don't mention this one

a strange coincidence of events just occurred.  i was walking home from campus, where i had been working on a paper on some bizarre control phenomena, when "Pipe Dream" by the now-sadly-defunct Trendy came up on my ipod.  the first sentence of the song is:

would it be all right / if i asked a deaf guy / to borrow his headphones?

yeah, that's PRO, in a clause introduced by ask that also contains an object, being subject-controlled.  i've got enough to talk about in my paper (analyzing sentences of the type "John said PRO to leave"), so this oddball case is going to get conveniently ignored for the time being.

WTF, Cupertino???

i have just stumbled upon a most peculiar Cupertino effect trap.  i am writing a paper for my phonology ii class on raddoppiamento in Italian.  it's a continuation of some previous work that i did last semester.  when writing my previous paper, i was running Mac OS X 10.4.  the system-wide spellchecker had no clue what this big, long, Italian word was, and offered up no possible corrections.  to avoid lots of little red underlines, i added the word to the dictionary and went merrily on my way.  since then i suffered a hard drive failure, which had two consequences: 1) the dictionary "forgot" that raddoppiamento is a word, as far as i'm concerned and 2) i've upgraded to Mac OS X 10.5.  no problem, i just have to re-teach the dictionary the word.

and that's when this happened:

whaaaaaaaaat?  where did that "d" come from??  i fired up dictionary.app (which presumably is the same dictionary resource used by the spellchecker) and, no surprise, raddoppiamdento is decidedly not in the dictionary either.  nor, as far as i can tell, is any substring that would fool the spelling suggestions algorithm (which i know for a fact does sometimes produce novel suggestions, especially when two words are accidentally conjoined) into thinking that raddoppiamdento was not only a possibility, but in fact preferable to raddoppiamento.

just for confirmation that i wasn't going crazy, i turned to Google, which seems to know which is the real word and which is the imposter (what the hell is going on, imposter just got flagged, despite the fact that dictionary.app gives both imposter and impostor):

um, yes?

if anyone has any hypothesis whatsoever as to what the great "improvement" Apple made to its spellchecker algorithm such that it produces these shenanigans, please leave a comment.

i can haz fotos?

seriously, flickr? seriously?

a quick handful of refreshes gave me greetings in languages that i expected: Portuguese, Tagalog, Arabic, French, and English.  although i guess flickr isn't totally hanging on formality—both "hello" and "yo" are given as English greetings.

just as long as they don't publish an entire site localization in lolcat.

on the origin of sign languages?

with sign languages, the sign is not necessarily arbitrary.  which can lead to hilarity.

i stumbled on this from a "don't click here!" link on mgoblog today.  i'm a little embarrassed to say that i enjoyed it quite a bit, and there are several other related videos on youtube.

the performer is David Armand, in character as Johann Lippowitz.  this was recorded in 2005, so don't get upset with me for being behind on my memery.

this also reminds me of the "fake language" videos going around youtube last year (which seem to have all been taken down since).  in those, the best you can do to fake a language is try to make up nonsense words that accurately reflect the phonology and prosody of the language, but with fake sign language you can actually put some semantic content into the mix.  just think about it: it's possible to "translate" an English song into fake sign language, but it's impossible to translate ASL speech into fake English!

everything's...segmented differently in texas?

i've been watching a lot of hockey on the versus recently (probably to the detriment of my academics, but it's the playoffs!)  as a result, i've seen the same eight commercials dozens and dozens of times over the past couple weeks.  mostly they're unremarkable, but one stuck out.  it's an ad by the Texas tourism board or something, and what caught my attention the first time i saw it is their tagline, which is displayed proudly at the end of the spot:

Texas: it's like a whole other country

i meant to write on "split another" last fall, but never got around to it, after i realized that there's already been quite a bit done on it (which i somehow can't find now via quick google search; odd).  the fact of the matter is that i didn't have anything too exciting to say.  my ideolect has split another—i say "a whole 'nother" without exception, so when i saw the Texas ad, it seemed wrong to me.  i wonder how many Texans actually say "a whole other."  my bet is that it's very few, and the only reason we got "whole other" in the tagline is because an editor at some point in the creative process nixed a spelling with nother.

so why prefer nother at all?  this may be just due to the influence of orthography getting the best of me, but it seems that if you take it upon yourself to reconstruct the unmodified phrase by removing whole, the results are better with nother.

a whole other --> *a other --> ?an other

a whole 'nother --> a 'nother --> another

when you get to the intermediate stage a other, allomorphy kicks in and you get an other, but does it get to go on to fully become another afterwards?  it seems to me that a 'nother is more likely to reform into a single word.  like i said, i realize this is relying on the spelling somewhat, but i have a feeling that unless i'm totally artificially imposing it there is some difference in the prosody of an other vs. a 'nother.

regardless of whether this little reconstruction exercise was sound or not, i still think that Texas should have stuck with 'nother.