Adam Norwood

Tag: language

  • All Communication is Lossy
    Visit the source: aworkinglibrary.com

    A nice piece on how the significant problem with communication between individuals isn’t so much that the conversation is lossy, it’s the lack of acknowledging and correcting for that “signal loss”.

    Adopting the mindset that lossiness is a fact of life has another benefit: that of beginning to see communication not as simply a transference but as a generative space. That is, we often think of communication as simply moving understanding from one place to another, the way we might move electrons from a substation to a home. This assumption is behind a lot of otherwise well-intentioned efforts to reduce or even eliminate synchronous communication, as it can seem wholly inefficient compared with other methods. But the best communication makes way for something new to emerge in the exchange. It’s not passive but generative, not mere delivery but a creative transformation.

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  • Paul Ford gifts us a new modern lexicon for time
    Visit the source: www.wired.com

    “Eileen, pace yourself. It’s only Scrumspan. We’ve got three lightmodes to go before good-binge.”

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  • Max Planck Society: Glyph
    Visit the source: glyph.shh.mpg.de

    Getting burned out on playing Wordle? Want something that’s more about the letters individually? Want to play around with taxonomies of multicultural letterforms for the sake of science? (who wouldn’t??)

    Glyph is a newly-launched game that will help researchers better understand how crowdsourced individuals around the word perceive the shapes, texture, and patterns of letters from 45 different written languages. The video below explains how it works:

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  • Why Are Letters Shaped the Way They Are?
    Visit the source: www.vice.com

    Over on Vice, an interesting write-up on a growing movement in the field of linguistics: that the sounds of words or letterforms themselves can have direct relationships to their referent:

    The Color Game did more than show how languages form over time, it violated a long-standing rule in linguistics: the rule of arbitrariness. In the subject of semiotics, or the use of signs and symbols to convey meaning, most students are taught about the theories of linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. He wrote that the letters and words in many writing and language systems have no relationship to what they refer to. The word “cat” doesn’t have anything particularly cat-like about it. The reason that “cat” means cat is because English speakers have decided so—it’s a social convention, not anything ingrained in the letters c-a-t. […] But the idea that words, or other signs, do actually relate to what they’re describing has been gaining ground. This is called iconicity: when a spoken or written word, or a gestured sign, is iconic in some way to what it’s referring to.

    Aside from familiar English onomatopoeia like bang, chirp, etc., see the takete/maluma effect or bouba/kiki effect, as examples of words that “sound” like something. From the Vice article:

    This effect extends beyond made up words. In 2021, researchers wrote about how words in English like ball, globe, balloon and hoop have more round vowels and sounds, compared to angular or spiky objects, such as spike, fork, cactus and shrapnel.

    Now I’m also thinking of:

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  • Why we’re blind to the color blue
    Visit the source: calebkruse.com

    If you’re super nerdy and experienced with using Photoshop’s individual color channels to make enhancements or custom masks, you might have noticed that the blue channel has very little influence on the overall sharpness of an RGB image — it never occurred to me that this is inherently a function of our own human eyesight, which is unable to properly focus on blue light, in comparison to other wavelengths!

    I like how the paper from the Journal of Optometry that this article links to straight up dunks on our questionably-designed eyeballs:

    In conclusion, the optical system of the eye seems to combine smart design principles with outstanding flaws. […] The corneal ellipsoid shows a superb optical quality on axis, but in addition to astigmatism, it is misaligned, deformed and displaced with respect to the pupil. All these “flaws” do contribute to deteriorate the final optical quality of the cornea. Somehow, there could have been an opportunity (in the evolution) to have much better quality, but this was irreparably lost.

    This also made me wonder if this blue-blurriness has anything to do with the theory that cultures around the world and through history tend to develop words for colors in a specific order, with words for “blue” appearing relatively late in a language’s development. Evidently that’s likely so, because hard-to-distinguish colors take longer to identify and classify, even for test subjects who have existing words for them!

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  • On Animalese, Localization, and Video Game “Beep Speech”

    I’ve long wanted a name for the dot-dot-dot-dot sound effects that have stood in for speech in video games since the early NES days — here described as “beep speech” which works for me! This video is a great roundup on how those beeps function, how they’ve been used over the years (up through Simlish and the even more recent Animal Crossing hybrid speech, which is actual vocalization skewed into psuedo-gibberish), and how they’ve been tweaked when games are translated and localized for different cultures’ languages.

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  • Seven rules for perfect Japanese typography
    Visit the source: medium.com

    From the files of things I don’t know much about: best practices for Japanese web typography, a nice short primer. Web fonts are problematic enough in the West, and we don’t even have the character set troubles introduced by having multiple alphabets, the huge glyph set and calligraphic history of kanji, the need to be interspersed with Latin characters and ruby characters… 

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  • Chibi: The Japanese Word That’s Cute And Offensive
    Visit the source: www.tofugu.com

    Chibi has its roots in kobun, or classical Japanese. The kobun noun tsubi 粒つび, which means “tiny, rounded thing,” eventually evolved into the verb tsubu 禿つぶ, which describes something becoming worn down or sharp edges getting rounded out.

    A good example would be a calligraphy brush losing its hairs (because that’s what they used to write back in the days of classical Japanese).

    The reading of tsubu eventually changed to chibiru 禿ちびる, and suddenly we’re not too far from chibi.

    I had a brief curiosity about what chibi fully means and came across what may be my new favorite post on etymology. Thorough history, examples, usage issue notes and cautions, and even a drawing guide. More word explications should come with an adorable drawing guide.

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  • The color gray in full bloom – OUPblog
    Visit the source: blog.oup.com

    “In A Descriptive Handbook of Modern Water Colours, by J. Scott Taylor…. London: Winsor and Newton, 1887, neutral tint is described as ‘A compound shadow colour of a cool neutral character. It is not very permanent, as the gray is apt to become grey by exposure’. Has anyone besides this author ever made a distinction of meaning between gray and grey? I do not know how the distinction is to be converted in speaking unless the words are differently pronounced” (1897).

    Glad to know that the gray / grey split in English has been confusing people for well over 115 years. What’s going on in pigment company Winsor & Newton’s world where gray turns into grey eventually? An interesting read about the etymology of the mysterious color and it’s uncertain linguistic origins.

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  • The cannibal curse of corporate prose

    From the NY Times review of the updated 2011 “digital” edition of How to Win Friends and Influence People:

    The following sentence, which appears on Page 80, is so inept that it may actually be an ancient curse and to read it more than three times aloud is to summon the cannibal undead: “Today’s biggest enemy of lasting influence is the sector of both personal and corporate musing that concerns itself with the art of creating impressions without consulting the science of need ascertainment.”

    I don’t think they like the book’s modernized language.

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