Language things
Sep. 28th, 2021 10:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livSo today I worked in the office for the first time in a year and a half. I'm exhausted from leaving the house at 7:15 am and not getting back until 7 pm, I've spent more time indoors with non-bubble people than basically the whole pandemic put together, and I'm not at all convinced it was worth it. However it is work policy that we have to be in person one day a week and honestly four days a week remote is better than the pre-pandemic situation of WFH being a very rare exception. The new normal involves hot-desking, and regular PCR tests, which I also don't love, but I think I will hate it less when it becomes more routine and when my team are also around for campus days.
Anyway, rather than whine about my mostly quite fortunate work situation, have some links I've enjoyed recently.
1] Twitter thread explaining kerning. Best if you can read both text and images as there are lovely animations explaining the concepts. If you find thread readers more accessible than Twitter there are some unrolled versions in the first few comments, though I'm aware that some people have moral objections to thread readers.
2] Video explaining an demonstrating American accents. On YouTube, visuals add a little bit of framing but are not essential. A transcript would be basically meaningless since the whole point is to hear examples of different accents.
The main presenter, Erik Singer, is a real virtuoso, a dialect coach who can imitate lots of different accents really well. Maybe all this stuff is completely elementary to Americans or linguists, but I learned a lot from the way he explains both the history and the phonology of different accents. And he's not making value judgements about different accents, just explaining how and why they are different. I particularly like that he invites linguists from various ethnic backgrounds to explain the accents of the communities that they belong to and study.
3] We're just at the end of the cycle of autumn festivals, with Simchat Torah, which celebrates reaching the end and restarting the annual reading of Torah. The Ark Liberal synagogue in north London has a cool video showing what the Torah scroll looks like. Many communities have a custom of unrolling the whole scroll for Simchat Torah and this is a kind of digital equivalent, though for some reason they roll from the end to the beginning rather than in the obvious direction.
This is also on YouTube; the visuals are the whole point. There is an audio track consisting of the kind of Israeli-Jewish songs that are often sung at the festival, but if you can't hear it you don't lose much. If you've never a seen a book written on a parchment scroll before the video gives a really nice impression. And if, like me, you didn't get to an in person Simchat Torah service because of the pandemic, it's a nice little memento.
Anyway, rather than whine about my mostly quite fortunate work situation, have some links I've enjoyed recently.
1] Twitter thread explaining kerning. Best if you can read both text and images as there are lovely animations explaining the concepts. If you find thread readers more accessible than Twitter there are some unrolled versions in the first few comments, though I'm aware that some people have moral objections to thread readers.
2] Video explaining an demonstrating American accents. On YouTube, visuals add a little bit of framing but are not essential. A transcript would be basically meaningless since the whole point is to hear examples of different accents.
The main presenter, Erik Singer, is a real virtuoso, a dialect coach who can imitate lots of different accents really well. Maybe all this stuff is completely elementary to Americans or linguists, but I learned a lot from the way he explains both the history and the phonology of different accents. And he's not making value judgements about different accents, just explaining how and why they are different. I particularly like that he invites linguists from various ethnic backgrounds to explain the accents of the communities that they belong to and study.
3] We're just at the end of the cycle of autumn festivals, with Simchat Torah, which celebrates reaching the end and restarting the annual reading of Torah. The Ark Liberal synagogue in north London has a cool video showing what the Torah scroll looks like. Many communities have a custom of unrolling the whole scroll for Simchat Torah and this is a kind of digital equivalent, though for some reason they roll from the end to the beginning rather than in the obvious direction.
This is also on YouTube; the visuals are the whole point. There is an audio track consisting of the kind of Israeli-Jewish songs that are often sung at the festival, but if you can't hear it you don't lose much. If you've never a seen a book written on a parchment scroll before the video gives a really nice impression. And if, like me, you didn't get to an in person Simchat Torah service because of the pandemic, it's a nice little memento.
(no subject)
Date: 2021-09-28 10:33 pm (UTC)Thanks for the link to the accents thing! It's so great!
(no subject)
Date: 2021-09-29 12:07 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2021-09-29 12:14 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2021-09-29 05:38 am (UTC)My university as a whole is applying a hybrid working approach where everyone is expected to be in the office at least once a week. My department has an impressively broken ventilation system and our Director is basically opting us out: people who want to be in the office can arrange to do so but everyone else is still at home.
Anyway, if and when we get this kind of "minimum 1 day in office" requirement imposed, I want to set it up so all my team are in on the same one day, or much of the supposed benefit will be lost.
(no subject)
Date: 2021-09-29 12:22 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2021-10-10 04:25 am (UTC)The Twitter thread and the Youtube series were both highly informative, and while I don't think I learned nearly as much from it as I could have, hearing the lingual shifts around the map was very interesting.
While watching the scroll, I saw there were some parts of it that were white space that didn't look like the ends of lines or the beginnings of new paragraphs, and I am curious, now, about the use of white space on the scroll and what significance it may have.