Noraneko's Multilingual Musings

So long and thanks for all the fish!

noraneko — Sun, 31 May 2009 01:01:00 GMT

As you may have heard, Microsoft decided to close the Aces Game Studio in January of this year.

Although I will miss working on Microsoft Flight Simulator, I am looking forward to graduate school (Masters in Computational Linguistics) at the University of Washington.

You can visit my blog at http://noraneko.hogoboom.org/.

Ciao!

Balderdash and Piffle

noraneko — Tue, 31 Jan 2006 03:10:00 GMT

Finally! My kind of television show!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/programmes/wordhunt/

I hope BBC America will pick it up!

Word of the Day

noraneko — Wed, 25 Jan 2006 01:48:00 GMT

Once in a while, I hit the jackpot – c. 725 CE!

I was at the gym last Sunday. My Swiss friend and I were loitering by the supplement display and the "Whey Protein" caught our attention, mostly because my friend laughed about how she first thought she should pronounce "whey." So, of course, I had to look it up. It was one of my oldest words to date! Etymology is sure fun, isn't it?

whey

1. a. The serum or watery part of milk which remains after the separation of the curd by coagulation, esp. in the manufacture of cheese.

c725 Corpus Gloss. (Hessels) S272 Serum, hwж. a1050 Rect. Sing. Pers. §14 (Liebermann) 451 Sceaphyrdes riht is, жt he hжbbe..blede fulle hwees oe syringe ealne sumor. 12.. Sidonius Glosses (Anecd. Oxon.) I. v. 34/3 Hoc serum, i. wee. a1250 Owl & Night. 1009 (Cotton MS.) Hi drinke milc & wei [Jesus MS. hwey] ar to. 13.. in Rel. Ant. I. 9/2 Cerum, i. quidam liquor, qwhey. c1400 Lanfranc's Cirurg. 200 A purgacioun with gotis whey. c1430 Two Cookery-bks. 56 Take croddys of e deye, & wryng owt e whey. 1549 Compl. Scot. vi. 43 Thai maid grit cheir of..curdis and quhaye. 1587 L. MASCALL Cattle, Oxen (1596) 56 See..that your cheese be well and close gathered, in pressing foorth cleane all the whay. 1600 SURFLET Country Farm I. xiv. 90 The whaie may serue for the feeding of the hogs and dogs. 1732 ARBUTHNOT Rules of Diet in Aliments, etc. I. 252 Of all Drinks, Whey is the most relaxing. 1791 SCOTT Let. in Lockhart (1837) I. vi. 183 My uncle drinks the whey here, as I do ever since I understood it was brought to his bedside every morning at six, by a very pretty dairy-maid. 1893 J. P. SHELDON Brit. Dairying xv. 163 On dairy farms where cheese and butter are made, pigs are useful to consume whey and skim-milk.

- Oxford English Dictionary

Word of the Day

noraneko — Thu, 05 Jan 2006 19:10:00 GMT

I was writing an email to a colleague this morning and I used the verb "jibe." I don’t believe I've ever actually written the word before in my life and I was compelled to look it up out of curiosity. I was using the word in the American English meaning of "to agree with" in my email.

jibe, v.
Chiefly U.S.
intr. To chime in (with); to be in harmony or accord; to agree.
gibe, jibe, v.
1. intr. To speak sneeringly; to utter taunts; to jeer, flout, scoff. Const. at, with. Also dial. to scold.
2. trans. To address with scoffs and sneers; to flout, taunt.
- Oxford English Dictionary

Word of the Day

noraneko — Mon, 12 Dec 2005 20:08:00 GMT

Today while listening to " Septimus Heap, Book One: Magyk" by Angie Sage on CD with my son the word "erstwhile" caught my attention. It's not a word one comes across often, certainly not in American English (Angie Sage is British.) I thought it would be much older than it turned out to be.

Erstwhile adv. Some while ago, formerly. arch.

1569 SPENSER Sonn. ix. in Van der Noodt's Theatre for Worldlings, Which erstwhile [later edd. earst] so pleasaunt scent did yelde. 1584 R. SCOT Discov. Witchcr. III. xix. 56 They resist the truth erstwhile by them professed. 1599 SANDYS Europæ Spec. (1632) 184 Those very same minds, wherein they were erst-whiles enshrined with all devotion. 1624 GATAKER Transubst. 209 Which our adversarie also Earstwhiles confessed. 1662 GLANVILL Lux Orient. 180 Those thick and clammy vapours which erstwhile ascended in such vast measures..must..descend again. 1881 A. J. DUFFIELD Don Quix. II. 407 During that year the clouds erstwhile had withheld their dew from the earth.
- Oxford English Dictionary

Linguistics for Software Engineers: Why Concatenation is a Bad Idea

noraneko — Sat, 19 Nov 2005 07:25:00 GMT

It is very tempting to write a application that concatenates strings or audio to make a single phrase or sentence. It seems like it would be really helpful if you are squeezed for space or to speed things up. However, natural language is a lot more complicated than you might think. Let's take a straightforward sentence.

The hero kills the monster with his iron sword.

If we change the sex of the character then we also have to change the noun and pronoun:

The heroine kills the monster with her iron sword.

If we change the number, we have to change the noun, verb, pronoun and number:

The heroes kill the monsters with their iron swords.

And that's just English.

Now, if we translate into French, we will also have to inflect the definite article to agree with the gender of the noun and the genitive construction is different from English too.

Les héros tuent les monstres avec leurs épées de fer.

And just to complicate this simple sentence, Swedish appends the definite article to the noun.

a hero en hjälte a heroine en hjältinna
the hero hjälten the heroine hjältinnan

Fun, isn't it? These are very limited examples, but I hope you get the picture. Natural languages are pretty darn complicated. If you plan to localize your software for other languages, just don't concatenate!

Aviation Term of the Day

noraneko — Fri, 18 Nov 2005 20:20:00 GMT

English - flaps
A hinged portion of an airplane's wing, generally on the trailing edge, that can be lowered during takeoff and landing to increase the wings' lift and drag. When partially extended, a flap adds lift by increasing the camber, or curvature, of the wing. Because flaps extend into the oncoming air, they also increase drag, helping an aircraft descend steeply without building up speed. Modern aircraft use several types of flaps; the most common designs are plain, split, and Fowler. Often confused with ailerons, flaps are not the primary control surfaces of an airplane.
— Microsoft Flight Simulator 2004, Glossary

Etymology: [f. next vb.; cf. Dutch. flap blow, fly-flapper, lid of a can.]

Quotation: 1906 Sci. Amer. 18 Aug. 116/3 One part of the wing..is formed of a series of longitudinal flaps, fixed at the edges to a wire gauze network, so that the flap is made to close when the wing is brought down, but keeps open when the wing is raised.
— Oxford English Dictionary, Second Edition, 1989

French – volet
Italian – flap
Spanish – flaps
German – Klappen
Japanese- フラップ

Word of the Day

noraneko — Wed, 16 Nov 2005 20:50:00 GMT

Tchotchke

trinket: a trinket or piece of bric-a-brac
[Mid-20th century. < Yiddish tshatshke ]
Microsoft® Encarta® 2006. © 1993-2005 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

This word came up yesterday during the workday. Now, I know what a tchotchke is and I knew it was from Yiddish before looking it up. However, the word came to my attention via an email discussion at work and the fact that the individuals involved spelt it "chochke." Now if there is one thing I can't stand is misspelled words. I am a linguist, so I should be sympathetic to phonetic spellers, but I just can't help it. I don't mind differences in regional spelling standards, but misspellings sort of leap of the page and smack me in the face. I suppose deep down I believe that poor spelling shows a lack of respect for following the rules, especially, as in this case, the offenders are flagrantly and happily continuing to misspell tchotchke. I wonder if poor spellers also get a lot of speeding tickets? I've never had one, so perhaps there is indeed a correlation.

Translation versus Transliteration

noraneko — Tue, 15 Nov 2005 18:48:00 GMT

The issue of translating "proper nouns" comes up a lot in coding software that will be localized into other languages. Developers, in my experience, like to hardcode anything and everything if possible. This is not just a US programming phenomenon – I've seen Japanese developers do the same thing, making localizing the software into English just as difficult.

The argument is usually something like "You don't translate a company name, like Boeing." Ah, but you do transliterate it. In fact, Boeing, and Microsoft for that matter, transliterate their company names on their own websites. When transliterated phonetically into Japanese katakana Microsoft becomes "マイクロソフト" and Boeing becomes "ボーイング " Conversely, since most non-Japanese don't read Japanese, we are used to reading Japanese transliterated into the Roman alphabet, e.g. "Tokyo" than "東京". There are plenty of languages which do not use the Western European writing system.

Just to be clear, here are the definitions of translate and transliterate:
Translate: turn words into different language: to reproduce a written or spoken text in a different language while retaining the original meaning.
Transliterate: transcribe something into another alphabet: to represent letters or words written in one alphabet using the corresponding letters of another.
Microsoft® Encarta® 2006. © 1993-2005 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

What this practically means that any text that is displayed to a user must be able to be localized, whether it's translated or transliterated. Plain and simple.

Aviation Term of the Day

noraneko — Mon, 14 Nov 2005 23:11:00 GMT

Aileron
One of the hinged flaps on the trailing edge of a wing of an aeroplane for maintaining or restoring its balance when flying. From the French. aileron, diminutive of aile wing. First appearance in English in1909.
Oxford English Dictionary, Second Edition, 1989

And in case you'd like to improve your vocabulary in a few other languages...
French - Aileron
Italian - Alettone
Spanish - Alerón
German - Querruder
Japanese - エルロン

Etymology is Habit Forming

noraneko — Sat, 12 Nov 2005 09:08:00 GMT

I wonder if anyone else has this happen to them: Most morning, driving in to work and listening to NPR, I hear a word and thing "Where did that come from?" I can't wait to get into work so I can access the Oxford English Dictionary Online to find out. I was introduced to the OED by a fabulous English teacher. I will always remember the word I was assigned to look up in the vast collection of blue-bound volumes, knappan — An old Welsh game in which a wooden ball was hurled through the air by successive players, each side endeavouring to drive it as far as possible in one direction; also the ball with which this game was played, 1573.

I was hooked. Today's that I just had to look up was frisky — Given to frisking; lively; playful, c1500.

Another fun game is to take an every day sentence and see what the oldest and newest words are and how many first appeard in Beowolf.

"Flight Simulator is an incredible and amusing game."

Flight – 900
Simulator - 1899
Is (be) - c885
An (a) - c1175
Incredible - 1412-20
And - a1000
Amusing - 1603
Game – 1160 (Jackpot - Beowolf!)

If this sounds like fun, you might like this language game on BBC's site:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/lj/conquestlj/legacy_entry.shtml?site=history_conquestlj_sermon

The First Woman Aloft

noraneko — Sat, 12 Nov 2005 08:48:00 GMT

On June 4, 1784, Elisabeth Thible, a French opera singer, became the first female aeronaut when she ascended in a Mongolfier balloon.

Am 4. Juni 1784, die französische Opernsängerin Elisabeth Thible war die erste Frau die mit einer Montgolfière aufstieg.

Le 4 juin 1784, Élisabeth Thible, une chanteuse française de l'opéra, est la première femme à prendre son envol dans une montgolfière.

Quotation

noraneko — Fri, 04 Nov 2005 21:45:00 GMT

"It is no coincidence that in no known language does the phrase 'As pretty as an Airport' appear."
Douglas Adams (1952 - 2001)