The second batch of your comments I want to tackle -- about a possible "third class of meaningful sounds" in an ET language -- is those that propose various kinds of noises. The noises described in your comments included percussives [sounds that could be made with drums, rattles, and the like]; crackling; clicks; whistles; burps and belches; teeth-clicks; farts; squeaks; squeals; and more.

Those of you who've complained that I didn't define my terms -- neither "vowel" nor "consonant" -- are absolutely right, and I apologize. For me, vowels are speech sounds that are produced without any obstruction of the flow of air through the vocal tract; consonants are speech sounds for which that flow of air is obstructed in some fashion. That of course means that the vowel/consonant distinction has to be a continuum, not an either/or binary split. As pgdudda has pointed out, the English liquids [L and R] and the English glides [Y and W and H] are neither strictly vowels nor strictly consonants; they fall in between the two, somewhere on the continuum.

My opinion -- and it's only that, an opinion, since I've never encountered an ET language -- is that all of the varieties of noises proposed in your comments would be perceived by Terrans, and by Terran linguists, as falling somewhere on the vowel/consonant continuum; that is, as either vowel-like or consonant-like. I don't believe they would perceive the noises as a separate, third class of meaningful speech sounds.

I could be wrong about this. For sure.

The first batch of your comments on my ET phonology question that I want to tackle is the batch that doesn't try to answer my question. I don't know whether it's because I didn't make myself clear, or because the question was perhaps read too quickly, or because the commenters just preferred not to color inside the lines. In any case...

My question was narrow and specific:
Suppose the ET language we're dealing with has three classes of meaningful sounds: vowels; consonants; and something else. What could the something else be?

Comments proposing that the something else could be colors, or smells, or the position of the speaker's face/ears/tail/fur -- something other than a class of meaningful sounds -- are answering a different question. It's an interesting question, and I thank you for the comments, but it's not the question that I asked.

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http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2009-11-07/

In a recent post, I said:
"Suppose you encounter a language that has three basic classes of meaningful sounds: vowels, consonants -- and something else. The question then is: What could that 'something else' be?" Now I'm not quite sure what to do with the blogmonster I managed to create with that question.

One possibility is to take up each of your comments, one at a time, and respond in detail. That means finding a way to explain a great deal of basic information about phonetics and phonology, without resorting to LinguistSpeak, and without creating additional confusions that would tie us up in knots for weeks, maybe months, while I tried to straighten them out. This would take a very long time.

Another possibility is for me to sort the comments into classes of some kind and deal with them in batches, with all the same caveats attached.

Another possibility is to notice that you seem to have had a good time proposing answers to my question, to thank you for all your excellent comments, and then to just butt out and mind my own business.

Do you [youall] have a preference?

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http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2009-11-06/

It took me more than a month, but my Battlestar Galactica fic from Round 16 is finaly finished!
Started at 3758 words, now finished at 5350.

Mission complete. :)
Many thanks to Emma, who made this community for us, and to fellow members of the comm, for the support and good example. :)

[Note: This will go through another fifty drafts, but I can live with this one. Here's page 1 of Draft 17, as promised.]

CHAPTER ONE

It's not fair.

That was the thought that consumed her, never mind how aware she was that it was childish and whiny. And unjustified. What had happened to her was what would have happened to any USCOL candidate who had failed her final exams. Still, it had all her attention. And there were other, even less seemly, thoughts tangled in with it...

"But I worked so hard."
"But I never missed even one class."
"But it was easier for the rest of my class because they came out of better linguistics programs than I did. [And whose fault was that?]."

Briar knew what drivel all of those thought-tangles were. She had failed three of her finals, that was the simple truth, and the penalty she'd been assigned for that -- a monograph describing and discussing the Brethandi languages -- was horrendously difficult, that was the simple truth as well. But she wasn't stupid; she was prepared to admit that it was in fact entirely fair and that she was a lucky woman. They could have just kicked her out of the program -- that was in fact what she had taken it for granted that they would do, when they told her about the failed exams -- instead of offering her the chance to redeem herself by writing the penalty monograph.

They were going to send her to Gaudalle, the Brethandi planet -- in spite of the fact that she hadn't yet qualified for USCOL -- to do the necessary fieldwork with the four languages: Thandi; Aubre; Lenadess; Nangdi. And it wasn't going to be easy. The Brethandi weren't humanoid; except that their legs ended in feet, not hooves, they looked exactly like Terran cattle. Briar hadn't yet taken any courses in nonhumanoid languages. The Brethandi did speak and write Panglish, saints be praised, because they understood that there was no way to function in this galaxy without being literate in Panglish, but they bitterly resented that necessity, as they bitterly resented the fact that although Earth had no empire it remained the dominant planet. No Brethandi willingly used Panglish. Briar's Brethandi consultants were going to be unanimously sullen, they were going to work with her only grudgingly.

Briar understood very well the politics behind what was happening. The point was not only that she should fail -- and fail spectacularly -- but that she should be an example to the worlds. The message to other potential U.S. Corps of Linguists candidates would be loud and clear: "This is what can happen to you if you're not the ideal candidate. If you, like Briar, don't come from a 'heritage' family, where your parents were part of USCOL, and their parents were linguists, so that from birth you ate and breathed linguistics. If you, like Briar, didn't get your prerequisite Ph.D. in linguistics at one of the top half dozen universities USCOL favors. Be warned. You could end up like Briar Jamison -- an interplanetary laughingstock."

SF writers trying to describe an ET language in their fiction tend to lean toward languages made up of colors or smells or textures or musical notes or some such thing. But a Terran language could easily work that way.

What you need to identify a language as extraterrestrial is some feature never before observed in any Terran language. For example, suppose you encounter a language that has three basic classes of meaningful sounds: vowels, consonants -- and something else. The question then is: What could that "something else" be?

It couldn't be tone, by the way, or aspiration. Tone is just a way to modify vowels; aspiration is just a way to modify consonants. You'd still have only two classes of meaningful sounds.

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http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2009-11-05/

Did everyone order the "second" season of "Blood Ties" when it came out last month? I got mine a few days after my birthday, so it was like a late birthday present.

And you know what I forgot, until I watched the eps again? Just how damn pretty the entire cast was...Christina, Dylan, Kyle, and Gina. Sigh. I miss them so much.

This new novel is huge. Scary huge. I have to fit into it, somehow, all of the following:

1. Enough of the backstory about USCOL [U.S. Corps of Linguists] -- historical, descriptive, and more -- to make it real and vivid for the reader. [This is not made easier by the fact that the backstory is actually going on in the Real World right now; Googling for "National Language Service Corps" will fill you in on that, at least if the name holds still for a while. It started as "Civilian Linguist Reserve Corps," briefly became just "The Language Corps," then moved on to the current "National Language Service Corps."]

2. Enough of the backstory about the Brethandi ETs on Planet Gaudalle -- historical, descriptive, and more -- to make that story arc real and vivid for the reader, and to make readers care about them. And to make readers interested in Thandi, Aubre, Lenadess -- the three major languages spoken on Gaudalle -- and Nangdi, a fourth language still spoken but endangered.

3. The story arc of the USCOL candidate -- Briar Jamison -- who has failed three of her horrendously difficult final exams, and as a penalty has been ordered to write a monograph on the grammars of those four Brethandi languages.

I do realize that George R.R. Martin would find fitting all of this into one book laughably easy. But me -- I'm struggling with it.

Come the day I have an opening page that I can live with, I'll post it here.

Stitch and bitch Sunday, 3PM plus or minus, arrange carpool in comments, yadda.

This month, let's try something: if you've got any yarn you know you'll never use, that you want to get rid of, bring it along. We'll spread it out on the table and let people pick it over, and anything nobody wants, we can give to sarah's sister (an elementary-school media specialist) to give to the art department, who appreciates the hell out of donations!



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For reasons that don't need exploring at this juncture in time, tonight I ran a word count on the directory that contains all of my AIM logs back and forth with ivorygates over the nearly-exactly three years (the first conversation was 10/11/06) that we've been chatting.

Result? 89.1MB. 255,821 lines, 9,414,488 words, 91,292,005 characters total. And okay, my AIM client stores logs in xhtml format, so some of that is formatting, and a bunch of it is pasting fiction back-and-forth at each other for commentary, so that takes care of a bunch more, but ... yeah. (We talk too much.)

My irc logs directory, meanwhile -- which had gone back to 2001 or thereabouts, but which I cleared out in early '08 when we were starting Dreamwidth, because I couldn't be sure there wasn't LJ-specific stuff in there -- can't be easily piped into wc because it's a lot of recursive directories, but it's 90.3 MB. Which means that ivorygates and I talk to each other nearly as much as an entire irc channel. Somehow I am not surprised.

Meanwhile, sarah and I have a first-recorded-AIM-conversation date of 8/24/02, with a word count of 131,500 lines, 3,087,070 words, 33,005,157 characters total. The funny thing is, we didn't stop IMing each other when we moved in with each other; it only slowed down a bunch. (She knows better than to talk to me for the hour after I wake up; AIM is the best option.)

These and other useless observations brought to you by trying to avoid my NaNo writing.

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http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2009-11-03/

etrangerici has posted a Broken Wings tag that is stunning in its ability to capture the inside of JD's head. Go, read!

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Answer: What is the difference between “accept" and "except"?

With examples from Harry Potter, The X-Files and Stargate SG-1

( Accept vs. Except )

I know that I have said in this journal, many times, that there was no point in my writing another novel because no publisher would consider a novel with my name on it. [For details, see http://ozarque.livejournal.com/2005/04/09/ .] And now here I am, writing another novel nonetheless. Contradicting myself.

I can explain this only by reminding you of my misery when I had no book-in-progress to anchor my days, after a lifetime spent anchored always by my books. Whether it's ever published or not, writing this novel is restoring balance to my daily life.

The writing has been going well so far. I'm up to my eyebrows printing out all the backstory files I've been accumulating for the past few years and putting them into a three-ring binder for easy access. And I'm well into a first draft of Chapter One.

Thank you for all the encouraging comments you've been sending me about this project; I'm very grateful.

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http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2009-11-02/

My round 18 Merlin fic, she is done. It was really touch and go for a couple of days, but now it's all over and done with and just needs to go off to the beta. Just in time for Nanowrimo *cringes*

Final wordcount: 4049

My startrekbigbang story, I Have Loved the Stars Too Fondly, is now DONE! I tackled this bad boy last round and couldn't get it finished. I started last around with 16,000 words and this round with 36,000 words, and finished this draft with 54,721 words. So that's 38721 in the past two rounds. Done and done! Thanks to everyone for the support and encouragement through the slaying of this beast. Fic will be posted (along with art and fanmix) on November 9th.

ficfinishing is now open to new members who wish to join for our special End of Year Double Round !

IMPORTANT: You must be a member of the comm to sign up! Join and watch the comm in order to see our sign up posts and the rest of our members only content. Our sign ups are always posted on the first of each month.

For our End of Year Double Round we're making a departure from our normal rounds in order to make participation easier during this particularly busy time of year and in order to meet the special needs of authors at year end. In order to do this we're offering three different Tracks for authors to sign up for: NaNoWriMo, Holiday Ficathon and End of Year Fic Finishing.

NaNoWriMo Track - For authors committed to writing a novel in 30 days for National Novel Writing Month. (This Track runs through November only.)

Holiday Ficathon Track - For authors with strict Holiday Ficathon deadlines (like Yuletide or Secret Santas) who really need to get specific fic out on time.

End of Year Fic Finishing Track - For authors who have personal goals to get certain fic or a short list of fic done before the calendar year ends.

Major differences from regular rounds:

1. The round lasts two months instead of one.
This makes it possible for authors to sign up for longer fic they couldn't normally finish in one two week active portion. It also allows authors to sign up for more than one fic and have a better shot at getting them done.

2. Instead of 14 Day posts there will be Week posts each Monday.
Authors will be more autonomous, deciding on their own fic finishing daily schedules, but with support and techniques from the comm.

3. Sign ups will not close and the comm will not be locked down.
Since this more freeform round lasts so long and does not have a core active portion we're leaving sign ups open for the next two months so that authors may come and get support as needed and readers can come and help out when they can. Week posts will still be F-locked for privacy, but members will not be kicked out if they are not signed up as participants.

How to sign up:

First Readers sign up as normal. Authors will need to locate the specific Track sign up post for whichever Track they wish to join and fill out the specific sign up form for that track.

Our fandoms this Round are the same as October (new ones will not be added until January): Numb3rs, Criminal Minds, Heroes, Blood Ties, Doctor Who, Torchwood, Bones, NCIS, Supernatural, Charmed, Blake's 7, Veronica Mars, Psych, Miracles, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel the Series, Firefly/Serenity, House, Stargate SG-1, Stargate Atlantis, Harry Potter, CSI, CSI:NY, Due South, Battlestar Galactica, Terminator/The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Lord of the Rings, Eureka, The X Files, The Sentinel, The Magnificent Seven, CSI:Miami, CW RPS/RPF, Leverage, The Covenant, Dark Angel, King Arthur/Merlin, Highlander, Hard Core Logo, Weiss Kreuz, The Pretender, Star Trek: XI/Reboot, X-Men, Burn Notice, Twilight, Dollhouse, Batman, Gilmore Girls, Moonlight, The Invisible Man.

*Please* Go read the EOY Double Round FAQ before you sign up!
Since this round is quite different it's possible there may be more questions on how it will be run so please read the FAQ and ask any additional questions in comments there.

Enjoy the round and good luck to everyone with finishing their 2009 fic!

I'm finding it really hard for me to get enthusiastic about NaNo this year; partially it's that DW is sucking up a lot of my creative energy, and partially it's that I just don't have any really good ideas to work with, and partially it's that I have, oh, about five unfinished or nearly-finished novels that I should be working on revising instead.

So instead I'm stealing afuna's idea and seeing if I can do "patch 30 bugs in the course of November" instead.

So far I've done:

1. Bug 2041: remove discount footnote
2. Bug 2042: ">>" and "<<" buttons on Manage Access Filters page are inaccessible
3. Bug 1966: "last maintainer" warning shows up for all maintainers, not just last
4. Bug 1986: Manage Comments page: elements unnecessarily printed when not a personal account
5. Bug 1591: add link to discussion entry into autoposted suggestions text (revert & close)
6. Bug 1894: migrate LJ::get_cap / $u->get_cap to specific user methods
7. Bug 451: Remove schools system
8. Bug 2060: remove pingback skeleton
9. Bug 2061: remove Vox specialcasing
10. Bug 2063: remove var/devdata/ directory
11. Bug 2064: remove old doc file
12. Bug 2056: Make talkscreen.bml and talkmulti.bml translate when called as endpoints


I will also try to do "review 30 patches in November". So far I've done:

1. bug 1975: Navigation search form looks wonky on /tools/search, review kareila
2. bug 1531: promo codes admin frontend, review exor674
3. bug 2034: in comment form, comment browser button is styled and shouldn't be, review afuna
4. bug 2004: Include title of entry in comment notifications in Inbox, review afuna
5. bug 1492: modify manage/subscriptions/comments.bml to also include entry, not just comment thread, review afuna
6. Bug 2022: Add link to Circle Gifts from the Shop, review 900degrees
7. Bug 1987: Make the codesharing community more obvious on the front page, reviewing foxfirefey
8. Bug 2038: Brittle NNWM, color entry text and color entry background need to be explicitly set, reviewing zvi
9. Bug 2051: Five Tabula Rasa color themes, reviewing zvi

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