codyrobbins's comments

As constructive feedback I really wish the favorite places list showed the address of each location rather than the location type. I think the address would be much more useful information and the type is obvious from the name for each location I added so it’s kind of superfluous. I also wish this secondary text didn’t awkwardly wrap onto a new line when the location name is long—I think ideally each place would have its name on its own line followed by its address on a new line directly underneath it.

But that’s just a quibble—this is awesome!

[1] http://codes.lp.findlaw.com/nycode/LLC/2/204

If you have a Rails app you’re most likely using the Mail gem to send mail, so that’s why I wrote this: https://github.com/codyrobbins/active-model-email-validator. It lets the gem worry about whether an address is valid. Since the mail library is actively maintained, in my opinion it’s a safe bet to trust that it is properly parsing and validating addresses insofar as is possible.

Pronunciation is not necessarily so simple, though: native speakers of every language employ a wide and relatively complicated set of phonological processes unconsciously. Here’s a partial list of the Japanese ones:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_phonology#Phonological...

Unless you’re unconsciously making these pronunciation changes on the fly, you’re going to have a discernible accent. I cringe when I hear English speakers of Japanese who haven’t internalized the simpler processes pronounce words like 人「ひと」as hee-toe and です as deh-sue. I’ve spoken Japanese for ten years and I still pick up something new every time I listen to a native speaker.

Regarding your other point, I always see people mention how complicated it is to learn to use the correct levels of politeness and honorifics in Japanese. But we encode largely the same information in English regarding relative social positions, familiarity with the conversational partner, etc. It’s really not any more complicated than it is in English, and in fact you could argue it’s less so because we primarily convey politeness with indirection and idiomatically. For example, if a waitress hasn’t brought your change at a restaurant after a few minutes and you say ‘Bring me my change now’ it would be incredibly rude. Instead you would usually say something along the lines of ‘Excuse me, I know you’re busy, but if it’s not too much trouble would you mind bringing our change over when you get a chance?’ You start by asking the waitress to excuse you for your imposition, go on to express that you understand the demands on her time, and then ask her (not command her) if she would mind bringing the change (not if she will actually bring it), when she has a chance to do so (not necessarily right this very second)—all despite the fact that you’re the customer and ostensibly she’s waiting on you. Depending on your tone of voice, the implication is that you really do want the change right now so you can leave but that whole song and dance conveys politeness and respect.

In any event, I have never had a problem speaking to practically everyone in Japanese using plain language. The only time I typically use polite language is with absolute strangers or people who seem in a bad mood, and even then I mostly speak in plain form and if your tone of voice is warm it serves to enact some closeness between you that people seem to appreciate. Very occasionally I’ve met a Japanese that seems to be a bit insulted if you speak too familiarly with them, but, honestly, I can usually chalk that up to that particular person just being a bit of a tight ass. If they persist in speaking to you in polite forms then you just switch back to the polite register to make them comfortable. Also, if you speak only in polite language then Japanese have a tendency to think that you only have a rudimentary understanding of the language. I have never used keigo, ever—if you’re in a business setting it might come in handy, but even Japanese themselves have to be instructed in how to use it when they enter corporate jobs. I can’t find the study now, but I was reading a paper that showed that native Japanese speakers have extremely warm attitudes towards foreigners who use keigo in business settings regardless of how proficient their use actually is or how many mistakes they make. If I remember correctly it was more or less irrelevant how well you used it—the Japanese had a high opinion of you simply for attempting to do so.

The “difficulty” of learning any particular language in relation to another is a bit of a meaningless comparison in my opinion. Ultimately, it appears to be the case that all human languages operate according to a common underlying linguistic mechanism—the seeming differences between particular languages are in fact probably actually just different surface realizations of the underlying mechanism with particular options twiddled in various combinations coupled with an idiosyncratic lexicon (i.e., a relatively unique but ultimately arbitrary vocabulary). The nature of the underlying mechanism is the subject of debate, as well as the list of the particular options available, but it seems pretty clear that all languages are utilizing a common underlying cognitive architecture.

That being said, it would seem to me if you define a relative acquisition difficulty metric as something like

  D(x, y) = a*O(x, y) + b*P(x, y) + c*L(y) - d*C(x, y)

  O(x, y) = cardinality of the set of differences between the language “settings” of x and y
  P(x, y) = cardinality of the set of phonemic distinctions present in y but not x
  L(x)    = cardinality of the lexicon of x
  C(x, y) = cardinality of the set of cognates shared by the lexicons of x and y

There’s probably work done on this somewhere but second language acquisition isn’t my area of expertise.

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[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_change

[2] http://mbostock.github.com/d3/ex/voronoi.html

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polytonic_Greek

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitch_accent

The Korean consonantal distinctions are particular tricky, though, because it’s one consonant in English being not two sounds in Korean but three.

For example, it has three distinct unvoiced velar stops [1] which are all considered the same sound in English: normal [k], aspirated [kʰ], and faucalized [k͈].

We use both the normal and aspirated [2] unvoiced velar stops in English as positional allophones [3], meaning we consider them the same sound but they’re actually different and we distinguish between them unconsciously depending on where the sound occurs in a word. For example, /k/ is aspirated in word-initial position in words like cam but unaspirated after word-initial /s/ in words like scam. If you listen closely enough you realize that you turbulently expire a lot of air after the c in cam but don’t do so in scam. Despite using both phones [4] in English, you consider them more or less the same hard k sound—if you pronounce cam with an unaspirated /k/ it may sound slightly odd but you’ll still consider it the same word cam. The problem is that in Korean doing so would result in two different words—so it makes it hard for English speakers to perceive distinct words in Korean that differ this way, and to pronounce the correct word that they intend when talking.

This is true for many languages because phoneme inventories never overlap, but it’s especially difficult for English learners of Korean because Korean has a third /k/ sound—the faucalized [5] one—and it doesn’t occur at all in English. I know phonologists—people who are trained in the study of human speech categories—who have an extremely difficult time discerning between [k] and [k͈].

Peter Ladefoged, one of the world’s foremost phoneticians, has a fantastic website to accompany his phonetics textbook and it has recordings of all the sounds known to be produced in human languages. You can listen to the distinctions between the Korean consonants here:

http://phonetics.ucla.edu/appendix/languages/korean/korean.h...

The /k/ sounds I’ve been discussing are the third row down (weight of measure, rope, and large). As an English speaker try to hear a difference between how the consonant is pronounced—it’s extremely difficult to notice.

Our sensitivity to these phonemic distinctions develops at an extremely early age: by one month old infants already begin to stop distinguishing between different sounds that their language slots into the same category as the same “sound” [6]. Infants don’t even babble at this age never mind produce or understand adult speech, but they have already stopped noticing certain differences in speech—that’s how deeply ingrained the way we perceive and produce speech is, and why it’s almost impossible to speak a non-native language without an accent.

(I am only tangentially familiar with Korean phonology so I might be getting some of the details slightly wrong here—please correct me if I’ve misstated anything.)

###

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unvoiced_velar_stop

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspirated_consonant

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allophone

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phone_(phonetics)

[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faucalized_voice

[6] http://www.sciencemag.org/content/171/3968/303 & http://home.fau.edu/lewkowic/web/Eimas%20infant%20speech%20d...

###

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_rising_terminal

[2] http://www.nytimes.com/1993/08/15/magazine/on-language-like-...

[3] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/28/science/young-women-often-...

[4] http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002708.h...

But this syntax they’ve come up with is an absolute horrifying mess. Ugh. Please say it ain’t so!

  font-feature-settings: "smcp=1”;
  font-feature-settings: "swsh=1,cswh=1”;

I’m guessing that these are probably mapping through to the underlying OpenType features directly somehow to support arbitrary aspects of a particular type, but it still needs to be less of a mess for the “normal” stuff.

Why can’t it be something readable and self-documenting?

  font-features: small-caps, contextual-swash;

You should read up on typography before decrying things about it. Robert Bringhurst’s The Elements of Typographic Style or Warren Chappell’s A Short History of the Printed Word are two great places to start.

The difference between them is not really simply a stylistic choice: text figures are basically lowercase numbers and titling figures are uppercase ones. Saying you don’t like them is like saying you don’t like lowercase letters, and that you prefer everything in uppercase. Using titling figures in running text is like typing in all caps—it’s screaming at you.

It’s not so much that the text figures are old and were abandoned, but rather that typewriters simply left them off to simplify things. And since computer keyboards were based on typewriters, they never made their way to computers either. And then they started being used exclusively in newspapers and advertising. If you look at books, though, you’ll see that they never really went away. Only now are we finally getting them back—and that’s the entire point of OpenType and it’s a good thing.

Now, the difference between text and titling figures isn’t precisely the same as upper- and lowercase, since titling figures are generally used in titles despite the fact that titles can be mixed case; and they’re also used in tables of numbers. (Although there is another dimension of figure variation—namely, whether they are proportional- or fixed-width—and fixed-width lining figures are typically used in tables so that the places line up.)

Yeah, I am presuming it—because I just laid out how what they’re doing is not necessarily driven by greed or immorality but defensible motives from their point of view. You’re simply saying they’re bad people and that’s probably not true in the vast majority of cases. I’m not vouching for anyone’s integrity, but you are so down a rabbit hole of fundamental attribution bias I don’t have any interest in attempting to change your mind.