From: owner-fegmaniax-digest@smoe.org (fegmaniax-digest) To: fegmaniax-digest@smoe.org Subject: fegmaniax-digest V13 #361 Reply-To: fegmaniax@smoe.org Sender: owner-fegmaniax-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-fegmaniax-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk fegmaniax-digest Monday, December 20 2004 Volume 13 : Number 361 Today's Subjects: ----------------- Re: punk/prog, pronounced Prudence [bisontentacle ] Re: Sieve [Benjamin Lukoff ] What the hell?! [Eb ] Re: fegmaniax-digest V13 #360 [James Dignan ] Re: What the hell?! [Capuchin ] Re: What the hell?! [Jeff Dwarf ] Re: Sieve [Sebastian Hagedorn ] medicins sans frontieres [Jim Davies ] Foreign languages and writing systems [Sebastian Hagedorn ] Re: Foreign languages and writing systems [Dolph Chaney ] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun, 19 Dec 2004 14:16:25 -0500 From: bisontentacle Subject: Re: punk/prog, pronounced Prudence one time at band camp, Jon Lewis said: >Perhaps the thing to do is start a CD-R copying tree for the >torrent-disabled among us. It could be limited to RH-related material >only. As you might guess from my previous plaints, I would be very into >such a thing, and willing to take on a good share of the labor. sounds like a good idea to me! the yahoogroups do this a lot already but i don't see why we shouldn't do the same here. maybe a good time to resurrect the permatree for those who can't do the torrent/ftp thing. i'm a bit overloaded right now so can't organize it but i'd be more than happy to feed a tree with flac/shns and/or audio copies of any and all shows which are torrented/ftped. woj ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 19 Dec 2004 12:36:46 -0800 (PST) From: Benjamin Lukoff Subject: Re: Sieve On Sat, 18 Dec 2004, Capuchin wrote: > That's interesting. I was playing a rousing game of Skip-Bo with a group > of punk rockers tonight and found that the word "discard" is pronounced > differently by some in the context of playing card games than it is in > normal discussion. If you throw something by the wayside, you've > disCARDed it. If you're eliminating a card from your hand at the end of > your turn, you're DIScarding. > OK, not really a pronunciation difference, but a difference in emphasis. Emphasis (stress) is an integral part of pronunciation, so this anecdote certainly belongs in this thread! ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 19 Dec 2004 15:07:12 -0800 From: Eb Subject: What the hell?! PJ HARVEY PLAYS 'LAST SHOW' EVER British singer PJ HARVEY stunned fans in Paris last night (18DEC04), by announcing she is never going to tour again. The rock musician, who has been promoting her seventh studio album UH HUH HER, shocked the small audience of competition winners at Studio 287 in the French capital by declaring she will avoid playing live dates again. Harvey told her fans the concert would be "the last show I will ever play." (AR/WNWCCC/ZG) ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 20 Dec 2004 13:11:11 +1300 From: James Dignan Subject: Re: fegmaniax-digest V13 #360 >My favorite English phonetic monstrosities are "cough" and "enough." >Silly language. > >Look Ma! Top-posting! Tell me about it - I used to live in the vollage of Croughton (the "ough" pronounced as in either plough or crow, depending on who you talked to)> I now live one block away from Coughtrey sreet (pronounced Coo-tree). James - -- James Dignan, Dunedin, New Zealand -.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.- =-.-=-.-=-.- You talk to me as if from a distance .-=-.-=-.-=-. -=-. And I reply with impressions chosen from another time .-=- .-=-.-=-.-=-.-=- (Brian Eno - "By this River") -.-=-.-=-.-=-.-= ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 19 Dec 2004 17:12:26 -0800 (PST) From: Capuchin Subject: Re: What the hell?! On Sun, 19 Dec 2004, Eb wrote: > PJ HARVEY PLAYS 'LAST SHOW' EVER > British singer PJ HARVEY stunned fans in Paris last night (18DEC04), > by announcing she is never going to tour again. > The rock musician, who has been promoting her seventh studio album UH > HUH HER, shocked the small audience of competition winners at Studio 287 > in the French capital by declaring she will avoid playing live dates > again. > Harvey told her fans the concert would be "the last show I will ever > play." > (AR/WNWCCC/ZG) She must have a nice fortune amassed or is planning to get a day job. She's crazy if she thinks record sales are going to mean anything at all in five years' time. Bowie is a total genius for selling future royalties for cash five years ago. Maybe she's going to set up some kind of patronage system? J. - -- _______________________________________________ Capuchin capuchin@bitmine.net Jeme A Brelin ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 19 Dec 2004 17:34:52 -0800 (PST) From: Jeff Dwarf Subject: Re: What the hell?! Eb wrote: > PJ HARVEY PLAYS 'LAST SHOW' EVER > British singer PJ HARVEY stunned fans in Paris last > night (18DEC04), by announcing she is never going to > tour again. > The rock musician, who has been promoting her seventh > studio album UH HUH HER, shocked the small audience of > competition winners at Studio 287 in the French capital > by declaring she will avoid playing live dates again. > Harvey told her fans the concert would be "the last > show I will ever play." > (AR/WNWCCC/ZG) Of course, plenty of people have said that before and gone back out on tour afterwards. Not that she (or they) were lying, but there's nothing to say she won't/can't change her mind. But if she doesn't want to tour and doesn't need the money, hey, more power to her. ===== __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Dress up your holiday email, Hollywood style. Learn more. http://celebrity.mail.yahoo.com ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 20 Dec 2004 10:01:18 +0100 From: Sebastian Hagedorn Subject: Re: Sieve Hi, - --On Samstag, 18. Dezember 2004 13:35:38 Uhr MEZ -0500 "Stewart C. Russell" wrote: > Sebastian Hagedorn wrote: >> I'm upset. Last night I was told that "sieve" does not rhyme with >> "grieve". > > It does, or can, if used in the slightly rare second name > "Siev(e)wright". I can just see the medieval guild humour now: > > SLIGHTLY DRUNK STUDENT (on a dare): What ho, good sieve wright! How much > for your finest sieve? (tee hee) > > SIEVE WRIGHT: Fuck off, tosspot. You're the 15th today. just to make sure I got it: the joke is that it's pronounced like syph, right? Anyway, in medieval times both instances of "sieve" would probably have been pronounced identically? Anybody got a copy of the OED handy? BTW, I realised what makes this word so hard for me. It's not just the broken analogy with "grieve", it's also a "false friend". The German translation of "sieve" is "Sieb", and that one's pronounced with a long vowel sound ... - -- Sebastian Hagedorn PGP key ID: 0x4D105B45 http://www.spinfo.uni-koeln.de/~hgd/ ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 20 Dec 2004 10:20:05 GMT From: Jim Davies Subject: medicins sans frontieres If you've downloaded the White Album gig, or anything else for that matter, then you might like to donate to MSF. You can do it on-line. Google will take you to the home page. You can go to your national site from there. It shouldn't take you a minute. x ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 20 Dec 2004 11:30:10 +0100 From: Sebastian Hagedorn Subject: Foreign languages and writing systems Hi, - --On Sonntag, 19. Dezember 2004 7:32:02 Uhr MEZ +1300 James Dignan wrote: > Let's face it, English is not the world's easiest language. actually I'd argue that it rather is ... its grammar is certainly among the easier ones. The difficulty lies in the abundance of idiomatic expressions. The grieve/sieve thing has nothing to do with the language proper, but only with its current writing system. I'm not about to open this can of worms, but my take on this is that a reformed spelling system with a strict phonology-grapheme correlation would do more harm than good. > And your > English is astonishingly good, Sebastian. Thanks. > My attempts at German would > make you cringe. Hmm, I generally appreciate anyone's efforts to learn a foreign language. Although I have to say that I have a very hard time understanding some foreigners who try to talk to me in *English*. Friends of mine whose English isn't as good find that easier than myself. I guess that English only works as a "lingua franca" within a group of people that have roughly the same language proficiency. - -- Sebastian Hagedorn PGP key ID: 0x4D105B45 http://www.spinfo.uni-koeln.de/~hgd/ ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 20 Dec 2004 08:21:32 -0600 From: 2fs Subject: Re: Foreign languages and writing systems On Mon, 20 Dec 2004 11:30:10 +0100, Sebastian Hagedorn wrote: > Hi, > > --On Sonntag, 19. Dezember 2004 7:32:02 Uhr MEZ +1300 James Dignan > wrote: > > > Let's face it, English is not the world's easiest language. > > actually I'd argue that it rather is ... its grammar is certainly among the > easier ones. The difficulty lies in the abundance of idiomatic expressions. > The grieve/sieve thing has nothing to do with the language proper, but only > with its current writing system. I'm not about to open this can of worms, > but my take on this is that a reformed spelling system with a strict > phonology-grapheme correlation would do more harm than good. I agree. For one thing, spelling is meaning in English, often - therefore, spelling homonyms alike would make them harder to distinguish. More importantly (for me, at least), spelling is history: some oddities of spelling are archives of past pronunciation or derivation, and once you know that, not only are they easier to spell but as words they're livelier for that history. In fact, English spelling is fairly regular - it's just a highly complex regularity. Finally, there are so many different Englishes that trying to phoneticize its spelling would inevitably privilege one group's pronunciation over another's. The real question is, who would it benefit? Spelling seems to be a knack separate from conventional "intelligence" as measured in schools - - witness the large number of otherwise brilliant people for whom spelling was a constant annoyance (George Bernard Shaw, notoriously). For the reasons listed above, and for some implied by Sebastian, foreign-language learners can benefit from those oddities. Children don't seem to be overly hindered in learning English as opposed to other languages; I don't believe there's any evidence suggesting that its spelling is a problem for learning to read and write. B'sydz wich, reformd speling tenz t' luk, wel, j'st playn dum. (And of course - rather like the problem w/Dvorak keyboard layout - there's a huge learning curve for accomplished readers and writers - only in this case, with no clear benefit on the other side of that curve.) - -- ++Jeff++ The Architectural Dance Society http://spanghew.blogspot.com/ ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 20 Dec 2004 08:57:17 -0600 From: Dolph Chaney Subject: Re: Foreign languages and writing systems At 08:21 AM 12/20/2004, 2fs wrote: >For one thing, spelling is meaning in English, often - >therefore, spelling homonyms alike would make them harder to >distinguish. More importantly (for me, at least), spelling is history: >some oddities of spelling are archives of past pronunciation or >derivation, and once you know that, not only are they easier to spell >but as words they're livelier for that history. Well said. Put it this way -- if phonetic spelling ever takes over, one leg of the rickety table which is my songwriting style is out. - -- Dolph ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 20 Dec 2004 09:41:50 GMT From: Jim Davies Subject: some will pay (for what others pay to avoid) Gosh. Okay, here's where I confess that my love for Devoto's solo album 'Jerky Versions of the Dream' can probably best be described by my owning *three* copies of the LP. *That* I would love to have on CD. Any Devoto fan should go to the used-record shop and pick him or herself up a copy for the 99 cents or whatever they are undercharging these days. I managed to get hold of some MP3s; they weren't all that great but I keep them nonetheless. Just so I can remember how wonderful that album is. Lyrically, it's the best thing he's ever done. No poetics, but it lifts me up. And the music is synthetic, it's slight, it's years after the fact, but still fresh. It's the bile - it acts as a preservative. If only he would take these songs out again. Sheets of ice over every machine from election day to Halloween am I acting badly in some bad dream? x ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 20 Dec 2004 11:53:01 -0800 (PST) From: Mike Swedene Subject: White Offer/Mac AVI Question In honor of the season and all that jazz.... If anyone needs the White Album (first half) that was posted on Easytree: Robyn Hitchcock and Heavy Friends The White Album Against the War Benefit 3 Kings, Clerkenwell London August 7, 2004 email me off list and I'll get the disc out to you. MAC QUESTION: I have two AVI files and need to join them together to convert to MPEG to get on to dvd as one file. Any pointers or websites besides: http://www.videohelp.com/ would be appreciated. thanks! mike ===== - ------------------------------------------------- "there is water at the bottom of the ocean" - talking heads _________________________________________________________ __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - You care about security. So do we. http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail ------------------------------ End of fegmaniax-digest V13 #361 ********************************