This big rainbow showed up right outside my window, I rushed to find my camera and, well…
Examples of simulated English:
Zeroth-order approximation: the symbols are independent and equiprobable. XFOML RXKHRJFFJUJ ZLPWCFWKCYJ FFJEYVKCQSGXYD QPAAMKBZAACIBZLHJQD
First-order approximation: the symbols are independent, but frequency of letters matches English text. OCRO HLI RGWR NMIELWIS EU LL NBNESBEYA TH EEI ALHENHTTPA OOBTTVA NAH BRL
Second-order approximation: the frequency of pairs of letters matches English text. ON IE ANTSOUTINYS ARE T INCTORE ST BE S DEAMY ACHIN D ILONASIVE TUCOOWE AT TEASONARE FUSO TIZIN ANDY TOBE SEACE CTISBE
Third-order approximation: the frequency of triplets of letters matches English text. IN NO IST LAT WHEY CRATICT FROURE BERS GROCID PONDENOME OF DEMONSTURES OF THE REPTAGIN IS REGOACTIONA OF CRE
Fourth-order approximation: the frequency of quadruplets of letters matches English text. THE GENERATED JOB PROVIDUAL BETTER TRAND THE DISPLAYED CODE ABOVERY UPONDULTS WELL THE CODERST IN THESTICAL IT DO HOCK BOTHE MERG INSTATES CONS ERATION NEVER ANY OF PUBLE AND TO THEORY EVENTIAL CALLEGAND TO ELAST BENERATED IN WITH PIES AS IS WITH THE
It’s fascinating to see how this grows increasingly realistic. I wonder how high-order you need to go before the result would be exclusively actual English words.
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For Michelle- good luck in grad school!
I’m in a neuroscience class, and the professor suggested we get this book, The Human Brain Coloring Book. It’s exactly what it sounds like: essentially color-by-number views of the brain. It just came in the mail, and I’m excited to break out some colored pencils…
He had his own idiosyncratic vocabulary: he spoke of “The Book”, an imaginary book in which God had written down the best and most elegant proofs for mathematical theorems. Lecturing in 1985 he said, “You don’t have to believe in God, but you should believe in The Book.” He himself doubted the existence of God, whom he called the “Supreme Fascist” (SF). He accused the SF of hiding his socks and Hungarian passports, and of keeping the most elegant mathematical proofs to himself. When he saw a particularly beautiful mathematical proof he would exclaim, “This one’s from The Book!”
Things that are awesome from linguistics: Canadian raising.
Most poor impersonations of Canadian English include exaggerations of the words out, about, mouse and house. What these impressions are trying to imitate is Canadian raising, the conditioned change in the dipththongs “ow” and “I”.
Dipththongs are usually explained as being “double-vowels”, but what’s important about them is that they are vowels in motion, on a trajectory from a start to a finish. What Canadian raising does is change the starting location to a raised position.
The above image shows the vowel-space of the mouth, and it shows the paths of Canadian English’s allophones for “ow” and “I”. In the top-left, we have a regular “ow” vowel, as in “loud”, moving from “ah” (roughly, as in “father”) to “oo” (“tube”). In the top-right, we have the raised version, as in “house”, moving from “uh” (“cut”) to “oo”. In the bottom-left, we have the regular “I” vowel, as in “eyes”, moving from “ah” to “ee” (“need”). In the bottom-right, we have the raised version, as in “ice”, moving from “uh” to “ee”.
What makes C.R. a classic linguistics 101 example is that it’s completely regular and predictable. Generally speaking, whenever either the “ow” or “I” diphthongs occur before a voiceless consonant —p, t, k, ch, f, s, th (“thin”, not “that”), sh—the diphthong raises. Thus, we have many pairs of unraised and raised words: lies vs lice, write vs ride, pouter vs powder, house (verb) vs house (noun), etc. This webpage has sound clips for six pairs.
(image from here)
