within a sentence, and it can admittedly get complex. Language stress systems vary pretty widely between languages.

But almost all science fiction and fantasy names I’ve come across use the exact same syllable structure as English. Somehow, though all the aliens you’ve met come from another solar system, their names reproduce the exact syllable structure as we hear in English. Whether it’s Kallo Jath or Kif Kroker or Mordin Solus or Garrus Vakarian or Ahsoka Tano or Gasgano or Jyn Erso or Yoda, I know immediately how to stress these “alien” words perfectly… because it’s how I’d naturally do it in my native language. English syllable rules reign supreme in all these names.

If you’re wondering why a name might sound “familiar” even if you made it up to sound alien, you could perhaps play with where you place primary stress. It doesn’t have to be complicated - some languages simply stress the final syllable of each word, for instance!

Let’s say I named a character “Matatari.” You probably automatically read the name to have the stress on the penultimate syllable. But you could test to see how it sounds with each of the different syllables stressed. The second-to-last syllable for English speakers might sound the most natural and “familiar” - but what happens if I made her name “MAtatari” or “matataRI”? Mátatari and Matatarí escape the rules of typical English stress.

2. Sound inventory identical to English.

All languages contain a finite set of sounds that combine into words. These sound units are called phonemes. A phoneme is like the b, e, and t sounds that combine to make the word “bet.”

Now, languages don’t all share the same phonemes, and they most certainly don’t have the same composite phonemic system. That is, languages might share some of the same sounds, but languages don’t have the entire same sound inventory. Think of a Venn diagram for two languages - some sounds will be in common in the center of the diagram, while other sounds will only appear in one of the languages.

When I hear people pronounce the names of their own alien languages, I hear… the phoneme system that English has. People just pick and use the sounds that are in the language they speak, whereas in truth, it’s most likely going to be the case that a foreign language lacks some of the sounds we have, and has some sounds we lack.

3. Use of cross-linguistically uncommon sounds.

Continuing off of #2… it turns out that some phonemes are more statistically likely to occur across all the world’s languages. How common a phoneme is cross-linguistically depends upon many factors, like how audibly discernible the phoneme is from other phonemes, how loud/quiet it is, and how easy it is to physiologically produce with our human anatomy (we tend to like to make sounds that are easy to make with our mouths, unsurprisingly). I’m not going to labor into the details of how something is common or how it isn’t, but I’m happy to list off some common and uncommon sounds cross-linguistically.

For one thing I notice in fantasy and science fiction names is the repeated use of sounds that are in English, but are actually very rare across the world’s languages. The sounds /f/ as in “fight” and /θ/ as in “thing” are very rare because they’re so quiet. They might be sounds in English, but most languages don’t have “f” and “th”! You’re also very unlikely to hear /ɛ/ as in “bet,” /ɪ/ as in “fish”, /l/ as in “lime,” and /ɹ/ as in “right.” (If you want an r sound, a rolled r is far more common - not that weird thing we have in English). I wouldn’t recommend /dʒ/ as in “jump” either.

So it’s actually slightly odd to see a bunch of characters named things like Worf or Kif or Sarek or Groot or Allura or Quark or Kit Fisto.

If you’re curious about sounds that are common, those are things like /k/ for “king,” /t/ for “tall,” /n/ for “no,” and actually a bunch of vowels that aren’t in English. If you know Spanish, think of the five main vowels a (as in “gato”), e (as in “tres”), i (as in “si”), o (as in “solo”), and u (as in “tu”). These vowels are the most common vowels cross-linguistically, and it’s actually pretty common for these to be THE five vowels in a language (with maybe a few diphthongs or something thrown in there). There’s also the schwa sound that you hear at the end of words like “para” - that baby gets heard a lot, too, for a variety of reasons.

4. Identical phonotactics.

Whether or not an individual sound is in a language is important. What also makes languages distinct is what sounds are “allowed” to be put next to each other. The rules for what sounds can go where in a word… is called phonotactics. What sounds are okay to put next to each other in one language might be entirely different in another language.

For instance, in English, there is no problem whatsoever with words like “string,” “sixths,” and “sounds” - words which have three or more consonants next to one another at the start or end of a syllable. However, having three consonants grouped together like s, t, and r in “string” might not be okay in another language. There are some languages, in fact, which don’t allow two consonants to be next to one another - you always have to have a vowel between consonants. This is why the word “Christmas” in English turns into “Kurisumasu” (クリスマス) in Japanese. The Japanese loan word takes the word “Christmas” and inserts vowels in between consonant clusters. And similarly, in English, we might have problems pronouncing some of the consonant clusters in Khmer words like “khnom” and “chngang.”

But we’d be very hard-pressed to find character names that flout the rules of English phonotactics.

Another thing to consider with phonotactics is where in the syllable a sound is “allowed” to occur. Sometimes there are different rules for what can go where depending upon whether it’s at the start of a syllable before the vowel (onset) or the end of a syllable after a vowel (coda). In English, we have the sound “ng”, like in “song” or “thing.” However, we cannot put “ng” at the start of a syllable in English. We can say “song” but not “ngos.” But, other languages like Vietnamese or Khmer have no problem putting the “ng” at the start of a syllable. Consider the common Vietnamese surname “Nguyen.” There’s that “ng” right at the start! Different languages have different rules.

And there’s all sort of variety: some languages only allow consonants at the start of a syllable but not the end of a syllable, some languages only allow certain consonants at the end of a syllable or a word, and some languages have specific restrictions about what consonant clusters are allowed. In general, it’s rare for long consonant clusters to be allowed (the word “sixths” in English is really unusual for what it allows).

I could probably keep going, but I imagine this gets the point across well enough. Again, this is not meant to be a criticism or evidence of shortcoming for writers. I don’t expect anyone to be experts in linguistics, and there is something to be said about readers getting frightened of printed words that look unpronounceable to them. Viewers also probably want to have an easy time pronouncing the names of characters they hear on screen. People are probably going to be happier to meet an alien named “Zarkon,” “Groot,” or “Morbo” than “Ng!lieng” or “O’kktroxnuo Khlebrrotk.”

However, I am writing this from an amused linguistic ramble about how our own native language’s rules seep into the subconscious. Even when people try to create “alien” names and words, we often find something far closer to home.

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nnmlihhecaaa · 8 years

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Catalogue essay for Predictable Contact EVERYTHING IS THE SAME AS EVERYTHING ELSE, NOTHING CAME FIRST Daniel Jewesbury

LIGHTS Unpredictable jarring cacophony. Tender refrains. Mood music, coloured lights. Tangential relationships. COLOURS Photography and film are innately surreal, they can’t help but be. They aren’t the world, but that’s not the point. The point is that they look so much like they are. That’s what I call specific unlikeness. Photographic representation is not just randomly unlike the world, it’s very specifically unlike it. That means that we are able to produce highly realistic visual representations of the world in which the normal physical laws do not apply. In photography, we can manipulate and overlay discrete elements to make a world of wonderful suggestions and collisions that approximates the realms we see when we close our eyes. In film, where we have an added temporal dimension, we can produce even stranger coincidences, inviting space and time to button back on themselves in the most alluring ways. This surreality, which we should understand as primarily an ability to exceed reality, isn’t something that suddenly appears with the arrival of complex CGI effects. It’s there from the outset, intrinsic to film and to montage and editing. It’s commonplace to comment that the relationship between the world and its image becomes confused in the wake of the photograph, that the way we experience the world becomes coloured by our experience of viewing images of it, and that in fact we now only experience the world as its own representation. Whether or not the world has simply become an inferior simulacrum of itself, I’m more interested in what it is that we are only able to imagine thanks to our innately photographic perception and vision. What material objects, apparently unrelated to vision and perception, only exist because we invented photography? What shapes only occurred to us because we had experienced the foreshortened, flattened space of the photographic frame? What forms and textures only arose because we experienced time in a new way in the cinema? Is there a hat that could not have been envisioned without Henry Fox Talbot? MOIRÉ I wonder, did the proliferation of easily accessible, relatively clean urban public toilets at the end of the nineteenth century change the way people ate, and perhaps brought into being certain types of foods, or particular forms of sociality? AMBIENT MUSIC I find I’m not a very coherent critic. I tend to make whatever I’m looking at about whatever I last read. I fit things around ideas. Optics produced the modern view of the universe at the most macro and micro level. We only challenged the classical view of the cosmos because someone figured out how to grind glass, and someone else worked out how to make a telescope, and then saw someone else’s moon quite demonstrably not going around us. PIXELLATION In a cinema, watching 35mm film being projected onto a screen, each frame of the film appears on the screen for about one sixtieth of a second. Given that there only twenty-four frames of film projected in any one second, this means that we spend more than half the time – thirty-six sixtieths of it – sitting in the dark when we watch projected film. Our brains perform a complex miracle, not only in making the series of still images appear to move, but in filling in the black void in between each of them. When we watch projected video the screen is illuminated at all times. Our eyes are bombarded with light. Video is fundamentally phenomenologically distinct from film. What is video perception? A projectionist I know claims that digital projection gives him migraines. PHONEMES The flat fields of colour that fill the frames of a Tintin adventure are a form of non-pharmaceutical retreat from the world beyond the page (I don’t know whether to call it the real world, or the pre-photographic world, since I’m already uncertain about the claim of any perception of external reality to any kind of priority). Tintin’s creator, Hergé, pioneered a style of illustration that became known as ‘ligne claire’, where the black outlines of the drawing had an even thickness, without any cross-hatching or shading to suggest volume or shadow, and colour was added in clearly separated blocks. Even the most densely detailed frame of a Tintin book will contain no shadow. Tintin moves – gets from place to place – in a thoroughly filmic manner. The visual grammar of his world is that of the film frame, obeying the 180º rule, and the logic of continuity between frames and cuts. The Adventures of Tintin would not be possible without the prior invention of cinema. This doesn’t mean it’s necessarily a good idea to turn a Tintin book into a full-motion film. INVERTED CHAIN The colour magenta (4-[(4-Aminophenyl)(4-imino-2,5-cyclohexadien-1-ylidene)methyl]-2- methylbenzenamine, monohydrochloride) did not exist until 1859. It was patented as an ‘aniline’ dye in that year, following an accidental discovery by an 18-year-old chemistry student which led to the production of the first synthetic dyes just a few years earlier. Magenta was originally called fuchsine, after its similarity in colour to the flowers of the fuchsia plant, which was named after the 16th century German botanist Leonhart Fuchs. In the year of its discovery, however, fuchsine was renamed magenta, in celebration of Napoleon III’s defeat of the Austrian army at Magenta in Lombardy, then part of the Austrian Empire. An enthusiastic former art teacher of mine, in the era before Google, believed that the battle was named after the colour; that it had taken place in the middle ages; and that the nomenclature derived from the soldiers’ blood, which had flowed so freely on the field of combat that it stained the very soil. Preparation of fuchsine was shown to cause bladder cancer amongst chemical workers. Magenta is not a colour on the visible spectrum. The purplish colour that it produces results from dilution of the chemical in water. Magenta’s complementary colour is green. In their solid state, magenta crystals are green. There is no beginning and no end. The world I can see represented – large crowds are standing at airports in the USA – is a mediated dramatisation of itself, exceeding its own reality many times over in its consumption and reproduction. I am caught inside it, contemplating objects and refracting them through ideas. Daniel Jewesbury is an artist and writer. From 2017 he will be Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at the Valand Academy of the University of Gothenburg, Sweden.

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green-valkyrie · 4 years

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He’s Not That Bad-- part 1/3

Avengers/OFC Steve Rogers/ OFC

More fluff than anything.

Summary:

Sarah, a woman blessed with magic, joins the Avengers team. She feels guilt after her powers weren’t enough to stop Steve from getting hurt while they were out on a mission. Undoubtedly, if Tony was ever going to make her a full fledged Avenger, she needed to gain more control over her powers. That was exactly what she intended to do, but she never imagined what she needed was help from someone she despised.

Word count: 2559

Part 1: Not Strong Enough

“Steve!” Sarah cried out as he was hit with a large chunk of concrete. Debris was falling from the building they were in. It seemed as if there was no escape. How did they even get separated from the rest of the group? Steve Rogers laid motionless on the floor, tiny rivers of blood flowing from under his helmet.

While the Hydra agents had been defeated, the threat of the building collapsing on the two of them was very real. They had to get out of here. There was little chance of Steve waking up. The large boulder was enough to kill a normal man, but not him. Sarah felt the floor quiver beneath her as she moved towards him and held him tightly in her arms. In a flash of violet they were removed from the space.

Sarah’s powers were not very strong. She had known she had them her whole life, but never used them for more than party tricks until she met the Avengers. It used all of her concentration to move both Steve and her from their danger. Landing in the front courtyard of Stark Tower with a thud, personnel rushed to their aide.

“Get Cap to the infirmary. He has been knocked unconscious. I’m going back with the others.” Sarah rose to her feet, inhaled and with the same flash of purple light, she was gone.

Sarah scanned the outside of the burning building, searching for her friends. Her worry grew as she could find none of them. “Guys! If you’re around, now would be the time to say something!”

Just then, the loud whirring of the Quinjet descended upon her. “Get in, kid.” Tony hollered over the loud sounds of the aircraft. “Where’s the Cap?” Leaping onto the platform, Sarah answered. “I moved him to the tower, then I came back for you.” She took a seat next to Natasha and Clint. She scanned the enclosure to see her friends. Natasha and Clint eyed Sarah over. Bruce is seated across from her, then Wanda, Thor and Tony follow down the line of benches. Standing next to the door of the cockpit, arms folded, is Loki. “You don’t look so good, Sar.” Natasha looks her over. “I’ll be fine. Steve is just… heavy.” Sarah’s eyes close as her head rests against the cold black metal wall. “Well, Is he OK?” Asks Clint. “I think so. He got rocked with some falling concrete, but you know he can handle more than you and I can.” Sarah didn’t open her eyes to answer.

“I got the documents we were after,” Wanda speaks up after a moment of silence. She hands a manilla folder to Tony. His face tightens as he reads over the information within. “Shit.” Tony closes the folder and sets it next to him. “They’ve been making high tech weapons. It’s worse than we anticipated.” Thor grabs the folder and mulls through the contents. “These symbols here…” He points and leans into Tony, “This is runic.”

“How and why would someone use runic to mass produce weapons?” Bruce pondered.

“The magic in those symbols is more powerful than anything that could ever be made by a mortal.” Thor said and eyed his brother. “What do you make of this?”

Loki rolled his eyes and stepped forward to grab the folder. “I haven’t the slightest idea why you are all so worried.” His green eyes scanned the documents. “Humans are too stupid to actually use these ruins correctly. It’s all gibberish.”

“Hey, man. Do I need to remind you that you’re on a jet full of humans.” Tony remarked.

“He doesn’t care, you know he doesn’t, Tony.” Sarah sat up and stared at Loki.

“You got me there, kid.”

“Besides, runes are used more based on their meaning than what their phoneme is. There’s a small group of people in the world who use these are their main source of magic--the Obsidian Council. It makes sense that Hydra would use them. I read a theory that implied this group worked with Hydra in the shadows during WWII.”

Everyone but Loki looked at Sarah. They didn’t know her completely and she was always surprising them with facts. Sarah was the type of person who had a mind full of random information, but couldn’t remember where she set her coffee cup, or her keys.

“Hmph, I suppose you are good for something.” Loki smirks, still analyzing the runes.

“How are you feeling?” Sarah sat in a steel chair next to Steve in the infirmary. White sheets covered his body and bandages covered his injuries. Her feelings of failure nagged at her.

“Ah, I’ll be fine. Thanks for saving me. You are an asset to this team.” Steve was hurt, there was no doubt about that, but he didn’t want to let Sarah know how bad it was. “I’m the Cap, I’ll be back on my feet before you know it.”

“I should have tried harder for you not to even get hit in the first place, Steve.” Sarah’s eyes welled up with tears. “What if you had died?” She reached out for Steve’s hand.

“Oh, very touching Sar, but I gotta let you in on a little something. It’s going to take more than a bit of debris to knock Roger’s on his ass.” Tony said entering the room, along with Pepper. A team of medical professionals flood the room. “Look at all these doctors, kid. We’ve got this.”

Pepper placed a hand on Sarah’s shoulder. “It’s not your fault. Don’t carry the guilt.” Sarah nodded at Pepper and stood. “I’ll let you get to it then. I’ll be by later, Steve.” The medical team started right away, changing bandages, cleaning wounds and injecting Steve with a myriad of drugs. Sarah knew that he would be alright, but if she could control her powers better, this never would have happened in the first place.

Sarah walked into her living quarters. She sat on the plush sofa and placed her elbows on her knees. Her hands met her face and she buried them in, hiding her shame from herself. I’ve gotta get a grip. She thought. I’ll train until my body gives out.

The gym was a large area, it encapsulated an entire floor of the tower she called home. Treadmills lined one wall, weight sets another. There was nothing in this space she couldn’t do. She walked through the glass doors to the massive balcony. Large tires, ropes and a few other heavy objects rested in their spots, waiting for interaction. Sarah raised her hands toward the largest tire and focused. Barely wavering from it’s position, it mocked her. Again. No movement.

Time after time, the tire didn’t budge. She could feel herself getting worn. Her body hadn’t given up yet, so she pressed on. Through the window on the floor above, Thor and Loki watched her struggle.

“She is a gifted sorceress.” Loki said studying the moves Sarah made. “What she lacks is the confidence to execute.”

Thor watched Sarah, too. Stopping to look in Loki’s direction. “You could help her.”

“No. I can’t”

Thor pursed his lips. “You won’t.”

“No brother, I can’t. She is not very fond of me.” Loki looked at his brother. “Any advice I would offer up would fall on deaf ears.”

“Suit yourself.” Thor left his brother to watch Sarah. Loki pondered for a moment and made his way outside to her.

Sarah was so focused, she didn’t hear the door open, nor see Loki take his place beside her. She jumped as he spoke. “You need to use your anger.”

“Jesus. Can’t you see I’m busy? I’m sure you can find someone else to harass for a while.” It was so easy to fluster Sarah, Loki often took advantage of that. She hated it. She hated a lot of things about him, however, the thing she hated the most was how much she actually looked up to him and his ability to use magic.

“I simply came to offer some advice. If you do not wish to receive it then I will take my leave.” Loki said and headed back to the door.

“Wait,” Sarah looked at her feet and twiddled her thumbs together. “What’s your advice.”

Loki positioned himself close enough behind her to place his hands on her shoulders. She shuddered, involuntarily. “Relax your posture, clear your mind, focus on your anger. If you doubt yourself, you will accomplish nothing.” Sarah closed her eyes and focused on Loki’s words. When she felt ready, her arms lifted towards the tire. She Inhaled deeply and long. Still nothing.

“There is still doubt in your mind, Sarah.” Loki squeezed lightly in her shoulders. “I said to let it go. Do as I say.” Loki knew how to push her buttons. That was exactly what he intended to do. He knew she hated him. He knew that if he was soft with her she would do nothing. He needed to invoke the anger inside of her.

Sarah tried again. Still nothing. Loki leaned into her. “Are you deaf, or just moronic?” He whispered in her ear. Anger growing in her core, she tried again. The tire moved, but very little. Loki whispered another insult in her ear, hands still locked on her shoulders. She tried again.

Several times, this exchange repeated itself. “That’s enough!” Sarah shouted, launching a shockwave of plum colored magic from her body. Loki was flung backwards, skidding across the concrete stopping after colliding at the door. Sarah spun around and stormed towards him. “You��re such an asshole! Why do you have to be so mean to me? Why are you even here?” She reached her hand in front of her and grabbed him with her magic, lifting him from the ground.

“Look around you. What did I help you accomplish?” Loki’s feet barely dangled above the ground. Sarah hadn’t noticed, until then. She released her grip on him, causing him to plop back to his feet. The tires, tables, chairs and even the plants potted in concrete had been blown over. The glass door that stopped Loki’s body was fractured.

“Oh my god.” Sarah grabbed her hands and held them to her chest. “I did it. I did it!” She jumped in the air, arms now outstretched. “Thank you!” She hugged Loki in a fit of excitement. He couldn’t believe she was touching him. He stood stiff, processing this moment. The rigid lines of his body made Sarah realize what was happening. “Sorry.” she said letting go of her grip on his waist. “How did you know that would work?”

“My mother taught me how to use magic. She did the same thing to me. Until you can better control your magic, anger is the most powerful emotion to use.” Loki’s posture relaxed. Natasha burst through the door.

“Sar,” Her movement stopped as she viewed the disarray around her.

Natasha’s eyes narrowed. “What did you do to her?”

“Tash, it was me.” Sarah looked at her dearest friend with bright, happy eyes. “Loki helped me. I even knocked him back from me and everything. It was amazing.”

Natasha stood watching Sarah express her glee.“That is amazing! I think though, you should be done for today. Steve was asking for you.” Sarah smiled, and headed for the door. “Thanks, Loki.” She said before leaving him on the balcony alone.

Loki closed his eyes and drew in a deep breath. He could still feel Sarah’s touch on him. He didn’t know why, but he wanted her to hug him again.

“Steve, you look great!” Sarah said, coming through the infirmary doors. “You can’t even tell that you got hurt!” Her eyes welled up with tears, elated at the sight of her friend.

“What did I tell you.” Steve chuckled and beamed a bright smile in Sarah’s direction. “I just have to make sure that the meds wear off appropriately and I will be good to go.” Sarah grabbed a chair from against the wall and moved it next to Steve’s bed. “I did something incredible just a few minutes ago.” Sarah started as she told Steve about what had happened on the gym balcony.

His expression grew solemn. “He didn’t hurt you did he?”

“Well, no. but he upset me, it was for a reason though!” Typically Sarah didn’t defend Loki. She couldn’t stand him. She felt a tiny chip of that hatred leave her heart after their moment on the balcony.

“He better not. We have done enough forgiving of him. If he were to hurt you, I couldn’t be so nice again.” Steve touched Sarah’s shoulder.

“You're so dramatic, man.” Sarah chided. “If he didn’t want to help us, he wouldn’t and you know that. He only offered to help me with my magic. He saw that I was so heartbroken because I couldn’t stop that big concrete rock from hitting you. Not everything he does is wrong.”

Steve felt the tension in Sarah’s words as she spoke. “Just be careful, okay? I don’t want you to get hurt.” Sarah locked eyes with Steve a moment before asking “Are you hungry? I could go make us something to eat.” Steve nodded “I’m starved. I want breakfast food.”

“Yes!” Sarah exclaimed as she ran out the door. She was a good cook. Everyone she cooked for loved her food. It was the thing she prided herself in. She marched through the kitchen area and grabbed her apron from it’s hook and tied it around her waist. Sarah took a deep breath as she unloaded the ingredients from the refrigerator. Wanda and Tony came into the kitchen. “Sarah, must be cooking something.” Wanda started. “Is there any chance you made extras?”

“You know I always do. FRIDAY, will you please just tell everyone I’m cooking?”

“Yes, Ma’am.” FRIDAY chimed back overhead.

“Thanks.”

“Why are you making breakfast?” Tony asked. “It’s 6:30 at night.”

“Steve wanted it. He is hungry after all the meds.” Wanda and Tony watched Sarah cook as the other Avengers made their way to the kitchen. Sitting around the large dining table, Sarah set tables out at every place. She then sat crepes, pancakes, waffles, bacon, omletes, fresh fruit and condiments in the middle of her friends. “Dig in!”

As Sarah took her place at the table, Loki emerged from the hallway. “Are you hungry?” She asked. “There’s plenty. Come join us.”

Loki sat down in his place. Taking a bit of food for himself. “I believe I will. You owe me for such a fantastic lesson.” He looked at Sarah, pressing his lips together, snuffing the smile that pushed through.

After eating, Sarah started cleaning up the dishes. Humming to herself as she loaded the dishwasher, she heard footsteps approach her.

Sarah turned around, expecting to see Steve, to Loki.

“I would like to teach you to control your powers.” Loki spoke softly. “You have great potential.”

“Don’t you think we would end up killing each other by the end of it?” Sarah’s reaction was more harsh than she intended. “I mean, we never get along. You want to teach me how to use my powers?”

“Yes. First thing in the morning, 6 O’clock.” Loki returned to his room.

Sarah didn’t understand why Loki offered the help, but she was glad he did.

#avengers/ofc #avengers #loki avengers #non cannon #original female character

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