ghoti

My doubts about formal grammar

There is something very similar to the chicken-or-the-egg question about formal grammar in which meaning is ignored and only the formal properties of the string is discussed. But would that string exist without production of meaning, without the communicative desire to impart something in an instance of existence? This is also like asking what is…
Finnegans Wake, Joyces Wake, Me-s Wake

I finally found (and puchased) a copy of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake in one of my local bookstores. I had not want to purchase it online because book hunting is so much more fun. In putting into my library database I had found even the LibraryThing community could get it wrong. The listing was Finnegan’s Wake…
Zotero

Manage your paper/articles/thesis references with Zotero. Zotero is a free and open-source add-on to Firefox, Chrome or Safari for managing your references within papers, articles or thesis. You may ask why is it in a browser. Good question. Hopefully it will be abundantly clear after you have finished reading this post. Workflow Typically I go…
Surface Pro 2 or iPad Air?

Our family secondary computer has finally died. It was a 2007 Sony Vaio notebook running Vista. It had served us well. RIP. This means we need a replacement, a new computer. So it was time to take measure of what is out there. The landscape has certainly changed since 2007. And my family’s tech has…
Playing with the ix500

Bought a Fujitsu ix500 scanner last week. Wow! I don’t know how I had lived without this incredible machine for so long. The scanning is so quick – 30 pages double-sided in a minute. By default it saves as PDF. But one click and it is converted into a Word document. I scanned a novel…
Mandela’s Language

If peace needed a language to convey its meaning and intention far fewer people from around the world would have turned out for his state memorial service. Peace is beyond language and so language comes second to emotion and thought.
collocation

How words (collocates) relate to a particular word (keyword or node). In corpus, this usually means within a certain distance from the node. For example, ±5 words to either side of the node which are then collated and summed for quick comprehension. Words often come together with greater-than-chance regularity. This can either be within the…
ICEWeb – the web as corpus

I hadn’t done web as corpus before. That is until now. People say the web as corpus linguistic data is unreliable. But then they said that too when the first corpora were made all those years ago. Undoubtedly how good the sample is is an important factor. One can say the same thing about any…
Get your non-English DOS OS to show English

There are times you would wish your DOS session is in your native language, English (like when reading the ‘help’ contents). To do this start up a DOS session and in the command prompt type and execute: chcp 437 To find your current OS language code type and execute: chcp To revert back to the…
memory

remembrance of seen smile heard cries come to nought without input into this vast machine detach the lines vanished functionality love & hate – a memory with no outlet for your emotion