Salt
The one response to my previous post so far asked whether it would not simply be better for me to declare that all my posts should be taken with a pinch of salt. That's an interesting point.
Actually, I don't think I can declare that and remain honest. Some of those posts are satire, some are metaphorical or literary in nature, some are humour (albeit of a mordant and somewhat peculiar kind). Those can perhaps be taken with a pinch of salt. But there's serious stuff here too: when I speculate from first principles and from direct findings as to what should be done or what was really done, that's fairly serious. When I look into etymology, that's mostly serious too. Not all of this stuff is humour.
But, son of men, I take your point. Satisfied? Heh.
Actually, I don't think I can declare that and remain honest. Some of those posts are satire, some are metaphorical or literary in nature, some are humour (albeit of a mordant and somewhat peculiar kind). Those can perhaps be taken with a pinch of salt. But there's serious stuff here too: when I speculate from first principles and from direct findings as to what should be done or what was really done, that's fairly serious. When I look into etymology, that's mostly serious too. Not all of this stuff is humour.
But, son of men, I take your point. Satisfied? Heh.
etched with acid at 7:48:00 am
1 Comments:
Hey! Forgive me for asking a totally tangential question, but have you come any books like this or a something comparable in your collection? http://books.google.com/books?id=gB_jNf8AQ0sC
149 dollars is just too exorbitant for me, but it's hard to find objective linguistic surveys of language variation in Singapore and Malaysia.
One issue that's interested me recently is the nasalisation of vowels in morphemes like "yuan" and the subsequent elision of the /n/ such that you get a nasalised "yue"; the other is the merger of morphemes (that are otherwise minimal pairs, even after discarding tone) like "ming" and "min". Do you know the geographic and demographic extent of these variations? Are they also found in South China? (I can tell that these mergers have become phonemic, telling by how many Chinese Singaporeans have written transcribed "-n" morphemes as "-ng" in their blog posts.)
I've been trying to find this out for at least a year but it's kind of difficult given that I don't have any exclusive journal subscriptions and I keep getting red herrings.
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