Posts | λy: B. Slade(linguist)

LaTeX in half an hour for linguists (and others)

Thu, 04 Jul 2019 22:12:26 -0600

A self-illustrating tutorial on using LaTeX, aimed at linguists, but it should be useful for non-linguists as well: https://gitlab.com/emacsomancer/latex-for-linguists

It illustrates a number of basic things: enough to cover all of the basic things a linguist would need for writing a paper (excluding bibliography things for the moment), and shows off some of the more exciting typographical possibilities of LaTeX.

The .tex file is directly accessible here: https://gitlab.com/emacsomancer/latex-for-linguists/blob/master/basic-for-linguists.tex

And the resulting .pdf here: https://gitlab.com/emacsomancer/latex-for-linguists/blob/master/basic-for-linguists.pdf

Scheming French Geeks, Eunuchs OS, Lisping & lots of Guile

Sat, 04 Aug 2018 09:46:00 -0600

I’ve recently installed GuixSD, a distribution of GNU Linux, on one of my machines. GuixSD^‖ is notable for having a number of major components (package manager, init system) written in GNU Guile, an implementation of Scheme, which is itself a dialect of Lisp (formerly LISP)^†. But Guix is pronounced /ɡiːks/ (i.e. identically to geeks). Why?

The final x of Guix is presumably by analogy to Linux, which was itself produced by analogy to Unix^‡, based on the first name of its creator, Linus Torvalds.^* Final x appears in other software/computer names, including LaTeX (where it is not, however, pronounced as /ks/ but as /χ/ or at least /k/).

So what about the Gui bit? Transparently that would seem to derived from the initial part of Guile, which, however, is of course pronounced /ɡaɪl/. So how do we get to /ɡiːks/ (i.e. geeks)? Through French orthography (and an obvious intention). So in French orthography Gui is pronounced /gi/, e.g. in names like Guillaume (the French equivalent of English William). Likewise, x in French is /ks/, so the whole combination would be realised in French as … /ɡiːks/. And it’s probably no accident that the Guix team seems to have a number of Francophone developers, including the project lead Ludovic Courtès.

What’s with the tricky names of the programming languages? Guile, Scheme. Guile is the GNU Foundation’s implementation of Scheme, and so the playful naming-by-synonymy makes sense. Scheme itself was originally Schemer (where some sort of file name limitation resulted in its current name), following a naming convention of other Lisp dialects/derived languages including PLANNER and CONNIVER (though where the ‘tricky’ naming scheme originated is not clear to me).

Moving away from the recent ‘technological’ use of these names, guile itself is an interesting word. Guile was borrowed into English from Old French guile (though the Francophone spelling), with cognates in Provençal guila and Portuguese guilha. Guile appears early in Middle English, at least by the early 13th century (some representative quotes follow).

c1230 (▸?a1200) Ancrene Riwle (Corpus Cambr.) (1962) 105 Muche gile is i vox.

13.. K. Alis. 1427 The thridde day, withoute gyle, He aryved at Cysile.

a1400 Sir Perc. 1034 He was by-thoghte of a gyle.

In Middle English (and presumably Old French) it would have been pronounced /giːl/; the Great English Vowel Shift, which affected English long vowels, resulted in modern /gaɪl/.

The Old French word itself has been theorised to come from a borrowing from (Germanic) Frankish *wigila “ruse”, and thus makes guile cognate with English wile “stratagem practiced for ensnaring or deception; a sly, insidious artifice” (usually in the plural forms wiles), which itself has somewhat dark and dubious origins, potentially an inheritance from native Old English, though possibly a borrowing from Old Norse, as the earlier attestations are from areas of the Danelaw of England which were obviously subject to heavy Scandinavian influence.

Amusingly, despite its very Francophone orthographic garb, French lost guile at some point and so the word is absent in modern French (the modern equivalent seems to be French ruse).

[If you’re interested in the technological side of Guix, have a look at this post over on my tech blog.]

‖ The ‘SD’ stands for ‘software distribution.

† LISP was coined from “LISt Processor”, since the list is the central syntactic structure, common to data and code representation in Lisps. Lisp is an interesting artificial language in that it has a number of dialects, including Common Lisp (reminiscent of Tolkien’s Common Tongue) as well as Scheme, Racket (Scheme-related, thus the name), Clojure and many others. The originator of Lisp, John McCarthy, was strongly influenced by lambda calculus, the formalism developed by Alonzo Church (one of Alan Turing’s mentors), which also of course is important in formal semantics as practised within linguistics.

‡ Why Unix should be so called is a elaborate instance of word-play itself. It was in some ways the successor to an earlier operating system called Multics. Both Unix and Multics were originally designed to be multi-user/time-sharing operating systems for large expensive computers in late 60s/early 70s. Multics is based on a straight-forward acronym of Multiplexed Information and Computing Service, while Unix is a play on Multics with multi- being substituted by uni-, and the result sounding like eunuchs, with the suggestion of Unix being an ‘emasculated’ Multics.

* Unfortunately Linux is not based on what would be the more interesting recursive acronym “Linux Is Not UniX” – unlike GNU, which is indeed the recursive acronym “GNU is Not Unix”.

Of typewriters, runes, and short-hand

Tue, 19 Jun 2018 14:18:00 -0600

Or, why is the & on the 7 key?

Back in ca. 2003, when I was preparing the diplomatic edition of Beowulf for Beowulf on Steorarume (heorot.dk), I noticed the use of what looks like the Arabic numeral ‘7’ for and (Old English ond).

Beowulf f.132v: ll.120b-123a

wiht unhælo
grim ⁊ grædig gearo sona wæs
reoc ⁊ reþe ⁊ on ræste genam
þritig þegna

The unholy creature,
grim and greedy, soon was geared-up,
wild and savage; and seized from their sleep
thirty thanes

This turned out to be a Tironian et (⁊) , one of a number of shorthand symbols devised by Marcus Tullius Cicero’s slave and ppersonal secretary Tiro in the first century which continued to be used by monastic scribes in the medieval period. The more familiar abbreviation of et “and” is of course the ampersand &, which, unlike ⁊, is in fact a stylised et. (For more discussion of some of the back history of both the ampersand and the Tironian et see these Shady Characters posts.)

Other shapes of the Tironian et

The fact that the Tironian et ⁊, a shorthand ‘quick’ symbol like the ampersand &, looks like an Arabic numeral 7 makes the appearance of the & above the 7 (i.e. as the shifted value of the 7) seem significant. At the time of creating the diplomatic web edition of Beowulf I assumed that this must be the reason for the particular placement of the & on keyboards.

Unsurprisingly, other people have thought of this as well, including a StackExchange question (as well as a comment on a Shady Characters post on ampersands). There the ‘accepted answer’ to this question says:

Although the 7 was the ampersand on IBM’s standard keyboard layout, that is hardly universal. The first nine printable characters in ASCII are ! " # $ % & ' ( ), which should give a good clue as to what the top row of a teletype keyboard looked like. On many early teletypes and terminals (and also, BTW, on the Apple ][), the shift key toggled bit 4 of the character being produced, thus it would turn a 1 (011 0001) into ! (010 0001), and , (010 1100) into < (011 1100). Since the digits 1–9 received consecutive code, so did the characters produced by combining them with the shift key. Shift-7 on those keyboards was apostrophe; the ampersand was shift-6.

Other typewriter keyboards also varied considerably in where they put the ampersand. Its association with the number 7 is nowhere near as consistent as the association between 1 and !, 3 and #, 4 and $, or 5 and % which existed in both older computer keyboards and today’s US arrangement.

The association of ! (‘bang’) with 1 actually has a fairly tidy explanation as many of the early typewriters omitted the numeral 1 and the typist was expected just to use the lowercase letter l in its place; likewise the ! was omitted and was also typed using the lowercase l then backspacing and typing a full-stop ..

While ASCII and older computer keyboards may not provide evidence for early association of 7 and &, an examination of the early typewriters from antiquetypewriters.com reveals firstly that almost all of the early typewriters collected there which have symbols as the result of ‘shifted’ numerals do in fact place & with the 7 including the 1892 Norths typewriter (London), Wagner Typewriter Co’s (New Jersey) 1896 Underwood 1, the 1898 Shimmer (Milton, Pennsylvania), Meiselbach Typewriter Co.’s (Kenosha, Wisconsin, USA) 1901 Sholes Visible, and, secondly, and crucially, the 1878 Remington Standard Model No. 2 (New York) also positions & as the shifted value of 7. The Remington Standard No. 2 is described as the first commercially successful typewriter, and its (QWERTY-style) layout thus became established as standard.

Remington Standard No. 2

The one early typewriter I found with shifted numerals as symbols which didn’t associate 7 and & is the 1895 Waverly (London) where the & is above the 6 and the 7 has a / above it.

So an association between & and 7 for keyboard does seem to have been established in the 19th century, presumably through the success of the Remington Standard No. 2. The question then shifts to whether or not the placement of the & above the 7 by the designers of the Remington Standard No. 2 was motivated by Tironian sensibilities or not.

The Tironian et has disappeared from most everywhere, excepting in modern Irish typography. Interestingly, some Irish typewriters place the Tironian et ⁊ above the 7 key.

Keith Houston at the Shady Characters website suggests that:

the Tironian notes suffered near-extinction in the Middle Ages, victim of a curious linguistic witch hunt. The secrecy and cipher-like nature of both traditional runic writing and shorthand did not sit well with the distrust of witchcraft and magic prevalent in those times, and Tiro’s system fell out of use.

Indeed, in Old English manuscripts, runes sometimes appear, standing in for the words which are borne by the particular runes as names, including ᛗ (mann “man”), ᛞ (dæg “day”), and ᛟ (œþel “ancestral land”). The last of these is used three times in the extant text of Beowulf.

Beowulf f.141v: ll.520–521

ðonon he gesohte swæsne ·ᛟ·
leof his leodum lond brondinga

then he sought his own sweet ·ancestral homeland·
– loved by his people – the land of Brondings

In any event, what of the question of “why is the & on the 7 key?”

It would seem in all likelihood that the placement of the & on the 7 is a happy accident. Outside of Ireland, Tironian ⁊s would have been long enough out of fashion that it seems unlikely anyone (or, at least, typewriter engineers) would have associated & with 7. The positioning of the Tironian ⁊ above the 7 key on some Irish typewriters, on the other hand, is then doubly predestined, given the largely standard positioning of the semantically-equivalent & over the 7 on many typewriters and the similarity in appearance of the Arabic 7 numeral and the Tironian ⁊ symbol.

Blog posts ensue

Thu, 07 Jun 2018 21:13:00 -0600

I’m still working on the back-end technology, but hopefully more blog posts should start appearing here soon(ish), acting as a (prettier and less ~~privacy-invading~~ blogspot-ish) continuation of my old linguistics blog, Stæfcræft & Vyākaraṇa.

If you’re interested in my ~~musings~~ scribblings on topics outside of natural language, you might visit my other blog, The Neo-Babbage Files.

In the meantime, here’s a clever Nepali tongue-twister my wife came up with:p

पारसीले परसि फरसि खान्छ रे

pārsī parsi pharsi khāncha re

“[They say:] A/The Parsi (Zoroastrian) will eat (some) pumpkin the day after tomorrow.”

पारसी (pārsī) is “Parsi”, परसि (parsi) is “the day after tomorrow”, and फरसि (pharsi) is “pumpkin” (often in the sense of a pumpkin dish). (रे (re) is a Nepali quotative particle.)