"but when the night is over and the walls start burning / when fire starts to matter ... "

[larryhammer]

... and the clock is churning / cliches and other chatter keeps our minds from learning

Five things, mostly about language in some way:

A jinormous and heavily annotated map of North American dialects (via all over). Who says which vowels where (Do you pronounce don and dawn the same? cot and caught? and so on), with extended explications of the various dialects. I'm amused to see that there's a small but noticeable distinction between native Tucson and Phoenix pronunciation, but that Wilcox is in another dialect entirely. And that Silver City is distinguishable from the rest of southern New Mexico.

A stort discussion on the expanded use of the colloquial X much construction. I'm more than a little amused that the OED's first citations are from Heathers, before it was popularized by Buffy. I haven't seen Heathers in a while -- wonder how it has aged.

Regarding Unseen Academicals, "crab bucket" is as brilliant and useful a metaphor as the Boots Theory of Economics. On the basis of that alone, Pratchett has still got it. (Also, I want that poem Trev Nutt wrote. WANT.)

A brief interview with Edward Gorey's Japanese translator, Motoyuki Shibata, starting with an extended digression into Gilbert & Sullivan and translation in general. More background: "Do you think Gorey is funny in Japanese?" "Shiranai. (I don't know.)"

Behold the adorable octowreath (via). The monster kit in the header isn't bad, either. But -- and octowreath! for the door! wa!

---L.

Comments

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

The dialect map is **fascinating**

(I love that there are areas even in the United States--i'm not so surprised by Canada--where indigenous languages are still in the majority.)

[larryhammer]

What startles me about indigenous languages in Arizona is that a) the White Mountain Apache use Apache more than I had realized (only some of the radio stations you get as you drive through are in Apache -- unlike, say, the Navajo rez where it's all in Navajo) and b) the second largest reservation in the state, the Tohono O'odham west of Tuscon, is majority English speakers.

---L.

[movingfinger.livejournal.com]

The "crab bucket" metaphor is not original to Pratchett. I believe it's either a US Southern-ism or from the Tidewater area.

I found the characterization of the Patrician in Unseen Academicals to be off. (Compare e.g. The Truth when he is interacting with de Worde.)

[larryhammer]

Agree about Vetinari, though part of it was him being slightly loosened by drink. That doesn't explain his apparently more limber personal affect for some of his other scenes, though.

---L.

[movingfinger.livejournal.com]

The drinking itself was strange (surely Vetinari has encountered such situations before and has dealt with them without drinking or drunkenness) and even stranger was his remark about the fellow who clapped him on the shoulder and said a few stupid things (that he might just want to kill himself when he woke up). That rings wrong: too obvious a statement, for one thing.

The scene in the stagecoach was weird, too.

[larryhammer]

And structurally off, as well.

---L.

[taigerchily.livejournal.com]

i just bought a linguistic atlas of (german speaking) switzerland as a christmas present for my mom - it was very difficult for me to give it away *lol* it's so interesting to see all those small differences between the regions...

[larryhammer]

Sweet. I've seen a general map or two of Swiss (and Swabian) dialects, but they didn't go into the details of what the differentiated the dialects.

---L.