Kara Jean

Sreekar Saha sent in this sign and expressed puzzlement over the English translation:

Before trying to figure out precisely what the Bengali says, I'd like to point out that, in essence, what the English says very politely is "Do not loiter" (not as strong as "No trespassing"). Telling people not to do nothing is not the same as telling them to do something.

Now, to tackle the Bengali. First of all, I was surprised by the variety of transliterations (not to mention translations) that I received from native Bengali speakers and Indologists. Perhaps this is due to the fact that there is no normative or standard transliteration for Bengali in English (I really don't know if there is or isn't). But I suspect that the differences in some cases may be due to dialectal and even idiolectal variation. For example, whether ফ is "f" or "ph".

I will give several of the transliterations for the sake of comparison. Then relying on charts from Omniglot and Wikipedia, you can follow along for yourself if you wish to do so (fortunately, the lettering on the sign is clear and distinct).

1. BINAA PRAYOJANE GHURAAPHERAA KARBEN NAA
(NOTE : AA stands for LONG A)

2. vinā prayojane ghurāpherā karven nā

3. bina prayojane ghurafera karben na

4. bina proyojone ghuraphera korben na

5. bina proyojone ghurafera korben na

6. bina proyojone ghurafera karben na

Here are some of the translations I received from the experts:

1. Do not loiter about if you have no business/nothing to do.

2. Don't wander around without purpose.

3. Do not hang around / wander without reason.

4. Without necessity do not hang out.

5. Without it being necessary, don't loiter / run around 'n stuff [here].

Leopold Eisenlohr, who provided the fifth translation, also offered these interesting notes:

Bina = without (probably same in Nepali? same in Hindi), proyojone= necessary, korben na = "you will not do" as a polite imperative, and ghurafera is more interesting. Ghura means to go around, spin around, as you would say for somebody running errands all over the neighborhood or something. In Bengali there is this lovely device of repeating the word with a different initial consonant, which gives the meaning "and stuff." Shower is chaan, so chaan-taan is "showering and doing all the other bathroom stuff like shaving etc;" packing-tacking means "packing and all the other stuff you do when you're getting ready to go on a trip. Usually the repeated word comes with a T, but I guess ghurafera just sounds better than ghura-tura.

[LATE UPDATE 1/21/14:  Two native speakers disagree with this explanation of ghuraphera.  See the comments of Debraj Chakrabarti and Native Speaker below.]

There's something about this sign (both in the English and in the Bengali) that leaves me pondering all sorts of existential issues. I have had the same sort of feeling after watching many a Satyajit Ray film, listening to Rani Shankar play an evocative raga, or reading a poem by Rabindranath Tagore.

[Thanks to George Cardona, Leopold Eisenlohr, Prasenjit Dey, Tansen Sen, Saroj Kumar Chaudhuri, Sunny Jhutti / Singh, Abdullah Mahmud, Philip Lutgendorf, and Fred Smith]

MRI scan of a human subject from the cranium to the feet

Artist Ramiro Gomez alters luxury magazine ads and photographs by adding in the often-underpaid workers that make their beauty and opulence possible. He paints gardeners, cleaning ladies, people who maintain swimming pools, and more. They are faceless bodies and appear like ghosts in and in front of mansions and sunny palm trees. By doing so, Gomez highlights the disparity between these lavish lifestyles and the workers who barely make minimum wage.

Gomez experienced this firsthand as a live-in nanny for a wealthy West Hollywood family. In an interview with Fast Company, he states,  “It was interesting the feeling that would happen as I was signing off this purse, that the family had so much already, yet they weren’t able to pay [me] more,” Gomez says. “I took it personally, in a way.” This job was also where he first had the idea for the series. After fishing magazines like Dwell and Luxe out of the trash, he tore out the ads and started painting in figures.

So, what do affluent folks think of Gomez’s work? Those that have seen it actually like it, including his former employers. His paintings illustrate the complex economic system that find ourselves in. Those who can most likely afford Gomez’s work are ones that identify with the luxury lifestyle. But, they are essentially buying work that is critical of their status. That’s part of the point of Gomez’s paintings – to engage with an audience who might otherwise not realize the other side of their privilege. (Via Fast Company)

The post Ramiro Gomez Paints The Invisible People Who Work For The Rich Into Luxury Magazine Ads appeared first on Beautiful/Decay Artist & Design.

Most of the vintage ads in this Collectors Weekly round-up were designed to shame women into buying a product that would make them more attractive to their mate. The Mad Man-era ad above was designed to assure Eastern Airlines passengers that they wouldn't be served by "loser" stewardesses.

Selling Shame

a bubble freezing at -10º F 

"I’D LIKE TO RETURN TO MY BODY NOW." -

Kabuki Quantum Fighter (Human - NES - 1991)

the mighty colon - Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon (Konami - N64 - 1998)

tvtooth:

Rina Chinen’s new single:  Do-Do for me. IN STORES NOW

m-agda:

where is your god now

My dialect — the sound, vocabulary, and grammatical structure of the way I speak English — is most similar to the dialect spoken by people in Topeka, Kansas. That’s according to a popular survey and data visualization making the rounds on social media, and the result makes sense. I was born in Topeka and spent the first 12 years of my life there.

It’s pretty cool that a dataset can figure out that connection based solely on my answers to a series of 25 questions. Do I pronounce “caught” and “cot” the same? (Yes.) Do I think it’s acceptable to say something like, “I write exclusively about science anymore”? (Yes. Haters can hate.) Do I call carbonated beverages “soda”, “pop”, or “coke”? (I think I say “soda” sometimes and “pop” other times and I’m not sure why.)

But those questions — and our collective answers — are good for a lot more than simply performing “guess your hometown” parlor tricks. You can learn a lot about where we’re going and how we’re changing as a society. Because, here’s the thing, contrary to what you might think, the United States isn’t losing its dialects. We’re not all speaking more similarly to one another. In fact, sociolinguists say the opposite is true. Even in a world where people in Topeka, Kansas and Brooklyn, New York listen to the same music, watch the same movies, and share words instantly, the way those people talk isn’t merging into a single, consumer-culture voice.

If that fact seems surprising, it’s probably because the myth — that distinct regional and local dialects faded over the course of the 20th century and are on their way to oblivion — used to be what experts believed, too. When Bert Vaux, a linguist at Cambridge University, was working on his Ph.D., he was taught that American dialects had largely disappeared. Mass media and mass culture were creating a mass speaking voice.

Then, about 10 years ago, while working as a professor at Harvard, Vaux put together a survey. Using 122 different speech variations — some having to do with vocabulary, some with syntax, and some with pronunciation — he asked volunteers a series of 140 different questions and linked their answers to their hometowns. Finished in 2003, the Harvard Dialect Survey forms the basis of the more-recent online quizzes you’ve probably taken through Facebook and Twitter. It showed that regional variations in dialect first mapped in the early part of the 20th century still existed.

That’s a big deal because those regional dialect families actually date back to the first migrations of English-speaking immigrants into North America. The Northern dialects — which actually stretch from Boston to Eastern Minnesota — have their origins in southeastern England and Puritan settlements. Southern dialects began with immigrants for southwestern Great Britain, including Wales. The third dialect family, the Midlands, comes from a wave of immigrants originating in northern England, Ireland, and Scotland. It spread west horizontally from the Philadelphia area. My tendency to use “anymore” as a positive part of speech — I do “x” anymore — as opposed to purely using it in the negative — I don’t do “x” anymore — is part of the Midlands dialect.

Everyone knew these families once existed. Dialect surveys in the 1930s and 40s had identified them and matched them to historical immigration patterns. But nobody expected them to still exist. Turns out, Vaux told me, that’s because researchers had been associating the dialect families too heavily with colloquialisms that had dropped out of common speech — things like the phrases farmers used to call in their cows at night. That stuff really had vanished. But the dialect families remained, they were simply now united around different things — like what we call tennis shoes (or “sneakers” for some of you), or how we pronounce certain vowel sounds.

Vaux’s discovery corresponds to work done by other sociolinguists, who say that even beyond the maintenance of these classical dialect families, Americans really aren’t speaking more similarly to one another. In fact, there are actually new dialects in the process of emerging.

For instance, the West — which you can think of as pretty much everything west of the Mississippi — has long been a mishmash of dialects. It was settled much later than the rest of the United States. Its residents came from a much more diverse set of places. It never really had the kind of coherent city dialects you can hear on the East Coast, or even larger regional dialects, on the scale of states. Instead, if you look at maps like the ones produced by the Atlas of North American English, the West looks big and open and wild — characterized by language features that span half a continent. The tendency to pronounce “caught” and “cot” as though they are exactly the same (and, more importantly, to not really grok that they could be pronounced differently) is a major part of the Western voice.

But that could be changing. Over the last 20 years, some researchers have started building cases for regionalization within the vast expanse of the West. Scientists have identified the emergence of several dialects that fall under a larger Pacific Northwest English dialect family, said Walt Wolfram, a sociolinguist at North Carolina State University. Portlandian, it seems, may actually be on it’s way to becoming a thing.

Researchers say this because the way younger residents of Portland speak is becoming more distinct, and it’s different from how older residents speak. The dialect includes aspects of the larger Western dialect — including the caught/cot merger. But that used to be something only some Portlanders did, writes Portland State University linguist Jeffrey Conn. Starting with the Baby Boomers, it’s become much more the norm. Younger Portlanders are also picking up a tendency to end their declarative sentences on an upswing of the voice, making statements sound kind of like questions.

Dialects abide and new dialects form because the way we speak is a major part of how we tell the world about our identities, says William Labov, a linguist at the University of Pennsylvania and the man behind the Atlas of North American English. American English has always been unstable because our regional identities are younger and more open to change, he told me. If your parents move to a new community when you’re a child — or if you move to a new community yourself as a young adult — your dialect doesn’t stay tied to that of your parents. It changes to match your community.

Of course, that means not all dialects will last. In the game of how we speak, you win or you die. When we think that Americans are starting to all speak the same, what we’re often actually seeing is the loss of a few "famous" dialects, without taking into account the strengthening or emergence of others. Southern dialects, for instance, are leveling out, Wolfram and Labov told me. The younger they are, the less “Southern” a Southerner is likely to sound. But, at the same time, Northern dialects, especially those associated with cities surrounding the Great Lakes, are becoming more distinctive.

All of this ends up influencing what you see when you take a quiz that shows you how your dialect matches up to dialects around the country. Yes, my #1 match was the city in which I was born … but that was just a 60% match. And I was almost as strongly matched with several cities in northern California and Nevada. Places I’ve never lived and, in some cases, never been.

Why don’t I match any better to my hometown? Because dialects change with social identity. I’ve lived in a lot of other places since I was 12 and my dialect has changed along with those moves and shifts in the communities I identify with.

Why would I match so well with places I’ve never lived? Because there’s a lot of similarities in the dialects of the West overall. It’s not too surprising that my Western dialect (via Kansas) would have a decent amount in common with other Western dialects. Those similarities reflect a shared history of recent migration and a shared identity that’s only now starting to separate out into regionalisms.

More importantly, given another decade, my results could end up becoming entirely different. I could end up sounding less like my hometown dialect and more like the place I now live — Minneapolis. My hometown dialect could end up sounding more distinct than it did when I last lived there. Language is change. A single map only gives you a snapshot.

viciouslycyd:

Kat Chow, "Make It So: Sir Patrick Stewart Moos In Udder Accents", NPR Code Switch ("Frontiers of Race, Culture and Ethnicity") 12/30/2013:

Cow-d it really be? Have our ears herd this correctly? (Sorry, I can't help myself.)

Patrick Stewart — ahem, Sir Patrick Stewart — mooed up a storm on the podcast, How To Do Everything, impersonating cows from various regions. You might even say Stewart was code-switching.

A listener who says she moos with "kind of an American, Nevadan accent" posed the question: Just how would a person moo in a British accent? (And, by the way, it's true: cows do moo in regional accents.)

The cited BBC story ("Cows also 'have regional accents': Cows have regional accents like humans, language specialists have suggested", 8/23/2006) was a great public-relations triumph for the cheese industry, and a lovely example of the dangers of talking to journalists. For details, see "Oh, the moos you can moo", 8/23/2006; "Where are moo from?", 8/24/2006; "It's always silly season in the (BBC) science section", 8/26/2006.

But this time around, the How to Do Everything podcast ("Cow to Moo Everything", 12/27/2013) treats us to the bovine vocalizations of Sir Patrick Stewart. It all starts with this question from a listener:

I was wondering if you could find out how do cows moo- well how was- how would a person moo in a British accent? 

This leads immediately to the following exchange:

Q: I think the place to start would be, how do you moo?
A: I moo with an American, kind of Nevadan accent, going "moo".

After some further inquiries, the HTDE team contacts Sir Patrick Stewart  by telephone, and he gives a suitably judicious response:

It's not a straightforward simple answer.
Unlike probably many other countries, where a cow's moo is a cow's moo,
in England, you understand, we are dominated by class,
by social status, and by location.

Sir Patrick continues in this mock-sociolinguistic vein, imitating the "very conservative" moo of an Oxfordshire cow, from David Cameron's constituency:

And the socio-culturally contrastive moo of a cow from Yorkshire:

He also tells us that because his wife is also from Nevada, he has "some experience of Nevada cattle", and so he gives his impression of a Nevada cow:

Sir Patrick's wife and the original caller are apparently from different Nevadan bovilinguistic strata.

Anyhow, the rest of the podcast will treat you to a Cockney cow, and the "very refined, very sophisticated" sort of moo produced by a cow who went to "the cow equivalent of Eton or Harrow".

One of the comments on the podcast is from Suze, a real expert, who reminds us that individual identity  and physiological state are also important variables:

That was superb!!! I'm a relief milker (and a musician) so I've always been interested in sound. I always moo along with "my girls" and it's truly fascinating to hear their individuality. Too bad they didn't ask him to imitate the moo of a cow ready for the bull! hahahahaha THAT'S a great one! Loved this show!!!

Karl Marx told us that

Hegel bemerkte irgendwo, daß alle großen weltgeschichtlichen Tatsachen und Personen sich sozusagen zweimal ereignen. Er hat vergessen, hinzuzufügen: das eine Mal als Tragödie, das andere Mal als Farce.

Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages occur twice, so to speak. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.

In this case, we're talking about great cheese-industry PR stunts rather than great world-historic facts. And so the first time was farce, while the second time was Star Trek's Captain Jean-Luc Picard pretending to imitate class and regional variation in the vocalizations of cattle.

Update — in partial response to Sili's appeal below, here's the spectrogram of an actual cow, in the form of a sample moo from SoundBible.com — "Sound of a large cow mooing in a pasture", recorded by Mike Koenig:

The sound:

Your browser does not support the audio element.

Sili asked:

Aren't there linguists of dairy stock who know how to do formant analysis?

My sister's in dairy, but I have no clue how to collect or analyse vocalisations.

Here's a narrow-band spectrogram, which gives a better picture of the laryngeal source:

And here's a spectral section, from 2.315 to 2.416 of the file above, with an order-20 LPC spectrum superimposed on the FFT spectrum.

As this suggests, a formant analysis is probably not mainly what is needed. The breed, individual, attitudinal, and physiological differences of interest are likely to show up to some extent in spectral resonances and anti-resonances, but perhaps even more in pitch and amplitude contours,  in the bovine equivalent of voice quality, and so on.

Could there be regional or herd-specific variations as well? Sure. Is there any evidence about this? No. But I'm open to inquiries from the dairy industry — I've always wanted an opportunity to use in real life one of my favorite punch lines: "Consider a perfectly spherical cow, radiating milk isotropically…"

Update #2 — I should note that there is some literature on cattle vocalizations, though not (as far as I have determined) on geographical or cultural variation. For example, Jon M. Watts and Joseph M. Stookey, "Effects of restraint and branding on rates and acoustic parameters of vocalization in beef cattle", Applied Animal Behaviour Science 1999, showed that branding makes calves vocalize more, louder, and with a higher pitch:

More branded than non-branded animals vocalized (58/95 compared with 7/94, P<0.0001). Branded animals showed a greater frequency range in the fundamental, or lowest harmonic, of the audiospectrogram, (68.04 Hz±5.33 compared with 28 Hz±8.74, P<0.05), a higher maximum frequency (186.66 Hz±5.19 compared with 141.6 Hz±6.6, P<0.01). and a higher peak sound level (P<0.05). 

And P.C. Schön et al., "Altered Vocalization Rate During the Estrous Cycle in Dairy Cattle", Journal of Dairy Science 2007, shows that cows moo in a breathier way near their "estrous climax":

It is known that the calls of female mammals can contain information about reproductive status. It is also suspected that the vocalizations of cattle contain information about age, sex, dominance status, and stage in the estrous cycle. In the present study, a methodology for the continuous automatic recording of vocalization of heifers during the periestrous period is presented. It was shown in 10 tethered heifers that the estrous climax results in an increase in vocalization rate.  [...]  We also found 2 different structures in the vocalization of heifers. The harmonic structure showed regular frequency bands, whereas the nonharmonic structure was noisy. The hypothesis that the disharmonic structure increases near the estrous climax was confirmed.

miserabelia:

caprellid:

The publicly funded, $35B cleanup of radioactive soil around Fukishima is staffed by homeless men recruited from Tokyo subway stations. They are preferentially sent to the most radioactive zones, and work for less than minimum wage. Mobbed-up subcontractors confiscate as much as two thirds of their pay in "fees." Everyone involved in sourcing the labor for the cleanup denies responsibility for the illegal practices, blaming sub-subcontractors or cowboy recruiters. The president of one contractor, Aisogo Service, defended the practice of not scrutinizing the labor force or the conditions under which it worked, saying "If you started looking at every single person, the project wouldn't move forward. You wouldn't get a tenth of the people you need."

Workers are also recruited from publicly funded homeless shelters. One man worked for a month for a total payout of $10. After this fact was verified and made public, the man disappeared. Workers are charged exorbitant rates for lodgings and food, and are docked pay for being too ill to work. As a result, some workers are in debt to their employers, a debt that deepens the longer they stay employed.

The decontamination project is two to three years behind schedule.

Below these official subcontractors, a shadowy network of gangsters and illegal brokers who hire homeless men has also become active in Fukushima. Ministry of Environment contracts in the most radioactive areas of Fukushima prefecture are particularly lucrative because the government pays an additional $100 in hazard allowance per day for each worker.

Takayoshi Igarashi, a lawyer and professor at Hosei University, said the initial rush to find companies for decontamination was understandable in the immediate aftermath of the disaster when the priority was emergency response. But he said the government now needs to tighten its scrutiny to prevent a range of abuses, including bid rigging.

"There are many unknown entities getting involved in decontamination projects," said Igarashi, a former advisor to ex-Prime Minister Naoto Kan. "There needs to be a thorough check on what companies are working on what, and when. I think it's probably completely lawless if the top contractors are not thoroughly checking."

The Ministry of Environment announced on Thursday that work on the most contaminated sites would take two to three years longer than the original March 2014 deadline. That means many of the more than 60,000 who lived in the area before the disaster will remain unable to return home until six years after the disaster.

Special Report: Japan's homeless recruited for murky Fukushima clean-up [Mari Saito and Antoni Slodkowski/Reuters]

(Image: Ueno Park, Tokyo, Japan, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from yeowatzup's photostream)