About speech and symbols

You may have seen this pretty funny nar­ra­tion by Rus­sel Peters.

When I was think­ing about think­ing about how peo­ple lis­ten to, and com­pre­hend pho­net­ics, and how it is influ­enced by their own speech habits, one of the things I noticed was that peo­ple seem to hear the same sound, my pro­nun­ci­a­tion of my name, dif­fer­ently (with respect to how I believe I pro­nounced it). I don’t know at what step their com­pre­hen­sion of the sounds change. Because the agents involved which mat­ter, include their com­pre­hen­sion of the word, and asso­ci­a­tion with some­thing they have heard before. And sec­ondly, the only way I know what they heard, is how they say it back to me. It was most pro­nounced (as in, notice­able) when Mo heard my name, and tried to spell it, by writ­ing it on the board. I’m not sure what he wrote, but as far as I remem­ber, it was on the lines of Vasheesh. I don’t know why that hap­pened, but that’s how stuff seems to hap­pen. You know what’s most freaky about this? It’s like the colour you might be call­ing red, might be entirely dif­fer­ent from what I call red, and we won’t know until we’re nam­ing the iden­ti­cal colour in front of each other. Maybe kids should be trained to iden­tify sounds and cor­re­spond­ing symbols/phonetics too, like is done with colours.

And on that note, I come back to the thought regard­ing which I put that video in there. That African dude, in Eng­lish expressed that pro­nun­ci­a­tion (appar­ently) with an !x. But that’s no sym­bol in Eng­lish that we’re taught to com­pre­hend, right? I’m fairly cer­tain that in what­ever native script he writes his name, there exists a well defined sym­bol for that pro­nun­ci­a­tion. Which makes me think, why not such a sym­bol in Eng­lish? Or Hindi?

One what basis, did the mak­ers of the lan­guage choose this belief for what would be the con­so­nants, the basics of the pro­nun­ci­a­tion of all the words to exist, and decide that these are ade­quately many. Clearly, the hindi script with 33 con­so­nants (and not just because of the num­ber) cov­ers many more pro­nun­ci­a­tions as basic, as com­pared to the Eng­lish alpha­bet, with just 21 con­so­nants. The dude behind the Hindi alpha­bet def­i­nitely was more orga­nized and did his job with deeper thought (I’m not going to say it’s much ‘supe­rior’ to Eng­lish, because the Eng­lish alpha­bet is much more made by evo­lu­tion over ages, rather than a sin­gu­lar focussed job, which was prob­a­bly the case with San­skrit and that Panini dude (and just pre-emptively, I know he’s pri­mar­ily the gram­mar dude, but he prob­a­bly did con­tribute to the prepa­ra­tion of the alpha­bet or some­thing)), which is prob­a­bly why I did men­tion that the Hindi alpha­bet even has some worth in mem­o­riz­ing, as opposed to the Eng­lish alphabet.

But nobody I know (apart from the Africans it seems) so far has been metic­u­lous enough to include pro­nun­ci­a­tions in their lan­guage, like a click.  how badass is that. The only (escapist) rea­son­ing I can imag­ine for this, is that most pro­nun­ci­a­tions out of our nor­mal voice­box can, in effect, be expressed using the sym­bols (and in the case of Eng­lish, accent marks) that are cov­ered in the alpha­bet. And they thought that’s enough. But bleh. Losers.

You know other pro­nun­ci­a­tions which aren’t really out of the lar­ynx, and I think deserve sym­bols? The ‘tch’ sound. And the cluck (gen­er­ally used to express dis­ap­proval or dis­agree­ment). Do tell if you would like hav­ing a more fun­da­men­tal sym­bol to explain a stan­dard pro­nun­ci­a­tion you like (or don’t like) to make.

Ran­dom note: Man­darin, as far as I can tell, doesn’t seem to be made out of basic let­ters of pro­nun­ci­a­tion at all. It seems to be made of glyphs which stand for words or phrases in entirety. I won­der then, how they decided how to pro­nounce whichever sym­bol. And how they choose to build new words and choose their pro­nun­ci­a­tion. Seems kind of liv­ing on the edge, if you know what I mean. :P


Titled: Rant

How I, wasted my life so far. I often blame oth­ers for poor cir­cum­stances in my life. It is some­times a mat­ter of com­pul­sion for me to believe, that an incor­rect or bad or mis­ap­pro­pri­ate deci­sion for my life was made by some­body else. This is incred­i­bly often true for things my fam­ily chooses for me,


Being a global communicator

I just noticed how it is an effort for me to talk to pretty much any of the Assamese peo­ple. Ziv said a very inter­est­ing thing: Peo­ple with their own accents and lan­guage, actu­ally ‘hear dif­fer­ently’. I thought the prob­lem was only an inca­pa­bil­ity of ren­der­ing the same pro­nun­ci­a­tion I was say­ing. I say my


I believe in magic (and some college-hatred)

This will not be about what it was sup­posed to be. It was sup­posed to be about how much IIT Guwa­hati and its hos­tel sucks balls. And how I hate my life, feel sui­ci­dally depressed, and ter­ri­ble, for hav­ing landed myself in such a sit­u­a­tion. And how, at a cer­tain point of time, I was


Solving life (momentarily, and only in a narcissistic sense)

Every fail­ure in my life is my own fault. And I will change that. My life is in my own hand. Travel doesn’t seem to help, except pro­vide me with lots of waste­ful time. In-flight enter­tain­ment being the most banal of them all. Solu­tion to my life: (pre­cur­sor: I don’t want to leave it to a


The prequel to Goodbye JEE: Sucky Education systems

So, today I’ll tell you what the prob­lem with the edu­ca­tion sys­tem really is. Obvi­ously it’s not that many exams like the boards and the JEE stress the stu­dents. Please. If peo­ple can com­mit sui­cide after/due to fail­ing in the class X boards, you can do noth­ing to remove the stress of chil­dren. The stress


The bizarre Playbook, probably has some meaning

  http://www.loopinsight.com/2012/03/13/playbook-gets-a-keyboard-and-trackpad/ When the Loop says it like that, it hurts me. Because it sounds kinda true. I wouldn’t buy a play­book myself, and that one? Moreso not. But it hurts me because I’ve been dream­ing about this. This is not the worst thing that could be. This is on the wrong side, but it’s


A smaller iPad?

   Apple’s strat­egy tends to be to intro­duce a prod­uct that’s really, really good, and then as time goes on, expand the prod­uct to fit price-points below and/or above it. […] Expand­ing the iPod line-up was an easy choice, because (1) dif­fer­ent iPod mod­els for dif­fer­ent pur­poses didn’t can­ni­bal­ize the other mod­els, and (2) they were


Writing, work to come, and my favourite qoute.

I am pissed at how I have taken to begin­ning writ­ing long arti­cles, leav­ing them incom­plete, and then never going back to them. I hope this one is short so I don’t have to be con­cerned about com­ing back and try­ing to fin­ish it, which going by the run­ning trend, won’t hap­pen if it comes


Untitled

I feel sad. Not the sor­row­ful kind of sad. Not the sad I would feel if I failed in a com­pe­ti­tion — espe­cially not the kind of sad if I’d worked hard for the com­pe­ti­tion. Or the kind of sad if some­body close to me died. Those would be things beyond me. The kind of