Some linguistic insanity

We’ve all heard stories of bizarre sentences resulting from, say, translating a piece of English into Russian and back again. I’m never sure whether these are true, apocryphal or embellished.

Well, yesterday I came across a website called Translation Party whose function is simply to generate these. It doesn’t translate things into Russian: you provide a piece of text, and it then repeatedly translates it into Japanese and back again until it achieves “equilibrium”. That is, it stops when translating the English text it has arrived at into Japanese and back no longer changes the text. I think it uses Google Translate or some such thing.

Here, for example, is the chain of English “sentences” resulting from typing in “shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”:

• shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
• I was on a summer’s day, what should you compare?
• I am on the day of the summer, compared to what it was?
• I, on the day of the summer, do you have anything to compare it?
• I, on the day of the summer, if you have nothing to compare it?
• I, for the summer, to compare what is not?
• I was in the summer of 2006 in comparison to what was not?
• I have the summer of 2006, what was that compared to?
• I have compared to the summer of 2006 or any year?
• I compared the summer of 2006, or any year?
• My summer of 2006, or any year comparison?
• My summer of 2006, or any comparison of the year?
• My summer of 2006, or from any comparison?
• My summer of 2006, or from or any comparison?
• My summer of 2006, any comparison or later?
• In the summer of 2006 I was, or any comparison?
• The summer of 2006, or is he or any comparisons?
• Summer of 2006, or any comparison of him?
• Summer of 2006, any comparison of him?
• Summer of 2006, any comparison of him?

Don’t ask me where 2006 came from (as I don’t speak Japanese, and therefore have no idea.)

Interestingly, if I make the tiny correction of capitalising the beginning of the starting sentence, 2006 doesn’t get mentioned at all and the site arrives at

• This summer, like me, you can compare what you are?

via a much shorter chain of sentences which includes the decidedly un-Shakespearean

• This summer, I was like, What can compare?

I have a horrible feeling that in not many years’ time that may well be standard English grammar.

Each time you enter some text, the website creates a link to the resulting page. Thus if you want to see the steps which led from this tweet from one of my Twitter contacts

• Good evening, people. Wow, now that I sat down again I’m tired. Ug

to

• Evening, good people. I am now on a Saturday, I’m currently in Uganda

all you need do is go to http://translationparty.com/#1013689.

Have fun!

How to make coffee without losing friends

You’ve probably noticed two trends in the instruction manuals or leaflets which come with consumer items. For one groups of items—mobile phones for example—the trend is towards giving less and less useful information. For example, my new phone has a red light on the side which sometimes flashes. It must do this for a reason, to indicate something, but I’ve no idea what and the manual doesn’t tell me. In fact much of the manual consists of sentences beginning “You can . . .” which mention a particular task but don’t actually mention how to do it.

The other trend is towards giving more and more unnecessary information—for example, telling you that candles burn and that the flame is hot.

Many sets of instructions are also written in barely intelligible English, translated from another language by a non-native speaker of English. Personally I think such translations should be required to meet a minimum legal standard, since confusion can in some cases be dangerous and in others can make certain features of a product unusable. If the instructions for a feature can’t be deciphered, then the feature is effectively not there and you may just as well have been sold a faulty product.

A couple of weeks ago I bought myself a Russell Hobbs coffee grinder, in order to let me drink nice, freshly ground coffee. It works very well.

My first reaction to the instructions that came with it was that it was a breath of fresh air to read ones which were obviously written by someone who knew English. Every word was intelligible.

My second thought was that they were rather detailed, but since a lot of the detail concerned safety and the reasons for various things, that was still OK.

What I wasn’t expecting, though, was the advice on personal relationships in step 20:

Item 16 is reasonable, though amusingly worded. So are items 17 and 18, though the writer appears either not to have heard of semicolons or to have missed an and out. Item 19 is certainly an adequate way of counting approximate seconds. But item 20???

That made me laugh out loud, but I’m wondering how on earth it made its way into an actual instruction booklet. In a draft as a joke when someone had been drinking, maybe . . . but the final booklet? For a well-known manufacturer? Do they know what is going out in their name?

I confess that when I grind the coffee, I don’t count in a “firm, clear voice”. I either time the bursts with my watch, or count quietly and take the risk of people jumping to conclusions.

National Blog Posting Month

OK, so I’ve just signed up for a thing called National Blog Posting Month, also known by the “elegant” name NaBloPoMo. This was probably a rash thing to do. The idea is that every day, for an entire month, I have to post something to my blog.

From past experience of writing a journal, this is unlikely to happen. Some days simply aren’t interesting. But it will be interesting to try, and to see whether I fail abysmally or only moderately . . .

The name is rather inaccurate. First, it’s not a specific month. It’s one month from the day I signed up. And second, it’s international. So it should really be called Ongoing international blog posting  exercise, or  Oninblopex.

I’ve a bit of a cold today and just thinking about doing this makes my temperature rise, so I’m definitely not predicting great  success. But let’s see.

Hmmm . . . Maybe I should go and un-sign-up . . .

Some John Cage anecdotes

The avant-garde composer John Cage is, of course, best known for his “silent piece”, 4′33″. This involves collecting together some musicians and an audience, and requiring them to sit in “silence”, hearing nothing but ambient sounds, for four time periods (“movements”) totalling four minutes and thirty-three seconds.

A performance at the Barbican, part of which I saw on TV, made it clear that this is more than just some kind of stunt. The audience was large; one does not usually have the experience of being with such a  large number of people in such focused silence for so long. The silence was intense, even experienced second hand through the broadcast. And it’s more than twice as long, for example, as the two minute silence we observe on Remembrance Day.

I’m not concerned about whether 4′33″ is music or not: the important thing is the experience, not what label we give it. Maybe really it’s theatre. Maybe it’s something else.

It seems everyone has heard of  4′33′.

But maybe less people are aware of John Cage’s writings. Like his music, they too are idiosyncratic. They include a Lecture on Nothing which is really a kind of meditation leading into periods of extended silence. The one I want to give a sample of here, though, is called Indeterminacy. In it, he took up a friend’s suggestion of giving a lecture consisting entirely of stories. He gave the lecture at least twice: a 30 minute version and (with different stories) a 60 minute version.

The catch was that in delivery, each story had to last exactly one minute. But they were of quite wiidely varying lengths, so he had to speak very slowly in telling some of them, and very quickly for others.

But—and here’s the point—many of the stories are very entertaining and well told. And having written ninety anecdotes for the two versions of the lecture, John Cage didn’t stop there. He continued writing them as he thought of them. In his collection of writings Silence, stories that aren’t included in the printed version of the lecture are as he says “scattered through the book, playing the same function that odd bits of information play at the end of columns in a small-town newspaper”, so every so often you’ll find an anecdote instead of blank section of a page.

Here are several of my favourites. The first concerns Xenia, who was his wife for about ten years:

Xenia never wanted a party to end. Once, in Seattle, when the party we were at was folding, she invited those who were still awake, some of whom we’d only met that evening, to come over to our house. Thus it was that about 3:00 A.M. an Irish tenor was singing loudly in our living room. Morris Graves, who had a suite down the hall, entered ours without knocking, wearing an old-fashioned nightshirt and carrying an elaborately made wooden birdcage, the bottom of which had been removed. Making straight for the tenor, Graves placed the birdcage over his head, said nothing, and left the room. The effect was that of snuffing out a candle. Shortly, Xenia and I were alone.

An unintended consequence of his interest in wild fungi:

When Vera Williams first noticed that I was interested in wild mushrooms, she told her children not to touch any of them because they were all deadly poisonous. A few days later she bought a steak at Martino’s and decided to serve it smothered with mushrooms. When she started to cook the mushrooms, the children all stopped whatever they were doing and watched her attentively. When she served dinner, they all burst into tears.

Hearing a lecture without absorbing it:

I went to hear Krishnamurti speak. He was lecturing on how to hear a lecture. He said, “You must pay full attention to what is being said and you can’t do that if you take notes.” The lady on my right was taking notes. The man on her right nudged her and said, “Don’t you hear what he’s saying? You’re not supposed to take notes.” She then read what she had written and said, “That’s right. I have it written down right here in my notes.”

These can be found on pages 271, 95 and 269 respectively of John Cage, Silence, Marion Boyars, 1978 (reprinted several times since).

A grammar puzzle

English grammar can be strange. Sometimes it seems to have a rule of breaking its own rules, as it were. An example that occurred to me yesterday involves the words less and fewer. I’ll tell you about it shortly, but I need some background first.

A rule

First consider the basic rule about these words:

• fewer refers to things you can count
• less refers to things you can’t count: continuous quantities.

So, for example, if you drop one of your plates on the floor while washing up and it shatters, you have fewer plates than you did before. But if you eat a larger piece of cake than planned, there is less cake left than there would have been otherwise.

Some exceptions which aren’t

This seems like a clear enough rule, and it’s one which we mostly adhere to in written English. Fowler [1], though, mentions a few apparent exceptions, such as

• It is less than seventy miles to London
• [It] costs less than fifty pounds
• We have had reliable temperature records for less than 150 years
• [Please write] fifty words or less.

On closer inspection, the first three of these turn out to fit the rule.Try using fewer in those examples: It is fewer than seventy miles to London sounds (at least to me) as though the distance to London has to be a whole number of miles. But it isn’t: distance is a continuous quantity, which just happens to be measured in miles. We aren’t counting the number of miles, but measuring the distance.

Similarly the time since temperature records began is unlikely to be a whole number of years, and we’re measuring the time, not counting individual years; less than 150 years really means “A time whose length is shorter than 150 years”.

The money example seems slightly different, since money does come in distinct steps. However, the steps are pence, not pounds. Normally you won’t get the correct price of something by counting out a number of pounds, and (at least to my ears) fewer than fifty pounds sounds like doing precisely that. We generally think of money as a thing which we have a lot or a little of, not as a pile of coins which we have many or few of. So it still fits the rule.

Fifty words or less is interesting because, as Fowler points out, it is standard wording for English exams. A whole number of words is definitely what’s wanted. But the emphasis is still really on the length of the passage to be written, not on the individual words.

As a borderline case, Fowler  gives having had in his house at one time no less than five Nobel Prize winners. I’m less happy about that one: I think that in written English it should definitely be no fewer than five of them. Nobel Prize winners seem to me to be something that you definitely have a whole number of, not something that you measure out. On the other hand, maybe when you have a crowd of Nobel Prize winners your attention is on the size of the crowd rather than on the individuals. But I somehow doubt it. Nevertheless, these examples do in fact fit the rule: fewer for things you count, and less for things you don’t. I’m merely a little dubious about the idea of not counting Nobel Prize winners.

Speaking colloquially

I’ve not studied the speech aspect of this, but it’s clear that many (maybe most) people ofetn don’t adhere to this rule when speaking. They say things like I’ve got far less things to do today and might treat less things to do, less work to do and less to do as equivalents which are all variants on the idea of doing less.

Are they speaking “incorrectly”, or are they using a different set of rules of “correctness” for speech? I’m not sure: to me this one does feel more like not noticing a word that doesn’t fit properly, thereby getting it wrong,  than like using a differnent rule  to determine what fits. But at the same time, carefully using fewer can feel artificial at times, creating too much formality, especially in situations where it’s harder to say or when speaking to someone who doesn’t use it. Far fewer feels more awkward to the mouth than far less, for example, and I think there probably is a “rule” in speech  of using phrases which have a smoother sound to them. Maybe sounding nice sometimes takes precedence over “correctness”. But whether it actually sounds nice to the listener will of course depend on how alert they are to the grammatical structures, how bothered they are by it, and whether it affects clarity of meaning.

The puzzle

OK, that was rather a lot of background. Here is the puzzle, though it may be that I just hear things a particular way which other people don’t share. I’d like to hear other people’s opinions on it. It concerns the situation where someone, say, has some things to  do and then does one of them. The situation afterwards can be expressed in a variety of ways. Some feel more natural than others; some seem more grammatically logical than others. This is how it looks to me, though it may be different for someone else:

Acceptable

• I now have fewer things to do.
• I now have one less thing to do.
• I now have one thing less to do.

These all feel to me like natural ways of saying it.

Less acceptable

• I now have less things to do.
• I now have one thing fewer to do.

Less things to do feels natural as a spoken expression, but either wrong or borderline as a written one. One thing fewer is verging on awkward: not exactly wrong, but not a very natural expression either.

Unacceptable (to my ears)

• I now have one fewer thing to do. (No no no! One less!)
• I now have one fewer things to do. (“One things?!”)

And there’s the puzzle.

• How many things do you have to do? Fewer. You have  fewer things to do.
• How many fewer? One. You have one fewer things to do.

And yet, far from being the correct expression, one fewer things to do is the most unambiguously wrong one of the lot.

On the other hand, if two tasks are done instead of one,  fewer becomes OK again: I have two fewer things to do.

At first sight, this is all very puzzling. The questions are ones like these:

• Why can I have fewer things to do but not one fewer things to do?
• Why can I have  one less thing to do but not one fewer thing to do?
• Given that the things to do are ticked off my list one by one, why does less rather than fewer end up being the apparently correct word?

Attempt at an answer

The problem with the two versions I listed as “unacceptable” seems to be  that however much we may want them to be logical, they refuse to read that way.  One fewer things to do insists on reading as though fewer qualifies one things, so singular and plural are mismatched. One fewer thing to do tries to make fewer thing into a valid element. But we know that fewer applies to more than one of something. What’s rather strange, though, is that one less thing to do doesn’t seem to suffer from the same problem, even though less thing isn’t really any more valid an element than fewer thing. Maybe it’s chosen simply because it doesn’t leap out quite so blatantly.

(By the way, I really wish I had a quick way to draw some sentence diagrams here.)

From my list, I think the three “least incorrect” versions are

• I now have one less thing to do.
• I now have one thing less to do.
• I now have one thing fewer to do.

In all cases, there is one thing which has already been done. This leaves less/fewer [things] to  do. But if we test the structure by removing fewer or less from the sentences, we see that they are all versions of I now have one thing to do, which isn’t the situation. The one thing is precisely the one which doesn’t need doing.

So the grammar is confusing because it’s trying to have its cake and eat it. Structurally, less to do and fewer to do are firmly attached to the one thing. But in their actual meaning, they refer to something entirely different: all the other things to do, which are nowhere to be seen in any of the three sentences. They’re trying to refer to two conflicting things at once.

Finally, if we remove the one thing from the three sentences and see what is left, we end up with

• I now have less to do
• I now have fewer [things] to do.

If the most natural phrase were I now have one thing less to do, this would give us our answer: it means “I now have less to do, by one thing”. Interpreted this way, the sentence is grammatically correct and self-contained. However, I think the most natural one is one less thing, not one thing less, so either some illogicality remains, or something unidentified is still going on.

I would welcome any thoughts on this! In particular, on whether my feeling as to the relative acceptability of the different constructions coincides with yours. There may be regional or international differences, or you might simply have gravitated towards a different usage from mine.

Note

[1] R W Burchfield (ed.). The New Fowler’s Modern English Usage, Oxford University Press, 1996, p. 295. Back

Unconscious musical memory

There’s a weekly programme on BBC Radio 3 called Discovering Music. It involves a studio, an orchestra, an audience, a presenter, and a piece of music. The presenter talks in depth about the piece and how it works, illustrated with extracts played by the orchestra. Finally, after the talk is finished, there is a full performance of the piece discussed.

Today, the programme startled me in a way with a phenomenon which seems to happen quite regularly, so I thought I’d blog about it. It’s about time I wrote something about music.

I spent the afternoon upstairs, NOT listening to any music but preferring silence and space. When it came to teatime, I went downstairs, where the radio was on, playing what I thought was some quite unfamiliar music. I didn’t pay any attention to the music, since I still wanted quiet. By the time I got to the radio, ready to turn it off, the music had changed to speech. I wasn’t listening to that either, but a “tune”—well, a snatch of Violin 2 orchestral part of something—was going through my head. Some symphony I’d played in years ago. Maybe ten years, maybe more.

Then I heard the word “Prokofiev”, and thought “Oh! Well I think this tune in my head IS Prokofiev! I wonder . . . ” and started listening to the radio instead of turning it off. After about half a minute, the radio presenter stopped talking so the orchestra could play their next extract. What they then played was almost exactly what had been in my head: the same tune, but from a different part of the movement. What was in my head was in fact part of Prokofiev’s 5th symphony, and it they happened to be discussing it on Discovering Music.

The point is that I didn’t think I knew what the tune in my head was, if you’d said “Sing a bit of Prokofiev 5!” I wouldn’t have had a chance, and if you’d said “Sing another part of the music that’s just been playing!” I wouldn’t have been able to do that either—but nevertheless, the right tune presented itself.

The next extract they played was from the last movement. That hadn’t been in my head, but my instant reaction to it was “Oh, good grief, I remember how fiendishly difficult that was!”, together with a vague feeling that I needed to go and practise that passage some more.

A few other fragmented memories of the piece surfaced: handwritten music on large, rather yellow paper; inaccurately-spaced leger lines, so that notes which at first sight appeared to go up or down actually went down or up; and a bizarre situation at one point where a correctly written pair of notes actually moved in the opposite direction to the way they looked. There were a few bars’ rest between them, and I can’t remember the precise notes, but it was similar to this: play a B sharp, then after the rest, start again on a C flat, which looks higher but is actually a semitone lower. Or it might have been a B-double-flat going up to an A sharp. Something along those lines.

I find this happens quite a lot: maybe I’m talking to someone, a composer’s name or a piece of music is mentioned, and shortly afterwards I realise that music by that composer, or an extract from the piece mentioned, is going through my head. Often if you asked me to consciously remember how the piece goes, or to think of a tune by that composer, I wouldn’t be able to. Or if you asked me what a particular piece of music was, I wouldn’t know. But it seems there is a part of my brain which does know, and gently presents it to me almost without my noticing.

A related phenomenon happens when I’ve been rehearsing a particular piece at orchestra, then find that what’s going through my head isn’t what I was rehearsing, but tunes from another work by the same composer.

I’m quite tired at the moment and don’t have the energy to start getting all analytical about this, or even all editorial about it, so I’ll just present it to you as it is. I’d be really interested, though, to hear whether other people have similar experiences of “uncoonsiously remembering” things which you thought you didn’t know, or unexpectedly remembering little details about a piece of music. So if you’ve read this far, feel free to comment!

Protected: Manchester photos

This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

More from my phone camera

A couple of nights ago I played around some more with the camera in my new phone, taking photos out of the back bedroom window. The weather was rather grey, showing promise of a good sunset but not producing one. It did however produce some nice clouds, which in my book are much better to look at than the featureless blue sky described by many as “lovely weather”. (Apparently, weather is “good” when it saps your energy and makes you permanently uncomfortable as a continuous stream of sweat runs down into your eyes, soaks into your clothes, and makes your hands sticky; the weather in which your nose runs non-stop, the air becomes steadily less and less breatheable and everyone gets skin cancer from the direct sun . . .)

Yes, I’m glad that the hot weather of the beginning of last week has now subsided. I don’t like the summer.

I initially decided against posting these photos, but people on Twitter seemed to like them so I’ve changed my mind.

Unfortunately the silhouetted skyline in the first one isn’t as sharp as it might be. Maybe I forgot to set the focus to infinity, or maybe the camera moved. I like the sky though:

Clouds over Manchester

The second one is a lot sharper:

A more in-focus skyline.

To produce these photos, I first found an exposure setting which showed as much detail as possible in the clouds, and took the photos. Then I used the phone’s built-in picture editor to adjust the brightness and contrast, so as to make the skyline (nearly) black and highlight the cloud detail. The next step was to adjust the setting the phone calls “colour balance”, which I think is actually the saturation level (it has grey at one end of the scale, and unnaturally strong colours at the other). I wasn’t aiming for a realistic picture: I wanted to show the shape of the clouds as dramatically as possible, and to show the viewer why I think they’re worth looking at. Finally I did some cropping to get the composition how I wanted it. (On the phone for one of them, and in Windows Paint for the other.)

For reference, this is how the weather actually looked. It’s the original version of the first photo above, before I adjusted the contrast and colour.

Original photo, before enhancing the contrast and colour

Don’t complain about the “bad” weather. Enjoy it, and point your camera at it!

From my new phone

A few days ago I got a nice new phone, with a nice new camera in it. It’s a while since I last posted here, and I want to show off the photos, so . . .

The phone is a Sony Ericsson C905, which has some idiotically advanced features. For example, the 8Mpx camera has an option (as yet untried by me) where it waits for someone to smile before it takes the photo, and another where it looks for faces in thee picture and focuses on the nearest one rather than on the centre. No doubt in 18 months’ time they’ll all seem very primitive.

Be warned: if you click the photos for the full-size versions, some of them are pretty big.

First we have an elder tree/bush which, sadly, is no longer standing (it seemed better to cut it down before it fell down on its own…) This was photographed using approximately 2x digital zoom:

Elder trunk showing signs of age: original photo

The interesting bit:

Zoomed detail

The high resolution is quite freeing when taking pictures. Being a phone camera, it only has a digital zoom, not an optical one. With my previous camera (Sony Ericsson k750i), I had to be very careful about using the zoom, because the loss of image quality would be quite significant. With this one, it’s possible to use an appropriate zoom setting while taking the photo, then zoom some more to see the part of the photo I really want, or to improve the composition.

These flowers are behind the kitchen sink; I had to hold the phone at a rather awkward angle to take the picture, and couldn’t easily see the screen to compose it.

Original photo, using macro mode

The phone has a very nice built-in photo editor, with a very silly name to make you think it won’t be any good (“PhotoDJ”). So as well as selecting the part of the picture I would have taken if I’d been able to see what I was doing, I used the editor to increase the contrast slightly. This made the colours a bit less bright, so I adjusted them back to how they originally were. (If you get confused comparing the two photos, the photo has been rotated 90 degrees.)

Zoomed, contrast slightly increased

Just the one flower:

Zoomed some more

And lastly, for no particular reason other than that it was the nearest small object to hand, a photo of the charger plug, in macro mode. If I’d been using a “proper” camera, i.e. a manual one, I’d have used a wider aperture to make the background fuzzier, but I was still pleased to see that the camera doesn’t force me to have everything in focus all the time.

Sony Ericsson charger plug

I’m pretty pleased with the camera

It does have weaknesses too though. As far as I know, all camera phones suffer from them.

Firstly, there’s no viewfinder: you can only use the screen. That might not sound like much of a problem. However, I discovered from my previous phone that it is: in bright light — e.g. outside in the sun, taking a picture of the nice sunny scene–the screen is much less visible and you find yourself wishing there were a viewfinder so you could see properly.

Second, there’s basically no manual control. You set things like brightness and zoom, whether the camera focuses on the middle of the picture or uses face recognition, the kind of lighting you’re in and so on. But you can’t say “Well I want the ugly background to melt away into fuzziness, so I’ll use the maximum aperture”. And it doesn’t tell you what settings it’s using.

The tiny lens is both a strength and a weakness. It basically means that compared to a standard SLR with a 50mm lens, the camera is living in a much bigger world. For close-up photos, this is great: one of the biggest difficulties taking them with a normal camera is that the depth of field is very shallow. That is, only a very thin slice of the scene is in focus. For a tiny lens at the same distance, the situation is more like photographing something some distance away, and more of the subject is in focus. The weakness, though, is that it’s quite hard to get things out of focus.

Now that phone cameras are turning into, well, real cameras, I hope someone will soon think of giving the user real control over them. It’s nice having the amazing resolution and all the clever electronics, but a bit good old-fashioned artistic knob-twiddling would be helpful, even if the knobs to be twiddled are virtual ones on a screen. Add a tripod bush, a viewfinder, and a way of attaching filters, and you’re just about there I think, at least for a compact camera.

Protected: Work in progress

This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password: