Vorkosigan

Ralph the Sacred River

http://ralphriver.blogspot.com/

is not only a good blog, but has links to many, many other concerned blogs.

Vorkosigan

spin

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree,
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.

Ralph, of course, was born from an interesting linguistic problem: how can you tell, while listening, where a syllable ends?

I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice-cream.

(Or, for Oz, Johnny Howard's mate, Mr Rabbit.)


spin

Vorkosigan

The speaker just has to cut the word off clearly, I guess.

Jose, can you see...??

But it's a good blog, with a great collection of resources and links to other blogs.

spin

It's like you've got a pair of scissors in your head cutting away, while parsing the language. There's no difference in pronunciation between "ice-cream" and "I scream", unless you deliberately put a pause after "I", which would sound false. You distinguish by context. If you don't hear the first syllable of the Coleridge line, you'll certainly hear "Ralph". This is because we tend to hear words starting with vowels as connected to the preceding consonant.

I'm no tab log person. I'll eye craw data ('n' there's juss snotty nuff), not precooked baloney.

(And I have nothing against Ed Cook!)


inps

Chris Weimer

I'm feeling this thread slowly crawl towards ~Elsewhere~

No, I have no odd combinations to off her you (but it doesn't even make sense. so lame)
:huh:

spin

There she may go, though tell me this: how do you know when to break a word from what follows? It's an interesting problem because it requires a lot of your competance, not simply at a morphological level, nor even grammatical. You need to be building a semantic understanding and be ready to change hypothesis in mid build.

When I was a kid, I learnt a song by rote, which I simply didn't understand:

Mairzy dotes 'n' dozey dotes 'n' liddle lamzy divey
A kiddley divey too
Wooden shoe


nisp